[R-G] Canada’s Conservative government rushes to reaffirm support for army champion of Afghan war

[Anthony Fenton]

Canada’s Conservative government rushes to reaffirm support for army  
champion of Afghan war
By Guy Charron
30 October 2007
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/oct2007/hill-o30.shtml

This is an updated version of an article posted in French, October  
20, 2007.

Canadian Armed Forces’ Chief of Staff Rick Hillier said last Thursday  
it will be another decade before the Afghan army is capable of  
pacifying the country on its own. The implication of Hillier’s remark  
is that Canadian and other NATO troops will remain in Afghanistan for  
years to come, waging war on behalf of the US-installed regime of  
Hamid Karzai.

Twenty-five hundred CAF personnel are currently embroiled in a  
colonial-style, counter-insurgency war in southern Afghanistan. In  
its October 16 Throne Speech, the Conservative government of Stephen  
Harper announced that it wants the current CAF deployment, scheduled  
to end in February, 2009, to be extended for a further two years to  
2011.

The parliamentary opposition parties, which have made a calibrated  
and hypocritical appeal to popular anti-war sentiment, were quick to  
seize on the apparent contradiction between Hillier’s remarks and the  
Throne Speech’s claim that Canadian troops will increasingly focus on  
training Afghan troops and that by 2011 the Afghan army should be  
ready to “defend its own sovereignty.”

Hillier—who has frequently made statements that contradict stated  
government policy—and the Conservative government have both responded  
by denying that there is any difference in their positions.

In an appearance Sunday on CTV’s “Question Period,” Defence Minister  
Peter MacKay lavished praise on the head of Canada’s military.  
Hillier “is doing tremendous work ...” affirmed MacKay. “He is a  
tremendous motivator.”

MacKay also took the opportunity to once again refute suggestions  
that Hillier—who has championed the CAF deployment to Kandahar  
Province, the center of the insurgency against the Karzai regime,  
both within the government and publicly—will soon be replaced as CAF  
head. “There’s (sic) no plans to replace General Hillier,” insisted  
MacKay.

Previously Prime Minister Harper and MacKay had vigorously denied a  
CTV claim, made in an early October broadcast, that the government  
will not renew Hillier’s contract when it expires early next year.

The prime minister, who has vigorously promoted the CAF mission in  
Afghanistan and the CAF as both a national symbol and instrument of  
Canadian power on the world stage, personally intervened to dispel  
any doubt as to Hilllier’s future, proclaiming him “an outstanding  
soldier.”

Those close to the military had reacted angrily to the initial CTV  
report, expressing indignation that a general might be dismissed in  
time of war and insinuating that to do so was close to treason. “If  
they were to move [Hillier] at this stage to take away his contract  
extension next February, it would be a huge slap in the face,” said  
Scott Taylor, publisher of the military magazine Esprit de Corps.

Appointed to head the CAF by the previous Liberal government of Paul  
Martin, Hillier has assumed a much more prominent political role than  
any Chief of Defence Staff since at least the Second World War. For  
most of the Cold War, the Canadian ruling class was careful to carry  
out its foreign military interventions under the guise of  
international “peace-keeping” mission. General Hillier is lauded by  
his supporters for having publicly campaigned for the revival of  
Canadian militarist traditions and for the CAF to play a leading role  
in the prosecution of the Afghan war.

Hillier has made himself the spokesman for the dominant section of  
the Canadian elite, which views the CAF’s “peace-keeper” image to be  
an encumbrance, to aggressively asserting their predatory interests  
on the world stage. He was determined, therefore, that—within the  
context of what US President George W. Bush has called the first wars  
of the twenty-first century—Canadian troops wouldn’t be confined “to  
directing traffic in Kabul.”

Hillier is credited with having convinced then-Prime Minister Paul  
Martin, in 2005, to change the CAF mission in Afghanistan from  
“peacekeeping” to a combat role in the Kandahar region.

To date, 71 Canadian soldiers have been killed and 500 wounded in  
Afghanistan, the vast majority of them since the CAF deployed to  
southern Afghanistan. The CAF has not provided figures as to the  
number of insurgents and Afghan civilians it has killed.

Hillier also played the leading role in the creation of a group of  
Canadian advisors, most of them CAF officers, who have been seconded  
to various Afghan departments to act as advisors—a colonialist  
euphemism for calling the shots—to Karzai’s puppet government.

In what is clearly a major political role, Hillier commands the  
Strategic Advisory Team (SAT), composed of some 20 members, which has  
the right to intervene in any Afghan ministry. The SAT has the job of  
coordinating critical aspects of the neo-colonial agenda of the  
imperialist countries which keep the Karzai government in place (See  
“The ‘Canadian Ministers’ of Hamid Karzai’s Afghan government”).

If Prime Minister Harper has sprung so strongly to the defense of  
General Hillier, it is because the latter epitomizes the militarist  
direction promoted by the Conservative government. During the 2006  
election campaign, Harper promised to develop the Canadian Armed  
Forces to the point where it would be noticed by the great powers. A  
central goal of his government has been to rehabilitate the idea that  
the CAF is an instrument of war to be used to promote Canada’s  
geopolitical position and strategic interests.

Shortly after his election, in a speech to several hundred army  
supporters gathered in front of the Parliament Buildings, Harper  
repeated a controversial statement made by Hillier to the effect that  
the soldier is the source of Canadian freedoms. In fact, democratic  
rights have historically been wrested by the popular classes in a  
struggle against the privileges of the rich and powerful and their  
principal bulwark, the state and its bodies of armed men.

Recently in the House of Commons, Harper savagely attacked the leader  
of the Liberal Official Opposition, Stephane Dion, when the latter  
sought to make political capital from the fact that the Canadian army  
is complicit in the torture of Afghan prisoners. Harper  
contemptuously told Dion that the defence minister was under no  
obligation to respond to Dion’s question because the Liberal leader,  
unlike the then-defence minister, has never served in Canada’s armed  
forces. Harper’s statement is a direct challenge to the elementary  
bourgeois-democratic principle of the subordination of the military  
to the civilian government and parliament.

The CTV report that claimed the Conservative government was preparing  
to replace Hillier cited Conservative sources who said that Hillier  
had irritated the government. According to the Globe and Mail, which  
is controlled by the same media monopoly as the CTV, “The charismatic  
General Hillier has irked the government by outshining his political  
masters and undermining former defence minister Gordon O’Connor.”

A former lobbyist for the arms industry and retired Brigadier- 
General, O’Connor lost his post as Minister of Defence in the August  
2007 reshuffling of the Conservative cabinet. O’Connor had come under  
criticism for lying about the fate of Afghan prisoners handed over by  
the Canadian troops to Afghan security forces, who are notorious for  
torturing and even killing their detainees. Hillier was one of those  
demanding that the discredited O’Connor be sacrificed, so as not to  
further undermine popular support for the Afghan war.

The fact that Hillier prevailed in an internal quarrel with the  
Defence Minster over how best to sell the war to Canadians, combined  
with the Conservative government’s repeated avowals of support for  
Hillier—a general with both an unprecedented public and government  
policy role—point to a profound change in the relations between the  
military and the civilian political power structure. Canada’s  
military exercises a growing influence in questions of foreign policy  
and in the general conduct of political affairs.