National Defence Committee on April 24th, 2018

[BGen (Ret'd) Gregory Mitchell]

I was just going to say that should this international peacekeeping training centre be set up and funded as a government agency or government institution, one of its tasks could be informing members of Parliament and running courses for them, or seminars, or whatever you wanted to do.

There are other ways to do it. You can ask CDAI and other groups to do something similar, but this could be something that you could directly control and it could keep you as informed as you wish.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

I have a hard time wrapping my head around it. Maybe I'll end it where I started with you, General Mitchell.

We talk about how great a reputation Canada has had historically in this area of peacekeeping or peace support. Why did we choose to withdraw from it by assigning fewer resources towards it? Why did we close the Pearson peacekeeping training centre? Why did we look at it as something that we needed to take money away from?

There must have been a legitimate reason, other than what Mr. MacKenzie has said in terms of lack of understanding.

[BGen (Ret'd) Gregory Mitchell]

Personally, I believe it was a lack of interest at the time, with the government of the day not wanting to put money into non-profits, NGOs, or anything else. It was going across the board. It was just another one. It was on the target list.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Yes, like our withdrawal from AWACS and the other things we did.

[BGen (Ret'd) Gregory Mitchell]

AWACS is not an NGO. It's a capability tool.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

I realize that. I'm just saying that it's a common theme.

[BGen (Ret'd) Gregory Mitchell]

I'm trying to do this without getting political, but I'm—

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

I'm not of the same....

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[BGen (Ret'd) Gregory Mitchell]

I understand that. All I'm saying is that if it's not valuable to you or you don't see it, then you stop supporting it. In this particular case, I don't think the value was recognized. The input of resources and the output on the international and national stage was huge.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

In my remaining few seconds, do you still stand by the recommendation you outlined in that article you authored, as talked about here, as being the correct path forward for Canada?

[BGen (Ret'd) Gregory Mitchell]

Yes.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

You do?

[BGen (Ret'd) Gregory Mitchell]

Yes, very much so.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Okay. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

You're right on time.

MP Garrison.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

General Thompson, you talked about the added complexity for missions when the protection of civilians is added in. I want to explore that a bit more from our view of the success of missions. Again, as a human rights observer on the ground, a lot of times missions were successful for civilians because they did create some safety and some ability to return to a more normal life, but they didn't look successful at the political level.

[MGen (Ret'd) Denis Thompson]

First of all, any force, whether it's peacekeeping, peace support, or counter-insurgency, whatever you want to call it, has to create the conditions where the belligerents are deterred and the civilian population is reassured. To do that, you need numbers, and you need quality density, as I mentioned before.

I'm going to give you some numbers. In counter-insurgency, to be successful you need 20 security force personnel—that can be internationals or local security forces—for every 1,000 people in the population. To secure Afghanistan, you need 500,000 security force personnel if you're going to be serious about it. Those are straight-on numbers. If you get a protection-of-civilians mandate and you're in a counter-insurgency environment, that's the kind of order of magnitude that you have to be thinking about.

If you can't do that—and a lot of times you can't—then you need to create what General MacKenzie talked about: UN protected areas. But they need to be properly resourced to protect the people who are inside those protected areas. If you can't do that, then you go to the lowest common denominator, which unfortunately is bringing these civilians as refugees or internally displaced persons onto your camp and protecting them there.

Those last two are actually the least desirable options. The bottom line is that you need to do what we did in NATO's case: flood the country with troops. Kosovo is another example. There were 40,000 soldiers from NATO in a postage stamp of a country. That completely stabilized it almost overnight. In fact, I recall visiting there, and you couldn't drive a kilometre without bumping into another NATO checkpoint. It created what I called at the time “belligerent gridlock”. You couldn't turn anywhere without bumping into a NATO solider.

[MGen (Ret'd) Lewis MacKenzie]

UNPROFOR, the United Nations Protection Force—12,000 to 14,000 strong in United Nations-protected areas—worked. Unfortunately, for the first time in military history, the people up front were feeling sorry for their headquarters in Sarajevo—it was the one being shelled—and the locals said, “What idiot gave you guys the title of protection force?” We said, “Yes, but we're the headquarters for the protection force 300 kilometres away.” That didn't fall on welcoming ears, because we were not, with 30 conscript Swedish soldiers or their infantry unit, in a position to protect anybody except by diplomacy.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

But protected areas were created.

[MGen (Ret'd) Lewis MacKenzie]

They were, on the Croatian-Bosnian border, absolutely, and it worked. Those areas were, in the early stages, relatively peaceful, until the whole thing went to hell in a handbasket.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

Part of the new situation we seem to have with peacekeeping is one in which groups are quite prepared to create human misery in order to either recruit or discredit other folks in the field. We've seen attacks on what you'd call the infrastructure that supports civilians. We've seen attacks on humanitarian aid going on.

Would you say that this is an important part of the changed landscape of peacekeeping, General Mitchell?

[BGen (Ret'd) Gregory Mitchell]

Absolutely. You have criminal elements who have a vested interest in a non-secure state. The more disruption, the more violence, the better they can do their work. You have neighbouring countries that like to meddle because of the resources in the Congo and other places. There is ISIS and al Qaeda and everybody else who thrives on disruption. It is in their vested interest, their best interest, to get rid of, attack, discredit, or do whatever they can to anybody who represents stability. The reason a UN force would be there or a peacekeeping force would be there is to provide stability or to help to provide stability.

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

Thank you.

MP Alleslev.

[Leona Alleslev, Liberal, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you very much.

Further on the theme of conversing with Canadians, earlier in the testimony we talked about what is today a spectrum of conflict, which is not necessarily what was peace and war, clear cut, from perhaps a generation ago or before 1990 and the Cold War.

How do we start to explain that the lexicon matters, that terms matter? What words should we be using right down to the name of this study? Our study is called “Canada's Contributions to International Peacekeeping”, and yet in every testimony, we trip over it. Are we in a new era of explaining war and peace and conflict? How would we characterize it, and what lexicon should we be using to more effectively communicate these ideas among ourselves and those in the tent and to Canadians in general?