Worry over the toll of recent Canadian casualties is obscuring the very real progress being made in reconstruction. And that's exactly the way the Taliban wants it.

The only way the Taliban can win is to generate doubt and fear in Canada, and hope for a withdrawal of troops.

I wonder if there isn't more to the public opinion polls than simple ignorance. I wonder if there's a subconscious tendency to avoid information that would require Canadians to step out of our comfortable lives, largely insulated from the more dangerous aspects of the wider world, and take a more robust position.

Over the weekend, Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor said that Ottawa might soon shift Canada's mission in southern Afghanistan from frontline combat to a rear-guard role in which we train the Afghan National Army (ANA) to provide security on its own. We endorse such a change -- so long as this mission shift is militarily sound, and not just an effort to take heat off the Conservative government in the run up to an election. Thanks in large part to the security provided by Canadian troops in Kandahar province -- and to the sacrifices of 67 of our soldiers and diplomats -- much of the country is (by local standards) flourishing. We must be certain not to jeopardize those gains for the sake of electoral calculations here at home.