Why Are We in Afghanistan?

Out of a black sky, one bomb. Four dead. A national tragedy. A nation in mourning.

Four years ago this month I was a low-level participant (as an army public affairs officer) in the Toronto funeral for Corporal Ainsworth Dyer, killed along with three comrades by a reckless American F-16 pilot in Afghanistan. I’d actually run into Cpl. Dyer once or twice previously; it was a shock and surprise to be there at his memorial. But we did our best by him, I suppose; we were dusting off or reinventing some procedures for large-scale public military memorials that it is fair to say had not been seen, at least in Toronto, in quite some time.

Even as I was trying to corral the media in that small downtown church, I recall thinking, “These are just the first.” I had internalized the expectation that, as ignominious as these fatalities had been, our national interests in stabilizing a chaotic Afghanistan meant that these deaths would be followed by dozens, even scores...