Hillier wanted Canadians in safer Kabul: memoir
Last Updated: Monday, October 19, 2009 | 10:38 PM ET
The Canadian Press
Rick Hillier says he argued for Canada to take over responsibility for the reconstruction of the airport in Kabul. (Les Perreaux/Canadian Press) Canada's former top soldier says in his new memoir that he argued for Canadian troops deployed to Afghanistan to be kept in the relative safety of Kabul, and he rebuffs 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, A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War, which is now available.
Blunt, hard-hitting and often cheeky, 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 Hillier for getting the country into the bloody, bitter guerrilla war in the south that has claimed the lives of 131 soldiers. One diplomat and two aid workers have also been killed.
"It had already been largely decided that the Canadian presence in Afghanistan was shifting to the southern half of the country," 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 Hillier persuaded former prime minister Paul Martin to take Canadians into the heartland of the Taliban.
But 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 [Defence headquarters] after my time as ISAF commander."
And with the decision made, 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 [provincial reconstruction] 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.
Clashes with Liberals
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.
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 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 Hillier himself gushes in the book about his respect and personal rapport with Martin and former defence minister Bill Graham.
His relationship with Harper was cooler and more business-like. Hillier describes the prime minister as someone who was sharp, asked good questions and above all was committed to the military.
At times, 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.
Clashes with defence minister
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 or the air force, or would go directly to a colonel running a base with a question," Hillier's memoir says.
"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 disagreed, too, over the level of funding for the military and what big-ticket purchases could be made and when.
Hillier also describes a closed-door meeting, soon after the Conservatives were elected in 2006, at which 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.
