National Defence Committee on Sept. 25th, 2006

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Okay, Mr. Bercuson, if you could go first, please.

[Prof. David Bercuson]

My understanding is that the Americans were operating in the south, and I think there are about 3,000 or 4,000--I'm not quite sure. Most of the U.S. troops in the south have been withdrawn, either out of the country entirely or they have been sent to eastern Afghanistan. The American troops that are operating in the south are, as far as I know, operating under ISAF. The Operation Enduring Freedom part of the mission, which is the U.S. controlled part--and they have about 20,000 troops in there under Operation Enduring Freedom--is in other areas of the country.

If you're asking me how the two operations relate, I think the answer is that the ISAF mission is obviously under NATO command and control. The commander of the ISAF commission is a British general. They would be answering to the North Atlantic Council and to the North Atlantic Military Committee and ultimately to the NATO commander. In a sense, there would be international input because NATO members would have more political say over the ultimate objectives of ISAF and the methods by which ISAF carries out its mission, whereas the Operation Enduring Freedom mission is one that is solely responsible, as far as I am aware, to U.S. central command.

[Dr. Douglas Bland]

I won't add a lot to that. There are experts in this town, military people, who would give you the story in great detail. All I would say is, as Dr. Bercuson has said, this is a NATO mission that we're involved in. There are large American units within the NATO mission. The NATO forces are commanded by international generals who report to a political authority in Brussels, to whom we have complete access, and are under the control of our Prime Minister and other people.

The great value of the NATO military organization is that over the years we and they have developed a very sophisticated way of commanding and controlling national forces so that national sovereignty is not attacked or diminished in any regard.

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

I wonder what your response is to the plea for NATO countries to step up to the plate in terms of the combat mission and the clear lack of commitment from many NATO allies to participate in the counter-insurgency combat mission that's happening in southern Afghanistan.

I know the Polish government has agreed to send 1,000 troops. However, it's not clear to me what role the Polish troops will play. Will they be part of the combat operation, or do you know?

[Prof. David Bercuson]

I don't myself know what the Polish troops will be doing. But let me say this: first of all, I think we forget that at the moment the fighting that ISAF is involved in is especially concentrated around the Kandahar region. We have to remember that ISAF was only recently extended to that area. When ISAF was started it was a purely UN mission with a mandate to operate only in the Kabul region and primarily as a bodyguard, as it were, for President Karzai.

We have to remember that other countries have been involved in combat or have taken casualties. I can't remember the exact figure for the Germans or for the Spanish, but in both cases I know more than a dozen have been killed in action from those two countries. I think NATO must step up to the plate, as you put it, this time.

I will be extremely disappointed in NATO and I will question the future of NATO as it is at the moment--not its future existence but its future governance--and the way it organizes its military forces, and whether or not it's transforming fast enough to meet these new missions it has taken on itself to do, if we don't see significant contributions of troops from other NATO countries, especially to these areas in the south.

This is the first out-of-theatre mission that NATO has done, its first mission in which it has been involved directly in ground combat, and I think NATO is learning its way and learning how to do things here, as we all are. Canadians, too, are also learning how to get back and focus and function in a war situation. I think it's a challenge to NATO. There is absolutely no question about it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Dr. Bland.

[Dr. Douglas Bland]

I will say briefly that it's democracy in action, I'm afraid. These independent nations within the alliance can determine what they want to do; they have their own ways of going about doing things. There's also I think in this discussion of burden sharing—that's the code word in NATO—a certain element of “After you, Alphonse.” Somebody is waiting for somebody else to go first. We'll see.

It would be useful for the Canadian government--the parliamentary committee on NATO affairs--to continue to pressure these other allies, but remember, it's not at all unusual. When we were four years into the Balkans, the United States wasn't there. It took a lot of pressure to get the United States involved in the Balkan operations. I'm afraid this is the way the alliance works, and it's not perfect.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

That is the time for Ms. Black.

Thank you, gentlemen.

We're going over to Mr. Hawn now.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Dr. Bland and Dr. Bercuson for joining us.

Dr. Bland, I'd like to address my first question to you, and I have a number I'm going to get through.

You brought up the point of the aide-de-camp to the British general being critical of the mission. I'd just like you to amplify on that a little bit and comment on the position of an ADC and the relevance of such comments in relation to the comments that we might have gotten from Canadian officers in the same positions.

