Hillier says PMO was one of his toughest foes

Canada's former top soldier, who took on the Taliban while at the helm of the nation's military, says in his new book that the Prime Minister's Office was one of his toughest adversaries.

Former chief of defence staff Rick Hillier fires a salvo of tough criticism at Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his inner circle in "A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War."

The book is set for official release on Oct. 24, but CTV's Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife obtained an early copy of the provocative new memoir.

"General Rick Hillier is a straight-talking general who has had the loyalty of his soldiers, and when Prime Minister Harper and his gang came in he didn't get along with them and that was no secret, everyone in Ottawa knew that," Fife told CTV's Canada AM.

Hillier didn't favour Kandahar deployment

In the blunt autobiography Hillier denies he was responsible for getting Canadian soldiers involved in volatile southern Afghanistan, where the highest number of casualties have occurred.

He writes in the book that he wanted Canadian troops to stay in the much safer Kabul area where they were originally deployed, but the decision to send troops to the dangerous southern Kandahar region was made before he became military leader in 2004.

"It had already been largely decided that the Canadian presence in Afghanistan was shifting to the southern half of the country," Hillier writes.

"Even before I returned from commanding (the International Security Assistance Force in the fall of 2004), NATO had announced its intentions to expand the ISAF mission beyond Kabul in 2006, and planning was already well on its way for a move into Kandahar province by the time I landed back in Canada that fall."

He suggests it was then prime minister Paul Martin's decision-making that resulted in Canada's costly commitment in the south. To-date, 131 Canadian troops have died in Afghanistan.

Hillier also has tough criticism for NATO, saying the military alliance is rife with infighting and political posturing and needs serious emergency medical attention if it is to survive.

He said it was "embarrassing" that the secretary general of the powerful military alliance had to beg for troop and equipment commitments from individual countries.

Hillier warns NATO is a "corpse" that needs serious attention if it is to be revived.

Repatriation controversy

He also sheds light on his strained relationship with former defence minister Gordon O'Connor and what he paints as businesslike relations with Harper.

Hillier also gives his side of what was a tense standoff over the repatriation of Canada's first female casualty in Afghanistan. He writes that he was ordered by the PMO to hide the return of the body of Capt. Nichola Goddard, because the PMO didn't want the event covered extensively by the media.

In the book, he calls it a "line in the sand" moment and recalls telling then-defence minister Gordon O'Connor that it wasn't an option.

But Fife points out it wasn't that black and white.

"There's another side to that if you read the book. He did bar the media, and if he was as tough as he said he was, he could have said 'I'm not going to do this I'm going to let the media on.'"

In the end, it was the outraged public response by Goddard's family that resulted in a reversal of the policy. Harper eventually explained his intention was to give families the power to decide themselves whether news crews could cover the return of their relatives' flag-draped coffins to CFB Trenton.