National Defence Committee on June 15th, 2010

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you very much.

I will give the floor to Mr. Braid for five minutes.

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you to all our witnesses for being here.

Today we've had such a wealth of information and testimony has been of such high calibre, it's hard to know where to start. So thank you.

Dr. Regehr, thank you very much for coming from Waterloo, the centre of innovation in our country.

[Ernie Regehr]

Mr. Chair, where's he from?

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Thank you as well for your more than 30 years of very thoughtful contributions to issues relating to global peace and security.

Dr. Regehr, you mentioned in your presentation that we should find a way to create capacity for political negotiation or political solution to be built into peace operations. Could you elaborate a little bit on that and explain how we might create or build that capacity?

[Ernie Regehr]

I think part of it is political leadership. It takes a certain amount of audacity to insert yourself into conflicts where the immediate interests of Canada are not so apparent. There's a generalized interest that we have.

The Norwegians have done that. They've become involved. You might ask, why should the Norwegians get involved in some of the places they have?

So I think we really need to understand that it requires strong leadership at the top to get involved in diplomacy that has the potential of becoming a high-profile activity.

It means working in a catalytic fashion, more often than not, rather than in a direct mediating role, for example, in the sub-Saharan conflicts, such as in Zimbabwe.

Somalia is hardly a conflict-prevention situation, but it is devoid of any credible attempt at diplomacy to resolve that conflict currently. Canada has a diaspora of a large Somali community here, which creates some of the problems that Fen has been talking about. But I think if you understand your role as being catalytic and facilitative in getting the regional actors involved, getting representatives of the diverse communities within Somalia involved, and creating tables to which people can come, I think that's the kind of activity we're talking about.

Of course, Fen just made a number of points about the more detailed and skills-based kinds of activities we can undertake.

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Thank you.

I'm changing gears a little bit for my second question.

Dr. Regehr, in what situations or scenarios would you envision the Canadian Forces and NGOs working in partnership, hand in hand on the ground, within the context of a peace operation?

[Ernie Regehr]

I think the distinction there is between coordination and integration. In a whole-of-government approach, you certainly need to have NGOs and the military and diplomats all working in concourse towards an identified common strategic goal, a national goal. So I think the coordination of NGO activities with those of other elements of government and the international community is a very important thing.

But I make the distinction between that and the integration of those activities. I don't think you want direct participation of one with the other on the ground in projects. That creates confusion or the implication that the development activity is really a part of advancing the war or military effort. As NGOs have pointed out many times, that creates a problem. Mr. Samson made the point about civil-military issues. He might want to elaborate on that.

I think that's how I would make the distinction: it's about coordination in a common effort, but not integration of roles.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you very much.

I have to give the floor to Mr. Bachand.

[Claude Bachand, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

I would like to continue the debate on coordination. The classic example is Afghanistan; some members of this committee got back from there two weeks ago.

At the moment, I feel that coordination in Afghanistan has completely fallen apart. It is like a nightmare. If things are going so badly in Afghanistan, it is precisely for that reason. Imagine: the UN asked NATO to get involved. A representative of the UN Secretary General is on the ground in Afghanistan, but there is also NATO and all its member countries, with 150,000 troops. When I ask whether the UN Secretary General's representative or General McChrystal is in charge, I have a lot of difficulty getting an answer.

General McChrystal is a brilliant man. He commands 150,000 soldiers. That is quite a strike force, with a wide range of capabilities. If can do almost anything. There are also 48 countries, all with different national interests. Diplomats and their staff in one embassy are pursuing a national interest that is completely different from the embassy next door.

Among those 48 nations, people doing development work may conceive their activities on the basis of a completely different philosophy from their neighbours. Then there is defence, including the troops on the ground. They all have rules of non-engagement. To get even deeper into the nightmare, there are hundreds of NGOs that do not wish to be associated either with the soldiers or with national interests that they do not approve of.

Do you agree that what is happening in Afghanistan is the perfect recipe for failure? I think that could happen in a number of theatres. We need guidelines and we need to know who is giving the orders. I always thought that a civilian authority directed the military. I feel that the UN should take the initiative to get people around a table to coordinate the action plan. At the moment, that is not happening.

Is there a way out of this nightmare? If not, are we going to let it continue till death do us all part?

[Paul Samson]

I am going to answer that question by highlighting the progress that has been made in development, in the context of various statements of principle, including the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. That highlights your exact question about coordination between donors specifically in the area of development.

