Evidence of meeting #24 for Foreign Affairs and International Development in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was afghanistan.
A recording is available from Parliament.
4 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you, Mr. Minister.
You have another two minutes, Madame Barbot.
4 p.m.
Bloc
Vivian Barbot Bloc Papineau, QC
Would it be possible to get a real picture of the Canadian military’s action? You tell me they protect all humanitarian aid. Would it be possible for you to draw up a balance sheet of this aid and to send us a written report on the role of Canadian soldiers in protecting what portion of humanitarian aid?
4 p.m.
Conservative
Gordon O'Connor Conservative Carleton—Mississippi Mills, ON
I'll hand over to the chief. It's possible, but I'll hand over to the chief.
4 p.m.
Gen R.J. Hillier Chief of the Defence Staff, Department of National Defence
Madam, what I would say is that we establish the stability and the security required in the area so humanitarian assistance can be delivered to people who so desperately need it. We can't do that without helping the Afghan National Army, the Afghan National Police--their country's legitimate security institutions--to actually start taking on the security burden themselves.
You can't do that by standing around an aid deliverer and helping them move down a specific road. What you have to do is remove the Taliban threat to that region so that the aid communities, the aid organizations, can get to where the people live, do it with a relatively low risk, and be able to help them get their lives back together, rebuild their families, rebuild their communities, and become part of a sustainable province.
We do it directly, ourselves, immediately following an operation or close to where violence is occurring. So during Operation Medusa, for example, Canadian soldiers from the provincial reconstruction team were in the immediate vicinity of where the Taliban were attacking us. They were concentrated solely upon helping people in that area who had been driven from their homes by the Taliban attacks and by the Taliban occupation of that area. They were solely focused on making sure they had food to eat, water to drink, or an opportunity to move away from the area of violence or move back into their homes when that violence had subsided.
Parallel to that, CIDA has developed a longer-term program to make sustainable development a reality in a more secure area, and at the same time, numerous international agencies work in the area because some security has been provided. There is a cost to doing that, but from the military perspective, we believe the security really will cost what it costs. Without it, none of the humanitarian assistance will be delivered. The Taliban will control the area, they won't permit it to occur, and they certainly wouldn't permit it to occur if you were trying to deliver it to female adults or children.
4:05 p.m.
Conservative
4:05 p.m.
Bloc
Vivian Barbot Bloc Papineau, QC
We are told it is working and that there is humanitarian aid. I would like to know what humanitarian aid got through to each part of Afghanistan. That was my question.
4:05 p.m.
Conservative
4:05 p.m.
Chief of the Defence Staff, Department of National Defence
A Newfoundlander can't even say hello in 10 seconds.
4:05 p.m.
Chief of the Defence Staff, Department of National Defence
I'll leave it to the next questioner.
4:05 p.m.
Conservative
October 25th, 2006 / 4:05 p.m.
Conservative
Peter Goldring Conservative Edmonton East, AB
Gentlemen, Mr. Minister and General Hillier, I want to first of all congratulate you and the men and women who are serving over there. They certainly are doing a superb job, and they've gained international respect for the work they've been doing too. It's people like Corporal Grant Wagar, who's with the Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders, who's over there serving now. He's really on his third tour, although this is the first time in combat.
That leads me to a question that has been raised by the media lately too, about taking troops from other positions, whether from the air force or from other units of the army, and retraining them for military combat.
Going back to my own experience in the sixties, I was in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and Canada wasn't involved in Vietnam, but I sure wanted to go. At that time the Commonwealth had a process of transferring from one military to another. So it really is not that unusual to take people from certain other jobs and retrain them if they have a willingness to serve in other missions.
Could you comment on that, and whether that is a concern or whether that will satisfy some of the short-term shortages, and how that fits in with your overall strategy?
4:05 p.m.
Conservative
Gordon O'Connor Conservative Carleton—Mississippi Mills, ON
I think I gave the outlines of it in Parliament, but I'm going to ask the chief to explain the concept in detail.
4:05 p.m.
