Foreign Affairs Committee on Feb. 14th, 2008

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

He's not recognizing you.

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

I have a point of order.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Mr. Khan.

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

Mr. Chair, can we get to the questioning rather than—

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Mr. Khan, that's not a point of order.

With all due respect, the NDP have their time and I'm planning on giving them their time.

Continue, Mr. Dewar.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

I was going to get to my questions, but I'm being interrupted.

I'm just pointing out that one of the things that is conditional in the grants is support of the Department of National Defence and Canadian Forces and their mandate. I'm reading from the grant application.

My question to Mr. Weera is simple.

You have said that the counter-insurgency approach, which is being advocated by the other panellists, which is being advocated by the government, and which is now actually being proposed by the Liberal Party to be continued till 2011--unless they've changed their policy again.... But I'm asking you, in terms of the UN and what it can do here, what are some of the institutions within the UN that can provide a space and a place and make sure reconciliation and peace negotiations are attempted?

Are there institutions within the UN that you would point to that would actually do that kind of work?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Dewar.

Mr. Weera, you have approximately 30 seconds.

[Seddiq Weera]

The United Nations had a track record of negotiating in the nineties. Brahimi said off the record to someone in the Afghan government, and I'm quoting here, that the biggest mistake he made is--Bonn was probably not the best place, but later on, in January 2002--that it did not include the Taliban in the peace negotiations.

But I learned that the mandate of the United Nations, the Security Council, does not have peacemaking explicitly. That's what needs to be addressed.

The UN is the best placed, it is trusted, it has the infrastructure. We need a neutral body to broker peace. If Afghans could have done it among themselves, why would war and terror be housed in Afghanistan today?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Weera.

That concludes our first hour. I want to thank all our guests for being here today. We very much appreciate it. I know Mr. Boivin had his presentation written out, and we will translate that presentation and see that it's circulated to all members, although his time was shorter than what he had anticipated.

Yes, Mr. Wilfert.

[Bryon Wilfert, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Can I make one quick point of order? Mr. Chairman, in defence of the clerk, we received a revised witness list for hearings on Afghanistan, and Mr. Pellerin and former Major-General Lewis MacKenzie are on it, so when Mr. MacKenzie comes, we should also note that he is on the list as well.

Unfortunately, the witness we asked for got ill today and wasn't here, but this is the list you should be looking at, ladies and gentlemen.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Wilfert.

We will suspend and we'll come back--

[Raymond Chan, Liberal, Richmond, BC]

One more point. Can I ask the panel here today to give us written answers to those questions that were not able to be answered in person today?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Very good point, Mr. Chan. There were a number of questions, I think, especially from Mr. Patry. If they could be responded to in some way, we would appreciate it.

We'll suspend for about one or two minutes and we'll come back.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

I'll call the second portion of today's meeting to order.

In our second hour we'll hear from retired General Lewis MacKenzie, who is appearing as an individual before our committee. We'll also hear from Strategic Forecasting Inc., Kamran Bokhari, director of Middle East analysis.

Welcome, gentlemen, to our committee. You've seen how we operate here. We look forward to your comments, and then we will move into the first round of questions.

If I could have a little more order, please. Thank you.

Mr. MacKenzie, or General MacKenzie--

[General, Retired) Lewis MacKenzie (As an Individual]

No, no, I'm “Mister”.

Mr. Chairman, thank you very much for the invitation,

even though it came a bit late last night.

I'd like to start off by saying that nobody is paying me for anything, and I didn't know I was the second choice on the list of people who were supposed to show up today.

By the way, the sheet I was sent told me I had 10 minutes, so I'll aim for that. There's is no time for an introduction, but thanks for inviting me.

I want to point out that in Afghanistan today we have, for the first time in recorded military history, individual nations providing contingents to a multinational force and dictating exactly what they can or can't do once they arrive in theatre. It's actually given the word “caveat” a really pejorative meaning. In all other circumstances in the last half of the 20th century, as far as I know, the mandate creating the multinational force dictated, before the force got there, the limits of what it could do in theatre.

In my last two UN commands, involving troops from 42 countries, every one of the countries had exactly the same restrictions on how I could employ them. I knew those restrictions, but they were exactly the same for everybody. In UNPROFOR in 1992, when we and the headquarters were forced out of Sarajevo, I wanted to take a fighting force back in to secure the airport. Not one of the 31 countries could legally agree without permission from their capital, as this kind of action was not included in the mandate. In fact, I was quite proud of the fact that the Canadian government was the first to agree to operate beyond our mandate. Shortly after, the Dutch followed suit.

