National Defence Committee on Sept. 25th, 2006

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Ladies and gentlemen, we'll call to order the twelfth meeting of the Standing Committee on National Defence, dealing with the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan.

Through the wonders of technology we have two witnesses today. One is from Queen's University, Douglas Bland, chair of the Defence Management Studies Program, School of Policy Studies, who's here in person. We'll hear from him first, but I'd also like to introduce, from Calgary--can you hear us, sir?

[Prof. David Bercuson, Professor, Director of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, University of Calgary]

Yes, absolutely.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Very good. This is Professor David Bercuson, director of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary. Welcome.

It looks like this may work.

We're going to have Mr. Bland present first, and then you, and then we'll open it up for some questions. There's a pretty strict order of proceedings to go by as far as timing and who gets to ask questions when.

Before we start, I'd just like to thank the committee once again for electing me as chair. It really is an honour, and I appreciate that. I congratulate Mr. Cannis and Mr. Bachand as vice-chairs.

Mr. Cannis.

[John Cannis, Liberal, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Mr. Chairman, first of all, I just want to say that you have my full support.

I apologize for being absent, but I know I would have voted for you. I was a bit late coming into Ottawa, and I saw the war room was empty.

Congratulations, and thank you, colleagues. I apologize for not being here for the vote.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you.

Mr. Bland, we look forward to your comments. After we hear from both of you, we'll open it up for questions, and either one of you can jump in.

[Dr. Douglas Bland, Chair, Defence Management Studies Program, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University]

Thank you, Chairman, and good afternoon to members of the committee. It's my pleasure to be here, and I thank you for inviting me.

I'm just going to say a few words, mostly extemporaneously. I look forward to your questions and to any discussion you might wish to have on this matter.

I begin by saying that Canada's three-D policy—diplomacy, development, and defence mission—in Afghanistan is the right mission for Canada and the right mission for the Afghan people. It embraces Canada's true traditions and values, and it is increasingly effective. I support it wholeheartedly and urge the House of Commons to adopt a non-partisan consensus to support the mission as well.

In 1947 Brooke Claxton, then Minister of National Defence, read into Hansard a statement on Canada's accomplishments in the Second World War. We fought a war, he said, to support people who had the will to be free.

The object of our policy in Afghanistan is to support the Afghan people, who have already displayed a will to be free. As Saint Augustine wrote more than 1,500 years ago, you can always have peace; you just have to obey the dictates of the tyrant.

We have to remember our policies and our history, and the history of liberal democracies everywhere. Peace is easy to achieve and hard to endure. Liberty is hard to achieve and easy to endure. We Canadians are now in the hard part of making life easier for the Afghan people, and the three-D policy is the way forward.

I want to discuss briefly each of the Ds in turn, but let me turn first to the criticism of the question of balance, perhaps an academic discussion of it for a few moments.

Too much, some say, is being spent on military operations and not enough on humanitarian development, but these criticisms often rest on an error in reasoning, when people equate balance with equal. Balance is achieved one D at a time, when just the right number of resources are provided to meet the particular demands of each of the three Ds. Balance is sustained when we adjust resources as the needs and circumstances change. There is no logical or appropriate way to balance the Ds without measuring particular needs independent of each other. In other words, there is no logic or requirement to make all three Ds equal in every respect. The principle must always be resources commensurate with particular needs.

If we take diplomacy first, for example, some 25 or 30 Canadian diplomats are stationed in Kabul today, when there were none in 2001. Scores of Canadian officials, on the other hand, in Ottawa, at the UN, at NATO, in Washington, in European capitals, and elsewhere, are coordinating every day Canada's diplomatic efforts and policies for humanitarian and security missions in Afghanistan, where balance is defined, as it must be, as the appropriate application of resources to needs. Canada's diplomatic contribution to the mission in Afghanistan is appropriate, purposeful, and balanced.

Look at the second D, development. Canada, as you know, is one of the leading developmental donors in Afghanistan, funding more than nine major projects within the national development strategy established by the Afghan government. That's the important point; it's their development strategy. The total cost of the development program in 2006 was $109.5 million. The government has pledged, through 2011, $100 million per year. The total allocation of development assistance to Afghanistan, over the period 2001 to 2011, is almost a billion dollars.

Moreover, the Afghan government, in London, in January of this year, established a humanitarian and development needs program, which they put before the donor nations. They discussed, among other things, the limits to which the Afghan government can handle major projects and large amounts of cash. Where balance is measured as appropriate application of resources to needs, the Canadian developmental program in Afghanistan is also balanced and effective.

