Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
National Security and Defence
Issue 3 - Evidence - Meeting of April 19, 2010
OTTAWA, Monday, April 19, 2010
The Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence met this day at 4:02 p.m. to examine and report on the national security policy of Canada.
Senator Pamela Wallin (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Honourable senators, welcome to our regular hearing of the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence. We are pleased to have with us today Colonel (Retired) Mike Capstick from Kabul, Afghanistan.
Since 2009, Colonel Mike Capstick has been Afghanistan Country Director for Peace Dividend Trust, a Canadian non-governmental organization dedicated to helping peacekeeping missions. The main office is in Kabul. Prior to this, Colonel Capstick commanded the Strategic Advisory Team, Afghanistan, SAT, from 2005 to 2008.
The 15-person SAT team lead by Colonel Capstick broke new ground in the complex, dangerous and unfamiliar territory of governance. This unique unit is a mixed military-civilian team. The work it has done in Afghanistan helped forge the foundation for the Afghan civil service. The team developed a comprehensive strategy for public administration reform and helped the ministries of rural rehabilitation, development and other related ministries and agencies of government.
Colonel Capstick retired from the Canadian Forces in late 2006 after 32 years of service. Do we have the facts correct?
Colonel (Retired) Mike Capstick, Peace Dividend Trust, as an individual: Mostly.
The Chair: You can correct us in a moment.
Col. Capstick: I did not command the SAT for the whole three-year period. There were three different commanders. The last was Serge Labbé, who is now the deputy senior civilian representative in Afghanistan.
The Chair: We will correct this for the record.
Colonel Capstick is also an associate with the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, University of Calgary; he was appointed to the Order of Military Merit in 2006 and was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal for service in Afghanistan in 2007 for his leadership of the Strategic Advisory Team.
Welcome. We will double-check the facts. Have you any opening comments today? If not, I would like you to generally spell out for us your definition of the Peace Dividend Trust.
Mr. Capstick: I will make a few opening remarks. I did not prepare anything formally.
Peace Dividend Trust is a non-governmental organization registered in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. The broader organization does many different things. It has done research for the UN and on the economic footprint of international interventions and other things.
What we do in Afghanistan is called a Peace Dividend Marketplace project. The objective is to leverage international spending power to help the local economy develop and to create jobs. We have other, similar projects, but Afghanistan is the flagship project and by far the biggest. It has been operating since 2008 as a full-fledged, CIDA- funded project. One portion in Helmand province is funded by the British Department for International Development.
We have similar projects in Timor-Leste, and a new project started recently in Haiti. We are quite proud that three of our Afghan staff went to Haiti to help set up the office and train the national staff.
That is what Peace Dividend Trust and Peace Dividend Marketplace Afghanistan do. We have offices in Kabul, Mazar-e Sharif, Jalalabad, Kandahar City and Lashkar Gah, Helmand province.
I am probably one of the few people who have experience on military, governance and now a little on the development side. I would like to focus any comments on what we are doing now as opposed to security or military matters, since I am a little out of date on that. It is amazing how fast the jargon and language have changed in last couple of years in Afghanistan.
Canadians simply do not think of the Afghan business community. Our vision of Afghanistan is tempered by combat operations in Kandahar. We do not see the growth, development and entrepreneurial spirit of Afghans — everyone from men with pushcarts on the streets of Kabul to Afghans investing in the Afghan building boom in the construction site that is Kabul.
There is a huge potential in this country in areas like mining, agri-business and services. The international community is helping to develop the potential, especially in areas like services and certain small areas of manufacturing. In the end, Afghan businesses will be the only regional businesses capable of meeting international standards. We are already starting to see some of that.
I think personally, and many people would agree, that if jobs are not created in one of the world's poorest countries, stability will always be a couple of arm's lengths out of reach. I am a little disappointed with the lack of debate and discussion in Canada. I would like to compliment this committee for at least starting the discussion regarding what we will do after 2011. Economic development is one area where Canada can help.
After security, one of the biggest complaints we hear from Afghan businesses on a daily basis is the structure within government for business — the laws, regulations and the way they are applied. A lot of work needs to be done in this area. The economy has always been dependent on aid, or it was before the Soviet invasion. It was characterized by state-owned industries and large, cumbersome bureaucracies, especially during the Soviet period. It is moving into a private-sector-oriented economy, so the laws are a mess. The laws and regulations are poorly drafted and unevenly applied. Often the laws are more honoured in the breach than they are in the application.
Canada has a lot of good experience in this area. Canada also has a lot of good experience in natural resource regulation and marketing boards, which Afghanistan will need in order to actually get to the point where it can export its projects.
There is a large disparity between the rich and the poor. However, all the Afghan people one talks to just want jobs. They are resilient, entrepreneurial and willing to work. They want nothing more than a bit of peace, order and good government, in the parlance of our British North America Act. They want to make their kids' lives a little better than theirs, and they need jobs to do that. That requires economic development, and I think Canada can help with that.
The Chair: Thank you very much. One of the things that struck me most about being there was that the Afghans I saw, in particular the women, are extremely entrepreneurial and can make something out of nothing; it is wonderful.
Thank you for being with us today. I know you are there in Afghanistan, and it is some awful time of day or night for you, so we will try to keep our questions short and crisp to get you through this and back home to bed.
Senator Dallaire: I want to ask you about the governance side, not only the past and the involvement that you had with the SAT, but currently and certainly into the future. Do you feel we have provided instruments through the diplomatic corps or other bodies of that nature with people who can inculcate, pass on, help and sustain the building of good governance in a failing state that is now a nascent democracy?
Col. Capstick: You have always been known for asking me tough questions, general.
In my experience, the whole issue of governance and assistance to the government in reforming the mechanisms of government, the civil service, the way people operate and the processes within the bureaucracy has probably been one of the weakest areas of the international effort since 2005. There has never been a comprehensive program for it, as there is with the Afghan National Security Forces.
That is my military mind coming out. With the Afghan National Security Forces, we have one structure, one set of leaders and one set of lines of accountability for performance of the assistance. That has not existed here. There have been many programs in various ministries, but the dots have not been connected.
Here, there is nothing in a ministry that is the equivalent of a deputy minister in Canada, that is, a senior civil servant. The deputy ministers are political appointees. The quality of ministries is based strictly on the competence level, the drive and the professionalism of the minister. The ministries that have had good, solid ministers have made progress. The ones with ministers who are not as good and solid have not made progress.
Senator Dallaire: A country like ours has a depth of stable governance with the diplomatic corps, although depleted. It has not necessarily been used in the past to assist nations in bringing about governance within failing states. Do you see a body in this country that should take on that capability and engage itself more deliberately in the future to building governance over there, or do you see the diplomatic corps doing so?
Col. Capstick: I am not sure the diplomatic corps is the right place to look. Assistance in professionalizing the civil service of this country is really needed; it needs to be professionalized. Canada could play a role in that.
No one appears to be in charge of reforming the civil service here. The U.S. is clearly in charge of reforming the army. If someone were to be in charge, I am sure we could find, in Canada, a former deputy minister or former clerk of the Privy Council, with a staff of good civil servants, both retired and serving, who would be the perfect leader for that kind of effort.
Senator Segal: Colonel, I first want to express a deep appreciation for the remarkable work you did with SAT. I think it was the first time the Canadian Forces has had that kind of strategic engagement with a host government in a military activity. I think it brought great credit to our country and to all who served with you. I want to let you know that we do not take that sort of thing for granted, nor should anyone do so.
Will it matter at all if the Canadian mission comes to an end in 2011 relative to what you are now doing? Will your current work be able to continue? I understand you do not necessarily want to get into the discussion about what the government should or should not do. I respect that. However, from the perspective of organizations such as your own, which are on the ground trying to do really good things in the precise economic development area that people on all sides would like to see continue, does it matter for logistics and the security of your operation whether the Canadian Forces are there after 2011?
Col. Capstick: It would not matter much to our current operation here. It might matter a little in Kandahar province. In the other areas, we do not depend on the military for security or logistics. We do have a great relationship with the Canadian embassy here in Kabul. In Kandahar, we do a fair bit with the Canadian Provincial Reconstruction Team there.
That said, we also do a fair bit with everyone else who is spending money in Kandahar province. At the end of the day, the 800-pound gorilla in the room is the United States mission, which has an official ``Afghan first'' policy that applies to all components of the mission — state aid and military. That will keep us busy.
In Kandahar, we are low profile in terms of our security posture down there. Whether Canadian troops are here or not, there will be some kind of troops in Kandahar, and we will learn how to work with them.
Senator Segal: I have one supplementary question. Many of the opponents of the end of the mission, not just for Canada but for NATO overall, argue that the deep corruption in Afghan society and government is such that it makes the proposition utterly hopeless. You have now had experience with various parts of this pyramid. You have broad experience in other countries, in the service of Queen and country. Can you give us a view on that?
It strikes me that it is very easy for people in one country to talk about another country being deeply caught up in dishonesty and all the rest. Can you give us your own sense of how we are doing on that front and what progress is being made, or would you count yourself among the counsels of despair who are out there on a full-time basis trying to destroy the mission?
Col. Capstick: There is corruption within all elements of what is going on in the Afghan government. Without a doubt there is low-level corruption in dealing with traffic policemen on the streets. However, I sit in the middle and hear the international view of corruption, which puts 100 per cent of the blame on the shoulders of the Afghans. I also hear the Afghan view of corruption that puts the blame on international shoulders.
The shenanigans of international contractors that have gone on over the last eight years make some of the Afghan shenanigans look like amateur hour. We all know that. The corruption here could be mitigated with joint Afghan and international efforts to do so. In some areas, progress is being made. Every day we deal with what we think are clean Afghan businesses that become truly upset about the corruption because they do not want to be in that game. Their society is not inherently corrupt.
Senator Lang: As you know, the question of Afghanistan is in the news here in Canada almost every day. We seldom hear about the positive aspects or changes that perhaps are taking place. It is good to hear that an organization such as yours is making some positive changes for the people of Afghanistan.
I will go back to your opening comments on the question of governance, similar to Senator Dallaire's questions. You emphasized that various Afghan government departments basically depended on the political minister of the day. Of course, that causes concern, because it will be difficult to weed out corruption if there are neither rules nor a strong civil service.
I understand that you led the Strategic Advisory Team in 2005. You also experienced the changeover to the Canadian Governance Support Office, CGSO, in charge of working with the civil service. If you were in charge today, would you go back to the strategic advisory team concept as opposed to the existing situation?
Col. Capstick: I do not know enough about what the CGSO does as opposed to what the SAT did. The CGSO is different in that it provides a more traditional technical assistance in specialty areas, whereas the SAT was more general in trying to help Afghan agencies with strategic planning capabilities.
