Evidence of meeting #15 for National Defence in the 40th Parliament, 3rd session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was war.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
NDP
Malcolm Allen NDP Welland, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I thank both of you gentlemen for being here.
Mr. Bland, I agree about the lessons learned. We hope we learn lessons in all the things we do, whether in the forces or elsewhere.
Looking at where we are now in Afghanistan, one senses that we're looking for security and development. Those are the primary things we're trying to accomplish. You eloquently described the nature of the conflict in talking about the low end to the high end of what it looks like in theatre and how it's not necessarily what you think it might look like when you get there.The realities can quite often be at opposite ends of the scale.
In that particular situation, knowing what our forces are doing in the south in a major combat role and looking at that spectrum of violence, do you think that what we are trying to accomplish--the development and security aspects--are attainable, based on where we are in the theatre, as opposed to what we wanted to accomplish when we left to go and what we're still talking about trying to accomplish? Do you sense that somehow we might not be able to do that because of the role we are playing on the ground and what we are facing?
Chair, Defence Studies Program, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University, As an Individual
In my view, the essence of the mission in Afghanistan, stated or otherwise, is to provide and to develop and to maintain and secure the conditions that allow for good governance--maybe not peace, order, and good governance, but at least good governance--so that the individuals and the rural communities and the various parts of Afghanistan can go about their business with some degree of safety. The ultimate mission here, the objective, is to produce a society in which there is adequate governance and accountability for the people.
You can't do that, and we see that, without security. The Taliban, or whoever is directing these operations in Afghanistan, are students of revolutionary warfare and guerrilla warfare and so on. The first lesson enemy commanders understand in these circumstances is you attack the security forces, the police, the politicians, the guy who delivers the mail, the guys who pick up the garbage. You create such administrative chaos that the people feel frustrated, insecure, and frightened, and they leave the arena to the insurgents. That's the kind of mission we're in now. We're not looking for, or at least I wouldn't look for, peace in Afghanistan.
Saint Augustine, whom you may all know about, 1,500 years ago wrote in a nice book that you can have peace any time you want; you just have to do what the bad guy tells you to do. He didn't put it in such gross language, but it's the same principle. You can have peace any time you want.
The people of Afghanistan--or the few of them I spoke with when I was in theatre, mostly civilians, teachers, administrators, and others--don't want peace; they want liberty and stability so that they can run their country in a day-to-day mission. We can deliver some aspects of security for them, I hope, while we're there; what we do when we're not there is, of course, another question. We'll leave it to somebody else to do that.
If that's not too academic, Chair, I think that's the way I would approach that question.
Director, Francophone Research Network on Peace Operations
I don't have anything to add.
Liberal
NDP
Malcolm Allen NDP Welland, ON
Thank you.
We were talking about this sense of how we.... If we send folks to do jobs, they need what I call adequate tools to go with them. We learned that lesson from the Balkans, as you pointed out. If we're preparing for worst-case scenarios, as we now believe we should, we don't want to send folks with tools that are inadequate. In a prior life I was an electrician at one point in time, and there was no sense in my showing up without a meter if I was about to find out that a line had 40,000 volts in it. It's not a good idea to wet your finger and hold it up, although some folks probably have done that.
We're sending folks with tools, but we need a balance between what we're prepared to go and do, based on our knowledge as we enter, and the realities on the ground. We need a balance between our expectations and the expectations of the folks who are actually going to go and help, for lack of a better term. We're being asked to do something, whether that's to keep peace or try to help create peace and bring, as you said earlier, some stability and security. In the case of Afghanistan we were hoping for development, but I didn't hear that in the last question.
If it's not an escalating spectrum of violence, what do we do if we prepare for the violence that isn't there with the tools that are appropriate? What do we do after that? Once we arrive and we're on the ground, and we don't actually need to have this level of equipment and tools, if you will, what would you see us doing then?
Chair, Defence Studies Program, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University, As an Individual
If I were a commander, I would park those tools and look at the situation and so on. The thing that I think is important....
Again, I assume, Mr. Chair, that members of Parliament, certainly at this committee, understand that Canadian Forces spend an awful lot of money and time training military staff officers to answer the question you just asked: what shall we do? Bongo, bongo, we're all going to the Congo. Okay, where is the Congo? They sit down and they have....
I just came from the Canadian Forces College in Toronto, where I was giving lectures two days ago. These officers are trained throughout their entire experience, from rank to rank, to do an appreciation of the situation. What are we facing? What tools do we need? What are the circumstances? Is it hot or is it cold? Is it Norway or is it the Congo? They draw up a sensible plan of operation and then adjust it when they get into the thing. It's the whole business of military staff planning for operations.
I'll take a minute to illustrate this point. I worked as an adviser to the inquiry into the deployment in Somalia. One of the things I thought was very interesting in the testimony and in the report is also something I would suggest the committee might take a look at in relation to your question. It's the section in the report that deals with operational preparedness. One of the first findings of the inquiry in relation to launching that mission into Somalia was that there was no problem in the way the military go about assessing how much they need, how many people they need, what they need to go into a mission. The process is fine.
