Thank you very much for the warm welcome and thank you very much to the committee for having invited me to make a presentation today and to present NATO's perspective.
With me today is Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony White, a member of my staff in Brussels.
Tony will be here this morning to give me a hand if there are any additional comments or follow-up questions you might need to have answered in writing.
With that, good morning. It certainly is a pleasure to be before this committee this morning and to have been invited to attend here, as the chairman of the NATO Military Committee, in a much different capacity from what I have appeared before this committee in the past.
Sincerely, I have had the opportunity to interact with many of the members of the NATO parliamentary group over the last couple of years. Again, I welcome this opportunity to be back in Canada and to address this group, specifically, and to follow on with many of the discussions we've had in the NATO forum.
I do this with the full awareness of your familiarity with NATO objectives and priorities, and given, in particular, the clear focus that you have had on operations in Afghanistan over the last while.
I will be talking about Afghanistan a little bit later, but I will preface a little bit of that with what we're doing from a NATO perspective overall.
As most, if not all, of you will be aware, I serve as the chairman of the NATO Military Committee, having been elected to that position by a majority vote of the 26 chiefs of defence of NATO in November 2004 and also with the full support of the government of Canada.
I came into my term on June 16, 2005, so that was nearly two years ago. What I have as a responsibility, primarily, is to speak on behalf of all 26 NATO chiefs of defence and also to chair the weekly NATO Military Committee meetings, which are a very important component of the decision-making process in Brussels. They are aimed at building and generating consensus-based military advice that we must provide to the council for the decisions it undertakes on behalf of all the nations, and obviously, on behalf of the alliance itself. I also serve in that capacity, but as the senior military advisor to the council and as the top officer in NATO.
Thankfully, and with a very sincere look at what the alliance does overall, I have had the opportunity to travel to a number of different locations since I've become the NATO chairman. I've been primarily to NATO nations, but also to partner nations and to many of our contact countries. I've also travelled, of course, many times, to our operational theatres, whether it's Afghanistan, Kosovo, or Iraq, visiting, most recently, Operation Active Endeavour, the ships involved in our counter-terrorist maritime operation in the Mediterranean.
Operation Active Endeavour, I would remind you, is the only Article 5 operation underway in NATO at the moment. It's a compendium of ships, primarily made up of vessels from the standing NATO Maritime Group, which, quite notably, has just integrated a Ukrainian vessel into the force. It's only the second non-NATO nation that's contributed to this operation, the first having been Russia, last fall.
As a result of all that, I have had the great privilege of seeing firsthand what your men and women and also what the men and women of the alliance and its partners do in operations. And I ensure that their voices are heard back at the level I represent at NATO headquarters. I often travel with the North Atlantic Council, as well. So in that respect, I hear it from that perspective and ensure that we know what the issues and problems are out there. And hopefully we can provide our best possible support to them in what they're endeavouring to do on behalf of your nation, but also on behalf of the alliance.
While, as I mentioned at the very outset, I will talk about Afghanistan—it is our number one operational priority—I would like to at least note a few things we're doing in other areas of endeavour.
Let me perhaps just put a little bit of context around the work NATO does.
We currently have 50,500 soldiers, sailors, airmen and airwomen from NATO and partner nations involved in a variety of operations on continents that are frequently far away, and also on three continents and on the Mediterranean. Apart from the military operation in Afghanistan, we have a renowned force, made up of some 16,000 soldiers, airmen, airwomen and sailors in an operation in Kosovo, which is a very important mission, particularly at this stage, which involves talks on Kosovo's long-term status.
We also have a training mission in Iraq, which is helping to support the professionalization of some 600 Iraqi members—students, military officers, and non-commissioned members—on an annual basis.
We have a support mission to the African Union. It's a very modest one, a small one, but it has nonetheless airlifted some 8,000 troops into Sudan on behalf of or in support of the African Union. We've done some capacity building for them as well and helped them with the professionalization of their forces, how to do lessons learned and a number of other important things. But again, it's at a very modest level and at the request of the UN and the country itself.
We also conduct the operations in the Mediterranean that I talked to you about. This is an enduring mission, but one which has paid off quite significantly, in my view, in reducing the illegal trafficking of arms, illegal immigration, smuggling of people and arms, and a number of things that we have been able to curtail in terms of counter-terrorist operations in the Mediterranean context.
All these operations—and it does spread our forces, collectively, in quite a sizeable region of operations—draw upon limited national forces. Each country has a finite limit to what it can provide, but nonetheless it involves all those NATO, partner, and contact nations. And when I talk about contact nations I refer specifically to the nations that are supporting us in a number of regions, including Australia, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and others that we are talking to in the margins of that as well.