[Dr. Douglas Bland]

Well, having had the misfortune in my other life of being an ADC to a general officer, I wouldn't wish it on any Canadian officer.

It just struck me as enormously odd that anybody in Canada, political leaders especially, would be taking a very junior officer, who is in effect a manservant to a general officer, an officer who wasn't in the field--as best I can understand it--and using his opinion as advice. If it had been an American officer of the same rank saying that Canadians should be doing more, I imagine that some parts of Canadian society would be outraged that we'd be listening to an American captain say such things.

My only advice to the House, with respect, is that they call in as many Canadian captains of experience with mud on their boots and ask them what they think of the mission. We don't need to listen to very junior British officers.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you.

My next one is to Dr. Bercuson, because, Dr. Bland, I know what you think of this.

There have been a number of studies that have been passed off as scientific to project the number of casualties. One was by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, which did a simple mathematical calculation and said that if we carry this on till February 2009, we'll lose another 140 troops. I would go back to Dieppe, which Dr. Bland brought up. If we did the same simplistic mathematical calculation, taking that one day's figures, it would have said we would lose 900,000 Canadians before the end of the Second World War.

Dr. Bercuson, what do you think of the relevance of those kinds of pseudo-scientific studies, and why do they seem to get traction with some sectors of the Canadian public?

[Prof. David Bercuson]

Well, I don't know what's in the minds of the people who create these reports, and this report in particular. All I can say is I think there has to be political motive behind it. I mean, this was, I thought, a really interesting study in manipulating statistics and trying to prove with those statistics whatever it was that you wanted to see come out of the study.

I guess what I'm saying is that it's almost as if they were measuring how high the ocean is at any given point. There's a 30-metre wave here and there's a trough over there, so let's take the average and see where we're going with this. I don't know what it shows.

I had a philosophy professor way back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth who used to say, “The square root of Hong Kong is red”. Now, that's a sentence that has all of the elements that make up a sentence, but it's absolutely meaningless.

The study we saw come out last week is exactly of that kind: if casualties continue in this way, if the war goes in this direction, if this happens, if that happens, if the other happens.... Casualties are a very sensitive subject to speak of. I think in this country we are so blessed that we have not seen heavy casualties in action for 50 years. But I would remind this committee that more than 500 Canadians died in active service in two and a half years in the Korean War, and that was for a country the population of which was much less than it is today.

I think you have to put casualties in perspective. You're going to take casualties in a war. Sometimes there will be more and sometimes there will be less. To try to draw out that string and say there will be x number at the end of five years or at the end of ten years is strictly and purely a political exercise--nothing more, nothing less.

[Dr. Douglas Bland]

If I could just make a short statement to back up what we're saying here, I think the authors of that study, when they finished, ought to have recommended that Canada withdraw from all UN missions. If you use the same statistics, you'll recall that about a month ago a Canadian officer on duty in Lebanon was killed in operations. That was 100% of the Canadian contingent. So UN operations are obviously much more dangerous than anything we're doing in Afghanistan.

On another hand, if their conclusions are true or have some value, then I think that policy alternative paper should have ended with a recommendation for greatly increasing Canada's mission as contributions to Afghanistan, because the situation is very dangerous--but it's just not worthwhile.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

My next question I'd like to address to either one of you. The Taliban, obviously, is targeting Canadians as they're targeting other people. With the timing of some of their attacks, with respect to activities or events around the world, how much are they targeting Canadian soldiers and how much are they targeting members of Parliament?

Dr. Bercuson.

[Prof. David Bercuson]

I guess you mean members of the Afghan Parliament? I have no idea.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

No, actually I'm talking about members of the Canadian Parliament, psychologically.

[Prof. David Bercuson]

Okay, I've got you.

Yes, of course. This is a part of what fourth-generation warfare is all about: that there is a base of public opinion at home and that you are going to try to erode that base of public opinion at home. Liberal democracies are particularly sensitive to that kind of operation because we do have--and we enjoy it as a privilege, and we must protect it--freedom of the press. But what it means is that, for example, when we make mistakes, if one of our soldiers inadvertently shoots at Afghan policemen or if members of the Afghan National Army are killed by our friendly fire, these are headlines in our newspapers. It's an inevitable part of this kind of dirty war that we are involved in; our public opinion is the most important strategic target the other side has. If they can break our public will then they will have won the victory they seek. It's as simple as that. They can beat us at home, even if they can't defeat us in the field.

