SEVASTOPOL, Ukraine ¨C In soldiers¡¯ parlance, I did six tours in Afghanistan.

Over 12 years, I spent more than three years in that benighted country, covering Canada¡¯s longest war ever, beginning in Kandahar and Kabul, then Kandahar again and the end piece, which has been a training and mentoring mission in Kabul.

As I witness Ukraine teeter on the brink of war over Russia¡¯s designs on Crimea, the last handful of Canadian military trainers serving in Afghanistan are about to go home.

It was all so new and exciting in early 2002 when a battalion from the Princess Patricia¡¯s Canadian Light Infantry lived among the ruins of Kandahar Airfield. The Pats were heavily involved in the hunt for Osama bin Laden in the mountains near the Afghan border with Pakistan.

The darkest days followed Canada¡¯s only decisive victory over the Taliban in Kandahar during the summer of 2006. The enemy learned from Operation Medusa. Never again did it concentrate its forces.

From then on, the Taliban did most of its fighting with homemade landmines. For several years, Canada had no meaningful counter to this menace. But by sticking at it in the face of mounting casualties ¨C like the boy who put his finger in that Dutch dike ¨C the Canadians prevented Kandahar from falling to the Taliban.

The momentum shifted in favour of Canada and its Afghan allies in 2009 after the Manley report to Parliament got the troops the helicopters and drones they badly needed and insisted that additional NATO forces (Americans) must join the battle in Kandahar, which changed the battle space geometry. For the first time, Canada was able to concentrate its forces and attention on districts to the south and immediately west of Kandahar City.

The designer of the ¡°ink spot¡± strategy that evolved was Lt.-Gen. Jon Vance, now the second-ranking NATO officer in Italy and soon to become Canada¡¯s top ¡°operator¡± as commander of the Canadian Joint Operations Command.

Shrugging off praise for his Afghan strategy, Vance called it ¡°Insurgency 101¡å when I reached him the other day by telephone in Naples.

Vance had two combat commands in Afghanistan, so is well-placed to ponder the country¡¯s future as Canada and NATO wind down their operations. Like me, the general has reservations about the Afghan government and wonders what might have been.

¡°I am not convinced all of the Afghan political elite were honestly working towards the creation of a political movement that would be more powerful than the Taliban with an enlightening message for the people,¡± he said.

¡°It seems to me there was not a wider catching on of those messages in the political architecture in Afghanistan so that the Taliban narrative got pushed out by a more positive Afghan narrative.¡±

Vance¡¯s point was that the Afghan government had a vital political role to play in the counter-insurgency.

¡°You can¡¯t be as effective as you want if the government is not there,¡± he said. ¡°I don¡¯t want too be too critical, to be too hard. They did not have enough white-collar capacity, for example. But I do wish that that part had been better.¡±

Vance and I differ somewhat over what Canadians think of the war and why. My view has been that Canadians were given an unnecessarily hysterical view of the situation by the media during the first half of the combat mission in Kandahar and heard far less about how Canada had turned the situation around during its last two years in the south.

¡°Honestly, I am on the side of the ledger that the Canadian people did understand Afghanistan,¡± Vance said. ¡°I think that they saw the nature of the Afghan conflict and found it difficult to arrive at a firm, satisfactory solution. That is pretty astute, because so did we.¡±

The roughest time for me, personally, in Afghanistan was when my colleague, Michelle Lang of the Calgary Herald, died alongside four soldiers in a roadside bombing just after Christmas in 2009. Having had dinner with Michelle not long before that in Alberta, and seeing her flag-draped coffin getting loaded into an aircraft, I could not for a long time reconcile two such different memories.

Vance¡¯s ¡°toughest emotional moment¡± in Afghanistan happened six months earlier when Cpl. Nick Bulger, who was travelling with the general, as he often did, was killed by another roadside bomb.

¡°Every casualty was a real kick in the stomach,¡± Vance said. ¡°It hurt especially when everybody had done the right thing. They were superbly trained and nobody did anything wrong. The nature of war is that you can get killed or injured at any time. It is capricious.¡±

That was the precise message that my father, who fought in Normandy, Belgium and Holland, imparted to me when I went off to war with the U.S. Marines in Iraq and the Canadians in Afghanistan.

War¡¯s caprices were something I reflected on during every one of the dozens of solemn ramp ceremonies that I attended for Canada¡¯s war dead in Kandahar. They will be on my mind again when the Canadian flag is lowered for the last time in Afghanistan.