But I feel that the lesson is much wider, as you explained. There is an even more fundamental request for, and need for, coordination. I feel that progress has been made in this area, but, as you said, it remains very difficult because of the number of parties involved. This is still a work in progress.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

I now give the floor…

[Claude Bachand, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Are my five minutes up, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

I will give the floor to Mrs. Gallant.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm wondering if the witnesses would state the number of years and/or months each has spent in conflict zones.

[Ernie Regehr]

I've spent a fair bit of time in East Africa conflict zones, in Sudan, and in Ethiopia at the Eritrea border. I've visited Afghanistan three times, and Uganda. Familiarity doesn't make one an expert in any of those places, I'm afraid.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

The former deputy special representative in Afghanistan, who spent six years there, recently told a Senate committee:

The Taliban doesn't want peace. They don't want a piece of the pie. They want to blow up the pie.

Mr. Regehr has stated that all conflicts can be resolved through diplomacy. Can you explain how to negotiate with players with a mindset such as this?

[Ernie Regehr]

My point wasn't that all conflicts can be negotiated; it's that all conflicts are. That's the way conflicts end. That doesn't mean the military process hasn't influenced enormously how the negotiations go and all that sort of thing. That's one point. That's what happens.

Secondly, it is also part of the pattern that the adversary is viewed as being the unique one that can't be negotiated with, that in other places it may be possible, but in this case it's not possible.

I used the example of Mozambique. That was an extreme case. It's the same with the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda. These are people of no redeeming virtue, who don't want to deal but who we sit down at the table with.

In Afghanistan, that may be a perception, but I have met with people in Afghanistan who, though not identifying themselves as Taliban, are highly sympathetic to the Taliban, who think they can negotiate strongly but who also realize that riding into Kabul and taking over the government is not something that's going to happen. So they realize that there's going to have to be some negotiating there.

I think the pattern in Afghanistan isn't so totally different from everywhere else. Ultimately it's going to come to that process.

[Dr. Fen Osler Hampson]

I think it's an excellent question and I'd like to give an academic answer.

In the past 25 years, 40% of civil and regional conflicts have ended through a process of negotiation. The others have either kept going—the so-called intractable conflicts—or ended simply because one side won and beat the other side. The problem is that the most stable outcomes, politically, have not been the negotiated ones. That presents a huge challenge.

As I indicated in my introductory remarks, we're seeing a high rate of recidivism in some of the negotiated peace settlements of the 1980s and 1990s. That presents a huge challenge—to come back to something that Mr. Martin said about conflict prevention. Part of the challenge of prevention is to prevent that recidivism with those conflicts that ended through a negotiated peace process.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you very much.

I will give the floor to Mr. Payne.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm actually very interested in a question similar to the one asked by my colleague, Ms. Gallant. One of the difficulties I see and hear, particularly in Afghanistan—and this is probably happening in other places—when I read information or watch the news, is that the Taliban are in fact killing their own people. For me, it is really difficult to understand how we can actually negotiate with them when they don't appear to have any remorse and kill their own civilians. I just have a bit of a challenge in seeing how we can do that.

That's basically a follow-up question to my colleague's.

[Dr. Fen Osler Hampson]

A lot of the people you have to negotiate with—and there's a long history, as I alluded to, of negotiated outcomes—are people who have blood on their hands. That's just the reality. They're often not very nice people, and sometimes those people, if there is a negotiated resolution, form the next government. We've seen that in Central America and we've seen that in sub-Saharan Africa in some of the negotiated conflicts. So we shouldn't be shy of negotiation.

The real question is, why do parties come to the table? They come to the table when the costs of a political settlement appear to be lower than the costs of continued fighting. I would submit that the challenge with the Taliban—which is a very amorphous entity and there are many factions and interests, and there's low-hanging fruit that, yes, can be co-opted by President Karzai and others, but there are others who can't—for those who are really intent on waging the struggle, the real question is, what's in it for them if they see NATO heading for the exit, if they see countries like Canada heading for the exit, if they think if they just hang on for long enough they'll be able to pursue their goals through military means and through insurgency because Karzai is weak? What's the incentive structure there for them to change that fundamental political calculus?

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Thank you. That leads into the next question.

However, I would like to ask Mr. Samson a question. In terms of CIDA, you talked about the amount of funds that Canada has put forth—$545 million—and how some of that was going into Afghanistan and Haiti. Could you enlighten us as to some of the projects that have been put forth and where we see successes?

[Paul Samson]

Sure. Thank you very much for the question.

Do you mean specific to Afghanistan?

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Yes, and Haiti.