Afghanistan Committee on June 18th, 2008

[The Chair, Conservative, Pierre Lemieux]

Colleagues, perhaps I could have your attention. I would like to welcome you to the ninth meeting of the Special Committee on the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan.

In keeping with our mandate to have good communication with the Canadian public, of course, this meeting, like all of our other meetings, is televised.

This evening we have the great honour of having General Hillier in front of us as the Chief of the Defence Staff.

For our viewing audience, General Hillier has been the Chief of the Defence Staff over the past three and a half years and he'll be retiring at the beginning of July, after 35 years of service.

General, it's a great honour to have you here with us tonight. I would ask that you start with an opening statement.

Then we'll proceed with two rounds of questioning, colleagues--a seven-minute round followed by a five-minute round.

With that, General, I turn the microphone over to you.

[General Rick Hillier, Chief of the Defence Staff, Department of National Defence]

Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am very pleased to be able to speak to you today. This is my last opportunity to do so.

As Chief of the Defence Staff, the Canadian mission in Afghanistan is one of my main responsibilities. Over the past few years, not a single day has gone by—and that is the truth—without my thinking about various issues related to that mission.

I'll concentrate this evening on the military perspective on our role in Canada's mission in Afghanistan, and that is our responsibility for security, with an increasing focus on building and enabling the Afghan national security forces to, themselves, build and sustain a more secure environment in Kandahar and, therefore, for the country.

In order to assess the current situation in Kandahar, we must remember that the education of units is a long-term enterprise, and that the province of Kandahar is a Taliban stronghold. It is truly the centre of gravity of Afghanistan. So said President Karzaï.

The situation in Kandahar is slowly and painfully changing, but progress is nonetheless occurring. We are far from September 2006 and operation Medusa, when Kandahar was essentially a war zone.

Our operations in Afghanistan are carefully laid out and conducted to help achieve one overall effect, which is, within a Canadian mission, to help Afghans secure and rebuild their country, focusing in particular on Kandahar province, where we are the lead nation for the NATO mission.

Those operations have three focal points or three strategic thrusts, if you will, to get that one effect.

First, we conduct security operations, including combat, in partnership with Afghan and allied forces, to force the Taliban onto their back foot and to allow building, in the most general sense of that word, to continue and accelerate. These operations are the most valuable part of our contribution to development and governance-building and to enabling those efforts to be successful. They are a direct contribution to the building and rebuilding in that country.

Second, we support directly the building of the Afghan National Army and also the Afghan National Police. We have made great strides in the former, with Afghan National Army leadership taking ever-growing responsibility for their own security, particularly over the last months and even more particularly over these last days. There is a complete brigade from the Afghan National Army on the ground in Kandahar province now. And there is a demonstrated ability over these last few days to surge in another Afghan National Army brigade and plan and conduct operations, and conduct them with ever-improving equipment, some of which, like the C7 rifles, came from Canada.

We have made less progress with the police, but we have seen some recent positive implications as a result of the recent massive international investment in building the Afghan police forces.

Third, while working to set conditions for better security in those first two strategic thrust lines, we work directly with and support our Team Canada--CIDA, DFAIT, and the RCMP--to implement, or enable to be implemented, specific initiatives. We know those efforts are essential to long-term stability, and we will do all we can to ensure their success. We all think alike in this regard.

I'll close by saying that there are about five things we should keep in mind in our mission in Afghanistan and in our approach to it.

First of all, containing the Taliban in the south, the centre of gravity, as I mentioned, directly permits the rest of Afghanistan, the majority of the country, to develop without anything but minor interference. Kabul, the northeast provinces, Mazar-e Sharif in Balkh province in the north, and the complete west of the country are all far more stable and have developed or are developing much more quickly than in the south. It is a huge plus, and incredibly positive, and sometimes when you go into a city like Kabul, you actually wonder why there's any focus there now by the international community. That focus now needs to be increasingly in the south.

Second, despite all the progress around the rest of the country and the difficult progress, but still progress, in the south, the enemy has a vote and is completely unconstrained in the tactics they will use. They ignore the laws of war. They ignore the Geneva conventions at all times. And we must always remember that they do have a vote.

