"I don't need a break, I need for people to do the right thing."

Last night I arrived back in Toronto from a business trip to a remote Northern Ontario community where I was without internet access for a couple of days. There was so much I wanted to write that I wasn't sure where to begin.

Then I opened my e-mail and read another letter from the same soldier who wrote me a couple of weeks ago. And right away, I knew where to start:

Dear Mr. Brooks,

As luck would have it someone more eloquent than I has written lately, and done a much better job of illuminating the point I was struggling to make in my last e-mail to you.

I am referring to the Globe and mail's Judith Timson, who wrote an outstanding column entitled "The moral moments that tell us who we are."

Let's ignore for now that Canada's mission in Afghanistan did not motivate Judith's insightful column on the universal topic of ethical behaviour, but in the opinion of this soldier whose boots have left footprints in the talcum dust of Afghanistan, it easily could have. Inspired by recent revelations in the Air India inquiry, and less
auspiciously the Conrad Black trial, Judith Timson examines the "moral moment", which she describes as "that instant when we must settle scores with our conscience - when we are called upon to make a decision that affects others and ourselves, to save lives, or reveal how lives could have been saved." As a soldier I have been fortunate to be aware on a conscious level of when the moral moment is upon me.

Afghanistan is a place that for a few fleeting moments can make even the best soldiers long to be somewhere else. Maybe the desire hits you during a ramp ceremony, or maybe as your patrol is about to leave a secure camp or forward operating base as your mind contemplates all the ways you could go and get yourself killed that day.

Sometimes you find yourself reflecting on your career choice, find yourself wondering if dead fathers do a better job of raising their kids than unemployed ones. On a bad day you might even do the brief mental math of considering leaving the CF as fast as possible. But the moment passes, swept away by good training, or more likely a sense of duty to those around you. So you take a deep, dusty breath and you do your job, and somewhere in the T-bill of moral accounting you gain a sum in the credit column because you did a good thing, you kept a promise to people who need you.

But Timson also points out which she calls a more "cynical notion: that we spend most of our lives leading up to a moment in which we are to be morally tested - and the rest of our lives explaining why that wasn't the moment." Mr. Brooks, what if Canada's mission in Afghanistan is a collective national moral moment? What if our current elected parliament is being tested, as elected officials ought to be, on our behalf in our greatest national moral moment since the Korean War? What if the people of Afghanistan really need our help? Why do so many Canadians feel compelled to explain that this isn't "the moment", citing far-flung arguments about gas and oil and George Bush. How can their paranoid vision scrutinize such gossamer threads while ignoring the crushing despair of the Afghan people and the brutal curriculum vitae of the Taliban?

I think I am cynical enough to agree with Timson about how we spend most of our lives, and maybe I am cynical enough to agree with the Toronto Star's Rosie DiManno when she so harshly indicts us "Still, and always, it's all about us. Don't pretend that we give a damn about them." I urge all Canadians, regardless of political affiliation, to consider that perhaps President Karzai was telling the truth when he said "Your military presence is a must because without that, we would not be able to keep our country together, and your reconstruction activity is necessary because it gives us economic opportunity and employment and a better quality of life."

All this is not to say that examination of the mission should not occur. I am all for making the necessary course corrections to ensure that the mission is on the best track to success. But a full 180-degree turn taken without the support of the legitimate Government of Afghanistan and the international community is not altering course, it is failure.

The moral moment is upon us; let's not spend the rest of our history explaining why it was okay to turn our backs on the people of Afghanistan.

This soldier is soon to be posted away from the Afghan mission. But instead of being relieved to be making it out of the mix in one piece as you would expect, I find it telling that he said to me "I don't need a break, I need for people to do the right thing."

He was talking to you, Canada.

Update: From another e-mail, this one from a gentleman whose politics fall well to the left of mine:

If you think it's more important to frustrate American oil interests than to aid a country fifth from the bottom of the UN human development index, then I wonder just what kind of humanitarian you think you are?