Hillier redux/NATO?

The new memoir by the retired Chief of the Defence Staff has certainly been extensively leaked to the media (Update: actually, since it's available online, more likely the publisher simply distributed copies). The first story, by CP's Murray Brewster, is the best:

Hillier argued for Kabul, instead of Kandahar deployment: memoir

Hillier describes PMO as one of his toughest foes

Hillier's fiercest foe was PM's office

When Hillier was pushed, he pushed back

NATO 'rotting,' general says

Hillier refuses to stay silent [Canwest's Don Martin is "Missing the most important point" according to Norman Spector]

Canada’s orphan war [nice quick analysis of the media coverage by Norman Spector]

Topic thread at Milnet.ca here. The book: A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War

Rather related, by Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post:

The slowly vanishing NATO
...
Only very rarely do the casualties of one country make it into the media, the political debates or the prime ministerial speeches of another country. There has been an international coalition operating in Afghanistan since 2001. NATO has been in charge of that coalition since 2003. Yet to read the British press, one would think the British are there almost alone, fighting a war in which they have no national interest. The same is true in France and in the Netherlands. American media outlets hardly note the participation of other countries, even though some -- Britain and Canada -- have endured casualties at a higher rate than that of the U.S. military, relative to the size of their contingents.

There is almost no sense anywhere that the war in Afghanistan is an international operation, or that the stakes and goals are international, or that the soldiers on the ground represent anything other than their own national flags and national armed forces: Most of the war's European critics want to know why their boys are fighting "for the Americans," not for NATO. Most of the American critics dismiss the European contribution as useless or ignore it altogether. As Jackson Diehl pointed out Monday, the central debate about future Afghanistan policy is taking place in Washington without any obvious contributions from anybody else [emphasis added, e.g., "A key piece of the NATO puzzle is the U.S., which is considering upping its troop count by 20,000 to 40,000. (MND) MacKay would not speculate on what the U.S. would ultimately decide..."--remember when George Bush was slanged to the rafters for being unilateral?]. I'm not going to blame the U.S. administration alone for this: It's not as if Europe has put forward a different plan -- and there was certainly a moment, back at the beginning of this administration, when that would have been very welcome.

The fact is that the idea of "the West" has been fading for a long time on both sides of the Atlantic...

...the next time NATO is needed, I doubt whether it will be there at all.

Above certainly applies to Canada too.

Update: BruceR. makes a very good point at Flit, commenting on the Applebaum piece:

...I'd take it one step farther. Deaths of Afghan National Army forces, even those incurred in direct support of a NATO country's operations, are almost never mentioned in the non-Afghan press, by any country. By extension, if the NATO alliance is dying, NATO's alliance with Afghanistan never seems to have been born, at all.

UPDATE: Just so it's mentioned somewhere, there have been six U.S. fatalities in Kandahar Province, all apparently in the once quiet Arghandab district, reported by DoD in the last 3 days. As per normal, this has not yet been mentioned in Canadian media [emphasis added].