When people talk about "the war" in Canada they're usually talking about Afghanistan. In the United States, Afghanistan has been overshadowed by Iraq, of course. In the U.S., Afghanistan stands as the war that had wider political support. You can still hear some anti-Iraq war politicians talk about their support for the Afghanistan invasion almost as a demonstration of their combat bona fides.

Canadians aren't fighting in Iraq. The Ottawa government passed on joining that effort. That brought criticism of Canada from some corners of America. It didn't measure up to anti-French feelings. There was no Freedom Bacon. But it's still evident.

A Republican ad that ran against Tennesee Democratic Senate candidate Harold Ford, Jr., recently accused him of being soft of North Korea and says, "Canada can take care of North Korea. They're not busy." Canadians reportedly complained directly to the White House about the the jab.

And today in the Toronto Star you can read a compilation of recent examples of slights and insults from American politicians under the headline, "Not many votes here but it's a convenient whipping boy when U.S. economic growth remains weak."

There are about 2,000 Canadian troops in Afghanistan fighting in the NATO deployment. Papers here are full of news of Afghanistan. Saturday there were protests in Canadian cities against the Harper government's commitment of troops. I see stories in Sunday's papers about the latest battles a change of military command , and concerns from Human Rights Watch about civilian deaths.

Canada's role in Afghanistan was brought squarely to my attention at the Edmonton meeting of the Canadian Association of Journalists over the weekend. The keynote address Saturday morning came from veteran war correspondent Arthur Kent. He said of the Canadian media:

"The country's richest news companies continue to under perform in investing in international news, especially when in this case so many Canadians are literally on the front lines."

If Kent's name rings a bell it's because in the first Gulf War, Kent was NBC's "Scud Stud,"a name he got from his good looks and live narration of Scud missile attacks. When I met Kent at a bar Friday night I had the sense that if I asked him about that media-made moniker he'd be as likely to punch me as anything else. But it was mentioned in his introduction, I've since read he doesn't begrudge his passing celebrity, and I was safely at the Edmonton Airport when I started writing this, so I thought I could add that detail now.

Kent left NBC on the most unfriendly of terms, suspended from his job on "Dateline" and with the network essentially questioning his courage because he would not take a new assignment in Bosnia without proper safety precautions and equipment. He sued the network for breach of contract and the network settled, for an amount he once called "terrific."

He now runs his own documentary film company in London and has continued to report on Afghanistan, where he first visited more than 20 years ago.

Salon once wrote that Kent had an "almost Frank Capra-esque vision of journalism." He urged journalists here to return to their roots, be tough on governments and fight the dumbing-down of network news. Journalists, he said, must rise above the "demented maelstrom of pseudo news that swirls around us each day."

But his romanticized view of the job and his Hollywood looks — you can pick from "rakish," "rugged" or "boyish" — shouldn't detract from a respect for his solid understanding of global conflicts.

Before the U.S. invaded Iraq, Salon asked Kent, "Will the U.S. and its allies face much resistance from the Iraqi people? "

After Saddam Hussein, the United States, Britain and other Western countries are large hate objects in the minds of most Iraqis. Look at 12 years of sanctions, 12 years of the people starving, while Saddam Hussein cheats the system and builds his weapons. We've known about it. Our governments have done nothing. It's naive in the extreme to expect the people of Iraq will welcome American troops the way the people of Afghanistan welcomed Western forces after the Taliban's collapse. Western countries have been directly damaging the Iraqis for more than a decade. We will not be seen as white knights who have come to rid them of their evil dictator, as I'm afraid the policy makers in Washington would have us believe.

He was tough on the Bush administration, both in the run up to the Iraq war and through the occupation. But he sees Afghanistan far differently. In that theater, he has plenty of criticism for the media first. He said that the media focuses too much on the bad news out of Afghanistan and that polls showing little public support are skewed, too.

"Really, the Canadian public only now is beginning to appreciate some of the complexities of the story. I have been going there 26 years. I still learn things every time I go back.

...

"Very little reporting is done to explain to Canadians — horrified and disgusted by the Iraq war, its commencement and conduct — that Afghanistan is not a Bush-Blair war. Afghanistan is a Brezhnev, Reagan, Thatcher war; one that Canada was deeply involved in."

Canada helped finance anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan and was involved in the country in the 1990s, he said, when the "Taliban exploited chaos to take power."

"We're not in Afghanistan today out of the goodness of our heart, some post 9-11 sense of mission. We're partly responsible for what Afghanistan has become and we're there making that right."

He criticizes the media's coverage of the on-the-ground military opearations in Afghanistan as well as the back-home coverage of the Ottawa government's role there. While saying that the media coverage gives an unfairly negative view of events, he also says reporters failed in asking tough questions about the prosecution of the war. He said there was a failure to discover a "gross weakness in the NATO deployment." That was the fact that NATO went to war without a "force reserve," meaning there was no group of soldiers, weapons and equipment held in reserve. That, he said, only became known recently from an admission by a British general.

Kent gives a troubling overview of the struggling government in Afghanistan. He's no fan of President Hamid Karzai, who he says is a "fashionable figure" whose family is connected to the opium trade. Kent has personal connections there and has watched former sources rise to power, only to be tossed out when Karzai, he says, would not stand for real reform.

He says reporters should be asking questions about why there are warlords and drug lords in the government and why expensive villas are going up around Kabul while reconstruction stumbles.

Kent is particularly critical of the new attorney general, Abdul Jabbar Sabit. Sabit is touted as a reformer, but Kent say Sabit has connections to a man on America's list of most wanted terrorists. Sabit, as an aide to the interior ministry, was also the lead man in Afghanistan's renewed crackdown on vice.

Reporters, Kent says, should press Prime Minister Stephen Harper about his support for Karzai. They should ask him, he said,

"You just played host to this guy. What did you do to tell him that Jabar Sabit is the not the kind of person we as Canadians want to see when our people are dying on the ground, trying to prop up your government?"

In urging on reporters, Kent gives a nod to the romanticism he's been pegged with. He says there was a time in the not too distant past when things were different in newsrooms in the United States and Canada — a time before corporate executives would sacrifice news for profits

"It almost seems naive now to talk about it, but there was a belief that hustle and imagination could spell success. Imagine if once again we were actually encouraged to be different, and once again to be uncompromising in that passion, in that accuracy and timeliness."

He takes some comfort in new media. He said by combining the "standards of traditional journalism" with the "open air market of the Internet" reporters could "sense freedom" and "be free of those suits" who run journalism today.

MORE: It was just pointed out to me that I failed to mention that Kent is Canadian; born in Medicine Hat, Alberta.