Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Deputy Minister and generals, for appearing in front of our committee.
As you know, Canada paid a high price for the war in Afghanistan. We had some 40,000 service members who rotated through that theatre. There were 158 deaths from the Canadian Armed Forces and one diplomat who was also killed, and over 2,000 Canadians were wounded or injured—some with horrific injuries—during that war.
During the 2011-14 period, NATO military commanders, including Canadian military commanders, assured their elected legislatures that the training mission was going well. They assured the public that they were making tremendous progress on the cornerstone of the war in Afghanistan strategy, which was to build a national Afghan army and a national Afghan police force that could defend the country.
Canada trained that Afghan National Army and that Afghan National Police force. There were some 1,000 members of the Canadian Armed Forces who participated in that training mission during that time.
The events of last August make clear that the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police force were very poorly trained. “The Afghanistan Papers”, which were published by The Washington Post just before the pandemic, and that somehow did not get enough attention as a result of the pandemic, make it clear that, at the time, NATO military personnel on the ground did not have the same view of the training mission. They said that the Afghan military and police were “unmotivated, poorly trained, corrupt and riddled with deserters and infiltrators”, the opposite of what NATO military commanders were saying at the time.
Some of you were involved at the time in that NATO training mission. Did you believe at the time—as General Mattis and General John Allen said at the time—that the training mission was going very well? Or did you see at the time how much of a problem the training mission was?