National Defence Committee on Oct. 23rd, 2006

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you, sir.

Mr. Bouchard.

[Robert Bouchard, Bloc, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Colonel, for joining us this afternoon.

You stated that the mission continues to be very demanding, that corruption is still a problem and that Afghans have no confidence in their courts. Yet, Canadian Forces have been on the ground in Afghanistan since 2001.

My question is this: have we fulfilled more than 50 per cent of our mission, in your opinion?

[Col M.D. Capstick]

I'm not sure I really understand your question. Much work needs to be done in Afghanistan across the board. It will be a long time before the international community can collectively declare mission accomplished in Afghanistan.

As I said, we are talking about a place that has been swept over by the forces of history, especially in the last three decades. There has been very major physical destruction to not only the infrastructure, but things we don't traditionally think of as infrastructure. Entire swaths of the agricultural economy were ruined by the fighting. Entire areas were deforested. On top of that, they had about seven years of drought. This is a very tough place to try to rebuild.

What is clear is that in the last couple of years, it has transitioned from being an internationally-led process to being an Afghan-led process. When I talked about the bond process, the constitutional Loya Jirga, and the two very successful elections, I'm talking about a significant process there. We're now at the point where Afghans and Afghanistan are taking control of their own future.

This isn't like it was in Kosovo, which was under UN administration. This is a sovereign state, and they are doing their thing with international help. Yes, there's lots to be done. Pick any sector you can think of. For every ministry we have in the Government of Canada, there would be problems in those sectors in Afghanistan.

[Robert Bouchard, Bloc, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

From an outsider's perspective, the Canadian Forces mission seems to have veered away from its humanitarian and peacekeeping objectives and taken on increasingly military overtones.

What would happen if Canada were to withdraw fully from Afghanistan?

[Col M.D. Capstick]

To cease or stop combat operations in Afghanistan would mean moving out of Kandahar province. Somebody has to fight the counter-insurgency battle in Kandahar province. If there were no international troops today in Kandahar province where the Canadians are, in Helmand where the British are, and Oruzgan where the Dutch are, my personal prediction would be essentially that there would not be a Taliban government, but chaos would continue down there.

This insurgency is not a purely Taliban operation, if you will. It's a complex and advanced mix of Taliban both old and new, criminal elements, drug cartels, and tribal leaders. They all have a different motivation, but their aims overlap. The place where they overlap is in the fact that they want to deny the Government of Afghanistan its ability to exercise its rightful sovereignty down there.

Why? For the Taliban it's clear. They want to re-establish the theocracy that fell in 2001. For the rest, for the drug lords and criminals, it's profit. There are huge amounts of money at stake. For the tribal leaders, a lot of it is that they just don't want their traditional power disrupted. Most of those groups, especially the criminals and tribal leaders, don't want any government down there, and that's what would happen. There would be no government down there and those people would be subject to the whims of the powerful, as they have been for most of their lives.

[Robert Bouchard, Bloc, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

Do I have time for one last question?

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Just a short one.

[Robert Bouchard, Bloc, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

Fine. I'll be brief then.

Are Canadian troops engaged in combat more often than the military of other countries present in Afghanistan?

[Col M.D. Capstick]

I believe that's an accurate comment at this point. I believe the Minister of Defence, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the Prime Minister have done what they do at the political level to try to get more troops down there.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you.

We'll go to Mr. Hawn, and then back to the official opposition.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Colonel, welcome.

You said that the PRT is connected to the national priorities of the Government of Afghanistan. How effectively, how consistently, has the Government of Afghanistan transmitted those priorities?

[Col M.D. Capstick]

These priorities are pretty recent. The London Conference and the presentation of the Afghanistan Compact and the interim Afghanistan national development strategy was the first common strategic framework in a common language ever used in Afghanistan development. This happened in February and since then there's been a big push to get that out there. The government is spending a lot of time lining up its own ministries to follow the plan.

