With pleasure. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. And thanks to all of you committee members for inviting us to appear before you today.
The mission in Afghanistan is one that has a high profile in Canada, that is dear to the hearts of Canadians because so many resources and so many principles are on the line. But it's also one in which the interests and the capabilities of some of the world's principal international organizations are heavily engaged.
It's a real pleasure to be able to appear before you with my colleague James Appathurai—another Canadian, representing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—and in my capacity representing the United Nations, which has a long and proud history in Afghanistan. It dates back to the late 1940s, when some of the very first United Nations programs, particularly for specialized agencies, were rolled out in Afghanistan.
I would argue—and I'll say more about the UN role in Afghanistan later—that the UN's role in the world and its effectiveness in the world as an agent of change, as a network supporting the project of nation building in Afghanistan, is very much being tested--being put to the test, and in many cases, I will argue on behalf of my United Nations colleagues, passing the test.
But obviously the United Nations is only as good as its constituent members. The same goes for NATO. Canada, with its long history of heavy involvement both in framing United Nations mandates and in helping to achieve results for the United Nations, has a very key role to play. The sorts of investments that were announced yesterday by the government in reconstruction, in development, and in capacity building are exactly the sorts of commitments that the United Nations needs from its key member states in order to deliver for Afghans and to deliver for the international community in Afghanistan today.
So I'd like to start by congratulating Canada, and here I mean not just the Canadian government but Canadian society, for its substantial and growing commitment to one of the great international causes of our time: the development and rebuilding of Afghanistan after a quarter-century of conflict.
I speak of Canada as a society because you are there in all of your guises. Canada's government agencies responsible for international policy are there obviously in a big way, but so are Canadian NGOs, so are Canadian experts, so are Canadian private sector companies, and so are Canadian families. So is Canadian civil society, which has strong connections, obviously, to Afghanistan, rebuilding shattered lives, helping to rebuild communities, helping to relaunch a process of development, peace building, and institutional renewal in Afghanistan today.
It's a very proud occasion for me as a Canadian to be able to report to all of you that this role within the United Nations family, for Canada and for Canadians, remains extremely prominent and extremely well appreciated at all levels in Afghanistan as a society.
This was never simply a mission to disrupt terrorist bases. It has become a key proving ground for the challenge of nation building, a test of the will of the international community both to support poverty reduction and to back the emergence of new institutions in a country that quite frankly, after 25 years of acute conflict, richly deserved both.
It's important to start out by observing that our achievements in Afghanistan to date are already substantial. In 2001, access to health care was negligible--in some parts of the country non-existent. Today, over 85% of the population has access to a basic package of health care services.
The economy of Afghanistan amounted in 2002 to approximately $3.4 billion U.S. That's the estimate from international financial institutions of the scale of the legitimate economy, the non-poppy economy, in 2002. In 2006 it was estimated at $7.9 billion U.S. In other words, the legitimate economy has more than doubled in size in only five years. That growth has actually outpaced the growth of the illegal economy, which is nevertheless very worrying and a question to which we should return during this discussion.
Per capita income in Afghanistan was only $150 U.S. per year in 2002. That's the best estimate. Today it stands well above $300 U.S. Trade with neighbouring Pakistan and Iran has burgeoned.
Let's take just the case of Pakistan. Under the Taliban, in the final year of record keeping, bilateral trade between Pakistan and Afghanistan was $25 million. That's a paltry sum for countries that have a border of over 2,000 kilometres. Today the total trade between the two countries, for 2006, stands at over $1.5 billion, and probably in 2007 it will reach well over $2 billion, or even $2.5 billion.
The Afghan currency has been reformed and remains stable. Inflation is low. The Afghan budget is balanced, and revenues have grown by over 30% in each of the past three years. Thousands of schools have been built or reopened, placing 5.4 million children in education, which is a historic high for the country and, above all, a historic and internationally important record for the number of girls in school in Afghanistan today.
Afghanistan has experienced the most ambitious road building period of its history. New transmission lines are now under construction. They will bring power to Kabul in the necessary quantities by 2008 and to the main cities of southern Afghanistan, including Kandahar, by 2009.
The poverty that remains such an abject barrier to advancement for so many Afghans often blinds us to the scale of this progress. It is, to our mind, one of the minor tragedies of the Afghan story to date that this forward movement, these substantial achievements, improvements to the lives of Afghans, are under-recognized in the outside world and under-recognized, quite frankly, in the constituencies that deserve to know that their intervention has made a difference most of all.
That includes, obviously, Canadian public opinion, where, quite frankly, the story has not been told. The reports of your committee, of the government, helped to tell the story. Media, quite frankly, have not helped us as much as we would like. This is a continuing challenge that we could perhaps discuss in the course of today's session.
It's not everyone who chooses to celebrate the fact that they now have $30 per month rather than $10 per month to live on. But this is, for Afghans, a fact of life. They are poor, but they have two or three times the resources, in many cases, that they had four or five years ago, and for them it is a cause for celebration. This advancement, this improvement, after 25 years of deterioration is a sign that things are changing.
No one is satisfied. No one in Afghanistan will tell you they have received enough. No one will tell you that all of the assistance or even most of the assistance has been effective. We're still learning. But we have had an impact and we do have results to show.
For Afghan men and women these numbers count. They have created and maintained a level of hope within the Afghan population, and this is one of the essential ingredients in our involvement. They are proof that peace and a better life are truly possible for Afghans, and it is our hope that we will be able to continue improving their lives, in cooperation with the international community.
