One day came the improbable news that some practically barefoot freedom fighters in a far away country had finally won a noble war against a vicious invading army, which had been routed.

Things seemed to get a little hazy after that, but soon there was more news and it was bad. The practically barefoot freedom fighters had split into two factions and they had started a new war, against each other. They battled using the discarded tanks and artilliary of their previously shared enemy, and neither side seemed to be able to win outright. 

Eventually a new third faction entered the fray. They were said to be students from some sort of Muslim school network in Pakistan, they were called Talib, and they seemed to have something against fun and laughter.

The significance of this didn't become clear until later, but meanwhile the struggle continued and the Talibs continued to make gains.

News of what was happening was scarce, but what news was available grew increasingly ominous. Nearly all civil liberties were being restricted in the Taliban pacified zones, and women were being singled out for special mistreatment. Shockingly, it seemed the country's complement of women had become prisoners in their own homes, restricted from moving about freely or otherwise living full lives, and no rescue seemed imminent.

The situation eventually fell out of the view of the Western media, and people who had heard of and cared about conditions in Afghanistan didn't have to wonder why, because the reason was obvious.

The obvious reason nobody tried to help the people of Afghanistan was that the barefoot freedom fighters had been a proxy army in Ronald Reagan's fight against the Soviet Union, and they had been given enormous amounts of cash by the CIA, and now they had reinvented themselves as a murderous public relations nightmare, and there was no profit in doing anything to change the situation.

Thus the situation was kept out of the public debate in the free world, and people who knew what was happening could only wait and hope and condemn the guilty in their minds.

But not everybody was content to simply sit back and condemn the guilty in their minds.

The non-Muslim world learned a new word, jihad, and this new word meant that enraged Muslims from all the corners of the world were going to Afghanistan to fight, not for the women, but for the Taliban, for Allah, for Islam.

Eventually the notorious Captain Pussy and I wrote a song about the thing, and we called it Starving in Afghanistan. Click on the play button to hear it.

The essential message of the song is that modern suffering is a media commodity, and thus the people doing the suffering are dehumanized for profit.

The names of the places where the victims suffer are interchangeable, the mechanisms that cause the suffering are interchangeable, and the reaction to the suffering varies widely but predictably.

If your country suffers and there is a profit motive for ending your suffering, then a big army will roll in and demolish whatever needs to be demolished, and kill whoever needs to be killed.

After that the media arrives and interviews the survivors and videotapes the destruction for posterity. Everyone else has to settle for just being unfortunate victims, and they get seconds of your time over dinner and the news.

Eventually a change did come to Afghanistan.

On September 9 2001, a Talib posing as a news cameraman detonated a bomb during an interview with one Ahmad Massoud. Massoud was the commander of something called the Northern Alliance, and as such he was the Taliban's main enemy and a Talib suicide bomber had martyred him, effectively wnning the civil war in Afghanistan for the Taliban.

But in the Taliban's greatest hour of triumph came their biggest blunder. The Talib had been sheltering a jihadi comrade named bin Laden, and two days after cementing their victory in Afghanistan, this comrade ensured their eventual demise by engineering the spectacular destruction of the World Trade Center.

After that the story advanced quickly. The plight of the Afghan people immediately became an American taxpayer concern, and boots were put on the ground and planes in the air and people were marked for death and seriously killed the survivors imprisoned in secret torture chambers.

But soon the Americans had to move on, and the Canadian military was duly roped in to do its part to secure freedom for the people of Afghanistan.

And that's where the still respected Canadian army still is to this day, battling the Taliban in a seemingly endless war that no side seems to be able to win outright.

Now comes the sad news that some of the Canadian military ranks think that those Canadians who drive their big SUVs and eat their fancy donuts and live their little lives don't care about what goes on in Afghanistan.

The war in Afghanistan is tainted by the hypocrisy of the American response there, and there in Iraq and elsewhere. And so some in the Canadian military fear that nobody knows what they're sacrificing their lives for, and that the plight of Afghan women and their children is something Canadians don't care about.

Let's hope that they're wrong.