National Defence Committee on May 1st, 2018

[Zoé Dugal]

That's a tall question. I don't want to be overly negative, but the situation in Mali is still extremely complex.

To echo what the general was saying and maybe to add to your previous question, you have to see Mali as.... It's not a country. You have to see the region because, for these countries, such as Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mali and the whole of the Sahel region, which is the bottom of the Sahara, it is very lawless. It has always been lawless because it's a desert. There's very little border security. People roam around these countries. There's very limited government authority in those regions.

If you look at the south in these countries, you can see that the south of Mali is fine. The north of Mali is not. It has never been very fine. However, as the general was saying, because of the situation in Libya, you've had this influx of fighters coming in, and the weapons also come from there, largely.

In terms of financing—

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

I'm sorry. I'm going to have to leave it there. We've run over time, but I'm sure that will come up again and we'll be able to circle back.

MP Garrison.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Despite the chair's comments earlier, the committee hasn't decided to retitle this study at this point.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

I didn't say we were.

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

Certainly, from talking to experts, we know that a new title other than “peacekeeping” may be what we end up with, but in talking to the Canadian public, I think peacekeeping is still where they're tuned into, so there's a usefulness to that terminology.

My question—and I'm going to start with you, Ambassador Mason—is that both in the media and sometimes here in Parliament we hear people talking about how there is no peace to keep. I'd like you to talk about that, because I think to keep repeating that devalues our efforts and the UN's efforts. Can you talk about that in the context of UN operations?

[Peggy Mason]

Yes. I might note at the outset, with respect to polling, that the most recent polling introduces the element of risk and puts forward to Canadians that peacekeeping is now of greater risk. That doesn't seem to have diminished their support for it.

Peace operations is a more accurate term, yes, but for better or worse, peacekeeping is the UN term. As long as member states are using that term, we shouldn't abandon it.

With respect to this really important question about there being no peace to keep, that was really what I was trying to talk about. Building the peace is actually perhaps the most accurate way to describe what the UN multi-dimensional missions are trying to do now, because it's not a sequential process. It's not that the military tries to stabilize everything and then the peace process works. It has to work in tandem.

That really was the problem with respect to Afghanistan. For most of the time the UN was there, it had no mandate to work on a comprehensive peace process. Actually, it never had a mandate to work on a comprehensive peace process. Even when there was relative stability, there wasn't that opportunity to take advantage of it and to bring all the players in, because that's the story with Afghanistan.

I've heard General Fraser talk in past days about the frustration of the Taliban fighters going back to Pakistan for R and R, but Pakistan had its own security interests that had to be addressed, and it didn't do any good to lecture and tell Pakistan to stop doing this. There needed to be a comprehensive peace process that took into account Pakistan's concerns over India.

Zoé's comments about the regional complexities of Mali also hit on a really important factor. I would just like to quote one comment from the observations of the Secretary-General in the December report on Mali. With respect to this interrelationship of the counter-insurgency force and the UN mission, he said:

I commend the commitment of the States members of the Group of Five for the Sahel to tackling the threats to peace and security, terrorism and transnational organized crime through the establishment of a joint force. While it has the potential to contribute to an enabling environment for MINUSMA, only a multidimensional approach that addresses the root causes of instability will be effective in countering terrorism, including by improving governance and creating opportunities for young people while bringing those who are disenfranchised back into the fold of society. Consequently, the success of the joint force—

This is the counter-insurgency force.

—remains intimately linked to the full implementation of the [peace] Agreement.

To come back to the question, no, there isn't a peace to keep. There's a peace to build, and it can be done by a fully resourced UN multi-dimensional peacekeeping mission.

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

I have the usual frustration this morning of a distinguished panel, and it's tempting to go all over the map, but we're looking for some specific recommendations on what Canada can do. I'm going to stick with Ambassador Mason for a minute. You talked about the establishment, or re-establishment, of a capacity for training for civilians and military in Canada. You were at the end of your presentation, but I'd like you to talk a bit more about how you see that working, and its value.

[Peggy Mason]

Yes, thank you very much. I'm very pleased to do that.

Before I do that, though, I'll echo comments that have been made by others here about this whole-of-government approach. Canada needs to focus on supporting the peace process. If we're going to send military peacekeepers, then we have to do more with respect to supporting the Mali peace process. We have contributed some money to the UN trust fund in support of the peace process, but I think we can do a lot more in that regard.

Turning to the training, of course the frustration for many of us is that we were ahead of the game back in 1995 when we set up the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre. It was the first, if you will, integrated training centre—civilian, military police. That's the key. They have to be brought together.

Part of the challenge of a multi-dimensional operation is all of these key actors with their own role to play: How do they interact? What are the limits? What can they expect of the others?