There are strengths and weaknesses in both models. Neither is sufficient to address the required massive reform in the Afghan civil service. A far higher powered comprehensive effort that addresses everything is necessary.
Senator Lang: Taking this a little further, do you have any idea of how to go about that reform? How would that change be made? That would seem to be fundamental if we are to be successful.
Col. Capstick: The international community needs a program that is analogous to the Afghan National Army or the Afghan National Security Forces with one international agency or organization in charge. There must be the right kind of people and the right level of people as the main leader of such reform. A senior retired Canadian public servant would be ideal for that kind of job in conjunction with the right kind of people in the teams at the working level. Currently, in some ministries in this city you cannot move without bumping into an adviser to the minister because there are so many of them. However, a great deal of work needs to be done with the working-level Afghans in the ministries, to give them a hand and teach them the skills they need, without doing their jobs for them. The civil service academy here likely needs to be professionalized much more as well.
Senator Banks: I will pursue the area that was introduced by Senator Segal and Senator Lang. By way of historical context, the SAT in 2005 and in the subsequent two to three years was for all intents and purposes a secretariat to advise the President of Afghanistan. One assumes that there was a certain amount of resistance from him at that time to some of the ideas proposed by the SAT.
Everyone accepts that, in terms of rebuilding and refurbishment of Afghanistan, we want a form of government that functions. It might not be our form of government or a form of government that we would like very much or even perhaps recognize, but we want to see a government that works somehow. You must have had some direct hands-on experience with the resistance, because if what you describe is to happen, it can happen only if the president says so. That is the impression we came away with. When you were there, did you find President Karzai amenable to and willing to consider the kind of public service reforms in Afghanistan that you are talking about?
Col. Capstick: I do not know how deeply I could speak to that question. I know that President Karzai was very appreciative of the SAT, and he told people to cooperate. It was a different world in terms of personalities, and much of it was based on the fact that both General Hillier, then Chief of the Defence Staff, and then Ambassador Chris Alexander had excellent relationships with President Karzai at the time. When General Hillier spoke, President Karzai listened, although he did not always do exactly what was recommended.
Resistance tends to come from people who are in positions of power or want to be in positions of power for their own reasons. It is a highly complicated set up in terms of being able to accommodate the various ethnic groups, regional interests and political interests not only within the cabinet but also within the presidency, which at the time was populated by many senior advisers. In every ministry, there was a counterpart Afghan senior adviser in the president's office. When you talked about finance, you did not know whether you should listen to the finance minister or to the president's senior economic adviser. I believe that has been fixed.
Senator Banks: If you were the king, how would you solve the problem that you have just described, which is that the people who need to be reformed in large part are the very people who oppose the reform and have the means to do so?
Col. Capstick: I believe the best way to resolve the problem is to work with, encourage and support those in government who want reform to happen. Approximately half a dozen ministers in the current cabinet want to move forward with reform and professionalize the government. Over time, they will push the opposers of reform out the door. It will happen, but it will take time.
Senator Banks: The answer is to find the good guys and reward them.
Col. Capstick: I would not say ``reward them,'' but I would say we need to support them and move them forward with the kind of help they need.
The Chair: I have a related question to make the distinction. Do you work with aid dollars?
Col. Capstick: Do I work with aid dollars?
The Chair: Yes, with foreign aid dollars.
Col. Capstick: We are funded by the Canadian International Development Agency, CIDA.
The Chair: I mean from any other bodies.
Col. Capstick: We get our money for our Helmand operation from the British Department for International Development.
The Chair: Are you under the same obligation to put an Afghan face on the expenditure of those dollars, as has long been the motivation, so that people might believe they are receiving help from their government?
Col. Capstick: No, we do not distribute dollars because of what we do. We basically facilitate between the international community and Afghan businesses.
The way our project is set up, by 2012, we want it to be entirely an Afghan entity. We do not know the funding past 2012. In fact, our aim is to make it a self-sustaining Afghan entity that actually charges for services.
The Chair: That is helpful.
Col. Capstick: I do not give out money.
The Chair: I wanted to make these things clear on the record.
Senator Meighen: Thank you, colonel, for being with us. I want to go to the question of the infrastructure projects that you probably know something about, being on the ground there. Over two years ago, when this committee was there, we kept looking for infrastructure projects, and we could not find any. That was a big disappointment. One wondered where all the Canadian aid had gone. We did see in our last visit the road being built by the army from the vantage point of the Ma'sum Ghar Forward Operating Base. We know about the Dahla Dam. Any infrastructure projects that seemed to succeed were largely being carried out by the army, digging wells and that sort of thing with the Provincial Reconstruction Team. What is the security status of infrastructure projects that are under way? Are they under constant threat? Has it improved? Have non-governmental organizations, NGOs, returned in some numbers to Afghanistan? There were few there, if any, when we were last there.
Col. Capstick: The security of infrastructure projects depends largely on where they are in the country. I do not get out on the ground enough to comment specifically on specific areas. I can tell you that a huge number of infrastructure projects are funded by any number of sources. I do not know whether CIDA does a lot of infrastructure, but the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, does, and the U.S. military is doing infrastructure projects all around the country. Their ambition is to use Afghan firms to do those projects, to the maximum extent possible. For example, in the next approximately two years, the U.S. Department of Defence will do about $10-billion worth of infrastructure projects — roads, bridges, dams, culverts — and they want to use as many Afghan businesses as they can to do those. That changes the entire security picture because they tend not to get attacked.
Senator Meighen: Is that because too many people are legitimately drawing benefit from it?
Col. Capstick: They are giving jobs to the local people. If the local people feel they have an ownership in the project, things tend to calm down quite a bit. If it is a great, big international company, it is a different story.
Senator Meighen: I should have been more precise in my question. We were only in the south, in and around Kandahar, so I cannot comment on development projects in the rest of the country. I am glad to hear the situation is improving or seems to be more stable. Thank you.
Senator Nolin: Colonel, I want to go back to the question of the security of your organization, as raised by Senator Segal. Do I understand that you do not rely on military security for your organization?
Col. Capstick: That is correct.
Senator Nolin: What about the other development agencies operating in Kandahar?
Col. Capstick: I do not know of any that rely on the Canadian Forces for their security.
Senator Nolin: Let me be very straightforward with you. After 2011, the Canadian Forces will have left. What will happen to the security of our own organizations doing development in that region?
Col. Capstick: I am not sure I can answer that question. The only one I know intimately is our organization. We are very small. I have two Afghan staff in our office in Kandahar, and I have one expatriate who works out of Kandahar airfield. When he has to move out of there into the Provincial Reconstruction Team or into town, he goes with a private security contractor.
The other companies I know working down there, SNC-Lavalin PAE and Agriteam Canada, have private security contractors. The military presence colours the overall security in the province, the region, the city. Our specific security needs are met differently by private security contractors.
Senator Nolin: On a different topic, your organization recently co-hosted an Afghan female business leaders conference. Can you give us your impression of the inroads Afghan women are making?
Col. Capstick: Afghan women businesses have a very tough, uphill battle. The overall culture is not conducive to women working, never mind running businesses, but there are some that are working very hard to move that forward. Like everything else, it will not happen by itself. It needs an international kick-start. For example, right now, the U.S. is buying all of the uniforms, the equipment, everything for the Afghan National Security Forces, and the Americans have done one project where they have done a set-aside for female-owned businesses. The first slice will be a $35- million contract for socks and underwear for the Afghan security forces. We have been working with women businesses for over a year on that.
Senator Nolin: Who is ``we''?
Col. Capstick: Our organization.
Senator Nolin: Not the Canadian Forces.
Col. Capstick: Not the Canadian Forces, no. Peace Dividend Trust. We have been working with them, training them on proposals and so forth. We will see how it comes out.
Senator Nolin: What about the Canadian Forces?
Col. Capstick: I do not know what the Canadian Forces does, sir. Down in Kandahar, you are very hard-pressed to find a woman-owned business.
Senator Nolin: When you organized that conference, did you hear from local women who knew that you are a Canadian and who came to you asking why Canada is not doing it if the U.S. is able to?
Col. Capstick: I can say I have not, because to most Afghans, the internationals are the internationals. Canada does not do the kind of things like the U.S. does, such as buying all the stuff for the security forces. They are spending $10 billion a year for the next five years. The Canadian Forces are down in Kandahar. I do not know of many women- owned businesses in Kandahar province. It is a cultural thing.
Senator Day: Colonel, I am starting to get a bit of a feeling for the Peace Dividend Trust.
Before I ask some specific questions in regard to that, my understanding was that the Strategic Advisory Team was primarily General Hillier's concept, although it did not consist entirely of military personnel. Please correct me if I am wrong. I am wondering whether the Canadian Governance Support Office that replaced the Strategic Advisory Team in 2008 is more under the International Security Assistance Force, ISAF, and fits into the overall leadership, or is it still a Canadian initiative?
Col. Capstick: I do not know how they are set up and structured. I know they do not have anything to do with ISAF. They are funded by the Government of Canada. They are run by a Canadian organization, CANADEM. You would probably have to ask the head of aid here or the ambassador what they actually do. I am not involved with them, nor do I interact with them.
Senator Day: Let me move to the Peace Dividend Trust, which is a Canadian initiative as well. Do you fit into any other more global or state structure? Do you work closely with USAID, for example, or are there a number of groups out there trying to achieve the same thing?
Col. Capstick: We are unique. We are the only organization that does what we do. We work with the Afghan Ministry of Commerce and Industries to do what we do. We work with an organization called the Afghan Investment Support Agency, which is an arm of the Ministry of Commerce and Industries. They are the people who prepare the business licences. For example, we have over 5,000 Afghan businesses on our database. They have to show up with their licence and tax certificate. We work a fair bit with Minister Shahrani, who is now the Minister of Mines, in his role as leader of the economic cluster of ministries.
We will help any international organization apply its Afghan-first policy, and that includes USAID and any military organization. We do a lot with the Canadian and British Provincial Reconstruction Teams. With respect to international corporations here, American companies have caught on that they will not get an American contract unless they have an Afghan component to it. If it creates Afghan jobs, we are happy with that. That is the kind of interactions we have.
Senator Day: You are dealing with all international entities or as many as you can tap into.
Col. Capstick: Correct.
Senator Day: Do you then go out into the marketplace, and if something is not being produced that you think could be and could be sold to an international agency or entity, do you encourage that? Are you looking for all goods and services?
Col. Capstick: Yes, we do all kinds of advocacy. Part of the problem here is that the international community is inside their physical security bubbles. Most of us arrive here and we think all one can get is gravel and carpets in the Afghan marketplace. The international businesses cannot get out, and the Afghan businesses cannot get in, so we try to find out what the international demands are and express them to the Afghan businesses. Once they catch on to what the demand is, they will invest to meet that demand. There are people building factories in Kabul to produce to international standards in order to meet the demand. One guy does PVC pipes and is exporting them now. Meanwhile, contractors are still flying the stuff in from North America. Once Afghan businesses know what the demand is, they will step up and invest their own money.
