who's head should be on the platter, Hillier or O'Connor

Damage control TheStar.com - columnists - Damage control
A single thread connects most of Canada's missteps in Afghanistan: Chief of Defence Staff Rick Hillier
March 13, 2007 James Travers TheTorontoStar

Canada's see-no-evil handling of Afghan prisoners is more than a national embarrassment. It's also a pressing reminder that an ugly little war is exposing this Conservative government and its Liberal predecessor as at least naïve and arguably negligent.

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 commitments necessary to give the troops a fighting chance.

Each administration has a defence.

A less dangerous than predicted maiden tour in Kabul made the military overconfident and helped convince Liberals that it was possible to get in and out of Kandahar without heavy casualties.

Under pressure from NATO and from a military with its own agenda, Conservatives seized an option that neatly bundled political, defence and foreign-policy interests.

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.

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.

That final point is most worrying. If war is too important to leave to generals, then democratic governments can't shirk full responsibility for its declaration and prosecution.

Canada does better on the first test than the second. Along with much of the world, this country has good reason for denying Al Qaeda a state sponsor. And protecting some of the most vulnerable people is admirable, even if the concern doesn't stretch to, say, Darfur.

What Ottawa isn't demonstrating yet is the due diligence required when lives are at stake. The necessary thoroughness was missing from Liberal analysis of the Kandahar mission as well as from the Conservative extension and is now evident in the laissez-faire handling of prisoners.

Concerns with PoW treatment date to at least 2002 when a front-page photograph caught Canada's elite Joint Task Force Two handing detainees to the same American forces operating notorious prisons in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Suspect arrangements since then did more to make life easy for the military and insulate politicians from criticism than to guard against abuse.

Protecting prisoners is important. It affects how others see us, how we see ourselves and upholds the standard this country expects for the treatment of captured Canadians.

But there is another concern at least as significant. Citizens need to know their governments take seriously something as serious as war.

O'Connor's failure to ensure PoWs are treated as Canadians expect only increases doubts about government competence. First Liberals and then Conservatives committed troops too easily to a hazy mission and both ruling parties were too willing to accept uncertain guarantees for prisoner safety.

Canadians are now asking a lot of their troops in Afghanistan. Surely they should demand as much from their politicians.