Slew of Books on AFG Coming Out

[The Bread Guy]

Titles and info highlighted -- Shared in accordance with the "fair dealing" provisions, Section 29, of the Copyright Act.

Publishers fire off a round of Afghan titles this fall
ALWYNNE GWILT, Globe & Mail, 7 Aug 07
Article link - Permalink (.pdf)

With the arrival of Quebec's famed Vandoos on the ground in Kandahar, Canada's fight in Afghanistan appears far from over.

At home, Canada's publishers are facing a different battle: with each other.

A slew of books on the mission are coming to bookstores this fall, as publishers race to beat the clock. "We don't know how long the war is going to go on in Afghanistan and because it's an ongoing story and on people's minds we wanted to release (the book) as soon as possible," said Ruth Linka, publisher at Brindle & Glass, which releases The Long Walk Home: Paul Franklin's Journey from Afghanistan in September.

The books range from personal experiences, photo essays and a soldier's long road to recovery, to the political questioning of government policy and the experiences of women living under the Taliban regime.

"Publishers will try to get the book out while the issue is still on people's minds [and this] is an important issue from many aspects of Canadian life," explained Carolyn Wood, head of the association of Canadian publishers.

Perhaps the juiciest tale comes from Penguin Canada, which will release The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar in October. The book by Eugene Lang, a former chief of staff for two defence ministers, and Janice Gross Stein, the director of the Munk Centre for International Studies, takes the reader into the backrooms of Canada's politicking as decisions were being made about whether or not to go to war.

"Everything about it had appeal," said Yvonne Hunter, the director of publicity and marketing. "I don't know that anyone has been able to have a talk with those directly involved in that decision making, so from a publishing perspective that's kind of irresistible." In October, Doubleday Canada releases Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery and Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army by Globe and Mail columnist Christie Blatchford. It's based on her trips to Afghanistan in late 2006 and early 2007.

"I'm not preaching a particular position and for me not to preach is very difficult," said Blatchford. "The book is not about what I think, it's about who these soldiers are." The Canadian public is not connected with the soldiers we're sending over, she added.

Adding to the theme of delving deeper into soldiers' lives is On Assignment in Afghanistan from East Coast publishers Nimbus.

This one, by two staffers at the Halifax Chronicle Herald, Chris Lambie and photographer Christian Laforce, focuses on soldiers from the Maritime provinces, a group that makes up a large chunk of Canadians stationed in Afghanistan.

"Here there is so much support for the troops, everyone has the bumper stickers and the ribbons. It's such a way of life throughout all parts of our population because everyone knows someone who's gone out there," said Nimbus managing editor Sandra McIntyre.

But even though the issue tops the news in the Maritimes, McIntyre thinks civilians are "looking for a connection" with the soldiers, for stories that might not get in the day's headlines.

The book will have a large appeal countrywide, she added, because many East Coasters are living out West in places like Fort McMurray.

Victoria book publisher, Brindle & Glass decided to take on Edmonton Journal reporter Liane Faulder's book idea earlier this year. The title character in The Long Walk Home is Paul Franklin, the soldier driving the vehicle that was blown up in 2006, ending diplomat Glyn Berry's life. Both of Franklin's legs were severed above the knee and the book chronicles his journey to walk again, a feat that few people with that injury ever accomplish. "It's his story from the moment the bomb went off and beyond. It's quite personal," said Linka.

Two photo-based books are also on their way: Pulitzer prize winner Paul Watson's Where War Lives , about his time spent in Afghanistan and other war-torn countries will be published by McClelland & Stewart, while Lana Slezic's book The Forsaken about women living under the Taliban, will be released by Anansi Press.

"Several years ago you'd hear a lot about what is happening with women in Afghanistan and now I find you hear mostly about the war and insurgents rather than how everyday people are trying to cope," explained Laura Repas at Anansi on why they picked up Slezic's book.

In December, Random House Canada will publish Outside the Wire, a compilation of stories from aid workers, doctors and members of the Canadian Forces that is edited by Kevin Patterson and Jane Warren.

The book does not take a political stance, but does show the changes that medical personnel and soldiers have had to contend with since moving out of the peacekeeping role.

"The book doesn't let you engage in rhetoric about the war because you're reading about what is happening on the ground," said Anne Collins, publisher of Random House Canada.

For Canadians, this first-person glimpse is part of understanding the Afghanistan war. It's also likely why Canadian publishers are eating up the manuscripts.

