Afghanistan Committee on Jan. 31st, 2022

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

I call the meeting to order. Welcome to meeting number two of the House of Commons Special Committee on Afghanistan. Pursuant to the House motion adopted on December 8, 2021, and the motion adopted by the committee on December 13, 2021, the committee is meeting to study humanitarian assistance measures in place to bring relief to the Afghan people.

Today the meeting is taking place in a hybrid format pursuant to the House order of November 25, 2021. Members are attending in person in the room and remotely using the Zoom application. The proceedings will be made available via the House of Commons website. Just so that you are aware, the webcast will always show the person speaking rather than the entirety of the committee.

Today's meeting is also taking place in the webinar format. Webinars are for public committee meetings and are available only to members, their staff and witnesses. Members enter immediately as active participants. All functionalities for the active participants remain the same. Staff will be non-active participants and can therefore only view the meeting in gallery view.

I would like to take this opportunity to remind all participants in this meeting that taking screenshots or photos of your screen is not permitted.

Given the ongoing pandemic situation and in light of the recommendations from the health authorities as well as the directive of the Board of Internal Economy of October 19, 2021, to remain healthy and safe, all those attending the meeting in person are to maintain two-metre physical distancing and must wear a non-medical mask when circulating in the room. It is highly recommended that the mask be worn at all times including when you are seated. As well, you must maintain proper hand hygiene by using the provided hand sanitizer at the room entrance.

As the chair, I will be enforcing these measures for the duration of the meeting, and I thank all members in advance for their co-operation.

To ensure an orderly meeting, I would like to outline a few rules to follow.

Number one, members and witnesses may speak in the official language of their choice. Interpretation services are available for this meeting. You have the choice at the bottom of the screen of “floor”, “English” or “French”. If interpretation is lost, please inform me immediately, and we will ensure that interpretation is properly restored before resuming the proceedings. The “raise hand” feature at the bottom of the screen can be used any time if you with to speak or alert me, as chair.

For members participating in person, proceed as you usually would when the whole committee is meeting in person in a committee room. Keep in mind the Board of Internal Economy's guidance for mask use and health protocols. Before speaking, please wait until I recognize you by name. If you are on the video conference, please click on the microphone icon to unmute yourself. For those in the room, your microphone will be controlled as is normal by proceedings and verification officers. When speaking, please speak slowly and clearly. When you are not speaking, your microphone should be on mute.

I remind everyone that all comments by members and witnesses should be addressed through the chair.

With regard to the speaking list, the committee clerk and I will do the best we can to maintain a consolidated order of speaking for all members whether they are participating virtually or in person.

I would now like to welcome our witnesses, and express our appreciation to them for being with us this evening, especially as many of you have agreed to come on short notice. I will also note that some of you are currently in other time zones where it is quite late or early, so thank you for being here.

We have Mr. John Aylieff from the World Food Programme, and Mr. Patrick Hamilton from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

When we resume after the first panel, I would like to make a few comments for the benefit of the new witnesses when they come on.

We will begin, and witnesses will have five minutes. I'm not going to remind you, but please pay attention when you are speaking to ensure you are within your time allocation.

With this, I would like to start the meeting.

Mr. Aylieff, go ahead for five minutes to make your presentation to the committee, please.

[John Aylieff, Regional Director, Asia and the Pacific, World Food Programme]

Publishing: I have clarified this, adding that he is regional director for Asia and the Pacific Mr. Chair, thank you very much.

Allow me to thank the distinguished members of the Special Committee on Afghanistan for your engagement with the country. There could be no better or more important time than now. Today, millions of people in Afghanistan—young children, families and communities—stand at the precipice of inhumane hunger and destitution.

This last year, 2021, was always going to be a tough year, with the worst drought in 30 years, the most intense period of conflict in decades and the impact of COVID-19. However, one factor above all provoked a precipitous surge in hunger and desperation: the suspension in August of international budgetary support that once represented 75% of the national budget, the suspension of development aid and the freezing of the country's foreign reserves.

Today in Afghanistan, 95% of households struggle to put food on the table. Twenty-three million people require food assistance. Nearly nine million of them are one step away from famine, and one million children, according to UNICEF, are at risk of perishing this year from acute malnutrition.

