Good Afternoon.
Today when I was reading some news from back home I saw the headline 'Swedish soldier killed in Afghanistan'. The vehicle he was traveling in was hit by a home made bomb. This is sad news, and my heart goes out to the his family. There are a few things I would like to mention about Sweden's involvement in Afghanistan.
Sweden has for a very long time taken a lot of pride in the fact that it during war times has taken a neutral stand point. Two examples of that is WW I and WW II. There is a war going on in Afghanistan, which means Sweden is in war, and has been since 2001. This has been debated quite a bit in Sweden, because from the beginning Sweden's involvement was only supposed to be a peace keeping unit in the so called ISAF force (International Security Assistance Force http://www.isaf.nato.int/). This force is however under the lead of NATO, it was not like that from the beginning but this happened in 2003. Keep in mind that Sweden is not a member of NATO. Like it or not Sweden is in war. War today looks very different than wars through history. There is still one thing that is for sure, and that is that people are gonna die, during modern war more civilians die than combatants. This is what we call collateral damage. See previous post:
There are many nations involved in this war. The Mujahedin and the war lords will most certainly not take the time and care to see what nation their target is from. I don't think they think too much about the fact that there is supposed to be different forces with different tasks in their homeland. To them it's just invaders, just like Genghis Khan and the Soviet Union ones was. Last, my heart truly goes out to a nation that has not seen other than war for the past 100 years.
