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