Senator Day: As a final question, you educate Afghan personnel and businesses as to what the demand might be because they might not know. Is that right?
Col. Capstick: Correct. For the smaller businesses with less experience, we teach them how to fill in the very complicated acquisition forms and that sort of stuff. I have Afghan staff who are trained to do that.
Senator Day: Thank you very much, colonel. That is interesting.
Senator Dallaire: Colonel Capstick, I want to go back to the time you were at the SAT. We have heard here the concept of the three D's: defence, diplomacy and development. We have gone out with this whole-of-government concept. However, on the ground over there, do you feel that civil servants, diplomats, CIDA people in development and officers have acquired enough multi-skilled or multi-disciplined workers to be able to integrate their capabilities in order to produce positive efforts together, or are there still significant frictions between those different players in the field?
Col. Capstick: I would be hard pressed to comment about the on-the-field experience there. When I was here with the SAT, it was obvious that when we were working together, we would figure out how to make things happen on the ground, but we are talking about a different world in 2005. This embassy was very tiny. There were a couple of CIDA people here, only about two or three diplomats and us. We worked out those issues. If you recall when the Provincial Reconstruction Team was first formed, there was only one CIDA person, one diplomat, and after Glyn Berry was tragically killed, there was a lot of disruption, so it was a different world.
My interaction here with Canadians is in the Canadian embassy, and it is leagues away from where it was in 2005 in terms of improvement. The ambassador is very inclusive. I am a civilian now and do not know how CIDA works with the military, but they work great with us. It has markedly improved in how it operates on the ground in Kandahar. With respect to the Provincial Reconstruction Team, you have to ask those guys; I am not familiar enough and do not participate on a day-to-day basis down there.
Senator Lang: I would like to go back to the question of security and your comments earlier about your experience in Kabul versus Kandahar. Obviously, Kandahar is a different world than Kabul. I get the impression, and correct me if I am wrong, that there is a sense of security in Kabul compared to other parts of the country, according to what you have said and the fact that you do not have military security. I gather you have private security for what you do. Why do you use private security versus military security?
Col. Capstick: The reality is that no one will provide us military security. It is that simple. It would be a complete misemployment of troops. That is my past speaking.
With respect to the way we operate in our offices in Mazar-e Sharif and Jalalabad, even when expatriates are there, we do not have security in Mazar-e Sharif because we do not need it in the north. In Jalalabad, we have an unarmed guard in our office because one of our employees is an Afghan woman, and sometimes people make rude remarks to her if she is there alone. In Kabul, we need security because the security situation here is unpredictable. There can be long periods with nothing and then periods of spectacular activity. The biggest risk to us here is being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In addition, our office here has one other activity. We distribute tenders from internationals to Afghan businesses. When our office in downtown Kabul has upwards of 400 to 450 Afghan businessmen a month come in to pick up tenders, we would like to think they are all trustworthy, but we do need to take basic security precautions. Therefore, we have armed guards there who do discrete pat-downs and that kind of thing. In the town, we move around in armoured SUVs because you do not want to be in the wrong place at the wrong time in an unarmoured vehicle. It is that simple. Down south, we operate differently.
Senator Segal: You have been there for some time now in different roles. Is it getting better? Is there real improvement? Is it noticeable in economic activity, the employment of local nationals and the quality of investment in building a future for Afghanistan that is not only about war?
Col. Capstick: The improvement is noticeable in the three or four areas you just mentioned. In 2005, there were no privately owned banks in this country. There are now 15 Afghan-owned private banks in this country and one or two international ones.
In 2005, there were two cell phone companies, with hardly any penetration of the market. I have in my hand here a BlackBerry from Roshan, a Kabul-based company, so I can get my emails standing on a road in London. There are supermarkets in Kabul with bar code readers where Afghans can shop and see price tags on merchandise. Those areas are improving.
Other areas I wish I could say are improving but they are not. There are places in Kabul and outside of town that I would not go to today that I would have felt safe driving through in 2005, so it is a mixed picture.
Senator Banks: This is kind of a rude question, because our friends the Americans are the most generous nation on earth, but with respect to that $10 billion being expended and their commitment to make sure it is spent on Afghans and to employ Afghans, in a contract to build a bridge, a culvert, or whatever is necessary, is there likely to be a Kellogg Brown and Root or a Halliburton as the head contractor that will subsequently employ subcontractors who might be Afghans?
Col. Capstick: If the project is large and complicated, that could be the case. However, I will tell you, the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, who was Lieutenant-General Eikenberry the first time I was here, the commander of the American forces, basically coined the phrase ``Afghan first'' and forced Afghan-produced water into the U.S. military system as opposed to importing water.
General McChrystal is having the same effect over at ISAF. The Americans are committed, policy-wise, to Afghan first, and ISAF is now pushing upwards at NATO to get the same commitment from the rest of us.
Senator Banks: That is good to hear. Thank you.
The Chair: There are those who allege that activities such as yours and the presence of aid dollars across Afghanistan in some way leads to the destabilization because you are funding corrupt government or business officials on the edge. I am sure there is some of that. How do you weigh it out?
Col. Capstick: That is tough to weigh out. Of course corruption follows the money. The big dollars in this country are development dollars and U.S. military spending, and corruption will try to follow that money. Everyone is working hard to prevent that from getting any worse than it is. Mistakes were made eight years ago, and you cannot rewind history, but there is a lot of dedication now to try to fix the practices that have led to that.
The Chair: Thank you very much. We appreciate this extraordinary effort on your part, and maybe if you get home you will get a couple of hours before the day starts again for you.
That was Colonel (Retired) Mike Capstick with Peace Dividend Trust, based in Kabul, Afghanistan.
I am now pleased to welcome Terry Glavin, Research Coordinator, Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee and cofounder of that organization. In an earlier life, he worked as a reporter, a columnist and an editor for The Vancouver Sun and The Globe and Mail. He has authored six books and won major literary prizes.
The recent report that his group has produced was released in March and is called Keeping Our Promises—Canada in Afghanistan Post-2011: The Way Forward. I went that day to listen to your remarks and the presentation of this report and decided it would be a valuable experience for us to listen to you. Do you have any opening comments?
Terry Glavin, Research Coordinator, Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee: Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak. We are honoured and pleased to be here.
The Chair: Could you tell us a bit about how this group came together, so that all senators have some context?
Mr. Glavin: I thought that would be the best way to start. We came together in the fall months of 2007. We are from all walks of life: Afghan-Canadians, women's rights activist, human rights activists, writers and academics who were concerned at the time. As committee members will remember, Canada was poised to become the first country to possibly pull out completely from the 39-member ISAF coalition. We think we dodged the bullet a bit with the Manley panel, which was a fairly close reflection of what we had recommended.
Our founding members include people like the Honourable John Fraser; Flora MacDonald, a former cabinet minister; and Iona Campagnolo, former federal Liberal cabinet minister and former Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia. Grant Kippen, former chair of the Electoral Complaints Commission in Afghanistan, is a member. Eileen Olexiuk, who testified two or three weeks ago before the House of Commons Special Committee on the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan and who is a former second-in-command of the embassy in Kabul, is also a member of the Canada- Afghanistan Solidarity Committee. We have people from all walks of life.
We have come together again with every bit as much of a sense of urgency in the last few months because 2011 is approaching, and this country is not possessed of anything that we would regard as vaguely resembling a proper debate about how we might move forward.
The Chair: Thank you for agreeing to be part of it and starting off the debate we will be having on that very issue over the coming weeks and months at this committee.
Senator Dallaire: In the world of development, humanitarian assistance and the United Nations in Afghanistan, do you believe that UN agencies, such as the United Nations Development Programme, UNDP, could commence taking over some of the responsibilities of humanitarians and NGOs who have been holding the ground, or is it too soon for that international body to come online?
Mr. Glavin: I suspect that probably in different areas you will see that sort of thing happen a lot faster than we might imagine, and in some areas it will take a long time.
The work of the United Nations Development Programme in the rural development area has actually been quite spectacular. I think the UNDP considers it the most successful program in the history of the UNDP, such as it is. We do have some ideas about the contributions of United Nations organizations, the work that the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, UNAMA, is doing and the general work that international agencies are attempting to do in Afghanistan.
On that particular point, the observation that the people we consulted made and that many people who work in the field at fairly senior levels have observed is that we can actually, if we are not careful, do more harm than good by getting in the way, by the sort of brain-drain function that can occur when international NGOs and agencies pull away some of the more capable young Afghans from the Afghan state. Something like 80 per cent of the development and humanitarian aid that goes into Afghanistan actually goes around the state, not directly into the Afghan Reconstruction Trust Fund — which is the main way this stuff is distributed — and that can actually do more harm than good.
It is very important to build up the Afghan civil service, to get these people up on their own feet and get the ministries working properly and competently as soon as possible. Beyond that, we do not really stray too far into those issues.
Senator Dallaire: It is one thing to abandon the preparation of battalions going off to the field — we do that in Sierra Leone and other places — but another to actually build depth into organizations — be it the civil service, the military, the police — and create an officer corps, an NCO corps or a police corps that has an ethos and some doctrinal references to continue to train the trainers and so on, and then to abandon that, that is another matter. Do you not think that essentially all we have done has been fiddling at the tactical level and not, in fact, changing the fundamental nature of their forces?
Mr. Glavin: That is correct. I think that is a perfectly reasonable apprehension of the difficulty that obtains. We have heard consistently across the board from people that these things take time, that they must be country-wide, and that there is no greater contribution we could make to the security of the country than to build up the competence and capacity of the Afghan National Security Forces. Of course, this actually is taking a lot longer than we imagined.
The March 2008 resolution, which stipulated the end date of 2011, was predicated on the assumption that Canadian Forces would be replaced by trained Afghan National Army kandaks and so on. It is difficult to train up a kandak: How do you teach people how to run a fleet of Humvees if they cannot count past 20 and do not know how to read?
It is taking a long time. However, if I may, the role of the Canadian Forces, I think — and we heard this also from everyone we spoke to — is no small part of the reason why Canada has a unique opportunity, among all of the ISAF nations, to make a very important contribution to the cause of a sovereign democratic Afghan republic. Although there are only 2,800 Canadian soldiers there, Afghans understand that if it were not for our few soldiers, we would have lost Kandahar. If we had lost Kandahar, we would have lost Uruzgan and Helmand, lost the trust of the Pashtun people, might have even lost Afghanistan.
