Foreign Affairs Committee on March 22nd, 2007

[Wajid Khan, Conservative, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Gentlemen, welcome.

Mr. Bland, I've just come from Afghanistan. I know about the operation at Kajaki Dam. Is it a military operation? I think not. It is there to increase the power to the provinces. It is strictly a mission for development.

I also know there are three companies--a Canadian company, an American company, and an Indian company--who are prepared to invest $1.8 billion in a copper mine in Afghanistan. I'm also aware of the fact that after Operation Medusa in Kandahar, Canadians are handling up to 100 projects. Japan and Kuwait are building roads, Kandahar roads. When you control Kandahar, you control Afghanistan. That's a psychological factor. So there is a perfect example of military operations in Kandahar and the 100 projects being developed there.

At the same time, the expansion of government work, which could not leave Kabul for some time...now they're travelling with the strategic assistance team, with Colonel Dixon. The ministers and deputy ministers in Kabul are going to 17 provinces.

I would like to receive your comment, Mr. Bland. Is this purely a military mission? Is this a military plus development mission? I've seen many, many other examples of development in Afghanistan, such as Maharat, and all those places where they're training hundreds and hundreds of people, men and women, and providing them with jobs—$120 to $150 per month. The average wage used to be $10 a month, which is now $30, so four to five times more, sir.

I think this is a very good example. I know about Afghanistan. I don't want to go to the Congo. What would you say to that, Mr. Bland?

[Dr. Douglas Bland]

I think that's a fairly accurate description of what's been going on.

If we have time, Mr. Chair, I'll just reminisce for a minute. My father served in World War II in combat units in Italy, Normandy, and the Netherlands. He liked to tell stories, along with his chums at the Legion and so on in his older age, about air strike three-D operations. He didn't know that that's what he was talking about, but now we know that that's what he was talking about.

His combat unit, when it was in the Netherlands, for instance, and it was an artillery unit, would be at one moment firing their weapons at German emplacements far away and then they would be stopping and cooking up dinner and giving it to the local people. And in their spare time they were building schools, handing out candy, and doing all sorts of humanitarian operations. Soldiers do those kinds of things, and our soldiers do it particularly well all over the world. It is natural that they would be doing this kind of thing.

If you read the report from the Somalia inquiry, you will see that the soldiers there from the Airborne Regiment were particularly proud of the operations they conducted building schools and helping people. The three-D notion is ingrained in our traditions of foreign policy and military operations.

I would like to come back to a question someone asked about exit strategies, and it's on everybody's mind. There is a real and theoretical change in warfare in our societies these days. In the old days, we used to think of war as having an immediate cause. There would then be some sort of a conflict, there would be a victory or a peaceful negotiation of the causes, people would stand down, and governments would agree—because these things were run by governments—and then there would be some sort of peace and a demobilization of sorts. That's the kind of model of warfare we have understood since at least 1914, and probably before that.

We're in an era now of what I call continuous warfare. There is no exit strategy, because, by definition, in continuous warfare you can't get out of it. Look at Palestine: people fighting people, people fighting our soldiers and our non-combatants. They are targets, they are shields, they are willing victims, and they are perpetrators.

A British general who had lots of peacekeeping experience all over the world wrote recently in a wonderful book, called The Utility of Force, that these are wars amongst the people. It's not the old model in which somebody starts it and governments negotiate and end belligerence. There is nobody to negotiate an end. We are more and more, as in Bosnia and throughout the Balkans, as in the Middle East, Africa, and other countries, becoming involved in continuous wars for which there is no exit. Wars among the people, where you can't even decide--if you are the most dedicated, true believer in UN peacekeeping--who you're peacekeeping with, we don't know how to handle yet.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Bland.

Were you done, Mr. Khan?

On that point, where does the local government, then, take responsibility? If we're involved in Bosnia, certainly we go in there, and we move it to a point where we think we have some control. And I'm not just talking about Bosnia, but of other conflicts. When does it really become that local government's responsibility? It seems that far too often we're in there, we seem to hand it back to the governments, and then it breaks out again.

[Dr. Douglas Bland]

That's part of our difficulty—at least mine—in trying to describe these things and think about them.

Mr. Chair, if I may put words in your mouth, what you're saying to me is old model. We want to look around for the government to deal with. Which government are you going to deal with? What if there isn't any government?