Let's look at the third D, defence. Canada's military operations get a great deal of attention in the media. They're interesting, exciting, emotive, and easy to report. Filming kids in school doesn't have the same effect, but this media emphasis—and I will say poor government public relations and information programs—leave many Canadians with the impression that the defence mission is Canada's entire mission and that members of the Canadian Forces are only engaged in combat operations.

Helping the Afghanis fight their enemy is, of course, the main reason for the UN mandate, and it will remain the main effort so long as the Taliban and other illegal groups attack the Afghani people. But of the approximately 2,300 members of the Canadian Forces in Canada, only about 1,000 are front-line combat troops; the remainder are support and assistance troops working in reconstruction and civil action programs. I'm sure the Chief of the Defence Staff has already given you the details of these missions.

When balance is measured as the appropriate application of resources to needs, the Canadian Forces multi-mission operation in Afghanistan is balanced and effective. Rather than looking merely at difficulties, I encourage this committee and the House to look at what has been achieved and how success can be reinforced.

What has been achieved?

First, Canadian diplomacy is successfully holding together a coalition of 36 nations to help the Afghan people develop their own strong and sustainable free society.

In development, since 2001, with Canada's help, 4.8 million children have been enrolled in schools, and one-third of them are girls; 12,000 villages have access to funding for water needs; 63,000 soldiers have been disarmed; 11,000 pieces of heavy equipment--tanks and artillery, for instance--have been secured; 3.7 million refugees have returned home; governance capabilities at the village, regional, provincial, and national levels are building through two free elections, and 25% of the elected representatives in their assembly are now women. I think maybe they're doing better than we are.

In matters of defence--the third D--in the face of the military operations of the 36 contributing nations, the Taliban and other illegal groups are on the run because they cannot stand in front of our soldiers, and they do not have the support of free Afghanis.

Let me turn for a minute to three main criticisms of the mission that I've watched over the last few years. Some people are urging Canadians to surrender the Afghani people to the tyrants, the Taliban, in exchange for mere peace. First is the question of balance that I've talked about, but let me be specific here on matters of military operations.

Critics declared inaccurately that billions are being spent on military operations each year, and they exaggerate the cost of military operations in order to support false charges of imbalance. There are two baskets of military money to be considered. There's everyday military spending for people, equipment, and operations of the Canadian Forces that taxpayers must pay whether the units are at home or away, on active duty or not. Then there are contingency costs--the particular costs of particular operations, or the cost of the optional extras, if you will. In Afghanistan these are costs to build a base, to fly troops and supplies in and out of the theatre, for bullets and beans, for medical support, and so on. Some critics improperly combine the two costs into one enormous bill, exaggerating the real cost of the operation and declaring the mission out of balance.

Here are the facts. The total contingency cost of the Canadian Forces operations in Afghanistan since September 11, 2001, is $1.8 billion, or about $360 million a year. The total cost rounded up for 2005-06 is $400 million. Recall that the development cost per year is $100 million. Given the very expensive nature of supporting 2,300 people in an undeveloped region of the world far from home, the Canadian Forces costs are reasonable and balanced in the circumstances.

The second reason people give to leave the Afghan people to the mercy of the Taliban is mere pride. Critics say that we are simple lapdogs to President Bush and American foreign policy. If that is true, what does the criticism say of the integrity of three Canadian prime ministers who support the mission, and all the presidents, prime ministers, and parliaments of the other 36 nations in the field? What does it say about the UN, the UN Security Council, and the council's two unanimous votes in support of the mission? What does it say of NATO and the European Union?

Something other than Mr. Bush's intellect and charm must be working here. What do all these other nations and their leaders know that critics here at home don't know? Why do they all think that diplomacy, development, and defence in Afghanistan is the right mission and that security is, for now, the necessary step to stabilize the country? If people know something different from all these other organizations and leaders, they should let us know.

The third reason critics say we should dishonour our commitment to the free people of Afghanistan is that our casualties are too high. Certainly each death, wounding, and accident is regrettable, but taken into context, we have to remember that Canada has spent a great many lives over its history defending itself, its values, and the values and interests of like-minded allies and other people who have the will to be free.

I think it unfortunate when people in the community, for whatever reason, use the casualty count to prop up their ideological interests. There's a great deal of misinformation being offered up recently by some of these people to oppose the mission, and I would point to some so-called statistical research offered to the public in the last few weeks. There are also people who try to impress Canadians by quoting, as an authority, a very junior British officer, a foreigner. I think that's regrettable. I'd like to elaborate on these issues later this afternoon, if it interests the committee.