The humanitarian struggle and the human cost of what is playing out in Afghanistan today are immeasurable. In a hospital in Kandahar, I recently met Fatima, a one-year-old girl weighing three kilograms. Her brother lay emaciated in the next ward, with a distraught and desperate mother, herself malnourished, running between them and watching her whole world disintegrate.

Fatima's father has not worked for weeks. The job market has simply collapsed, with no liquidity, no oxygen in the economy, small and medium-sized businesses going under, casual labour opportunities nowhere to be found and the price of bread up by 50%. Fatima and her family are symbols of millions of other Afghan families who cannot cope today and, sadly, their number is growing every single day.

When others fled the country, WFP stayed in Afghanistan after the Taliban took Kabul in August to deliver life-saving assistance to millions of Afghans who did not have the option to leave. We stayed, alongside other organizations represented here today. We are now running WFP's largest-ever operation in Afghanistan, a program which by the end of 2021 had fed 15 million people.

WFP programs save lives, feed families, treat the malnourished and keep girls in school. Furthermore, WFP's programs provide stability, or a semblance of stability, in a country where economic collapse is forcing people to make desperate and perhaps even unimaginable decisions, including selling their own children to survive or joining extremist groups for monetary incentives.

To date, we have received fairly good co-operation from the Taliban, who have respected our humanitarian rules of engagement. In any conflict environment there are daily operational challenges, but we have addressed them rapidly and boldly with the Taliban and they have co-operated in troubleshooting incidents and addressing our concerns. WFP has unhindered access to every one of Afghanistan's 34 provinces, and every one of WFP's female staff are working today.

Our critical constraint going forward is funding. In spite of immense generosity from donors, WFP runs out of money in early April. We stand before a funding gap of $1.9 billion for 2022 alone, and we have absolutely no visibility on donor funding streams after that. To keep our operation going to feed 23 million people, we need $220 million U.S. per month, and we are terrified of what will happen when the money and the food run out.

Recent sanctions waivers have been useful and facilitate hard currency entering the country to support humanitarian efforts. However, I must stress today that humanitarian aid alone cannot avert an economic collapse. It cannot shore up the banking system, prevent small and medium-sized enterprises from faltering or create jobs on anywhere near the scale that is needed.

I want to be really clear. If the economy is left to collapse, millions more Afghans will be in urgent need of assistance. Humanitarian needs will reach levels we collectively cannot meet. Once this occurs, we will witness destabilization and mass movements across borders. We will see exactly the sort of environment in which extremism flourishes. That's why we must work together to give Afghans better choices to ensure a future for the millions of children at risk.

There is a segment of the population that still has a voice, that will contribute to a stable, moderate, Afghanistan, that will demand a country in which girls can be educated and people can live without fear. We cannot afford to turn our backs on that segment of the population.

I would like to laud Canada, which has been a strong partner for WFP in Afghanistan for literally decades. We sincerely thank you for providing $66.5 million Canadian in support to the humanitarian community since the takeover by the Taliban on August 15, 2021. The WFP commends you also for the important study you are undertaking and recommends that in that study you focus on food security and nutrition as being fundamental to addressing the crisis at hand. At the moment, this is a hunger emergency.

To conclude, Mr. Chair, working together as an international community, we can prevent calamity in Afghanistan, but doing so will require sustained focus, sustained engagement and sustained resource flows.

Mr. Chair, thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Thank you, Mr. Aylieff.

You were well under six minutes. That's great.

We are now going to give the floor to Mr. Hamilton.

Mr. Hamilton, go ahead, please.

[Patrick Hamilton, Head of Regional Delegation, United States and Canada, International Committee of the Red Cross]

Thank you very much indeed, Mr. Chair.

I would very much like to echo the sentiments of Mr. Aylieff in congratulating the special parliamentary committee of Canada for being engaged and consulting with us on this day on this extremely critical issue.

My name is Patrick Hamilton. I'm the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross's delegation to the U.S. and Canada.

To be clear, the International Committee of the Red Cross is the founding member and founding body of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, incorporating all of the national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies globally including the Canadian Red Cross.

We are a Swiss private organization with our headquarters in Geneva, with a mandate derived from the Geneva Conventions, the laws of war to protect and assist victims of conflict and violence around the world. We have a very strong relationship with the evolution and implementation of those laws of war around the world.

