I'll start with some contentions.
The situation has deteriorated, but it isn't lost. NATO, the UN, and the Afghan government cannot succeed by business as usual. A much greater effort is needed, proportionate at least to that of the Balkans. Canada's contribution to success can be important but not decisive, but Canada's contribution to failure could actually be decisive.
The majority of the Afghans, who have suffered so much, as we heard in previous discussions, need and want foreign help, including Canadian help. Afghanistan is not Iraq; it's NATO-led and UN-authorized. The local population has not yet given up on it, although their expectations are not being met.
I want to reinforce that. In the fall, Sally Armstrong attended a meeting we had at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, where we met with three young Afghan female journalists. We set up an evening discussion and put out 30 or 40 chairs, because that's what we thought would be necessary, and well over 200 people showed up. The impressive thing was that I didn't hear from any of those women—and I asked them directly, “Do you want us to stay or do you want us to go?”—that they wanted us to go. I think all of them wanted us to do a better job, but none of them wanted us to go.
I'll come back to public diplomacy in a moment.
My view is that Canadians aren't pacifists, and they will support our effort there as long as they believe it's necessary, affordable, effective, and not just serving somebody else's agenda. They believe Pakistan remains a key to the outcome, and that there may be an opportunity there.
I'd like to talk mainly about the diplomatic dimension of this. There are two things.
To start with, I support the Manley report. And I broadly support the Conservative motion, as I know it—I've taken it off the Internet, so I'm not sure I have the last version—with an exception that I would have much rather seen Canadian activities in Afghanistan predicated on results than dates. I don't know how you're going to know in the summer of 2011 whether it's time to leave, and I certainly don't think you can know that now. You may have other reasons for taking that view, or the government may have other reasons, but it isn't based on solid information. I advocate that ultimately good policy becomes good politics. When you are tied to timeframes and deadlines that are artificial, you end up getting tangled in politics as well. So I have some doubts about that part.
The government effort has shifted gears. It will never be perfect. It is the most difficult assignment we've carried out probably since the Second World War, and we started from almost zero. It takes a bit of time for people to understand what they're dealing with and to get themselves organized. I'm relatively confident that's under way now.
I do see that there needs to be a very big diplomatic effort. I don't think we've been doing enough at all. We need to be taking a role that is commensurate with the contribution Canada is actually making. One has to be realistic. There are other countries involved, and those other countries are playing a much larger role, in particular the United States and the British as well. But we are the third donor. We have the leverage, and we should be using that leverage. We should be insisting on using it.
I think the tactic recommended by the Manley commission of holding, of playing chicken with NATO on another battalion in Kandahar, is absolutely the right thing to do.
I've been travelling a bit in Europe, and it will not surprise you to find out that they don't see this at all with the same urgency as we do. They tend to think that this is the Americans' problem. You'll notice they're putting a lot more effort into Kosovo than they're putting into Afghanistan, and they're basically leaving it up to us. I've been around NATO long enough to know that unless you put them in front of an ultimatum, they're not going to respond.
If we're doing what we're doing in Kandahar, our NATO allies will let us go on doing that eternally. It's only when they see that they're facing something that really might change and we really do mean it that they are going to back off, that they're going to start taking their responsibilities more seriously.
I was speaking in Scandinavia—in Stockholm and Oslo—and they have just decided that they would not send their battalion of forces to Darfur, partly because of the difficulty of getting in there. So I said to them, “Well, it just so happens that we need about that many people in Afghanistan.” Then they came back and said, “This is a very difficult sell in our country. People don't really support it. It's a very difficult thing for us to do.” I said, “Yes, it's like climate change. You care a lot about climate change, but actually we don't care as much as you do, or apparently we don't. So when it comes to climate change, we'll just take a pass the way you're taking a pass on Afghanistan.”
One could argue that we've already done that, but nonetheless the issue is that unless we push them, diplomatically they're not going to do it—unless we push in Washington. We realized in Washington in the last week that we actually have quite a bit of influence there. Maybe we could use it constructively.
It's the kind of thing that should be job one for our embassies, job one for our senior officials, job one for our ambassador in Washington. Now, Washington is not only about bilateral relations between Ottawa and Washington; it's also about what's going on in the world and what we're trying to do in the world. The United States is playing the major role in Afghanistan, and we have to respect that and we have to be realistic about it. At the same time, we have a significant enough role that we have a voice.
I would also like to see the creation of some kind of contact group, based in capitals, the kind of thing we used to do for Bosnia and for Kosovo. And that's the way we brought an end to the Kosovo war, in effect. We had a group of senior officials from the various interested capitals and we got them together, and ultimately we got to an agreement on that.
So I think there's more diplomacy we should be directing at Pakistan. There's more we should probably be directing at India and at Iran. I think there's a lot to be done on that front, and if I were in the committee's position, I'd be advocating doing more of that.