National Defence Committee on Oct. 23rd, 2006

[Col M.D. Capstick]

I'd be careful about drawing the relationship to us being there and schools being blown up, because they were being blown up before. We weren't in Kandahar before the elections on September 18, and there were somewhere between I think 14 and 20 religious leaders who were assassinated in Kandahar province and Helmand in an attempt to disrupt the election. Schools were being burnt then, etc. Because we're there now, we know about it. So there's that point.

How does the feedback get to the Government of Canada? The kinds of decisions that you listed about the location and content of the mission, etc., are decisions that are made by political leaders. That's the basics of civil-military relations in a democratic society.

The feedback to the government is through the military chain of command. For a year, I had direct access to the Chief of Defence Staff and to the commander of the Canadian Expeditionary Forces Command. I gave them opinions in a fairly frank manner. Brigadier-General Fraser has direct access to General Gauthier, the expeditionary forces commander, and to General Hillier. We make recommendations all the time. What they do with them is their call.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

But in your eloquent paper on silos and the problem with silos within the three-D, are the silos only being dealt with here in Ottawa, or can the silos be dealt with on the ground in Afghanistan?

[Col M.D. Capstick]

The reality is that the silos were being dealt with on the ground in Afghanistan before they were being dealt with nationally or internationally. People on the ground do what they have to do to make things work. For example—and I talked about it a bit in my presentation—when I arrived in Kabul, I was joined at the hip to the Canadian ambassador and to the head of aid, the senior CIDA officer in Afghanistan. For the entire year I was there—and the new team is carrying on—I met with the ambassador on an ad hoc basis, when we had to if there was an issue, or on a weekly basis just to keep each other informed. I thought the head of aid was living in our house for a while.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

But in the allocation of resources, what feedback loop exists such that there could be more money for development if you on the ground decided that would be important?

[Col M.D. Capstick]

They go through the departmental chains back to Ottawa.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

But there isn't a decision-making body there that deals with all three-Ds?

[Col M.D. Capstick]

No, but the Canadian ambassador is the head of Canada's mission, if you will, in Afghanistan. He may not have that on his desk plate, but the ambassador is the head of mission. The ambassador is the senior Canadian official in the country and the ambassador meets regularly with General Fraser, etc., and whoever is there, and he in fact instituted a weekly conference call to try to get all of those things together.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

I just wanted to know—

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Just a short one.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Yes. If the Canadian people were pretty clear they didn't want us in Kandahar any more, but wanted us helping somewhere else, what do we have to do?

[Col M.D. Capstick]

That level of decision is not going to come from the bottom up or from the people on the ground; that level of decision is one that political leaders make right here, right on this hill. We follow orders.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you.

Ms. Gallant, five minutes.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. .

Just following up on Dr. Bennett's question, could you compare the relationship that Afghanistan has with the international community through the compact versus the relationship of Sudan, to which I believe she was referring, with the international community as it would apply to the strategic framework you worked on in Afghanistan?

[Col M.D. Capstick]

Well, as I understand it, the Government of Sudan does not want an international force in its country. The elected Government of Afghanistan, on the other hand, which now has all three branches of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—working, though not all perfectly, wants us there. This is a joint Afghan-international operation. The Afghanistan Compact, including the security pillar, which includes stabilizing the country, is part of the Government of Afghanistan's plan. It is a sovereign government and a member of the UN.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Thank you.

If you can, as it pertains to the PRT, would you explain how the money flows? It comes from Canada through CIDA, and where does it go from there and how does it eventually—

[Col M.D. Capstick]

I really can't, Ms. Gallant, because I didn't work down there. But there are CIDA people in that PRT, and I guess the picture you should get is that of PRT with a Canadian lieutenant-colonel as the commanding officer, because that's how we operate in the military. There's a senior diplomat in there, the guy who replaced Glyn Berry, and there's a senior CIDA officer in there—with help. It's the CIDA people who plan, coordinate, and manage the development projects; it's not the CO of the PRT doing that. His job is to help them do that by providing the security and technical assistance they need and a place to live, because you can't go and live in a guest house in Kandahar until that insurgency is settled.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Okay, and just following up on another question, would the continuity afforded by an eight-month deployment versus a six-month period assist the mission in achieving its objective sooner?

[Col M.D. Capstick]

I'll speak of what I know.

Because my team was put together in very short order, I could not get everybody for a year. I could get some for a year and some for six months. It became very clear very quickly that we had to be there a year. For the team that replaced us, I think all but one are there for a year.

In Afghanistan, when you're dealing with Afghans, trust and relationships are everything. You have to build that trust up; you can't be disrupting it every six months. Every time I had to rotate one of my officers out of those places, I had to go and hold a lot of hands and make sure they didn't think we were abandoning them.

