When Edmund went to Afghanistan in 2008, not a good year for ISAF or its parallel US formations, he was deployed with an American outfit called the Combined Security Transition Command - Afghanistan (CSTC-A , pronounced "See Stick-a"). CSTC-A was supposed to "build capacity" in the Afghan state and security forces and, in Edmund's case, that meant convincing the Afghans to adopt the Western European and North American rule-of-law ideal and apply it to war.

He knew that his mission was futile from the get-go, and said as much but only to me. He liked and admired many people he met there, Afghans and Americans alike, but could not imagine any circumstance in which the Americans had a prayer of making so much as a dent in Afghan culture. When he came back to Canada, he put the Afghan experience firmly behind him and returned to defending soldiers at court martial and advising assisting officers as quickly he could.

I never saw Canada's participation in the war in Afghanistan as anything but part of the protective multinational cover applied to US operations. Like the European nations in ISAF (the Netherlands, Germany, Romania, Poland et al.), we were there to help make the US occupation look like an effort of the "community of nations". Well, NATO nations, plus like-minded allies such as Australia. Eventually, frustrated by the hassle of deferring to allies with differing objectives and agendas, the Americans took over ISAF. The Netherlands and Canada were early leavers; by the end, I think only the British and a few other nations were left of the once-mighty multinational gaggle.

Having made what we hoped was a good showing, we cut our losses and bugged out in 2014. The Dutch were out by 2012.

Sitting at my perch in Canadian Expeditionary Force Command Headquarters in Ottawa, I saw the mission re-formulated and narrowed year by year as waves of jargon came and went. Ink-blot theory, COIN, counter-IED, sustainment. In the end, we polished off a 20-km stretch of road in Panjwaii District and handed over our remaining small segment of Kandahar Province to the Americans and moved to Kabul for two years of trying to train the Afghan National Army. When that was done, we left.

Edmund and I were both brought up on Kipling and the history of the British Empire, and I vividly remember how we reacted to the first moves of the U.S. intervention in 2001. "What can possibly go wrong?" we said. "Just about everything," we said. "This will end in tears."

There's plenty of good history and analysis of the so-called "global war on terror" (promptly reduced to the acronym GWOT), and the stuff that's any good starts and consistently circles back to the aspirations and activities of Pakistan, the rampaging elephant in the room that the US never even tried to confront. Now we'll see how the Pakistani security and intelligence services manipulate the Taliban (that's a plural, people) as they try to govern Afghanistan, and how long it will take before China and, possibly, Russia decide that they can't stand the instability any more.