Mr. Speaker, I move that the first report of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development presented on Thursday, February 26, 2009 be concurred in.
I thank my colleague, the member for Sudbury for his support.
The foreign affairs committee tabled a report on Afghanistan. We now have an opportunity to open up the debate on this report and, of course, on Canada's mission in Afghanistan but also perhaps, I hope, about where we are going.
Mr. Speaker, I do not have to tell you the concerns that Canadians have, that members of this Parliament should have and that the world community has in terms of what is going on, not only in Afghanistan but in the region.
The list of recommendations that came out of the foreign affairs committee report with regard to Afghanistan was fairly thorough. There were 35 recommendations.
We heard from people who had been in the field and had a military point of view, people who were there who had a diplomatic point of view, and certainly from people who were there who had a development point of view. We heard from Afghans themselves directly, through video conference. We also heard from people who have worked in Afghanistan, and who looked at it from a Canadian perspective.
Hopefully what the report did was give some helpful advice to parliamentarians as to where we should go in Afghanistan. In particular what was important about this report was that it actually talked about diplomacy, and it talked about the role of Canada when it comes to diplomacy in the region.
I think most Canadians have been seized with the mission in Afghanistan, but most recently with the concerns, the problems and the challenges. What they have seen is that the rhetoric we have heard in this place has fallen to the side and that reality has taken over.
We have seen a mission that has had many problems. I think the focus has been, with all due respect to the government, too one-dimensional. By that I mean that while the government was seized with the military option, the opportunity cost of that was that they forgot what the other options were.
Sadly, I think when we look at the Manley report and what was in the Manley report, certainly the testimony, the details of that report showed a cause for concern. The report said that if we carry on in the present manner without looking at the diplomatic side and doing development differently, we will find ourselves in a great muck and in a situation that will be hard to resolve.
That is where we are. I say this respectfully to those who have sat on the Afghanistan committee and indeed to my colleagues on the foreign affairs committee and certainly to those on the defence committee.
I do not think we have had enough debate in this country when it comes to Afghanistan. I do not think we have had all the options put in front of us. That has not served any of us well, be it those who are serving in the military who I have had the opportunity to visit when the defence committee went to Afghanistan, or especially those who serve in our diplomatic community.
What we are doing right now is a sad testament to the history of Canadian diplomacy, and it is because of a failure of imagination, a failure to listen to those who have said that we must do more when it comes to the region, not just focus on the country of Afghanistan but be seized with the region.
We have seen that the new administration in Washington has at least opened up the debate and looked at the region a little more. They have looked at Pakistan and Afghanistan. What I think is crucial, as we see in this report, is that we look at the entire region.
It is interesting to look back to 1998 and 1999, when the UN sent a special envoy to Afghanistan and to the region. Mr. Brahimi, who was instrumental in putting together the Afghanistan Compact in 2001, was sent to the region by the secretary general of the UN of the day. He was sent there with a gentleman by the name of Mokhtar Lamani, a Canadian.
At the time, they found three things that are very important to note for this debate today. They said that right then the Taliban were training foreign fighters. They said there was a problem with the drug economy and they said there was a problem with human rights in the country.
If one reads those reports, as I have, and puts their hand over the date, they could be representing exactly what is happening in Afghanistan right now. We have a problem with adherence to human rights. We more or less have a narco-economy and we have a problem in terms of foreign fighters. One simply looks at the growth of the Taliban in the last couple of years and it is hard to deny those facts.
I think those facts are certain. I do not think anyone disputes them. I think everyone from every side agrees on the proliferation of fighters. We agree that the drug economy has proliferated. We agree that there are problems with human rights. Certainly, we just have to look at the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission's reports to look at the concern around human rights.
The problem is that we have not done anything different to seize an opportunity that is in front of us. The opportunity in front of us is to say that what we have done in the past has not worked. We need to set a new direction, a new course. I would ask the government to look at this report, look at what others have suggested and consider that new path.
