Iranian Press reports on Hillier book!

This is from an Iranian news agency. It is a bit surprising that they should notice Hillier's book and write an article about it. Hillier is probably correct that the NATO mission has not been successful and certainly not supported in the way that the military would like. However, from what is said here it would seem that Hillier is not really sympathetic to the political difficulties involved and is gung ho for a military solution. In my opinion NATO should never have been there in the first place and is just being used as a helpmate for a U.S. agenda. The entire extension of NATO's role was a farce from the beginning simply spreading the burden of US imperium on other countries.


Afghanistan to be graveyard of NATO alliance?
As public support for the Afghan war rapidly falls in NATO countries, the head of the alliance has stepped up efforts to keep member-states united. On Thursday, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen spoke before a meeting with alliance defense ministers in Bratislava on a new approach against the widening Taliban insurgency. "We all have to achieve more in training and equipping the Afghan security forces," Rasmussen told a security conference before the ministers' meeting in the Slovak capital, which is not expected to announce decisions on troop levels.
Meanwhile, Canada's former top general has said that the setbacks in Afghanistan have greatly damaged NATO's credibility. Almost eight years on, a continued lack of focus and resolve in Afghanistan will be NATO's undoing, retired general and former Canadian chief of defense staff Rick Hillier warned in a new book. Hillier wrote in his autobiography, to be published next week, that "Afghanistan has revealed that NATO has reached the stage where it is a corpse, decomposing" and in need of "lifesaving" otherwise "the alliance will be done." He said the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is vulnerable to "any major setback" in Afghanistan and faces extinction unless it can "snatch victory out of feeble efforts." In the book, "A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War," Hillier says no Western country had predicted an Afghan resurgence following the early success of the US invasion in 2001. When Hillier took command of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) years later, "It was crystal clear from the start that there was no strategy for the mission in Afghanistan," he wrote. "NATO had started down a road that destroyed much of its credibility and in the end eroded support for the mission in every nation in the alliance. ....