Okay, thank you.
All that being said, I do believe it is worth considering for a moment where nations have come since we started the overall operation in Afghanistan. There is now a democratically elected government, and many of you have met some of those members of government. It's established within a relatively secure and stable environment, if you consider what it used to be. There are numerous reconstruction and development projects underway, providing very good hope for the Afghan people. There are more than 17,000 projects across Afghanistan, which is not insignificant.
Eighty-three percent of the population now have access to military facilities, compared with 2004, when it was much lower, at around nine percent. The GDP growth for this year is estimated at a very significant level at 12% to 14%. Over 4,000 kilometres of roads have been completed. The same number of medical clinics have been established. Over seven million children are in school, and I could go on and on. These are only a few examples of the progress that has been made in Afghanistan since we started our mission collectively.
Having visited there on many occasions, I would say to you that the people are feeling the benefits of the international presence, and they're feeling the positive benefits, although there are some negatives as well. All that being said, the successes that we deliver are somewhat fragile. They are fragile because the opposing militant forces, I like to call them—and that includes not only the Taliban but drug lords, criminal elements, a number of extremist groups, if you like, freedom fighters and so on—would prefer a return to that lawless environment they used to be able to operate in, and in which, as you well know, they could intimidate, they could kill people, and force people to support a wide range of their illicit activities.
Nonetheless, the opposing militant forces have discovered, through bitter experience, that they can defeat neither NATO nor SAF by conventional means. Even so, they not only remain a threat to our mission, they also threaten Afghanistan and its prospects for the future.
So I can say from a NATO perspective that we are achieving some success in Afghanistan. I sincerely believe that.
The momentum that we gained this spring, much different from what we saw last fall, by the way, with additional forces and commitment to engage these opposing militant forces, has demonstrated not only to NATO nations but also to the Afghan people themselves that they do have a better chance of prospering. This is important, from our perspective. They have a much better chance of prospering with NATO than they do with the Taliban. I think that's well recognized now.
We are seeing, in fact, local Afghans actually rejecting extremist elements and running, for lack of a better term, insurgents out of their towns and communities. And we're seeing the opposing militant forces very significantly adjust the way in which they try to oppose us, and this in direct response to those operational successes, Canada having been at the centre of one of those very significant successes last fall.
What we are doing, combined with the reconstruction and development people—and I come back to this because it's an important element of what we believe—is making Afghanistan and their way of life very different and improving it overall. From our perspective, what's important is not only having an image or a perception of improvement, but also that there is actual and tangible improvement to the Afghans on the ground. That really is an important part of winning hearts and minds.
In November 2006, we made a number of commitments at Riga. Following those commitments, which were made by all the heads of state mentioned above, our troop levels in Afghanistan have increased by more than 7,000 soldiers. Though there is still some room for improvement, the caveats—or restrictions—imposed on operational troops have been reduced.
Overall, then, that has meant that we've increased the numbers in Afghanistan to somewhere around 37,000 troops—I know you're familiar with these numbers, but just to reiterate them—from 37 different countries, and that is compared to what Afghanistan and the mission represented, which was about 5,000 troops in Kabul, when we started this engagement in Afghanistan. So it's quite an evolution. If you add the 11,000 or so members of the coalition who are operating in Afghanistan still, that takes the numbers up very, very close to the 50,000 I've talked to you about.
All of this has improved our operational capabilities. I will nonetheless be the first to say, because I've said this in many fora, especially at ministerial and heads of state levels, that we still have shortfalls in the statement of requirements, the combined joint statement of requirements that we continually seek to fill. Most of those are critical enablers, whether it's medical evacuation or in-theatre lift or communications surveillance and so on. They're being slowly but surely filled, and every contribution that NATO nations or partner nations make, however small, is always very much welcomed. But we keep reinforcing the need to fill it all, and we also reinforce the need to reduce those caveats.
To maintain this momentum, though, we do need to continue building our own and also Afghan capabilities. I haven't talked about that much, but the Afghans themselves are improving in capability and they're fearless fighters. They're also very, very committed to establishing and maintaining that security and stability in their own country and ultimately taking it over themselves. They really are very, very sincere about this, everyone I've talked to, especially their minister of defence and their president.
In my view, all the nations that are militarily engaged in Afghanistan are contributing to success in their own way. They all have specific mandates, but they're all operating under the same operations plan and under the same overall objective. As a consequence, NATO continually asks its members and partners, whoever they may be, to contribute more where they can, and I will continue to do that as well.
That being said, especially with the caveats, it's very clear to us that there are some national caveats that have to be there. It's a law, and that does constrain some freedoms to some degree, but what's most important to us is that there be few or no restrictions on the movement of troops, the geographic flexibility applied to troops in Afghanistan.
On an equally important front, perhaps, the alliance continues to stress the civilian and military cooperation aspects of what we do and the fact that this is crucial—I firmly believe this—to overall success and our ultimate exit strategy. The essence of that cooperation, you heard about it this morning, is embedded in the provincial reconstruction teams and what they do. There are 25 across the entire surface of Afghanistan at the moment. They're doing a number of things to improve how they do business. We have workshops on lessons learned and a number of best practices being applied, coordination being done in Afghanistan of PRTs, not wanting to suggest for a second that there's one-size-fits-all in this respect, but nonetheless trying to harmonize our efforts so that they're more effective overall.
