bout de papier, Vol. 24, No. 4 (2009) — Winter 2009 // Hiver 2009, pp. 19–21
A SOLDIER FIRST: BULLETS,
BUREAUCRATS AND THE POLITICS
OF WAR, by General Rick Hillier,
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 2009,
509 pp, $34.99.
I read General Rick Hillier’s A Soldier First with mixed feelings. I was impressed that our popular General came out with a book on his experience so soon after retirement, but I was disappointed that he did not explain his own role in framing Canada’s engagement in Afghanistan. By the end I was also frustrated that he offered little insight into how to conduct ourselves in the closing chapters of our engagement. For that, we need to look elsewhere. Gordon Goldstein’s aptly titled Lessons in Disasters, which I will also discuss, is a good place to start.
It is rare in public life to see a substantive book written within a year of a senior officer leaving office and offering a detailed and provocative description of military life overlapping with life in Ottawa’s fast lane. And there is much more: it also offers penetrating prescription for the many potholes that mar the Ottawa fast lane; the problems with peacekeeping and the misnamed peacemaking in a variety of dangerous places; and the failures of NATO and the United Nations in organizing the international community in such matters. General Rick Hillier has done exactly that. News reports have already cherry-picked the book of some of its provocative views and descriptions of many around Ottawa and its arcane processes. However, the book has not been examined in any detail, nor its various conclusions tested against the world as seen by others.
It is worth emphasizing what an unusual event this book represents. General Hillier is the first Chief of Defence Staff to write a book upon his retirement since the time General Jacques Dextraze did so in 1977. Only Dextraze and Hillier have recounted their unique contributions in the service of Canadians since the position of Chief of Defence Staff was established in 1964. There have been 15 Chiefs since then. Equally, there are few others in the military at Hillier’s rank who have written such works. General Lew MacKenzie is a singular exception.
Hillier’s book is a breezy romp through the life of a dedicated soldier with two important overarching themes. First, Canada and Canadians have consciously devalued both the importance and the role of the military in achieving national goals. He writes “[’m not sure that the CF [Canadian Forces] ever had a significant relationship with the people of Canada. Since the Second World War, our military was never really regarded as the armed forces of Canada by Canadians themselves; Canadians never took ownership of the military.’ The second theme of the book emphasizes that the role Canada plays in today’s world is more tied to having a well-trained, well-led and well-equipped military than any other factor. Not for Hillier the idea that “soft power” as the road for Canadians when they confront nasty and dangerous states sliding towards failure.
In the view of the General “… for many years our political landscape had been dominated by a select group in Canadian society, self-proclaimed opinion leaders who I prefer to think of as snake-oil salesmen, who had been allowed to create the impression that Canadians were very sensitive, would advocate only “soft power” and would support their military only in the role of peacekeepers.” He goes on to state that, “To the contrary, Canadians, in enormous numbers, understand the sheer lunacy of ‘soft power’ and that really, in life, there is just power, soft or hard, and that the levers of influence always work both ways.”
In his view what the “vast majority of Canadians” wanted was “more information on the Afghanistan mission — they were starved … on why we were there, what our national interests were, what activities our troops were involved in and what else we were doing on the ground to support those activities” Hillier writes that he gave a lot of speeches and public presentations and validated the value of his words by comparing shows of hands by audiences before and after of their support for his position. “At every speech I gave, the audience would start out at about 50-50 in their support for our presence in Afghanistan. By the time I wrapped, that support would be at 75 to 80 percent or higher in favour.”
Hillier’s description of what Canadians needed by way of information is correct. Unfortunately, apart from the afterglow of his speeches, there is little evidence to support the view that Canadians were significantly changed by his public endeavours in their opinion on the war. In June 2006, a year after General Hillier was appointed Chief of Defence Staff, polling reported 59 percent of Canadians supported the combat mission in Afghanistan. In October, 2009, more than a year after he retired, the same pollsters reported less than 50 per cent support. In the same period, Liberal and Conservative politicians who read the national tea leaves better than most united and voted a parliamentary deadline on the mission for mid 2011. There are many reasons for this change in public support for
the mission but it can be said with some certainty that the efforts by the General to
explain the war did not have the effect that he claims in his autobiography. His outreach to the paparazzi of the sports and entertainment world appears to have been seen by many Canadians for what it was, warm words without serious content.
