Foreign Affairs Committee on March 22nd, 2007

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Welcome.

This is meeting 45 of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, Tuesday, March 22. In the first hour we're going to continue our study here, and in our second hour we're going to look at a report.

Today, from Queen's University, we have Douglas Bland, chair of the defence management study program, School of Policy Studies. Mr. Bland is a lieutenant colonel in the Canadian armed forces and has served extensively in Europe and in Canada. He is an associate professor at Queen's University and an author and co-author of numerous books and publications commenting on the military establishment. His research is concentrated in the field of defence policy-making and management at national and international levels, the organization and functioning of defence ministries, and civil military relations.

Appearing to testify before us also, as an individual, is Walter Dorn, professor until his sabbatical in 2006. He served as co-chair of the Canadian Forces College department of security studies. He has a long history of economics in the Royal Military College. He's with the department of politics and economics at the Royal Military College and a faculty member of the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre. He is a scientist by training whose doctoral research was aimed at chemical sensing for arms control.

I think we're going to have an interesting morning. We welcome you both.

I'm not certain if you've appeared before this committee before. We will give you time for opening comments, usually 10 or 15 minutes, and then we'll go into the first round of questioning. The questions will be seven minutes each.

Welcome.

[Dr. Douglas Bland, Chair, Defence Management Studies Program, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Chair and members, for the invitation to be here. I hope I can make a positive contribution to your deliberations.

I have just a few comments to make, and then I'll be at your disposal. I always liked the question period better than the presentation period.

I've been asked and have participated in numerous public debates about our operations in Afghanistan. One of the questions, a key question, people ask is whether the Canadian deployment to Afghanistan is the right policy for Canada. Let me give you reasons why I think it is.

First, the mission supports four inseparable long-standing objectives of Canadian foreign policy, and these are: first, to keep the defence of Canada and Canadians as far away from our shores as possible; second, to support the United Nations and especially support the authority of the Security Council; third, to maintain NATO and the NATO alliance with like-minded nations, which means, to me, strengthening the alliance of liberal democracies, which is key to our security interests; and, most critically of all, to support the reasonable security interests of the United States in our own interests, by which I mean that America is the source of our economic well-being and our national security.

Let me address one other question that's often raised directly or indirectly at these public meetings, and that is whether we should be doing something other than fighting the Taliban, or--and it's a second or third question, I guess--whether we should be doing something else somewhere else. My answer is this: Canada's diplomatic foreign assistance and military operations today in Afghanistan are fully consistent with Canada's policies and actions in these policy areas over most of Canada's history. Those who believe or choose to believe otherwise ought to heed I think the considered opinion of two prominent Canadians who were there at the birth of the United Nations and of NATO and who set out the fundamental parameters for Canada's foreign policy in the early period, 1947 to 1950.

Paul Martin Sr., then Minister of External Affairs, in remarks in 1964 criticizing the continued decline of Canada's military capabilities and the resulting loss of influence in international affairs generally and in the United Nations in particular, recalled that in the 1950s:

...many nations had an appetite for power without teeth, but Canada had developed both the appetite and the teeth for a new international role.

Martin's cabinet colleague, Brooke Claxton, Minister of National Defence from 1947 to 1956, in an address to Parliament shortly after the end of the Second World War, characterized Canada's participation in that great war as “the war of liberation” fought together with people who had the “will to be free”. Later in that address he provided the principle that guided Canada's international commitments, or that he hoped would guide Canada's international commitments, in the post-Second World War era. We will maintain, he said, a willingness “to carry out any undertakings which by our own voluntary act we may assume in cooperation with friendly nations or under any effective”--and he emphasized “effective”--“plan of collective action under the united nations.” What that principle meant, to paraphrase Mackenzie King, was commitments, if necessary, but not necessary commitments.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Excuse me, can I just stop you for one moment?

Madame Lalonde, is there no French translation?

[Francine Lalonde, Bloc, La Pointe-de-l'Île, QC]

There was no interpretation for a moment. I do not know if it is a problem with the sound system.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

All right. Do you have it now? Can we have some French?

[Francine Lalonde, Bloc, La Pointe-de-l'Île, QC]

I am getting the interpretation now.

However, I lost you there for a minute.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

All right.

Please continue. Sorry about that.

[Dr. Douglas Bland]

What Brooke Claxton was talking about was--to again look to Mackenzie King and that period--that Parliament would decide what would be done in matters of commitments that Canada would make. We were not under any obligation--NATO was hardly formed at that time--and we certainly had no obligation to any idea, such as the idea of the United Nations and collective security. We were not robots in the international arena.