Third, there have been and there will be setbacks to the mission. The Taliban is not 10 feet tall, but it is capable and does learn and can both surprise and kill.

Fourth, development is absolutely critical as a visible and tangible sign of positive change and as a sign that there is an alternative to the desperate life guaranteed by the Taliban. And with that development, jobs become all-important. The roads we are helping them build--Route Foster and others--and the Canadian commitment to build schools, to rebuild the Dahla Dam, and to carry out things like a massive inoculation program for the children, who have the highest child mortality rate in the world, are powerful things for that population.

I've just referred to a conversation I had four years ago with President Karzai, when I was the commander of ISAF. We were talking about the desperate need for jobs in that country to keep people away from the Taliban and from being enticed by them and the offer of $10 a day or so to pick up a weapon and shoot at us or the Afghan security forces. There is a desperate need to give them jobs, to give them hope for the future. I had a discussion with him about the program Canada ran way back, immediately following World War I, leading into the Great Depression, when hundreds of thousands of young men came home from the army and were without jobs, without hope. We established a construction program in this country that actually helped, I think, build the country we have today. It gave people hope for the future and a way to survive the present.

The last point I'd make before I sum up here is that governance is perhaps the most critical pillar of a country. This remains a personal concern of mine, and I know the concern is shared: how to help the Afghans build an effective government structure nationally and provincially and then deliver the things their population needs and be able to do it over the longer term.

I constantly remind folks that a lot of building went on in Afghanistan before, but when all the troubles took place in the early nineties, it wasn't the army that fell apart, it wasn't the security forces that fell apart; it was the government that fell apart and that then caused those security forces to break up and go to work for the warlords around the country and that led directly to the situation in which we now find ourselves.

In closing, I'll say just a few words about our young men and women in uniform, whose dedication and courage have been instrumental in bringing the progress we are starting to see show up in Kandahar today, and around the rest of Afghanistan, in great strides. They are incredible young Canadians. They are ordinary young men and women who do extraordinary work because of their great dedication. They are professional, they're highly motivated, they're robust in their approach, and they deliver effectively. They wear our nation's flag on their shoulders, much to our pride, and they represent you, me, and Canada in a massively great way.

I want to publicly say thanks to them and their families for the work they do, the stress they endure, and the sacrifices they make.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I am prepared to take any questions you might want to ask me.

[The Chair, Conservative, Pierre Lemieux]

Thank you very much for the opening statement, General.

I'll now turn to the Liberal Party and Monsieur Patry.

[Bernard Patry, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Merci beaucoup.

I will share my time with some of my colleagues. I just have one question for the general.

Last Monday the Taliban captured 10 villages. Up to now, the Afghan army has, with ISAF, counterattacked and recaptured four of the villages.

Today there was a press conference by L'Agence France-Presse, and a Taliban spokesman, Yousuf Ahmadi, spoke from Arghandab, declaring that ISAF and the Afghan army didn't get one inch and one fighter into Kandahar.

My question is, if a small force of 400 Taliban can have this effect, where are we heading, for the moment? What's going to happen?

[Gen Rick Hillier]

Sir, thank you for the question.

Mr. Chair, what I would say is this: I would take anything the Taliban say with an enormous grain of salt. As I have said to you, they are unconstrained by the law of war, they're unconstrained by the Geneva Convention, and they certainly are unconstrained by the truth.

They obviously inflate their numbers. We don't believe there are 400 warriors in that entire district. They have obviously inflated the number of villages in which they have some control or some presence on the ground. I think some of the TV photographs that have shown families going about their normal lives in those supposedly captured Taliban villages actually put the lie to their words.

The Afghan forces have demonstrated to us this time that out of any dark cloud, there is always a silver lining. What we've seen in these last days are Afghan forces surging into Kandahar province, another entire brigade on top of the one that's there. Last fall, as we worked with them to do operations against the Taliban, the most they could manage were basic operations for one battalion at a time.

Now they're running operations at the brigade and corps level and they have taken on an increasing responsibility that is very positive over these last several days—not perfect, but very positive—to bring in the forces, move them to the Arghandab district, restabilize the area, and ensure that the Taliban in fact do not control the villages there.