The second finding was they didn't do any of it, or the parts that they did do were arbitrarily dismissed by bureaucrats and general officers and other people. They just grabbed something out of the air and said, “Let's go to Somalia.”
The answer, and what I would encourage Canadians to insist on, is a very highly skilled and trained military staff that can answer these questions before you go on an operation.
My last point, Chair, is that the only thing I regretted about the Somalia inquiry was that it was held after the troops came back. It should have been held before they went over. The House should have called commanders, politicians, and others to the table and said, “Do you know what the mission is? Have you got enough stuff? Do you know your rules of engagement?” When somebody is looking over your shoulder, that makes people--at least in my case, anyway--pay attention.
So we shouldn't be examining, with respect to everybody, the detainee issue now--years later. We should have looked at that before we went overseas, just to be current.
Liberal
The Vice-Chair Liberal Bryon Wilfert
Thank you.
We'll now go to the government side.
Mr. Hawn, you have seven minutes.
Conservative
Laurie Hawn Conservative Edmonton Centre, AB
Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, folks, for coming.
Through you, Mr. Chair, I'll probably deal mostly with Mr. Bland.
You talk about the administrative delusion and you talk about the experience that commanders on the ground got in the former Yugoslavia and how that may or may not have been passed on. With that planning experience, will military planning experience and capability always lead the government's ability to develop policy, because it's those folks, the young Hilliers and the young Natynczyks, who bring that experience that government members don't have? And what's the responsibility of government to listen to that experience?
Chair, Defence Studies Program, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University, As an Individual
I wouldn't presume to say what the government's responsibility is. I think citizens would expect the government to talk to its professional advisers, to other advisers from other parts of foreign policy, to advisers from the international community, and maybe even to good old academics once in a while, and then form an opinion about the kind of mission we are capable of doing, how we can do it, and so on. They would be looking into the future force. We talk a lot about the present force; we've got to think about the future force.
I would hope that, just as this committee is doing, governments will assemble a history and an experience of what has happened in Afghanistan--how it changed and moved, and how we responded to that--so that we can conduct the next operation more smoothly.
I am encouraged, and maybe Jocelyn is too, at meeting so many young bureaucrats from the Government of Canada, CIDA, and others, in Kandahar and in other places and in the field in other parts of the world. These are foreign policy guys, young people who are getting right into the war business and international operations. They're going to be the civil service cadre of the future who will say to an officer, “I remember when we were together in Afghanistan; we did this and we learned about that, so let's do that again.”
That's what was missing when we went into the post-Cold War era, because hardly anybody outside the military had been involved in any of these kinds of operations.
Conservative
Laurie Hawn Conservative Edmonton Centre, AB
Thank you.
You said that war is about peace, and I suggest that everything done by the Canadian Forces, every single day and by every member, is about peace in one way or another.
You also talked about definitions of peacekeeping and peacemaking, and we've heard various terms thrown out. There seems to be...“desperation“ is probably too strong a word, but there seems to be a strong desire to be able to define whatever it is. It seems to me that the idea that we've got to do that becomes part of the administrative delusion.
You talked about appreciating the situation and what the military does in that. Does that administrative delusion, perhaps falling out of trying to define something too closely, lead to a tendency to situate the appreciation? Do we say, “Okay, we've made up our minds, this is what it is”, and wind up going to a former Yugoslavia or an Afghanistan without a clear understanding, and then put an awful lot of pressure on the folks on the ground to pick up the pieces of that administrative delusion?
Chair, Defence Studies Program, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University, As an Individual
Yes, and that's what I mean, Chair. If we get these discussions and definitions and dichotomies wrong, it's dangerous for people.
If you define something as peacekeeping and it conjures up in the minds of citizens, politicians, and others--and maybe soldiers too--a certain end result, but it's something else when you get there, well, you're really stuck. If we begin as high-low combat operations and take it from there, and then apply the techniques, as Jocelyn has talked about, in the circumstances that we've learned from peace operations in different places, that's fine; however, if you go and say, “Well, this is a Korean-type war”, or “This is going to be a revolutionary war”, and start with those kinds of definitions, it takes you nowhere, actually, and puts you in a very dangerous situation.
That's what happened in Somalia. When the Airborne Regiment went to Somalia on the understanding that they were going on a combat mission--and they didn't have a mission when they went, we must remember--and other people thought they were going on a peacekeeping mission, after that everything went off the rails from that confusion.
Conservative
Laurie Hawn Conservative Edmonton Centre, AB
If that happens, then do we wind up with challenges--for instance, what we're facing in Afghanistan right now--of interpretation of international law, where people have difficulty putting things into the context of the extremely difficult circumstances we're operating in? That includes in Afghanistan, and I suggest in Africa, where it would be just about impossible to do that. Do we wind up with challenges to the folks on the ground again because there's a tendency for the mission to become a target of some NGOs or others who may have an ideological or other axe to grind?
Chair, Defence Studies Program, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University, As an Individual
I'll give you perhaps two sentences. I'm out of my depth somewhat, other than from operational experience with the law, but when I was doing that, it was an entirely different kind of world.