In the Latin American sense, when we're talking about some of these things.... In Colombia, for instance, there is a government, but then there are vast ungoverned spaces where the government doesn't have any control and other forces move into the ungoverned spaces. In Latin America, especially now, we're seeing the transformation of street gangs, for instance, in Brazil, from being petty thieves and so on to being political organizations. They have moved into these ungoverned spaces.

We're dealing now, for instance, in the Middle East, in Palestine, and perhaps in Afghanistan, and certainly in the coming wars in Africa, with large areas of ungoverned space. The model of saying that we're going to have a peacekeeping operation where we'll talk to this government and that government and we'll stand in between them—and Walter can correct me if I'm wrong.... The mission the UN sent to Palestine to settle the war and to observe the war was sent in 1947. It's still there. What the UN usually does is enhance the status quo. It's not suited for this. We don't know how to handle these kinds of wars.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Bland.

Madam McDonough.

[Alexa McDonough, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm very sorry for being late.

I apologize to our guests. I'm especially sorry not to have heard the presentations.

I have to say, though, just listening to you, Mr. Bland, and without having heard your earlier presentation, it seems to me that you've added strength to the argument about Kandahar and the folly of what we're embroiled in.

I want to thank Dr. Dorn for the work he has been doing to try to dispel the myth, which keeps being thrown in the faces of those who ask for the facts to be known and analysed, that peacekeeping is now for wimps, that peacekeeping has now gone the way of the dinosaurs and the dodo birds. Of course, the facts show otherwise. What is clear is that Canada is a dropout in terms of any robust involvement in UN peacekeeping.

I want to revert, very briefly, to a conversation I had last night with an Afghani Canadian friend who has lived in Canada for 17 years, who goes back to Afghanistan almost every year, and who has just come back from Kandahar and Kabul.

I had an opportunity to ask him what he would ask here this morning. The essence of what he said is, how can Canada continue to characterize the Taliban as the devil incarnate, say we are there to protect the people, and then be completely oblivious to the numbers of citizens being killed? He made the point that had he been killed in Kandahar when he was there a couple of months ago, he would have been counted as a Taliban devil because he had a beard and because he was Muslim and because he was Pashtun.

His point was that it is desperately, desperately important to engage with the Taliban and to recognize that the exclusion of 10 million Pashtuns from any decision-making, any really effective representation, is a recipe for Kandahar and Afghanistan to turn into Canada's Iraq. I want to ask for your reaction to that.

I wish he was here this morning. If he wasn't out working his guts out to earn a living and help support his family in Kandahar, it would have been a very good idea for him to try to enlighten us from a perspective that we don't hear enough from.

I'd like to ask for your reaction to his comments.

[Dr. Walter Dorn]

Very quickly, since I'm a professor I love to correct factual points. Palestine was 1948. The UN did not vote against Sudan; it actually authorized the force for Sudan. It's the Sudanese government that's the problem.

I don't think my colleague's cynical views of the motives of the developed world for contributing to peacekeeping are accurate. I think many of them are doing so for the high-minded ideals that we've contributed to peacekeeping in the past.

If you look at my fatalities list you'll see that half the nations in the top 10 fatality countries in UN peacekeeping are developing and the other half are developed world. Canada, of course, is the first in the developed world and India is the first in the developing world.

There is an exit strategy in Afghanistan. It's the same one that has been applied so successfully in lots of conflicts we had in the 1990s. It's only in Somalia where we gave up. And we decided to go on fighting this endless war, which is maybe another Iraq. Maybe what we have in Kandahar is another Somalia. It's just not a workable strategy.

NATO does have a model of its own. It has peace support operations. It's actually a very well-developed, doctrinally founded model of peace support. They've done successful peace support operations in Bosnia and Kosovo. It's not that we have to go only to the UN for the model of peacekeeping; NATO has the model.

I appreciate the words on protecting the dam. That's exactly the sort of project we have to do more of, in a protection mandate, rather than one on search and destroy.

I agree that our soldiers do public outreach extremely well. We do it better than the Americans. I think we are probably the best in the world in terms of relating to local populations. We have that because of our bilingual and multi-ethnic culture in Canada.