Those operations are progressing. The Taliban spokesperson, whoever he is, can stay on TV and talk about it all he wishes. At the end of the day, the Afghan National Army forces, supported by us but also by other allied forces, will ensure the security of Kandahar City, which is where the Taliban would like to go; and secondly, will re-establish the stability and security in that Arghandab district. We'll do this over the next days, and the Taliban will be pushed from that area, and hopefully we, with the Afghan security forces, will have such a significantly robust footprint that the Taliban will not be able to come back into it in the very near future.

So I would take everything he says with a grain of salt. We're conducting operations. Those operations will be successful, and we'll help re-establish security in the few villages where the Taliban are right now.

[Bernard Patry, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Thank you for these specifics.

[The Chair, Conservative, Pierre Lemieux]

Mr. Martin.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Thank you.

And thank you, General Hillier, for being here. For the record, I want to publicly thank you for your service to our men and women in uniform—you did a superb job—and also for our country. So I thank you.

And to reiterate, I add our thanks to our men and women in uniform for the service they are committing to our country and committing with excellence.

I want to pose a couple of things to you, General.

A Pentagon report recently indicated that in May the Americans lost more people in Afghanistan than they did in Iraq. I want to juxtapose that with what happened with the Sarposa prison break. If we're winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan civilian population, then presumably we would to have the intelligence that would enable us to prevent such a thing from recurring.

Can you tell us whether we're winning the hearts and minds in that area? And if we are, how could such a break have happened, if we are being successful? If we're not being successful at winning the hearts and minds of the people in the area, what do we need to do to be able to accomplish that objective?

[Gen Rick Hillier]

Thank you for the question, sir.

First of all, in any counter-insurgency campaign where there's a rudimentary infrastructure—that is to say, in terms of telephone communications and Internet-based communications—and a large number of people such as the huge number who live in southern Afghanistan, it is incredibly difficult to know what is occurring in many of the little villages and towns and the locations of valleys around Kandahar itself.

With respect to the Sarposa prison, for example, we work not by ourselves but with our allies within NATO and the Afghans themselves to build a fairly complex, robust intelligence collection system. We do the analysis of all the information we get, working with all those different partners, and we try to predict exactly where people are going to be so we can proactively conduct our operations and not be caught by surprise. But when you have that rudimentary infrastructure and when you have a Taliban that can actually move in from an area and execute an operation without talking on cellphones or without telling folks around them that they're going to do that, occasionally they will achieve surprise. You cannot know everything all the time, and it is an extremely difficult culture in which to get information.

We get information all the time. Every hour of every day of every week we get thousands of pieces of information, and we try to balance that each against the other to see if there's a picture emerging. But sometimes there are just thousands of pieces of information and they're meaningless to us, or they're lies, or they've been deliberately injected by the Taliban, or something happens where they've decided to do something and the information gets to us and then they can't do it.

I'll give you the example of how some of these things work. When I was there myself as commander of ISAF, we were out on an operation, and we found ourselves in the middle of a city in the most godawful traffic jam with my small security convoy. We were absolutely tied up, could not move, with literally hundreds of vehicles, trucks and cars, mules and camels, and all those three-wheel bikes and motorcycles around us, and we were actually stationary. Over our secure radio we got a warning that there was a suicide bomber in that city, that it was directed at the commander of ISAF, that this was the target, and that we should be aware of the suicide bomber. Further, the intelligence was that the suicide bomber was in a yellow taxicab. We looked around and counted 72 yellow taxicabs within our field of view, and so the intelligence automatically became meaningless. But at the same time, if I'd been blown up with my convoy, I'm sure somebody would have walked backwards from there and said, “Well, you should have known, because somebody said it was a yellow taxi.”

