Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you very much. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here today.
For those of you who don't know me, who haven't met me--I know some of the committee members, as I had the opportunity to meet you in Kandahar--for 11 months, between February 2008 and January 2009, I lived in Kandahar as the representative of Canada in Kandahar, or the RoCK. Yes, it's the absolute best title I'll ever have as a public servant.
Today is a terrific opportunity for me to talk to you about some of the key lessons I've pulled from my time in Kandahar. If you'll permit me, before I start, what I'd like to do is begin by acknowledging the fabulous team I had the pleasure of working with in Kandahar, both military and civilian. Each demonstrated tremendous dedication, commitment, and, above all, sacrifice, something that is not, perhaps, always understood or acknowledged.
What we are being asked to do in Kandahar is new for Canada. Certainly, some of it has antecedents from our experience elsewhere, but engaging in an act of counter-insurgency, where we are an implementing actor at the national, provincial and local level, has required that Canada develop new approaches and new tools, on both the military and the civilian side.
I think we have learned a great deal from our efforts. Some of it is sui generis, unique to the context, but there are some aspects that we can generalize and carry into other contexts. I am keenly aware of this and hoping to apply what I have learned in my new role as the Director General responsible for Canada's Stabilization and Reconstruction Task Force, in the Department of Foreign Affairs.
There are three key take-aways from my time in theatre that I'm hoping to touch on today.
First is the importance of joined-up approaches, a unified strategy, if you will. That means being integrated, not just coordinated, in the field and in Ottawa.
Second is the value of concrete metrics, benchmarks, priority setting, and sober assessments, both in the field and in Ottawa.
Third is the impact that can be achieved with greater civilian engagement--having the right people with the right tools--and having that occur in parallel with Afghan leadership and ownership.
I would first like to make a few comments about the duties of the representative of Canada in Kandahar. As you are aware, the representative of Canada in Kandahar, reporting to the head of mission, is Canada's senior representative in Southern Afghanistan. The RoCK is responsible for the governance and development aspects of the mission. I was the principal link with the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan at the provincial level, and with other countries, NGOs and international organizations such as those of the UN.
The RoCK is the counterpart to the Canadian Brigadier-General responsible for the International Security Assistance Force in Kandahar Province. Together, we ensured a unified, civil-military approach to delivering on international and Canadian priorities.
While I was in theatre in Kandahar, we grew our civilian team from 15 to 63, including a mix of Canadian civilian police as well as corrections, development and political officers, namely from CIDA.
If you'll permit me, I'd like to talk about five key actions that I think worked while I was in Kandahar. I'd also like to touch on the opportunities that exist, based on my experience over the past year.
The first key lesson for me is the importance of political governance and flexible machinery. You're a perfect example of that. I would cite the creation of this committee and the creation of the cabinet committee on Afghanistan. Mechanisms that we've created internally are communities of practice, which bring together the various components to speak regularly in an integrated fashion, in a way that wasn't necessarily happening before. Clear political direction from yourselves and the cabinet committee, together with engagement at the ministerial level when decisions were required, has made a difference.
I lived in a pre-CCOA function, and I've lived in the aftermath. I had the opportunity to experience both. These coordination mechanisms are very important for forcing links that might not otherwise occur, and they also facilitate leverage. I'll give you an example. Our communities of practice bring together the team in Kandahar, Kabul, Ottawa, and also our other missions abroad. When we're experiencing a problem, let's say with NATO, it's not just a question of going to Kabul and asking Kabul to talk to COMISAF, the commander of all NATO forces. We can also leverage Brussels in a way that we were perhaps not making effective use of previously.
The second key take-away is clarity of purpose. Establishing the six priorities and the three signatures was, from my perspective, absolutely essential, along with the metrics that followed and the sober assessments of how we were progressing. I remember my first day at the PRT in Kandahar when our USAID colleague came up to me and the first thing she said was that the problem with us Canadians was that we tried to be everything to all people. The six priorities have actually helped us not to be all things to all people. It doesn't mean there aren't other important activities that need to occur in Kandahar. It means that Canada doesn't necessarily have to be one that leads on them. We can make sure that others are leading on those initiatives. We stay focused on delivering things that Kandaharis have told us they want, which are integrated into those six priorities.
These are the kinds of investments that Kandaharis want. You hear it at every shura meeting you go to. It doesn't matter where you are in the province. I travelled extensively. I was only at KAF two and a half days a week. The rest of the week I was either at the PRT or out at the forward operating bases. I was always out and about by road. I feel I had a good sense for what Kandaharis were looking for.
