Scott Taylor gets these things right

Nice stuff here:

...
In The Unexpected War, authors Eugene Lang and Janice Gross Stein would have readers believe that the increased military role undertaken by Canada in Kandahar was Gen. Rick Hillier’s baby. To be fair, when the word first came out that Eugene Lang was working on an "insider" book detailing Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan, the political knives were immediately drawn in Ottawa. Having been the key adviser to defence ministers John McCallum and Bill Graham, Lang clearly had a rare insight into the political dynamics that dragged Canada into an "unexpected war" in Afghanistan. However, because of his actual advisory role in drafting the preparatory blueprint — right down to the controversial agreement on the handling of detainees — political hacks predicted Lang’s book would be a partisan whitewash.

Those prognostications have proved to be correct, as Lang has indeed produced the Liberal party’s revisionist version of events. Missing from the equation is any of the well-docu-mented mishaps and mistakes the former government made. For example, the multitude of screw-ups and eventual firing of Art Eggleton warrants a mere paragraph in the telling, and John McCallum’s public drunkenness scandal does not see the light of day. According to Lang, Canada’s commitment to a military mission in Afghanistan was Gen. Rick Hillier’s personal project that was the right thing for the Liberals to agree to at the time. However, once the Harper government was elected and extended the mission to 2009, it became the Conservatives’ mistake.

Former prime minister Jean Chretien, on the other hand, names a different scapegoat in his just-released memoirs, My Years as Prime Minister. According to Chretien, it was his nemesis and fellow Liberal and prime minister Paul Martin who fathered the faltering Kandahar mission. "When my successor took too long to make up his mind about whether Canada should extend our term with the International Security Assistance Force, our soldiers were moved out of Kabul and sent south again to battle the Taliban in the killing fields around Kandahar," claims Chretien.

Glossed over in Chretien’s account is the fact that our initial battle group was committed to Kandahar under his direction as part of the U.S. Operation Enduring Freedom. Despite months of advance notice, our troops deployed wearing dark green uniforms to a desert climate, were transported into theatre aboard American aircraft and were ferried about the battlefield courtesy of U.S. choppers. The years of Liberal government neglect of our military resulted in this embarrassing state of affairs, but it was during Chretien’s so-called safe deployment in Kabul that the rust-out of our army’s equipment proved fatal. Our troops suffered three fatalities while patrolling in unarmoured, obsolete Iltis jeeps, and the backlash sent defence procurement bureaucrats scurrying to purchase a fleet of new armoured Mercedes G-wagons...