It is extremely difficult to parse out from the huge amount of information we get, the huge number of facts we receive, and put that together and get a very clear picture and not be surprised. Most of the time we get it right, and we proactively then take action to preempt something or to go after their leaders, or to achieve certain things that we believe are right. So the vast majority of the time we get it right, but occasionally, over a period of time, with enough of that information floating around and enough of it hidden from us, and with good operational security on the Taliban side—and they do have good operational security, which is how some of their leaders have survived for years without being targeted or without being taken out either by NATO or by other forces here—sometimes they can achieve surprise. In the case of the Sarposa prison, they did.

[The Chair, Conservative, Pierre Lemieux]

Thank you very much, General.

Mrs. Barbot, you have seven minutes.

[Vivian Barbot, Bloc, Papineau, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I am going to be sharing my time with Mr. Bachand.

Good evening, General.

I would like you to tell us about security in Afghan prisons. This week, we were concerned by what happened at the prison that, without maligning the work done by our troops, enabled so many Taliban to escape. In answer to a question in the House, the minister said that it was not possible to ensure security in the prison and to avoid suicide attacks.

What are we to understand from this? Are Afghan prisons so lacking in security? Should we expect to see this happen again? What exactly is the situation?

[Gen Rick Hillier]

First of all, madame, I don't think we will see repeated events like that, because the Afghans, and in this case the Ministry of Justice, which had responsibility for that prison and the security of it, are learning some very painful lessons and have already learned some very painful lessons. They are taking measures to ensure that at other places around the country this kind of thing cannot occur or would be much more difficult to implement.

Secondly, it is their responsibility to secure their prisons. We will work with them over these next days and weeks to ensure that security is at the right level for anything in Kandahar province and to help ensure that this kind of thing doesn't occur again. They've learned a lot of lessons already. As we go through these next days and weeks and do the complete analysis of the kind of attack that took place, we'll help them learn some more lessons.

The one thing we know is that it was a massive truck-borne bomb that hit the wall of that prison and blew it open. That would have caused shock and dismay and destruction and death for a large area around it. It certainly helped create the conditions for many of those prisoners to escape.

We'll go through it with them. We'll support the Afghans as they learn the lessons on how to prevent this kind of thing from occurring again. We'll support them in improving the security of the prisons for which they have responsibility. That specifically is not our responsibility, but we want to work with them in the immediate area around there to make sure we can help them improve it.

Again, I would say we're not perfect. The enemy does have a vote. At times, they can achieve some surprise and get an attack through, as they clearly did in this case. We'll simply work with the Afghans that much harder to make sure the chances of it occurring again are reduced.

I come back to that same point. We used to have a rule in the units where I worked. Rule one was to focus on the enemy, and we do. The enemy has a vote; we want to make sure that vote can't be exercised very often.

[The Chair, Conservative, Pierre Lemieux]

Mr. Bachand, you have the floor.

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

Good evening, General.

I was listening closely to your arguments with regard to the Sarposa prison. Numerous observers feel that this is a monumental failure for intelligence services. You seem to be saying that they were lucky, to some extent, but it seems to me that we did not help ourselves. I am having difficulty understanding, because there was a massive assault on the prison. Not only was there a truck, but approximately 50 insurgents took part in the operation. It seems almost inexplicable that there were no warning signs. I would question the idea that you cannot predict everything, that we cannot ensure that there are no attacks against us. Instead, I agree with observers who said that this was a failure.

I would like to hear your comments regarding the fact that when people from Corrections Canada went there last year, the first thing they said was that the prison perimeter had to be secured. That was a year ago, and this was not done. Does this not prove that the various departments are working a little too much in isolation? Were the recommendations of Corrections Canada given to the Canadian armed forces? Did you provide your support to the Afghans in order to secure the perimeter?

Securing perimeters is a Canadian armed forces specialty. I am having trouble following you when you say that it was just random and that it could not have been avoided. I think that intelligence services failed to do their job. You should simply admit it and say that those flaws will now be fixed. Did the people from Corrections Canada tell the Canadian armed forces that the security perimeter absolutely had to be consolidated?

[Gen Rick Hillier]

Mr. Chairman and Mr. Bachand, thank you. Merci beaucoup de la question.

First of all, it was a significant attack, but I'm not sure that 50 fighters were involved in it. I would wait until we get the details for what the exact number was.

