Did we win the War on Terror?

Whatever happened to the war on terror? For a few years, it was billed as the defining event of our generation. Now, nobody much talks about it.

On Monday, the few Canadian soldiers assigned to support French anti-terror operations in Mali quietly ended their mission.

Roughly 25 Canadian military personnel and a Canadian Hercules transport had been involved in the French-led, United Nations anti-terror mission there. But when the French pulled out, there was no one left in Mali for Canada to support.

It hadn’t begun this way. When Canada signed on to the war in Mali in 2013, it was viewed as a crucial battleground for the West, one that terrorists based in North Africa were determined to exploit.

In those heady days, terrorists seemed to be everywhere. The Islamic State was operating in Iraq and Syria. Terrorists threatened western interests in Libya and Somalia. Freelance terror groups in North Africa were merging with the remnants of al-Qaida.

Even NATO was consumed by the terrorist threat. The North Atlantic alliance had played a major role in the Afghan war. Anti-terrorism promised to be NATO’s new focus.

Now, this has changed. NATO no longer cares. Instead, it is consumed by the new Cold War with Russia. Anti-terror operations are rarely ever mentioned.

The Taliban in Afghanistan had been viewed as a major threat to the West, including Canada. Now, few talk about the Taliban at all.

Similarly, few talk about the war against the Islamic State in Syria or the war against al-Qaida in Yemen.

Instead, we talk about something much more old-fashioned. We talk about Russia, China and the new Cold War.

Everything is retro. When I was a kid during the first Cold War, I came across a comic-book character called Sgt. Rock. Rock was famous for fighting Communists everywhere. In this comic, he was fighting Chinese Communists trying to take over Taiwan. He felt so strongly about Chinese Communism that he risked nuclear war to defeat it.

In that sense, Rock was the precursor to U.S. Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Both exhibit an almost unnatural attachment to anti-Communist Taiwan.

Both have a critique of mainland China that is dominated by Cold War stereotypes.

The stereotypes are familiar ones. During the first Cold War, Russians were presented as subhuman brutes. The Chinese, meanwhile, were portrayed as brainwashed robots. Anything that strayed from these stereotypes was labelled by the government as enemy propaganda.

Little has changed. In Canada, those who go too far risk being banned completely from the airwaves. That, for instance, was the fate of Russia’s RT television network.

There is a benefit from rerunning the Cold War. At least we know how it worked out. With luck, we will, again, avoid nuclear holocaust.

And we can put our minds to the broader question. Whatever happened to the war on terror? Did we win it?