Mr. Speaker, when the House is this quiet on this kind of issue I feel like there can almost be an understanding of what peace might be. Every party in the House wants Canada to help Afghanistan achieve a just and lasting peace.
This evening we are deciding whether this peace can happen using a war fighting combat mission ending in 2011. Yesterday I heard the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Defence suggest that there are members in the House who want to abandon Afghanistan. For the record, I personally believe that Canada should play a role in peace-building in Afghanistan for as long as it takes, even beyond 2011. I also want to say that I am proud of the courage and loyalty to our country displayed by our brave soldiers in carrying out the mission set by Parliament.
However, I find it very difficult to believe that the current mission and the role that the Liberals and Conservatives are asking our Canadian Forces to play is the best path toward a lasting peace, nor am I convinced that this mission has been well thought out with the support that our soldiers need to succeed there.
The fundamental flaw of the mission, I believe, is the absence of a comprehensive strategy of conflict resolution. I will explain a little more what I mean later, but without it I believe we are dooming our troops to a war without end against an enemy that we create more of every day.
We know that DND has overrun its annual budget by $1 billion again, for a total of $3.6 billion in overrun since 2001. Even that amount has not stemmed the violence or the tide of newly recruited insurgents fighting back. In terms of troop numbers, the Manley report calls for 1,000 more troops and the U.S. army general, Dan McNeill, said last June that NATO was about 5,000 troops short.
If this counter-insurgency mission were to follow U.S. policy in troop levels, as it has in other respects, according to its own counter-insurgency manual for missions of Afghanistan's type, we would need some 480,000 troops on the ground.
Rather than commit billions of dollars and 2,500 Canadian troops to a poorly designed mission of war, I have come to believe that it would be preferable to consider a different approach that includes an act of diplomatic process run by the United Nations toward conflict resolution and a sustainable peace.
The resolutions to many modern conflicts over the past couple of decades have come about through a parallel peace process that genuinely addresses the political causes and issues of the conflict and, in doing so, isolates the criminal elements.
I know the government has a rare allergy to research, especially in the social sciences, but I would like to raise something that the Liberal-Conservative alliance has apparently not yet considered, that is, how to resolve conflicts without reliance on absolute military victories. In conflict resolution theory, it is understood that demonizing and dehumanizing an assigned enemy group is directly counterproductive to achieving peace.
In Canada, we have and continue to dismiss the Taliban as criminals and fanatics, without acknowledging the legitimate issues of political exclusion at play. Without a process to incorporate the legitimate political objectives of all sides in a structure of collaborative governance, we cannot claim to ourselves or to those whose hearts and souls we seek to win to be truly seeking peace. Sustainable peace is not possible so long as political exclusion continues and yet we continue to exclude a large segment of Afghan society from the national government.
Recently, the independent journalist and historian, Gwynne Dyer, wrote that the original U.S. mission in Afghanistan threw out all the prominent Pashtun political and religious leaders who had dealings with the Taliban. He continues:
Six years after the invasion that wasn't, the Pashtuns are still largely frozen out. That is why the Taliban are coming back.
Afghanistan...is also a country where the biggest minority has been largely excluded from power by foreign invaders who sided with the smaller minorities, and then blocked the process of accommodation by which the various Afghan ethnic groups normally make power-sharing deals.
The Taliban are still the main political vehicle of the Pashtuns, because there has been no time to build another. It doesn't mean that all Pashtuns are fanatics or terrorists. Indeed, not all the Taliban are fanatics (though many of them are), and hardly any of them nurse the desire to carry out terrorist acts in other countries. That was the specialty of their...Arab guests, who fled across the border into the tribal areas of Pakistan almost six years ago. The current fighting in the south, the Pashtun heartland, which is causing a steady dribble of American, British and Canadian casualties, will continue until the Western countries pull out.
No one knows for sure the political answer for Afghanistan. The problem, however, is that at the moment we are not looking for it. We are stuck with the simplistic answer that turns all the Taliban into the enemy, without acknowledging the legitimate political motivations behind the insurgency.
I am not saying that the path to peace will be easy. There will undoubtedly be broken deals and ceasefires before the criminal element can be identified and isolated. Until there is a political process to address the legitimate political issues, we cannot rightfully identify a group as the enemy of peace without being the enemy of peace ourselves.
In other words, we are told by our government that the Taliban do not compromise, and the Taliban tell their new recruits that we do not compromise. This is how wars continue without resolution, and this is how we are fighting the war in Afghanistan.
The path to peace is a long and challenging one. It is a path that requires patience, restraint, and both physical and emotional courage. However, it is a path that will cost fewer lives and fewer dollars, and most importantly, will truly and sustainably resolve the conflict in the long run.
It is for this reason that I have long opposed the current counterinsurgency mission in Afghanistan and I have argued for a new approach. As columnist James Travers recently wrote:
Talking to the enemy isn't sleeping with the enemy...By demonizing enemies and diminishing their importance to local solutions, the Prime Minister gravitated to the wrong side of potentially positive trends...But talking is a prelude to peace and peace is made between enemies--
What the NDP is asking for is a UN-led, rather than a NATO-led, process. Unlike NATO, the UN's explicit mandate is to preserve and promote international peace and security. UN agencies, such as the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, UNICEF, the United Nations Development Programme and the Peacebuilding Commission, tasked with carrying out this mandate, have a vital role to play in meeting the challenges in Afghanistan.
We believe that Canada should be leading the way on the path to peace, that we should be using the considerable skills and expertise Canadians bring to the table on Afghanistan.
This Liberal-Conservative motion is asking us to vote on a continuation of the same failed approach without the dimension that I consider crucial to a successful mission in Afghanistan, for Afghans and for Canadians.
I and my NDP colleagues understand the gravity of this vote as the most solemn task with which a parliamentarian is faced. We refuse to abandon Afghanistan.
We also refuse to accept the same futile approach that is making things worse. And most of all, we refuse to ask our troops to risk their lives for a mission of war when the option of peace has been neither explored nor exhausted.