One of the amazing dark holes in the General’s account of the war in Afghanistan is how and why the decision was made to deploy a Canadian combat mission to Kandahar in 2005. At the time General Hillier had just been appointed (February 2005) Chief of Defence Staff and Paul Martin was Prime Minister. There was a policy vacuum in Ottawa on both defence and foreign policy matters. The Prime Minister was looking for policies that would be “transformational” in both areas or at least policies that would sharply differentiate his government from that of Prime Minister Chrétien. Nowhere has there been a cogent explanation of just what the transformation would entail and for many months officials in Foreign Affairs, Defence and the PCO/ PMO laboured to satisfy the Prime Minister.
General Hillier skates around his role in this debate and the success he ultimately had (and surprisingly does not claim) in obtaining agreement for the five elements that became our Afghan policy in 2005. Other writers give General Hillier pride of place in developing, selling and carrying out the Kandahar policy. Paul Martin in his 2008 autobiography Hell or High Water writes that the “burden of my message to General Hillier was that our commitment in Afghanistan had to be shaped in the context not only of other current commitments but potential new ones. He assured me that he understood, and that whatever the next stage might be in our Afghanistan mission, it would not preclude our capacity to deploy elsewhere.” In Mr. Martin’s mind the “potential new ones” included Darfur, the Middle East and Haiti.
Mr. Martin also writes that he was impressed by General Hillier’s advocacy of what was called “the three block war” as the basis for Canadian combat operations in Afghanistan. The concept originated with an American General who in the late 1990s used it to describe the various challenges
faced by soldiers on the modern battlefield. Within a three block area these could range
from full scale military action, to peacekeeping in the traditional sense to organizing humanitarian assistance. The war in Mogadishu, Somalia in the early 1990s reflected the concept but its future utility was undermined once two American Blackhawk helicopters were shot down with a significant loss of life. However, Mr. Martin spends some time explaining that his agreement for the deployment to Kandahar was a limited one. He did not want to be locked into an open-ended commitment. “We did not have the capacity to do everything we wanted to do militarily in the world. … And it was important that our military commitment in Afghanistan not crowd out every other mission we might choose to undertake; Martin writes.
Mr. Martin’s account of the Kandahar deployment is supported in large part by Janice Stein and Eugene Lang’s 2007 book The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar. Both carried out extensive interviews with the principal participants in the Kandahar deployment debate and Mr. Lang was chief of staff to the defence minister at the time. As such there is high credibility for their account of the debate and it is all the more surprising in light of these public accounts of General Hillier’s role, that he underplays his involvement throughout his book. One would have hoped A Soldier First would have contained a detailed firsthand account of why Canada became a participant in its first ground war since Korea. General Hillier spends more time detailing his activities while head of the ISAF in Kabul starting in December 2003 than he does in his role in Ottawa in 2005.
Of equal note is the lack of reference in the book to any detailed examination or intelligence assessment of what the deployment in Kandahar would involve.
Mr. Martin’s description of what he understood would be the environment in Kandahar is worth recording:
The plan General Hillier presented to me was based on Provincial Reconstruction Teams, meaning the gradual restoration of order by the military in expanding circles, with reconstruction intimately linked and immediately underway once the area was secured. …In my time as Prime Minister, we never envisaged a broad military campaign that would make reconstruction efforts more difficult, if not impossible, as we bit off more than we could chew. In my view, the change in strategy under the subsequent government was unfortunate. I don’t think anyone, including me, expected the Taliban resurgence that Canadian troops encountered when they moved to Kandahar. I do believe, however, that the virtual abandonment of reconstruction efforts in the first year or so of the new government was a mistake.