These are the two great traditions of Canadian foreign policy--at least they were when we had the appetite for a significant international role and when we were quick to come to the aid and accept the sacrifices of wars of liberation fought by people with a will to be free. In Afghanistan today, as was the case from 1939 to 1945, young Canadians are engaged in a war of liberation in alliance with and at the request of people who have continuously demonstrated a will to be free. What efforts and sacrifices could be more in accord with Canada's defence and foreign policy traditions?

My worry today, however, is that except for a small cadre of Canadians who are actually serving in the Canadian Forces or in the foreign service or in government or non-governmental humanitarian agencies, Canadians don't have much stomach for an international role much beyond rhetoric, even when we're fighting alongside allies to aid people who wish to be free. If you think otherwise, look at who serves and at the appalling state of the Canadian armed forces--a consequence of government decisions over many years not to properly fund Canada's military capabilities. That decision is reflected by some politicians across the political spectrum who say we are actually not funding armed forces, for instance, because that's what Canadians think is proper.

My point today is that if we have an appetite for an international role, and if we believe that it is in our own interest to aid others who are struggling for freedom and liberal democracy, then we should stand up and provide ourselves with the means, or, in Paul Martin's words, with the teeth to match our appetite or at least part of our rhetoric. I'm not, however, at all confident that Canadians are aware of these traditions that I've mentioned, and I don't think they have much of an appetite for the international role Canada once played in the world.

Afghanistan, ladies and gentlemen, might be our last hurrah.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Bland.

Mr. Dorn.

[Dr. Walter Dorn, Professor and Co-Chair, Department of Security Studies, Canadian Forces College, As an Individual]

Mr. Chairman, I thank you for having invited me to present my ideas to the committee.

My friend and colleague, Douglas Bland, and myself have great respect for each other, but our approaches are different.

I will offer you a constructively critical perspective. When I teach officers at the Canadian Forces College, I take this approach, believing that our soldiers should learn to view their work from differing and critical perspectives, weighing the pros and cons of different strategies.

During training, soldiers should learn to think alike. During education, they should learn how to think differently. Unity and diversity--or diversity and unity--is a key principle of our participatory democracy, as you well know here in Parliament.

My research and experience is focused on UN peacekeeping and peace operations, so I will compare our actions in Kandahar and Kabul and our peacekeeping missions, some of which I have experienced first-hand.

The first consequence of our deployment in Afghanistan is that Canada is currently at the historic low in its UN peacekeeping contribution. Ironically, this comes at a time when UN peacekeeping is at a historic high. We currently deploy merely 55 soldiers under the UN blue flag, at a time when the UN has over 70,000 soldiers in the field. The police forces of Canada contribute 50% more than the Canadian Forces. I have drawn this out in graph 1, showing the rank of Canada over the years from 1991, when we were the number one peacekeeper, through the 1990s, when we were in the top 10, to the fall to our low of 59th place in the world today in peacekeeping.

We have often ranked number one since Pearson proposed the first peacekeeping force 60 years ago, a concept that has thrived and evolved internationally as he hoped it would. We have begun a large slide. One of the largest drops--to one-quarter strength--occurred one year ago almost to this day, when we closed our mission in the Golan Heights: 190 logistic specialists left the UN mission, largely because of the need in Kandahar, and we have provided the UN with nothing remotely comparable.

I will point out graph 4, which shows our contributions of troops, observers, and police over the last few years. That large decline in March of last year is the decline I'm currently speaking about.

It is clear that one of the casualties of our large Afghanistan deployment is our contribution to UN peacekeeping, something that Brooke Claxton and Lester Pearson and Paul Martin Sr., whom we've heard reference to, were very much supporting, trying to get Canada to do more. Our contribution is falling not only in the field but also at UN headquarters, which has to supervise over 100,000 military and civilian personnel in the field.

There is not a single Canadian officer serving in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, where I did my sabbatical last year. The department has 70 officers in its military division and not a single Canadian.

The UN is currently experiencing a surge in demand for its peacekeeping services. This I've illustrated in graph 5, which shows you the number of uniformed personnel in the field since 1991. You'll see the surge now reaching a record high of around 80,000 military police in the field.

