Evidence of meeting #47 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.
12:15 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you, Dr. Rubin.
We'll come back to Mr. Casey, but we'll go to Mr. Graham first.
12:15 p.m.
Liberal
Bill Graham Liberal Toronto Centre, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you very much, gentlemen, for your interventions.
I think you started out on a rather pessimistic note about the perception of Afghans by both the successive military interventions, and more importantly, perhaps, the nation-building that is presently going on in their own country and the ability of their own institutions to respond to their needs.
I think if you were to travel across Canada and to speak to the Afghan diaspora, of which there is a substantial number in our country, they would confirm that. Whenever I speak to anyone in my own riding, and quite often they are taxi drivers in Toronto--and I'm not using this as a joke.... They are in daily telephone conversation with their families and friends in the communities there. In the last few years they have become progressively less enchanted and less hopeful about an ultimate good end to this. This is largely because of lack of security and lack of delivery of services, as both of you have pointed out. And it is attributable to the drug problem. There's no doubt about it.
I'd like to ask one question. Clearly there's a large debate among the military forces themselves at NATO meetings about this. What is the role of the military as opposed to local police? You have said that the American eradication program will not work. What is the chance that the U.S. administration will abandon that? It is being forced down the throats of every other NATO member, whether they like it or not, by the U.S. administration. If Colombia is any example, we're not likely to see them abandon it. If they don't abandon it, where does that take us?
Equally linked to that is perhaps something that hasn't been mentioned so far. A direct result and one consequence of it is the endemic corruption in the country, which is a huge inhibition to the delivery of the very services you said are essential if we're going to get the Afghan population believing that the right thing is being done. Most Afghans you speak to are very skeptical about the problem of corruption being helped. Is there some aid mechanism...? Have we ever found in a society that we can use aid to provide the public services with enough money that they don't have to be corrupt, or that we can eliminate corruption? That would be my principal question.
I have a second question. We haven't talked a lot about Russia; we've talked about every other neighbouring country. Whenever I've met with Sergei Ivanov, or any of the Russian authorities, they've always made a strong point that their intelligence authorities are very supportive of what we are doing in Afghanistan. They are very helpful to us. When I say that, I mean the western powers generally. Is that true, or is there another Russian agenda in the region?
12:20 p.m.
Director of Studies and Senior Fellow, University of New York, Center on International Cooperation
Thank you.
Let me start with Russia. Russia has supported the effort, but Russia is politically aligned with the Northern Alliance. Therefore, they have a different nuance in the way they support it. They have actually protested against the sidelining of some figures from the Northern Alliance. They continue to maintain relations with them, against the day when they may need to renew them.
Russia has made one very positive move recently. They have basically agreed on the abolition of all their claims of debt against Afghanistan through the HIPC process, which will be immensely helpful.
On the negative side, the kind of political—
12:20 p.m.
Liberal
Bill Graham Liberal Toronto Centre, ON
On the Northern Alliance, I assume it's because they see the Taliban and the Pashtuns as an Islamist threat, which would be reflected in other parts of Russia--Chechnya and other places--and they see the Northern Alliance as a way of containing that threat.
12:20 p.m.
Director of Studies and Senior Fellow, University of New York, Center on International Cooperation
Yes, that's right. And precisely because of that, Russia is now an obstacle to pursuing some of the political initiatives toward incorporating and negotiating with the Taliban, because there is a list of Taliban figures who are subjected to sanctions under resolution 1267 of the Security Council, and some of the people on that list are now working for the government, like the governor of Oruzgan, but Russia will not agree to remove any people from the sanctions list. If they're on the sanctions list, it's very difficult to invite them, give them aid, and so on. So it would be useful to discuss that.
The sanctions list is also very useful now as a way to counter narcotics. Under a resolution passed in December, the Security Council adopted a proposal from Mr. Costa of the UNODC to add to those names under sanctions major drug traffickers from Afghanistan, because the Government of Afghanistan, obviously, finds it quite difficult to arrest them.
In terms of corruption, we should say briefly that in a way, the word is misleading, because there are different kinds of problems. There is no way to use aid to eliminate corruption in government in Afghanistan--or, I might add, in the United States. I won't speak about Canada. But the real problem is not bribery and corruption. The real problem is the capture of control of governance institutions, essentially by the illegal armed groups and drug traffickers. That's a very different problem.
Basically, what you have is an organized crime problem, in a sense. So resolving the drug problem, either by making it disorganized or by making it non-criminal, is the only way, I think, you can address the major problem of corruption in Afghanistan, which is capture of the state.
