Afghanistan Committee on June 4th, 2009

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

I'm sorry, but that's all the time we have for that round.

We're moving over now to the government side, and Ms. Glover.

[Shelly Glover, Conservative, Saint Boniface, MB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I want to say

welcome to our witnesses.

I just want to take a moment, Ms. Golberg, to say thank you on behalf of Canadians, and Canadian women, in particular, for representing us so well when you were in Kandahar in Afghanistan. I think as women we see things a little differently, so it is truly a privilege for me to be here today. I am not a member of this committee normally, but I did sit in on it one time and saw very clearly that we do see things differently, and it's a privilege for me to be here again today. So thank you on behalf of other Canadian women and myself.

I want to get to some questioning about the human rights of women, because I think they are very, very important. When I was here last time, it was really surprising to me that we actually had members of this committee who thought it wasn't a fact that women were not going to school. That's why I say women see things a little differently: when we see other women being oppressed and abused, we really take it to heart.

So I want you to comment for me, if you could, because of your experience, and tell us how important it is for these women and young girls to be going to school. What have you seen, and how important is that?

[Elissa Golberg]

Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to be here.

It can't be overstated how significant it is for these girls and their parents to have the opportunity to go to school. This is a fundamental shift in their society.

And you're especially struck by it when you go to one of the schools that Canada or another donor has helped to rehabilitate and you see seven-year-olds, and I say seven-year-olds because of course when you're watching the seven-year-olds and you're looking at them and they're counting and they're reading and they're singing, you are immediately struck by the fact that that is not something they would have been permitted to do seven years ago. This is new, and this is changing, and it's an adjustment for their society.

Now, I'm not going to sing to you a happy freedom day song. There's a lot of work to be done. Kandahar in particular, the south, is extremely conservative. It is the most conservative part of the country.

Nevertheless, whenever I talked to the teacher-parent committees when we would go out and about--because we didn't construct schools unless the committees agreed to it--they wanted their girls to have the opportunity to go to school. They were asking for that opportunity. And it wasn't just girls. It was also adults.

One of my favourite projects in the field--and permit me to blow my horn on this one--is a small project we're funding through the Kandahar local initiatives program for adult literacy and numeracy. We have about 14,000 adults who have gone through the program, 80% of whom have been women. When I would talk to the graduates of that program, those women would say to me, “I can now go to the market and know that I'm getting the right change.” They'll also tell you that it's changed the way their husband looks at them. Now, that's just anecdotally, from talking to some of the graduates. You also have them telling you that it's also meant that their family dynamic has changed, that the husbands are now a little bit more willing to allow their kids to go to school, both male and female.

The other things we've been doing to try to facilitate this in those contexts where there might otherwise be some concerns--because kids are often, obviously, also viewed as an economic asset to the family--is to provide additional support. Through the World Food Programme, we do food-for-literacy programs. So we'll give pulses and oils in order to encourage the family members to allow their children to go to school. There is a range of things we're doing from that perspective.

But it's not only education; it's also employment opportunities. One of the things we've been trying to do through the Kandahar local initiatives program is specifically target, with the Afghan Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, opportunities for women's employment.

Again, Kandahar is different from the rest of the country. I know the committee has talked before about MISFA, the microfinance program. It's been extraordinarily successful elsewhere in the country. We've had a much harder time of it in Kandahar. Why? Anecdotally speaking, it is because the south is much more conservative. What makes microfinance programs generally successful is that women can work outside the home.

We've been working with our colleagues in the U.S.A. to try to find ways that women can have employment generation opportunities inside the home--poultry raising, tailoring, and other kinds of opportunities--that will make them economically viable, but also respect the culture in which they're operating.

The last thing I'll flag is on health care. Access to health care for women in the south has improved in a way that is unbelievable. If anybody had been there before, they would know that frankly women were not allowed, for the most part, to seek health care by themselves. They would always have to be accompanied by a male family member. And frankly, the health care system itself was just not at a level at which it could meet women's needs.

Some of the things we've been investing in have been specifically to facilitate women's access to better medical services, whether it's midwives, for instance, or things like the first maternal waiting home to open in Afghanistan, which is in Kandahar. That's going to significantly improve the chances for women to survive childbirth, and subsequently, for their children to be able to grow up.

So there are some key advances we're making, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is going to take significant amounts of time, and nobody should be under any illusions otherwise.

[Shelly Glover, Conservative, Saint Boniface, MB]

I know I'm probably out of time, but I do have a question about the fact that women protested against the Shia law. How significant was that? It seems to me that it was quite significant, but I'm not there. I am not sure what relevance that has, because I haven't been there and I haven't seen it. So can you tell me just how significant that moment was?

[Yves Brodeur]

I think I will have to answer that question, because Elissa had left Kandahar and Afghanistan at that time.

It was very significant. What we saw there was, as we say in French, a crise de conscience among women concerning their role and importance in society. There was a very important and significant mobilization of women to protest the law. What happened, and I have said this to the committee before, was that you had the beginning of a debate involving women, and not only women who were against the issue, but also women who had views that were religiously based.

That was a very defining moment. In the recent history of modern Afghanistan, all of a sudden you have women who have decided that they have to be involved, to be active in defining their own destiny. That's very good, and it's recognized. I think, by and large, women want to maintain it, and I think that is what you heard from Mrs. Sobhrang two weeks ago.

It's work that needs to progress. We need to support it, and we're doing so. It's actually quite positive.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you, Ms. Glover.

We'll go over to Mr. Harris.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for your presentation this morning.