In Afghanistan we have the bizarre situation of individual countries dictating what their contingents will do within a multinational force. It's a commander's worst bloody nightmare, particularly when NATO has provided him with about 50% of the troops he needs to achieve his mission in a timely manner. This is not my comment only, but also that of a previous ISAF commander on his return to the U.K.

In the past, when I would rant against the failure of the United Nations New York leadership in places like Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and East Timor, the latter before Australia rescued it, I thought to myself that if only NATO ran this particular mission, the alliance would sort it out in no time at all. Was I wrong! After the ill-conceived bombing campaign, on NATO's 50th anniversary, against Serbia, Kosovo, I debated General Wesley Clark at the Wye River in the U.S. on the wisdom of the decision to bomb, and after the debate he shared a story with me.

During the bombing campaign he was making small talk with the Greek ambassador, and he said to the Greek ambassador, “Coming from an Orthodox country, this must be really difficult for you. There must be a lot of controversy in Greece about this bombing campaign.” “No,” said the ambassador, “there's no controversy at all—we're all against it. But we're in NATO, so we're here.” Why? No risk. Nobody scratched themselves, let alone suffered a casualty or a fatality.

Based on NATO's performance in Afghanistan, I've discovered that NATO, regrettably, is an even bigger debating society than the Security Council.

Now to our Canadian role. I'll provide a little background, because I think it's important for context. In early 2002, the delayed deployment of 3PPCLI, owing to a lack of strategic lift and very hesitant high-level decision-making beyond Canada's control, took us to Kandahar. We were not there for bloody peacekeeping, as even the media keeps reporting, but as one-third of the combat power of the U.S's airborne brigade, part of the 101st Airborne Division. We stayed there six months, and everybody remembers when it ended.

Coincidentally, as we were leaving a training exercise, my regiment suffered four killed and eight seriously injured in a friendly fire incident. The Prime Minister of the day said he couldn't find 800 soldiers to replace 3PPCLI, until somebody came sniffing around in Canada looking for support for the Iraq invasion. Then, magically, after a one- year hiatus, we found 2,000 soldiers—over the objections of the military, which is fine, since politicians make these decisions—to send to Kabul to secure the capital. Poor President Karzai was more like the mayor of Kabul in those days, because he couldn't get outside the city limits.

In early 2006, Canadians returned to Kandahar, and I was there at the time they were moving south. This is important: they found the Taliban surrounding the city, organized in company groups of up to 100. Their strategic objective was to take over the city, their Jerusalem, the historic capital. This threat was soundly defeated by those led by our Canadian battle group. I think that's an important point.

Let me make an analogy. How many of you have heard people say, “My God, wasn't the world a safer place during the Cold War?” Well, look at it through the prism of the worst-case scenario—a nuclear holocaust, the end of mankind, and the destruction of the world. Things were pretty serious during the Cold War. Now look at Afghanistan through the prism of the worst-case scenario. Two years ago, it was losing Kandahar city and losing southern Afghanistan. What we have in Afghanistan today is an enemy that's been pushed back from the capital. They are being pushed out of areas that the Canadians and our allies have secured. This is classic insurgency, and not the grossly misused Vietnam-era description I keep hearing, “search and destroy”.

The ISAF mission is to expand the secure areas until they overlap and to maintain the security for the local population until they trust you. They, the local population, will defeat the insurgency, not us. They defeat it by not supporting it and by trusting that we aren't going to turn tail and leave ahead of schedule.

NATO's challenge is to maintain the security in those areas, and that takes troops on the ground. Without more of them, the number of secured areas are limited until the ANA—the Afghan National Army—can take over more of that task.

This is not 2002, when we went into the mountains around Tora Bora searching for bin Laden and his supporters to kill or capture them. Our soldiers now create or expand secure areas for the local population. If the Taliban resist our mission—in other words, seek to destroy us—we deal with them.

The thought that the Canadian battle group in southern Afghanistan could play a meaningful role, with the caveat—and it is a caveat, no matter what anybody says—not to participate in the establishment and holding of these secure areas is, in a word, ridiculous.

To conclude, imagine the commander of region south—Major-General Marc Lessard, a Canadian, who is commanding troops in all three southern provinces—calling his 12 commanders together, including the Canadians, after February of next year and saying, “I'm going to establish a new secure area and I need six nations, and Canada, you're one of them. We're going to push the resisters out of that area and we are going to establish a secure area over a hundred square kilometres for the local Afghans, the IDPs, and the refugees to come home.” And the Canadian CO says, “Sorry sir, I can't do it.” That's just not acceptable.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. MacKenzie.

We'll move to Mr. Bokhari.

