Canada to Kandahar, Kabul and Back

After nearly thirteen years the last Canadian soldiers are finally coming home from Afghanistan. Since the first group of forty special forces members of Joint Task Force 2 arrived in December 2001 to the lowering of the Canadian flag in Kabul today our soldiers have sweat, bled and died in that far away land.

During our time in Afghanistan, Canadians Forces were sent there under three different Prime Ministers, they fought Taliban and al-Qaeda, garrisoned and patrolled the outskirts of Kabul, and went back to Kandahar in force in 2006. There they stopped a Taliban offensive to re-take Kandahar City cold in it's tracks, causing such heavy losses the Taliban had to change tactics from direct combat with large maneuver forces to a smaller scale war of ambushes, raids and the deadly IED's. To finally in their current job of training an Afghan army that can take over and finish what we started.

Through all this the Canadian soldier sometimes had the support of his fellow citizens but he never lost the support of the majority of the Afghan people. Who when Canada redeployed from Kandahar to Kabul came out to say thank you, and to protest.., not that we were there, but to protest that we were leaving them.

You don't have to agree with our presence there, you don't have to agree with the way the war was fought (certainly there was lots to criticize), but we should be proud of those men and women who put themselves in mortal danger so that others could at least have a chance for a better life.

Canada needs to be defended, and if it's not going to be by our soldiers it will be by someone else's. Canada at times will need to stand up and back up it's foreign policy ideals with more than just talk. We have done so regularly in the past and certainly we will do so again in the future.

In many countries soldiers are paid thugs who keep a repressive regime in power, In others they're teenagers forced to serve, reluctantly pulled from home and school for mandatory military service. We in Canada don't do that, and we can never be thankful enough that we still have young people in this country who are willing to stand up, sign on the dotted line and volunteer to do the dirty and dangerous work that sometimes needs to be done.

Thank you to all who served, thank you for giving up everything to put our country's words and will in to action. Thank you for living in the dust and dirt never knowing what the next step might bring, or what threat was around the corner while we sat comfortably at home. And thank you most of all for giving everything you had for everyone of us.

God Bless the Canadian Soldier.