Foreign Affairs Committee on April 17th, 2007

[Col Alain Pellerin]

If we look at the polls, the support of the Canadian public is quite stable, at about 50%. It varies a little, but overall, 50% of the population supports the mission. With regard to Quebec, I do agree with you, it's a bit less.

It will be interesting to see what happens when my regiment, the Royal 22^nd, goes to Afghanistan in August. We have to remember that Quebeckers want us to explain why this kind of mission is taking place. In that regard, perhaps the government does have its work cut out. The Quebec public also supports the Canadian Forces, and in particular my regiment because it has been around a very long time. I think that if we explain clearly to Quebeckers that this is a just mission and that progress can be achieved, they will support us. It's not only as you mentioned a matter of helping women go to school; it's much more than that. For example, we've been in the Kandahar region for a little over a year and the Taliban, who are still present there, are now using the tactics of the weak. Remember operation Medusa from last September. They lost about 100 men then. There are no frontal attacks, as we saw last year, in the Kandahar region. I believe our presence has been felt, not only in Kandahar, but in villages such as those in Panjwai valley, where operation Medusa took place last September. Six thousand families have gone back to live in the valley because the Canadian Forces are providing security there.

I believe there's been a lot of progress, but unfortunately, the mission seems to be evaluated in terms of the number of deaths and bodies being flown home to Canada. In my opinion, you have to go to Afghanistan in order to talk to the troops and see how much the soldiers believe in this mission. They see progress and they are prepared to continue. All I'm asking is that they be supported.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Pellerin.

We're going to have to go to the next round.

Mr. Goldring and Mr. Khan, on a split. I would ask for very quick questions and then quick answers.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

Gentlemen, thank you for being here today.

It certainly is good to see the advances that have been made. When we first started, there were some 700,000 children in school, now we have some tenfold increase. Of course there's still so much more to do. And there is the tragedy of our soldiers coming home.

You made a comment earlier, Colonel Pellerin, about governance and having a strategic assistance team that's largely military. Could you expand on that a bit? What do they draw on from their experience to deal with the headmen? Are the headmen the same people as local warlords? Is this the training that comes from RMC? To me, coming from the military and talking about a form of governance, although it's important....

[Col Alain Pellerin]

That's a very interesting question. I would suggest that you invite Colonel Capstick, who was the first commanding officer of that mission in Kabul and who is back in Canada, or Colonel Dixon, who's there now.

On the background to that, there was a request from President Karzai to General Hillier to provide some advisers to the government to do very basic things: preparing plans; flow charts, where they could go to international meetings; and to suggest a plan—a very simple plan—on how to implement their future.

With respect to those officers, I think it's a background in our own training. In Canada, the training for officers in our profession is second to none. I think we have a very good training system. It's very hands-on, and that starts at the military college and staff college, etc.

There are about 15 or 16 senior officers in Kabul. They're involved with all the ministers They're close advisers to ministers. One of them is a chief of staff to a minister. It's is very unknown here in Canada that we're working so closely with the Afghan government and that we are very successful.

Again, we try to do that at their own pace, because it's their country. It's not our policy to be implemented by them, but rather what we can do to help implement their policy. It's a very successful program.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Mr. Khan.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Gentlemen, thank you for being here.

I just want to touch upon something that's been bothering me. We never hear from my colleagues or the media that the school children who are blind and deaf in southern Afghanistan, in Kandahar, came down for a picnic at Camp Nathan Smith a couple of weeks ago. That is a huge success story. Nobody talks about the 100 projects that are taking place as the military moves forward and the development they did in Kandahar. And I don't hear about the security for the Kajaki Dam, which will be providing electricity to possibly two million people. Of course the UNICEF gentleman, Nigel Fisher, talked about the progress.

These things have to be looked at on an incremental basis. Afghanistan is larger than Iraq, with 30 million people, and we have limited resources. A tremendous job has been done. Nobody talks about the judges who have been trained—75 and 95 and 20. There is a lot of progress going on. And there's the cooperation between the jirga on the Afghan side and the jirga on the Pakistan side. There is some communication.

