Afghanistan’s war is one that Canada’s government would like to forget.

Ottawa no longer says much about this conflict or the soldiers who fought in it. Yet the casualties continue to mount.

News that another veteran of Afghanistan apparently killed himself Monday only underlines this extraordinary disjunction.

The death of Master Cpl. Sylvain Lelièvre is the fourth apparent suicide by a Canadian soldier in just over a week. All four had returned to Canada after serving in Afghanistan.

They are not the only delayed casualties. Other soldiers have come home only to be nickeled and dimed by a government that once lauded them as heroes.

Some wounded soldiers are being discharged early to ensure that they don’t qualify for pensions.

Veterans who once might have received annual disability pensions must now make do with lump sum payments that, in most cases, provide them with less money.

A study by Veterans Ombudsman Guy Parent estimates that hundreds of incapacitated veterans risk poverty once they turn 65.

The Ottawa Citizen has reported that military officials want wounded soldiers seeking help to pledge, in writing, that they won’t use social media to criticize their treatment.

Government ministers insist they are doing their best for veterans. But other than that, we don’t hear much about those who served — or continue to serve — in a war that Prime Minister Stephen Harper once called crucial to Canada.

The prime minister’s references to Afghanistan now are usually brief and elliptical, as they were on Remembrance Day when he listed Kandahar as one of the many places in which Canadian troops have fought and served since 1914.

Canada still has 620 troops in Afghanistan tasked with training local forces. But Harper no longer travels there to pose for the cameras with them.

He used to regularly show up at military bases to praise soldiers and their families. That practice, too, appears to have been curtailed.

There is not as much talk about heroes as there once was.

This is not how Harper once approached the Afghan War. A Liberal government first dispatched Canadian battle troops to Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. But once Harper became prime minister in 2006, he prosecuted that effort with a vengeance.

In speech after speech, he explained why the war was necessary, why Canada would prosecute it to the bitter end and why he would never do what he eventually did do — set a firm target for withdrawing all troops

In one 2006 address to soldiers, he sneered at suggestions that Canada might pull out its troops before the Taliban was fully defeated.

The war had to be fought and won, he said at yet another military event.

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“You can’t lead from the bleachers,” he told Canadian troops in his first of three trips to Kandahar. “I want Canada to be a leader.’

“Terrorism will come home if we don’t confront it here” he said on his second trip.

For Canada’s soldiers, no praise was too extravagant.

“Canadian heroes are being made every day in the deserts and mountains of southern Afghanistan,” Harper said in marking the fifth anniversary of 9/11.

In April 2007, he pledged that veterans would receive the “respect and honour they deserve.” Their families, he said a few months later in Valcartier, Que., would be supported “just as much as we support the troops.”

In those early years of the war, soldiers were told they were taking part in a struggle that would define both Canada and the world.

Afghanistan, Harper said in 2006, was the place where “our security concerns, our values and our capabilities come squarely together.”

Yes, he went on, there were casualties in such a life and death struggle. But that, he said, was the “price of leadership.”

Seven years later, that price — in lives and limbs and mental health — is still being counted.

The war itself continues. But it is back-page news. No one wants to talk about it. Or about the people who fought it.

Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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