We held the fort with the contribution of the Canadian Forces and the dignity with which the Canadian Forces has conducted itself. We make mistakes, but we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and carry on. We are respected in that country. Canada is respected in that country in no small part because of the contribution that Canadian soldiers have made. No one we spoke to wants the Canadian Forces to withdraw completely.
People are beginning to understand that our military is surprisingly small and that we have moved through several rotations already. However, the opportunity that the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee is hoping that Parliament will turn its attention to is an opportunity to make an enormous contribution to this country in ways that we have not really had a debate about. This is in no small part because of the reputation of this country, established by the work of the Canadian Forces in Kandahar.
Senator Dallaire: An option is to leave a very strong cadre to concentrate at the strategic level. NATO has quite a significant training and development program run by a Brit. We have a two-star Canadian who has been involved.
One option is to keep a sizeable capability, build our schools, equip them, provide pedagogical tools, and so on. The other thing is what we did with the eastern countries at the end of the Cold War. We brought many of their people here and put them through a process of education, from language training to technical schools, within our own infrastructure.
Would Afghans respond to coming to another country to take courses that would easily be one year to one and a half years long?
Mr. Glavin: I would have to defer to people who have authority such as you in military matters to answer those kinds of questions. We canvassed the military issue fairly extensively. We are of similar mind to what the Conference of Defence Associations proposed. There has been more talk lately about building some kind of national officer training program. That is fine.
We do not anticipate anything short of a fairly drastic reduction in the military effort that we are making in Afghanistan in 2011. That does not mean we cannot still be enormously effective in training. There have been some quite convincing suggestions about leaving parts of the air wing. There is a lot of enthusiasm — although I do not know that it is politically saleable — for persisting with training for the Operational Mentor and Liaison Team, OMLT, program to enhance the capacity of Joint Task Force Two, JTF 2, and human terrain capacity and the anthropological work that could be done in the south to great effect.
Although we have been very enthusiastic supporters of the military mission, we have no argument with the proposition that the battle group should come home and the overall military focus should shift.
Senator Segal: I want to thank Mr. Glavin for the work the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee has done. It is often difficult to get a debate going on these issues outside the parliamentary bubble. By definition, no matter how well-intentioned people are, the parliamentary bubble becomes influenced by other events on the ground that may not actually be tied to the broad question in Afghanistan.
The 2008 resolution appears to be guiding everyone. In my view, it seemed to be explicit about combat in Kandahar. Based on what I assume was negotiation between the two main parties in the House of Commons, it was explicit about what it was explicit about. I assume it did not generalize beyond that because both parties were of the view that circumstances on the grounds could change.
From the work of your organization, do you have a sense about why that focused proposition regarding the military in a combat context in Kandahar seems to be being used as a broad reason to remove all military presence of any kind — strategic and aid-, security- or training-related? I keep reading the resolution and wonder whether I missed something, since I am only a person from rural Ontario and maybe these things are too complex for me. Can you help with us that?
Mr. Glavin: I wish you would help me understand why the debate has not been unfolding within the parliamentary bubble that you mentioned. That is what I find most perplexing.
The Chair: Here we are.
Mr. Glavin: It is great, and I am very happy that this committee is taking on this issue.
I understand the mystification. We came at it similarly. The way we look at it is that there seems to be a general presumption that withdrawing from Kandahar means Canada has put in its shift and now we are clocking off from the military involvement.
Things have changed radically since March 2008. The resolution is based on presumptions that no longer abide. The good thing is that there have never been so many Americans in the south of Afghanistan. The kind of force we were contributing militarily is not necessary any more in that regard.
Regardless of what the resolution says, people have not kept their eye on the six priority areas that govern Canada's engagement in Afghanistan: security, border security, aid, development, national institutions and reconciliation. We do not know that anything will happen after 2011. We have this dance of the seven veils. I do not mean to be uncharitable, but the government has said it will leave it up to Parliament to decide. Parliament gives it to the Special Committee on the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan to sort out. The special committee will not deal with it unless it has something from the government, and every time the government sticks up its head on the issue, someone wants to shoot it off.
This circular peculiarity has created a situation in which we are actually withdrawing from Afghanistan in ways I think no Canadian fully understands. I certainly do not, and I pay close attention to this stuff. This has completely paralyzed the capacity of NGOs and CIDA to do any forward planning. It has left all of our Afghan friends, comrades and allies wondering whatever happened to Canada. Where did we go? This is very disturbing to encounter in Afghanistan.
The Afghanistan Compact expires in 2011. Look at all the main contributors to the 43-nation International Security Assistance Force. Three things make Canada unique. First, we have no history of foreign conquest. We are not seen as an imperialist power.
Senator Banks: Except by some professors.
Mr. Glavin: Bingo. In Afghanistan, people are more intelligent about Canada than the professors you mentioned.
Second, Canada has no authorship in any of the Cold War proxy wars that embroiled the country in such agony. We never walked away; we never abandoned Afghanistan. We have no authorship in any of the Mujahedeen difficulties. Third, we are a democracy.
We have three things going for us. We are known primarily because of the work of the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan. We are uniquely situated among all of these countries to assist Afghans in the entrenchment of the embryonic democracy they are trying to build in that country.
To answer the question why we think about Afghanistan the way we do, I come from a journalistic background. Imagine that the only thing people understood of Canada was from three or four reporters who spent their evenings driving around in the back of police wagons in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. That is the picture of Canada we would have. This is not to criticize the embedded reporters with the military, by the way. They are decent and brave, hard-working journalists.
However, at any given time, we have no more than three or four journalists in that country. There are 34 provinces in Afghanistan. You do not see, as we have seen in Tehran, people streaming in the streets in this explosion of a pro- democracy movement. Nonetheless, that movement exists across the board in Afghanistan.
We spoke to everyone from Burhanuddin Rabbani, former president, Khan of all warlords and head of the Northern Alliance, to young feminist MPs; from journalists, doctors and teachers, to Abdullah Abdullah. Everyone was very clear on this one point. A baker's dozen of public opinion polls undertaken across Afghanistan since 2006 demonstrate that Afghans want democracy. They desperately want the rule of law. They want to be able to change their governments by clear, fair and transparent electoral processes. They desperately want freedom of speech and equality.
The struggle they are engaging in, the risks they taking and the sacrifices they are making for democracy would take your breath away. However, they need the machinery of democracy. They need to understand how it all comes together. We take it for granted: The election writ is dropped; three or four months later, tens of thousands of Canadians have gone about their business and done their job; and we change our government. They do not have that yet.
There is an emerging culture of democracy in that country. It is very sensitive and delicate. The Americans are afraid to do this. No one will trust Iran to do it; no one around this table should trust Iran in Afghanistan. Afghans trust Canadians to do this. It is the most important work that needs to be done in Afghanistan.
History has caused this peculiar situation whereby this remarkable opportunity — and onerous responsibility — happens to have fallen to Canada. That is why I am sorry if there is a bit of frustration in my voice. We are rapidly approaching 2011, and democracy is the great contribution this country could make to this cause, which, by the way, is the cause for which our soldiers have died.
Our soldiers did not die so we could leave Afghanistan established in sordid negotiations between Islamabad, Tehran and Washington. We cannot bring those soldiers back to life. However, we can ensure they did not die in vain.
The interesting thing is that Canada can actually do this at a fraction of the cost of a full war military mission, and I do not know why we should not.
Senator Lang: Thank you very much. I want to commend the witness for his very thoughtful and passionate presentation and comments. First, as a Canadian, I want to say it was very nice to hear the comments that were made about our armed forces, especially in view of the current debate occurring day after day. It is certainly good for Canadians to hear the other side of what we are actually doing in a country that needs a lot of help.
I have two questions. My first is on the withdrawal for 2011. Your organization has stated that the battle group should come home, yet at the same time you feel we obviously have a significant role to play. If Canada were to make the decision to leave some military presence there, would you see us still mentoring, as well as training, or would it be one or the other?
Mr. Glavin: I would like to see Canada spending some time mentoring the United States' forces. I know it sounds funny, but you will find that the American forces actually turn to Canada for guidance and leadership in Kandahar. We forget that Brigadier-General Ménard is now in command of more American soldiers than Canadian soldiers, I believe. We have seniority in that country.
We talk about Kandahar Airfield as though it is some little air strip in the bleak desert, but it is a small city with more than 30,000 people. At the core of it are 2,800 Canadian soldiers. I believe the average age of a Canadian soldier is 10 years older than an American soldier. We know the country. We are trusted by the people.
I am not a military person. My background is not military, so I feel a little bit uncertain making recommendations. However, we do have military people in the committee, and I think the committee has been advised very well by people who understand military matters.
We have some specific suggestions about leaving some military capacity behind, and I am not certain Canadians would object to this at all. The recent polling suggests that two thirds of Canadians think that Canada should hang in there; Canada should definitely stick around to finish this job and keep the promises we have made.
There is another thing about Canadians that is different from Americans. When their poor young soldiers come home in coffins, they are landed very discreetly at military bases and people are left alone in their grief. When a Canadian soldier dies, there is a huge convoy down the king's highway into the largest city of the country. We take it very seriously.
In that context, it is so difficult to show the many victories those soldiers have won for our Afghan friends and for Canada. It is hard to draw direct cause and effect lines between the death of a soldier and a young girl who learns how to write her name for the first time, but those lines are there.
It is the way we talk about this. As I said, I approach this as a journalist and writer. I try to sort out how it has come to pass that so much of the Canadian debate about this issue has gone so sideways.
We make recommendations that CIDA needs to take a far greater role in ensuring that Canada actually understands what we have been doing there. The NGOs we have been funding have been doing tremendous work. Most of them have been doing spectacular work. However, those NGOs also have to be told: ``You actually have to make a greater effort to show Canadians what you are doing.''
I cannot remember where I was going with this exactly except to say that we do have some specific suggestions about the particular contributions the Canadian Forces might continue to make. However, our emphasis is on literacy, literature, libraries, the embryonic institutions of Afghan democracy, the machinery of elections, and allowing the flowering of a democratic culture in that space created by the Canadian Forces and so many other soldiers from so many other countries.
Senator Lang: I would like to go to another area, and I think you heard the previous witness. He mentioned the weakness of the civil service of the national government. That must have caused concern to you and anyone who is interested in what is happening in Afghanistan.
He recommended that there should perhaps be a change in how we approach the Government of Afghanistan and how we could help them try to work towards a stronger civil service, so they can deliver government programs well in a proper manner.
Do you have any observations on that?
Mr. Glavin: Yes. The observations we have on that are certainly consistent with Colonel Capstick's observations. In fact, we consulted with Colonel Capstick when we were in Kabul.
The work he is doing is absolutely spectacular. I cannot say enough about it. It is exactly the sort of work that needs to be done. It gave us cause to think we should do an entirely separate report on this kind of economic development regime that he is trying to help build, because there is no way we could cover it off adequately in this.
