Another Atlantic Canadian casualty in Afghanistan. Master Cpl. Darrell Priede, a military photographer, had a photography business in Oromocto, N.B., the community near Base Gagetown that has taken too many of these hits. So has Atlantic Canada, where we supply a disproportionate percentage of Canadian troops, which in turn have been taking a disproportionate percentage of the casualties.

Canada has some five per cent of the NATO contingent, but our 56 fatalities account for about a quarter of the total in the year and a half since we moved into Kandahar.

As such, Atlantic Canada is carrying more of the Afghan burden than anyone in the NATO domain and the questions of what we’re doing there, whether we’re making any kind of progress, and when we’re coming out become more pressing with every fatality.

Straight answers are rare. If anything, the picture becomes more confused.

Along with the scandals and the lies over the detainees affair, the political clash over an exit timetable, and the continuous muddle involving Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor, out comes the Senlis Council, the most authoritative independent observer of the Afghan conflict, saying that Canada’s efforts at rebuilding Afghanistan are, despite good intentions, “non-existent.”

The Canadian aid workers defend their efforts and claim they are making headway with food, health and work projects.

I suspect what this means is that we do have some useful projects that are working, but measured against the larger picture, it’s not even a drop in the bucket.

In fact, in trying to get a fix on what’s going on in Afghanistan, one of the things we forget is how tiny our presence is and how subject its success is to forces beyond Canadian control — the stability of Pakistan, the population’s resentment over civilian deaths due to bombing and its own destitution, corruption in the Karzai government, the heroin trade, tactics of the Taliban and, most important, the loose cannon which is the Bush administration.

We have 2,500 out of some 50,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan. Three-quarters of troops are American, and even those are participating in what in the U.S. is often referred to as “Americaâe(TM)s forgotten war” as Iraq consumes all the attention.

About six months ago, Afghanistan did rise again in the American consciousness. It rose along with the realization that the war in Iraq was irretrievably lost. The supplementary question was: Are we losing in Afghanistan too? Since then, more troops have been sent to Afghanistan.

The galling backdrop to the Afghan mission is that it’s a hundredfold more complicated and dangerous than it should be simply because George W. Bush and company went off and invaded Iraq — inflaming Islamic insurgencies everywhere; allowing insurgents to cut their teeth on new techniques, then export them, like the increasingly sophisticated roadside bombs used in Afghanistan, which are killing our troops.

And now the administration is proposing to kill the poppy crop with chemical herbicides, which is sure to inflame the situation more. What seems like a logical solution — to buy the poppy crop, which apparently the world needs for morphine production anyway, somehow offends the fine sensibilities of the invaders of Iraq.

In the end, one ray of hope for Afghanistan, as for the world, is that the whole Bush government — not just Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz — will eventually be gone and a new start made, assuming that the world isn’t embroiled in a bunch of new wars by then.

Meanwhile, some things have changed. The definition of success in Afghanistan has been quietly transformed. The thumping militarism of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, General Rick Hillier, and the war party intellectuals who were so contemptuous of our peacekeeping tradition and eager to follow George W. Bush anywhere, has gone mute. The Canadian public isn’t buying it.

In his recent trip to Afghanistan, Harper emphasized that “military means alone” wouldn’t do it. Handing out pencil cases to children, he said success depends on “creating the economic, social and governmental infrastructure that ensures lasting peace and prosperity.” There’s pressure in the U.S. as well to shift the emphasis to development from an impossible military conquest.

So we wait. If we dare not hope outright for the miracle of peace, at least we’re looking for better news, for no more casualties, and for an outcome that will ensure that those who have died already did not do so in vain.

The rest, alas, is out of our control — except to bring certain politicians up for judgment eventually.