"When the Second World War was going on there weren't very many truly Canadian publishers so it is a relatively new phenomenon," explained Wood.

Linka at Brindle & Glass believes the pattern will continue.

"Writers reflect the concerns of a society and as long as it's in the media and as long as people are talking about it, I think we as publishers are going to continue to see manuscripts about it."

 

[MarkOttawa]

Bits from Unexpected War (via David Akin):

Unexpected War: Kevin Lynch
http://davidakin.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2007/10/18/3298525.html

"Kevin Lynch, a powerful Ottawa mandarin who enjoyed the respect of Paul Martin and the Prime Minister's Office, was a well-known opponent of the Defence Department. "Kevin hates defence, he hates foreign affairs," said [John] Manley. Lynch had worked for Manley when he was minister of industry and would work for him again when Manley would replace Martin as finance minister in 2002. Years earlier, when he was a senior Finance official working for the government of Brian Mulroney, Lynch had successfully urged draconian cuts to the defence budget. And, in the mid-1990s under the Liberals, Finance Minister Paul Martin had cut the budget of the Canadian Forces by nearly a third to help eliminate the deficit. Now that there were urgent priorities in the aftermath of 9-11, priorities directly related to Canada's economy, Lynch and Martin were not about to put scarce dollars into the black hole of defence."

-Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang, The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar, Toronto: Viking Canada, 2007. P. 7

Unexpected war: Canada's generals
http://davidakin.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2007/10/18/3298536.html

"... Canada's generals and admirals tend to be more concerned about their relationships with their American counterparts than they are with their own political masters in Ottawa, a preoccupation that would play out over the next few years on a variety of issues"
"One example illustrates the point. Defence Minister John McCallum tried urgently to reach a senior admiral at NDHQ and was put on hold and told to call back later, as the admiral in question was on the line with the Pentagon."

-Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang, The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar, Toronto: Viking Canada, 2007. P. 14

Mark
Ottawa

 

[GAP]

"... Canada's generals and admirals tend to be more concerned about their relationships with their American counterparts than they are with their own political masters in Ottawa, a preoccupation that would play out over the next few years on a variety of issues"
"One example illustrates the point. Defence Minister John McCallum tried urgently to reach a senior admiral at NDHQ and was put on hold and told to call back later, as the admiral in question was on the line with the Pentagon."

-Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang, The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar, Toronto: Viking Canada, 2007. P. 14

Granted that it is your immediate boss, but I can visualize not wanting to hang up on a real person.....  ;D

 

[MarkOttawa]

The Unexpected War a predictable diatribe on Afghanistan
http://www.cdfai.org/bergenarticles/Oct.17.2007%20The%20Unexpected%20War%20a%20predictable%20diatribe%20on%20Afghanistan.pdf

One day, a good book is going to be written about how Canada became enmeshed in the war in southern Afghanistan.  Sadly, the new book The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar, by Liberal sympathizers Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang, isn’t it.  It is difficult to know where to begin criticism of this apology for the Liberal governments which first committed Canada to Afghanistan...

...although The Unexpected War doesn’t put it this way, there was precious-little informed oversight taking place by the Liberals in Ottawa.  McCallum had no idea what challenges Afghanistan presented and decided that he had to travel to Afghanistan to learn, but his generals were apparently opposed.  Astoundingly, it was Sasha Trudeau, son of Prime Minister Pierre, who told him: “You’re the minister, tell them you are going,” which he then did.

That the generals are portrayed as a gang of bullies should come as no surprise given that Lang, one of its authors, was McCallumn’s chief of staff at the time.  Bill Graham fared no better as the new defence minister in 2004 when defence officials “failed” to brief him on the recommended location for the  Canadian Provincial Construction Team in Kandahar.  And who was Graham’s chief of staff? Lang, who apparently had learned nothing from his two years with McCallum.  Indeed, when there is any mention of McCallum’s chief of staff, he is referred to disingenuously in the third person.

It gets worse, the book describes McCallum’s first meeting with U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, who it says would become synonymous with “arrogance, intransigence, misguided policy and abject military failure.”  Then it elaborates on Rumsfeld’s “astonishing ignorance of counterinsurgency and the strategies and tactics” they use.  How about Liberal gang’s own astonishing ignorance?