We have noticed — and people have talked to us about quite a bit about this — that you can do more harm than good if you are not careful. Throwing a bunch of money at the country, sending in a bunch of expatriates and having all these lovely, wonderful people who will all go to heaven when they die driving around Kabul and Herat and Jalalabad in these convoys of heavily armoured white SUVs is useless and ridiculous.
You need to invest in building up the Afghan state. You need to invest. We are arguing for a root and branch partnership, specifically with the lower and higher education ministries. We could make numerous contributions to training the civil service, and not ignoring the civil service would be a good start.
The finance ministry is beginning to get its act together. We hear much about corruption, but you have to remember that only 20 per cent of the aid dollars that go into Afghanistan actually go into the Afghan state. If there is corruption, you cannot blame the Afghan bureaucracy for all of it.
Corruption occurs in that country at all levels. Much of it is less sordid than you might imagine. It is a complicated problem, and the way in which it preys on ordinary Afghans is to be watched closely.
Our specific recommendations focus on the civil service in the areas of teacher training, proper textbooks, proper administration of school districts and a highly robust partnering with the education ministries. The country needs literate people, and it is insufficient to have one book to read. There needs to be a re-establishment and revival of Afghan cultural patrimony and its canon of literature so that Dari- and Pashto- speaking people who are literate have available to them the rich history of Afghan literature and contemporary books published by Afghans but not published in Tehran.
This is a big issue. Increasingly, from a national security point of view, we have to say that our greatest fear comes neither from Islamabad nor the northwest province but rather from Tehran. We have not been paying sufficient attention to it because we think of it as a soft power. If we fail to do this work, they will do it. Already they are investing heavily in teacher training and textbooks. It has gone as far as Tajikistan, where they are reverting from Cyrillic script back to Farsi script. Tehran is running that show. The most gleaming place in Kabul is the mosque-and-madrasa complex of Mohammad Asif Mohseni Tehran's ayatollah in Afghanistan. This is not where Afghans want to go, or how they want to be led, or where they want their teachers to be trained.
Either we stand with them, or we do not stand with them.
Senator Lang: Why is it we seldom hear about anything of this nature? Do we live in a bubble? This information never seems to be reported.
Mr. Glavin: It is poorly reported. As a journalist, I can say that it is extremely poorly reported. This is largely because Iran's involvement is usually reported in the context of the discovery that an improvised explosive devise, IED, appears to have been manufactured in Iran. As well, there are stories of Iranian revolutionary guards supplying weapons to Hizb-i-Islami or elsewhere. This sort of soft power notion has caused us to pay little attention to those other elements. There is little information in the English-language media. Many of our members speak Dari and read Farsi script, so we are beginning to do more translation from Farsi.
It is important to keep your eye on establishing a robust democratic culture to help Afghans already doing this work to hold their presidential palace accountable to them, to properly elect members, to run provincial councils properly and to develop a culture and a literature of democratic ideas. Currently, there is a 12-lane one-way highway from Tehran to Kabul that is all about ideas, propaganda and what Tehran wants Afghanistan to be about. This affects 60 per cent of the population of Afghanistan who speak dialects of Farsi. We could reverse that traffic, to a great extent.
The Iranians are entering into a venture with other member countries of the International Communications Consultants Organization, an emerging free-trade zone in central Asia, to have a multi-national broadcasting company. Many of our Afghan friends are extremely concerned about this serious business. They want to be involved in the conversation and debates with their Iranian friends, but they do not want that conversation to be controlled and monitored by Tehran.
Senator Banks: Would you tell us briefly what you meant when you said there should be anthropological work in the south by Joint Task Force Two?
Mr. Glavin: JTF 2 is difficult to talk about.
Senator Banks: We know a bit about it but I do not understand ``anthropological work.''
Mr. Glavin: Human terrain analysis, which is the new buzz phrase people use these days, is about developing a better sense of who we are dealing with and the tribal structures and relationships between them.
The Chair: ``Know thy enemy'' is the old phrase.
Mr. Glavin: As well, ``Know thy friend.'' The political culture of the entire Pashtun belt is difficult to penetrate and understand.
One of the great failings, about which the Canadian Forces will be frank, is that in the south they find themselves in the unfortunate position of preventing the Taliban from taking over while not knowing what kind of regime they are defending. This creates a serious difficulty. We heard from Kandahar MPs, one of whom said that the problem could be fixed tomorrow if they bombed President Karzai's house. Of course we explained that we cannot do things in that way.
Senator Banks: It is not as simple as that.
Mr. Glavin: There is much sympathy in Kandahar for some of this insurgency because it is understood not to be animated by Talibanism but by a sense of justifiable animosity at times toward the tribes that have benefited from the regime in much of the south. It is a terrible situation, because Canadian soldiers expect to advance the scope and field of democracy when at times they are perceived to be expanding the scope and field of gangsters.
Senator Banks: The problem we face began, to a degree, after the U.S. assisted them in expelling the bad guys. Afghanistan was abandoned and chaos ensued. We are talking about that again. I confess I am not sympathetic to the House of Commons' decision to pick a day, and my party was partly responsible for that. I tried to imagine Winston Churchill saying, ``We shall fight on the beaches and on the landing fields until June 1942, after which we shall see.'' We undertook to do something that has never been fully and clearly explained to Canadians by any of the three prime ministers under whose aegis it was done properly.
I want to find out where you are coming from. If that parliamentary decision — which I regard as absurd, picking a date by which we will have achieved this — had not been made, would your report be different? Is your report suggesting that given that the decision has been made and there is nothing more we can do about, in light of that, this is what we should do? If that decision had not been made, I gather your report would be speaking in different terms. Is that right?
Mr. Glavin: I think I see what you mean. We submitted quite a hefty number of recommendations to the Manley panel. Even then, we were looking at 2011 closely. We should not forget that 2011 is when the Afghanistan Compact expires.
We recommended that we persist, and we made a number of recommendations. Our argument was that in 2011 we should have a close look at what we are doing here. We should consult with our allies and have a thorough assessment of how things had gone, how things had worked out, how the various participants and signatories to the Afghanistan Compact held up their end of things and then decide from there what to do.
The way it has been interpreted, maybe the way it has been written, is that we go as far as 2011 and then we are out of there. As it happens, the Canadian Forces are worn out. I do not think you will find much appetite in the military for a continuing battle role there.
The other issue is that the contribution of raw force that was necessary and that we made in our own small way with 2,800 soldiers has been taken up now with the election of Barack Obama. At least he is paying attention. Does that help?
Senator Banks: Yes. Thank you.
Senator Nolin: I want to go to page 3 of the synopsis of your report dealing with the Taliban. You make an interesting suggestion in your third bullet. You say that a new Canadian policy on Afghan reconciliation should stipulate any negotiation with illegal armed groups, particularly the various Taliban factions and so forth. Can you elaborate on that?
Mr. Glavin: This goes to the question of abandonment again. One thing you never hear from Afghanistan is the absolute terror that any prospect of a negotiation with the Taliban strikes into the hearts of the people.
Senator Nolin: Why does President Karzai continue talking about that?
Mr. Glavin: I do not know. On this issue it is interesting. We have to be careful not to imagine that cause and effect lines run only one way.
If you could put yourself in President Karzai's position for a moment, and if you were possessed of the apprehension that by 2011, the Canadians, Americans and Brits in the south will bail, what should you do? How would you secure for yourself some sort of legacy? How would you protect your own hide, since your political base is actually in the most chauvinistic elements of Pashtun society, which also produces the Taliban? Maybe you should cobble together some sort of an arrangement.
My personal belief is that if we were far more emphatic about our commitment to stand with the Afghan people for as long as it took them to be standing on their own two feet, I suspect you would probably not be seeing all of this. It is a bit — what is the word I am looking for? It is almost exponential. The more President Karzai appears to be appeasing or accommodating the extremely conservative Pashtun chauvinism, the more the Americans think they might as well cobble together some sort of a deal, or maybe negotiations with the Taliban will be the way it ends. The more the Americans think that way, the more President Karzai retreats into that posture.
Senator Nolin: You are recommending an Afghan-led organization, not the government. Is that right?
Mr. Glavin: Not President Karzai going to Islamabad or Riyadh and cobbling together some sort of an arrangement with others in the background, no.
With respect to national reconciliation, there is a wonderful paper that Christopher Alexander has written called Ending the Agony: Seven Moves to Stabilize Afghanistan.
Senator Nolin: Are you referring to our former ambassador?
Mr. Glavin: Yes. I recommend that paper to committee members. He has managed to take a very firm position on the question of transitional justice, which is to say ending impunity and having a process in place. Also, he has managed to imagine an accommodation of some kind of negotiations with the Taliban, if they were willing — which I seriously doubt — in a kind of single package.
All I can tell you is what everyone we spoke with said to us across the board: If you think you will be able to negotiate a deal with the Taliban, you are dreaming. There is absolutely no way the Taliban is interested in negotiating anything except your death. This is a jihad against reason, so if you think you can reason with it, good luck.
At the same time, there is a lot of sympathy for the idea that you can draw away low-level commanders, people engaged in the insurgency for reasons I described earlier, not necessarily animated by Talibanism. It is all very complicated.
However, you have to understand this is something that is a darkness at the heart of a certain kind of Pashtun identity. The Pashtuns are great people. In fact, the strongest and best organized pro-democracy movement between Delhi and Tehran is in Pashtoonkhwa, the northwest frontier province and the federally administered tribal areas, less so in Afghanistan because they can vote a little bit now. The Awami National Party, the Milli Awami Party and a number of parties that are pro-democracy and pro-ISAF are also Pashtuns. It is a Pashtun phenomenon.
The great fear is that when President Karzai talks about negotiating with the Taliban, he means making some sort of extra-constitutional arrangement that entrenches an old notion of Pashtun prerogative to govern Afghanistan. The Tajiks, Uzbeks and the Hazaras are particularly terrified of this, especially the women and democrats.
The argument we are making is that if there is an impetus to proceed, it must be open and transparent and cannot be just the president's office. It must involve the Supreme Court Afghanistan, the parliament, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, and it also must be answerable to ISAF.
With respect to this business about trespassing on Afghan sovereignty and thinking that everything must be Afghan- led, everyone told us to stop being so polite. Afghan sovereignty is the function of a triangular relationship between the international community, the Afghan people and the Afghan state. Everyone we spoke to said we should be interfering more in order to ensure the government is accountable to the people. This is where Canada has such an important role to play. As I said, we have an advantage that no one else has. This is particularly so when it comes to the question of reconciliation. Reconciliation is one of the six priorities that Canada has identified for engagement in Afghanistan.
