Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
National Security and Defence
Issue 2 - Evidence - Meeting of December 3, 2007
OTTAWA, Monday, December 3, 2007
The Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence met this day at 3:35 p.m. to examine and report on the national security policy of Canada.
Senator Colin Kenny (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Welcome to the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence. My name is Colin Kenny and I chair the committee. I will introduce the members of the committee. Senator Rod Zimmer, from Winnipeg, has had a long and distinguished career in business and philanthropy. He has been extremely active in his community, volunteering for many services and charitable causes.
Senator Nancy Ruth, from Cluny, Ontario, is a feminist activist who has been instrumental in co-founding organizations that work for women's social and legal change in Canada. A senator since March 2005, she is a member of the Standing Committee on Internal Economy, Budgets and Administration and the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance. She is also a member of the Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs.
Senator Moore has represented the senatorial division of Stanhope, Nova Scotia, since he was called to the Senate in September 1996. He has been active at the city level in Halifax and Dartmouth and has served as a member of the board of St. Mary's University, from which he holds an honorary Doctor of Laws. He is a former member of the Royal Canadian Air Force Reserve Squadron and is currently a member of the Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce and the Standing Joint Committee for the Scrutiny of Regulations.
Senator Tommy Banks, from Alberta, was called to the Senate in April 2000 following a 50-year career in the entertainment industry. Currently, he is Chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources, and he is a member of the Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs.
Senator Michael Meighen, who was appointed to the Senate in 1990, is a lawyer and a member of the bars of Ontario and Quebec. He is Chancellor of the University of King's College and former Chair of the Stratford Festival. Currently, he is Chair of the Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs and a member of the Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce and the Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans.
Senator Joseph Day, from New Brunswick, has had a successful career as a private practice attorney and has served in the Senate since October 2001. Currently, he is Chair of the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance and is Deputy Chair of the Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs. He is the former President and CEO of the New Brunswick Forest Products Association.
Senator Grant Mitchell, from Edmonton, has long been recognized as one of Alberta's foremost political, community and business leaders. He was a member of the Alberta Legislative Assembly for the riding of Edmonton- McClung from 1996 to 1998. He was appointed to the Senate in March 2005. Senator Mitchell is also a member of the Standing Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources and the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance.
Colleagues, we have before us today The Senlis Council, which is an international security and development think tank founded in 2002 with offices in Brussels, Paris, London, Ottawa and Kabul, as well as field offices in the Afghan cities of Lashkar Gah and Kandahar City. The council provides analysis and recommendations on the connections between foreign policy, security, development and counter-narcotics policies.
We have before us Ms. Norine MacDonald, the president, founder and lead field researcher. Since 2004, Ms. MacDonald has led an extensive program in Afghanistan focusing on global security development. Ms. MacDonald's international experience in law, academic research, policy, advocacy and philanthropy provides the council with insight into the synergies between development, security, public health and drug policy.
With her is Mr. Almas Bawar Zakhilwal. Since joining The Senlis Council, Mr. Zakhilwal has presented papers to numerous academic forums on issues of security, development and counter-narcotics in Afghanistan. As one of the founding members of Senlis Afghanistan, he has undertaken extensive field research in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar before being made Canadian Country Director for The Senlis Council in 2007.
Welcome to Ottawa. We understand you have had a long flight from Paris. We are delighted that you are here and understand that you have a brief statement.
Norine MacDonald, President and Founder, Lead Field Researcher, The Senlis Council: Thank you very much for having us here today. As was mentioned, I am the lead field researcher for Senlis Afghanistan, and I have been living and working in Southern Afghanistan for three years. Although my colleague Mr. Zakhilwal is Afghan, he is our Canadian country director, so that is a bit of a switch.
We provided you today with a dossier that contains background information and a copy of our latest security update on Kandahar. My understanding is that you are looking specifically at the security situation in Kandahar, and my brief remarks will focus on that. I can take questions on other issues dealing with Afghanistan as a whole as well, if that is of interest to the committee.
We believe in the application of classic counter-insurgency response, so our comments on defence issues in Afghanistan are linked to development aid and counter-narcotics policy. Our particular interest in Senlis Afghanistan is to do research on the ground. As I said, I am living and working in Southern Afghanistan, and our reports are based on interviewing regular Afghans in the camps and the villages and those living in Kandahar City and surrounding areas, especially when talking about that province in particular.
