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This fairytale is immediately relevant to this week’s debates because the Taliban are the incubators, precursors and role models of ISIL, and breaking the Talibs’ grip on Afghanistan has opened up the brightest democratic space anywhere between Syria’s bomb-strewn Mediterranean coast and the outskirts of New Delhi. Some quagmire.

Some sense of proportion: the death toll of 158 Canadian soldiers during more than a decade of hard-won gains in Afghanistan is only slightly greater than the number of dead Muslims – 137 innocents at last count – butchered in a single jihadist suicide bombing last week at a mosque in Yemen. Some further proportion: the contribution Harper is making to the half-baked U.S.-led coalition is only another year’s modest commitment of a mere half-dozen Canadian fighter jets, a couple of Aurora patrol planes and a Polaris transport plane, a ground crew and a few dozen Special Operations Regiment advisers and trainers up in Kurdistan.

You’d think we were invading Russia.

The news from Yemen isn’t likely to be getting any better. The day after the mosque suicide bombing, the United States pulled the last of its troops from the country. Don’t expect the news from Libya to improve any time soon, either.

This brings us to another fiction: If we’d only left Moammar Gadhafi in power, we’d all have been spared the embarrassment of the failed-state nuthouse we created there in the first place. Another inconvenience: we didn’t overthrow Gadhafi, his slaves did.