I have just a few words here, Mr. Chairman. I'm not going to speak very long, which is very unusual for me, I might add.
Can I say, sir, first of all, thank you for the invitation to be here. At least one good thing has come out of this from my perspective: I've had my first haircut in three months, triggered by my appearance here today because I didn't want to look unsoldierly, if you will.
Sir, I am happy to be here, and I am happy to say a few words and try to put some context into what has been discussed over these days and weeks. I truly did not initially believe that I could add anything of value to what was being discussed in the little bit that I did follow, but I must say that after sitting and watching TV for one 10-minute period in the afternoon and hearing myself described as both a liar and negligent in my duties, I felt that I really should come here and just offer from my perspective, as Chief of the Defence Staff, what occurred in and around these last two and a half to three years.
So I'm here to do it and delighted to be here today.
Let me, if I could, at the front end, put in context some of the work that we did—and the work that continues, obviously—from my perspective as Chief of the Defence Staff from February 4, 2005, until I retired on July 2, 2008.
Our task during that timeframe and my mission, as articulated by the Prime Minister and the Minister of National Defence in two subsequent governments, was daunting. It was to rebuild and transform the Canadian Forces, in essence. That meant several things to all of us.
One, it meant that we had to be engaged in helping to articulate a defence policy to guide the spending, the actions, and the changes, and that certainly resulted in the defence policy statement of 2005 and, subsequently, a Conservative government defence vision.
Second, it meant transforming how we conducted our international operations against what were very new threats, based on stateless actors and failed and failing states; that is, conducting operations internationally by getting our army, our navy, and our air force working together effectively and efficiently under one commander and in one major focused mission at a time.
In the past, I used to joke that we had a great army that could work with anybody in the world, a great navy that could work with anybody in the world, and a great air force that could work with anybody in the world, but they couldn't work with each other. We set out to change that.
Third, we wanted to transform and reshape how we approached operations in Canada and our readiness to help Canadians in their time of greatest need. Whether it was a natural disaster, attack from without, or attack from within, we wanted to be as ready as possible, and we were going to transform how we approached operations in Canada--in essence, considering Canada a theatre of operations.
Last, and fourth, we wanted to handle, shape, and transform the programming for all of those things, that is to say, for the acquisition of equipment that we needed in this new environment, the changes in training, the revitalization of the leadership, and all of the other bits and pieces that would make us successful.
They were daunting tasks, without question, each of them on their own with tens of thousands of pieces, people, and activities just to get the momentum towards helping us achieve our goals. I say this because, despite our focus on Afghanistan, we had missions galore elsewhere.
We provided help to our American friends during Hurricane Katrina, as all of you will remember. We deployed the DART during the tsunami to help folks who were in desperate need following that terrible natural disaster. We deployed the DART again into Pakistan following the earthquake there, whilst, I might say, we were moving the mission from Kabul down to Kandahar itself, an incredible challenge indeed. We assisted in the evacuation of civilians from Lebanon in the summer of 2006. We participated in fighting forest fires and floods, helped the RCMP with drug seizures, did our air interdictions and our fishery and sovereignty patrols--in short, everything that our nation needed us to do. It was all part of what we did on a daily basis.
Despite my having said that, Afghanistan was a prime focus for us. We went by the first government decision back in the spring of 2005 to commit us from Kabul down to Kandahar as part of the mission there, with a view to working under the Americans initially and then helping the transition from the American command structure to a NATO mission throughout Afghanistan.
So our mission was shifted from Kabul to Kandahar by the previous government. We then had to move and establish our provincial reconstruction team from Kabul to Kandahar itself whilst we were closing out Camp Julien and getting rid of all the things that we had in Kabul. We had to prepare to deploy the battle group in 2006--almost 2,000 soldiers with all the supporting elements that were going in--and all the while we were doing that, we were expecting attacks against us.
We were very fortunate in moving the PRT in that we did not get attacked during that timeframe, but that only lasted until January 15, 2006, when the first attack in the south occurred for us since our battle group back in 2005. Unfortunately, we lost our diplomat, Glyn Berry, and we had Paul Franklin, Will Salikin, and Jeff Bailey, three incredible young men, three incredible young Canadians, severely wounded.