Therefore, if you have a training environment where you bring together all those elements, in both your training staff but also in the composition of those being trained, then you can start to get at some of these problems. You cannot only train for current missions, but you can be thinking ahead and looking at these problems, the one that was raised earlier about protection of civilians, but also accountability, such as for sexual misconduct or other misbehaviour of forces. This is a tremendous problem but it's not something the Secretary-General can solve. It's individual troop contributors who maintain the discipline. They will not allow the UN to handle it.

These are the kinds of things that a multi-dimensional centre can look at. The most important part, though, is what Zoé Dugal said, that there is no opportunity.... I mean, the military needs this kind of training in conjunction with civilians. They get a bit of training, but most organizations cannot provide this training. It's really, really important. If we recognize how important the civilian dimension of peace operations is, then we better step up on the training in that regard.

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

Ms. Dugal, you're nodding. Would you like to jump in on this?

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

I'm going to have to hold it there, because that's your time.

MP Fraser, welcome.

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you all very much for being here. I appreciate your expertise in this important study.

General Fraser, if I can begin with you, I take what you're saying. I think it's well known that there has been a change in the paradigm of conflicts regarding non-state actors filling a void in any failed state, so failing states that don't have civil society or institutions to keep the peace.

Are there other factors, though, that we can look to that have changed the evolving nature of conflicts within states, such as different types of weapons being used, or different tactics, or the rise of technology, that could inform our view of how we can rebuild or keep peaceful situations in countries that have failed institutions?

[MGen (Ret'd) David Fraser]

The biggest change, and I think Bosnia was a transition.... Up until that point, national institutions were in place when we went in to conduct operations. I don't want to call them peace operations. I'll call them UN operations. It's a more generic term. It still uses something so that people understand it's the United Nations and that embraces a concept.

We had institutions that were still in place in Bosnia onwards. If I use Iraq, if I use Afghanistan, if I look at Mali, those national institutions were erased, destroyed. Colin Powell said once, “You break it, you own it”. Well, we, the international community, broke a lot of countries. We broke Afghanistan, we broke Iraq, and we broke Syria. We took national institutions and erased them, which made operations.... I hate the term “root cause” because it's too generic, but the root cause was getting rid of the national institutions, because you set the country back about four generations. Now it's going to take four generations at least to build what an institution that is called a country looks like again.

That's not a military operation, that's a whole-of-government operation. That is diplomatic. That is judicial. That is policing, and we start with policing first, not the army. It's about social policing and those institutions. When we look at any situation today around the world, if we look at a country, we can't think about it in terms of what Canada looks like. We're starting from a blank piece of paper, and we have to rebuild it.

Capacity building is the idea. Capacity building is how you want to do things. I firmly support what the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre did, but that was stage one. Capacity building, in my recommendation, is done in the host nation, not here in Canada but in the host nation, so that the legacy that Canada leaves, as part of an international community, is a college, a university, or a training centre in the host nation where we train the trainers, they train their own people, they build it, and then we exit from that. It's not a combat operation and it's not missions out in the field. It's about building capacity and building national institutions that, in today's operations, are completely obliterated because of the lack of state actors. They are gone.

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Thank you, General.

Ms. Dugal, I suppose that touches very much on the point you made about prevention being the key and about supporting institutions within civil society to avoid this situation where non-state actors can come in and overtake a population.

Do you think that what General Fraser has just said is an important point, that judicial resources, helping build institutions including police forces, having them on the ground, and supporting civil society are key to the prevention of these types of situations?

[Zoé Dugal]

Yes, absolutely. I completely agree. Prevention is at two levels, in my view. The second level is what the general was just referring to. After a conflict, we send in peacekeepers, we stop the fighting, and now we have to rebuild the country. This is the second level of prevention, because you want to prevent the conflict from reappearing. Police are crucial. It can't be taken in isolation. As you've just said, the police, the justice system, the prison system, etc., are a continuum.

The military is important, but what affects civilians' lives day to day are the police and the justice system. This is absolutely crucial. It cannot be done in isolation, either. You have to rebuild all state institutions at the same time, and it's a huge task.

The first level of prevention, though, is to prevent the conflict in the first place. This is where the international community has not been very good. We are better at trying to prevent reoccurrence of conflict after a transition. The UN and others have been learning a lot over the last 50 years on how to rebuild states. It's not been very successful in Afghanistan or Iraq, I agree with the general. It's been much more successful in other countries like Bosnia, East Timor, and Kosovo, for example. There are a lot of UN successes that we can build on. There are a lot of lessons learned that are there for the UN to use. There have also been a lot of successes in Africa. We could spend the rest of the session discussing those.

However, instead of doing this, you could also start with not having a conflict in the first place, in which case the institutions wouldn't get destroyed. They could be reformed at a slower pace within the society itself with some help from the international community.

