Canadians fought a war in Afghanistan. Why do we struggle to talk about it?

It's not much of a stretch to say the federal government has trouble saying the word Afghanistan.

A couple of weeks ago, late on a Friday, Defence Minister David McGuinty and Veterans Affairs Minister Jill McKnight issued a statement to quietly defuse what some in the veterans community might view as a Remembrance Day bomb. 

They announced that a Senate bill (S-246) currently before the House of Commons — designating service in both the first Gulf War and Afghanistan as wartime service — would be the subject of public consultation in the coming months.

While it is most definitely about Afghanistan, the word Afghanistan does not appear anywhere in the 335-word joint statement.

In the eyes of Canadian law, at the the moment, the service of 40,000 troops over 13 years, the deaths of 158 of them, the wounding of an estimated 2,000 soldiers is reduced to the banal catch-all designation of "special duty area."

The fact the federal government doesn't recognize the Afghan war as a war — and needs to ask the public what it thinks — is jaw-dropping for many people, especially veterans. 

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"The Afghan mission was a war by every metric, and the current terminology of 'special duty area' rings hollow and judged against the life-and-death realities we faced on the ground," said retired colonel Mark Gasparotto, who led combat engineers during one of the bloodiest battles of the war, Operation Medusa. He spoke on Parliament Hill last week.

Those life-and-death realities are day-to-day realities for people like retired corporal Bruce Moncur. There's no debating semantics for him because the war is etched into his body. 

He was nearly killed during Operation Medusa when an American warplane mistakenly strafed his position. The attack left him with a catastrophic brain injury.

"I'm sitting there eating, and my fire team partner comes to sit next to me, Fraser Gill, and I'm eating, and I just remember being tossed in the air like a rag doll," Moncur recalled in a recent interview with CBC News. 

Retired corporal Bruce Moncur in Afghanistan. He was wounded by friendly fire in 2006. (Submitted by Bruce Moncur)

"I landed and I got thrown down the mountain … I'll never forget the sight of the coagulating sand with the blood mixing together. And I'm thinking, this is it. I'm probably going to die on this mountain in the middle of nowhere."

Retired sergeant Matt Snoddon served multiple tours as a psychological warfare officer, meeting local Afghans and trying to convince them to support the government. 

For him remembrance isn't something reserved for one day in November. 

Asked to relate the toughest day he faced during the war, Snoddon paused for a long time before relating how he and other soldiers and medics scrambled one night to save a group of Afghan children horribly maimed in an accidental explosion.

For the most part, the military itself and private organizations, such as the NATO Association of Canada, have been left to quietly mark significant anniversary events on their own this year, including the commemoration of Operation Medusa, the largest battle Canadians fought, in September.

Retired sergeant Matt Snoddon served multiple tours in Kandahar as a psychological warfare officer trying to convince local Afghans to support the local government. (Submitted by Matt Snoddon)

Increasingly, it seems Canada has left those who fought in the country's name to carry not only its wounds, but its memory.

"You know, we can't ignore the fact that there is a price to pay now and through the next generations," Snoddon said.

"I and many others like me have been stuck with the bill for that. And unfortunately my kids will have to pay a part of that bill and the people around me will have to pay part of the bill. I think that can't be forgotten."

One of the hallmarks of the war that sticks with veterans is the cruelty the Taliban inflicted on ordinary Afghans.

Former Canadian commander — retired major-general Denis Thompson — recalled how in 2008 insurgents used a 10-year-old boy as a suicide bomber.

"There was a lot of very cynical and vicious attacks," Thompson said, noting how the boy did not control his suicide vest and was remotely denotated by an old, nearby Taliban fighter as the child got close to a Canadian patrol. 

"There are no limits, if you will, to one's imagination when they're coming up with ways to terrorize the population or to get at the security forces."

Canadian and U.S. troops in 2011 on the last joint patrol of Canada's Afghan war. (Murray Brewster/The Canadian Press)

It is fair to say, however, for many veterans Afghanistan risks becoming the war Canada has already forgotten as a collective institutional amnesia settles over most of Ottawa.

This year saw a remarkable convergence of anniversaries. 

It has been 25 years since Canadian troops first set foot in Afghanistan following 9/11, 20 years since the beginning of major combat operations, 20 years since the first female soldier was killed in combat, 20 years since Operations Medusa, 15 years since combat ended and five years since the South Asian country fell back into Taliban hands.