We are an organization of some 20,000 staff working in 100 contexts around the world, the vast majority of our focus being in those contexts of intense conflict, which have included Afghanistan for an unbroken period of the last 35 to 37 years. We have a very long-standing history with Afghanistan and have been there over the last numerous decades, as has WFP, in terms of trying to provide humanitarian responses to Afghans affected by the numerous rounds of conflict and violence that have so sadly affected the population over that period.

We still have some 1,800 staff based in Afghanistan today. They, like the WFP, have remained in country throughout the last months since the seismic events of August and have continued to focus on bringing a humanitarian response to the population of Afghanistan, where we have focused in particular on the provision of health services, and where we are currently providing support to some 28 provincial-level hospitals all around Afghanistan, support that incorporates everything from the payment of salaries through to the running costs and medical provisions.

We have stepped in to provide such systemic-level support to these Afghan hospitals as something that is really beyond precedent, as far as our normal modus operandi is concerned, because of the gravity of the situation today in Afghanistan.

Here I would very much also echo Mr. Aylieff's sentiments that we feel that considering all of the concerns that have gone with those 37 to 40 years of conflict and suffering in Afghanistan, the ICRC has never been more concerned about the population of Afghanistan than it is today. We feel that the Afghan population is really on the brink of catastrophe and that the centre of that catastrophe is, indeed, the situation of economic paralysis and the total absence of liquidity today in the Afghan market.

Our director of operations was speaking earlier today about a visit he made to Afghanistan back in early November. He said that when he arrived at Kabul airport and then was driving around Kabul, at first glance he had the impression that there was material in the markets, that there were people out in the bazaars, and so he said to his colleagues, “This looks relatively normal”, and they responded, “Look again. Look closer. Do you actually see anybody buying anything?” He couldn't.

In the further trips he did around the country, he really saw an economy and markets that have ground to a halt because nobody has any money. This is really having a major impact on the lives of millions of Afghans all across Afghanistan today.

Through the hospital program we have engaged in, we see the impact of this in particular with severely malnourished patients who are arriving at these hospitals, in particular young children, many of whom are being forced to share space, sometimes two, three or four to an incubator at a time, because there are not the numbers of incubators to be able to cope with the numbers of children being brought in, or the heating apparatuses and other things that would go to ensuring that the conditions in the hospital are adequate to deal with the scale of the caseload that is coming in.

What made this situation all the more devastating for our director of operations when he was there was seeing how many of these children were spending a month receiving treatment in these hospitals, going home, but then returning a month later because they were not receiving the food that they so desperately needed back home because there was no food and there was no money.

Of course, these circumstances arrive on top of multiple years of severe drought in Afghanistan, the broader COVID impacts, including the economic impacts of COVID, and then obviously these cumulative decades of conflict.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Mr. Hamilton, can you wrap up, please?

[Patrick Hamilton]

Our key messages to you are that it is desperately important that the international community, including the Canadian government, engage today. It is essential that liquidity be brought back into the Afghan system. There is a need to ensure that the central bank can begin to function once again and can be supported to do so. It is essential that public sector services be enabled to function again and that the people who run those, the bureaucrats, are able to carry out their jobs, whether they are teachers, doctors, water engineers or others, so that the 420,000-person workforce that used to operate those essential services be enabled to do their jobs and be paid for doing them. As well it is essential that humanitarian actors like ours are provided with a carve-out from sanctions regimes to allow us to continue our work.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Thank you, Mr. Hamilton.

We're going to the honourable members now. The first round is six minutes. Please keep the time in mind.

The first speaker on the list is from the Conservative Party.

Mr. Brassard, please go ahead for six minutes.

[John Brassard, Conservative, Barrie—Innisfil, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our guests for being here. There's no question that the situation is dire in Afghanistan, and I think it's important to hear that directly.

Mr. Aylieff, quickly, are you on the ground in Kandahar? Did I hear you correctly, or are you outside of the country currently?

[John Aylieff]

Mr. Chair, and honourable member, I'm phoning in from Bangkok at the moment.

Our teams with our 600 staff are in all parts of Afghanistan.

[John Brassard, Conservative, Barrie—Innisfil, ON]

Thank you, sir.

Part of the purpose of this committee—I'm not sure whether you've seen the motion—is to speak to the government's contingency planning as it relates to the events surrounding Afghanistan.