We have included in the dossier video interviews of local Afghans talking about the issues, and I recommend those to you. If the committee is interested, we have more video interviews of local Kandaharis and Afghans as well that we can forward to the committee.
There are three laminated maps in your dossier to which I will refer that will help me in describing what has happened in the security situation in Kandahar Province in these last months.
The conclusions we have reached in our report are that the Taliban insurgency now controls vast swaths of unchallenged territory in Southern Afghanistan, including rural areas, border areas, some district centres, and important road arteries. They are the de facto governing authority in significant portions of territory in the south and are starting to control parts of the local economy and key infrastructure such as roads and energy supply. The Taliban also exercises a significant amount of psychological control, gaining more and more political legitimacy in the minds of the Afghan people.
The disturbing conclusion is that despite the vast injections of international capital flowing into the country and the significant military efforts, including those of our troops, and our universal desire to succeed, the state is once again in danger of dividing, with the south falling into the hands of the Taliban.
On this map you can see Kandahar City, and off to the west you see a Canadian flag indicating Forward Operating Base Wilson. The red marks the road. Around Kandahar City, the districts in the south — Reg, Shorabak, Daman, Panjwai — have a significant Taliban presence, as does Maywand. Khakrez has been controlled by the Taliban since September. In Zhari District there has been fighting even in the last weeks. Arghandab District was the subject of a battle while we were doing our research. Spin Boldak is the only district that we can say is relatively untouched by Taliban presence.
If you wish to travel by road in Southern Afghanistan, the road from Kabul to Kandahar, which we used to travel freely — about a seven-hour drive — is now almost void of any international traffic or resupply convoys. They are stopping at Ghazni, which is one and a half or two hours south of Kabul, and there was bombing of a Taliban emplacement in Ghazni in the last two weeks.
The road from Kandahar that travels toward Herat and Lashkar Gah City is now deserted. There are no international convoys travelling on that road. The villages and shops in that area are closed. There are no children playing, and there are regular ambushes.
Many of these districts are now controlled. In Helmand Province, four districts out of 13 are controlled by the Taliban. In our research, we have been told that families are putting one son into the Taliban and one into the Afghan army.
There are Taliban radio stations and, I am sad to say, there are Taliban passports circulating. I am circulating a document that was picked up in Arghandab, and in the report there is a translation of it. We believe it was printed in Pakistan, and it allows the Taliban to print their own passports for travel in Southern Afghanistan.
Because we are on the ground, we know the situation there very well. The Canadian military is doing a remarkable job in increasingly difficult circumstances. However, due to an insufficiency of the total number of NATO troops — not Canadian — on the ground, we are not able to take and hold territory in Southern Afghanistan. The NATO International Security Assistance Force, ISAF, forces are forced to return to fight in areas previously cleared of the Taliban, and they are facing an enemy that can continuously regroup from Pakistan and benefits from an almost endless flow of potential recruits.
We said in our last report that a NATO-plus initiative is needed. I can go into this in more detail during the questioning. We recommend a doubling of the troop levels from those countries that are not making a proper contribution and a removal of all limitations or caveats on troop movements. In particular, we have recommended a move into Pakistan alongside the Pakistan army to deal with the Taliban-al Qaeda bases.
The inadequate response of several NATO member states to the surging Taliban resistance is, in our view, tantamount to an abandonment of the Karzai government and Southern Afghanistan.
The lack of boots on the ground and an inability to retain control of areas previously cleared of the Taliban means a reliance on kinetic operations or air strikes, that is, the bombing of villages in Southern Afghanistan which, I am sure you have heard, has led to a mounting number of civilian casualties in Southern Afghanistan. That is a humanitarian crisis, but it also leads to the loss of hearts and minds and to easy Taliban recruitment.
We believe the increased number of troops is necessary to take and hold all of Southern Afghanistan in support of the Karzai government and also to put an end to the necessity for bombing campaigns and civilian casualties.
