This, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s
Globe and Mail, is another bit of nonsense from Jefferey Simpson:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/battle-of-the-book-rick-hillier-and-how-we-got-into-afghanistan/article1350090/
Battle of the book: Rick Hillier and how we got into Afghanistan
Canada's next military role goes missing in action
Jeffrey Simpson
Wednesday, Nov. 04, 2009
Rick Hillier became popular across Canada as the straight-talking defender of the military he recently led. Now he's written A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War, a book that is predictable in many ways but leaves the interesting questions of his time as Canada's top soldier unanswered.
The book is dedicated to “Canada's sons and daughters who serve our nation in the Canadian Forces.” Nothing suggests that the former chief of the defence staff feels other than overwhelming pride in those men and women. That the autobiography is mostly about him, dedication notwithstanding, is what one would expect from an autobiography.
The general spoke up publicly for the Forces more than any of his predecessors. For this, he earned their gratitude and that of many Canadians. That the military's budget is now soaring relates, in part, to his public-relations efforts and to the re-equipment decisions of two governments, starting with that of Paul Martin.
Here is where the tale – or, rather, non-tale – of the Hillier book gets interesting. Eugene Lang, chief of staff to Bill Graham, Mr. Martin's defence minister, co-authored a book with the University of Toronto's Janice Gross Stein that reported in considerable detail how the general had argued for and planned Canada's entry into Afghanistan. Mr. Hillier's book suggests he took a secondary role in those decisions.
Politicians made the decisions, he says, an assertion that is correct in practice but that surely plays down his role in urging not just participation, but in the dangerous province of Kandahar. The Afghan mission has cost more than 130 Canadian lives and many more wounded, and run way over budget. It's turned out to be more costly in lives and treasure than anyone imagined.
Eight years on, the mission has failed to bring peace to Afghanistan. If anything, the security situation is worse, because Pakistan has become so unstable as an adjunct to the Afghan conflict.
Reading Mr. Lang and Prof. Stein, Mr. Hillier was the driving intellectual force convincing the Martin government. They describe his five-point package for Kandahar – after other countries had swiftly signed up for less turbulent parts of the country. A Kandahar commitment, they report the general as arguing, would impress the Americans and heighten the Canadian military's profile.
They write that this bold course of action was seen as making “a mark for Canada in the world.” Then they assert, ominously as events proved, that “there was comparatively little discussion about the operational challenges of southern Afghanistan, of Kandahar specifically.”
Mr. Lang and Prof. Stein's book is the best outsider's account of how Canada got into Afghanistan, although Mr. Lang was an insider for some of that time. Other officials with knowledge of the inside debates have argued that the authors didn't get everything right. They probably didn't. But no one looking for greater insight should turn to Mr. Hillier's book.
Readers will know what he dislikes: NATO, the United Nations, most civil servants and the Chrétien government (“a decade of darkness”). And what he likes: the U.S. military and those who serve in the Canadian armed forces.
Missing in action are serious reflections on what the Afghan mission was all about apart from killing some “scumbags,” how Canada got there and his own role, which, if Mr. Lang and Prof. Stein are to be believed, was a good deal more decisive than the general suggests in his book.
Missing, too, are any serious reflections on what a better-equipped but still small Canadian military should do in today's world. If NATO is, as Mr. Hillier says, a “corpse, decomposing,” then presumably we should not get militarily involved through that organization. The UN is also apparently next to useless, as his account of the Balkan conflict suggests.
So if Canada can't or shouldn't work with NATO or the UN, that leaves the U.S. military and, of course, independent solo missions of unspecified kinds.
The world has failing states, counterinsurgencies and genuine terror threats to Canada and its allies. It has one superpower deeply overextended financially, with a superb military that got mired in Iraq and now can't find a way forward in Afghanistan.
The Canadian military needed its pride restored and kit upgraded, for which Mr. Hillier deserves credit. The question of what to do now, given Afghanistan's lessons, would have been worth exploring.
Here’s why Simpson is spouting
nonsense:
• Rick Hillier has a big brain and a
Big personality and a
BIG ego to go with them;
• That makes him about
average in Ottawa;
•
All the key players at the tables – Martin, Graham, McCallum and Himmelfarb have
bigger brains and equally big or even larger egos;
• Hillier’s personality was a huge plus inside the CF, it actually was a
negative in the rest of
official Ottawa where it was perceived to be a threat to the established order of things;
• At the top table, where the
decisions were being made, Rick Hillier was guest, not one of the ‘regulars;’
• It is almost certainly true that Hillier
”was the driving intellectual force convincing the Martin government” that Canada needed to do something big, bold and
valuable to rescue our military reputation and to give effect to Paul Martin’s
vision, as he articulated it in his
Foreward to “A Role of Pride and Influence in the World.” But that was, still is, because the top levels of the bureaucracy in PCO, DFAIT and DND – where
strategy is supposed to be developed – were almost totally devoid of
visions. All the
vision there, at the top of government, resided in Finance; thus
• It is
impossible to believe that this is
’Hillier’s War’ as so many in the Toronto
commentariat would have us believe. It is
Chrétiens’ War and
Martin’s War and, indeed, even
Harper’s War or McCallum’s War or Graham’s war or MacKay’s War but it is
not Hillier’s War.
Simpson goes father off his track when he says,
”if Canada can't or shouldn't work with NATO or the UN, that leaves the U.S. military and ... independent solo missions of unspecified kinds.” That, too, is nonsense.
Coalitions, supported by (mainly) the US, is the new order of the day. NATO has provided a solid framework of standardization upon which
any coalition can build and NATO might still provide a sort of
official fig leaf behind which the UNSC can protect its diplomatic modesty, but all we need is:
1. A UNSC
mandate;
2. A coalition
coordinator – which might even be Canada;
3. A coalition ‘leader’ – which, for now, will most likely be the USA but could be e.g. France, India or Britain or even <gasp> China depending on the theatre and the politics therein; and
4. A fairly small
combined and
joint staff team to plan (quickly), coordinate and control the deployment and operations of the coalition force.
Simpson is right that Hillier has ‘failed’ to predict where we are headed next. Once again:
not Hillier’s job, that’s why we elect and hire all those big brains and bigger egos in Ottawa.