There’s a price to pay for being unready for war. Will Canada have to pay it again?

A little more than 18 years ago, amid the dust and hard heat of Kandahar Airfield, the weary look on Col. Ian Hope’s face spoke more loudly than his words. It was the spring of 2006 and the Canadian contingent in Afghanistan had just been through several brutal weeks. More than half a dozen Canadian soldiers had been killed in roadside bombings. As it turned out, it was the beginning of a bloody, unrelenting wave of casualties that would rend the heart of a nation and seize the political agenda in ways the Conservative government of the day never expected….