In the development section, which I believe is part of proper counter-insurgency strategy, we have seen no significant aid and development in Southern Afghanistan and have seen a spreading starvation crisis there. We have called on the government to develop combat aid agencies so that aid would be delivered by our military and the British and Dutch militaries in the south, and for the military to be given control of the aid budget in Southern Afghanistan. We believe aid and development funding should match military funding.
Finally, there is a presentation in your dossier on the counter-narcotics section. We believe counter-narcotics policy is extremely important in winning the fight in Southern Afghanistan. As you may know, Southern Afghanistan is now responsible for 95 per cent of the world's heroine production, and that is financing the Taliban and al Qaeda. We propose that Afghan opium farmers be allowed to grow opium poppy for the medicinal morphine, of which there is a global shortage. We surveyed Canadians, and eight out of ten Canadians polled support this. In October, the European parliament endorsed the poppy-for-medicine proposal with an overwhelming majority.
I will conclude by referencing two maps. On this map we have plotted the incidence of Taliban insurgent activity since the beginning of 2007. As a result, we have indicated what areas seem to have a permanent Taliban presence where there are regular insurgence attacks and there is insurgence fighting with NATO. After we plotted it, we calculated what percentage of the Afghanistan land mass that was, and we concluded that 54 per cent of Afghanistan has a permanent Taliban presence and 38 per cent has a substantial presence.
Since we did that calculation, there have been bombings in the north as well. The Taliban has not taken credit for those, but clearly the instability in the country is moving north. As I said, there was a bombing raid on a Taliban location last week in Ghazni, which is one and a half hours south of Kabul.
This last map indicates the impressions of the locals regarding Taliban control. When meeting with people in the villages, with police chiefs and local leaders, we asked them to draw where they believed the Taliban had control and where they believed that the Karzai government and NATO had control. We compared all the maps and came up with a template reflecting the impressions of the locals regarding Taliban control. The pink areas show Taliban control and the green areas show the government and NATO control. I think we can all agree that that is a disturbing map. That is accurately showing locals' impressions of Taliban control.
I have one more thing to pass around. I am sure you have heard a great deal about the suicide bombings in the south. They have taken to putting ball bearings in the suicide bombers' vests. The ones I have here were taken from a neighbourhood — the result of what landed in one man's room. Increasingly, the vests are full of these small projectiles, which make the bombings even more deadly. I brought them from Lashkar Gah in Helmand province.
I whipped through that, Mr. Chair, and covered our main points, hopefully provoking questions.
The Chair: You did well and we appreciate your brevity. Colleagues, we have 40 minutes.
Senator Day: These maps are helpful. You are not painting an encouraging picture for the investment that Canada has made in Kandahar through NATO on behalf of the United Nations. I think it was announced on Friday: The military is up to $3.1 billion now. Do you have any assessment as to how much has been put in on the development side?
Ms. MacDonald: In our past reports, we have looked at that. We believe that the military investment is about 10 times development and aid, which is why we have stated that development and aid should match military spending. We are not saying take away from military; just increase development and aid.
Senator Day: I heard that comment. I appreciate what you are saying.
Does The Senlis Council receive any government money? Are you entirely funded by foundations?
Ms. MacDonald: We are funded by the Network of European Foundations. There is no government money.
Senator Day: Do you bid on any contracts from the government when you are over, or do any of your subsidiary organizations?
Ms. MacDonald: No, we have not.
Senator Day: How many employees do you have in Afghanistan?
Ms. MacDonald: When we are all there, about 50. We did one survey of 17,000 Afghan men, and we subcontracted more workers for that. Maybe we were 100 people at that time. There are four non-Afghans in the entire group — myself and three gentlemen — so it is primarily an Afghan organization.
Senator Day: You indicated that you have spent the last three years in Southern Afghanistan; is that correct?
Ms. MacDonald: I first went to Afghanistan three years ago this coming January, and I have spent most of my time in Southern Afghanistan for the last two years.
Senator Day: Are you able to circulate freely, or are you protected by Canadian Armed Forces and stay within that protected area with them?
Ms. MacDonald: No; I have been to the base twice and to the PRT, provincial reconstruction team, once for visits. I am with my Afghan colleagues, and we travel as Afghan civilians.