12:20 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you, Mr. Rubin.
Mr. Smith, were you going to respond to that, as well?
12:20 p.m.
Executive Director, Centre for Global Studies and Adjunct Professor of Political Science, University of Victoria
Yes. Very quickly, on the corruption issue, one of the things, Mr. Graham, that Canada is now doing is providing some salary support money. There's quite a gap between what civil servants are paid and what they would be paid to work for a warlord, or whatever. So I am told that CIDA is now into the salary support business, and I think that's a good thing.
12:20 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Do you have any idea how much money has been allocated to that line of ledger?
12:20 p.m.
Executive Director, Centre for Global Studies and Adjunct Professor of Political Science, University of Victoria
No. There may be somebody from CIDA here who knows, but there may not be.
12:20 p.m.
Executive Director, Centre for Global Studies and Adjunct Professor of Political Science, University of Victoria
He can find out.
12:20 p.m.
Conservative
12:20 p.m.
Director of Studies and Senior Fellow, University of New York, Center on International Cooperation
Just briefly too, I would like to relate the problem of salary support and corruption to the problem of exit strategy. One of the problems we're facing in Afghanistan now is that, for instance, to create the army, to recruit people and keep them, we have to pay them amounts that are far above what the Government of Afghanistan will ever be able to pay them for the foreseeable future. The same is true for the police and elsewhere.
There is a serious sustainability question--especially as aid donors operate on yearly budget cycles--which deprives the Afghan government of the ability to plan how much it will have in resources.
March 29th, 2007 / 12:25 p.m.
Conservative
Bill Casey Conservative Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, NS
Thank you.
The subject of Iraq came up a minute ago. I wonder what the impact will be if the Americans pull their troops out. They've just passed a motion in Congress to reduce their presence in Iraq substantially in less than a year, which is not very far away. The British have also indicated that they are going to reduce their troops in Iraq. What does that do to the balance of power in Afghanistan? Will some of those resources go to Afghanistan on both sides? It might produce an excess of resources on both sides. Is there any prediction of the impact of that on Afghanistan?
12:25 p.m.
Director of Studies and Senior Fellow, University of New York, Center on International Cooperation
Unfortunately, of course, the way the war would end, under any scenario that I can imagine, would be a tremendous morale booster for the other side.
However, I tend to think that the benefits of ending U.S. involvement in Iraq would outweigh the harm it might do to Afghanistan because of the resources that it would free up. As well, to some extent, the United States in particular--and perhaps it would require a new administration to do that--could signal a different policy and thereby recover some of the legitimacy that the intervention has lost in Afghanistan as a result of the intervention in Iraq.
I do know that Iranian intelligence officials and diplomats are very concerned, however, that some of the Arab al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq might decide to come to Afghanistan and try to start sectarian conflict there. And they would very much like to share that information and that concern with the United States and other western countries, but they're having difficulty doing so at present.
12:25 p.m.
Conservative
Bill Casey Conservative Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, NS
I do.
President Clinton was here last November, and he made the interesting statement that the United States should never have gone into Iraq; they should have focused on Afghanistan. I can think of scenarios where that might become the new focus, where Afghanistan might become the new focus for the United States.
Do you think they would put a much greater effort into Afghanistan if they did pull out of Iraq?
12:25 p.m.
Director of Studies and Senior Fellow, University of New York, Center on International Cooperation
The sentiment in the U.S. Congress, certainly, and actually in the administration, is to put more effort into Afghanistan even while we are in Iraq. I don't know if they would add more, but it would certainly make it much easier to do so. I might add that it's a mistake just to conceive of these two operations as part of something called the war on terror and to think that if this war on terror loses one focus, it will have another. It's a much broader political problem. And of course we need a generally different policy towards the entire Middle East also, but that's not what we're here to discuss.
12:25 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Perhaps on another day we'll invite you to come back, Dr. Rubin, and give us your ideas on those. I think all people are questioning the Middle East and the direction we're going.
Mr. Smith.
12:25 p.m.
Executive Director, Centre for Global Studies and Adjunct Professor of Political Science, University of Victoria
No, I won't add to that.
12:25 p.m.
Conservative
12:25 p.m.
Bloc
Francine Lalonde Bloc La Pointe-de-l'Île, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
One of our witnesses said that in any case, as far as he was concerned, Afghanistan was a country of ongoing war, and that we did not have to look for ways out, that we had to get used to this type of war.
I would like to hear what you think about that, because it flies in the face of the reason people agree to go to Afghanistan. They think that even though Afghanistan cannot manage to not be dependent on others, at least the conflict could come to an end.