When the human cost of the mission in Afghanistan comes home, ask yourself this: who's not complaining? The people who are not complaining are the members of the Canadian Forces who are taking the casualties. They understand the reason why they're there, and when you ask them they will explain it. What we need from our leaders in Canada is support for this kind of courage.

Finally, the three-D mission is the right mission for Canada. It's directed by some of the best-prepared and dedicated Canadians Canada has ever sent abroad. They are courageously supporting the Afghan people, a people who have already shown a will to be free. They are also supporting Canada's reputation as a defender of liberty. Diplomacy, development, and defence is the right mission for Canada in Afghanistan, and we Canadians should be working to reinforce that mission, not trying to work to leave it.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you, Mr. Bland.

Now we'll switch to Calgary.

Professor, if you're ready, go ahead, and take the time you need. Then we'll open it up for questions. We'll try to direct questions to whomever the questioner wants. We'll let you know if it's you or Mr. Bland.

Go ahead.

[Prof. David Bercuson]

Thank you very much. I too support the mission, because I believe it represents Canadian values abroad, and it certainly serves Canadian interests.

I just want to let the committee know something they may not know, because I just spotted it on the CBC website about 10 minutes ago. The headline is: "Afghan women's official killed by gunmen. Two gunmen on a motorcycle shot and killed the head of a provincial women's affairs department near her home in Kandahar, Afghan government officials said Monday."

I don't think I need to say any more about that, because this is one of the main reasons why we are there. People lose focus of the extent to which trying to free the Afghan people from this extreme, fanatic religious intolerance is one of the reasons why we have committed ourselves to that mission. It's going to be a long battle, but I think it's very much worth it.

It certainly serves our pride to be there and to do this work. And it serves our interests. This is a country that is tying in to a whole variety of international obligations, whether they be obligations of trade or international law or diplomacy or sending troops to various parts of the world. We depend on international trade for 40 cents of every dollar in the pocket of every Canadian.

We can't pretend that we are isolated from the rest of the world. We can't pretend that there's anything moral about sitting back and letting others do the heavy lifting in protecting and defending the systems that nurture us while we ourselves live by the good grace of others. We can't do that. We have international obligations, both to the United Nations and to NATO. That seems to me fairly obvious, and it has been stressed a lot lately, especially by the Prime Minister in his speech to the General Assembly last week.

I want to talk about the evolving nature of the mission, more than anything else. I think Dr. Bland has discussed the details of the mission much better than I could. I just want to say this: in war, and this is a war, or whatever else we may call it, the enemy has a will and an intelligence of his own. He doesn't fight the war that you want him to fight. He fights the war that is most effective for the achievement of his objectives.

So the previous government decided to go into a very important part of Afghanistan, namely Kandahar, to do the diplomacy, development, and defence work that needed to be done. Dr. Bland has certainly spoken a great deal about that. I think one of the key points is that without the development work, this insurgency is going to continue. We need to help the Afghan government tie the outlying regions of Afghanistan to the government in Kabul. We need to help them do that. We need to help rebuild the country after years of war. But the other side doesn't want us to succeed, and that's the point. There is another side, there is an enemy, and they want to try to undermine, destroy, and disrupt our efforts to rebuild.

That's why the nature of this mission has changed over the last year or so. It's because their efforts to destroy what we have been doing need to be countered by our military operations. Eventually, the hope is that we will succeed in defeating the insurgency, and the emphasis will shift back to where we would like it to be, which is to the aid and development work.

I want to say something else, and that is that in the course of a struggle, in the course of a war, there will always be setbacks. There will always be times when the enemy will adjust his tactics so that he will take advantage of your weaknesses and will appear to have you on the defensive. I don't know whether that is the case or not, and certainly we've taken some casualties lately, and we all understand that. It is up to us to adjust and meet the challenges that the enemy is posing.

If the political objective of supporting the Karzai government and of keeping the Taliban from re-establishing themselves in office in Afghanistan is worthwhile, if it serves our national interests, if it serves our values—and I believe it does—then we must adjust, and we must regroup, and we must outsmart, and we must out-think, and we must outfight the enemy. And that's the way we will prevail in the long run. But to believe that because we have taken casualties here or casualties there, that they have us on the run and that this war is being lost, I think is just foolish.

It would have been very easy for someone to have declared on the morning of August 20, 1942, that Canada had been beaten and that this country was out of the Second World War because of the extreme losses we had suffered at Dieppe the day before. We know better. We know from our history and we know from our own hearts about this.