Almost begrudging respect is paid to the intellect and skill of current Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Rick Hillier, who it says, single-handedly bamboozled the best minds in Ottawa into adopting Canada’s International Policy statement.  That should come as no surprise, given that Lang was quoted in The Globe and Mail on Aug. 10, 2006, saying: “The problem is, there isn’t anyone who can take him (Hillier) on with a counterworld view. He blows them away.”  The problem wasn’t Rick Hillier: the problem was with the Liberals who were supposed to exercise informed oversight over him...

One of the final insults comes after it quotes Lang’s former boss, Graham, who said in an author interview on January 30, 2007: “There is no doubt about it. We’ve watched this mission evolve
differently from when we got into it.”  The book then says: “Most important, any government owes its citizens a clear, compelling, and honest explanation of why its soldiers are fighting and dying.”  That’s true, but it is also gratuitous.

A good time to explain to Canadians why its soldiers were fighting and dying would have been during the summer of 2005 when Graham and Hillier agreed to tour Canada talking about “what the mission meant for Canada, why it was the right mission, what Canada would be doing for the people of Afghanistan and how the mission would be dangerous for the Canadian Forces.”  On September 23, 2005, newspapers were awash in stories quoting Graham warning Canadians of the perils of Afghanistan and the dangers of Kandahar.

In the end, if I had to pick the most-upsetting part about reading this self-serving diatribe, it would be knowing that I paid $33.39 to do it.

Bob Bergen, Ph.D., is a Research Fellow with the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute (CDFAI) in Calgary. The opinions expressed in this document are those of the author and not necessarily those of CDFAI, its Board of Directors, Advisory Council, Fellows or Donors. Bergen’s column appears bi-weekly. Learn more about the CDFAI and its research on the Internet at www.cdfai.org

See also:

ARE THE CANADIAN PEOPLE READY FOR THE BODY BAGS? (November 24, 2005)
http://www.damianpenny.com/archived/005283.html

Mark
Ottawa

 

[observor 69]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20071027.BKUNEX27/TPStory/Entertainment/Books

AFGHANISTAN

Damned if we didn't, damned when we did
JENNIFER WELSH

October 27, 2007

THE UNEXPECTED WAR

Canada in Kandahar

By Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang

Viking Canada, 348 pages, $35

Events of the past few weeks illustrate the extent to which Afghanistan has come to dominate both Canadian foreign policy and domestic politics. A Throne Speech from Stephen Harper's government suggesting a further extension of the Canadian mission. A public opinion poll showing that Afghans believe the presence of Canadian troops is vital to their security. A high-profile task force created to recommend the best policy for Canada after February, 2009. Just one month in the life of Canada's involvement in Afghanistan.

The decision in May, 2005, to send Canadian troops to Kandahar, Janice Stein and Eugene Lang argue, has single-handedly altered the public's image of its military from that of a benign peacekeeper to an army engaged in full-scale combat and counterinsurgency warfare. It will also shape Canadians' thinking about their country's role in the world for a generation.

The Unexpected War is about the challenges of political decision-making and how Canada's capacity for effective policy choice is waning. It is the product of fruitful collaboration between one of the country's best analysts of international security (Stein) and a former adviser to two Canadian defence ministers (Lang). It does not tell our current political masters how to "solve" the problem of Afghanistan (though it does offer some well-informed advice). Rather, it recounts the story of how our leaders chose to deploy the military in its largest combat mission since the Korean War and invest taxpayers' dollars in the most ambitious development-assistance effort in Canadian history.

Given the stakes of the Afghan campaign, and its effects on Canada's reputation and diplomacy, it is fortunate that this account has not waited years for documents to become publicly available or active participants to publish their diaries. As the authors rightly note, this is a story "that belongs to Canada's citizens." We need to hear it now.

Drawing on a wide range of interviews with key players in Ottawa, the authors counter three widely held beliefs about Canada's involvement in Afghanistan. The first is that Afghanistan is "just like Iraq." Having spent time on university campuses earlier this autumn, I was stunned at how quickly and easily young Canadians are conflating these two conflicts, with little appreciation for the differing role of the international community in each case or for how ordinary Afghans perceive the role of foreign troops. While not experts on the region, the authors have done their homework, providing a rich picture of the country Canadian decision-makers freely admitted they knew nothing about.

The second argument debunked by Stein and Lang - a favourite among those who oppose both the war and the current government - is that Afghanistan is "Harper's War." The book chronicles how today's mission is the product and responsibility of three prime ministers, each of whom made fateful decisions that contributed to Canada's descent into war. Despite recent efforts by Jean Chrétien in his memoirs to point the finger at Paul Martin, both men - along with Harper - share responsibility for the failures and achievements of Canadian policy in Afghanistan.

