Number of Canadian troops killed in combat in Afghanistan last year: 0.

This would be the combat component of the mission that Liberal leader Stéphane Dion wants ended by next February and upon which he seems prepared to trigger a national election that Canadians don't want.

Number of Canadian troops killed by improvised explosive devises in Afghanistan in 2007: 12.

Number of Canadian troops killed by roadside bombs and land mines in 2007: 11.

The last Canadian casualty in conventional combat – died fighting – came during the latter stages of Operation Medusa, four servicemen perishing during a ground offensive on Sept. 3, 2006.

Since that time, there have been deaths in rollovers, helicopter crashes, suicide bombings and accidents but none from aggressively engaging the enemy.

If Liberals are trying to spare Canadian lives – by venturing passively, ducking into calmer territory and promoting reconstruction in the absence of a secure environment – an anti-combat insistence is utterly without merit.

But it might get Canadian troops killed. An enemy that knows troops won't fight back, can't fight back because of political handcuffs slapped on half a world away, is an enemy given a blood-embossed invitation to attack at will.

An enemy that knows – as the neo-Taliban command indisputably does – how undermining a rash of killings would be in the midst of a federal election here, would predictably target Canadian troops with renewed vigour. It serves their purpose if an alarmed electorate casts ballots in favour of the get-somewhat-out party.

This is as stupid, tactically, as giving the Taliban an exact withdrawal date.

Rather than seek a political accommodation with the Tories on Afghanistan – by respecting the proposals contained in an Afghanistan report authored by the foreign policy savant who was once Liberal deputy prime minister – Dion prefers insurgency tactics of his own. And the odds are just as strong that he'd lose anyway, few convinced that a campaign fought on the back of Afghanistan would deliver the Liberals anything better than a minority, if that; more likely a leadership review that would send Dion back to the party marginalia he richly deserves.

Canadians are dying in Afghanistan precisely because they are doing what Dion and his hard-core rump want: They are training Afghan troops. They are protecting aid projects. They are leaving the security of Kandahar Air Field in reconnaissance patrols and resupply convoys and to attend Shuras. They are showing a presence that does not, for the most part, involve chasing down enemy combatants.

Indeed, they would prefer to engage and attack because fighting a conventional battle is their forte – the Taliban has never come away from such a confrontation other than defeated. That's why they stopped doing it.

Unless Dion wants Canadian troops to stay exclusively in barracks – an insupportable option because they would accomplish nothing, certainly not the Liberal preferred approach of furthering reconstruction efforts and humanitarian intervention – his intransigence on the mission's combat portion is without sense. And even someone with no military smarts should realize that.

There is no safe distance in Afghanistan. Troops doing Dion's bidding, the anachronistic peacekeeping model that can only have a chance at succeeding if security is minimally established, still need to get outside the bubble. And they will be killed because insurgents attack convoys, seed roads with explosive devices and continue recruiting suicide bombers.

John Manley's call for more troops from NATO allies as an absolute proviso will happen, even if ultimately it falls upon Americans to dispatch a battalion cavalry to Kandahar. The U.S. has reawakened to the urgency of Afghanistan.

But what the Liberals are doing out of sophistry and political self-absorption will get your sons and daughters killed.

Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.