National Defence Committee on Sept. 22nd, 2011

[BGen Craig King]

Right. In terms of the command and control in theatre, Major-General Mike Day maintains command over the entire affair. Brigadier-General Lamarre is specifically focused on operations in Kandahar. And then the training mission is what it is in Kabul.

We should link up afterwards, because I did some time in Zgon as well. I'd be interested in your views. We could reminisce a little.

In terms of the structure of how we're bringing stuff back, we're moving things over ground lines through Pakistan to go down to Karachi at a port facility where they'll be loaded on vessels and come home.

[Corneliu Chisu, Conservative, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

It could be dangerous.

[BGen Craig King]

It is, and it's one of the areas that we're carefully considering for two reasons. One is that there are always risks of banditry going through some of the back parts of that country. You'll also be aware of the flooding recently that's occurred there. Unfortunate as it is, for our purposes it hasn't affected our ability to transport what we had. And it's an area where there is risk, so we mitigate that risk by what we're sending on that route, and as I mentioned in the opening statement, the idea for Pakistan is to send anything that's not sensitive.

With respect to the support hubs that we've established, as I referred to, the staging terminals, the one in Kuwait has just been stood up. We have about 180 people there managing that. Aircraft fly in with vehicles and weapons, they get loaded on a ship, and away it goes back to Canada.

We just recently had one in Cyprus. We shut that one down, and literally today we stood up and started operating in Kuwait.

So in terms of broad structure, that's what we're looking at. And all of this, I have to emphasize, is done with a view to being as efficient as possible as we're moving this huge volume of stuff and getting the very best efficiencies to save money and bring it back home in a proper way so we can reuse it later.

[Corneliu Chisu, Conservative, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

Thank you very much, General.

May I have another small question, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Yes.

[Corneliu Chisu, Conservative, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

Regarding the timing of repatriation of the vehicles, and we need to clean them to have them environmentally safe--

[BGen Craig King]

Yes, absolutely.

[Corneliu Chisu, Conservative, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

--do you see any difficulties? For example, how are you transporting the LAVs or the tanks from the theatre to Kuwait?

[BGen Craig King]

The process we follow is a very rigorous one to make sure we're in compliance with all applicable regulations and standards imposed by those responsible agencies in government that regulate that. So there is a tremendous amount of effort to prepare the vehicles as they come through to make sure they're thoroughly inspected, they're thoroughly cleaned, and they have been prepared for reception back here in Canada. That was rehearsed with some shipments we made in the late spring, early summer. The guys on the ground there are well practised. There are probably some guys around from when you closed out Bosnia, so they know what they're doing, and I can assure you that we don't foresee any delays in that kind of process.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you. Your time has expired.

Mr. Kellway.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And to the witnesses, thank you for being here today.

My concern is that we've asked our soldiers and the taxpayers of this country to fund mission impossible, and there are a couple of reasons I'm worried about that. One is financial. It seems that most countries around the world spend somewhere between 1% and 4% on the extreme of GDP on military expenditures. It seems to be the case that in Afghanistan the kinds of military and security forces we're hoping to build there far exceed the ability of Afghanistan to support.

There was a recent report out of the U.S. Government Accountability Office that currently 90% of the Afghan military and security costs are being paid for by the U.S. and that Afghanistan itself simply won't be able to take over funding the military and security forces that we're attempting to build there. Is this something that's really financially sustainable?

[Jill Sinclair]

If you like, Mr. Chair, I'll start and then pass it to General King.

The funding of security forces, as you point out, is enormously expensive, and there's no question that the Afghan government is going to need the support of the international community for a long time to come. I don't have the numbers, but there's also no question that it is cheaper to assist the Afghans to do their own security than to keep deployed forces there. Here you've talked about the U.S. contribution to this effort, and to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan doing that business, for example, it costs a lot more.

But in many other post-conflict situations around the world, we've seen this need for sustained engagement and for developing the security forces, because the worst thing you can do is to kind of stand them up and then leave them and not fund them. So issues of pension and making sure that you're bringing in recruits and they're getting a reasonable wage, and that you're dealing with issues of corruption and things like attrition, are absolutely essential. Those are the sorts of discussions that, again, you may want to raise with our DFAIT colleagues, I think, in more detail. But those are the discussions, let's say, in the Friends of Afghanistan and that go on in the UN context and with the Afghans themselves as they stand up their economy. It's going to be a long-term process.

I don't know if you have anything to add, General.

[BGen Craig King]

I don't. I think you've raised some very good points.

It's certainly a concern. All I can say from my perspective as a military officer is that your security forces are raised in response to the security situation you find yourselves in and the threat that exists to your state. This is why the peace process is important. We were discussing former president Rabbani's assassination. This is why that kind of thing is a blow. It has so many effects in the long term in terms of what it means, even for things like the structure of your security forces in the long term.

The only other thing I would offer is that Jill's absolutely right: in Afghanistan it's not just a security issue. It's the whole apparatus of government--how Afghanistan is raising revenues and what the decision processes are within the Afghan government as to how those funds are dispersed. It's all the sorts of things that you do as our political leadership. It's a big question that you've asked and it's something that is a concern--absolutely.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Does it suggest, then, that we, Canada, will be there well beyond 2014? One of the fundamental reasons for going to Afghanistan as expressed by the government time and time again--and to the extent that it has support among the Canadian population--is around issues of building civil society in Afghanistan: humanitarian assistance, protection and human rights, and those sorts of things.