Finally, let me say this. Others have talked about other missions. Afghanistan is not the only place in the world that needs Canadian help, either Canadian aid or Canadian development work or Canadian troops. We have a small military right now, and I don't want to get into the partisan politics of why we do; we just do. We're doing the best we can with what we've got. This is a mission that is doable, it's a mission that's achievable, and it's a mission the Canadian Forces can do well. We have precious few troops left to do anything else.

But if we were to try, let's say, to intervene in Darfur, a worthy mission, of course, we'd have to fight our way in. That's what people forget. They say Darfur is a humanitarian operation and this is a war. Anyone who thinks we're going to get into Darfur to help the refugees there, to help in that civil war to try to avert the genocide that's taking place there, without fighting our way in and being engaged as heavily in combat as we are now, is kidding themselves. I would like to remind the committee that there are other missions. This is not the only important thing that needs to be done in the world, but right now it's something we can do and it's something we should do.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you, sir. I appreciate that.

We'll open it up for questions now. The first round is seven minutes. We'll start with Mr. Dosanjh.

[Ujjal Dosanjh, Liberal, Vancouver South, BC]

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Bland and Mr. Bercuson.

I have a couple of questions I'm going to throw out, and then you can respond.

First, Mr. Bercuson, you said the mission evolves. One of the ways the mission is evolving is in response to the Taliban or the other side evolving. I would like you to tell me how one can define Taliban in the current context. We have been reading a lot in the newspapers. There are different elements in the Taliban, whether they come from Pakistan or other parts. Some people are suggesting you can't even call them Taliban; you can call them neo-Taliban. I would like you to tell me how you would define the enemy in Afghanistan today. How has it evolved, and do we need to respond differently? Is that why the situation in terms of our response is also changing?

The other question is to Mr. Bland. I agree with much of what you have said. You say this is a perfect mission, and I support the mission wholeheartedly and fully. Is there anything you would suggest, as an historian, that we're not doing right, or we should do differently, or more, or better? You've said this is the mission, it's great. We support the mission. I want you to take a critical look at it in a positive, supportive way and tell me if there is anything we're not doing that we should be doing, or if there is anything we are doing we ought not to be doing.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Mr. Bercuson, do you want to start?

[Prof. David Bercuson]

Yes.

I would define the other side, or the enemy, as I put it, as the insurgents. Who are they? They are a mix, undoubtedly, of religious fanatics, warlords who oppose the government for their own political, social, or economic reasons, or their troops--probably drug lords, probably smugglers. Whenever you get an insurgency--and this has proven true pretty well throughout the history of insurgent warfare--you're always going to get disparate elements coming together behind one or two major groups that are leading the insurgency. It is not necessarily that they agree with all their objectives, but they want to see the government attacked, or they want to see the government turned over. It is in their own interest--whether it be a political interest, a social interest, an economic interest, or an ideological one--for the government to go away.

What we have out there is some kind of a loose coalition of insurgency, and that leads right into your second question, which was what do we do about that. The answer is we have to try to adjust a constant mix of diplomacy and development on the ground, of reaching out to certain of the elements to try to pacify them, or neutralize them, or manoeuvre them out of the fight, while at the same time the hard-core element--those who simply will not give up for whatever reasons--are usually the ones who are ideologically motivated more than anybody else; those are the ones we have to fight.

What we've got here is a phenomenon that has been called by others “fourth-generation warfare”. It's a very different kind of situation from what we saw either in the Second World War or in the Korean War, and it brings together the necessity to attack it on several different levels at once. That's why the mission your government chose was the right mission. We put troops to defend, but we also have to do development to win over the people, because if we don't win the people over they will inevitably go over to the other side and the government will be lost.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you.

Mr. Bland.

[Dr. Douglas Bland]

Mr. Chair, identifying enemy forces in this kind of situation is difficult, and everybody understands that. It's forcing me to go back and read the stuff I used to like to read in the 1970s, of revolutionary warfare and so on. It's very interesting.

There are many factions within the Taliban. There are people who are simple criminals and there are other kinds of people around. I think for the soldiers on the ground, the guys I talk to, they know the enemy: it's the person who's shooting at them. And it is a difficult problem, but the Taliban soldiers are not ten feet tall. They're scared and they're hungry and they're tired, and they're going to live in the mountains this winter. They have their own sets of problems, and we should exploit those.