Senator Day: We would like to concentrate on Southern Afghanistan, because that is where the Canadian operation is located. Obviously, however, the government is in Kabul. When I ask you questions about the stability of the government, you will have to include the direction that comes from Kabul.
Could you tell us what you see as the major challenges for the government at this time in order to establish itself as a functioning directional government?
Ms. MacDonald: There are three things simultaneously. The Karzai government is in danger of falling if we do not greatly increase the troop numbers on the ground in the south. That is a military point of view.
The Karzai government is in danger of falling if we do not deliver development and aid to the people of Southern Afghanistan, who are facing a starvation crisis. We have seen starving babies and elderly people, along with many young men without any work.
Finally, the American-led counter-narcotics policy in Southern Afghanistan, which primarily has been marked by the forced eradication of the poppy crops of the poorest farmers, has turned the rural people against the internationals. They cannot tell the difference between us and the Karzai government. Forced poppy crop eradication has to stop and the farmers must be provided with alternative livelihoods, such as the poppy-for-medicine proposal that I mentioned.
Senator Day: Did you say the Karzai government has not accepted the eradication as a government policy?
Ms. MacDonald: They have had no choice but to accept forced poppy crop eradication. That is American policy and financed by the United States of America. They have fought against chemical spraying successfully to date, but the Americans would like to spray chemicals.
Senator Day: I still want to get a feeling for the Karzai government. Your indication now is that we have to send more aid there. We have heard that, because of corruption, the money you send to Kabul — I have forgotten the name of the department — is lost; none of it is getting down to the governors in the various provinces or states, where it must be. Could you analyze that comment that we are hearing? How does that compare to funds going to the military operators in the area who, if they had more funds, could put them into challenges that the communities have and the public would see a direct connection?
Ms. MacDonald: One reason we have recommended that the military deliver aid — in particular, food aid — in the short term is as a counter-insurgency strategy but also to ensure its delivery. I would not put the question of corruption at the doorstep of the Afghan people. They are living in the most desperate circumstances. It is a highly unstable situation.
We have to be responsible for managing our development and aid delivery and ensuring it gets there. I am always concerned about the lack of development and aid being put at the doorsteps of the Afghan people or the Karzai government. Let us take responsibility for delivering it properly.
Senator Day: Did you not say we have to send aid to the Karzai government in order to prop that government up? Is that not, in effect, what you were just saying — that they are going to fall if they are not given more development money?
Ms. MacDonald: In the short term, we have to ensure that the aid gets delivered. We propose that it be delivered, in the case of Kandahar, by our military.
There are issues of corruption, but part of it is due to our lack of proper management of the delivery of development and aid. Of course, it is true that there are some Afghans involved in corruption, but we have to take responsibility for dealing with it. My concern is about saying the Afghans are making their own problems. If we did a better job of delivering development and aid, we could avoid that.
Food is like money in Southern Afghanistan. We would not deliver a truck-load of $1 million in cash to someone in Canada without proper security measures; and we should not be doing that in Afghanistan, either.
Senator Day: How is the Karzai government looked upon by the majority of Afghan people in Southern Afghanistan? Is Karzai looked upon as a puppet of the United Nations, of NATO, of the Americans, or is he a legitimate person operating as a leader of their government?
Ms. MacDonald: There are two classes of answers. People who are extremely poor — who live in the village thinking about feeding their families — are very withdrawn from the government. It is not an issue; they are just thinking about how they will feed their family. They do not care who the government is.
For those who are more sophisticated, the Taliban and al Qaeda are using the points you mentioned to undermine Karzai's legitimacy. He needs more time to establish a proper, working, functioning democracy and a proper relationship with the Afghan people. At the moment, he does not have that time. They are just learning about democracy and they need time to understand what those ideas mean and how they would benefit their lives.
Senator Day: Leaving out al Qaeda and the international objective of terrorism, is the Taliban looking only to establish itself in Afghanistan as a legitimate government of the people? Are we are imposing a government on them that they do not want?
Ms. MacDonald: The people who support the Taliban?
Senator Day: Well, you are telling us the Taliban is in control of more and more and it is moving north. Are we just seeing over again what we saw when the British were there 100 years ago and the Russians were there 20 years ago?
