Wasted lives in afghanistan
The news articles in the past two days concerning the deaths of four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan shows two good reasons why our troops should not be there.

First and foremost, we have mandated our troops to do two things incompatible with each other; on the one hand young soldiers are sent to a country with little experience or understanding of the religion and culture of this fiercely independant and tribal people. We ask them to search out and ruthlessly destroy an enemy they cannot identify by normal military means.
Instead, they must rely on a system of unscrupulous informants, many paid by bounty or reward, who direct them to suspected homes. They are searched in a manner producing dishonor for the occupants, who are left in shame until they can seek revenge. Ordinary people are thus turned into an ever-growing, fertile pool of new recruits and a public sympathetic to the terrorists aims.
Thus the Canadian troops, who are meant to bring freedom to an oppressed land, become nothing more than another invader. Had their role been purely defensive, then one can see the second mandate being possible. In the words of a news article, the slain Lt. William Turner "...went to Afghanistan not to fight but to help ordinary people beleagured by decades of war to rebuild their communities with aid and encouragement." How is raiding a village one day and extending an olive branch the next supposed to work?

The second reason against our troops being there is because they are assuming all of the bad habits set down by the Americans. Knowing full-well that dogs should not be allowed to enter religious premises and that news of this practice would bring sharp criticism in Canada, the Canadian military used outside "private contractors". A news item as to the cause of the death of four soldiers killed in the roadside bomb attack possibly being attributed to the use of search-dogs in a mosque brought a perplexed response from our military. They stated we don't have a dog capacity "and up until recently their existence (the private contractors) was not supposed to be exposed." What are we to deduce from this? The handlers must have been on the military base. Did the Canadian military think that using civilians to do what they can't or shouldn't do would absolve them from any responsibility? And most imporantly, what else have they contracted out that the Canadian public is not aware of?

Our troops deserve better than this.