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Benjamin Hertwig is a writer and former Canadian soldier whose first book of poetry, Slow War, was a finalist for a Governor-General’s Literary Award.

The war in Afghanistan has circled in on itself, a snake swallowing its own tail. Two decades ago, hijacked planes flew into the Twin Towers. Americans jumped from the towers as the world around them burned. This week, seven Afghan citizens died during a chaotic scene at Kabul’s airport, some plunging to their deaths trying to hold on to what was left of America in Afghanistan: a departing plane.

For many years, Canada and the United States worked together in Afghanistan. In my work as a poet, I have visited with thousands of primary school students across Canada and have learned that these students know little, if anything, about Canada’s longest war (2001-2014). In their defence, all were born after Sept. 11, 2001. All were still young when Canada withdrew from Afghanistan. Even some of their teachers were born in the late nineties and have no direct memories of the terrorist attacks and few memories of the wars that followed. I provide this statement with neither glibness nor sadness nor defensiveness, though the time I spent as a soldier in Afghanistan remains the single-most influential six months of my life. In the national memory, however, 13 years of war in Afghanistan does not even seem to register as a wound. The memory is perhaps the faintest of scars, only seen in certain lighting, if you are looking for it. But who is looking for it?

Writing in April, 2020, Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser to former U.S. President Barack Obama, declared the age of 9/11 over, announcing that it is “no longer Sept. 12.” The pandemic is now the seminal rupture through which future generations will mark time, understandably. As the narrator of Teju Cole’s Open City states, “Fallujah will be as meaningless to them as Daijon is to you.” In Among the Walking Wounded: Soldiers, Survival, and PTSD, John Conrad, an Afghanistan veteran, puts it this way: “Kandahar is, in many haunting ways, the Saigon of our generation.” “What,” he adds, “will the next generation of Canadians see in their mind’s eye when they read about the war on terror and specifically our war in Kandahar?”

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Canada’s first foray into Afghanistan happened two decades ago, when I was still a high-school student in the Prairies. I had never been to New York. Some of the soldiers I eventually served with had never left their home provinces, let alone Canada. In my Grade 10 English class, I watched the chemical intensity of 9/11 unfold on a boxy television and saw the blood rush of national interest when four Canadian soldiers died in a so-called friendly fire bombing during the early days of the ground war, the first Canadian deaths in a combat zone since the Korean War. Canadians marched on the streets in resistance to the war. “When the rich declare war, it is the poor who die,” wrote Canadian poet Rita Wong in The Common Sky: Canadian Writers Against the War. Canadians also gathered along highways and at airports to pay their respects and welcome the dead home. Now, the recollection of antiwar protests, Red Fridays and Yellow Ribbon campaigns seems like a long time ago.

“There may be some who want to cut and run,” boasted former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper on an early visit to Kandahar Airfield in 2006, “but cutting and running is not your way. It’s not my way. And it’s not the Canadian way. We don’t make a commitment and then run away at the first sign of trouble.” Months later, after the death of another Canadian soldier, defence minister Gordon O’Connor added his own inflection: “Canada will mourn the loss of Corporal Boneca, but he will not be forgotten. His memory will live on through the people whose lives he has touched, while fulfilling our mission to bring peace and security to Afghanistan.” Had there been appetite for early negotiations, one wonders whether soldiers like Anthony Boneca would still be alive.

For Canada, all that remains of the war in Afghanistan is the aftermath – for instance, the suicide epidemic among veterans, as explored in The Unremembered, a Globe and Mail investigation into Canadian soldiers who took their own lives after Afghanistan. For the people of Afghanistan, the war is over – and the war continues. Most Afghan civilians do not have the option of flying away. For all the times Canadians argued about the cost of the war – billions of dollars, 158 Canadian soldiers, tens of thousands of Afghan civilians – a brute fact has emerged: what we tried to do did not work. The next time Canadian leaders seek simple military solutions to complex international issues, I hope we will reflect on this reality.

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