The third key take-away is the adoption of an integrated approach between the civilian and the military team. That was really what creating the position of the RoCK was all about. It was to make sure we had better integration between the military and the civilian components of the mission. In the first instance, it meant that you needed to recognize and bridge cultural differences, which included both bureaucratic cultures and general life experiences.
I worked closely with Brigadier-General Laroche and Brigadier-General Thompson on physical co-location of our staffs, joint planning among our staffs, joint intelligence, and resource allocation. This is a huge advancement, something Canada is doing much better than any of our allies. The development in the field of a joint, integrated civilian-military strategy, the Kandahar action plan, was the first of its kind. Other allies have taken notice and commented on many occasions about what progress they've seen in the integration. They knew that when General Thompson and I were together, we had a unified front. They knew that if they talked to us separately, we would be reinforcing each other's views of things, which was very important.
The take-away from that is basic. You need a common analysis among everyone on the team. To advance that, we pushed our civilians farther out to the forward operating bases, where we had political officers, development officers, and police officers physically co-located with the battle group in the “omelette”. Right away, within the first couple of weeks of our doing that, we saw a difference in the analysis that was coming back from the teams in the field. They had a shared vision of what was happening at the district level, and it meant that we could better pull forward the resources from the PRT. It also meant that we could push some of the resources from the Afghan government in Kandahar out to the districts. This is something we had not been able to do before, without having our political development and police colleagues out there.
The fourth thing I'd like to flag is active, empowered civilian engagement and expertise combined with a sustained focus on Afghan leadership and ownership, even if it takes time.
We've drawn a lot of lessons from our first two years in Kandahar, and we've adapted to deliver on governance and development in a non-permissive environment. That's really the key. We are trying to deliver governance and development programs in a context that frankly Canada has never had to do before. We've adjusted our planning cycle and approach so that we can more effectively implement our strategies. As I said, we've significantly increased the footprint to deliver. This has been especially important on the side of police and corrections officers. Having my police officers and my corrections officers working with their Afghan counterparts every day makes a big difference. You have to have enough of your team in theatre so they can have that sustained impact over time. The other thing was engagement with civilian authorities. With the creation of the position of the RoCK, you now had a civilian counterpart, someone whom the governor could turn to, someone whom the line ministries could turn to in a civilian capacity, who could then make the link for them as well into Kabul and their line ministries. There is not always an obvious link between what's happening at the national and provincial levels; we could facilitate that, also demonstrating that the Canadian interest in Kandahar went far beyond security matters and was integrally linked with our development and governance concerns.
Finally, the fifth take-away for me was really the devolution of authorities, and that was a big evolution. Delegated decision-making and financial authorities made a big difference in terms of our being agile and responsive to developments on the ground. For instance, the fact that the RoCK was allocated $2 million worth of signing authorities—which frankly is probably the most significant signing authorities that a field officer on the civilian side has in any of our missions—meant that when the Sarapoza prison break occurred, within 24 hours of that happening we were able to do the site review, go to the prison with the engineers and the Afghan Ministry of Justice officials, and do a preliminary assessment of what needed to be done. Within 24 hours we had already identified a plan for rehabilitating the perimeter of the security so that we could get back to helping them to strengthen their capacities, but equally important, so that Kandaharis weren't going to see the blown-up prison entrance every day as they drove down the road, which was impacting on their perceptions of security. Because we had delegated authorities, I didn't have to come back to Ottawa and have that conversation about the allocation of resources. I was immediately able to allocate the resources and start the engineering work. That makes us much more responsive to issues as they occur.
We've also created new tools to deal with being in a non-permissive environment. The creation of the Kandahar Peace and Security Fund and the Kandahar local initiatives program has been a real development. Again it means the political director and the development director in the field have an ability to respond to local initiatives as they're emerging. We can make links with things without having to go through a longer process, which was the case before. It also means we can be more creative with the partners we're engaging with. The challenge I would say, though, with respect to partners, and a challenge we'll continue to face, is finding and maintaining a mix of partners who are risk-tolerant, who are willing to work in some of these locations within Kandahar.
In conclusion, I would say we've come a considerable way in the last 16 months. We continue to demonstrate leadership, positively engaging with our Afghan counterparts, but we need to maintain our focus. We need to continue to adapt to changing circumstances, and we need to continue to set realistic goals and report on our progress against them as we facilitate greater Afghan leadership.
I am very conscious of the time, so I will perhaps stop here in order for us to have a discussion and for me to answer any questions you may have.