But yes, I don't deny that it was a significantly large attack, and it did achieve surprise and obviously achieved their objective. Therefore they can crow about it, because it was one of their successful attacks. But to say that we absolutely therefore should have known about that one is to not show an understanding of the complexity of the situation on the ground. To be able to move, in that large area teeming with people, numbers of men with weapons in small vehicles and to show up in an area is actually relatively easy to do. The fact that most of the time—in fact, the majority of the time—we can proactively preempt that kind of movement is, I think, a testament to the incredible hard work and the success we already have.

Once in a while they'll get it through. We still have a lot of analysis to go through with the Ministry of Justice folks who were doing the security of that prison. That was their responsibility, not ours. We are working in the general context of conducting security operations, not focused on each key piece of infrastructure in and around Kandahar City itself, because we wouldn't have nearly enough troops if we were doing that.

We'll do the analysis with them. We're most interested ourselves in how the attack took place, and we'll learn some lessons from it that will simply make us more capable in the future.

I don't know, but I anticipate that CSC passed us some of the details about the need for security. But we would have started to work with the MOJ, as a Team Canada, to get that security in place as opposed to doing it specifically ourselves. That's not what we do—look at each piece of infrastructure there.

So yes, it was a significant attack. Yes, they did have some success. And guess what? We'll carry on the normal operations. We'll pay attention to that ourselves. I know the Afghans are going inside-out to make sure they learn the lessons and take corrective measures, and we'll simply be better off as we go forward in the future--although we wish it had not occurred, obviously.

[The Chair, Conservative, Pierre Lemieux]

Thank you very much, General.

Mr. Dewar, you have seven minutes.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Thank you.

And thank you, General, for being here yet again. I guess this is the last time.

[Gen Rick Hillier]

It is.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

July 1 is coming soon, so—

[Gen Rick Hillier]

It's July 2, sir.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

July 2? All right. We have you for Canada Day. Good.

I want to start off by asking questions around the most recent events.

I think people have acknowledged, and you have tonight, that this is a bit of a setback, and that's the reality. The Minister of Foreign Affairs acknowledged that there are some things we need to know more about; for instance, in intelligence. Was there any collusion on the inside? How is it that they were able to strike so quickly and have such an effect, emptying a prison and setting us back?

My question is about who we are working with on the ground. Are we working with contractors who have been contracted for security as well as—and now I'm speaking of the prison—with the Afghans who are responsible for security in the prison? In other words, are there companies or contractors that we work in tandem with there?

[Gen Rick Hillier]

Mr. Chairman, no. To my knowledge—and my knowledge is perhaps not complete, but I'm pretty certain it is in this case—we are not working with any contractors for Sarposa prison, for example, who are working to provide security to that prison. It is the Ministry of Justice and Afghan national security forces who do that job and have responsibility for it.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

So if there were any breakdown, it would be within those two groups? In other words—what the minister was musing about the other day—if there was collusion or there was someone on the inside, it would be someone from either of those two groups: the Ministry of Justice or the other?

[Gen Rick Hillier]

I have all kinds of personal thoughts and processes about what occurred, how it occurred, and how effective it was. But I prefer to wait until we get an opportunity to walk through the analysis with the Afghan security officials themselves, with the Ministry of Justice particularly, just to make sure we can learn as much as we can without my speculating on what might have occurred. There are all kinds of possibilities, and it would be nice to be able to put some of them concretely to bed.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Absolutely, and I think that's a fair point.

I'd like to know a little more about how you see the.... I heard you say earlier that we're going to carry on what we're doing, that we're going to keep focused on some of the goals that have been set out, both through the work that you have been doing previously and, I guess, what the government is giving some direction on.

One of the things I'd like to ask a bit more about is the whole-of-government approach, as you understand it. What we've heard from the government is that it includes DFAIT, CIDA, and the military. A little bit of a surprise to me is that the team also includes the U.S. State Department and members from the U.S. police mentoring teams, as well as USAID. How long has that team approach, as far as you know, existed—in other words, having those other component parts, from the U.S. State Department, from U.S. mentoring teams, as well as from USAID, which, for those who don't know, is like our CIDA?