The question is for both of you, because I'll note that on February 29, 2020, American and Taliban diplomats signed a peace agreement in Doha, Qatar, which saw the agreement for U.S. withdrawal of troops for the Taliban to stop the attacks on the Americans. On April 14, 2021, U.S. President Biden announced the withdrawal of America's remaining troops in Afghanistan by September 11, which was the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. At that point, was either of your organizations expressing concern to the international community or directly to the Canadian government about what you thought was going to happen in terms of a humanitarian crisis that was going to occur if and when the Taliban did take over? Were there any discussions at that point with Canadian officials?

I'll start with Mr. Aylieff and then go to Mr. Hamilton after that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Go ahead, Mr. Aylieff.

[John Aylieff]

Thank you very much, Chair.

I would say that before that agreement was signed and before the Taliban swept through the country and took over, the humanitarian situation was already very dire. There was the worst drought in 30 years; there was intense conflict, and, particularly in the year preceding the takeover in August, there were unprecedented levels of displacement, and hardship was rising. From early 2021 we were highlighting rising humanitarian needs. With Canada, with whom we have regular dialogue and regular contact across all levels, in the capital, but certainly also in Afghanistan, we were in constant contact about our concern about that humanitarian situation. What I think no one foresaw, however, was the precipitous takeover of the country by the Taliban, and I think that generated and created an immensely complex both political and humanitarian situation.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Go ahead, Mr. Hamilton.

[Patrick Hamilton]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Yes, I would again very much second Mr. Aylieff's comments about the fact that we were also engaged very much in the worsening humanitarian situation in Afghanistan, in any case, in the first half of last year. We've had a 20-year standing engagement with the international coalition and its members in Afghanistan and on the humanitarian situation there. We're expressing concerns about the escalating humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, but as Mr. Aylieff says, I don't think any of us foresaw just how rapidly things would change in terms of the circumstances as the coalition pulled out.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Mr. Brassard, you have a minute and a half.

[John Brassard, Conservative, Barrie—Innisfil, ON]

Things were changing rapidly, as you know, gentlemen, and started changing rapidly around May and into July as the Taliban starting making gains across the districts and territories in Afghanistan.

Who specifically within the Canadian government would you be dealing with, which departments? Whether it be government officials through IRCC, Global Affairs Canada or International Development, who specifically would you have been talking to at the time?

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Mr. Aylieff, go ahead, please.

[John Aylieff]

Thank you, Chair.

Our relationship is with Global Affairs Canada, which I wanted to add had already provided, in the course of 2021, $14.5 million Canadian to the World Food Programme.

That allowed us to do two things. One was to bring urgent, life-saving humanitarian assistance to over two million people in 26 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces. Secondly, part of that funding was supporting WFP's humanitarian air service, which is absolutely fundamental in moving humanitarian workers from all organizations around the country to over 20 locations, allowing humanitarians to get into the deep field.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Mr. Brassard, you have one more minute.

[John Brassard, Conservative, Barrie—Innisfil, ON]

Thank you.

Mr. Hamilton, you spoke about displacement and migration. We've heard stories about families living out in the open and being hunted, and homes being destroyed. Can you describe, in the context of what we're hearing, just what your organization is seeing on the ground?

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Go ahead, Mr. Hamilton.

[Patrick Hamilton]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

We are, as I mentioned, present in most of the provinces around Afghanistan today, and obviously have been concerned about some of the allegations and reports you're alluding to. We have not been able to observe any of those events first-hand or to document them ourselves.

On the other hand, we have been engaging with the new Taliban authorities, the de facto government, on their obligations with respect to international humanitarian law—for example, the protection not only of civilians, but also of health services and health staff—and we have a long-standing engagement indeed with them over their behaviour on conflict, in line with our mandate related to international humanitarian law. We are obviously very concerned, as mentioned, by the allegations you report, but haven't been able to witness or document those ourselves directly.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Thank you, Mr. Hamilton,

Thank you, Mr. Brassard.

Now we will go to Mr. El-Khoury of the Liberals for six minutes, please.

[Fayçal El-Khoury, Liberal, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to welcome the witnesses.

We're fully aware that Canada remains present in areas where military conflicts or violence occurs. I think that the Canadian government recently announced $56 million in emergency humanitarian aid for the Afghan people.

How does this money actually support the people of Afghanistan?

Based on your experiences on the ground, do the Taliban impose conditions that must be met in order for your organizations to use international funds to operate?

My questions are for both witnesses.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Go ahead, Mr. Aylieff. Do you want to go first and then Mr. Hamilton?