Ms. MacDonald: I should differentiate between Taliban control and support. I do not see widespread support for Taliban ideology. They are gaining control through clever manipulation, propaganda and terrorizing the local people. Anyone found working with internationals will be beheaded or hanged in a horrific way. That has quite a strong deterrent on the local population.
Senator Day: It is a good deterrent.
Ms. MacDonald: No one there at the lower levels wants to see the return of the Taliban. At the higher levels, where they are connected to al Qaeda philosophy, I would have a different answer.
Senator Day: Are you convinced that the Karzai administration is, and will be, a more just administration?
Ms. MacDonald: Yes, absolutely.
Senator Day: Is it worth supporting?
Ms. MacDonald: Absolutely.
Senator Meighen: Are you saying that with a better aid delivery system, primarily done through the military, which will result in a winning of the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, we will then be able to win the military war, whereas today we can win only an occasional battle? Is that correct? Is it oversimplified?
Ms. MacDonald: No, that is a statement of classic counter-insurgency theory.
Senator Meighen: Do you subscribe to it?
Ms. MacDonald: Yes. The war cannot be won by military means alone; you have to win the hearts and minds of the people as well.
Senator Meighen: You no doubt read our report after we went to Afghanistan. We said the same thing. Senator Day alluded to what we heard regarding the level of corruption within the Afghan national police, in particular, within the higher levels of government and within some of the provincial administration. As a result, we determined, as I think you have, that more aid should be delivered directly by the Canadian military. The level of aid, small as it is, was doubled. Whether or not it was as a result of our report, I do not know.
Ms. MacDonald: I actually saw the results of that on the ground.
Senator Meighen: You are not a military organization. Is it fair criticism of Senlis, when you suggest that we have to double our troops or increase the troops substantially, to say, "What do you know of military tactics and procedures? Should you not stick to your knitting?''
Ms. MacDonald: In that report, we had a contribution from Paul Burton who heads our London office and who was the head of Jane's intelligence service for Central Asia. Our staff at Senlis Afghanistan includes three gentlemen who fought with the Northern Alliance against the Taliban. The report was also based on interviews with local police chiefs and military commanders who had been involved in several battles. Finally, we consulted privately with a number of NATO military commanders who had previously been in Afghanistan, and we solicited their response to our proposal for the doubling of the troops. We felt we had surveyed both Afghan and non-Afghan military individuals before we released those reports.
Senator Meighen: In your report, a formula was developed to establish appropriate troop levels.
Ms. MacDonald: Yes.
Senator Meighen: That level is 2.3 troop soldiers for each $1 billion of a country's GDP. Canada is slightly under that level. The Netherlands are where they should be, and the Americans should be putting in another 15,000 troops, which will not happen at least until they are out of Iraq. You may wish to respond to that. How was that formula established?
Ms. MacDonald: A number of different formulas were examined. You could advocate for one or the other. We felt this particular formula gives some equity across the NATO nations. All NATO nations voted to go to Afghanistan, yet not all of them are contributing troops on the ground in Southern Afghanistan. It is not useful to say we should support the Karzai government and only have your troops going out in daylight hours in Northern Afghanistan.
Senator Meighen: Why do we not succeed in getting more of our NATO allies participating in the south?
Ms. MacDonald: With regard to the Americans, the actual percentage increase in the number of troops suggested is very small in comparison to what they have in Iraq. A recent newspaper report indicated that the marines themselves would like to move from Iraq to Afghanistan. We support this wholeheartedly.
We believe that other NATO countries are not making a proper contribution because there is a lack of domestic political understanding of the urgency of the situation, the danger that exists to the Karzai government and the danger that losing Southern Afghanistan would be to our own national defence agendas. Perhaps this is also the case in Canada.
We are trying to provide information from the ground to the national politicians involved in making decision about the NATO troops. It is not the NATO military that decides how many troops go; it is the politicians in the NATO countries. We want to convey information to the political masters so that they can develop an appropriate sense of the domestic political urgency behind these issues.
Senator Meighen: We do not seem to have been making much progress on that front. Can you offer me a contrary view or any hope?
Ms. MacDonald: I would hope that our government would contribute to developing that sense of domestic political urgency and responsibility in our NATO colleagues. I think it is part of our responsibility as Canadians.