And yet as those important milestones passed this year, there was mostly silence from Ottawa. 

A forgotten war?

Unlike wars and major battles of the last century, there was no major national public commemoration to mark Afghanistan.

Canadians were uniformly outraged when U.S. President Donald Trump blithely dismissed allied contributions to Afghanistan, including Canadian sacrifices.

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"We have never really asked anything of them," Trump said in an interview last January. "You know, they'll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan or this and that. They did. They stayed a little back."

Trump's remarks provoked a backlash across Canada. But beneath the anger lay an uncomfortable contradiction.

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While Canadians were quick to defend the war's sacrifice online, they have been far less willing, it seems, to talk about the war itself.

Only a handful of federal statements have been issued — five in all. The federal government did mark the anniversary of the end of major combat and the beginning of construction of the long-delayed national memorial.

The prime minister's Veterans' Week statement, released on Nov. 5, specifically mentions the Gulf War and the four soldiers killed last month in Wainwright, Alta., but not Afghanistan.

Historian Sean Maloney, at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ont., said we struggle as a nation to talk about war in general and find it particularly tough to sort out our feelings about Afghanistan.

Canadian and U.S. troops on one of the last joint patrols of Canada's Afghan war in 2011. (Murray Brewster/The Canadian Press)

"Why are we afraid to talk about it?" Maloney asked. 

He spent a decade battling the Defence Department for permission to publish his history of the war. 

"What are we embarrassed about? Who's embarrassed? Is it the bureaucracy? Is it elected officials? Is it both? Is it cultural mavens that this doesn't fit in with?"

Retired general Wayne Eyre, the former chief of the defence staff who led a team to train Afghan soldiers during the war, said Maloney's questions are not easy to answer.

"Part of it is because of how it ended up," Eyre said, in reference to the Taliban victory in 2021.

"Canada has gone through various waves of understanding and commemoration based on the national mood and who's to say that's not going to change in the future with respect to Afghanistan? My hope is that we learn from it, we continue to venerate those that we lost over there."

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The last major public commemoration directly related to the war was the hastily organized national day of honour in 2014, a tribute by the former Conservative government after the last Canadian troops were withdrawn from the country. 

Unlike some of our allies, Canada has never undertaken a comprehensive public accounting of the mission.

There have been internal assessments at both the defence and foreign ministries, but no national examination of the political decisions, military strategy, money spent — or why it ended the way it did.

Maloney said he believes the reluctance reflects something deeper and that the Afghan war challenges the comfortable story Canadians tell themselves about their country.

"We're peaceful people in the middle, we're trying to be reasonable, and we're a middle power, da-da-da. Well then you go back and look at the history of the country, it doesn't fit with that," Maloney said, pointing to Canada's participation in the world wars and Korea.

A Canadian soldier in Zangabad, Afghanistan, in 2011 preparing for the handover of a base to U.S. forces. (Murray Brewster/The Canadian Press)

Former diplomat Pam Isfeld said she has noticed the same thing and wonders how well equipped Canadians are to face a world that's increasingly more dangerous when they are reluctant to acknowledge their past.

"It's an important part of our history, and the idea that nobody really wants to talk about it, I don't understand," said Isfeld, who served as a civilian adviser to Canada's combat commander in 2006.  

Awarding-winning photojournalist Louie Palu, who spent almost 15 months — over five years — embedded with the Canadian army in Kandahar, said there's often more interest in the United States and Europe about the exploits of Canadian troops than there is at home.

"It's still shocking to me how few people either talk about Afghanistan or Canada's experience in Afghanistan, or acknowledge that we were at war," he said.

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A decade ago, Palu produced a documentary focusing on Canadian troops using his remarkable photos. It was a film that won multiple international awards and was screened all over the world and yet was rejected by every Canadian film festival which it tried to enter.

Canada accepted over 54,700 Afghan refugees who fled the 2021 Taliban takeover, many of them deeply invested in the Western political and social value promises of a better future.

Abdul Razaq Khan, a former translator for Canadian media outlets, said he was grateful for finding a safe haven and often thinks about what his home country could have become.

"Canadians were helping to build our country, and we had to step up for that," Khan said.

Asked if he was angry about the way life has turned out, he replied: "No one leaves their country happily."