As far as the units down south are concerned, General Fraser is the brigade commander, for example, and I believe his tour is nine months anyway, as is that of some of his staff in that headquarters. For the rest, that's a force generation issue that others, like General Hillier or General Leslie, are far more capable of answering than I am.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

You have one minute.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

It's a short question. Actually, it's a follow-up on a question Mr. McGuire asked on why a country of 25 million people, if they decide to make this happen, can't make this happen?

I just finished a book called The Places In Between, by a Scotsman named Rory Stewart, who walked across Afghanistan in 2002. It's an interesting book, but what it pointed out to me—and I'll ask for your comment on this—is that they can't do that because the culture varies between villages that are sometimes only twenty klicks apart. Is it fair to say there is not a culture in Afghanistan, but there are dozens and dozens of cultures in Afghanistan?

[Col M.D. Capstick]

That's a fair comment. It's really not an easy place to get around. It's like a lot of societies that are tribal-based. It's very rural, with very austere conditions. There are people who have never left their village, ever. There are families that have been in that village for generations, and somebody may have gone to the village next door. They haven't gone as far as Edmonton to St. Albert or that kind of thing. So there is that.

More importantly, though, they have started to take control of their own destiny and their own fate. People aren't rushing to go and join these guys, the insurgents. I won't call them Taliban on purpose, because that does elevate some of the criminals to a level they shouldn't be at.

The example that I think of happened on May 29. A two-phased riot occurred in Kabul when there was an American vehicle accident. Stage one was clearly a spontaneous response to a tragic accident. That stuff happens. It's probably not going to happen in downtown Ottawa, but that stuff happens in lots of parts of the world. And phase two of the riot in the afternoon was clearly an event orchestrated by certain groups that wanted to get things going.

Everybody was afraid this would carry on. The next day, nothing happened, but not only because of the big Afghan National Army presence on the street. We went to work the next day and sat with our Afghan counterparts and they were in shock. They were angered about the riot. They could not believe this could happen in Kabul. Down in their souls, they said that if this was the harbinger of things going bad again, they wanted nothing to do with it. Essentially, the people got a grip on it. When 5,000 people in a city of 3.5 million riot, I'm not sure we should panic, but you could feel it.

And it was not only the professionals we were working with. The one-eyed, half-an-arm plumber who seemed to live in our house because we always had something broken was in as big a shock as everybody else. He just did not want this to happen. But they are taking control, and that election day last year was pretty impressive.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Mr. Dosanjh will finish the second round, and then we'll get started on the next round.

[Ujjal Dosanjh, Liberal, Vancouver South, BC]

Thank you.

My friend Mr. Hawn raised the question with you about the balance of the mission, something he had raised once earlier.

It's an intriguing way of looking at the balance in the mission. I sat at the cabinet table when this mission went as a three-D mission to Kandahar. My understanding was that it was to be almost an equal measure of reconstruction and humanitarian work, diplomatic efforts, and defence.

You mentioned the intensity of the fighting that's going on, and we've been essentially fighting a war for the last several months. Now we are reduced to looking at the balance of the mission, with us doing the military fighting substantially, only doing some reconstruction and humanitarian work, but then backfilling our part of the reconstruction and humanitarian work that we ought to be doing by using the examples of other countries that are doing that work. That is not acceptable. That was not the mission. If that is how the mission is now going to be looked at, then it is a changed mission, which is what most of us have been saying for some months.

I'm not asking you a question. I just want to leave that with you, but you can answer or you can make a comment on it.

The next question I really have is with respect to the eradication of the poppy crop. We have the interview of Norine MacDonald published in the Ottawa Citizen yesterday. In the interview, she says the following things. I will refer them to you and you can comment on them.

The question asked of her was “Have you encountered violence?” To quote her:

Violence is a daily fact of life for everybody in southern Afghanistan. There's bombing every night. You go to sleep to the sounds of the Americans bombing in Panjwaii. There's fighting on that road all the time. We've been with people who have been through Taliban ambushes. A lot of Afghans are having to leave their villages and move to other areas, and then move again and again, to avoid the fighting and bombing.

After a little while, she goes on:

Between the drought, and the (opium) crop eradication, and the bombing and fighting in the villages, they're in a desperate situation now.

And then there's a question: “How then would you describe the security situation in southern Afghanistan?”

It's a war zone. It's dramatically deteriorated in the last year. Certainly, crop eradication played into the hands of the Taliban. Whatever local support the international community might have had in southern Afghanistan was substantially affected by that forced eradication scheme. The Taliban saw a political opportunity there and they took it.

I'm not certain that it is true, but from all of what I've heard and all of what I read, it is my understanding that what Norine MacDonald of the Senlis Council is saying is opposite to what Karzai is saying. He said in the House of Commons, “If we don't kill the poppies, poppies will kill us”, or something to that effect. That is totally contrary to the UN policy about poppy eradication and Senlis Council's recommendations.

The question I have is, are they right that we're losing support because of the poppy eradication? Or are you right when you said “Almost none”?

[Col M.D. Capstick]

Sir, I'm wearing a Canadian Forces uniform and not a Senlis Council badge.