News

The following is an edited transcript of a discussion Thursday between Chief of the Defence Staff General Rick Hillier and The Globe and Mail editorial board.

OVERVIEW

"We have come out of a decade of darkness. We have been disowned, abandoned, divorced by the population of Canada.

Canadians need to take ownership and be engaged [with the military]. There won't be public support to transform the military unless we have the support of the pouplation. And we can't get the support for the missions unless people see the necessity of doing these kinds of things which will help recruitment. We are transforming the military.

We are conducting operations all over the world in 19 countries. And at home. Canadians don't see this part. We do commmunity events, we respond to natural disasters.

Internationally, most of our operations are small. We have 15 people in the Congo, supporting the UN mission. They are very effective. We get back kudos. They say, can you send me 10 more? In Africa, we are in Darfur, helping bring stability and security. We have 65 people there."

LOGISTICS OF AFGHAN MISSION

"When I was in Afghanistan, the first thing the president [Hamid Karzai] said was: 'My greatest threat is our lack of capacity to handle our own threats.' Part of the reason was because those very visionary and extremely intelligent leaders I saw — starting with Karzai — had zero capability to turn their vision to a strategy to a policy to a plan.

There was no bureaucracy, no public service. They were either dead or living in the West because of the 25 years of brutality.

Kabul, and the northeast, north-central, and northwest have made enormous strides . . .

The real need is in the south, to make sure it does not again become a fertile ground for terrorists to breed and recover and recruit and reconstitute and resource themselves and then project their violence.

I'm there to help Afghans rebuild their families and communities and become part of something more stable and get on with life.

It takes a while to build an army. It takes us a while to build a new unit, and we're an army in longstanding. They're starting from a clean sheet of paper."

ON THE NEW CANADIAN FORCES

"People try to put us in a niche: You're not conducting peacekeeping or you are conducting war-fighting operations or you are conducting combat. Here's what we're doing, because the terms are not necessarily helpful.

We're doing the entire spectrum of operations, from straightforward negotiation and dealing with folks to training police, training the army, to helping work with the international community, right through to firefights with the Taliban, to ensure they're not going to be able to stop the progress.

So to describe that as war is actually, it's really 1940, 1950s terminology."

ON AFGHANISTAN

"You're living with people who desperately want you there — and the Afghans do. I mean, they say: 'The only thing between us and chaos again is you.'

You're living with people who are benign or neutral or slightly hostile, and you're living with a small group of people who actually want to kill you.

That's a completely differnet dynamic than what we trained, prepared, structured for over 50, 60 years of the Cold War, when — we aim for the North German plain, countering that armoured thrust in the Warsaw Pact — everything we've done in structure . . . was all designed for that fight . . .

Everything we're doing in transformation is designed to shape out our structrue, training, equipment, organization, leadership, how we approach things, how we work with people."

PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE?

"The great thing about being a chief of defence staff is I don't have to feel anyway about that or make a comment on it.

We have a saying in the army . . . we defend democracy, we don't practice it.

Polls, shmolls, geez, after a while you start to get a little tired of them because you can get any spectrum you want depending on the question you ask

In my heart of hearts, I believe this: Canadians in vast numbers support our men and women in uniform."

THE ARMY HAS FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGED ALREADY

"What is occurring now is a crystallization of the kind of operations that have taken place the last 15 years, since the Cold War.

If anyone thinks that what we were doing in the Balkans in the early to mid 1990s was peacekeeping, they simply do not understand whatsoever what you had to do on the ground."

CANDID TALK ABOUT MISSIONS

"The Canadian Forces have actually been in a survival mode for the last decade and our ability since the Somalia affair — and that crystallized a whole bunch of other things — when our population, in the view of many soldiers and sailors and airmen and airwomen, disowned us, divorced themselves from us, led us into a situation where our survival was the only priority which we had.

So now we're out of that. And one of the aims is to make sure that never occurs again.

But I also throw the ball back in the other court. Canadians disowned their Canadian Forces in one respect back in the early to mid 1990s. And have never been engaged in the way they needed to shape it going forward. So it's a responsibility I throw back into normal Canadians' laps and say: 'It's your armed forces, you get engaged.'

We do live in a very nice, luxurious, safe, stable, fat and easy country, right? It's easy to get myopic and navel-gazing and think the rest of the world is like us. We're part of 1 per cent of the world that's like this.

Canadians need to wake up to the fact that we are viewed by the rest of the world as luxurious, decadently so perhaps."

CASUALTIES

"We've taken casualties on every mission we've been on . . .

You simply cannot sit down and formulate any percentage that you might or might not expect in terms of casualties. So what you do is shape and learn and reduce the risk to the lowest level . . . but you cannot project."