As we are now doing, and I think as NATO is doing, we should be negotiating with the Taliban, not in the sense of saying, “We'll allow you to abuse 50% of the women if you'll stop fighting”, but negotiating with them to put down their arms, to quit their units, to run away, to surrender to us, and so on. We do that in all kinds of wars.

I don't mean to be trivial, but you could take the question of “How do we identify the bad guys?” to the level of Canadian cities. How do the police identify the criminals on the street before they've done something? It's a problem, and there isn't any straight answer.

I don't think I said the mission is perfect; I said I support it because it's the right mission to do. I think the balance is right, but it's never stable, and it has to be changed. As the demand changes, you change the resources, as the Chief of the Defence Staff is doing on the military side right now. Some people in the House might want to look at CIDA operations, which we seem to have done a great deal of over the years. But I'll let that slide.

So what can we do? At home we need to look at this as a war management problem of the whole of the Government of Canada. This is not a mission of the Canadian armed forces or the Department of National Defence, or even just CIDA and the foreign affairs department. The people of this town, the public servants and others, have to understand that this is a whole of government operation, not a three-D operation. We need to have some committees--of the House, perhaps, and, dare I say, of the other place--that deal with the management of Canadian interests in wartime. That's an important thing to do. We need to bring to the Canadian people, through the media if necessary, the work that's being done to give them a resolute picture of what's happening.

My recommendation to government is that they don't take grey-haired men in suits from the academy or old generals out to talk to Canadians about what's going on; they should go to the field and bring home young men and women, captains and majors and sergeant-majors and so on, and stand them in front of Canadians. They will put people like Mr. Staples in his place. I did that at Queen's University a couple of times with my graduate students, and it was a wonderful experience.

I think we should be involving, as I said, more of government and so on. In the field are very experienced officers who have been fighting these kinds of wars since 1990. They've been promoted through the ranks because of their merit and their ability, and I think governments and other people ought to listen to them. They know better than I do what kinds of tactics and stuff they need in the field.

What we need to do, if we're into a long-term operation--and we are--is change the recruiting system, change the laws governing recruiting. We need to have the House of Commons rapidly okay procurement projects at all kinds of levels, not just major airplanes but all sorts of places. We need more money put into the operation.

Here is where I think the government, and the House of Commons especially, can lead. We need to make the Taliban and these other people afraid of a liberal democracy that's upset. That's what we've done in our history. There's nothing more fearsome than a liberal democracy that's working together against these kinds of people.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you, Mr. Bland.

Mr. Dosanjh, thanks for the question.

We'll move on to Mr. Bachand.

[Claude Bachand, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

First of all, Mr. Bland, I would like to point out that Mr. Staples is a good friend of mine. There are many opinions on the current conflict, and there is one in particular that I would like to raise with you, to see if you share my views.

I get to the UN often. I am also a member of the NATO Parliamentary Association. The debate on gauging current action in Afghanistan is underway everywhere, not just in Canada. I imagine that you both agree that responsibility for this war rests with civilian authorities, in other words, with the elected officials who decide how it should be conducted. If elected officials see things that are not going well, it is their duty to make them known and to try to change them.

Gentlemen, I would like to know if you agree that civilian authorities have the last say in how the war is waged. Naturally, that includes this Committee on National Defence. I hope that your answer will be yes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Go ahead, Mr. Bercuson.

[Prof. David Bercuson]

I have said in a lot of different places, in a lot of publications, and in a lot of fora stretching back over 10 years that as far as I'm concerned there ought to be much greater parliamentary control over troop deployments abroad. I have called for the necessity for Parliament to approve deployments of as small as 200 to 300 troops being sent overseas. I believe this is extremely necessary, not simply because of the forms of parliamentary democracy, but to engage the Canadian people in the debate about whether or not troops should be sent overseas.

Secondly, I've also called for much greater authority on behalf of your committee, and the reason is your committee, in my opinion, deals with something that is entirely different from everything else the government does. What your committee does is deal with questions of the military and national defence. It deals with questions of deploying Canadian troops abroad to kill people, if necessary, at the behest of the state, to serve our national interests.

The people whom we are deploying abroad are also going in harm's way. By signing up to the Canadian military they have taken up, in a sense, an unlimited liability. They will lay their lives on the line for the people and the Government of Canada if necessary. There is no other citizen in this country, including the police, who has a liability that is unlimited. That is why I think your committee needs to have more power and authority than other committees in Parliament and why Parliament should vote on overseas deployments.

I also want to say this, and that is, once the vote has been taken, you have to leave it to the military to do what it needs to do until such time as it is necessary to go back to Parliament at the end of the deployment, because you can't be interfering in everything the military does all of the time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you.