[Kamran Bokhari, Director of Middle East Analysis, Strategic Forecasting, Inc]

Honourable chairman and members of the committee, thank you so much for inviting me to share my thoughts. I too was invited late last night, and unfortunately I don't have a written document to share with you.

A lot can be said. One is perplexed with the complexity of the topic and about how to size it down to seven to ten minutes, but let me try to highlight or underscore certain issues.

I think the best way to look at the situation in Afghanistan is to ask how to get from where we are to where we need to be. Obviously, where we need to be means Afghanistan being more or less stable, so that NATO forces can begin withdrawing.

Before I jump into that, I want to highlight something that is very disappointing to me as an analyst: the huge amount of poverty of thought that exists globally on this issue. This poverty of thought is intellectual more than anything else. It is caused by three things. First, there's the sheer superficiality of knowledge about Afghanistan—and of course about other areas, but since we're dealing with Afghanistan, we'll stick with that. Number two, there is very little knowledge of the complexity that is Afghanistan. Number three is that there are just too many voices, and the real crux, if you will, of the matter is drowning within those voices.

So where are we right now? We are witnessing a surge in the insurgency, both in terms of actual fighting, the guerrilla-style fighting, and suicide bombings.

We're also seeing this in neighbouring Pakistan, which wasn't the case, at least a year and a half ago—in the last year and a half we've witnessed an uptake in Pakistan. The Pashtun areas of Pakistan are undergoing a Talibanization, if you will.

The debate, the discussion, amongst NATO states, at least at the surface level and to the global audience, shows a sense of disarray concerning what needs to be done. What is the objective? How are we supposed to reach it? All of this is boosting the confidence of the Taliban.

I can tell you for a fact, based on intelligence, what every single Taliban commander is telling the fighters who are under his command is: these people are going to leave; they're only here for a short period of time; and our job is not to win the battles but to make sure they leave sooner rather than later.

So this debate about whether we should stay, whether this is a military conflict, whether we should engage in combat, engage in development work—all of that is only adding to the confidence of the Taliban while we're debating the whole issue.

Of course, the Taliban are being approached. There's a lot of talk about a negotiated settlement. What does that mean? Do we negotiate from a position of relative weakness? Do we allow the other side to dictate terms that at this point in time are not favourable by any stretch of the imagination?

Negotiated settlement also assumes that we know who to negotiate with. We tend to look at the Taliban as this one email address or one door that we can knock on and they'll come out and say okay, we're ready to talk. That's not the case; neither do we have an address, nor is this a monolithic entity.

Quickly going through what the Taliban constitute today, there are at least three categories. I agree that these are theoretical categories and that reality is much messier, but as an analyst, I can't help but come up with theoretical models.

One type of Taliban are those who are in country, in Afghanistan, who are commanders who report back to the Shura, led by Mullah Omar. They're based in Afghanistan; they're waging the insurgency there. Then there are Taliban who are connected to elements within the Pakistani state and society; and then there are Taliban who are connected to al Qaeda.

These are three separate, very broad categories. These are not factions. These are not well-defined groups but broad categories. How can we begin to talk about negotiating when the Taliban themselves are a complex phenomenon?

I mentioned earlier that the insurgency is growing. Of course, this is not the nineties: the Taliban are not taking over territory; that's not what they're aiming for. They're aiming to make life difficult for NATO forces so that the whole idea or confusion in NATO capitals about this perhaps not being the right mission, that we need to modify it, that we're not sure what we're doing, is exacerbated in our minds, so that one day we will pick up and leave. Will that happen? I don't know, but that's what they're trying to do.

We did not see Taliban activity in the Herat region; that's not a traditional Taliban area. North of Kabul we're seeing activity in Kapisa and Badghis provinces, and even along the Turkmen border, which are all areas of operation. Obviously, the supply lines are not running that long. We're not talking about infantry, but about the ability to stage attacks. The recent attack on the Serena Hotel is an eye-opener to all of us as to the enhanced capabilities of this insurgency.

We tend to talk about either military conflict or negotiated settlement as if it's a black and white dichotomy, an either/or situation. It is not, because every military conflict ends with a negotiated settlement—and each side knows that. There is no war for the sake of war; we're not going to be in Afghanistan for the long haul or just for the sake of occupying the country. We need to get beyond that and to understand how to reach a negotiated settlement. Right now it is too early for a negotiated settlement, because we don't know what that negotiated settlement would look like, let alone try to negotiate it.

Pakistan is in disarray because of the political turmoil and the growing jihadist insurgency. Pakistan has a large role to play in the future stabilization of Afghanistan, so we need to see how that plays out.