In terms of the views on the Taliban, absolutely, our view is too simplistic now. If we start looking at the Pashtuns, the Daris, and the different tribes and weave into that web of interests and motives...then we'd be getting close to the truth. It's only in that way that we can begin to get back to the question of local government, of how you devolve power to the people, especially in those regions where the central government has proven to be corrupt, and that you actually look regionally at ways in which people can start helping themselves.

It means giving them more power, which means power sharing. It means sharing with a lot of people we now mistakenly classify as Taliban. It means sharing power with people, many of whom don't agree with our current policy, who have an interest in their families and lives in that area.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Dorn.

Mr. Bland, did you want to make some comment on that?

[Dr. Douglas Bland]

Chair, I've followed members' opinions and ideas over many years, and I respect them, and I enjoy most of them.

I have anecdotes too that I could tell, if we had lots of time, of people coming to me from those parts of the world, from Afghanistan, saying, "God bless Canada. You saved my life. You saved my farm. You saved my village. Your guys are dying in our name. We want to be free from religious dogma. Thank you." I wish they were here to talk to the committee.

When we talk about peacekeeping--and again we can always have a theoretical argument--I can't find anybody who has a definition of what peacekeeping is. When peacekeeping failed miserably in the Balkans and led to the deaths of thousands of people--for instance, in Srebrenica--peacekeeping started to take on terms like robust peacekeeping, muscular peacekeeping, and so on. I think there is certainly a place for peacekeeping-type operations in warfare. But I just hope people don't get it confused with mythical peacekeeping.

As for negotiating with the Taliban, perhaps somebody can explain something to me. If you don't know who it is you're killing, and you call them Taliban, who is it that you're going to negotiate with? How do you know you're negotiating with somebody who is the Taliban? Who is the Taliban? Who are the leaders? I've got a little research money. I'll buy a one-way ticket for anybody in the House who wants to go to Afghanistan and drive off into the countryside and negotiate with the Taliban.

More seriously, I would like somebody in a responsible position to write down a list of the negotiating points. What is it that you're going to negotiate? On the hard side, is it the abuse of only 50% of the women in the country? What are you going to negotiate on when somebody has a gun at your head? Quite seriously, a paper on negotiating strategy with the Taliban would be useful.

The other point, of course, is that we don't like to beat up on third world countries, and Afghanistan is a third world country by any definition. So why should we be out there telling the Government of Afghanistan to negotiate with people who are trying to destroy their country and their government? I don't have answers to those. Perhaps somebody does.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Bland.

We'll go to Mr. Goldring for a quick question. We may go a little past 10, if that's allowable. I know there are a couple of you who have a number of other questions.

Mr. Goldring.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

Dr. Bland, I believe it's evident that our government wishes to take a balanced approached to the situation in Afghanistan, or indeed other regions of the world. Part of this balance involves some of your comments earlier about the state and condition of the armed forces. Coming from the Royal Canadian Air Force of the 1960s myself, I see a considerable difference between that and today. But we have been ordering heavy lift and are trying to catch up on it.

I think it's well recognized, from our earlier meetings here too, that the balanced approach requires, first of all, your security, and if that involves a robust military, then that's exactly what it takes to set the stage for doing your next stage of security, your policing, whether it's by international police or whether it's by the country's own police force. I note that we're doing much work with the Afghanistan police force, paying them, for example, so that they can provide this service on an ongoing basis.

The third part is the governance, and this is the whole discussion of this democracy that we have been involved with. There seems to be a very clear role in here to, at the same time--and this is the balanced approach--be working on bringing about a civil society structure of governance and helping it right out into the remote areas and remote communities, trying to get an understanding of it so that when the day comes that the military does leave, you have a much more in-depth rapport with these remote regions with the centralized government, and trying to help them grow through that and recognize the benefits of democracy. Could you comment on this as a balanced approach and on the importance of it?

I have one other short question on the democracy unit. I think there's been discussion on how to do this. How do you get it involved? Is it government-to-government or not? I think the sense is that we have a unit that is completely at arm's length from our government, and how that's structured and formulated.... The intent is to not supplant their form of governance with our own, but to work within that country to try to structure and to help them into a more democratic civil society.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Goldring.

Mr. Bland.