This underscores even more emphatically the need for civilian and military cooperation. We, the military, especially from the NATO context, don't want to control the PRTs or the civilian international community, but we certainly want to be able to harmonize our efforts or at least coordinate our efforts with them, and that's an important dimension of what we're trying to do in a comprehensive approach point of view. You would probably call it more “all of government”. We call it comprehensive approach in the NATO forum. That brings together all the elements, military, political, social, economic, and so on, to bring to bear what we need to do in that theatre.
In short, the reconstruction and development in Afghanistan must be seen as a seamless progression and it must be seen as the ultimate requirement to ensure that the Afghans can, at the end of what we do here, become self-sufficient in the long term.
Over the past few months, the Alliance has also improved direct support to the Afghan army in a number of ways, particularly through the deployment of operational mentoring and liaison teams, which Gen. Howard mentioned earlier.
Those teams are extremely important in training the Afghan army and improving its capacity to deploy and operate with NATO forces in the operational theatre.
The chiefs of defence got together just a few weeks ago, looked at Afghanistan, and at what our commitments are there, and they agreed with me that one of our critical requirements in Afghanistan is to sustain and enhance what we're doing, from an operational, mentoring, and liaison point of view. The training and equipment of the Afghan army—and, arguably, the same goes for the Afghan national police, the Afghan border guards, and so on—is a critical element for us at the moment, and very much a part of what we are currently trying to do, in terms of keeping this positive momentum going.
As that continues, more of these “omelettes”, as they're very affectionately called—I'm not that favourable to that term, but nonetheless that's what most people use—will be required.
At the moment, we have a requirement for 46 of these omelettes, to give you an indication. Twenty of them have been filled by NATO. The other 26 are currently being filled by the coalition, and they're called “embedded training teams”. I was very gratified, as the Afghan battalions stood up and needed the assistance, to see what Canada was going to be doing, in terms of a regional approach to provide these liaison teams, in a brigade sense, if you like, to enhance what these OMLTs are doing.
These OMLTs, as we embed them or as we generate them, then off-load those embedded training teams that the Americans have applied to this. Those embedded training teams take on the training of the Afghan national police, which is equally important, and that is ultimately part of the force multiplier that we need in Afghanistan.
In the end, we will need somewhere in the neighbourhood of a hundred of these operational mentoring and liaison teams to actually support the professionalization and ultimate independent approach to the Afghan national army, and everything that represents. So these are important, and important to our overall exit strategy, which certainly we need to take conscious consideration of.
Again, I'll just mention the comprehensive approach, because it is a very important element of what we do. It's the glue, from our perspective, that holds together all the lines of activity that we have on the international front in Afghanistan. If we're divided on this approach, on the comprehensive approach and what it means to harmonizing our efforts, I'm convinced that we will have trouble and we will have some difficulty in achieving the overall success that we need to achieve.
Regional actors are equally critical to the success of our efforts. Pakistan, for example—and you know what Pakistan now represents—has shown immense willingness, particularly lately, to support our operations.
I visited Pakistan again just a few weeks ago. I have been discussing with them the importance of the border controls, especially. Pakistan views, the same as we would view, that a stable, democratic Afghanistan is just as important to them as it is to the nations supporting this mission because it is a direct neighbour of theirs, and stability in their region is what they want, ultimately.
In that respect, Pakistan has deployed some 80,000 troops along the border with Afghanistan. And if you factor in the fact that they have to rotate those troops, just as we rotate troops, you need a three-to-one ratio, which means they've committed somewhere in the neighbourhood of a quarter of a million troops to support the Afghan border activity. They've established some 1,000 border posts along the border, as compared to perhaps 100 on the part of Afghanistan.
They have also participated with us in what we call the Tripartite Commission, which is made up of Afghans, the Afghan chief of defence, primarily; the International Security Assistance Force through its commander; and also the Pakistani commander.
All of that has been a feature of our cooperation in the region, and it has enabled us to do some very good coordination along that border, not the least of which has been engaging where we need to, ensuring that we can curtail insurgent activity across the border together when it's needed. They also participate in a joint operation centre in Kabul. They are very capable officers. I'm very aware of what they do, all of that being a better coordination of our efforts across the border.
And finally, much of the publicity that surrounds the events in Afghanistan is reported as solely the purview of NATO, and consequently ISAF. This is the impression that is no doubt the result of a number of things, especially when you note that most of the activity that we see reported is front-line activity, and not the other activity that comes with it.
But NATO is not alone in Afghanistan, and I know you know this only too well. I've seen what James Appathurai and Chris Alexander and others have said to you, and I know the CDS will have said this to you as well. There are a number of very important actors there, not the least of which is the U.S. coalition, the United Nations, the G-8, the European Union, the World Bank, and soon we will have a European Union police training mission in Afghanistan, which will help us to do all the things I've just talked to you about.
