Quotes of the Day

In the tinderbox region around Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, the centuries-old code of Pashtunwali is supposed to protect peaceful visitors from harm. So when a four-man Canadian military-outreach team accompanied by Afghan army troops arrived March 4 in the village of Shinkay, 70 km north of Kandahar, to discuss construction projects with local elders, the soldiers felt comfortable removing their helmets. It was a near fatal mistake. They had barely settled down for a chat when a young man, shouting "Allahu akbar" ("God is great"), leapt to his feet and struck Canadian Forces Reserve Lieut. Trevor Greene, 41, a savage ax blow to the back of his head.

As horrified elders watched, Greene's comrades shot dead the assailant--later identified as Abdul Karim, a villager thought to be in his late teens or early 20s--then beat a hasty retreat under the crackle of gunfire. Within hours, the wounded Greene had been airlifted to the U.S. Army hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, where doctors reported late last week that he was in stable but serious condition. He faces "a very long and protracted recovery," says Dr. Catherine Gray, a Canadian Forces medic in Germany.

Back in Afghanistan, Greene's comrades say the attack won't stop the program of village visits that began late last month when Canada took command of the 6,000-strong multinational brigade in the country's volatile south. "We are not going to change things just because of one unusual incident," says Canadian Forces spokeswoman Captain Julie Roberge in Kandahar. A military investigation of the Shinkay attack has so far turned up no evidence of a planned ambush. All the same, the episode has rattled Canadian troops. Says Roberge: "As a soldier you expect gunfire, not an ax."

The gruesome attack came at the end of a troubling inaugural week for Canadians embarked on what may be their most dangerous overseas mission since the Korean War. Some 2,300 soldiers have been deployed to Kandahar, where hard-core Taliban rebels determined to topple the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai retain strong local sympathy. Since the troops officially began their one-year assignment Feb. 28, two Canadians were killed when their light armored vehicle collided with a taxi, and six others have been injured. A total of 14 Canadian soldiers have been wounded in accidents, suicide bombings and other assaults so far in 2006. And as Canadian Forces began a major push last week into villages north of Kandahar, a roadside bomb exploded 800 m from Chief of the Defense Staff Rick Hillier, who was meeting with village elders. Hillier, who commanded an earlier Canadian deployment in Afghanistan, shrugged it off. "It was a day in the life of this mission," he says.

More troubling events are almost certain in the months ahead. The Canadian deployment is the knife edge of an international strategy to shift the management of "stabilization" operations in southern Afghanistan from U.S. forces to the nato-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)--the transition is expected to be completed this summer--and Taliban rebels are already probing for weak spots in coalition defenses. "The insurgents are learning as they go," says Christian Willach, manager of the Afghanistan ngo Safety Organization. "In the coming months everyone is going to have a harder time."

But the attacks have cast the piercing light of public scrutiny on a mission that was approved with little attention and almost no debate, and some Canadians have begun to wonder whether the effort is worth it. "Canada should pull its troops out," York University professor James Laxer wrote in a commentary in the Globe and Mail last week, arguing that Canadians "are not engaged in peacekeeping" but participating in a war aimed at establishing U.S. "hegemony" in that part of the world.

The rising casualty count has prompted a barrage of calls from opposition M.P.s for a parliamentary debate. But stung by a backlash from Canadians angered by what they consider a betrayal of the soldiers risking their lives overseas, Liberal and New Democratic Party (N.D.P.) critics now claim they were not asking for a vote to terminate the mission--just a more thorough exploration of the rationale for war. "We still don't know exactly what the terms of engagement are, under whose auspices we are operating," says defense critic Dawn Black of the N.D.P. Acting Liberal leader Bill Graham says his party still has "total support" for the Afghan deployment--not surprising, since he announced it last May as Defense Minister in the previous government. A debate, he says, would only help "Canadians better understand what is at stake."

So far, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has stonewalled the critics, pointing out that all parties supported the original deployment during an earlier "take note" debate last November. "It is not this government's intention to question this mission when our troops are in danger," says Harper, who added that the perception of a "lack of resolve" would weaken troop morale.

