Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I add my thanks to the committee for the opportunity to be here.
I have provided the committee with a paper that's been distributed this morning. I want to make three additional points just now.
Approaches to post-2011 roles for Canadian Forces outside North America will clearly be influenced by the Afghanistan experience. When the Prime Minister told CNN in March 2009, “My own judgment is, quite frankly, that we are not going to ever defeat the insurgency,” we should understand that he was not only stating an Afghan-specific truth, but was reflecting a broader reality.
Complex human conflicts are not amenable to purely military solutions. That's how the UN Security Council put it in its most recent resolution on Afghanistan.
The focus on multi-dimensional or whole-of-government approaches by earlier witnesses before this committee speaks to the same reality. National or intra-state armed conflicts are largely ended through negotiations and high-level political settlements. The latter is the phrase used by General McChrystal in his 2009 report.
The point is simply to note that if insurgencies are not defeated but end through political negotiations, then such processes should be built into peace support operations from the start. That's a point the Department of Foreign Affairs has made in setting out considerations for deciding whether to participate in a particular peacekeeping mission; it says it asks whether “the peacekeeping operation will take place alongside a process aimed at a political settlement to the conflict”.
The Security Council's February 2010 session on peacekeeping emphasized that “an advanced peace process is an important factor in achieving successful transition from a peacekeeping operation to other configurations of United Nations presence”. But such a process cannot credibly be left to a national or host government alone. It requires international diplomacy that engages the conflict and the search for political solutions from local to national to regional contexts.
My second point is that while Canada must be part of future peace operations, we have to understand that there is no guarantee that other efforts will be much easier or more obviously successful than has been the intervention in Afghanistan thus far. Peace operations after all are by definition mounted in extraordinarily difficult circumstances; even after peace agreements are signed, state governance remains dangerously fragile, economies are shattered, security forces are seriously compromised, and political loyalties are complex and frayed.
Remember, in 2002, when the International Security Assistance Force was established in Afghanistan through the Bonn peace accords, our forces were there in a consent-based security assistance mission anchored by a peace agreement. In 2003, ISAF became increasingly focused on extending the authority of the government further out into the country—a prominent feature of operations these days. Throughout that period, there were plenty of spoilers to be dealt with through what was most certainly a robust peacekeeping operation. But the strategic-level consent of the early years of ISAF steadily eroded, and by 2005 it had essentially been lost. ISAF had morphed into an enforcement mission in much of the country, but without a persistent process aimed at political settlement.
In other words, peace support operations lead to the unexpected, with no guarantees. It is the constant updating of the lessons of experience that can shift the odds toward success.
Finally, and briefly, the fact that Canada does not face imminent or foreseeable military challenges to its sovereignty, territorial integrity, or internal order means it enjoys considerable flexibility in determining the best ways and means of addressing security challenges beyond our borders. In other words, because Canada is not burdened by the need to maintain high levels of military forces for security at home, our international peace and security toolkit need not be dominated by a military capacity.
We have options. In the future we can decide on the most effective ways to deploy resources abroad in response to contemporary security threats. Canada is thus in an excellent position to make the kinds of multi-dimensional contributions to international peace and security that a succession of witnesses before the committee have said are essential.
Thank you.