I'm interested in your statement of progress in relation to the number of civilians engaged in the mission in Afghanistan. I think you've told us that there is now a total of 63, and the breakdown was into police officers, corrections people, development officials, and political officials. Could you give us a numerical breakdown of the 63 we're now talking about?

[Elissa Golberg]

There are more than that in Afghanistan as a whole. I think we're at 102. We can give you the specific breakdown in Kandahar, which is what I was responsible for. We went from 15 to 63 in my time there. They included 24 civilian police officers and four corrections officers, and then the rest were a mix of political officers and CIDA officers.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

You were the first RoCK, I guess. You've been replaced. Who's you're replacement?

[Elissa Golberg]

It's Ken Lewis.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

I mentioned the structure as well, of some of the other members of the committee. You talked about mission command, civilian and mission command, military. Would you consider the RoCK as the mission command civilian?

[Elissa Golberg]

I would for southern Afghanistan, yes. I reported to the ambassador, who obviously has oversight over everything that's happening in the country. The purpose of establishing the RoCK was to have somebody in the south who was managing the civilian personnel and the governance and development programming. That was essentially the division of labour between General Thompson, General Laroche, and me. They, in the first instance, were preoccupied with security, but not all of security.

As Denis would have pointed out to you—I think he appeared before the committee—we used to have a list of things that were essential to individual Afghans on a daily basis. We used to joke, because the first one was security, and then the rest were basic services. Denis used to say, “I'm responsible for the first.” Then he'd say, “No, I'm actually not solely responsible for the first, because within security are also included policing and corrections, which of course is Elissa's area of responsibility.” We worked very closely together, but certainly I was where the buck stopped on governance and development issues in the south.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Would these individuals, then, essentially report to you?

[Elissa Golberg]

That's correct.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

They did. Okay.

I'm also interested in the Kandahar peace and security fund that you mentioned, and the local initiatives fund. Are these separate funds over which you would have control? If so, what kind of money are we talking about? We know that there's a great deal of Canadian aid going to Afghanistan, and I would think not very much of it is in the direct control of Canadian decision-makers, as I understand it. Perhaps you could elaborate on that for me.

[Elissa Golberg]

The KPS is a $400,000 replenishable fund. It's a delegated authority to the political director at the PRT, the Foreign Affairs officer. It's to help focus on peace- and security-related initiatives, things that might come up. If the governor wanted to hold a jirga meeting, for instance, we could use resources to quickly support that kind of reconciliation initiative.

The KLIP, the Kandahar local initiatives program, as I was leaving was upped to $15 million. The KLIP is a social and economic development fund to work with local partners and again to take advantage of local opportunities that would arise, for us to be able to quickly disburse resources. The support we're providing to Kandahar University, for instance, and some of the work we're doing on employment generation and enterprise development comes out of the KLIP fund.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Are these budgeted funds for a period of time, or are they one-off notions? If you're engaged in supporting the university, that sounds to me like something you might not do as a one-off but maybe as an ongoing support.

[Elissa Golberg]

It depends on the project. The resources exist out for a certain number of years, and depending on the project, you can allocate funds over a few fiscal years, or if it's a one-off project, obviously the resources are out the door.

The KPS, the Kandahar peace and security program, was a pilot project in the first year. It has now been renewed for this year, because we see that it makes a difference for the political officers in the field to have a readily accessible resource base. We can increase it, depending on how well the program goes over time.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

How would that compare with our overall aid commitment to Afghanistan? The money for these two together, I suppose, is $15 million to $16 million. How does that compare to the overall aid commitment to Afghanistan from Canada?

[Elissa Golberg]

Do you mean on a year-over-year basis? Overall it was about $132 million per year in the year that I was there. This is a fraction of it, but it was meant to be a sort of “small is beautiful” thing. You're really looking at local initiatives, so there's an absorptive capacity question as well. It's about being strategic. Those funds are meant to identify those very punctual opportunities that arise to which we can add value and which complement the larger programs we have in place. You have these two things happening in parallel with one another.

For instance, with the big signature project funds that are going towards primary and secondary school education, we can then use KLIP to focus on the university. It's a complementary set of tools.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

We had what was to me a disturbing report a couple of weeks ago in the newspaper in which a district education officer or local official gave a rather despairing view of education development and the building of schools, which is obviously something that Canada has placed an emphasis on. He said that building schools in rural areas was almost impossible. He thought the biggest problem was a lack of teachers, that they didn't have teachers—the capacity to actually run schools. Also, the security issues were too difficult outside of urban areas. In the same news article there was a reference to Canada making use of UAVs to supervise construction projects or to see whether the contracts were doing what they said they were to do.

It seems to me, first of all—and this is a military question, I suppose—that it's a very odd use of a $2.5 million drone to see whether the contractors are actually doing the work they're contracted to do. It also indicates that the notion of being able to do that readily is not as simple as it sounds.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

You just have a few seconds for a response. I know it's going to be hard to do, but please try.

[Elissa Golberg]

The reason we always work with communities is that they have to be part owners of the schools that are being constructed. That helps to ensure their security. We're not going to put something up in an area where the communities themselves are not buying into it, nor the department of education. That's a critical pillar for our decisions around school construction.

I don't disagree that teachers are also key, which is why we're focusing on the 3,000 teachers. It's not just bricks and mortar; it also has to be the teachers, going in parallel, absolutely.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you.

That ends the opening round. We have a few minutes left to get into the second round. We'll first go to the government and then back to the official opposition.

Mr. Hawn.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

I thank both our witnesses for being here.

Ms. Golberg, you mentioned the requirement for risk-tolerant partners. Did you find any when you were there? If you did, who were they?