When there's a risk of conflict, it's because there's a problem in the society that cannot be addressed through the traditional means of government. The government needs to reform, and the state needs to reform, but it doesn't have to pass through this phase of violent conflict, which is extremely disruptive in terms of infrastructure, human suffering, and destroying institutions. It's much better if we can try to prevent conflict and work on reforming institutions without having to destroy them in the first place.

[Colin Fraser, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Thank you very much.

Ambassador Mason, I'll turn to you. I appreciate very much what you're saying about the importance of training and the element that will play, and I understand it's not the whole picture, as General Fraser said earlier.

I represent West Nova, which has Cornwallis Park in it, which was the centre for the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre in the nineties. The people there did amazing work in training peacekeepers, not only practically but theoretically, about what they needed to know before going into conflict situations and to keep the peace. Is this the type of training centre that you would envision?

Obviously the focus would have to change a little bit given the changing nature of the actors involved in these operations, but do you see that type of centre being what we could look to, having one place where there's practical and theoretical work going on and training people not only those from Canada but from around the world who come here to learn how to keep peace?

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

I'm going to have to hold it there. I'm sorry. We'll have time at the end.

[Peggy Mason]

Yes.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

Well, there's your answer.

We're going to go to five-minute questions now.

MP Spengemann, the floor is yours.

[Sven Spengemann, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

Chair, thank you very much.

Thank you all for being with us. My first question is to General Fraser.

Going back to the reality on the ground, when we're talking about a setting in which we have multiple insurgent groups, rebel groups, and shifting alliances, all enmeshed in a civilian population that may or may not be displaced internally or turn into refugees, how important is the exercise of gathering good intelligence? What could Canada do as a contributor to peace operations with respect to knowing who is who in a very, very fluid and often rapidly changing environment like the ones we saw in Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan?

[MGen (Ret'd) David Fraser]

Let me use a different term, which is “human geography”. People who understand the human geography are far more effective in communicating and establishing relationships. To give an example of human geography, in Afghanistan we were using the wrong maps, because we were using maps written and done up by people back in the 1800s. I asked my staff to go and get me a tribal map. When we understood the human geography, the complexity just exploded off the page. We started to have different relationships, and we started building those relationships and having a better understanding of the cultural sensitivities of the groups that we were dealing with and an understanding of what their grievances were with each other and what their grievances were with us, because we didn't understand them—wrong culture, wrong race, wrong religion, blah, blah, blah.

The more we sat down and talked to them, the better we could understand it. You put a big bowl around that whole thing and that's called intelligence, intelligence and understanding the situation that you have to deal with. The better intelligence you have, the better informed decisions you can make and you can actually deliver the right effect at the right time with the right results. It's not about killing. It's about engaging in relationship building, and we need significant capability.

One of the greatest assets that Canada has provided on operations throughout our history.... I used “us” in Afghanistan. I said, “We're multicultural, multi-ethnic.” I used to show up in meetings. I had my political adviser, who was a woman, and my development adviser, who was a woman. I was a guy. I had an imam with me, and I had a guy you might know. His name is Harjit Sajjan and he is a Sikh. I said, “Welcome to Canada. This is Team Canada. This is what we come with. This is just us.”

The one thing about Canadians is that we'll talk the crap out of you, because all we want to do is talk to you and we want to understand what's going on. Then the imam would say a prayer, and they'd be really confused because he was wearing a uniform and he was speaking in their language and he was praying with them. After we had the prayer, we sat down and had a talk. You want to talk about a multiplying effect? Canada was a superstar over there. We found out stuff that the Americans and other international agencies did not because we are just unique because we are multicultural and multi-ethnic. That's intelligence. Understanding that, Canada just being Canadians going over there and doing what Canadians do best.... I don't think there's another country in the world that can do it as well as we can. We just don't give ourselves enough credit.

[Sven Spengemann, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

It's fair to say that we have an excellent starting point. If we have the right maps and the right people, we're in the game.

How long does it take to build the relationships to actually get valuable information on an ongoing basis? You can't just walk in.... With all the good circumstances you outlined, that's a great starting point, but it takes time to build trust.

[MGen (Ret'd) David Fraser]

It's at least a year.

When you first walk in there, they don't believe us. They have a history. Pick a country and they have a history. After about a year, six months, they're going to start talking to you. I'm talking about the key people, what the ambassadors are talking about, the political people, the people who are going to do the process. That's a long-term relationship. You don't change those people out quickly.

The police force and the security people, the apparatus underneath it, you can change. But where the peace process happens, that's a long-term relationship. You have to put people in there for a couple of years to make this thing work.

[Sven Spengemann, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

In addition to people and good maps and good insights, are there technologies that Canada could bring to the table in peace operations?