Perhaps there are lessons to be learned from the American experience in Iraq. There was a time, when the regime was disbanded, when we saw a de-Baathification process. Now we're seeing a re-Baathification process. Perhaps the solution lies in bringing back certain pragmatic or moderate Taliban—but we're not there yet.

There's a question of why we need to stay in Afghanistan, and this is becoming the hallmark of the debate. We definitely need to develop institutions, but what are the primary institutions that we need to develop and upon which every other institution will rest? These are the security institutions, the Afghan National Police and the Afghan National Army. But they're not there yet, and they're not going to be there for a very long time. We need to admit that and to acknowledge it. Until such a time, we need to be able to support these institutions.

You see, you can't build anything when you're being shot at. If you're being shot at, you're going to shoot back. Our troops, our NATO forces, are having to do two things: develop, and keep the Taliban from shooting at them, and of course at those in Afghanistan who support the NATO mission. We can only hope that by 2011 the ANP and ANA can increasingly begin to take responsibility for security, but that is something we can't discuss in greater detail because this is a very futuristic assessment.

I think that ground reality will determine in 2011, or in the years to come, where we stand. Instead of having this lack of a coherent policy and allowing this to become a political debate or a punching bag for a political vendetta, I think the politicians should let the technocrats, the military commanders, the intelligence officials, and the experts give them the ground reality upon which any further policy is to be based.

Am I running out of time?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Yes, you are, sir.

[Kamran Bokhari]

I will wrap up by saying that, sure, they—the Taliban—are not winning, but we're not winning either. We shouldn't take comfort from that. Therefore, we need to do what needs to be done, which is to support the security institutions that can then build other institutions.

I'd like to end by saying that my organization doesn't take money from anybody. We are a very for-profit organization, and we don't take any cheques.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Bokhari.

We'll go to the first round, and Mr. Patry and Mr. Wilfert, I'll let you folks sort that out.

Go ahead, Mr. Wilfert.

[Bryon Wilfert, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

General MacKenzie, at the beginning you talked about the rotation of Canadian Forces in and out of Afghanistan. Quickly, there are two things: one, do you believe in the principle of rotation?

Two, on page 34 of the Manley report, it talks about the move towards reorienting our mission there from combat to intensified training of the Afghan army and police—which we all believe is a laudable goal. The question is, if you rotate, you will then, presumably, on both of your flanks—if the Canadians are there—take more of the offensive heavy lifting, if you will.

I want your comments on that, and then I'll turn it over to Mr. Martin to put his question on the table.

[Gen Lewis MacKenzie]

Yes, I must have misspoke on rotation. I don't believe in rotation. You waste all of the time and energy and money you've invested into contacts and knowledge of the area and getting to know the local people, the people who are going to win the insurgency. The rotation, in my world, is always the nation itself rotating its own troops in and out, which is exactly what we're doing.

As far as moving from combat to training, that's exactly what's going on now. On my first trip to Afghanistan, I'll tell you, I was pretty uneasy standing among about 200 soldiers all armed with live ammunition, AK-47s. A year later when I went back, I participated in a rundown, a live firing exercise, at platoon level. I was as totally at ease as I would be with Canadian soldiers. They're coming a long way. You don't have to teach Afghans how to fight; they know how to fight. What you have to show them and mentor them on is combined operations where large groups are operating together and maybe injecting some indirect fire or artillery or whatever, controlling air. But as far as sneaking through the hills or running across the fields and attacking people, you don't have to teach the Afghans how to do that.

So we're doing that. We're weaning ourselves from the combat role, by way of percentage of energy expended, to the training role, and it has actually been quite successful. There's a problem with the training. For some reason, NATO has the Germans doing one thing, the French doing another thing, the Americans doing another thing, us doing another thing. We all have slightly different tactics, and when they come together, it could be done better.

[Kevin Sorenson, Conservative, Crowfoot, AB]

Thank you, Mr. MacKenzie.

Mr. Martin.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Thank you both for being here today.

Mr. Bokhari, what are the internal political mechanisms that are required to deal with the insurgency that is coming not only from Pakistan but also from other countries in the region? As a second part to that question, is a regional working group that includes Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and other countries required?

General MacKenzie, the failure to deal with the Afghan National Police has been, I'm sure, very concerning to you as to others. In your view, General, what do you think is required, and how do we get our allies to make the strategic investments in the Afghan National Police to be able to ensure that they are equipped, trained, and paid for the job they do, along with the two other components of the pillars of security, the Afghan judiciary and their corrections system?

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Martin.

Mr. MacKenzie or Mr. Bokhari or whoever.