Nonetheless, there are still groups intent on proving that the end to this conflict is not yet in sight. In 2001, the Taliban regime was not dismantled; it was simply pushed back beyond Afghanistan's borders and somewhat forgotten until 2002-03.
In the intervening five years, the Taliban have recovered and to some extent reconstituted themselves. They have found new funding sources and reconnected with old allies.
Last year in southern Afghanistan, with a transition under way from U.S. to NATO leadership, the Taliban set out to challenge government authority in Kandahar. It set out to show that Afghanistan's clocks were once again turning back to 1999--or even to 1994, the first year the Taliban phenomenon really became known in Afghanistan--to a time when girls were barred from school; when summary justice was meted out across Afghanistan with blatant disregard for due process and human rights; when, quite frankly, terrorists took charge of this very important country and extended their influence over the region of South Asia and the whole world.
In September 2006, the response of the international community to this threat was Operation Medusa, a conventional military response to a stubborn enemy of peace. It was the first brigade-level combat in NATO history. It was a battle waged and won primarily by Canadians, with the strong support of allies and the sanction of the United Nations Security Council.
Medusa changed the insurgent landscape in southern Afghanistan. It restored hope. It rallied the tribes. It devastated Taliban morale. In the end, it brought roads, jobs, and rural development projects to Panjwai and Zherai districts, which at this time last year were starting to become sanctuaries for the Taliban and places from which they were able to operate in other parts of the country. In short, Medusa allowed the Government of Afghanistan to regain the advantage in its deadly contest of wills with the resurgent Taliban.
In the month of December in Kandahar province, President Karzai spent a total of five days, the longest period since he took office. His rural development minister visited battle-affected communities. In the intervening weeks, the Afghan national director of security made inroads against suicide bombing facilitation networks in Kandahar, Khowst, and Kabul. Also in December, Mullah Akhtar Usmani, the number three leader of the Taliban, was killed in a NATO-led operation.
So Medusa has been a pivotal moment in the recent history of security in Afghanistan and in the south. Those who stood behind Afghanistan in those operations, behind Afghan National Army soldiers and behind the Afghan government, deserve an enormous amount of credit for showing a tough enemy that NATO means business, that security will be brought to southern Afghanistan whatever the cost, and that our commitment across the board, from the United Nations to NATO to member states, remains extremely strong.
Security is not the whole story. The success of operations like Medusa has cleared the way for a development process that is very much on track. The Afghanistan Compact, which was agreed to in London during January and early February 2006, is a unique framework for organizing the effort of 60 nations, all the principal international financial institutions, all the principal organizations, in support of a nation building process. The benchmarks and the objectives outlined in that Afghanistan Compact have been shown over the past year to be the right ones, to be ones worthy of being pursued, to be emblematic of the nation building project that everyone is trying to achieve in Afghanistan.
It is no accident that many of those involved in post-conflict situations in other parts of the world have sought to emulate the Afghanistan Compact to bring together, to orchestrate, international efforts--in Haiti, in Iraq, in other parts of the world--on the same sorts of principles as we are now trying to observe and to implement in Afghanistan.
The United Nations remains at the heart of this effort. There are upwards of 5,000 UN personnel in Afghanistan. This is a fact that is little known in Canada and the outside world, where the focus tends to be on NATO, on the military mission. But these are civilians, and they are part of the largest political mission the United Nations has. It's also an integrated mission, where the expertise of over 20 UN agencies, programs, and funds is brought to bear on the challenges of Afghans, particularly in rural communities, where most Afghans live on a daily basis.
The United Nations has delivered up to one-fifth of all the assistance that has gone to Afghanistan in the past five years. We have overseen the holding of elections. We have implemented rural development projects. We have implemented, even in the conditions of insurgency this year, inoculation programs for the most devastating diseases that have affected children in Afghanistan, even in the war-affected south.
These achievements have not come without cost. Like all of those who work in Afghanistan today, United Nations staff face security risks. But those risks are judged by all of us to be worth taking, given the results we are able to achieve, given the presence across the country, including in Kandahar and neighbouring provinces, that the UN and other civilian agencies are able to maintain and indeed strengthen now, at the beginning of 2007, as a result of the military success in 2006 that we were all so pleased to observe.
There remain enormous challenges in Afghanistan today. Security is foremost among them, and we should spend the necessary time in this discussion literally going over the shape of that challenge and what the possible solutions are today.
The development challenge remains enormous. Despite a doubling of GDP, Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries in the world. It is really surpassed in the acuteness of its poverty only by a few countries in Africa.
Governance, however, above and beyond the security and development challenge, will be the key to unlocking success in the future. Institutions have been built in Kabul. Ministries are functioning effectively at central level, at least in one out of three government institutions, I would say by a rough reckoning, but they are not always functioning at sub-national level, at provincial level, or at district level. This must be a major focus of international engagement if we are to succeed in this great project.
Establishing the rule of law is another major overriding priority for 2007. This goes to the heart of the reform now taking place in the ministry of interior, but it also has to engage much larger, more substantial forms of support for the attorney general's office and for the court system in Afghanistan. We hope Canada and other nations, with the sorts of commitments announced yesterday, will be part of shaping that agenda. That agenda obviously is deeply related to the challenge of counter-narcotics. The drug industry is the greatest illustration there still is today of the weakness and fragility of the Afghanistan state, of the legacy of failed statehood in Afghanistan, and of the incompleteness of our achievement to date.
Mr. Chair, I will leave my opening remarks there and hand it over to my colleague, but I look forward to your questions.
