On social media, I have many friends who are military veterans and some who are still serving. I am more than a little sad to see some of them writing about how the Canadian combat mission "improved" life for -- as one put it -- "an entire generation of Afghans." Then, inevitably, there's a statement about girls going to school.

Y'know, that's not what armies are for.

The military profession is a tragic one because it is inherently wasteful and its core business is destruction. The fact that training for war can make good people better just makes it worse. The view of military service in the so-called Western world was severely warped by the Second World War and its crusade against Fascism in general and Hitler's version of it in particular; we won, and that victory halted a great evil. That success blinded us to the great evils we perpetrated ourselves to accomplish it, and the fates of many innocents who perished or were permanently scarred along the way. The end justified the means -- stopping the Holocaust justified the fire-bombing of Dresden, etc. etc. etc. Look back a century further and note the same logic around the American Civil War: the abolition of slavery justified slaughter on a scale grander than anything seen since the 30 Years' War in the 17th century.

Canadians are very romantic about military service, largely because they know almost nothing about it. "Peacekeeping" is a big part of our national myth, and it's a crock of lies; it works only when all parties to a conflict are ready and willing to quit fighting, and no patron powers are stirring the ashes. Of the UN missions under way now, UNFICYP in Cyprus is a good example: in 1974, after nine years of peacekeeping, EOKA was a spent force and the newly independent island was beginning to confront its ethnically defined inequities, when Turkey gingered up its diaspora on the north side of the island and actually invaded in support of a breakaway statelet. Cue the pocket war, and UNFICYP is still there.

When we first accepted a gig with ISAF, it was 2003 and we were going to Kabul to keep the peace while the Afghans organized their new government and conducted their first national elections. It was a very bumpy ride, and a clear-eyed after-action analysis in 2005 would have resulted in a withdrawal instead of doubling down with a move to Kandahar to fight the Taliban as part of a combined formation made up of troops from Britain and the Netherlands as well as us. (At that time, the US was running its own show, Operation Enduring Freedom, and was not part of ISAF -- although everything ISAF did had to be tailored to US intentions.)

The war in Kandahar shifted quickly from forces in the field to counter-insurgency, and the highly professional regular armies of ISAF had neither the skills nor the experience for it. The ruthless British imperial armies of the early to mid-20th centuries probably could have put it down -- for a while -- but the post-Cold War forces of NATO were still designed to fight the Soviet horde thundering through the Fulda Gap. So it did not go well.

Alas, the Canadian public still has no clue. When the nice kid who mows my lawn realized that Edmund and I were ex-military, she reflexively said, "Thank you for your service"; she had no idea that joining the Canadian Forces was a career move, not an act of sacrifice, for people like us. In lovely, leafy Stratford, where the military footprint is limited to an Army Reserve unit of about 100 part-time soldiers parading on Thursday nights at our handsome Edwardian armoury, cars with Veteran licence plates park for free because, first, romance, and also because there are so few of us.