The UN has stopped coming to Canada for contributions, knowing that the answer will undoubtedly be no, with a finger pointing to Afghanistan. This is doubly tragic because robust peacekeeping, which the UN has evolved over many decades, points the way to a long-term solution in Afghanistan. The time-honoured and tested principles of peacekeeping have led to the resolution of many seemingly intractable conflicts, including intrastate conflicts in Cambodia, Mozambique, Liberia, Sierra Leone, the former Yugoslavia, and East Timor. Former combatants finally relinquished the simplistic labels of “my enemy” or “the terrorist” to adopt a peace agreement, the only thing a lasting peace can be based upon, especially in internal conflicts.

When peacekeeping has deviated from its three central principles, as it did in Somalia in 1993, it has resulted in disaster. The three central principles of peacekeeping are impartiality, consent, and minimum use of force as a last resort.

Now let's see how these principles apply to Kandahar today.

First is impartiality. Impartiality doesn't exist in Kandahar. We have a declared enemy given to us by President George Bush, when he said in September 2001 that the U.S. would make no distinction between the terrorists and those who harboured them. At the time, I recognized this as a recipe for an expanding and endless war. Instead of isolating al-Qaeda, President Bush widened the war to the country's regime, giving us the first regime change in the global war on terror.

The U.S. has not sought and did not receive UN authorization for its war on terror or the operation designed to carry out this war, Operation Enduring Freedom.

Unlike ISAF, OEF has no UN sanction. Canada entered Kandahar under the banner of OEF. From that moment on, we could not be labelled as impartial, objective, or having the population's interest foremost in mind. We have become increasingly identified with the global perception of the U.S. around the world, as seeking to find and defeat enemies in its national interest. We have become one of the conflicting parties, and we remain so today even though we are currently deployed under NATO.

The second item is consent. There is no peace agreement. We do not have consent of the main parties to the conflict for our deployment in Kandahar. Even the consent of the local population is in doubt. We do have the consent of the Government of Afghanistan, though many inhabitants see President Karzai as a leader hand-picked by the United States and legitimized by an election in which they did not vote.

Without winning the hearts and minds of the locals, you can never win the war or the peace, nor obtain their consent to your presence. Canada has for decades urged parties in vicious conflicts around the world the come to the peace table, but we can't seem to do it ourselves.

Third is minimum use of force as a last resort. We are clearly on the offensive in Kandahar. The posture is not one of self-defence or protection of civilians. Rather, it is characterized by search-and-destroy missions and large-scale offensives in which civilians are all too often unfortunate casualties. We seem to be producing as many enemies as we are killing, as angry brothers, sons, clan members, and other displaced people fill the ranks of the fallen. We, too, are losing our young and courageous, namely 45 soldiers and one diplomat dead in the fields of Afghanistan.

We have lost more soldiers in Afghanistan during our deployment there than in any UN operation over a period of 60 years. This was not because Canada was risk-averse in peacekeeping. As you can see from the last page of the table, we still rank as number two in the level of fatalities in the history of UN peacekeeping. But the stance the Canadian Forces chose in Kandahar—and this was a conscious choice of its leadership, to choose this region and the current posture and to work under Operation Enduring Freedom and then NATO—has meant that to many we appear as aggressors, not defenders.

We deviate from these three principles of peacekeeping—impartiality, consent, and minimum use of force—at our peril. What is the alternative? There is no use criticizing unless we have a better way. Robust peacekeeping of the type the UN has practised so successfully in recent years is the better way. In the eastern Congo, where I recently was during my sabbatical, and in Sierra Leone and Liberia, this approach has given us useful lessons: one, serve the local population first and foremost, not only to win hearts and minds to our cause, but to make sure their interests become our common cause; two, narrow the list of spoilers of the peace process, rather than broadening it; three, negotiate for peace and always give a way out to those committing violence, except for those who have committed the most egregious crimes, which should be referred to the International Criminal Court or to a special tribunal under due process; and four, do not lump together all those who oppose the international presence.

In Afghanistan, this means recognizing that not all those who oppose the Canadian presence are Taliban terrorists. There are many former mujahedeen from various clans that the west once supported during the war against the Soviet invaders. They are motivated by the defence of their country, not love of the Taliban. They long to live and die like the heroes of their folklore, whether it be heroes from the time of the British colonizers or Soviet occupiers. They are willing to sacrifice themselves for their tribe or country.

Of course, to use another Mackenzian turn of phrase, it's combat if necessary, but not necessarily combat.