Our party has said that what we should be focusing on right now is ending the war. Ending the war that is happening should be everyone's primary focus right now. The work that has been done by our military, development and diplomacy components has hopefully been to that effect. However, right now we are stuck.
I think we are stuck because the government is saying that when 2011 comes, we are out. That is what I hear. That is it, except for the odd time when we hear the Minister of National Defence say that we might stay in the PRTs and train military or police. However, we have not heard from the government about exactly where we are going.
I suggest a couple of things as a member of my party and caucus and as a foreign affairs critic. I think that the government should be pushing those who are saying that we need to have a Bonn II, so to speak. We need to take a look at the reality on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan but also in the region. We have seen the proliferation of insurgency beyond the south into the north. Right now, we should be engaging with countries in the region. We should be engaging with Russia, China and Turkmenistan. We need to talk to Iran. We need to make sure that we talk to Pakistan as well.
These are the countries in the region and we have done nothing to engage them. There are countries that want to engage those countries because it is in their self-interest. After the Taliban took over, the first people they went after were Iranians. There is no love lost between these two countries. Somehow, perversely, what has happened in this conflict is that refugees who fled the Taliban have safe refuge in Iran. Right now, the Iranians and Russians are sitting on the side, watching us spend our treasury and spill our blood. They are just waiting until we say that we need to do something different.
The time is now and I will explain why. Up until a year and a half ago, it was not a problem for those countries in the neighbourhood to watch the rest of us do the work that they had tried to do on Afghanistan before. They thought we would eventually learn the lesson. Right now, there is an opportunity because the threat to those countries is omnipresent. The insurgency is growing past the point of the south. It is going to the north. It is going to other regions of Afghanistan, which means it will effect those other countries.
I plead with the government to look to diplomacy to push for special rapporteurs like Mr. Brahimi, who knows the region, who can talk to pretty well everyone in the region, with the exception of al Qaeda, and who knows this file. He would be the person to help set dialogue in the region. The fact that we need to end the war has been missing in our policy. To end the war, it means that we have to set up negotiations.
One of our goals is reconciliation. The problem with that goal is usually reconciliation is after a conflict ends. The same goes for development. We set up PRTs and if we bend to them, they are fortified. There is not a lot of back and forth with everyday people. There is ongoing training. The problem is it is not spread out and integrated into the area. This is the reason a war is still going on.
From our perspective, we cannot have reconciliation in the middle of a war. We have to end the conflict first. To do that, we need to identify the people to whom we can talk. That is why Canada's policy should be pushing to have a special rapporteur, a group of imminent persons is how I put it before, or whatever we want to call it. We need to have someone to engage those countries in the neighbourhood.
We should also be offering our expertise and diplomacy. I already mentioned Mokhtar Lamani. He was working with Mr. Brahimi when he was there in 1998. Mr. Brahimi was the person who put together the Afghan compact that followed the Bonn conference. We need to seize these components.
In the list of recommendations, there are four or five that push the government to this direction, to say that we need to take a new direction, set a new course, put more resources into diplomacy and put Canada in its rightful place in the world, where we can take a leadership role when it comes to building a consensus toward diplomacy. We have the people and the knowhow to do it. As I just enumerated, we have people who have done this before.
Mr. Brahimi and Mr. Lamani have spoken out on this. They said that one of the challenges they saw after the Bonn conference was there was not enough attention paid to bringing in those who would be reasonable, to talk to those who would want to see an end to the conflict. That opportunity was lost. However, it is not too late. In fact, it is never too late, when it comes to ending a war.
The report states that Canada should re-calibrate its focus in Afghanistan, that when it comes to our role post-2011, we should put more resources into the diplomatic side, on a regional basis.
We should do this by identifying those countries in the neighbourhood. This war will not be ended by Parliament. I am certain of that and I understand it. However, the war can end if Canada pushes with like-minded countries to identify those who are willing to take up the cause of ending the war, of ensuring that the people in the region are going to be responsible partners. To date, this has not happened.
