Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Good afternoon, honourable members, and thank you for this privilege of sharing with you today some thoughts from industry on the role that industry can play in Canada's future engagement in Afghanistan.
I'll tell you a little bit about Allen Vanguard, the company I head. We are a Canadian company, with our international headquarters here in Ottawa. We have manufacturing facilities in Ottawa, as well as in Pembroke, Ontario, some in the U.K. and the U.S., as well as professional services groups in those countries. We export our products and services to more than 100 countries. Our specific focus and expertise is mitigating and defeating the threat posed by improvised explosive devices and other weapons of terror that over the past decade have had a destabilizing effect on an increasing number of regions in the world.
In a NATO context, the improvised explosive device is an expected feature of future operations. Encountering IEDs has certainly become a major feature of the stabilization and counter-insurgency operations that currently occupy the alliance. Counter-IED is now widely understood to encompass three key areas or layers of capability: first, at the pointy end of the threat is defeating the IED device itself by locating and neutralizing it; second, protecting and training security forces against IEDs; and third, developing forensic and intelligence systems to identify and defeat the IED network that supplies, finances, and fabricates these lethal devices.
Increasingly nations are taking a systematic approach to carefully integrating this range of measures needed to protect their own forces from this threat and to defeat adversary IED systems that threaten not only military forces, but civilian populations as well.
In operational theatres such as Afghanistan, NATO has been providing effective counter-IED support to its own deployed nation forces. It has been very preoccupied with that in response to a threat that has grown almost exponentially over the past five years, while at the same time trying to devote some effort and resources to building the same capacity within indigenous Afghan security forces. Given the extremely dynamic nature of the IED threat, both technically and tactically, industry has been an integral part of this effort, not just in delivering timely technological solutions to military forces but also in providing direct operational support to deployed, deploying, and indigenous forces.
The operational partnership between the counter-IED industry and military and police forces is unique, and I would say growing stronger by the day—and not just in Afghanistan. Allen Vanguard's subject-matter experts, many of them veterans of conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq, play a very direct role in assisting dozens of nations to develop their capacity to protect themselves against IEDs.
In fact, our personnel have authored NATO counter-IED doctrine under our current multi-year contract to NATO Allied Command Transformation. Our employees have assisted national police and military forces around the world in developing counter-IED policy, strategies, and capabilities. Our highly specialized trainers conduct training in support of these efforts. As well, our scientists, engineers, and counter-IED specialists have developed anti-ballistic protective gear, radio frequency jammers, bomb disposal robots, protection equipment, intelligence products, and mobile forensics laboratories, all employed in the fight against IEDs around the world.
In sum, our people, who are overwhelmingly Canadians, are justifiably proud of the vital role they play every day in saving the lives of front-line personnel and vulnerable populations against the insidious threat of IEDs. It's certainly clear to us that Canadian industry does, and can, play a very meaningful and specific role in support of transition to Afghan security leadership between now and 2014.
Afghan officials are well aware of Allen Vanguard's expertise. As other Canadians note from time to time, we are perhaps better known internationally than at home. In fact, we were invited by Afghanistan's ambassador to Canada, His Excellency Jawed Ludin, to meet with Afghan ministers and senior officials in Kabul in mid-November.
We met with the First Vice-President, the Minister of Defence, the Minister of Interior, the head of the National Directorate of Security, the Deputy National Security Advisor, and others, and their messages were consistent and clear.
Minister of Defence Wardak was unequivocal. As he stated at NATO's defence ministerial meeting last June, transitioning to Afghan leadership must, as he said, be conditions-based, and these conditions include building key enabling capabilities currently provided by ISAF. He stated that he is not at all satisfied with the current state of his army's counter-IED equipment, training, and capabilities, and identified this as his top priority in relationship to leadership transition.
Minister of Interior Mohammadi also identified counter-IED capability as one of the biggest challenges to leadership transition, given that more than 80% of Afghan security force casualties are caused by IEDs. We were told that 15 to 20 civilians are dying each day, and on average six police per day, with most of these resulting from IEDs. The minister lamented that his police are on the front line and that today they are, in his words, completely reliant on ISAF response capabilities and are otherwise virtually defenceless against this threat.
NDS director Nabil made a similar plea, and Deputy National Security Advisor Abdali stressed the need for assistance in applying a strategic national approach that will join the efforts of the three security institutions involved to build capacity in an integrated and a sustainable way.
We also consulted closely with NATO authorities in Kabul and were fortunate to be able to meet with both the ISAF counter-IED staff and the NATO training mission representatives during our visit two weeks ago. We learned that, as demand for Afghan soldiers and police has escalated each year, NATO's main focus has necessarily been on training soldiers and leaders to a very basic level. The more specialized functions, such as counter-IED capabilities, have lagged.
They are now developing plans to address this counter-IED requirement, but the availability of specialized expertise to train, advise, mentor, and assist in managing counter-IED capacity-building programs has inhibited progress. NATO's military counter-IED specialists are understandably consumed with providing life-saving support to their own fighting troops, and they have very little if any residual capacity to contribute to building Afghan security force capacity. This is a serious constraint that distinguishes the counter-IED capacity-building need from other more generalized security functions.
This is why industry assistance can make an enormous difference.
To give you a clearer sense of the practical dimensions of the Afghan challenge, together NATO and Afghans have identified a need for almost 300 qualified Afghan counter-IED response teams, including almost 90 for the Afghan National Police, who are at the forefront of protecting vulnerable populations. By the end of August of this year, they had only been able to field one operational police counter-IED team.
I should hasten to add, though, that NATO's focus until now has been exclusively on just generating these individual teams. NATO staff in Kabul are just now able to turn their attention to the institutional enablers that will need to be developed to build a national system, the one that will bind together army, police, and intelligence agency efforts, the one that goes beyond defeating the IED device to defeating the IED network and bringing terrorist suspects to justice.
These are specific areas in which Allen Vanguard's particular expertise has been sought in assisting many other nations. I'm confident, actually, that before long we will be playing a helpful, strategic capacity-building role in support of NATO in Afghanistan as their requirements become better defined.
In conclusion, IEDs are a key factor impeding Afghan men, women, and children from living normal lives and constraining development workers from helping them to do so.
It's certainly clear to us, and I believe widely understood, that helping Afghans to counter the deadly and destabilizing IED threat will figure prominently in any planning for a transition from NATO to Afghan security leadership. And with little spare NATO capacity to commit to this particular effort in the near term, Canadian industry can make a valuable contribution in an area that will have both immediate and a long-term impact.
I'm hopeful that the committee will give this due consideration.
I thank you again for inviting me to share these thoughts. With that, I look forward to your questions.
Thank you.