The current model of the Canadian Forces, originating from U.S. Marine Corps General Charles Krulak, is a three-block war concept. In the first block, Canada will engage in a high-intensity fight against the armies of failing states, to use the words from a recent army poster. The three-block war, let me be clear, is unworkable and fatally flawed, because you cannot simultaneously fight offensive high-intensity combat and carry out effective humanitarian and reconstruction tasks. This is the case in Kandahar. In Kabul, we did have a working peacekeeping model.

The UN uses force as a last resort when all negotiations and warnings have failed. I saw this in the eastern Congo in November 2006 when the renegade 81st and 83rd Congolese brigades tried to capture the city of Goma. The UN gave a firm order to these forces to halt in Saké. When this warning was not heeded, the UN and Congolese government forces stopped the advance using advanced helicopter gunships flown by India.

NATO has not even started talking or negotiating with its opponents in Kandahar, or anywhere in Afghanistan, to my knowledge.

The UN has tried to create a working model for a broad-based central government of national unity. This is an approach that is sometimes called the ink-blot approach: you get a model that's working and spread out according to the consent of local people, rather than impose yourself on their lives. This alternative model suggests that you spread out only when you can succeed. As hearts and minds are won, people will flock to the safety and security of protected areas, to places where their voices are heard, where their rights are respected--especially the right to peace--and where their votes are permitted. We have to build a capacity for dependency and unity, not animosity. This is what is working in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and it seems to me to be the only model that can work in the long term in Afghanistan.

Some may dismiss the UN's 60 years of peacekeeping as outdated and outmoded, and my colleague has certainly done that in the past. But today's operations are in fact the result of a steady evolution of learning from past lessons on the underuse and overuse of force. A balance has finally been achieved in many UN operations, but in the mountains of Afghanistan and on the plains, we seem to be re-learning these lessons the hard way.

I've looked at it as hawk, dove, and owl approaches. The first two are flawed. The hawk approach is, in my mind, too aggressive and will not establish long-term stability or peace. The dove approach--calling for an immediate withdrawal--is not strong enough to deal with the messy problems in harsh war zones. The owl approach is the only one that can show the wisdom to know when and where to engage. We should move to this owl approach, or the ink-blot model, where we spread out only when the time is right.

Furthermore, as the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Honourable Peter MacKay, said to you two days ago, we seek to restore Canada's leadership in the world. Then we should start where we are able and universally recognized to provide solid leadership. Of course, we should still make substantial contributions to NATO and NORAD, but if there is an activity where we stand out in the eyes of the world, it is in peacekeeping. We need not compete with South Asian nations for boots on the ground. We should be innovative, using our specialized expertise and equipment to make UN peacekeeping more effective and the world safer. We have the technology and skilled personnel that are so badly needed in UN peacekeeping today. With UN peacekeeping booming, it is the place to be. It is the model to use.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you.

We will go into the first round of questioning.

We'll start with Mr. Eyking.

[Mark Eyking, Liberal, Sydney—Victoria, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I'd like to thank the two guests for coming here this morning.

There's no doubt the Afghanistan situation is one of the biggest challenges we're facing as a country. If we're going to be a meaningful NATO member, we know that we have to participate substantially in Afghanistan, because that is the major role NATO is facing right now. But our relationship with NATO in Afghanistan is going through quite a test, and as some of you mentioned already, we hear statements that in Afghanistan we seem to be in one of the toughest regions. We're putting a lot of military there and not enough aid, compared to what some of the other countries are doing. There's no definite exit strategy for us, and that doesn't seem to be communicated between us and NATO.

The other thing is, regarding the way NATO is handling the poppy farmers in Afghanistan, the Senlis Council has said we should be taking a totally different approach to poppy eradication. They've come up with some fairly good, constructive ideas. Especially because Europe is using over half of the narcotics that are coming out of Afghanistan--illegal narcotics--European countries should be going in there, buying the crop, and using it for prescribed drugs. They say that would go a long way to getting some sort of respect from the people in the area, instead of our going in and damaging the crops.

I have three questions. One, should we be changing our role in Afghanistan? Two, should we be clear with NATO on our long-term commitment? And three, should Europeans be taking this poppy situation more seriously and probably taking a different strategy?

I'll just open that up to whoever wants to answer.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Mr. Bland.

[Dr. Douglas Bland]

My colleague and I always have interesting discussions about peacekeeping. I think it's a great operation.

I spent a lot of my life in Canada's largest, oldest, and most successful peacekeeping operation, and it was called NATO. It liberated more countries and more people than all the other operations the UN ever imagined, and it kept us safe. But we can talk about that at another time.