Senator Meighen: We have been trying for some time without apparent success. From your perspective on the ground, can you offer any illumination as to why it is so difficult, other than that no one wants to put their troops into harm's way if they can avoid it?
Ms. MacDonald: It is either that those countries do not understand the situation in Southern Afghanistan and the danger that President Karzai is in, or they prefer to see whether they can have other countries such as Canada take responsibility for the fighting in Southern Afghanistan. Our organization does not believe that that is appropriate.
Senator Meighen: Regarding the poppy eradication program, when we were there, we were told that one proposal put forward was to buy the crop and encourage people to go into peanut production or some other alternative. The response was that this is a wonderful idea, except twice the crop will be produced because people who are producing it now will continue to produce it illegally since the price obtained is so attractive.
Your program suggests poppies for medicine. If the previous idea is correct, is the same result not likely to occur in this instance? That is, farmers will sell their poppies for medicine in one field and grow more poppies in another field for the illegal trade?
Ms. MacDonald: We have been studying poppies for medicine for three years; I went there to start that work. In our various technical studies, we have discovered that in the poppies for medicine program, the farmers would get an attractive farm gate price and net farmer income price. We have asked the Canadian government to support running pilot projects to test this idea.
Maybe they can grow peanuts or pomegranates, but three to five years are needed to convert to those other crops, and what they know how to grow now is poppies. Given a choice five years from now, the government may decide it does not want to be in the pharmaceutical industry and wants only other crops. However, a transition crop is needed now.
There is a huge, untapped global market for morphine as a pain killer. Morphine is a product we know, and only the six richest countries have a sufficient supply. A global pain crisis has been identified by the World Health Organization. It is a great legal opportunity; it would break farmers' economic ties with the Taliban, which is involved with trafficking the poppies, and would give the farmers an economic relationship with the Karzai government. It would be a positive reason to support the Karzai government because they would need the government to get their goods to market.
Senator Meighen: Is the doubling of the poppy production since the fall of the Taliban due entirely to the price and to Taliban encouragement?
Ms. MacDonald: It has a lot to do with the growth of the insurgency, the Taliban and al Qaeda. It is important to put al Qaeda into the mix as well.
Senator Zimmer: Your presentation was informative and candid.
The recommendation here in the November 7, 2007, report is that the military should now be tasked to deliver aid to ravaged areas of the south and east and be granted control of the war zone budgets of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, DFAIT, and the Canadian International Development Agency, CIDA. That recommendation has received push back from the NGOs and other think tanks. What motivated The Senlis Council to make this recommendation, and would this be a short-term or long-term project?
Ms. MacDonald: What motivated this was seeing starving children, babies and elderly — women and men the age of my father looking like skeletons — in camps in Southern Afghanistan. I understand what the development and aid community is talking about when they say that the military should not be involved, but these are extraordinary circumstances. Their somewhat theological responses are not a satisfactory answer to the people whose children are starving in Southern Afghanistan. Military involvement should happen until the development and aid community has reorganized itself to deliver proper development and food aid to those people.
Senator Zimmer: In its analysis of The Senlis Council report, the Conference of Defence Associations has stated that the notion of a combat CIDA and military control of CIDA funds in the field is a controversial proposal that needs more thought in terms of implications around linking political, military and humanitarian efforts overtly. In addition, Gerry Barr, President and CEO of the Canadian Council for International Co-operation, CCIC, and Kevin McCort, interim CEO of CARE Canada, have stated that this recommendation will only worsen the current serious burying of lines between military and humanitarian objectives. Can you comment on that, please?
Ms. MacDonald: I invite those gentlemen to go with me to the camps and see those starving children and starving elderly. Perhaps they have a better idea of how to deliver aid to those people. There has been no substantial food aid in Southern Afghanistan since March 2006. There are camps in Southern Afghanistan, inside and outside Kandahar City, where thousands of people live without shelter, food and medical aid. When we are forced to bomb a village because there are insufficient troops on the ground, there is no medical aid, no one to count the dead or to help the injured. When the injured have their own families to take them to the hospital in Kandahar City, that hospital is completely insufficient to deal with basic health care needs, let alone war zone health care needs. It is a nightmare.