An objective assessment of this policy, according to Canada's own benchmarks under the reconciliation engagement priority, is that not one progress indicator has been completed. There has been no movement forward from policy baselines; not one target is with reach; not one result has been achieved. Here is one example: In August 2008 the Afghan government was found to have a limited ability to share information about its programs, policies and objectives with respect to national reconciliation. By February 2010, the presidential palace had not even shared its plans with the Afghan parliament. The Afghan president has used the words ``peace at any cost.''
Now, as I say, we have to remember that these cause-and-effect lines run both ways. You have to put yourself in Karzai's position. It would concern him if he gets the impression from the British, the French, the Japanese, the Canadians and the Americans that this will not last, that we have the banking crisis, and that much of our public is wobbly about all of this and we will be out of there soon. That is where he is coming from.
Then you have pretty well anyone who is literate in Afghan society, and no one is speaking for them. The role that Canada can play in reconciliation is ensuring that our Afghan friends should not feel the sensation of knives in their back. Someone has to speak for those people.
The Chair: We are over time here and there are two more questions, so please keep this very short.
Senator Nolin: Thank you very much for your enthusiasm. It is refreshing here in Ottawa.
Senator Pépin: Thank you for coming, and I have to admit that you have answered my question. At the beginning, there were some recent articles where you said that Ottawa did not have any policy regarding Afghanistan. However, looking at your report we just received and listening to you, I think that maybe you want to add something of what Ottawa's Afghanistan policy should be, but if we go through the document and listen to you, we have a fair idea where you would like the Canadian government to go.
The Chair: We will try to table this. It does need to be translated, and then it will become part of our documents.
Mr. Glavin: We had not finished the main translation of our report. I am sorry about that.
Senator Nolin: What will we lose if we do not do that?
Mr. Glavin: We will lose honour. I do not know. How do you put a price on betraying a promise to all the families who lost soldiers in this?
Senator Meighen: One 80-pound gorilla not referred to so far is the opium trade and the influence on Afghan society and the effect it has on us trying to wean people away from the Taliban, because they can pay more than we can, it would appear in some instances, thanks to the poppies. As far as I can determine, we have not come up with a widespread, believable, successful plan to replace the growing of poppies with another crop that is equally remunerative. Using poppies for medical development is controversial.
From your observations and knowledge of the country, do you have any insight into this situation and how we should be addressing that?
Mr. Glavin: We will have beheadings and IEDs and suicide bombings so long as there is a narco-economy in that country. The Taliban is essentially a narco-terrorist phenomenon.
On the question of opium, our mistake is imagining that this is actually what Afghans want to do. They do not.
One of the difficulties is that the Afghan government is not particularly interested in pursuing a medical opiate initiative for a couple of reasons. First, many people in the country regard this as being profoundly offensive to the Quran. A lot of effort is being made to develop an agricultural base in the country. You need infrastructure for things like wheat and almonds and vineyards and so on, and any suggestion to this vast underclass of poor farmers that the government will buy opium will discourage people from taking the risks and initiatives to re-establish legal agricultural economies. Third, you can set up any kind of fancy program you want and have the government buy opium at premium prices, but the lad in the black turban will come to you at harvest time and say, ``You were supposed to sell that to me, and if you do that again I will kill your children.''
Senator Meighen: We were told that perhaps a farmer would have another field and plant poppies in another field and sell one field to the government for the nice high price and another field to the Taliban, so now they are producing twice as much.
Mr. Glavin: Yes, that is not my plan.
The Chair: I know you can answer this in 30 seconds or less because you are a journalist. Why is the media not covering this story?
Mr. Glavin: Because there is no media. There is hardly anything left in terms of a mass media, a national media in this country.
Much of it has to do with simple insurance policy issues. I am a freelancer. When I go to Afghanistan, I spend little time behind the wire. Security is not an issue for me. I go where I want; I can pass. If you are an editor, do you want to send a reporter up to Paktika for a little while? It is complicated.
The way we have come to talk about Afghanistan in this country, unless you put that record needle on the record, no one will hear the music. We have to change the nature of the debate and not think of 2011 as something that ends but think of 2011 as something that is beginning, completely change the nature of the debate. If we learned more about Afghans and what they have to say, I think the debate in this country would not be so infantilized.
By the way, in June 2008 this committee produced an excellent report that addressed this issue directly, and we specifically cite your findings in our report about how the debate in this country is being infantilized. Thank you for the work you are doing to elevate the level of debate in this country. I cannot tell you how happy we are that you are doing this.
The Chair: Mr. Glavin, thank you very much for being with us today.
Our next witness is Brigadier-General Jonathan Vance. He was commander of Joint Task Force Afghanistan from February to November 2009 for virtually all Canadian Forces in that country, which are based at Kandahar Airfield, Kandahar City and Kabul, and prior to that he commanded 1 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group in Edmonton from August 2006 through 2008. General Vance joined the Canadian Forces in 1982 and has had a long and distinguished military career. Since his return from Afghanistan, he has been sharing his views, which he will do again today.
He is not done serving his country yet. As was announced last month, General Vance is to take up new duties soon at DND headquarters here in Ottawa as Director General Land Capability.
Welcome as we begin taking our testimony on Canada and Afghanistan and what will happen post-2011, and thank you very much for being here.
Brigadier-General Jonathan Vance, Former Commander, Joint Task Force — Afghanistan, National Defence: Good evening, honourable senators, and thank you for inviting me to appear before you.
I have returned from command in Afghanistan very humbled by and grateful to all Canadians, military and civilian, who serve there, and to Canadians at home for their unwavering support of their soldiers, sailors, airmen and women.
I will restrict my opening remarks to only one point I wish to convey to you, and that is that I think that Canada, with our allies and the international community, is currently poised to be very productive, indeed more noticeably productive, in Afghanistan over the next year to 18 months and beyond.
The year 2009, the year that I commanded, was a transition year. We went from an internationally under-resourced mission country-wide that was having difficulty applying effective counter-insurgency techniques, due to relatively small numbers of troops on the grounds, to one marked by an increased military and civilian presence, who could use best counter-insurgency practices. This environment is consistent with and reinforces Canadian national objectives in Afghanistan and meets or exceeds the conditions that Canada had indicated as necessary to support a military engagement between 2009 and 2011, and it is entirely consistent with the independent panel's findings.
Canada has earned a leadership role in this emerging environment in Kandahar due to the quality of our troops, our ability to execute the counter-insurgency doctrine we share with our allies and our capacity to command and control allied forces, including U.S. forces in Kandahar. The spirit and specifics of the commission's report have served us well as we undertook important transitions in the renewed ISAF environment — transitions that include making it more possible for appropriate civil effects to be brought to bear. In many respects it was prescient.
We learn every day in Afghanistan, and we have, in my opinion, come a very long way in understanding how to conduct full spectrum operations in such a complex environment. Our allies have learned as well. I am optimistic that we, in the international community, are doing our part and are being productive. It yet remains to be seen how long it will take for Afghanistan's people and their government to take full advantage of this.
The Chair: I want to reinforce that point and have you expand on it, because we have heard here today and from other sources that, in terms of the military operation, counter-insurgency in this last operation that we now see the allied troops involved in is really wrapping that up, that on the military side we have accomplished much. If there is an area outstanding, it is the Afghan partner.
Brig.-Gen. Vance: That is exactly how I characterized it. Unlike linear warfare where you can use weapons to overcome resistance, counter-insurgency is not an environment conducive to using strictly weapons or military effects to fundamentally change the environment. I have said that counter-insurgency is about re-establishing the social, political and economic fabric of communities such that they grow resistant to the coercive effects of the insurgency.
This is particularly important in Kandahar because it is not a grassroots, homespun movement. It is a movement being exported out of Pakistan and supported that way. There are ideologically aligned people in Kandahar. I have pegged it at about 5 per cent, based on my experience. Others have said up to 10 per cent. Nonetheless, the vast majority of the people are simply held hostage.
In that environment you need troop density, be it military or police — a combination of international and indigenous — to allow for sufficient presence for the international and national actors involved in development activities to gain confidence and that re-establishment of the economic fabric. They will not leave the safety of their compounds or even engage in rehabilitative practices unless they have some confidence. For example, the United Nations people will not leave their compound unless an element of security is provided.
In that environment, no matter what the international community does — we can create a sense of stability in a community — it does not matter unless the people see that their government is actually serving them. Everything else is simply service by proxy. They need to see their government act; otherwise, it is simply a surface charge. Buried in that is not just the provision of services, but to see and have government acting as it should in a unselfish manner that supports the people and how you and I would think any government should be. Afghans have exactly the same desires. They may have slightly different models and a slightly different cultural context, but they still demand that their government be fair, present and give the opportunity for a good and ever increasingly better life.
If the Afghan government is incapable of taking that step, either under its current regime or any future regime, then I think there is a real problem. Those words are consistent with any military leader who has served or is serving there.
Senator Dallaire: General, we have been in this new era of conflict resolution for the last 20 years. We have been in a number of failing states and in different catastrophes, and we have gained experience from them.
We have also had significant issues in the political spheres. Generally, in other arenas in this country, the military took over the mission. It is a military-run mission in Afghanistan. As such, the other components of the government are not being given the opportunity or the resources to do their work.
We are in an era where the diplomats, nation builders, humanitarians, development people and the security forces, police or military, need to find a new way of working together to be able to bring about solutions of depth. For example, as you were establishing security, they are helping to build governance into that same area. As someone else is bringing up infrastructure, someone else is establishing a modicum of stability in the general population.
Do you feel that our civil servants in CIDA and the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, DFAIT, who are deployed in the field are trained to work intimately with security forces in order to bring about these significant changes in their deployment disposition, sense of security and their commitment to development and governance in conflict zones? Before you answer, the sense is that the system of our government does not permit them to be deployed to be able to function in their full capacity because of security problems.
Brig.-Gen. Vance: It is a great question. It is the thing I probably worked on the most. As the commander, I tried to ensure the team found traction in being able to bring their effects to bear in Afghanistan.
It is false to look at this mission as an either/or scenario — military or civilian, or it goes military and then becomes civilian. It is a counterproductive way of looking at it. It is not a linear mission.
I believe the most effective counter-insurgency doctrine is that which states you bring to bear civil and military effects at the same time on a manageable sized community. If you have enough people, military and civilian, you can deal with a province. If you do not have enough, you drop it down to a district. If you still do not have enough, then down it down to a sub-district or village.
Those are certainly the effects we were able to start in Afghanistan in 2009. We had not been able to do that beforehand to the degree we wanted because there were not enough military personnel to commit.
From the premise that counter-insurgency demands civil and military effects from all partners, Afghan and international, at the same time, it does not necessarily matter at what point in time a particular group delivers those effects. In a period of immediate post conflict in a village, let us say, there are civil effects that will be brought to bear by military people, such as immediate humanitarian acts to re-establish water. These things are the basics of life.