[Dr. Douglas Bland]

Not to be a professor, but when I talk to students and other people in public meetings and they say that missions should be balanced, I always remind people that balance doesn't mean equal. You can have 2,000 soldiers and 25 diplomats in a mission and the mission would be in balance--unless you think we should have 25 soldiers and 2,500 diplomats out in the field, but that sort of gives me pause.

I think we need to be fair in these deliberations. Afghanistan has had, what, five years to get it right? They did have votes, they did have people out, and they did have universal voting. I think they need to do something. As you all know, we're dealing with, in some respects, a society in which the idea of liberal democracy is as foreign as it could possibly be.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

It might take 20 or 30 years.

[Dr. Douglas Bland]

It's going to take a very long time. It took a long time in Germany after the war to make things work, and there you had a literate, organized state that at least had its roots in liberal democracy in European enlightenment. Maybe that's not what's in store for these places. Maybe they don't need to do that. But we have to give them time to sort it out. Leading and negotiating away things for them won't work.

To come back to the idea of balance and whether you have to use force, police, or this or that, again, just from a theoretical point of view, when people talk about security and defence in a difficult environment, why try to put this idea of a peacekeeping mode into the most difficult cases you can imagine? Why don't we start in something easy, like Vancouver? We'll just disarm the police and we'll have peacekeepers standing between the bad guys and the good guys.

In our societies we have balance between police, courts, human rights, welfare programs, and all sorts of things to sort out very similar problems that you see in major countries, or failing countries, I guess is the word these days. Except that in those countries the problems are exaggerated at every level--in the security, the welfare, the humanitarian, and the democratic systems.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Bland.

Mr. Patry.

[Bernard Patry, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Merci, and thank you very much.

Mr. Bland, all conflicts will end through negotiation; no conflict will ever end without negotiation.

My question is for Professor Dorn.

This conflict doesn't seem to show any signs of finishing soon. Knowing all the interrelated regional issues that involve and impact on Afghanistan, would you not say it is the time now for all the international communities through the UN to start real diplomatic talks that would include the P-5, with Pakistan, India, Iran, and for sure Afghanistan?

[Dr. Walter Dorn]

Yes, the UN should do more in Afghanistan, but they're hamstrung because all the major nations that can back the UN are now putting their resources into NATO. We're seeing a problem in that we're not getting the kind of support in the UN for attention on Afghanistan. They're basically saying NATO is the big player, and since they, including three permanent members of the security council, say they want to handle it through NATO, then you're blocked from a major UN initiative.

I think we should have a different force there. In fact, I think one model would be that NATO does the really tough stuff when necessary and the UN does the easier part in the various provinces.

To answer the question about how to negotiate with people you can't recognize as being Taliban or not, well, it's negotiating with everyone. You try to bring everyone into the big tent. It's actually a loya jirga process, without exclusion. There's no problem with negotiation there; you just have to negotiate with the people you find opposing you.

There are lots of definitions of peacekeeping, and the UN has one very good definition. They're found in textbooks and we teach them in courses. The definition has expanded. It's not what it was when you were doing peacekeeping. The UN has expanded it. It has become more robust. It's becoming more multi-dimensional and able to adapt to complex internal conflicts.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you.

Very quickly, Mr. Bland.

[Dr. Douglas Bland]

If 36 or 37 countries in Afghanistan are putting their efforts behind the NATO operations and not the UN operations, that has to tell you something. Those countries are not full of dumb people, dumb diplomats, and dumb politicians.

[Bernard Patry, Liberal, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

I never said that. I'm very sorry.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

No, he never said that.

Mr. Wilfert.

[Bryon Wilfert, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I'm sorry I missed your presentation. I was at a breakfast meeting with a former foreign minister of Australia and a few others on Afghanistan.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Very quickly, please.

[Bryon Wilfert, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

My question is this, and this point was raised very strongly.

The approach on the national Afghan army is different than on the national police. If we, whether it was our government or the present government, have not committed the resources to the development of a strong national police force in Afghanistan--most of them are underpaid or not paid at all, and there are many issues with regard to training, etc., as we only had six RCMP and I think one chap, if he's still there, was from Prince Edward Island--my question to you is, how can we approach that differently?

If we believe that security is important and, once forces move out, to have the local national police there, what should we be doing differently with our allies, etc., and with the Afghan government to encourage a strong, viable, national police force in the villages across Afghanistan?