Behind the political posturing, however, is a growing national anxiety that Canada's military is heading into risky, uncharted territory and talking more brazenly about it. Defense chief Hillier warned last year that Canadian Forces would be involved in killing "scumbags" as they ramped up their participation in the global war on terrorism. David Fraser, the tough-talking new commander of the multinational brigade, pushed the envelope even further when he asserted this month that the Canadian mission in Afghanistan was part of the "evolution" of the nation's military toward the "harder side" of peacemaking. "We're going into [the Taliban's] yard," says Brigadier General Fraser, who commanded the Mechanized Brigade Group in Edmonton, Alta., before his assignment to Afghanistan. "We're going to start kicking them." Those were unfamiliar messages for Canadians accustomed to seeing themselves in the post-cold war world as benign peacekeepers. And it has enraged critics who say the Afghan enterprise was wrongheaded from the start. "Trying to stabilize an environment like Afghanistan isn't doable in a war-fighting situation," says Peggy Mason of the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre in Ottawa. "The government has to explain right now why we're there, and it has to be more than simplistic stuff saying 'It's our war too.'"

The issue threatens to polarize Canadians, who are suddenly confronted with the realities of a strange and distant war. "There's more of a compelling interest in Afghanistan than any other mission we've been in over the last 15 years," says David Rudd, executive director of the Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies in Toronto. "We've seen what an insecure Afghanistan can produce in terms of terrorism against North America, but the previous government never explained it to Canadians." According to an Ipsos-Reid poll this month, support for Canada's deployment in Afghanistan has dropped to 54%, down from 66% when the first substantive military mission was sent there in February 2002. (An earlier contingent of Canada's secretive special-forces unit, JTF2, arrived in late 2001.) Canada's subsequent participation in the ISAF force based in Kabul was regarded as a piece of shrewd North American gamesmanship: former PM Jean Chrétien, who had angered Washington with his refusal to participate in the Iraq war, was able to claim that Canada's Afghanistan commitment made it impossible to send Canadian soldiers elsewhere in the Middle East. Since then, including this month's toll, 10 Canadian soldiers and one civilian official (from the Foreign Affairs Ministry) have been killed and 40 Canadian soldiers injured. As the casualties mount, warns Rudd, Canadians need a full national hearing on Afghanistan before Ottawa decides whether to extend Canada's mission beyond its scheduled pullout date next February. Adds Rudd: "I think if the resources are there, it's worth it to stay longer. But we can't maintain that level of commitment indefinitely--and I don't rule out that some people may begin to ask whether we're on a fool's errand."

Afghanistan may also prove to be a test for the Canadian military on the home front. After a decade of fighting for more funds and better equipment, Canada's top commanders hope they can win public support for the military's gradual shift from "peacekeeping" missions to a more active combat role. While the politicians waffle, the military has launched its own p.r. campaign, making soldiers and their families--in a rare break with tradition--available to the media. At the same time, Canadian Forces have bought 50 Nyala armored patrol vehicles for added protection against land mines--signaling that commanders expect to be involved in unconventional combat environments like Afghanistan for a long time to come. "We've been engaged in many complex missions for the last 15 years," says Brigadier General Mike Ward, who commanded the Canadian task force in Kosovo in 1999 and is a top aide at the Canadian Expeditionary Command Force headquarters in Ottawa. "We know these missions are dangerous. We'll take the time to mourn, but we'll carry on."

The true-grit approach is echoed by rank-and-file soldiers. Sergeant Gerry Repesse, 38, a military-police officer from Edmonton who served in Afghanistan in 2002, says he would gladly go again. "It's my career," says Repesse. "When I joined the military, I knew at some point it would put me in harm's way." More poignantly, the sentiment is shared by relatives of the injured, like Trevor Greene's family, which was at his bedside in Germany last week. "I know a lot of Canadians don't want us to be in Afghanistan," says Greene's father Richard, a retired R.C.M.P. officer. "But they don't really understand what those soldiers are trying to do over there." Trevor, father of a 1-year-old daughter, worked as an author and a journalist from his boat at Fisherman's Wharf on Vancouver's Granville Island before shipping out with his reserve company this year. He was promoted to captain after his injury.

For Greene's comrades in Afghanistan, life has got starker since the Shinkay attack. "You don't know who the bad guy is here," says Sergeant Daryl Schuch, who works in the computer-technology department at Kabul Airfield. "They don't have big tags on their heads saying 'I'm going to shoot you.'" Schuch recently took part in a parade in Kabul honoring Corporal Paul Davis--one of the two soldiers killed in the vehicle accident this month--before his body was returned to Canada. More than 2,000 soldiers, including Canadians, British and Americans, served as the honor guard. "The Americans have got this process down to an art," says Schuch. "I hope to hell I don't get that good at it."

• Stephen Handelman