At Last...

It's been quite the week on the home front of the war in Afghanistan.

Troops are rotating in from Quebec, where support for the war is weakest.

Two opinion polls, described in the Christian Science Monitor (http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0719/p99s01-duts.html), give new snapshots of how Canadians view their military and this current deployment.

A report commissioned by the UK House of Commons says that Britain and Canada are bearing a disproportionate load in the supposedly all-NATO mission.

And the July 23 issue of Maclean's (Canada's version of Time) has a couple of articles about Afghanistan.

The first, a column by Andrew Potter, is all about "supporting the troops." Potter says people have two "intellectually and morally" honest ways to support the troops: demand that they be brought home or demand that they be given the resources--human, financial, and political--to win.

Meanwhile, a feature by Sean Maloney claims that the two years of effort in Afghanistan are paying off. He says that "the only way the Taliban can win is to generate doubt and fear in Canada." To do that, their strategy is, in part, to attack troops in such a way that produces mass casualties.

I'm no expert. I'm by no means qualified to evaluate Maloney's statements, the methodology of the public opinion polls, or the accuracy of the reporting of their results. I'm just thrilled that Canadians are finally talking about Afghanistan.

Oh--there's also a report from the front I think of as Absurd-istan. This Maclean's also contains a whine by Barbara Amiel, wife of now-convicted felon Conrad Black (who owns Maclean's) about having to move. You see, the four-month lease on their posh digs ran out, and they didn't expect the trial to take this long, and now she has to, like, find another place to live.

Obviously, her column was written before the conviction. In any case, I'm sure the soldiers and civilians being killed in Afghanistan feel her pain.