Afghanistan Committee on May 14th, 2009

[BGen Alan Howard]

Certainly from the CSTC-A perspective, we use consultants to assist us both in Kabul with the headquarters and then the delivery of training. I did not get involved and didn't see any contractors involved with actual conduct of military operations. But because we were short, we hired a number of contractors to help us to great effect. They tended to be ex-military and tended to be on staff training. For example, in the introduction of NATO weapons and up-armoured Humvees, they brought a great skill set to help us do the training.

However, I was not involved in any sort of conduct of military operations with private security. We did not hire them for that task.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

And on the ground, it's not an issue in Kandahar?

[BGen Dennis William Thompson]

No. The principal company from a western perspective is DynCorp, who are involved in the training of the Afghan National Police. Their principal mandate is to deliver training--you may have got this last week, I would imagine--at the Kandahar training centre, just outside the front gates of the airfield.

There potentially is one DynCorp member in each U.S. police mentoring team. Frankly, I'm not in the best place to answer what they do. I think it's largely logistics; it's obviously not combat operations. But I never had big issues with them.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Okay.

This is more of a point, but there may be a question in there. On the voter registration, I actually heard reports of concerns of oversubscription, shall we say, and concerns that there might have been some movement over the border, and that a lot more men--looking at the gender breakdown, at the men who have registered to vote versus women--were being registered to vote. The reports I heard were that there were actually men who were going to sign up on behalf of their wives, and a concern that people were crossing the border from Pakistan registering to vote.

I'm wondering, were there reports that you had heard, and is there anything to these reports?

[BGen Dennis William Thompson]

I don't know if there's anything to them. I can talk to you about Mr. Wasifi, who was from the Independent Electoral Commission, obviously an Afghan. He came every week to the weekly provincial security meeting to talk to us about progress in terms of numbers of voters who had registered, or where we were in the run-up to the planning and whatnot. He was a guy who was very positive, because he was the one who did the process in 2004.

But no, I don't have any specifics. He never came with any stories of that nature.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

So that's not something you've heard.

[BGen Dennis William Thompson]

No, I haven't heard that. But to be frank, I haven't been following this very closely since February.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Fair enough. Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you for that, and thanks to the committee.

Gentlemen, we appreciate your being here. Part of the mandate of this committee is to let Canadians know what's happening. This was a televised meeting. Your frank and prompt responses were appreciated. I'm sure they've added value to what Canadians know about our operation there.

Do you have anything you want to wrap up with?

[BGen Dennis William Thompson]

No, I'm fine, thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

After two hours, I don't blame you.

The meeting is adjourned.