ROAD ACCIDENTS IN AFGHANISTAN

"There's an operational driving that occurs here when you get from Point A to Point B — it's not just that you get up to 30 km/h and stay there and slow down. Because if you do, you become predictable and more easily targetted.

We've done a lot of training and work to get them ready, but there is always that last piece of acclimatization which you have to do and that's probably caused one or two of the accidents we've had.

To describe many of the routes that we are on as roads is kind indeed.

You are on a side of mountain somewhere and you are trying to get through a flock of sheep or pass a donkey train or in the middle of a camel train, and on your left-hand side it's 2000 feet down and you're in the middle of something that's maybe as wide as your vehicle, eroded by water, and they call that a road.

You know, my heart was in my throat 80 per cent of the time in when I was in a vehicle in Afghanistan.

The chain of command wears my bootmarks down their back on this, we're talking about men's and women's lives here.

But the reality is we are in that theatre and there will be some accidents."

LIGHT ARMOURED VEHCILE LOGISTICS — BELTED?

"In a LAV . . . what you will have is your driver who is buttoned down, your commander who will have his head and eyes out in all probability, he can slide down and be buttoned down, and in the back you will have a minimum of two up, possibly a third, covering the quarters at the rear with their weapons and their observations, ready to respond. And a third guy, actually probably a third and fourth on each side, looking at the upcoming sides for any indication of something that's abnormal.

We had cases where a LAV coming along with guys in the back fired rounds at a vehicle that came up real close — we have warning signs, warning actions that communicate this a lot. But we still get people — these could be Montreal drivers, I've got to tell you — skyrocketting up and ignoring all these warnings.

Occassionally LAV troops fire shots into motors of such vehciles."

THE ACCIDENT THURSDAY THAT KILLED A CANADIAN SOLDIER

"We still don't have all the details on this accident.

The commanders and the chain of command are onto it. But the reality is we lost a soldier."

"I get a call a 2:30 in the morning and nobody every calls me with good news, right? When the phone rings [at that time], it's an event."

KANDAHAR REGION

"Parts of the region have really been left free and easy, so now there's very much an international presence in those places. So automatically you get events.

The Pakistanis have really conducted a lot of significant operations along their border. (Waziristan, Khyber Pass)

The ground there is actually incredibly difficult — 18,000-foot mountains, no infrastructure . . . to think you could actually shut down that border in any effectively way is but to dream.

"As a result they [the insurgentsw] have hidden away into the highlands in the north part of Kandahar . . . so as a result they are there now and they are conducting operations."

Coalition forces have been going into those areas "and are coming face-to-face with them."

"As a result of those two things, you are seeing a greater amount of activity. You are not seeing the Taliban being left alone . . .

What we do is, we train those Afghan units and we go with them and support them as they go into those areas . . . so our job is to support the Afghan army national battaliions."

IS IT A CLASSIC GUERRILLA WAR?

"Hard to say. The Taliban, obviously, have some longstaying power . . . eventually you reach a crossover point, where instead of these guys needing to be contained by the police and army, supported by military forces from the West, they actually have the capability to train and build to this level at the same time the Taliban has been worn down. So now you have the upperhand.

There has certainly been a correlation between common criminals in the drug trade, the drug traffickers themselves, and the Taliban/terrorists. There is no question there is a money link that goes from one to the other.

All that crap about the Taliban saying one of the good things they did was suppress opium production, that was bull. What they did was constrain the growth to increase the price and make more money from it."

IS PAKISTAN DOING ENOUGH?

"I'd never be satisfied they are doing everything they can, I'd never be satisfied they are doing enough.

Some people say the answer to a more stable Afghanistan is a actually found in Pakistan.

But they've done a lot, you got to give them full kudos, they continue to do a lot."

TREATMENT OF PRISONERS

"We hand them to the Afghan national police or the Afghan national army . . . We're trying to build a country, you've got to help build their rule of law, a justice system . . . Surely this is one of the basic precepts of how we do it."

EXIT STRATEGY?

"One of the most frustrating things of all when you are in Afghanistan . . . is to have various countries come in, or their organizations, and immediately start talking about exit strategy.

That communicates a message to the Taliban and the terrorists . . .

There's a saying that the Taliban used to use: 'You may have the watches but we have the time.' But we probably help them believe that saying.

You've got a country that's been actually devastated, brutalized, destroyed by 25 years of war. It was turned from a relatively advanced country back to the Stone Age. And it was done by the process of that destruction.

You are not going to have any success rebuilding that country in three or four or five years. So people who think in those terms don't understand the scale and scope of what's been done in that country.

