A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War, by General Rick Hillier (HarperCollins Canada, Oct. 9) This book will make a large political splash when it lands in October. Hillier, chief of the Defence staff of the Canadian Forces from 2005-2008, was an outspoken leader whose frankness didn’t win him any friends in Ottawa, but which made him loved by his troops in Afghanistan. If he delivers the kind of honest assessment of the Canadian military that everyone is hoping for, there will be a lot of damage control being done in the PMO this fall.
Canada's former top soldier says he argued to keep the troops in the relative safety of Kabul, and has rebuffed claims he was responsible for getting the country mired in the bloody battlefields of Kandahar.
The decision to send Canadian soldiers to southern Afghanistan was largely made before Rick Hillier became the country's military commander, the former chief of defence staff says in a provocative new memoir.
The book, A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War , is officially released Oct. 24 but an advance copy was purchased by The Canadian Press.
Blunt, hard-hitting and often cheeky, Mr. Hillier lays out his side of the story through the tumultuous early years of the war, including his strained relationship with former defence minister Gordon O'Connor and an attempt by Prime Minister Stephen Harper's office to limit his public profile.
But it was the Liberals - both publicly and privately - who've tried to shift the blame onto Mr. Hillier for getting into the country into the bloody, bitter guerrilla war in the south, which has claimed the lives of 131 soldiers and one diplomat.
"It had already been largely decided that the Canadian presence in Afghanistan was shifting to the southern half of the country," Mr. Hillier writes about his return to Ottawa in the fall of 2004 after a stint as NATO commander in Kabul.
"Even before I returned from commanding [the International Security Assistance Force] NATO had announced its intentions to expand the ISAF mission beyond Kabul in 2006, and planning was already well on its way for a move into Kandahar province by the time I landed back in Canada that fall."
In a book written two years ago, former Liberal staffer Eugene Lang and academic Janice Gross Stein argued Mr. Hillier persuaded former prime minister Paul Martin to take Canadians into the heartland of the Taliban.
But Mr. Hillier says the decision to set up a provincial base in Kandahar was made before his time - and that he had argued within National Defence for Canada to take over responsibility for the reconstruction of the airport in Kabul, a much more benign assignment.
"Nobody in Ottawa seemed interested, so the idea died," he writes in the 498-page memoir.
"The government had already signalled its intent to go into Kandahar province, and the Department of Foreign Affairs, CIDA and National Defence were well into their planning of that mission by the time I came back to work at NDHQ after my time as ISAF commander."
And with the decision made, Mr. Hillier said, he did argue forcefully - as a responsible soldier - for a battle group to back up the provincial reconstruction base that the Liberals had agreed to establish.
"If the security situation in Kandahar became dire, as indeed it did soon after our arrival, those (PRT) soldiers would be stuck out in vulnerable positions with no easy way to ensure their security or rescue them from the extreme risk they would face every day," he writes.
It's a much different picture than the one painted by Ms. Gross-Stein and Mr. Lang in their award-winning book The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar , which said Hillier argued for the combat force as a way to impress the Americans and take the pressure off them in Iraq.
Many in military circles have long said they were concerned Hillier could be singled out for blame if the mission ultimately fails and for controversies such as the inquiry into the treatment of Afghan detainees, despite his popularity with the troops and general public.
Mr. Hillier dismissed some elements of the detainee controversy - the accusation that Canadian soldiers had beaten up prisoners - as muckraking "yellow journalism."
And the claim that Afghans were torturing Afghans was something that "is not abnormal in failed states and occurs even in solid countries like Canada," he writes.
In vintage Hillier style, the book brims with praise for members of the Forces and is sprinkled with anecdotes about his family and early life.
But it is his political and bureaucratic battles that make the most engaging reading.
Mr. Hillier clashed publicly with the Liberals over his description of the budget-cutting Chrétien years in the 1990s as a "decade of darkness" for the Canadian military.
The party's defence critic at the time, Denis Coderre, painted the general as a Conservative stooge, a response Mr. Hillier characterized in the book as "dumber than dirt."
Despite the seeming bad blood, the Liberals tried to persuade him to run for them soon after his retirement in mid-2008. And Mr. Hillier himself gushes in the book about his respect and personal rapport with Paul Martin and former defence minister Bill Graham.
His relationship with Mr. Harper was cooler and more business-like. Mr. Hillier describes the prime minister as someone who was sharp, asked good questions and above all was committed to the military.
At times, Mr. Hillier sneers at the whirlwind of Ottawa media speculation that accompanied some of his public statements and his relationship with those in power, including O'Connor, who was his first Conservative boss and a former brigadier-general.
While he was happy to have a minister who already knew the "ABCs of defence," Hillier was frustrated by O'Connor's tendency to go around him for advice. O'Connor would "sometimes meddle in the day-to-day details" of the department.
"Gord constantly reached out to information from generals or colonels in the army, navy of the air force, or would go directly to a colonel running a base with a question," says the memoir.
"It seemed to me he was asking the advice of the lower ranks of the Canadian Forces in order to get the answer he wanted, not the answer I would necessarily have given him .... He preferred to hear advice that he liked, that was in line with his own views."
They also disagreed over the level of funding for the military and what big-ticket purchases could be made and when.
Mr. Hillier also described a closed-door meeting, soon after the Conservatives were elected in 2006, at which Mr. O'Connor passed along a request - likely from the PMO - that they "see less" of him in public.
It was a request he says he ignored.
The book blasts Ottawa's senior civil service as ponderous and process-driven, delaying and derailing a number of key military equipment purchases. Mr. Hillier also criticizes NATO for its willingness to let Canadian soldiers keep fighting and dying in Kandahar without reinforcement.
Near the end of the book, he describes a high-level meeting among senior NATO commanders at which he tells them Canada felt "alone" in its fight - a comment that elicited sympathy and offers of support from the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.
But Mr. Hillier says sympathy wasn't what he wanted.
"It's not about helping Canada; it's about getting the job we, as NATO, signed up to do," he writes.
He said it was "embarrassing" to see the alliance's secretary-general have to beg individual countries for troops and a handful of helicopters.
NATO, with its petty jealousies and convoluted command structure, is a "corpse" that needs to be revived - otherwise it will be the end of the alliance.
The Ottawa bureaucracy was singled out for particularly scathing treatment in a chapter entitled "Making Canada Small," in which Hillier argues that in-fighting and empire-building among senior officials was ruining the country.
"It is impossible to overestimate the amount of jealousy that developed in other government ... departments or the lengths that some senior bureaucrats would go to in order to sabotage a rival," he writes.
Although he doesn't name names, Mr. Hillier suggested that the lives of soldiers were put at risk by foot-dragging bureaucrats who reluctantly approved an urgent program to add more armour to fighting vehicles that were blown up with regularity in Afghanistan.
He also accused officials of undercutting cabinet ministers.
"Instead of providing incisive leadership and focused support to our elected leaders to help our country be the influential and powerful G8 nation that it could be, we often find the opposite," Hillier writes.
"Canada could have a real impact on the international stage, throwing the kind of diplomatic, military and development weight that befits our nation, but for the small-mindedness of some of our most senior civil servants, who only care about power in Ottawa."