[Dr. Douglas Bland]

I would simply say that there is a military logic to that kind of question and answer, but we ought not overplay it. I think the Taliban in the region we're in are attacking Canadians because we're the closest target, so they're shooting at us because we're there. But certainly their leaders, if they are rational people, would see some connection between worrying us...it's a matter of will.

If I could, Mr. Chairman, I'd like to say something about a curiosity. When a member of the Canadian Forces is killed, you can see the results four or five or six times on television as the body in the casket is coming home. Has anybody here seen pictures of great heaps of dead Taliban on the field, or of blown up vehicles, or Taliban prisoners or anything? We don't see those on television, and the irony is that our law won't let us do that. It's against the law, international laws of conflict, to humiliate the enemy by showing his body, or showing them captured, or tied up or anything else, but we can show our own casualties, and that has an effect on people. And it's just an odd irony of our legitimate liberal system.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you.

The time has expired.

Now we're going to start our second round. The second round is five minutes. And the way this goes is to the official opposition, to the government, to the Bloc, back to the government, and back to the official opposition.

I have Mr. McGuire's name here for the first slot.

[Joe McGuire, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I'd like to first of all compliment Mr. Bercuson on his suggestion that this committee become more involved in the day-to-day operations of what the Prime Minister called the war in Afghanistan. And as I said last week, we should be getting briefings, at least once a week, on what's going on in that particular theatre. Not only are we not getting briefings, let alone exercising any oversight of what the operation may or may not need....

I think this committee should ask the Prime Minister, or we should empower ourselves, to get us more involved. I know that in the first Iraq War, the national defence committee got weekly, regular briefings on what was going on. That is not the case right now, and I think it should be. And I thank you for putting that out there. I will certainly support it, because we really don't know. We read what's in the newspapers, basically, but we don't even know what the situation is in the present initiative. I know that our military has claimed victory in a way, but we have no idea in this committee whether we had a victory there, or what kind of blow we have given the enemy. Mr. Chairman, I think we should become more involved in the situation and have at least regular briefings on what's going on there.

I was listening to President Clinton's recent interview in which he said that if he was still president, he would have 20,000 troops in Afghanistan, that it was a mistake to withdraw those troops and put them into Iraq. Of course, NATO has asked countries to beef up their contributions, and it has been suggested that Poland is the only one that has come to the table at this point. I understand, from listening to Insight Central Europe at 4:30 this morning when I was driving to the airport, that this request has resulted in the Polish coalition government breaking apart, because there was not the support in the parliament for those 1,000 troops.

If the ex-President of the United States says we need 20,000 people there--that this has given rise to the insurgency and that things seemed to be fairly well under control until the Americans chose to go into Iraq and left a much reduced military effort in Afghanistan--in order to set the stage for the democratic institutions to take root, what hope do we have, really, with the number of people we have on the ground there now? I throw it out to both of you for your response.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Mr. Bland, you may start.

[Dr. Douglas Bland]

Well, I don't deal in hope, I don't think. I think the mission is doable. As I said, there will have to be adjustments as circumstances change. It's interesting that the focus is on NATO, and I think we should have some pressure on NATO to do things, but this is a UN mission. There are tens of thousands of UN troops from other countries engaged in lesser operations in different parts of the world. Perhaps it's time for the UN as a whole, because it is its mission, to begin to make more contributions. And I think people ought to think about that a bit. But I think the good work of political leaders in the North Atlantic alliance will sort this out, as it has sorted out almost every other disagreement, and there have been lots of them over the years.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Go ahead, Mr. Bercuson.

[Prof. David Bercuson]

Let me say this. You can never have more troops than you need in a military operation. The purpose of war is not to match your prowess against that of the enemy. The purpose of war is to beat the enemy. If you can bring 10, 20, or 30 times the number of troops to bear than the enemy has, the better off you are. The fewer troops you have, the more difficult the job becomes.

Now I don't know whether the job is doable with the number of troops that are in Afghanistan today. I don't know that. I tried to say earlier that the job is worth doing because it's worth doing. And if we need more troops to do it, we need to send more troops to do it.

Does that mean that more troops wouldn't be better? More troops are always better. Quantity has a quality all its own, and I think we have to remember that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you. Your time has expired.

We move next to Ms. Gallant.