From NATO's perspective, they look at this as a 10-year mission. Right? Minimum.

There is going to be a huge demand on Canada to contribute over the longer period of time, on the developmental parts, diplomatic efforts. And there will be continued pressure, from NATO, from the United Nations . . . and not least there will be huge pressure from the Afghans. They say the only thing between us and chaos is you."

So the mission from every perspective in the international communtiy is going to be longer term. Canada will decide in coming months what it is going to do in the longer term.

But the pressure on Canada to be engaged in a significant way — whether it's only military, of course, is not necessarily guaranteed — there will be significant pressure.

"Three to five years out from now, you'll start to see the dynamic change dramatically [as the international community becomes less needed.]

Afghanistan will need support for a long time. 25 years of war, and it really did destroy the place, its quite incredible."

Go into Kabul, you say: 'Oh My God, this is terriible, the place was destroyed.' You go out of Kabul and you come back and say: 'God Almighty, why are we wasting our time and money here? We're already there. Let's get into other places, Kandahar."

DRUG TRAFFICKERS

"There's no single easy solution to that one. You can't just go in and eradicate everything, you would make hostile to you a good chunk of the population who are surviving growing the crops . . .

But you've got to build economic activity in lieu of that one.

The Afghans themselves are placed, with support from us, to do that . . .

At some point in time, you've got to move the per-capita income from $300 a year to somewhere around in plus of $1,000. The United Nations drug programs say a country that is above $1,000 a year in income is not an exporter of drugs."

BUREAUCRATIC MONEY BATTLES

"Actually I don't think I have anything to deal with. I have no fight. I have no dog in that hunt, so to speak.

The Conservervative Party of Canada's election platform said they are going to increase the regular force to 75,000 . . . That is their platform, their commitment, and their responsibility to deliver.

My job is to implement when those investments come.

I come at this from the moral high ground: Here is what the country of Canada has been asking from the men and women in uniform over this past decade, and looking forward they are going to have nothing less, probably much more. Here is what we are going to need to be able to do that. And we really do need that.

This is not about Hillier. This is about men and women in uniform who risk their lives for our country.

I am the individual who pins memorial Silver Crosses on young widows and mothers, so I have a remit to each one of them . . . and I intend on meeting that remit."

POLLS

"If we're not in Afghanistan and the international community is not there, the Taliban will overwhelm the fledgling government we're going to need to be there — the 'we' being the international community.

If the Taliban do overwhelm the fledgling government because the international community abandons them, as they were abandoned in 1992 by the international commmunity, the Taliban will be back in, will control the southern part of Afghanistan, will give support to al-Qaeda and other ideologically similar groups . . . . and allow them recruit, prepare and plan around the world and hide, and project their violence around the world, that will directly affect Canada.

We're on a target list. That's been well-communicated by al-Qaeda . . . [abandoning Afghanistan] it's kind of like that view that if you give Czechoslovakia to the Germans, they'll stop everything in 1938, when actually their goals are much greater than that."

WAR ON TERROR

"I go by what the soldiers see and feel and say. Protect the weak and vulnerable. They actually believe in that, and that's why they're there. Maybe you can get security to a level where you don't risk getting killed every time you go shopping for food or maybe you can get security to a level where medical clinics can be built . . . so children don't die before the age of five in a 25 per cent range.

There are those who would say it's an American mission, un-Canadian, and we're there to hunt down for the Americans people on their list.

What I say is 80 to 90 per cent of the information that we use and analyze and coalesce and use to focus our operations, 80 to 90 per cent of it comes directly from the Afghans . . .

Over the last days and weeks, the number of people that have come and said: 'There's an explosive device over here' or 'There's a small cache of explosives over here', or 'There's a vehicle parked down here' — that happened in one case — that's got something different about it, and we search and find a nubmer of explosives in it, the number of people that have come forward is quite incredible on a increasing basis.

That reflects the fact that they need us there, they want us there, and what we're doing is seen by them as exactly what they need."

OVERSTAYING THE WELCOME?

"What you want to do is make sure the moment never comes. The minute they no longer need us, we've got to be out of there. I don't think that will be an issue, truthfully . . .

We have to be very careful in the perception we create. And that includes taking some risk initially and being out amongst that population. You cannot do your job in an armoured fighting vehicle going at high speed to an area, weaving in and out with your helmet on, your sunglasses on, you're quickly seen as a best an irritant, bringing no or little value, and you go from benign hostility to hostility to where people will actualy attack you.

You gotta have your sunglasses off and look 'em in the eye, so they see you as people and see you as people who are there to help them.

[We'll leave] the minute that they can stand on their feet with minimal assistance. But we want to do that without talking [now] about exit strategies."