It seems that financially we've run into a very obvious conflict between building security and military forces in Afghanistan and the very objective of the mission, which was to build in Afghanistan a society that values human rights and protects women and children...those sorts of things. Can you comment on that?

[Jill Sinclair]

If I might, just to have a go at it, to be very clear at the outset, Canada's military contribution, which is now a training contribution only, is to 2014. That's very, very clear, and there's nothing beyond that envisaged. In terms of where the international community goes vis-à-vis Afghanistan, beyond that I can't speculate.

But for partnership going forward with Afghanistan as they stand up their governance functions, I think every political leader around the world has said that this isn't a transitory commitment. How it manifests itself will be different. One can only hope that by 2014, with a well-trained Afghan security force—we're at 300,000 now—and with all the changes going on, if they're able to be sustained, you'll have an Afghanistan that's in a bit of a different position with regard to what it needs from the international community.

But that's all very speculative, obviously, and you have to pit it against the day-to-day realities we all see. But the trajet I think is one that is showing success, even if it's difficult.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

Mr. Opitz, it's your turn.

[Ted Opitz, Conservative, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the witnesses.

First of all, General, thank you for your briefing. That was an excellent briefing. You didn't have to apologize for being simple, because there are a lot of moving parts and I think we need to go by the numbers. I know that General Lamarre and General Day are two outstanding general officers who are going to bring Canada a lot of credit in what they're doing. In fact, I remember General Day as a young RSS captain back in the day. By the way, we all served in Zgon. I was on Operation Palladium. So we're all going to have a party.

I'm going to ask three questions in particular.

To my friend's question, this may help explain something. In the Canadian Forces, we teach the military ethos and we teach values. I presume that is something that is going to be taught to the troops in Afghanistan. So in terms of civil society, what benefit at the soldier level does teaching ethos and values have for the individual soldier and then in branching out within their own units and civil society?

[BGen Craig King]

First of all, you have in the Afghan National Army probably one of the very few unifying institutions in the whole country. Think of Afghanistan in comparison to our own country. What is the unifying thing? In Afghanistan the national army has that position. It's also one of the most respected organizations within the country. People tend to be--particularly in the south, in my experience--rather jaded about political process. There is a sense of disenfranchisement or whatever. But I will say that with respect to the army, there's universal support, which transcends ethnic lines, by the way.

So you bring a recruit into this environment, into a national institution. You give him an opportunity for a wage that he was not able to realize in his own community. You give him training. You give him literacy. And perhaps he takes his desire to end his time with the army and he goes back into civil society. What a tremendous asset that has now been built in terms of a citizen of Afghanistan: to have a perspective of the nation as a nation, something that transcends those ethnic lines, and to have the skills of literacy as well when he goes back into civil society. That is a tremendous asset, and we have a hand in that with what we're doing, absolutely.

[Ted Opitz, Conservative, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

I'd like to take a step back in terms of the structure of the training mission. I presume we're modelling it on the Canadian system with our training centres--Kingston and Canadian Forces College to some extent--and in terms of mentoring, because we do have four-ringer mentors, I believe, in Kabul. Is that correct?

[BGen Craig King]

Yes, absolutely.

[Ted Opitz, Conservative, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

So maybe you could take a step back and describe how the Canadian system being built around the way we train our soldiers here overlies the training of Afghans.

[BGen Craig King]

Absolutely.

Broadly speaking, our training system is geared, as is the Afghan one, to producing the very best soldiers in all the breadth and depth of the competencies that we expect them to have. Those come in two forms: individual training and collective training.

Individually, we make sure that the individual has those skills, that he can march, shoot, and communicate. That is a very basic description of those sorts of things. If he's an engineer or if he's an artillery soldier or if he fights out of a tank, we make sure he is able to operate the systems that are at his command in the way that is necessary to achieve the effects we want on the battlefield. So that's the individual training system.

Our collective training system builds teams: everything from platoons to companies of 150 to battalions of 600 or more.

So the elements of the Canadian training system--which, by the way, was the foundation for the success we were able to achieve in Kandahar--very much mirror the training structure we have within the NATO training mission.

The KMTC, the Kabul Military Training Centre that I described, where Colonel Mike Minor is doing great work, you could equate to kind of a battle school environment or maybe some of the stuff being taught in Gagetown, New Brunswick. When you get to Colonel Rory Radford's consolidated fielding centre, you're talking about perhaps the Canadian Manoeuvre Training Centre out in Wainwright, Alberta, and those kinds of parallels.

The fact is that our guys are in there mentoring the trainers of the Afghan force with the view that they own that development long term, in both the individual realm and the collective realm.

[Ted Opitz, Conservative, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

Absolutely. Thank you.

Captain Bernatchez, I know we have a distributed model out there, and obviously we have force protection soldiers around certain things. What are the rules of engagement, and what's left and right of ARC for our force protection services?

[BGen Craig King]

That's more of an operational question, and for reasons of operational security I will decline to respond to your question, with the greatest of respect, sir. We just do not discuss that in this forum.

[Ted Opitz, Conservative, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

That's fair enough. Okay.