However, as the environment improves, it becomes more stable because of a cooperative effort among many actors. Then more and more civil effects can be brought to bear by civilian actors — Afghan, international and NGO — and that is critical. That produces a self-reinforcing environment.
I believe our civilians are absolutely adequately trained to go in when it is appropriate for them to go in. When I was in Afghanistan, we had civilians working at the district level, living in district centres with the soldiers for prolonged periods of time, mentoring district leaders. They occasionally went on patrols that would go to relatively benign environments. They traveled with the military.
They did this so that, where that stabilized influence starts to spread, the civilians can then reinforce. The military forces and civil-military cooperation, CIMIC, officers and so on are used to get immediate traction with the townspeople to show them that we are about more than simply combat.
In conclusion, I disagree with this whole idea that the military provides security and everyone else does everything else. I disagree with that way of looking at the war, because war is not linear. If the military simply constrained itself to what we could call security, we would not be establishing security, because security at the point of a gun is not security at all but armed defence.
Therefore, we needed to move at the local level beyond armed defence into a stabilizing environment. A stabilizing environment starts to materialize only when the townspeople or the villagers — the local population you are serving — gets involved. They start to call in seeing IEDs, for instance. They start to have a stake in their own community.
We would try to have the briefest possible window where it was only military and only military effects. That could last as little as hours to maybe a couple of days. Then you start to bring the civil effects to bear, and the armed defence piece becomes less and less important.
Senator Dallaire: My whole question was around the fact that there is no such thing anymore as only combat- capable generals or troops. We need them to be multi-disciplined and to be able to function with the auspices of other disciplines, so that together they bring about solutions.
Are our civil servants being protected? If they get injured, for instance, are they being trained to function with the military? Are we doing enough at the war college in Toronto to learn these other disciplines and work together with them in an integrated way?
Brig.-Gen. Vance: I believe that the training of civilians from CIDA, DFAIT, RCMP and Correctional Service Canada and exposing them to the military and the mission while we are training is getting better every year. I had the pleasure of doing a little mentoring and had a discussion with the next civilian Representative of Canada in Kandahar, RoCK. He was in Fort Irwin, California, for the entire duration of Exercise Maple Guardian. I gave him three hours of my view of his job in Kandahar, having just worked there. The whole cohort of civilians was with him, as my RoCK, Ken Lewis, was with me in Wainwright as we did our Exercise Maple Guardian. More and more we are seeing the annual cohorts of civilians joining their military counterparts.
There is no question that the military needs to retain the capacity to fight. On a day when you are doing a battle group attack to achieve a military objective, it is all military, all the time. Those days are becoming rarer as the environment starts to mature around counter-insurgency. There still will be times like that, particularly as you try to expand that influence.
However, it is my opinion that the civilians were adequately trained. In fact, the best part about them is that they often provide a bit of a challenge function. They are not necessarily overly indoctrinated, so they think widely. One wonders what values a young Canadian with DFAIT — who has some international experience and who is really trained for the capitals, the country or the world — places on the municipal level in Afghanistan. They have great value because they are bright and dedicated, and all those things are brought to bear.
I am not trying to make it sound better than it was. There are many challenges, but they did work very well with their military counterparts.
Senator Dallaire: Finally, do you not think we should be institutionalizing the education and development of these civil servants, our military and security forces to be able to function and to bring in new concepts to be more even proactive in failing states where we will find ourselves again in conflict — to make it a more multi-discipline doctrine — versus hoping that we get some good people to join us?
Brig.-Gen. Vance: I am the product of the environment, which was a multi-discipline environment. By its very nature, counter-insurgency doctrine is multi-discipline. I suppose I am an example of what the Canadian Forces produces through its war colleges and staff college system, which is the ability to work with many actors. For instance, I have an experience pillar from the Balkans. We know from a purely academic perspective that it takes more than uniforms fundamentally to change an environment, whether it is a linear war or a counter-insurgency war. I do not think we are doing it in an ad hoc or haphazard way. We are deliberately training to be multi-disciplined.
There is room for growth. We need to step back from what we have done and look at it not only from a National Defence perspective but with other departments as well. We will all want to learn as much as possible from this given that the future security environment probably contains failed and failing states that are a threat.
Senator Lang: I want to look ahead a little further on the question of security. Let us assume that the resolution passed by Parliament is acted on and we remove ourselves from Afghanistan. You spoke of the importance of combining civilians with the military and, for example, working in Kandahar City to ensure their security and to build up the trust that is so important in the community.
Will Canada still be able to provide humanitarian aid to that part of the world without having a military presence to give security to the people providing that aid?
Brig.-Gen. Vance: Yes, of course, it will. The international community, in its military, civilian and NGO forms, along with its Afghan partners, will be present in Afghanistan beyond 2011. I do not know how Canadian programming, through CIDA and DFAIT, will do that, although it is entirely feasible. I simply do not know how they will physically transition beyond 2011. I do not think it has been articulated yet.
Many nations are contributing to improving life in Kandahar. It is being done without their soldiers on the ground. India is a case in point. India and Japan provide a great deal of humanitarian investment in Kandahar. You do not need your own troops there; you need the effect.
I tend to look at this in terms of effects, not who is delivering them. You are okay as long as there are good enough effects to achieve what you want. A military and police presence by Afghans and the international community without Canada after 2011 can still provide the necessary security environment for all of the other actors to bring their effects to bear. The U.S. has grown in large numbers in its civilian commitment in the south of Afghanistan, and into Kandahar specifically.
How all of this will be managed is beyond my purview. I do not know what will happen, but I am convinced it will be a very productive environment. Soldiers going to Afghanistan ultimately to replace the Canadian commitment will carry on that work to provide a stable environment.
Senator Lang: To put it into proper perspective, Canada will expect someone else, such as the Americans, to give us that security rather than ourselves?
Brig.-Gen. Vance: Yes. You can reasonably expect more and more that the Afghans themselves, along with Americans and others, will provide that security.
I am not an expert in where Canadian development money goes. However, I think about half goes to Kandahar and the other half to the rest of the country. Canadian contributions outside of Kandahar through CIDA flow because of the presence of other countries' soldiers. Therefore, you do not necessarily need to have your own soldiers to have the same effect.
Senator Banks: As a person from Southern Ontario pointed out earlier today, the parliamentary resolution says that Canada will change its role in Afghanistan in 2011, and it will no longer undertake a combat role in Kandahar. I think it contemplates other uses and contributions Canada might make.
I want to get an update from you because you have been on the ground much more recently than most of us. It is true that all those other things have to occur, and the government has to be seen to be serving the people in order to make a counter-insurgency effective. However, the first duty of any state is to protect its citizens. At some point, as you said, there has to be the military effect. We have all heard differing opinions about development of the Afghan National Army and, more important in some respects, the Afghan National Police. You have had direct contact with that. Please bring us up to date. How are we doing?
Brig.-Gen. Vance: International engagement with the Afghan National Army will be seen by historians as a great success. The Americans took the lead. It was well resourced from the beginning. An institution that already had a certain gravitas in the country was mentored from top to bottom. The money was followed and operations such as training people undertaken. For example, in Kandahar, over time, we had a brigade with one effective battalion go to one that is now largely meeting the highest capability milestones put before it. Two battalions are now at Capability Milestone 1, and others are on the verge of that. They are newly equipped, well trained and motivated soldiers.
I think we will look back to say that was a job very well done. It is not complete yet. There is a lot of ground to cover before the Afghan National Army is entirely self-sufficient. They do not yet have the capacity to generate their own officer corps at a staff college level. We need to support the academic aspects of warfare to get their captains, majors and colonels through a staff system. That takes time to generate. I do not have the estimates on when that will occur.
They are getting ever more capable at the local level to fight in war or in counter-insurgency operations. They are not entirely capable on their own, currently — I will be frank — because they do not yet have or are able to manage the enablers that Western forces can bring to bear. They do not have it in their own country, and they do not yet know all the details of managing it even if they did have it. Managing jets, unmanned air vehicles or artillery, et cetera, takes time. They are learning, and they are progressing.
Without those enablers, the fight is too fair. They are basically armed the same way as their enemy. Their numbers could be about the same on any given day. Therefore, we are able to give them the edge that makes certain their ability to deal with things in the most surgical and precise way possible without having to obliterate the landscape.
As we look back, the Afghan National Police will be seen in a slightly different way. The lead was not resourced well when it first started. I will not throw rocks, but it was not well resourced.
Senator Nolin: The European Union was supposed to be taking care of that.
Brig.-Gen. Vance: Perhaps the undertaking was much more of an onerous task than had originally been conceived. The institution was badly damaged in every respect, including the moral plane, which is so critical for police. In many parts of the country, it is the mujahedeen wearing the uniforms. It has the vestiges of the old war-lord structure embedded in it.
It is my view we are moving in the right direction. Why do I say that? It now has leadership at the ISAF level and policing is resourced by the Law and Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan and the global security funds. Nations are ponying up the money. Mentoring is starting to occur at the local level and, thanks to great people like Assistant Commissioner Graham Muir who are devising model policing plans that involve mentoring in logistics and so on, we are starting to see the effects, although slowly. It is so much easier to produce an infantry soldier than it is to produce a town village constable, but it will take more time. I attended a number of graduations of police recruits. They are motivated and know what they need to do. I am optimistic that the raw material exists and that the international community has its machine in order, which over time will improve.
We need to watch it, because a police force is often symptomatic of the ills of the country in the first place. If there are corruptive practice, war-lordism and employment issues, if even the best police force or army in the world is not employed properly and going about its business effectively in the harness of the government, then it does not matter how good they are. For example, if Canada were having an issue of insurgency, there would be a multi-discipline, multi- department operation with the government managing and directing carefully what its military and police forces would do. We experienced a little of that during the FLQ crisis and with the events at Oka. The government is engaged.
There must be linkages between the government in Afghanistan and its security forces. Every ministry of the Afghan government lacks the capacity, not the will or desire to do better. The white collar capacity to turn ideas into action in Afghanistan has either been killed off or is in the Diaspora. There are good ministers who want to do better, but the levers and linkages with their forces are still badly damaged. One of the important aspects of international engagement is to help them to re-establish the reins. How long does it take to produce a civil servant who can operate a police headquarters? It takes time and investment. You are not producing them in the mould of the Canadian civil servants. There is a cultural bent that you have to be sensitive to. If you were to produce cookie-cutter types, it would be easier; but you do not want to do that.
Senator Banks: Is it reasonable to put a date on when that job will be accomplished?
Brig.-Gen. Vance: I am not qualified to answer that. I had only a small view of that country, so I cannot answer that question.
Senator Day: I think the senator was setting you up when he asked you about a date. I am glad you answered as you did.
Brig.-Gen. Vance: I am glad, too.
