Afstan: It's all the CDS' fault

Jim Travers of the Toronto Star has his knives out for Gen. Hillier:

Damage control
A single thread connects most of Canada's missteps in Afghanistan: Chief of Defence Staff Rick Hillier

Gordon O'Connor's surprise visit to Kabul and Kandahar this week is pure and simple damage control. Having glossed over the fact that Canada effectively washed its hands of PoWs, the defence minister is now trying to restore public confidence that prisoners will be treated as the Geneva Convention requires and self-interest demands.

But the problem runs deeper than a defence minister so superficially briefed that he either didn't understand the agreement with Afghanistan or misled Parliament that the International Red Cross is monitoring detainees and reporting any abuse to Ottawa.

O'Connor's loose grip of what's happening in Afghanistan is symptomatic of governments that put Canadians in harm's way without fully defining the mission, analyzing limitations on success or limiting the risks.

Harsh as that sounds, the record is worse.

Liberals dithered so long in shifting the mission from north to south that more decisive allies grabbed the safer reconstruction projects while Canada was left to go toe-to-toe with the Taliban.

It's just as revealing – if easier to forgive – that neither the military nor its political masters forecast the fierceness of the fighting or that major battles would require Cold War weapons left at home.

Conservatives are guilty of reckless haste and playing partisan politics. In successfully dividing Liberals by extending the mission to 2009, Prime Minister Stephen Harper failed to extract from NATO, Pakistan and the Afghan government any of the admittedly hard-to-get [impossible to get - MC] commitments necessary to give the troops a fighting chance...

A single thread connects most of this: Chief of Defence Staff Rick Hillier. As former Liberal defence minister Bill Graham says, Hillier's fingerprints are all over a mission that, among many other things, was intended to shake Canada's dated image as the world's peacekeeper and justify rebuilding the forces, particularly the army, into something leaner, faster-moving and more muscular.

Hillier's tough talk and blatant politicking continue to raise eyebrows: After all, he is a senior public servant and in this country mandarins are anonymous.

Mr Travers is wrong on two counts:

1) The Chief of the Defence Staff is no "public servant" or "mandarin"; those by definition are civilians. He is a soldier.

2) In Canada mandarins are no longer "anonymous"; they testify constantly to parliamentary committees, make public speeches at conferences, and so on.

As Gen. Hillier said in July, 2005: "We're not the public service of Canada. We're not just another department. We are the Canadian Forces, and our job is to be able to kill people." The statement had then PM Martin's full support. Even Jack Layton went along with it.

Mr Travers continues:

But Hillier is popular with the troops and useful to politicians who don't mind that he's increasingly identified with a war polarizing public opinion...

Meanwhile, John Ibbitson of the Globe and Mail analyzes why Minister O'Connor will keep his job.

...he's not doing all that bad a job. As a former general, Mr. O'Connor is handling the complex challenges of equipping the troops in Afghanistan while beefing up the Canadian military with considerable skill. Imagine the political cost if a more inept minister mishandled either of those formidable tasks. A genuine defence crisis -- one involving troops being killed because they didn't have the equipment they needed, or billions of dollars being wasted thanks to a flawed procurement process -- could bring down the government.

...firing Mr. O'Connor would hand an important narrative over to the opposition. The Conservatives have invested serious political capital in creating a Canada-in-the-world story. It's the story of Canada's commitment to the people of Afghanistan, of the restoration of a disgracefully underfinanced and underequipped military, of the renaissance of Canada's international voice...

Gordon O'Connor's problem is that he doesn't realize how bad a politician he is. Now, lots of people enter political life lacking experience, and must learn, painfully, on the job. But he doesn't learn, doesn't want to learn, and has a tendency to fire people who tell him he needs to learn.

He prepares badly for Question Period, and gets flustered and irritable during it. His answers to questions from reporters can be long-winded and complex, which only invites further contradictions. And he improvises, as he did yesterday, telling reporters he planned to meet with the head of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission while in Kandahar, not realizing that the individual was out of town.

He's a communication director's worst nightmare...