Thank you for the invitation.
I'm afraid I'm not going to have an awful lot pertinent to tell you because I left Afghanistan in August 2005. I was there from September 2002 to August 2005. I was the first Canadian diplomat accredited full time to Afghanistan, and I was on my own that first year. There was no means of communicating with Ottawa at that time, so I travelled to Islamabad and filed my reports through the Canadian High Commission there. Then, as you are aware, the embassy opened in August 2003, and the first resident ambassador appeared. I was the political counsellor, and the deputy head of mission and chargé in the ambassador's absence. We were a very small team, just four: the ambassador, the CIDA program manager, the consular officer, and me.
I was able to travel extensively, especially in the first year. There were no travel restrictions on me. Sometimes I wondered if people even knew I was there because I went wherever I wanted, when I wanted. I had been told before I left to ensure that I would get the views of the “man on the street”, so it meant that I had to get away from some official circles and travel throughout the country.
My major responsibility, and what I reported to Ottawa on, was reform of the security sector. That included the army, police, justice, counter-narcotics, demilitarization, the provincial reconstruction teams, and so on. I had to report also on political developments, the constitution, elections, the formation of political parties, and of course human rights. The benchmarks against which I reported were the Bonn Agreement, the Loya Jirga decisions, presidential decrees, and civil society perceptions in Kabul and in the provinces.
I was also a political liaison for our defence attaché and RCMP liaison officers who were in Islamabad but accredited to Afghanistan as well.
Another part of the work was to organize all the programs for visits, including being the note-taker and writing the reports on the visits of the defence and foreign affairs ministers, senior officials, the Prime Minister, and the Governor General, twice.
As a background, I'll just tell you that I worked for CIDA at one point: Southeast Asia, Bangladesh, Colombia, Ecuador, and Pakistan. In Foreign Affairs, I worked on the economic and democratic transition in Russia, the Canadian assistance to that transitional period; on Bosnia; on reconstruction of the former Yugoslavia; and on the Balkans. This is before I went to Afghanistan.
What I learned, and certainly Afghanistan confirmed that, is that these fragile states, as they called them, or failing states, and the countries in transition and post-conflict situations, are not the usual diplomatic fare, as you can imagine. Rule of law is most often absent. In fact, I can't think of anywhere that it was present in these countries of transition in the way that we would describe it. Violence was the way they solved their differences, and of course corruption sets in very quickly. Human rights are severely neglected.
I've had many requests since I came back to go on talk shows, to have interviews, and I relented a few weeks ago, and I guess that's why I was invited here, because of my CBC interview. I want to clarify that I agreed to the CBC radio interview, and the sole purpose was to give some support to Richard Colvin, because I didn't see anyone really speaking up for him at all. In fact, he was being, it seemed to me, quite maligned.
During that interview I made no mention of ruling parties, politics, or names. I was quite surprised—and that's my naïveté in dealing with the media—to find it so highly charged and politicized in the evening news.