So there are a number of difficult issues we still need to face, but all of this, with a comprehensive approach, will allow us, in my view, to prevail in the long term.
I have one last set of points before I open it up to your comments, and just a couple of moments to address the issue of detainees, because I know it is an important part of your discussion here in Canada and especially in Parliament.
I would note for you that there is no NATO-wide policy on detainees; however, it was directed through the operations plan, which is approved. It's recommended by the military committee but approved by the North Atlantic Council.
Commander ISAF, through the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, was directed to develop a set of guidelines and procedures governing the manner in which detainees were to be handled. It provides a very clear guidance. I have seen the guidance. It has been exposed to the North Atlantic Council. They're satisfied with it. All of it gives very clear guidance on the way in which individuals are to be handled.
Again, you've heard the terms on the criteria. We normally have to hand them over within 96 hours of the original detention or arrest. At the end of that period the individual must be released or handed over to Afghan authorities. And these are sovereign authorities; they handle their own internal security matters. However, there is a but: NATO has provided explicit instructions that no individual is to be handed over to any authority if it's believed that the individual is likely to be harmed or injured, abused in any way, following the handover.
In sum, we have directed and instructed our forces on the ground to exercise extreme diligence when arresting or detaining individuals, first of all; and we've also given them explicit instructions on how to handle them subsequently.
We call it a standing operating procedure, or an SOP. It's an SOP that is a sub-set of that operations plan I talked to you about. It has held us in good stead so far. And it is supplemented by a number of bilateral agreements between nations and the Afghan government in the same way that the Canadian government has done this.
This is what we encourage, and certainly we acknowledge Canada's attention in this context from a NATO perspective.
To conclude my remarks, Mr. Chairman, I would like to reiterate that the route we are taking to deliver peace and independent government in Afghanistan requires far more than military force. Our mission is an overall mission, which will ensure long-term success.
What is critically important from our point of view are the positive actions on the part of the rest of the international community, and a number of things are going on. I looked at some numbers a few days ago and noted some $26 billion has been applied to Afghanistan since the UN mandate was established in 2001 and the thousands of troops you are very familiar with. The military forces of NATO with their civilian counterparts are creating better conditions in Afghanistan, which will, in our view, deliver lasting peace.
Everyone is doing their part, in my perspective. Some nations are very small. I can tell you those small nations all feel just as committed to Afghanistan and would like to have larger contributions if they had them to provide, but sometimes can't. NATO views that no contribution is too small. Anyone who wishes to help we are very pleased with.
We'll continue to use what has been contributed by nations, including Canada, in the most effective way, but we need more resources to achieve the task overall, and I talked about that earlier. We continue to articulate those requirements, and the Supreme Allied Commander, General Craddock, has done that very recently in pointing out very clearly what some of the shortfalls still are.
Afghanistan is certainly a fragile country, and those of you who have been there will know that. Although it has its own government, it still has a number of tribal, rural, and other cultures that underpin it. The change there, and General Howard talked about this, will not occur overnight, and we're very conscious of that. It's going to take time and it can't be rushed. The last thing we want to do is come out of Afghanistan too soon and find ourselves back in there in the way that we had to go in there in the first instance.
For that reason, it's the belief of NATO, and my own personal belief, that it's simply too early to allow forces to come out and certainly to allow the forces we're opposing, and those we have now managed to control in a very significant way, to re-establish what was a very brutal and also oppressive hold on the people of Afghanistan. We expect to be there for a while yet and until the job is done.
In closing, I would say, as a Canadian NATO officer, that I'm very proud of the fact I can show this Canadian flag every day in the North Atlantic Council and on several visits to a number of different nations. Canada has played a very pivotal role in this process, a very important role, and is highly respected by the nations.
Again, I refer to the Riga summit and the dinner I attended with all the heads of state. Canada was spotlighted during that dinner. Many of the heads of state complimented the Prime Minister for the courage, the commitment, and also the sacrifices that Canadians were making to make this mission what it is and to do what has to be done.
Those are the contributions Canadians are making there with unfortunate losses, which we always regret. We recognize those losses every time they occur, either at the military committee or at the North Atlantic Council level. We know the Canadians have made some very courageous contributions, military and civilian—it's not just military. People put their lives on the line every day to do the job that's being done there.
Canada is making a difference, and that's the message I want to leave with you. It is making a positive difference and it's a nation that's seen at the leading edge of leadership and capability in Afghanistan.
The final word I would say, nonetheless, is that all the allies are contributing, and it's a very complex mission, but one that ultimately we will prevail in. From my perspective, I continue to be encouraged every time I go there and see the improvements that occur step-by-step. They are not huge improvements. It will never be downtown Nepean or downtown Ottawa, but that's not what we're trying to achieve. We're trying to achieve a stable environment they can thrive in, and I think we will, in the long term.
Thank you. It has been a pleasure to be given this opportunity to be here today.
Mr. Chairman, I would be happy to answer any questions committee members may have. Thank you.