I'm a little surprised that Dr. Dorn would be praising the Taliban as a liberating and helpful Boy Scout organization in Afghanistan.

[Dr. Walter Dorn]

Don't put words in my mouth.

[Dr. Douglas Bland]

They are hardly the people to hold up to the Afghan people. It's why the Afghan government invited Canadians to make war on these criminal elements in their society.

Finally, when we talk about peacekeeping as not being warfare, the Congo exercise was a very good example of the fact that peacekeeping is another form of warfare or a different type of tactic. When the blue flag didn't work in the Congo, the United Nations employed combat forces, as Walter said, with gunships, explosives, and ammunition, killing lots of people, including civilians, as they're doing in the other states.

But let's go back, if I may, to the questions.

I think the role of the Canadian Forces, the Canadian government, and other agencies in Afghanistan have been evolving for two reasons. It's entirely reasonable that the mission will evolve over time, as our missions in Korea, NATO, and Cyprus in the Middle East, and all over the place evolved over time, because circumstances have changed. As the circumstances change in Afghanistan, for better or worse, I expect our operations in all aspects will evolve differently.

On our commitment to NATO, I think it's a very good question. I delivered a presentation a few days ago in this city in which I said that I think it's time for us to rethink our NATO alliance, not the alliance itself or the treaty but our support to Europeans. The European Union has not been helpful to us, and it's not helpful to the situation of NATO commitments in places like Afghanistan and perhaps Darfur. I've been predicting for many years that our next big mission is Mozambique, or I should say Zimbabwe. We need to think about that.

On the poppy problem, over the last 10 years or more, I've been involved on the sidelines with Plan Colombia, which is the drug strategy designed by Latin Americans and supported by the United States to eradicate cocoa drugs, and so on, in that region. They've tried a number of interesting strategies. One is to substitute another crop. Two is to eradicate the crop. Three is to buy it out. There are more drugs flowing from that region to Europe and the United States than ever before or than there were 10 years ago. These strategies don't work because they're at the wrong end of the spectrum. By that I mean the poppy problem isn't a supply problem; it's a demand problem.

The crudest Afghan farmer understands basic economics. He knows if there is a demand for his crop, he'll grow the crop and make money. The demand for the crop comes from the United States, Russia, India, Canada, and all over Europe. If you want to stop the growing of the poppies, stop the use of heroin in the communities.

We could go through all the details, but if you ask an Afghan farmer to grow carrots and tell him you'll support the growing of carrots, he'll grow carrots, especially if you give him money. I don't want to compare it to Canadian supply agricultural policies, but he'll grow carrots and he'll grow poppies too. Why wouldn't he? He has a market for the crop.

Let's solve the demand problem.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Bland.

Madame Lalonde.

[Francine Lalonde, Bloc, La Pointe-de-l'Île, QC]

Thank you.

Thank you very much, both of you. I believe this is our first really fundamental debate on this matter, and it pleases me greatly.

Mr. Dorn, you are questioning NATO's strategy in Afghanistan. Canada cannot remain there with a different strategy. Are you not in fact questioning the “war against terrorism“ strategy?

My second question is aimed at determining if Canada's change in strategy is clearly linked to the arrival of General Hillier. The change in policy did not occur with the arrival of the Conservatives, but with that of General Hillier, who studied for three years in the United States. There is a military base in my riding, which is why I have some information. General Hillier transformed the army and brought about the adoption of the 3D formula, that I discussed back home, on the base. If you have a bit of time, I would also like you to speak to us a little bit about that. In my view, it is impossible for a soldier to invade people's homes and then come later on the same day to do diplomatic, defence and humanitarian aid work. I do not believe that these things are compatible. In fact, you are saying that the war we are waging at the present time is incompatible with humanitarian aid.

[Dr. Walter Dorn]

Thank you.

First of all, I find myself alarmed that my colleague to the left put words in my mouth. I certainly didn't describe the Taliban in the words he used. I made the point that not all fighters are Taliban and that it's simplistic to view this war as just a fight against the Taliban, the enemy. It's overly simplistic. We adopt that model to our peril.

Secondly, I challenge him when he says that NATO has statistically liberated more people than anybody else. I can count in my head over half a billion people in which UN operations, over 62 of them in the history of the world, have brought people to peace. You have to ask where NATO was actually deployed in areas that were subsequently liberated. I just don't believe, on either of those cases, they have a factual basis.