Chief of the Defence Staff, Department of National Defence
Sir, there's been a lot of discussion around what we are trying to do, which is essentially to use 100% of the Canadian Forces to do 100% of our deployed missions, specifically focused on the one in Afghanistan because that's where most of our deployed people are. The deployed missions are the ones with the most stress, the most demand on our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and airwomen and their families. The intent is first of all to have a better tasking mechanism across the Canadian Forces. In the past ten years we've probably used a total of 40% of our Canadian Forces to do 100% of those missions.
We've not been as effective as we need to be at reaching right across. When we need logistics people, or military policemen and women, or intelligence officers, or signallers, or all the supporting enabling trades, we need to reach right across the Canadian Forces and use them for operations also. It has always been the same people in the combat units who have carried the burden, and what we want to do is be much more effective and much fairer in using everybody.
We want, first of all, to use them in their primary roles, and that's a key part right there. So we're reaching right across the Canadian Forces. In part, we can't do that because during some of the financial cuts that we've taken in the past, which were pretty brutal to us.... For example, we took a lot of money out of our posting budgets, hundreds of millions of dollars. We posted people to combat units, posted people to headquarters or training schools, and we thought it would be a good thing that they would stay there longer than in the past. It was good stability for their families, good stability for them. Over ten years, we've realized that the negative implications of that are enormous. That is to say, those folks posted in combat units carry all those deployed burdens on their shoulders, and we don't have the money to facilitate the exchange of people, put the lessons learned from the operations into training schools, take the people who have had training school deployments or employments and put them into our combat units. That's only part of it.
Secondly, we're looking at a way to take care of those precious infantry men and women, combat engineers, gunners from the artillery, and of course I would be remiss if I didn't say the crewmen and crew women from the Armoured Corps, who really are at the point of contact with the Taliban. What we want to do is use everyone we have across the Canadian Forces to fill out the units, so we don't have to ask people to go back more than once unless it really is an urgent need.
In other words, sir, we look at taking them out of National Defence Headquarters, taking them out of other headquarters, other training establishments, and putting them back into the combat units and backfilling in those spots where we absolutely need to--we'd actually like to slice a little bit off there--with navy or air force personnel to pick up some of that slack. We look at our recruiting pool, how quickly we are recruiting people for those combat trades, and are there people in the recruiting system right now that we could, for a two-year period, put into some of that combat training to train them completely as infantry men or women and use them for a period of time before they go on to where they want to go as a primary MOC. We're using reserves and offering men and women in the reserves, many of whom you mentioned--that's the example you mentioned, sir, from the regiment in your area--who desperately want to go on this mission because they believe in it, giving them a better opportunity to sign up for a longer-term contract, or do a very quick component transfer into the regular force.
In short, we're doing a plethora of things. I've only named probably about 5% of that. We're looking at how we share the burden completely across the Canadian Forces, so that no one man or woman has to carry an inordinate amount of it on their shoulders.
4:10 p.m.
Conservative
Gordon O'Connor Conservative Carleton—Mississippi Mills, ON
To confirm the main point that I made in Parliament, we're not planning to take sailors and airmen and make them infantry.
4:10 p.m.
Chief of the Defence Staff, Department of National Defence
No, sir. What we would do, for example, is take a bunch of sailors and train them to run our convoys--first, to run the convoys in a benign scenario, and then so they can handle them in a more high-risk scenario, and take some of that load off some of the combat armed soldiers we've had doing that job, which is not their primary responsibility, and put those back into the combat units. That kind of demand, first of all, is very exciting to the non-combat, non-army folks around the Canadian Forces.
4:10 p.m.
Conservative
Peter Goldring Conservative Edmonton East, AB
But it's still primarily because of the shortage of capacity to be able to do otherwise in the military over the years. It's not an unusual thing to do in the short term.
4:10 p.m.
Chief of the Defence Staff, Department of National Defence
We've done it in our history. We've done it numerous times, including recently for the Balkans, and it is because we have not manned our units to the full status over these past years.
4:10 p.m.