We then had to set ourselves up to take command of Regional Command South on March 1, 2006, and of course the gentleman sitting on the far left there, Brigadier-General David Fraser, at the time was our initial commander. We then had to work with him and all the other nations in NATO to start transitioning that mission from the U.S. command structure that I mentioned to the NATO mission itself.
All of a sudden, in 2006 we found ourselves in the middle of a war. We were in combat operations that were more intense than anything we had undergone since the Korean War. We found ourselves against a determined and tough enemy, with individuals who were well prepared, well trained, and committed to what they wanted to do. They weren't 10 feet tall, but they were bloody good fighters. The Taliban knew about the U.S. NATO transition that was coming up and perceived a lack of focus from the United States with the Iraqi operations they were conducting and were determined to take advantage of that transition. They masked fighters in and around Kandahar province, particularly in the districts of Zhari and Panjwayi, and aimed to take control of Kandahar city, if only psychologically. That is, if only they could make people believe that Kandahar city was isolated and under their control and at their mercy, they would have succeeded almost as well as if they had physically taken it. They believed they could mask the fighters around the city, disconnect it from the rest of the country. They believed they could discredit NATO, discredit Canada, and probably cause the fall of the Afghan government in Kabul itself.
We found ourselves in ambushes, direct firefights, encountering improvised explosive devices, dealing with the murders of civilians around those areas, and all taking place starting early in the spring of 2006. For example, we took four casualities in the spring of 2006, again on April 22. Four beautiful young Canadian boys--Matthew Dinning, Randy Payne, Myles Mansell, and Bill Turner--were killed on April 22.
We found ourselves in the middle of intense fighting throughout that spring and summer. We found ourselves in an area on a timeframe when the Taliban tactics changed, and in addition to the ambushes and the IEDs and the suicide bombers, they were now willing to take us on with some hundreds of fighters in direct combat. Hundreds of Taliban fighters, deploying in and around the Zhari and Panjwayi area, were willing to fight, to pitch battles against us. That culminated in the last summer of 2006, in early fall, with Operation Medusa --from our perspective--when we found ourselves in serious combat operations against several thousand Taliban fighters who had masks. We took numerous casualties, killed and wounded. We started transforming how we looked after those casualties, both the bodies of those who had been killed and the wounded, transforming how we looked after their families and transforming how we looked after their battle buddies.
We also realized, after a decade of darkness that was the culmination of many, many years of lower funding and lack of support that we perceived, that some of our own kit was completely unsuitable for that environment. For example, we were much involved with getting rid of the oldest jeep at that point in time because it simply was no longer acceptable.
My focus during that timeframe was keeping our young soldiers, our sons and daughters, alive. That was my focus and it was the focus of my chain of command. I would not have had it any other way.
In the operations I mentioned, we also took detainees. Men who gave up after violent firefights where we had taken casualties.... After those fighters ran out of ammunition and could not escape, men with explosive residue--the level 3--on their hands which meant they were into sophisticated explosive devices and gunshot residue all over their bodies.... Men who violently and physically resisted their detention.... And all were treated professionally. It was a great credit and a great compliment to our Canadian soldiers and to their leadership, despite the emotion of grabbing somebody who had just shot your friend or just blown up the vehicle the rest of your buddies were in.
Even with all of that, we took actions to meet all of our responsibilities, including those concerning those detainees. We handled them professionally, and our soldiers did a magnificent job of that. Even when we had some complaints against them, we investigated those and found that they were groundless. We had a government agreement from our previous government with the Afghan government for the transfer, and with the responsibilities of the Afghan government clearly signed out first.
We provided the information necessary to the International Committee of the Red Cross so they could do what they wanted to do. When they indicated that the information was not sufficient or helpful to them, because in most cases Afghan men go by only one name and refused to give us anything more, that's all we could provide. We changed our process and changed the information we had so that we could make it better for them.
We supported the rest of the 3D team in their actions, including protection for the members of that 3D team. In other words, when Mr. Colvin went out to visit one of those prisons or any other site in Afghanistan, he could not have done that without the work, the support, and the protection of our soldiers.