I would hope that the international community, perhaps led by Canada--that'd be fine--would convene the next Geneva Convention to adjust international law to meet the circumstances and the experiences that we have now, on the assumption that the wars we will be engaged in, for the most part, will be wars among the people, wars in which combatants will be difficult to notice, wars that will in no way fit the model that the earlier conventions at Geneva were assumed to be addressing.
That's a big lesson that I think we need to take out of this experience in Bosnia, perhaps, as well as in Afghanistan, and in the Congo; what are we going to do about that? That's a horrible situation there too.
Conservative
Laurie Hawn Conservative Edmonton Centre, AB
When we were chatting earlier, you mentioned that it relates to responsibility to protect and Canada jumping in somewhere outside of Canada to exert responsibility to protect, which I suggest might be somewhat difficult for a country with the relatively limited capacity of Canada.
You mentioned a responsibility to protect situation that happened right here in 1970 that you were involved in. Do you want to just touch on that briefly?
Chair, Defence Studies Program, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University, As an Individual
Yes, that was the FLQ crisis. I was stationed in Petawawa with an operational unit. It was Thanksgiving. That morning, a lot of us had been out duck-hunting. It was nice, peaceful garrison life.
By late that afternoon, we were fully armed to the teeth, weapons loaded, on board helicopters--our brand new set of Huey helicopters that hadn't been used in operations very much--and flying down the Ottawa River.
We landed where the Rideau Centre is now. It used to be a parking lot. We brought in one helicopter after another, a dust-off into the centre of the city. I always like to tell people that it was Canada's first experience in combat aerial operations, but unfortunately it was in downtown Ottawa and not in somebody else's country.
We then went across to the Cartier Square armouries, where we met senior mounted police officers as we were still loading magazines. We were told to guard various houses here and there.
One of the NCOs said to a mounted policeman, “So what do we do if somebody comes up on the lawn?” The mounted policeman said, “Shoot him. But then tell us first.” My commanding officer quite sensibly said, “Hold it: nobody's shooting anybody.”
The point of the little war story is that it's nice and sunny going duck-hunting. You come home, the turkey's in the oven for Thanksgiving...and that evening we're downtown, walking streets, and people are frightened.
In Kandahar, in Bosnia, in Germany under NATO, which was our greatest peacekeeping operation, the siren goes off and your life changes. Everything changes.
Again, we shouldn't hope to be able to dictate from Parliament or from NDHQ to the commanders in the field how they will react to the situation when they arrive on the ground. You train these people. You commission them. The Queen commissions them, and you give them the responsibility to command operations for Canada in the field. You assume, as I do, that they're sensible people in difficult circumstances, and then you hold them to account before they go and when they come back.
I hope that's not too much preaching, Mr. Chair.
Liberal
The Vice-Chair Liberal Bryon Wilfert
Thank you.
Before we go to the second round, Mr. Bland, I would like a short clarification.
You mentioned that when we went to the former Yugoslavia, we were basically conducting peace operations inside a conventional war. Was that a failure of intelligence or was that a failure to execute the intelligence that we got?
Chair, Defence Studies Program, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University, As an Individual
Oh, it was a circumstance that arose.... I'll try not to be too long about this. We'd just had the war against Saddam, the first Iraqi war, and all the nations of the UN came together. People were talking, just after that, about the golden age of the United Nations and peacekeeping, that if you fly into someplace and put up the blue flag, people stop fighting. And it was a mistake.
The Government of Canada sent the troops into Yugoslavia from our posts in Germany on the assumption that this would be a UN peacekeeping operation, with white vehicles brightly painted and a big UN flag, and that this would be enough to stop the operation.
Then when we discovered, almost immediately, when they mortared some of our first convoys going down the road, that, “Uh-oh, this ain't peacekeeping”, there was no adjustment; very little adjustment.
Liberal
The Vice-Chair Liberal Bryon Wilfert
Thank you.
We're going to begin the second round with the official opposition.
I believe Mr. Dosanjh is going to share his time with Ms. Neville.
Welcome back to the committee, Ms. Neville.
Go ahead, Mr. Dosanjh.
Liberal
Ujjal Dosanjh Liberal Vancouver South, BC
Thank you.
I want to go back to the issue that you raised, Mr. Bland, in terms of our experience with non-state actors in Afghanistan and in Bosnia. In the coming decades many of the peace operations, or whatever you might call them, might not involve two states and a situation in which you have the consent of both parties and the UN goes in and just basically monitors the situation. Increasingly you will be dealing with non-state actors.
I have two questions for both of you. First, in the long run, if that's true, then our thinking about peace operations or peacekeeping or peacemaking changes altogether and takes into account the recent experience in Afghanistan.
Second, you raised the issue of the Geneva Conventions. You obviously raised it, but have you thought about how the conventions ought to be amended?
Do either of you have a suggestion?
Thank you.
Liberal
The Vice-Chair Liberal Bryon Wilfert
This is a five-minute round, so we are going to have to be even more succinct. There's about 3:40 left in this round.