Mr. Bland.

[Dr. Douglas Bland]

I agree with almost everything David had to say, and I'm sure he knows that.

I take a slightly different academic look on that. I don't think the government is responsible for Canada's national defence or the civil control of the armed forces. Parliament is responsible for the control of the armed forces. The civil authority in a democratic system is civilians elected to Parliament. The government is accountable to Parliament for the execution of policy and so on.

Not to debate the point too far, I agree entirely that Parliament and members of Parliament need more information. They need more background, and if I may say, with respect, members of Parliament need to do more work to find out what's going on so that they can carry out their responsibilities.

I would disagree with Professor Bercuson on the point that once the decision is made to go to war--and I know he didn't mean it that bluntly, or along that sharp a line--that it's then up to the military. What I think was often missing in Canadian operations through the time in Bosnia--you'll remember Somalia--was active, informed oversight by Parliament of these kinds of missions, for any number of reasons.

I think things have changed dramatically in the last number of years, and I would encourage this committee, the House, and the other place to become much more involved in the oversight of military operations and so on, not to the point of second guessing what's going on; I would hope oversight in the sense of saying, do you guys have enough? Do you know what your mission is? Do you know where you're going? Do you need more money? Do you need more support? That kind of oversight I'm sure would be greatly welcomed.

[Claude Bachand, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

I am, nevertheless, satisfied with your answer. However, I do not agree with telling the military, once the vote has been adopted in the House, that they have free rein, and that we will take out our chequebook and ask them how much money they want to deal with the issue.

I wonder about what has been in the press lately, and what is happening in the theatres of operation as such. I do not know if you have seen the report that just came out in the United States and that states that since involvement began in Afghanistan and Iraq, terrorism has been on the rise.

As parliamentarians, we are in a position to question whether the military approach, or the almost strictly military approach, is the best.

You say that the Taliban have been somewhat thrown off track. In that case, I do not understand why we are sending in tanks. There is also talk of perhaps sending in F-18s. In fact, they are not really all that off track.

Moreover, we question that. How is it that we are unable of defeating them? Perhaps it is because they now have the support of their own people. Perhaps it is because there has not been enough development work done and they think that nothing has changed since the military involvement.

I would like you to give me your views on that. Personally, I get the sense that both of you have a strong military bent. I am not challenging that, since it is your right. However, some of us believe that perhaps we should consider another approach. Perhaps we should look at how we can win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. In fact, that can often be achieved by building schools and hospitals. I agree that security must be provided, but there are several ways of doing that, and it is not necessarily by going as far as killing the last Taliban in Pakistan. There could be security perimeters to ensure that what is built is not demolished overnight.

I would like to hear your comments on those two aspects, on diplomacy and development, rather than on the military approach, as I am not convinced that that is the best approach at this point in time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Okay, time has elapsed, but I'll allow a short response, if you can.

[Dr. Douglas Bland]

Well, we're academics, but we'll try.

I agree with you. I think the policy of the government is not single-minded combat operations and chasing the Taliban. Once the Taliban stops shooting at our guys, they'll be building schools and houses. If it is a fact that terrorism and the threat, if you will, is on the rise, then I guess we have two options: quit and run, or face the threat and increase our resources that are working against them. I think that's the place we ought to be going.

Who should we ask for advice about what's going on in Afghanistan? I think it would be good to have the President of Afghanistan come here and talk to us about it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Okay, time has elapsed, so maybe Mr. Bercuson can jump in later on that.

Ms. Black.

[Dawn Black, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you very much.

And thank you to both of you for appearing before the committee, one via technology and the other in person.

I want to ask a couple of questions. First of all, I have a comment about the death, which Professor Bercuson spoke about earlier, of Safia Ama Jan, who was the department head for women's programs in Kandahar province. She had requested official transportation and bodyguards from her government over and over again, and those were refused. I think there's some responsibility for the local government there to provide the security that their officials ask for. She's not the first provincial person to be assassinated by the insurgent forces. I think it's a sad reflection that she had been asking for protection and had not been given any. She was travelling in a taxi when she was assassinated.

I want to ask about the situation as you see it on the ground in Afghanistan. We know the Americans are also operating in southern Afghanistan, where the Canadians and the British and the Dutch are. I'm wondering about how those two different missions, the Operation Enduring Freedom mission, which the Americans are involved in, and the NATO mission relate to each other, and whether you see any future changes in the two different missions in southern Afghanistan.