Canadians Do The Heavy Lifting

This week our Prime Minister Harper was in Riga, Latvia begging other countries in NATO to help more in South Afghanistan. Two more dead Canadian soldiers are coming home this week.
The countries that are not pulling their weight are Italy, France and my country of birth, Germany. These nations have "cherry picked" their duties and are in areas that are not nearly as dangerous as the areas where Canada, Britain and the US operate, according to Gen. Rick Hillier, chief of defense staff.
Three years ago John McCallum, then Canadian defense minister with our governing Liberal party said,

If, as allies, we fail in Afghanistan, we will fail it's people, we will fail the international community and we will fail our alliance and our vision for the future.

Three years later, in my opinion, we have already failed. NATO is obsolete.
And now, it's back to my knitting.