By 2005 there was ample evidence that the Taliban resurgence was well underway in both the south and east of Afghanistan. The lack of any understanding or apparent willingness to assess what would be encountered in Kandahar province would seem to border on folly on the part of those, including General Hillier, who put together the Kandahar plan. This lack of assessment or even some measure of the risks led to an undermanned, underequipped and in some measure under-led Canadian force on the ground in Kandahar and that has continued to this day.
General Hillier does not offer any reflections on this sad outcome of his efforts. For him the rehabilitation of the Canadian Armed Forces, their reconnection with Canadians and such ephemeral events as the Highway of Heroes is more important than providing his successors and others with signposts and recommendations for the future. Towards the end of the book he writes, “If anybody had told me that we were going to go into intense combat operations, sustain total casualties of over 100 soldiers killed and about 400 wounded, and suffer all these losses within three years and that Canadians would still support the mission, I would not have believed them.” The jury is still out on the depth of that support. One would hope that in the future the General would offer advice and help as Canadians grapple with ongoing casualties, the possible exit from Afghanistan and what will be the next overseas operation for the new Canadian army. Unfortunately the new Chief of Defence Staff seems to have taken a vow of silence and as such seems unlikely to offer Canadians any advice on these issues.
The debate in the United States on increasing its troop levels in Afghanistan is instructive for Canadians on how a country should examine the conditions under which soldiers are sent abroad to die. Already history’s judgement on American policy in Afghanistan will be that it is solely responsible for the present disaster. Not only is Afghanistan on the verge of implosion but, equally, the spillover of the war into large parts of Pakistan adds a dimension that is downright scary. The world can live with a failed Afghan state but it cannot live with a failed Pakistan.
It is these mutually supporting disasters that the Administration is now facing as it seeks to come up with a policy that does not dominate the last three years of President Obama’s first term. The decision to send significant numbers of additional American troops to Afghanistan is accompanied by the search for “off-ramps” where it can start to withdraw troops without precipitating a faster slide to failure in Afghanistan.
It is the squaring of these concerns that has given importance and prominence to Gordon M. Goldstein’s 2008 book Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to the War in Vietnam. Professor Goldstein examines the discussions and actions in the Kennedy administration through the eyes of McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser to both Kennedy and Johnson. After leaving Washington in 1966 Bundy was troubled by the role he played in the disaster in Vietnam and these are seriously explored and analyzed and the parallels they offer in the debate over Afghanistan today. He gives very high marks to the role that Kennedy played in looking down the road further than any of his advisers and, fresh from the disaster at the Bay of Pigs, did not see his military advisers as providing either impartial or even sound advice.
Lessons in Disaster has become essential reading in today’s White House but there is more than just time separating 1962 and 2009. However, political leadership is one element that can save us from disasters on the scale of both Vietnam and Afghanistan. Military advisers, including Chiefs of Defence Staff, have large roles to play in the decision making associated with wars in foreign places. However, as Professor Goldstein emphasizes, prime ministers and presidents decide and, in doing so, there is aneed for greater wisdom and foresight than we have seen so far on Afghanistan. There is not much time left for Afghanistan or for Pakistan and Lessons in Disaster more so than A Soldier First should be required reading for those involved.
Setting aside his book’s shortcomings, General Hillier was a unique star that flashed across the Canadian skies. It would be wrong to suggest that he had no impact on us. At a time when there is little faith or trust in current leaders and governments generally, there is ample evidence that General Hillier, for many Canadians, represented values and attributes not seen in many of our leaders. A letter by Monique Kok in the Ottawa Citizen recently reflected the legacy of the General for many Canadians:
A year ago when I read that Gen. Rick Hillier, then Chief of Defence Staff, was retiring, I surprised myself by bursting into tears. I’m not the type of person to cry about this sort of thing, having no family members in the Canadian Forces. To my shame, I’m not sure I can even name the current Chief of Defence Staff. But when I read that Gen. Hillier was retiring, I felt a tremendous sense of loss. … Hillier’s guileless and frank reports made it seem as if one of us — albeit the one with the best vantage point — was reporting faithfully back to us.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 24, No. 4 (2009) — Winter 2009 // Hiver 2009, pp. 19–21. Read the rest of this issue →