We continue to work interdepartmentally to resolve problems that we might hear about. We instituted a board of inquiry and a military police investigation when claims, proven false against our handling of detainees, were made. We supported the development of the supplemental agreement. During that timeframe, just to make sure we were absolutely responsible, we decided that if we did take any more detainees during the immediate timeframe when the supplemental agreement was being negotiated and put in place, we would hold them until the supplemental agreement was finalized and agreed on and the supporting framework was there to ensure that it was followed. In short, we wanted to make sure that the capacity and the process in DFAIT were there, with the supporting departments, to handle that supplementary agreement. We stopped transfers completely from Nov. 5, 2007, until my commanders on the ground were comfortable that the process in place was going to work, that we were meeting our responsibilities, and that we were doing all that was right.
Based on all of our actions--on substantive evidence of mistreatment, that is--we stopped those transfers until things changed significantly in November 2007.
We didn't base it on hearsay, hypothesis, or second-hand information. We didn't base it on Taliban detainees saying things without corroborating evidence. My chain of command, augmented by my visits and video teleconferences with them in theatre, was my confidence factor, and they didn't let me down.
We didn't base our work on things like reports written in May and June of 2006, which said nothing about abuse and nothing about torture or anything else that would have caught my attention or, indeed, the attention of others.
I sat there for a while listening to some of the TV reports and listening to some of the comments of this committee, and I actually started to question myself. I wondered if I had really missed something as important as that. Was I indeed negligent in my duties?
Then I read the reports and I realized that no, I had not seen those reports. I seldom read C4 traffic. I didn't have immediate access to it unless somebody brought it to me, and there was no reason, based on what was in those reports, for anybody to bring it to my attention. After having read that, I am absolutely confident that was indeed the case. I also was completely comfortable that there was nothing in those reports that would have caused General Gauthier to come and brief me on something like that, again because there was simply nothing there. When the report talks about infrastructure and talks about the Sarposa Prison being better than the ones in Uruzgan and Helmand provinces and a few other things, there's nothing there to warrant the intervention of the Chief of the Defence Staff.
We also didn't base our actions on statements that said most or the vast majority--or words to that effect--of the detainees that we took and handed over to the Afghans were innocent farmers. Nothing could be further from the truth. We detained, under violent actions, people trying to kill our sons and daughters, people who had in some cases done that, had been successful at it, and were continuing to do it. People were blowing up vehicles and launching IEDs against us and had either been caught in the act or with explosive residue at level 3 or gunshot residue on their hands.
Yes, we probably detained the occasional farmer. Whether they were farmers by day and Taliban by night, which is often the case, is something that's very difficult to discern. Innocent farmers were very rarely detained by us and were almost inevitably immediately let go.
We didn't base our actions upon people making statements such as “all detainees were tortured”. How ludicrous a statement is that from any one single individual who really has no knowledge to be able to say something like that? We certainly didn't see any substantive evidence that would indicate it was that way.
We certainly didn't base our actions upon somebody saying that DFAIT was telling DND something they didn't want to hear. My commanders can testify for themselves--every single one of them, not just the two guys here today--and they will say they wanted, asked, and needed to know what the real truth was, because that was the way we were going to do our job.
We also didn't base our activities upon somebody telling us that he knew General Hillier had known about this or had read this report. That's absolutely false. It was impossible for any individual, particularly one 12,000 kilometres away, who had written a report and shotgunned it to numerous addresses to be able to determine that I had seen it, which in fact I had not.
I would also go back and say that during the report dated 26 May and the one of 2 June, I was actually in the theatre of operations with General Fraser. I visited the provincial reconstruction team and talked to all the folks who were available there. I was back and forth throughout that timeframe many times and was never once pulled aside or grabbed by the ear. Nobody whispered in my ear, “We've got a problem, and I reported it in a report”.
Last, we didn't make our decisions based upon somebody saying that General Gauthier briefed General Hillier. Again, if you are 12,000 kilometres away from Canada, you don't know what our schedules are, where we are, or what we talked about. For somebody to say that is absolutely untrue and discredits that individual.
The only thing in the witness's statement that I heard that I would agree with was that General Gauthier was very difficult to deal with. He was; he was a pain in the butt most of the time, but I'll tell you this: I think he was a pain in the butt to me in the 20 years I've known him because he always demanded clear, unequivocal facts, he always demanded the logic of what we were trying to do to be based up by those facts, and he always held me accountable as his boss to make sure he had a clear, precise mission and the kind of support from me and from the rest of the structure to go off and do his job.
I think I'll stop right there, Mr. Chair. I'd be prepared to answer any questions you might like.
Thank you.