Canadians fought a war in Afghanistan. Why do we struggle to talk about it?

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Is Afghanistan in danger of becoming Canada's forgotten war? Parliament is struggling with a bill that would designate the 13-year conflict — where more than 40,000 Canadians served — as a war. The prime minister's Veterans' Week statement mentions the tragedy in Wainwright and service in the first Gulf War, but not Afghanistan.

It's not much of a stretch to say the federal government has trouble saying the word Afghanistan.

A couple of weeks ago, late on a Friday, Defence Minister David McGuinty and Veterans Affairs Minister Jill McKnight issued a statement to quietly defuse what some in the veterans community might view as a Remembrance Day bomb.

They announced that a Senate bill (S-246) currently before the House of Commons — designating service in both the first Gulf War and Afghanistan as wartime service — would be the subject of public consultation in the coming months.

While it is most definitely about Afghanistan, the word Afghanistan does not appear anywhere in the 335-word joint statement.

In the eyes of Canadian law, at the the moment, the service of 40,000 troops over 13 years, the deaths of 158 of them, the wounding of an estimated 2,000 soldiers is reduced to the banal catch-all designation of "special duty area."

The fact the federal government doesn't recognize the Afghan war as a war — and needs to ask the public what it thinks — is jaw-dropping for many people, especially veterans.

Afghan mission was 'a war by every metric,' says vet fighting for recognition

"The Afghan mission was a war by every metric, and the current terminology of 'special duty area' rings hollow and judged against the life-and-death realities we faced on the ground," said retired colonel Mark Gasparotto, who led combat engineers during one of the bloodiest battles of the war, Operation Medusa. He spoke on Parliament Hill last week.

Those life-and-death realities are day-to-day realities for people like retired corporal Bruce Moncur. There's no debating semantics for him because the war is etched into his body.

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