Evidence of meeting #45 for Foreign Affairs and International Development in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was afghanistan.
A recording is available from Parliament.
10:05 a.m.
Conservative
10:05 a.m.
Chair, Defence Management Studies Program, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University
Mr. Chair, I think the point is very well taken, and it has been recognized in these kinds of continuous warfare operations that you need police amongst the people.
I hope you've had a chance to speak to Brigadier-General David Fraser, who commanded our forces in Afghanistan. He acknowledges that he wished he had had the time, the money, and the resources to work with the police first, and now they're trying to correct that. As I understand, the United States is going to provide hundreds of millions of dollars for that effort. But it's a lesson we've drawn out of those places. Policing, in most parts of the world, and I'm sure Walter would agree, is a very tricky thing.
We don't have enough police either. I think the committee from that other place on the Hill recommended yesterday 800 more policemen just for our airports. It would be good to have about 300 to 400 mounted policemen to go to Afghanistan, but I don't think Parliament has voted that kind of money.
10:10 a.m.
Professor and Co-Chair, Department of Security Studies, Canadian Forces College, As an Individual
Yes, I believe you have the right strategy. You build where you can build, and we should spend the billions in areas where they know they can be effective. In many cases that means developing the capacity that's there, and building capacity, not dependency.
We have our basis in the Afghan National Police, and we have a long way to go. But we seem to be spending precociously on the war fighting and so miserly on the other side.
10:10 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you, Mr. Dorn.
I know that when we've talked to the different agencies that have asked for police forces or when police forces have gone, there is frustration, though, if we're asking police to do military-type procedures and combat and not the military. I mean, you have to get the military there; you get it to the place where the police can look after things.
A couple of things. Mr. Bland, you mentioned that you gave a paper a few days ago related to NATO and the EU. Can you send a copy of that presentation to this committee?
10:10 a.m.
Chair, Defence Management Studies Program, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University
Yes, Chair, I'll do that. I'm just reworking it now for publication, but I'll send you something.
10:10 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you, Mr. Bland.
Mr. Dorn, in your bio it says that you've taken a sabbatical leave and you've been working with the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York. One of the areas of the study you're doing is technological means of patrolling borders. We have a real concern between the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. As you know, the minister went to Pakistan. The minister negotiated and spoke with the Pakistani government to see if they could in some ways monitor the border.
Could you give us a bit of an idea of innovative, new, technological ways that perhaps that border could be better monitored?
10:10 a.m.
Professor and Co-Chair, Department of Security Studies, Canadian Forces College, As an Individual
Yes, very quickly.
Use of satellites--we'll be launching very soon RADARSAT-2, which has unprecedented radar coverage day and night, in all weather, to look at movements on the ground, with three-metre resolution.
We are now getting equipped with uninhabited aerial vehicles that can be flown--the U.S. is flying them, and we've flown them in Afghanistan. It's a major means.
Then we have excellent ground surveillance radar, like the Coyote reconnaissance vehicle, which would help out. We even have underground means, using ground-penetrating radar to look for weapons underneath the ground, or mass graves, if you want to find sites of atrocities. There are also seismic sensors, so that when people or vehicles are passing by a point, we know they're going there. That's one way of intercepting any fighting forces, by getting advance warning they're coming there, using the air to be able to do the reconnaissance and then have an intercept mission.
March 22nd, 2007 / 10:10 a.m.
Bloc
Vivian Barbot Bloc Papineau, QC
There would be so many things to say about the meeting we have just had. What strikes me at this stage is the extent to which we are floating in euphemisms. We are no longer waging wars, but more muscular peacekeeping missions.
Mr. Bland has told us that the army has always tried to turn on the charm in its dealings with the locals. However, I believe that there is a fundamental difference between sharing one's food with the local population and seeing to it that the people have access to proper food over the long term.
Furthermore, minister MacKay came to see us yesterday to tell us that Canada wishes to assume leadership in the war in Afghanistan. However, at NATO and at the UN, Canada has no leadership role; at most, it has a participatory one.