If we look at the recent events, as was mentioned by my colleague from Toronto Centre today in question period, we have concerns around the follow-up to the Afghan elections.
Mr. Galbraith, who has written extensively on Iraq, was being honest when it came to Afghanistan. He was clear in saying that if we were going to call this a free and fair election, then we were obviously sending the wrong message to the people of Afghanistan. Why?
When we have ghost polls that come through with results that show 90% support for the president, what message do we send to the people of Afghanistan? Do we think that will not noticed by the people of Afghanistan? If we ignore the Galbraiths and others, we will basically tell the people of Afghanistan that all the rhetoric about democracy, that the notion they should be able to decide who runs their affairs, is something we did not mean, that we actually do not care.
When it comes to corruption, it is the same. There is rampant corruption going on right now in Afghanistan. It is totally linked to the drug trade. People are sitting in the cabinet of the present president who are part of that.
Do we think the people of Afghanistan do not know that? They are not stupid. They understand their country better than we do. If we do not heed their call, then what will happen to them? They will not be willing to listen to us. Nor will they be willing to work with us when we try to help them.
Sadly, one of our recent messages to the Afghans was that if they did not tell us all the facts of what was happening on the ground when it came to reporting on the insurgency, then we would withdraw aid. I guess that shows the fatigue of the mission. We send a message to the people we are trying to help, that unless they tell us what we want to know, then we will not help them.
I think that is the frustration of people on the ground right now. The direction we have taken has been one that has been the same over and over again. We say this is not a war that is won militarily speaking, but we add the same ingredients every time.
I plead with the government to read the report. I know in its dissenting report, it took issue with some of the concerns that were laid out by the committee. However, I look at some of the first recommendations that were made. They basically said that we needed to have NATO-led international security forces in Afghanistan, ISAF, continue to focus on avoiding Afghan civilian casualties and minimizing property damage. The government's response to that recommendation was that the Canadian Forces made every reasonable effort to do so.
That is not the point. It is not about the Canadian Forces. It is about what was happening in the whole mission.
We cannot look at this mission in isolation. It is not only about what we are doing. The fact is when we have our allies call in air strikes that take out civilians, every time that happens it sends not only the wrong message to the people we are trying to help, but it helps the other side because that is used to recruit members for the insurgency.
When we talk about recommendation 3, which states that the Government of Canada should reinforce efforts on the diplomatic military development levels to promote the creation of conditions favourable to a peace process in Afghanistan, I would hope the government would say, yes, that it believes this is a good idea.
Again, I go back to the goal the government has set out as reconciliation in its own reporting. It has not been able to make any real progress when it comes to reconciliation. I know there are some pilot projects ongoing on the ground. Those are important. We have to build that capacity. However, the key focus is how to end this war. If we try to have reconciliation before we end a conflict, it will be very difficult. Talk to any expert who deals with conflict and post-conflict. The reconciliation piece is after the conflict ends.
When we look at the report and recommendation 3, I hope the government takes this seriously and pushes beyond the notion of what it has set up as its goal for reconciliation and goes further to tell us how we end this war.
Again, I plead with the government. It needs to talk and work with our allies. It needs to talk to people in the neighbourhood. If we do not talk to the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians and Pakistanis about what their self-interest is when it comes to Afghanistan and when it comes to Pakistan, then this will be ongoing for a very long time, much longer than we already have been engaged.
It is important to note how long we have been engaged.
In summary, I hope this place and our country will debate the war in Afghanistan more than we have. I hope we will provide solutions that come from all of us to ensure that when we get to the point of saying, “what's next”, which is where we are at right now, we will have a plan, a consensus to take us from what we have had in the past and move to the future to end the war in Afghanistan, to use our diplomatic muscle and ensure that all is not lost, that in fact Canada can reclaim its rightful role in the world as a nation that ends conflict and builds societies in a post-conflict situation.