There are of course some concerns, and you addressed those concerns—the regional actors—but there has been a new development. I'd like your comment on that. There's a new united national front that has come up. Are you aware of that? And if you are, what is your view? There is also a former defence minister, Mohammad Qasim Fahim, and Yunus Qanoni and Mustafa Zahir, Zahir Shah's grandson, who were trying to bring about a prime minister's position. So I see it as very positive, because they're thinking of democracy. I would like to receive your comment on that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Khan.

Mr. MacDonald.

[Col Brian MacDonald]

Perhaps I could respond first of all to your comment about the lack of media attention. Since I have occasional contact with the media, I think perhaps I could comment on this.

I covered the first Gulf War with CTV, and I also then covered with CTV the Balkan crisis. One thing that was really interesting to me was the way in which the attention span of the media had shortened in that period of time. When Lloyd and I would be doing a talk-back at the end of a sequence of data in the first Gulf War, we would characteristically spend about 2 minutes and 40 seconds in that talk-back. By the time we had hit Bosnia, we were down to a minute and 15 seconds, a minute and 10 seconds. As a consequence of this, the amount of attention that can be paid to the detail is something that simply seems to be decreasing. The attention span somehow is decreasing.

Among the other controlling things in television there is, first of all, the traditional journalistic principle of “if it bleeds, it leads”--that it is far easier to talk about disaster than to talk about good things happening. Beyond that, of course, there is the problem of having to have visual materials. If you can't get the pictures, then you can't tell the story. All this makes reliance upon television as our dominant medium as a means of expressing and communicating complex ideas—as is certainly the case in Afghanistan—difficult.

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

Ten seconds.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Okay, you got it. That's all.

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

When we talk about our troops pulling back, and we talk about the negative feeling in support of the troops, do you think it has any impact as far as their security in Afghanistan is concerned? If somebody says pull your troops back, the enemy thinks this is a weak link in the chain: if we attack a few more people they'll end up withdrawing them.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Khan. Unfortunately, we don't have time for the answer.

Madam McDonough.

[Alexa McDonough, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, gentlemen, for being here today. I have to say that you've unloaded a lot of information, and without our having the ability to really process it and think it through, it's difficult to respond. It feels like a bit of an assault, but I know that's not your intention.

I'm very disturbed about two things. One is that I think there is a failure generally.... I'm not meaning to level this accusation specifically at you, but I feel that it's been repeated here, again. It happens all the time in Parliament when one tries to ask questions, and all too often in this committee. There's a kind of intermingling and mixing and not making a clear distinction; one talks about the ISAF troops in general, and we don't really deal with the specifics of what the Canadian troops are doing in Kandahar as part of the counter-insurgency mission. The same is true when we keep hearing—as we do—various references to success stories, but actually, very seldom do we get the kind of information we need to really assess the mission in Kandahar, per se.

I want to say, Mr. Fisher, that I very much appreciated in your presentation that you were acknowledging that there is a very serious problem with Canada's failure to deliver with anything like a reasonable effort the 0.7% ODA. Every time we hear the claim that our highest commitments are to Afghanistan, of course, it's never acknowledged that we're at less than one-third, and in fact, less than one-quarter of some of the other developed countries in the world in terms of our level of commitment.

I want to go to a couple of specific reports that you haven't referenced in all your good news about progress. Most of what has been presented today is in very stark contrast to the assessment of the Secretary General in his report to the Security Council last week. Specifically, that report goes on at considerable length about the very serious popular alienation from both the Afghan government and, I think, the countries that are engaged in propping up that government. That is a result of a horrendous amount of corruption, bad appointments, and as Mr. Fisher himself said, the fact that the biggest security threats experienced by most people in Afghanistan are not at all from the Taliban but are in fact from the corruption that exists at the level of officials and from the violence associated with warlords, drug lords, and so on. I wonder if you could address that. I'm saying this specifically to Colonel Pellerin and Colonel MacDonald, if they could address that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Be very quick, please.

[Alexa McDonough, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Yes.

I'll stop there, and if I have time for another question....

[Col Alain Pellerin]

Since we don't have much time, I'll leave it to Colonel MacDonald, because he's done all the research on the report.

[Col Brian MacDonald]

There is certainly no question that a critical problem in Afghanistan is the corruption of public officials. And the reason you have the corruption of public officials is the availability of money to corrupt them. That money is coming predominantly from the drug traffickers. These are large quantities of money that could be used to buy off an official, and as a consequence create a situation in which the local populace sees quite clearly that officials who should be working on their behalf are working on their own behalf.

