Thank you.
Good morning. And I apologize for my inability to deliver any part of my presentation in French.
For those of you who don't know us, the Senlis Council is the security and development and counter-narcotics policy group. I'm the president, founder, and lead researcher for the Senlis Council and Senlis Afghanistan. I am a Canadian. We have offices, however, in London and Paris. Senlis Afghanistan is based in Kabul, with field offices in Kandahar and Helmand. Yesterday we just officially opened an office here in Ottawa, and I'm pleased that our Ottawa office is represented by my Afghan Canadian colleagues, two of whom were instrumental in the establishment of Senlis Afghanistan.
I've been living and working in Kandahar and Lashkar Gah for two years now, where I lead our field research activities with a team of 50 Afghan colleagues. I spend my days in the villages and the camps, talking to Afghans on the ground, conducting surveys and interviews to document the situation there from a policy point of view.
We recently concluded a survey of 17,000 men in southern and eastern Afghanistan, and the results were chilling. Of the men surveyed, 50% stated they believed the Taliban will win the war. Over 80% worry constantly about feeding their families. These men are living on about $2 to $3 a day to feed their families—when they can get work. These are very bad numbers.
Yesterday we released a report that notes the extreme poverty of southern Afghanistan and the growing disenchantment of the local population with the international presence. The province's refugee camps are full of starving people and have become easy recruiting ground for the Taliban. There has been no substantial food aid into Kandahar province since March 2006. As was mentioned earlier, civilian casualties continue to fuel local resentment against the foreign presence in Afghanistan.
Kandahar's hospitals are completely inadequate to deal with war zone casualties or even the basic health needs of the local population. We have released a study of the hospital in Kandahar city. This hospital, which is where civilian casualties of the war are brought and which is also there to provide basic health care for the province, does not deserve the name “hospital”. There is no effective blood service, no equipment, no medicines, no proper operation facilities. But there is a ward for malnutritioned babies, without proper food or medicine.
The Afghan people are suffering and they feel we are not addressing their legitimate grievances. Our military is doing a remarkable job in difficult circumstances, but we are not doing what needs to be done on development, aid, or counter-narcotics policies to assure that we have the support of the Afghan people. Without winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, we will continue to win the military battles, but we will not win this war.
Canada's development and aid failures in Kandahar are endangering our substantial military successes there. Yesterday, we called on Prime Minister Harper to dramatically overhaul Canada's development aid and counter-narcotics policies. In these recommendations we called for CIDA to be relieved of its responsibility for development efforts in Afghanistan and to be replaced by the appointment of a special envoy to Afghanistan to coordinate development aid and counter-narcotics policy, with a development and aid budget equal to the military budget. We need a major and immediate overhaul of our approach in Afghanistan. The government must be clear with the Canadian people what our objectives are and state our critical success factors.
In this regard, we have organized some very short, two-minute video clips that will be shown at the end of my presentation to give you an idea of the plight of people in Afghanistan and why we need to redefine and clearly state our objectives.
In this regard, we propose that the objectives follow the internationally agreed best practices that Canada helped to develop: the UN millennium development goals. Our report recommends that Canada adopt the millennium development goals as critical success factors to assist us in managing and measuring the progress of the mission in Afghanistan. In carrying out our mission in Afghanistan, Canada is well able to, and should, take leadership on these issues, just as we did when we led the way with the landmines treaty. The achievement of the millennium development goals is pivotal to bringing peace and economic prosperity to the people of Kandahar and would help to ensure that they are immune to the anti-west Taliban propaganda. The list of development goals is set out in the report that's in the package to be handed out to you today. It deals with hunger, poverty, health, clean water, or a broad spectrum of issues.
I can't emphasize enough the desperate poverty of the people of Kandahar, particularly those living in the informal refugee camps in the region. Providing families with immediate food aid is possible and inexpensive, especially compared to the cost of our military budget. If we're not moved to do this from a humanitarian point of view, we should do this out of a counter-insurgency theory point of view to support our military presence there.
There is increased concern and anger in Afghanistan regarding the increasing number of civilian casualties and the bombing campaigns that are levelling villages and leaving thousands homeless. This must be dealt with.
Finally, on the counter-narcotics point, opium poppy cultivation is the mainstay of the Kandahar agricultural economy. The counter-narcotics program in Afghanistan is based on U.S. drug policies and dominated by the U.S. approach. This has meant a forced poppy crop eradication program. The United States has clearly stated it is now proposing chemical spraying operations for the next planting season.
To date, forced crop eradication in Afghanistan has left the poorest farmers with no means to feed their families, and overall, opium cultivation has gone up. We believe chemical spraying will add to the growing hostility against the international presence in southern Afghanistan. There should be no crop eradication, manual or chemical, until the poverty-stricken farmers have other means to feed their families.
Crop eradication has destroyed livelihoods and generated extreme poverty for entire communities. It's cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and it has also proven to be wholly ineffective. I restate: cultivation is up 60% last year in southern Afghanistan.
By sitting back and allowing this destructive and counterproductive U.S. policy to be prosecuted in Kandahar, Canada is complicit in a policy that is undermining our own military efforts, and they are doing a great job in a very hostile environment.
The Senlis Council has proposed an economic development initiative, the village-based poppy for medicine project, under which poppy grown in Afghanistan would be used for the supply of the essential painkillers, morphine and codeine. There's a global shortage. This proven counter-narcotics strategy would replace the current highly destructive policies of forced crop eradication. Poppy for medicine projects would also serve to support another of the millennium development goals, which call for enhancing access to affordable essential medicines in developing countries. At the moment, there is no morphine and no codeine in Afghanistan, despite it being the world's largest producer of opiates.
A similar system was put in place by the United States in Turkey and India when it was trying to convert Turkey's and India's opium production from heroin to medicines, and that was successfully implemented. Those two countries are now the prime suppliers of opiates for medicine for the United States of America.
Our field research and extensive discussions in the region indicate that a village-based poppy for medicine project is feasible, but the only way to find out if it really works is to test it in the regions in southern Afghanistan. We are willing to undertake such a pilot project in Kandahar and to share the research findings and expertise with the Canadian government and the international community. We ask the Canadian Parliament for its support of our proposal to run those pilot projects in the next planting season.
We also believe this would send out a positive message to the rural communities that we are trying to work with them in a positive way to find a legal way to make an income, and that in turn would generate support for the Karzai government and reduce support for the insurgency.
My very last point is this. From afar, I have followed the Canadian debate about whether we should stay or whether we should go. As a Canadian, from my experience in Kandahar, I firmly believe that Canada should not pull out of Kandahar. What we need is to radically overhaul our mission in Afghanistan, to clarify our objectives and our measures of success, and to deliver on our commitment made to both the Canadian people and the Afghan people.
What happens in Afghanistan in the next year will have an impact on our own security here in Canada for generations to come. We have to be clear about what our objectives are and how we will measure our success, and we should stay until the job is done.
Thank you very much.