On the issues of contributing substantially to NATO, yes, absolutely, we have to contribute substantially to NATO, and we have to do so for the long term. I believe the answer is not that the NATO strategy is completely flawed, but the overly offensive approach used in southern Afghanistan is flawed. That is tied in with the global war on terror, as you say, because this is a strategy brought in. When we moved into Kandahar, the campaign plan was designed in the United States and authorized by Donald Rumsfeld. This was part of the GWOT, the global war on terrorism, Operation Enduring Freedom. So I think we came in on the wrong foot. We should have come in on a much more impartial, objective, consensual, and minimum use of force basis rather than on an offensive basis in which our motives are questioned.

General Hillier did bring the three-block war concept. He brought it from the United States, where, as you mentioned, he spent so many years, but he transformed it from something that was never meant to be, as many U.S. officers will tell me. The three-block war was meant to describe the dilemma in which the United States found themselves during their operation in Somalia, in which they were primarily there to help the people and they might find themselves in combat. So you had to deal with the dilemma where you were forced to do combat. That's necessarily combat, and in responding to the attack against you, all of a sudden, you are alienating some people. That's a completely different problem. We're going in and saying, “Your strategic goal is to commit combat”, and that's the combat if necessary but not necessarily combat approach. You only engage in combat as a last resort, with a minimum use of force.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Dorn.

Mr. Bland, do you want to respond to that?

[Dr. Douglas Bland]

We could have a debate about who liberated whom, but if you go to Spain and Bulgaria and Romania, all the eastern European countries, they're not only liberated, but they're liberal democracies.

[Dr. Walter Dorn]

A civil society.

[Dr. Douglas Bland]

One of the points that Walter makes that's important is that there are some—it depends on whose stats you look at—70,000 or 80,000 so-called peacekeepers around the world. And that's great. More power to them. It makes a lot of money for a lot of nations. That's how they pay their soldiers.

The thing is, if there are that many soldiers available, why do we need to be there? Lots of people seem to be doing this job. The other side of that coin is, of course, if Canadians want to be involved everywhere and have an appetite for international affairs, as Paul Martin Sr. said, then pony up the resources.

There's no reason in this country, where we have 32 million people, that we only have 60,000 people in the armed forces. It's ridiculous. We can make a much bigger contribution if we actually believe in things like responsibility to protect.

Why aren't we doing something in Darfur? Well, because the United Nations won't let anybody do anything in Darfur. The Security Council has voted against it. The mission in Afghanistan, on the other hand, was sanctioned twice by unanimous vote of the United Nations Security Council and as a United Nations peacekeeping mission, employing appropriate operational means—three D and the CDS.

The Liberal government that appointed General Hillier as the CDS did so, in my conversations with all the defence ministers of the time and with the Prime Minister of the time before he was Prime Minister, with their eyes wide open. They believed not in three D as a three-block war—and we shouldn't get confused about that—but they believed, as Canadians have always exercised, whether it was in the Second World War or the First World War or Korea or anywhere else, and in UN peacekeeping, that you need military operations, humanitarian operations, and diplomacy. We've always done that. It's nothing new.

The point is—and the story hasn't been written yet—how did we get to Kandahar? I'd just say this. We got there because we were late. You can make that argument. There were ample opportunities for the government of the day to deploy a provincial reconstruction team in the northern, peaceful parts of the country. The government dithered around, did nothing, then realized they couldn't pull out of Afghanistan. So they deployed a provincial reconstruction team into a dangerous area, and then we had to protect it, and we've been protecting that kind of operation ever since.

So there's a long story here. It's complicated, it's not simple, and it's not a choice between this abstract idea of collective security under the UN or some three-D thing from the United States war college. It's much more complicated than that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Bland.

Mr. Obhrai.

[Deepak Obhrai, Conservative, Calgary East, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll share my time with my colleague, Wajid Khan.

I want to make a comment. I don't need a response.

I've been to the Congo; I've seen the UN peacekeeping operations and their impact on everything, but I want to set the record straight. Walter said the Afghanistan mission was not a UN-sanctioned mission, if I'm to understand you correctly. I am sorry, it is a purely UN-sanctioned mission. That is why we are there, as you are. I know at one time we wanted to be with the UN, and the second time, when we didn't like it, we just ignored the UN. But I want to be on the record to say it is a UN-sanctioned mission.

WIth that, I'll hand over to my colleague.