Senator Day: With respect to the Observer, Mentor, Liaison Teams, OMLTs, and the training of Afghan nationals, you said ``follow the money.'' When we were in Afghanistan, we were told that one of the problems was their inconsistent pay. They are not receiving their pay in the proper manner, so in some areas, the Provincial Reconstruction Team started sending the money and providing proper equipment. Has that changed? Is there central funding that is working well?
Brig.-Gen. Vance: Are you referring to the pay for the Afghan National Army of the Afghan National Police?
Senator Day: The Afghan National Police's pay situation was more serious, but at one time the Afghan National Army had many of the same problems. The OMLTs were looking after that.
Brig.-Gen. Jonathan Vance: My experience in 2009 was that the Afghan National Army was properly paid with a pay incentive to be in the south. There was a short period of time when the pay incentive was removed, which caused a problem for the army, so it was reinstated. The incentive was an operations premium for being a soldier in the south.
Senator Day: Are the funds coming from the national government?
Brig.-Gen. Vance: Yes. The Afghan National Army are properly paid. The institution is much further advanced in its logistics and personnel policies, including leave and discipline. The short answer to your question is that they are paying themselves properly. In my experience, they had pay problems and logistics issues, but certainly the army does not have that. Pay for the police on the ground was inconsistent, as only some were receiving any.
When there is a system rife with war-lord tendencies, a police recruit might or might not get paid when he shows up for work at his police post depending on the police leader there. Those problems begin to disappear when you mentor them and are present. We saw the dramatic beginnings of a turnaround in Kandahar with the arrival of the U.S. 97th Military Police Battalion under my watch and tactical control. We disbursed them throughout the city in small platoons to mentor and accompany their Afghan National Police counterparts. The young lieutenant or sergeant could have that conversation with the police chief to learn whether he had paid his soldiers.
Many efforts were made by the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, the CSTC-A, to ensure that police constables, or soldiers as they call them, received their pay. They used everything from their cell phones to work- around solutions to avoid the corruption.
I thought that worked well, but we were only treating the symptoms. If the corps is so rotten that you have to bypass it to pay the troops, can you trust the corps to be employing them correctly? These are real concerns. As I have stated many times, the policing environment is the most important thing ultimately to get right. The grassroots government is important to a community.
Such an important effort needs to continue through the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan, NTM-A. Major- General Mike J. Ward, a Canadian, is in charge of the police file, which is very good. I am optimistic that the alliance will do its part.
Senator Day: I am happy to hear that things are improving.
You will recall that perhaps two or three years ago this committee came forward with a recommendation that the Canadian Forces needed a rest. Some people say that the Canadian Forces need a rest, in particular the battle group soldiers and the reservists, given our heavy reliance on them. Do you accept that as one reason that we will not continue our mission in Afghanistan after 2011? Is it that the Armed Forces need a rest?
Brig.-Gen. Vance: I have not been made aware of any policies or any ambitions on the part of anybody in the Canadian Forces to take a rest. I am not aware of any such desire or need for a rest. It would not be up to me to state an opinion as to whether we need a rest.
We did Afghanistan, the Olympics and Haiti at the same time. Without Afghanistan, we can still do Olympics and Haiti and probably something else. I do not perceive, nor did I perceive as a commander, that we are desperate for a rest. We need continued investment across the board, and I believe we are getting that. In my new job, I will be dealing with that in great detail, so I do not know enough about it yet to comment, but I believe we are being adequately invested in.
I am answering you as honestly as I know; I have not heard of anything that would demand that we take a rest.
Senator Day: Can the progressive reliance on more and more reservists in the groups we are sending over there be sustained?
Brig.-Gen. Vance: I would disagree with the premise slightly. The level of reserve participation by task force has been quite consistent over time. It is between 300 and 500. There are some niche capabilities in the Canadian Forces that we have deliberately placed in the reserves. If you think back longer than those three years when we were looking at the minister's monitoring committee on mobilization in the Canadian Forces, we are looking very closely at how we make up the Canadian Forces such that it can mobilize. One of the decisions taken at that time was that some capability would be resident in the reserves. Civil-military cooperation, for example, is found in the reserves. That is a good thing. There are highly talented folks in there who learn a lot and have that certain je ne sais quoi because they have that military-civilian aspect to them. That capability is being used. It is being deployed.
It might look like we are relying more and more on them, but we had relied on them anyway. It is just that now we employ them. With respect to the reservists being used in the battle groups, thank heavens we have a robust army reserve group that can do that. I do not think it is necessarily a sign of weakness. It is how we are designed. We may deliver decisions over time that design the Canadian Forces in such a way that for sustained operations at brigade level, which is essentially where we are at, we need a certain reserve component, and so we are using it.
Conversely, once the operations in Afghanistan cease on the military side in 2011, that strong demand on those reservists will diminish and they can be prepared to do something else. The Olympics had a strong reserve component to them as well.
Senator Day: I appreciate that clarification.
The Chair: I do also want to say that from time to time make references to ``this committee.'' There are different incarnations of this committee, so we will refer to it as earlier reports by earlier committees.
Senator Nolin: I will follow up on Senator Banks' question. I understand the question of a date or trying to have a fixed time for success is impossible. I presume it will be beyond 2011.
Assuming the proper rules of engagement, how can we be involved in the mentoring and training mission without being in a combat mission? Can we be one without being the other?
Brig.-Gen. Vance: It depends. The Canadian Forces are leaving in 2011, so it would not be us.
Senator Nolin: We can have a debate on what you will do at the end of 2011, but reading the motion from the House of Commons, it does not say you are leaving; it says you are ceasing the combat mission in Kandahar. That is what it says.
Brig.-Gen. Vance: It has been made clear to me through the chain of command that we are leaving.
Senator Nolin: That is why I am asking you that question.
Brig.-Gen. Vance: The question is whether it is theoretically possible to be involved —
Senator Nolin: Not theoretically; to be involved in training and mentoring the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police, or only one or the other, without being involved in a combat mission.
Brig.-Gen. Vance: If that was restricted only to Kabul for the purposes of their staff college and training their army recruits before they go into operations, there are nations that are doing that now. Canada is involved in that.
Senator Nolin: That is the training part.
Brig.-Gen. Vance: We will not be doing that, but countries can be involved in that. You cannot be in the mentoring role, in that close daily proximity, without being involved in operations.
More and more, as time goes on, operations will cease to be heavily combat-oriented and will be more classic security- oriented, civil domestic operations style. You still need to be with them. In other words, you cannot be a mentor; that mentor is just inside the wire and sends them out. You must accompany. There is an inherent risk and requirement to be involved in operations.
That is exactly what we do now. That is how we operate now. Our OMLTs and P-OMLTs that work with police do exactly that. They mentor, they are present, they assist, they aid in the development, and they are also involved in every aspect of the operations, including when combat happens.
The Chair: I think some of the concern is that the words ``training'' and ``mentoring'' are often used interchangeably, and they are not interchangeable; they are two different things.
Brig.-Gen. Vance: With respect to the training aspect, there are some people who are not involved in combat operations because they are involved in the school houses, if you will, in Kabul. Canada is involved in that now. Canada is also involved in the OMLT or embedded training, as the Americans call it, covering the full spectrum.
It is clear to me, to ensure the point is clear, that all of the Canadian Forces are leaving. Whether it is in a training or mentoring role, all Canadian Forces are leaving.
I would leave one final point. There is an element of risk, not combat risk, not offensive combat risk, but there is an element of risk just being in Kabul.
Senator Nolin: We have seen what happened with the French contingent in Kabul.
Brig.-Gen. Vance: Right. Did I answer your question?
Senator Nolin: Yes, that was an answer.
Senator Dallaire: Let us make it clear: There is training, there is education and there is development. Educating an officer corps, developing an officer corps or an NCO corps through formal institutions, NCO academies, military academies and staff colleges can be done without your necessarily being part of the combat capabilities. You can do it because you have some of that experience to be credible to these people.
The Chair: Is that a question you can answer briefly for us?
Brig.-Gen. Vance: Yes.
Senator Meighen: I have two unrelated questions. First, I brought this up with the previous witness because it fascinated us when we were there in I think early 2008, with respect to a road that was being built by Afghans with the assistance of the Canadian army on the other side of Ma'sum Ghar. At the time, the Taliban was distributing leaflets suggesting it was injurious to anyone's health to work on that road. Is that project finished?
Brig.-Gen. Vance: I believe you are referring to Route Foster, which became Route Hyena. It was a NATO name change.
That route was proceeding at pace. We had 400 people working on it daily. It is still a project on the books. We needed to refocus the engineering effort and the local Afghan effort more closely associated with their communities, in their towns. I do not think it has progressed a great deal. We did it for about half the tour and realized that an awful lot of resources were going into 18 inches a month, and that same level of energy could be applied more effectively in other towns, such as Panjwaii.
Senator Meighen: Building infrastructure in the towns, stores, wells or whatever?
Brig.-Gen. Vance: Correct.
Senator Meighen: Too bad.
Brig.-Gen. Vance: I am sure it will be finished some day. It got to the point where it did not need to be finished anymore.
Senator Meighen: This is unrelated, but since we have you here and are fortunate enough to be able to question you, I will ask: What is happening with recruitment? We heard for many years the tales of woe in terms of specialized trades and the difficulty of getting people and no trainers — all the trainers in Afghanistan, no one to train the recruits. Are recruiting targets being met? Do we have enough trainers to train them? Are you able to update us on that?
Brig.-Gen. Vance: I cannot give much insight into that. I have been away. I do know, however, that we continue to meet our targets and in some cases exceed our recruiting targets. In the main, there are still some stressed technical trades that are recruiting actively. That is all I can tell you.
We have managed quite well in using combat-experienced veterans returning home to train the next cadres. Our schools are productive. There is always an annual management challenge of making sure it all happens, but I think it is being managed very well, and I think we are producing.
The Chair: You are about to take up your new duties as the Director General Land Capability. What does that mean?
Brig.-Gen. Vance: As Director General Land Capability Development, DGLCD — and it has an army name called Chief of Staff Strategy — my job really is the future of the army, being the staff officer responsible for working on four structures for the future over five-, ten- and fifteen-year horizons and the investment plans to go into those, the equipment of the army, so everything involved in stating the requirement and staffing the requirement will be my purview. Army infrastructure will be my responsibility, as will army signals, and counter-IED falls into my purview.
Ultimately, when dealing with four structures, you are also talking about out-year budgeting, baseline budgeting and the management of where our PYs go, where the people go, so it is a fairly broad role.
The Chair: We will have you back on that topic.
Thank you very much, Brigadier-General Jonathan Vance, Commander Joint Task Afghanistan in 2009 and now about to take on his new role thinking big thoughts about the future of our land capability.
Thank you, all. We will bring this meeting to an end.
(The committee adjourned.)