There is a parallel problem, and that is the decision on the part of the international community to focus first on the reconstruction of the Afghan National Army, which has been going reasonably well. Some of the commentators, and I must confess that I probably agree with them, will suggest that the institution that should have been focused on first was the Afghan National Police, because it is considerably behind the Afghan National Army in terms of the development of a credible, consistent force that acts for the benefit of the people rather than for their own ends.

If we are able, then, to get the reform of the Ministry of the Interior, including the Afghan National Police, I think we'd be in a position to be in a far better frame for the future.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. MacDonald.

[Alexa McDonough, NDP, Halifax, NS]

I have a brief follow-up question.

There is very little devotion in your comments to the need for an aggressive, robust, peace-building process of a regional nature. I know that Mr. Fisher has referred to this, and I just want to quote that the key in peace operations is to ensure that the resort to military force is a support to the peace process rather than a substitute for it. Those are the words of Ernie Regehr, but that view has been expressed again and again by those who are very experienced in what it means to be involved in genuine peace-building. I'm wondering if you could comment on that, because this is a very widely shared concern among Canadians.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Madam McDonough.

[Col Alain Pellerin]

Absolutely. If I could quickly make a comment—and I've worked with Ernie Regehr and I have a lot of respect for him—I don't have any disagreement where that is possible in Afghanistan, and I think that has happened.

What we have to remember is that the ISAF got involved starting in the north, starting in the west, which were chunks that were easier to handle. There, peace-building is possible. In fact, it's happening in the region. Development is happening, reconstruction is happening, schools are being rebuilt and what not, so that process is happening. It's just that in the south you have the combination of the worst two elements, the drug money and the Taliban, which need to be addressed before you can start the peace-building process, unfortunately, and that is what's happening now.

But I think after one year in Kandahar I can say that we can report a lot of progress in the Kandahar province.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Pellerin.

I have one very quick question for Mr. Fisher. We haven't heard so much from you in the questions and answers, but in your conclusion you say, “Therefore, Canada should retain a long-term commitment to Afghanistan's future, well beyond 2010.”

I think Canada has said that we are committed to a long-term future, that being through humanitarian aid, and a long-term future with development dollars and ODA and making sure that Afghanistan remains one of the big recipient countries.

You also say:

It is in our strategic interests and certainly in the interests of peace, order and good governance in Afghanistan. There is no quick fix and it is premature to be talking about an exit strategy.

Do you believe it is premature to talk about an exit strategy in regard to our military in 2008 or 2009? Is it preliminary to question how we can transition into a different phase but recognizing the importance of long-term stability in development?

[Nigel Fisher]

I think it's always important to question, but the wrong question is, how soon can we get out militarily? There is a military and a development investment required. When I say military, certainly for the next few years, well beyond 2010.

We also have to look at the objective of that. If we think Afghanistan is just one more theatre in the fight against international terrorism and we equate the Taliban, in all their forms, with international terrorism, I think we miss the point. We have to focus on Afghanistan, its reconstruction and its security, as a means of ensuring that Afghanistan does not become a continued source of terrorism. I think there's a subtlety there that perhaps we don't get in just talking about international terrorism, lumping in Iraq with Afghanistan, and Taliban with al-Qaeda.

So, yes, in short, I think it's premature to think about moving out the military in the next few years.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much.

I want to thank all three of you for being here. Certainly you have clearly talked about the successes we have experienced there, the frustrations and the difficulties that will still be there, but it's good to hear that we are making some fairly huge steps in achieving what I think all the world wants to see achieved.

We will now suspend and we will come back with our new witnesses shortly.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

We'll call this meeting back to order.

This is our second hour. We have two guests with us, Marc André Boivin, the coordinator representing the Réseau francophone de recherche sur les opérations de paix. He has been working in the research field of peace operations and peacekeeping. From the University of Ottawa, we have Pierre Beaudet, professor, International Development and Globalization Program, Faculty of Social Sciences. He has been a consultant to CIDA and a researcher and director of Alternatives and Alternatives International, and he has worked in the international development field.

Certainly we welcome you here. We have invited you in the past and have run into some problems. I don't know if they were technical or what they were, but welcome here today.

You know how this committee works. You have ten minutes or so for opening statements, and then we'll go into questions.

The time is yours.