The Unexpected War is particularly valuable in detailing the Chrétien era of decision-making, when the dust from the events of 9/11 had barely settled. Few Canadians know that, in early 2002, their government rejected a humanitarian and stabilization role, preferring instead to send a battle group of 800 soldiers to Kandahar to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda. While the campaign was short-lived, its symbolic purpose in the eyes of military officials was clear: It would allow Canadian Forces to show the public that they were "not just blue beret-wearing peacekeepers."

In 2003, Jean Chrétien authorized Canada's participation in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan for one year, with little appreciation that this would be "the first step down a long road." For politicians and civil servants in Ottawa, this commitment helped Canada squirm out of an uncomfortable position: It allowed us to support the broader "war on terror" (maintaining our credentials as a supportive ally) without having to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with the U.S. in Iraq. Stein and Lang describe the Chrétien government's decision as a textbook case of duplicitous policy: Liberal politicians spoke with a "principled voice" to Canadians about standing aside in a war not authorized by the United Nations, but with another, "pragmatic" voice to Washington about how Canada was still pulling its weight.

The third bit of folklore the authors challenge is the claim that Canada was strong-armed into Afghanistan by a ruthless thug - namely, the Bush administration. Here, the book is at its finest and most authoritative. As Stein and Lang demonstrate, Canada's deployment of troops was not the result of explicit pressure from Washington, but rather a pre-programmed deference toward the United States within our own ministries of Foreign Affairs and National Defence. Officials in Ottawa insisted that unless Canada appeased the Americans by helping out in Afghanistan, Washington would punish us for taking independent foreign policy stances on Iraq and ballistic missile defence. In reality, members of the Bush administration had a much more mature vision of the Canada-U.S. relationship; they respected our decisions and moved on. The problem is with us, not them.

At every key decision point, it was the anticipated reaction of the United States, rather than the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, that shaped Canada's choices. The authors contend that this was particularly true for Paul Martin, a man who was more concerned about conflicts elsewhere, such as Darfur and Haiti, and who feared that the commitment to Afghanistan would prevent Canada from fulfilling its other global responsibilities. (In this, the former prime minister has been proved right.) But at that time, as was so often the case with Afghanistan, there were no clear-cut options. We were damned if we did act and damned if we didn't.

The Martin era coincided with the rise of a new chief of defence staff, Rick Hillier. Some readers may take away the message that Hillier is the real culprit in the story. Through personal charisma and the force of his ideas, he convinced Martin and his cabinet to "go big" in Afghanistan in 2005. But such an interpretation is one-sided.

Stein and Lang suggest that Hillier was merely doing his job - spectacularly well, in fact. He had a compelling vision of what Canadian Forces could and needed to be in the messy post-Cold War world. Missing, though, were alternative advice and ideas about Afghanistan from Foreign Affairs (and to a lesser extent CIDA). In a healthy parliamentary democracy, leaders need the support of a three-legged stool - defence, diplomacy and development - in order to make wise decisions about peace and war. The impression one gets is that between 2004 and 2006, the defence leg was much stronger than the other two.

The authors' greatest complaint with our leaders is that they did not foresee the campaign of counterinsurgency in which NATO forces are now engaged. "No official, civilian or military, used the word war to describe what was going on in southern Afghanistan." They should have seen it coming, Stein and Lang argue, based on Afghanistan's history and the changing nature of war in the 21st century. That may be so.

But as a Canadian sitting outside the country, I wonder how our leaders stand up against others. Were they any better at foreseeing the Taliban insurgency? Why? Or why not? Here, some reference is made to the Dutch and the British. Not enough, however, for Canadian citizens to understand their leadership in comparative perspective. Future histories of the war in Afghanistan will pass judgment on what has ultimately been a collective gamble by Western democracies. As the authors of this book suggest, it will be a decade or more before we know whether it has paid off.

Jennifer Welsh is professor in international relations at the University of Oxford and a Trudeau Fellow. She recently completed a study of Canada's promotion of good governance through foreign aid.

 

[Gardiners1]

I just received Fifteen Days from Chapters.ca this week and so far it has been an absolutely excellent read.  Christie Blatchford is a great writer and I would recommend the book highly even though I am only 45 pages or so into it.