As for the communications, that's an interesting question. The Afghan cabinet is following the plan. The international community is involved in something called the Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board, which is supposed to manage the plan as it develops.

General Richards at ISAF is responsible for getting the PRTs working towards that plan, and he has spared no effort in that regard.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

We talked about the amount of money spent per person. There are apples and oranges, and I don't know what the answer is. But is there a difference between what a dollar buys in Bosnia and what a dollar buys today in Afghanistan?

[Col M.D. Capstick]

There certainly is a difference. Is there enough money in Afghanistan? Academics who do development studies will be debating that one for fifty years. From this simple soldier's point of view, it doesn't look like it.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

I don't disagree with that.

You've talked about the three pillars of the mission, and there's been a lot of talk about balance, or perceived lack of balance, in Canada's commitment to the mission. Canada is supplying a great portion of the combat power in the 25% of the country that's not in decent shape. But we are one of 37 allies. Is it fair or unfair to say that the coalition's mission is balanced among those three pillars?

[Col M.D. Capstick]

It would be fair to say that the mission is more balanced than not.

We have to be careful about our stove pipes. We tend to focus on the military side, on the International Security Assistance Force. That's only one organization in this process. The Afghan reconstruction process is being led by the Afghan government. The main international player is the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, UNAMA. Under it, there is a whole alphabet soup: World Bank, IMF, you name the official development organization. I don't even know how many countries are involved in development, but there are more in development than on the military side.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

So there is balance to the mission.

Talking about the poppy crop for a second, what is your sense of the Afghan government's commitment to a solution to this problem? What are they doing about it?

[Col M.D. Capstick]

There is an Afghanistan counter-narcotics strategy. It is a broad-based plan. I almost used the word “holistic”, but that's tough to understand. It covers a lot of areas. It includes alternative livelihoods, interdiction of the stuff when it's on the move, interdiction of the labs, and eradication in some of the hard-case areas. It is a broad-based plan, though, and that's the plan the government is committed to.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Do you think it's realistic?

[Col M.D. Capstick]

It's going to take time. Everything takes time there and we have to be patient.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

We've talked a little bit about military planners in reconstituting failing civilian government organizations. There would seem to be a lot of precedent for this in other things that Canada and other countries have been involved in militarily, specifically the Balkans. Can you comment on any of these precedents and how this might relate to them?

[Col M.D. Capstick]

I don't think I can, because this was unique.

I mean, the only precedent I know of was the planners that General Hillier lent to Ashraf Ghani when he was Minister of Finance. There are no other countries in Kabul right now that are doing something similar, although both ISAF and the coalition have political-military integration sections, if you will, that deal with the government.

But nobody else, such as Afghan civil servants, sat in Afghan government offices and worked side by side. I mean, you have to picture the room. By the time I left, there were 15 Afghans in a room, and three or four Canadians. My guys had Government of Afghanistan e-mail addresses. They ate lunch with them; during Ramadan, they did not eat lunch with them. They hid in the truck to smoke and that kind of thing. We're the only people who were doing that.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Okay. Just--

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Sorry, that uses up your time.

Over to Ms. Bennett and then back to Ms. Gallant.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Thank you very much.

I think it was in the honourable member McGuire's riding this summer that a number of the military families were concerned about the same soldier having to go back to Afghanistan two, three, four times, because the mission has now been prolonged to 2009. I really did feel they were very concerned that Canada's commitment there is extraordinarily difficult, because of sort of drawing Kandahar as the area we have the responsibility for.

In your paper on the three-D approach, is there a way, on the ground, that you have an ability to provide feedback to the Government of Canada and to the people of Canada as to what rebalancing would look like? If the people of Canada are as uncomfortable with the combat mission as I think they are, how would we change our responsibility in Kandahar and maybe take a different part of the country for a while? How would we decide to spend more money on development or diplomacy instead of on the military--again, the story is that while we've been doing this mission, 200 or 300 schools have blown up--which I think is what Canadians thought we were there to do.