Would it enlighten this debate if we could at least agree on the need to wage war in certain places — even if, personally, I do not agree with war — and on the moment at which Canada should intervene in peacekeeping missions? It is clearly in this area that we have the most expertise, and this is what the people are in agreement with.
There is another element that we must pay more attention to than in the past, and it is the fact that the citizens of this country, overall, are opposed to warfare. Things get a little muddled when we are told that we are moving on to the 3D formula, whereas we are well aware that we are unable to do the three things at once.
I would like to know your views on this.
10:15 a.m.
Conservative
10:15 a.m.
Professor and Co-Chair, Department of Security Studies, Canadian Forces College, As an Individual
There is a spectrum of force, and we have to find the correct balance point. There will be no ideal point, but rather the one that gives the best results. In some cases we've gone too far in the spectrum of force, and in many cases in its history the UN has not used enough force. Now I think they've found the right balance point.
In my view, in the Kabul region in Afghanistan, we found a good point and we had a working model. But going into Kandahar, we went so far in the spectrum of force that it actually created more enemies than it's dissipating. So it's finding that correct point of force.
Canada has a major contribution to play here, because we do have both the peacekeeping and the war-fighting experience. We have a proud tradition of peacekeeping and a proud tradition of fighting in the world wars and in the Korean War. I think the expertise we have is central and very much needed by the UN, in order to have that kind of blend of capacity, especially now that we're talking about a more muscular type of peacekeeping.
One of the ways we can be involved in leadership in the UN is not by putting lots of people on the ground. We can't compete with the South Asians, who have 25,000 in total on the ground. We can have value-added by giving the technological capabilities. They're so needed. You can have one air reconnaissance vehicle replacing a battalion of soldiers in terms of the area it can cover and what it can see and what it can do.
We have the means. It's just that we're putting all our eggs in one basket now, and that's in Kandahar. We just have no eggs right now for the UN. We have a mere 55 soldiers, which is a shame for our long-standing tradition.
10:15 a.m.
Chair, Defence Management Studies Program, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University
I always encourage students not to become wrapped up in the myths of peacekeeping—for instance, that Canada invented peacekeeping and such things. We didn't.
Walter is very right that we have some sort of special expertise. Well, lots of people in the world have special expertise. The Norwegians and the Scandinavians, the Indians and the Pakistanis, and all kinds of other people have lots of expertise.
I agree with him that Canada ought to provide a great deal of technical assistance to these kinds of missions. But guess what? Parliament is not paying for it. There isn't any technical stuff out there. Our airplanes are falling out of the sky. Maybe we have a hundred Coyote vehicles that are ten years old.
We don't have the stuff that people seem to think we have. I refer you, if you wish, to a study we did at Queen's University, called Canada Without Armed Forces?, which not only pointed out where our major capabilities are falling, but—more difficult—pointed out that many of our major capabilities are going to crash before they can be replaced.
We have the oldest Hercules fleet in the world. Does anybody here fly around on 40-year-old airplanes? Does anybody here in Parliament have their kids driving around in 25-year-old trucks in war zones? That's what you're doing. That's what Canada is doing.
Yes, we should provide more. I agree we should provide more. We should be the technical background to the United Nations missions. We can do all those kinds of things. We can have large communications squadrons and hospitals to support them. But somebody has to vote the money.
10:15 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you, Mr. Bland.
Mr. Casey, you may have a very quick question, and then we're completed.
10:15 a.m.
Conservative
Bill Casey Conservative Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, NS
Thank you very much. I'm really enjoying this presentation.
I have two questions. One is for Dr. Dorn. You mentioned earlier that it's not a war against the Taliban. What is it?
Dr. Bland, I really appreciate your concept of continuous warfare. I think you're right there, but do you agree with the mission in Afghanistan? Do you see this as continuous warfare--not unlimited, but indefinite? If you were in control of all the levers, what would you do?
10:15 a.m.
Chair, Defence Management Studies Program, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University
If I were in control of what, sir?
10:15 a.m.
Conservative
Bill Casey Conservative Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, NS
If you were in control of all the levers and all the power, both from the military and political side.