Many of the nations I just talked about, especially NATO and the partner nations, are not only providing troops to operations in NATO, but they're also providing troops elsewhere, whether it's in support of the European Union or whether it's in support of other UN operations or coalition operations, in a number of places.
All that being said, it's really to point out to you that the ability of those nations to commit forces or capability to NATO, and most importantly to sustain those commitments, is very much commissioned by their responsibilities elsewhere, including in their own nations, and we need to consider it in that context.
Another factor that is also driving the Alliance is the need to maintain NATO's operational effectiveness in the face of continuing change and transformation. You have no doubt had discussions on this with the Canadian Forces.
NATO is thus undergoing this very important process of transformation across the spectrum, which is really aiming to ensure that our forces, and the command and control mechanisms that provide the oversight for them, are capable of responding with a much more far-reaching capability than we had before and a much more flexible one than we had during the Cold War—but also one that needs to adapt to the many changes we're seeing around the world. This is not the NATO of our fathers or grandfathers; this is a very different NATO. In fact, overall, what's happened is that NATO's competitive environment, for the lack of a better term, has changed quite significantly.
An important and very visible way in which NATO has adapted to those changes is not only in the defence reform that goes on across the spectrum of NATO and partner nations, but also in the creation of the NATO response force, which I know you've heard about. It's made up of some 20,000 to 25,000 air, land, sea, and marine corps capabilities, ready to move on very short notice—a very high-readiness force that can actually be deployed within five to thirty days of notice to undertake an operation.
I can get into more detail later on, if you'd like, but we certainly have seen its ability to do that, even before it achieved full operational capability, at the Riga summit last November, with the support that was provided to Pakistan, for example, and in the validation exercise that was done last year in Cape Verde, just off the west coast of Africa.
So, overall, what nations are looking to do is to improve the overall capability of their forces and their ability to interoperate with NATO, though adaptable logistics; interoperable command and control systems, which are crucial; language capability; and additional lift, whether it's airlift or sealift; and other things too numerous to mention.
At the same time, the political-military relationship has to evolve in order to ensure that nations are actually able to respond to that very short notice requirement for deployments, if required, and be able to be flexible enough to adjust to this changing environment we're in—one that in many cases requires some very short-term decision-making.
So all of that provides a backdrop to what we're doing in Afghanistan, which I'd now like to touch on a little bit more in depth.
General Howard gave you a very good overview of what's going on in the region you are most interested in, the southern region. Of course that is where much of the current insurgency has been focused, but believe me, there is insurgency throughout Afghanistan. So it's important that you understand the extent of what we're trying to do there, not only from a military point of view, but also from a civilian point of view, or with a comprehensive approach or perspective, if you like.
Just a short time ago, six years or so ago, Afghanistan was a very different place. It had no notion of the rule of law. It had very ambiguous diplomatic or political relations with a small number of countries, two or three at the most, and it was very much an uncontrolled environment in which terrorism could, quite frankly, thrive. And it was a launching ground, if you like, for terrorist attacks and the ones that we saw on September 11.
There were other elements of that as well. Girls could not go to school. Women were prevented from exercising fundamental human rights—not only women, but also men in many cases were restricted from doing many of the things we enjoy. It was, for all intents and purposes, what we would consider an ungoverned space. And there is still some ungoverned space in Afghanistan.
This was the premise on which the most basic human freedoms were inhibited—by the Taliban primarily. And of course I've mentioned to you the breeding ground that it became for international terrorism, something we all have a distinct interest in assuring does not occur again.
Our approach to the resulting operations in Afghanistan has been measured, deliberate and progressive. You are well aware of this, because you have been following events in Afghanistan since the very start. In fact, there is no doubt amongst the 26 nations of the Alliance and its partners that the Afghanistan mission is NATO's absolute operational priority.
And we have no option but to prevail; this is a very important evolution of the alliance and what it represents.
In that context, though, I can assure you that the alliance is very united in its purpose. I had the opportunity to sit in at the heads of state and government dinner in Riga in November; there was no doubt about the commitment of all the heads of state to NATO and what it represents, and a very emphatic commitment on their part to ensure that what needs to be done will be done on the part of every nation.
Progressively, over time, the capability and equipment shortfalls and the national caveats—which I know you're familiar with—have challenged the effectiveness and also the flexibility of our military mission. But they are being addressed. Again, I can touch on that if you wish.
We've also recognized the need for the international community to collaborate with military forces to find the solutions for Afghanistan. And while the military component remains the essential element of providing security in Afghanistan, and stability as an essential ingredient of success, we are continually seeking ways to harmonize that component with the crucial reconstruction and development effort.
In essence, there is a full recognition that success in Afghanistan cannot be achieved through military means alone—and that's perfectly crystal clear to us at NATO, I can assure you.
Mr. Chairman, are we going to be cut short, with the bells?