Conservative
Peter Goldring Conservative Edmonton East, AB
I have a question in another area too--and it might be difficult for you to comment on but I would like you to try. We've been working on a study of governance and democracy development. Seeing that the elections have been fairly recent in Afghanistan, have you detected following the elections...? You would have been interacting with some of the political people who have been elected in the specific provinces and areas. Would you feel that there is a role there for continuing government assistance to help develop their political parties from a community level, through more of an understanding on how best they can serve?
I would think that after this number of years of not having a democratic government, there's a whole learning process of not only the politicians themselves but also the people they serve, and indeed the people themselves, to understand what their politicians can do. Can you see a role there that would help in the future governance of Afghanistan?
4:10 p.m.
Conservative
Gordon O'Connor Conservative Carleton—Mississippi Mills, ON
I don't think there's a role for DND. That's not DND's function. You'd perhaps have to speak to people at external affairs or some other part of the government.
The only area in which DND gets loosely into what you would call governance is the strategic advisory team that's in Kabul. There are about 15 officers in Kabul who are advisers to the president. They assist in organizational matters in the government. One of the big challenges the Karzai government has is that they have next to no civil service. As you know, ministers can make decisions, but if they have no civil service to implement the decisions, then nothing happens at the other end. That's a challenge for them.
I'll ask the chief to speak further on our strategic advisory team and explain what they do.
4:10 p.m.
Chief of the Defence Staff, Department of National Defence
Sir, the basis for your question is absolutely logical and sound. The ability of President Karzai or his key ministers, extraordinary leaders all of them, to turn their visions for their country, through policy, into a plan, and to implement that plan with a civil service, is extremely low. The Taliban either killed all those bureaucrats or drove them out of their country. They're living in the United States or Canada or western Europe.
So any help they can get at all is incredibly valuable. It allows their capacity to be built to actually govern effectively their country better than they can do now.
They have numerous agencies helping, including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank Group, the Asian Development Fund, and the United States Agency for International Development. We have put in a small strategic advisory team, as the minister referred to, composed of about 15 military officers who are simply planners. We have the advantage, I believe, of being the only institution in our country that spends a long time in training, educating, and developing people to plan--from the strategic right down to the tactical in terms of how to take a vision and bring it down to implementation.
They are working for the president's chief of staff and his policy action group, under the over-watch of our ambassador there, to actually help those people turn their vision through a process, just through a process, into something that they actually get an effect from. They're actually walking through how they plan and set up something to deliver their vision, and articulate it clearly in that plan, to put money against it and then deliver it.
We have had incredible feedback on that plan from the Afghan government, from President Karzai himself, with whom I've discussed this numerous times when I was the commander there, and from our NATO allies, who say it's one of the most novel things they've seen, perhaps the most valuable thing they've seen, in the last couple of years in that mission.
So we think we've made a small impact there with planners who simply help plan.
4:15 p.m.
Conservative
4:15 p.m.
NDP
Alexa McDonough NDP Halifax, NS
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, gentlemen, for being before the committee today. I want to say at the outset that I was extremely impressed, when I had the brief opportunity to visit Kandahar and Kabul, with the professionalism, the competence, and the courage of our troops there, as well as by the people I met in Kabul who were doing important strategic task force work.
Having said that, I have a lot of concerns. My time is very brief, so very quickly, before I go to the question of the really shocking and worrisome reports of children starving literally within a few miles of the Kandahar base, and trying to reconcile that with your claim, Mr. Minister, that humanitarian aid and reconstruction are at the core of this mission in Kandahar, I want to go to another point.
I'd like to give you the opportunity, I guess for the benefit of the committee, to clear up some confusion created by your testimony last week before the defence committee. There you were perhaps unable to remember, but I'd like to bring to your attention and ask you to comment on some briefing notes supplied to you--I'm sure they're voluminous--signed by General Hillier, to the effect that they're in fact an addition to the obvious capacity being deployed in Afghanistan.
I'm now quoting directly from those briefing notes: “The second task force that includes approximately 1,200 personnel and forms the basis for contingency planning for other possible missions the Government may wish to consider.” Before the defence committee, Mr. Minister, you indicated that you were simply not aware of that. I believe you indicated, General Hillier, that no such troops in fact existed. I wonder if you could reconcile the contradiction here.