10:15 a.m.
Chair, Defence Management Studies Program, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University
Heaven forbid. I'm an academic.
You can go first. I've got to think up an answer.
10:15 a.m.
Professor and Co-Chair, Department of Security Studies, Canadian Forces College, As an Individual
I think that as we are now fighting it, it is a war against the Taliban. That's the way it's being perceived. What we have, right from September 11 when Bush made the statement about no difference between terrorists and those who harbour them, is a war against the Taliban, because the Taliban government did harbour al-Qaeda. It was declared, then, a war.
I remember that at the Pearson peacekeeping centre at noon on September 11, I said the United States was going to attack Afghanistan. I was quite clear that no matter what they actually found on September 11, there would be an attack on Afghanistan, and that Canada's role was to moderate the United States in what would happen--so it was a war, and it's being fought that way, and now we're part of that war; we are a combatant. We are one of the fighting nations.
I don't think I would agree that I said this was not a war against them. We're fighting it as a war against the Taliban, but it doesn't have to be. It could be a more impartial mission, one in which we take on anybody who commits violations according to a set law. Then you have a much more solid process in which you involve widespread discussions, creating a body that is representative of all the people, not just the government elected in the territories--when there was a vote and when they could vote.
10:20 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you.
Mr. Bland, have you decided which levers you'd be pulling?
10:20 a.m.
Chair, Defence Management Studies Program, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University
I don't know whether I'd want to be Rick Hillier, Prime Minister, or either. They are dreadful jobs, actually.
For those who had difficulty hearing me when I made my introductory remarks because we had problems with the microphones, the answer to your first question is something like this. When people ask if the Canadian deployment to Afghanistan is the right policy for Canada, the mission supports four inseparable and longstanding objectives of Canadian foreign policy. They are: the defence of Canada as far from our shores as possible; the support of the United Nations, especially the authority of the Security Council; the maintenance of NATO and the alliance of like-minded states; and most critical of all, support to the reasonable security interests of the United States in our own interest, because the United States provides the source for our economic well-being and our national defence.
If I had my hands on the lever, Canadians might not like it, but then who knows.
Seriously, Canadians at the political and bureaucratic levels need to understand that we're in the situation we haven't been in for a very long time of having to find out how to manage a war. The bureaucrats in this town don't understand that, and they're learning very slowly. We can have slogans like three Ds, and that's all they are--slogans. We need the other slogan, “whole of government approach”, which some of us have talked about for a long time, to bring the efforts of the foreign ministry, the defence ministry, the Department of Transport, Corrections Canada--maybe not the Department of Fisheries and Oceans--and all the parts of the government together so they work in a coherent way under a strategy. The Canadian political community, with respect, hasn't got around to understanding how to manage a war that is being waged in Canada's interests broadly defined. We need to do that.
We also need to mobilize a great deal of our resources in financing police, military capabilities, diplomatic capabilities, and humanitarian capabilities. That takes a lot of money and effort. On that conversation for the most part over the years--and Walter might agree with me--going back to the intervention in the Balkans in the early 1990s, we still haven't got it. We still don't understand that those are the wars of the present and the wars of the future. We haven't adjusted the Canadian bureaucracy to the steady piece of the commitments to NATO and UN peacekeeping.
UN peacekeeping has a lot of merits, but one of its faults is that it's still kind of stuck in the idea of state-directed warfare, intervention between states, and so on. Many countries, especially in the west, haven't got used to the idea that continuous warfare is not abnormal. It's not asymmetric warfare or irregular warfare; it's the real thing. It's the new regular warfare. So we need to think about how we are going to handle that politically, bureaucratically, and with all the instruments of government.
If I had my hands on the levers, I'd just go and do that.
10:25 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you, Mr. Bland.
I want to thank you both for coming. It has been good. We had two differences of opinion on certain issues and we had a healthy discussion. We appreciate your comments, your time, and that you stayed the extra time. I realize you were scheduled for one hour and you stayed for an hour and a half.
We're going to suspend and then come back to look at a report highlight.
[Proceedings continue in camera]