Canada is at war. Even now, after the deaths of more than 70 Canadian soldiers on the roads and battlefields of Afghanistan, that fact still startles. How did this come to pass? Why are we fighting in a shattered country on the other side of the planet? Whom exactly are we fighting, and for whom?

The Unexpected War contributes enormously to answering these questions. Policy wonks Janice Gross Stein of the University of Toronto and Eugene Lang, a former chief of staff to two ministers of national defence, have used very impressive insider access to detail the labyrinthine process leading to our current deployment of over a thousand troops in the most dangerous districts in Afghanistan. The authors conclude that “Canada slipped into war in Afghanistan, step by step, incrementally, without fully understanding that it was going to war.“

The book confirms that Canadian foreign policy decisions are made within the context of our relationship with the U.S., especially since 9/11. The departments of foreign affairs and defence put enormous pressure on the government to do something to appease Washington. Perhaps a modest increase in our Afghanistan deployment would help free up U.S. troops for Iraq?

A lack of vision, talent, and momentum at foreign affairs and the civilian side of the ministry of defence met head-on with the force of nature that is General Rick Hillier, the chief of defence staff, and “something” became a large “3D” (defence, development, and diplomacy) package in Kandahar. But, as former defence and foreign affairs minister Bill Graham says, “I think everybody was convinced that Afghanistan was a lot further down the road to recovery than it really was … We were probably drinking too much of our own bathwater.”

No one anticipated the Taliban offensive of 2006 (a monumental intelligence failure, on which the authors do not dwell), and a very difficult assignment became a very dangerous one. Unless something dramatic happens to resolve an impossible security situation involving safe havens in Pakistan, billions in drug money, and imbalances between reconstruction and development, it appears unavoidable that Canada will be in Afghanistan for some years to come.

Stein and Lang have made great, sometimes awkwardly charming efforts to make what could have been a baffling policy paper into an eye-popping, very readable, and provocative narrative. They come a hair’s breadth away from pronouncing that the military hijacked Canadian foreign policy. Despite a few minor shortcomings – a sense of drift during the discussion of ballistic missile defence, some repetition, the lack of a regional map –  the book, the first detailed analysis from a major publisher, will be invaluable to anyone trying to parse our Kandahar commitment.