Thank you, Mr. Chairperson.
Members of the committee, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Stefan Lehmeier. I am the coordinator of the peace operations working group of the Canadian Peacebuilding Coordinating Committee.
Before I begin with my presentation, I would like to inform you that all the witnesses who appear before you this morning, as you've said, are part of the Afghanistan Reference Group, a network of Canadian civil society organizations with involvement in Afghanistan.
The views shared by the witnesses have been informed by a large number of Canadian NGOs, but they do not necessarily represent the views of all the agencies involved in the Afghanistan Reference Group.
The following three presentations will focus on the military, political, and diplomatic dimension of Canada's engagement in Afghanistan.
It is clear today that the West's involvement in Afghanistan has contributed to an ongoing deterioration of the situation as far as national security in Afghanistan is concerned. In September, the secretary general of the United Nations declared that, based on statistics, 2007 was the worst year since the fall of the Taliban regime when it comes to public safety. There was a 20% increase of violent incidents compared to last year. Several NATO commanders publicly stated that there was no military solution to solve the multitude of problems facing Afghanistan. Without a fundamental review of the international community's efforts in Afghanistan, foreign forces will remain in the country for decades and will be caught up in increasingly difficult and intense combat operations against the insurgents.
The root causes of the problem, which has only got worse, are linked to the international community's inability to understand the nature of Afghan society and its internal conflicts, which go back decades, even centuries. These conflicts were further complicated by the arrival of foreign forces in 2001. These foreign forces openly became allies of the various parties involved in the conflict. In my opinion, it must be stressed that the armed violence we see in Afghanistan today is much more than local insurrection in southern Afghanistan. It indicates that civil war between the Taliban and Hizb-e Islami, and also the Northern Alliance, has not been resolved.
No provision was made in the Bonn agreement in 2001 for comprehensive reconciliation and inclusive peace negotiations involving all key parties to the conflict. Part of the reason for that was that al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Pashtuns were conflated with each other and considered spoilers that could only be dealt with by means of violence.
In the absence of a comprehensive political settlement, the engagement of the international community in Afghanistan's reconstruction and stabilization has been fragmented and therefore weak and incoherent. From the beginning, there have been two distinct and fundamentally incompatible military missions: the U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.
The primary mission of Operation Enduring Freedom was and is counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency. It came to Afghanistan to assure first the security of Americans from al-Qaeda, and only then the protection of the Afghan government from the insurgency. This approach is fundamentally different from ISAF's mission of providing a secure environment for the establishment of a self-sustaining, democratic Afghan government able to exercise its sovereign authority throughout the country.
In the beginning, in late-2001 and early-2002, there was a strict separation between the two operations in terms of both geography and mandate. But after ISAF's expansion to all of Afghanistan, which took place between 2004 and 2006, its nature began to change, and it got more and more drawn into Operation Enduring Freedom's counter-insurgency campaign, which was, as I said, not part of its original mandate.
One of the results of this unforeseen transformation of ISAF has been that NATO is today more divided than ever over the purpose of its presence in Afghanistan and over an acceptable way to share the military and financial burden.
Just as the international military intervention in Afghanistan is fragmented, so is the political effort. The UN was initially confined to a very narrow humanitarian coordination role, while key stabilization tasks were parcelled out to a series of individual lead nations that turned out to be unequipped to handle their responsibilities. I think the reform of the Afghan National Police has been the most striking example of these challenges.
Despite all these lessons learned over the years, even the recently established coordination mechanism to oversee the implementation of the Afghanistan Compact, the Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board, is proving to be largely ineffective in its current set-up and with its current procedures.
Regionally, Afghanistan has long-standing conflicts with Pakistan over relations with India, the border, ethnic issues, and transit trade. The issue of Taliban insurgents receiving safe haven in the tribal areas of Pakistan is inextricably intertwined with fundamental issues of governance in those areas. These are political issues that will not be resolved militarily, yet few attempts have been made so far to bring relevant parties to the negotiating table to find political solutions.
In view of the above, we believe that a reorientation of the international focus from the current counter-insurgency campaign to the development of a comprehensive multi-dimensional peace process is urgently needed, and the following two presentations will elaborate on that.
Thank you.