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The Liberal senator, then the chair of the National Security and Defence Committee, published opinion columns in several newspapers in 2007 urging the government to get Canadian helicopters to Afghanistan as soon as possible.

Canada finally assembled a fleet of Chinook helicopters, as well as smaller Griffins, which arrived in Afghanistan in late 2008. “And of course once they came in we no longer had an extraordinarily high percentage of casualties,” Mr. Kenny said. Canadian deaths increased slightly in 2009, before dropping by more than half in 2010.

“My view is that the political leadership in the country was negligent at the time,” he said, arguing the government should have done more to get helicopters for the troops.

He noted that even the U.S. and U.K. had lower casualty rates. “Certainly the U.K. appeared to have a pretty similar role to Canada, and the U.S. had the same thing. The difference was they had equipment.”

Mr. Petrolekas, who was with the NATO operational command between 2003 and 2007, said the drop in casualties might have had more to do with the changing insurgency than the arrival of helicopters.

And he said helicopters could not replace combat vehicles like the one damaged in the April, 2007, bombing. “You cannot patrol roads, you cannot patrol into villages, often for days at a time, you cannot go from A to B without a fighting vehicle,” he said.

“They had a bad day and bad luck, and whether there was insufficient surveillance overall of roads and other things, perhaps you could make that argument in some cases. But I don’t think you could say that having had helicopters earlier would have prevented those particular deaths.”