I understand the policy and theoretical basis for these objections, but they have no plan to feed these people. These are our Afghan brothers and sisters who are fighting alongside our military to fight the Taliban and al Qaeda for a peaceful and prosperous Afghanistan and a safe Canada, and we are abandoning them. Something has to be done. Until they have a better idea, this is what we are proposing, and I believe the military are more than willing and able to do it. When I see the young men and women sitting in the military camp, I tell them that we are going into those camps and they know those people need food. The young men from New Brunswick and Saskatchewan, for example, would be happy to go in there and feed those families.
Senator Zimmer: I have a supplementary regarding poppies for medicine. If you did that, and created the other crops, what pre-conditions in security, infrastructure and governance would be needed in place prior to initiating such a project in Afghanistan to ensure its success?
Ms. MacDonald: This is why we want to run the pilot projects. We set out a complete protocol including the village getting a licence, micro-credit and a co-guarantee system; punishment for breaking the licence; how it would be modeled and turned into morphine at the village level; and how other jobs would be generated. After much research and feedback from the village and from other international agencies, we developed an entire protocol that we want to test. We are not saying that we should convert the whole crop over night or in the next planting season. Rather, we want to run some protocols in the province of Kandahar, outside Kandahar City, and in the province of Helmand, outside Lashkar Gah City, and test these theories that we have been promoting.
Senator Mitchell: I have two specific questions and then a more general question about development aid.
Can you tell me if there is any way to estimate roughly how many Taliban fighters are in Kandahar and generally in Afghanistan?
Ms. MacDonald: We hear varying numbers from the locals we talk to. Our research is based on talking to people on the ground. It is clear that the Taliban fighters move around a great deal. Sometimes they split up; sometimes they come from Helmand to attack in Arghandab; and sometimes they take off to Khakrez. Khakrez is about an hour outside of Kandahar City. It has been controlled by Taliban since September, and we have been told that sometimes there are 200 Taliban there and other times there are 1,000 Taliban there. I would say that people feel like there are thousands of Taliban in Kandahar Province, but they do move around a great deal.
Pakistan is the base. When we ask people what kind of Taliban they are, we hear they are partially Afghan Taliban and partially Pakistani Taliban. Other types of foreigners are described to be there as well. The Taliban are able to recruit and replenish their troops from across the border in Pakistan. There seems to be a relatively endless supply of Taliban.
Senator Mitchell: But it might not be hundreds of thousands.
Ms. MacDonald: It would not be hundreds of thousands. If it is 10,000, that would be a great many. I understand from the military point of view that for every one of them — the local insurgents who can blend in so well — we need about three. There are about 10 police bases between Kandahar City and Lashkar Gah City. Someone would need three times as many people to try to take one of those small police check points. That is the ratio I have had explained to me by military officials.
Senator Mitchell: It underlines the theory that a handful of Taliban fighters can hold millions of people hostage and own that country, or believe that they can own that country.
Ms. MacDonald: That is the perverse nature of an insurgency.
Senator Mitchell: Who funds you?
Ms. MacDonald: Our funding comes through the Network of European Foundations, and I am employed by a Swiss philanthropist.
Senator Mitchell: With respect to development, I would like to know what you think Canada's development priorities should be in Afghanistan. I would like to qualify that to some extent, or ask you whether any particular emphasis needs to be placed on women. The observation could be made that Third World development occurs when women are educated. That is particularly a problem in countries like Afghanistan, where women have been aggressively not educated. Clearly, that would likely recur.
In that context, I would like to know what your relationship is with the UN, although I think you have said a bit about that.
Finally, you made the point that the Taliban are tremendously ruthless and vicious with the population. Yet, you also made the point that development supporting military work can begin to push that back. How do we relate development aid to overcoming the fear of that ruthlessness? How does that work? Is there a mechanism to make that work? Is there a theory about it?
Ms. MacDonald: The first things people need are food, shelter and medical assistance. That is the classic Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I cannot emphasize enough the need for emergency food aid and emergency medical assistance for the people of Southern Afghanistan.
You are absolutely right about the women's issues. In Kabul, you can see some difference in the lives of some women, but unfortunately in Southern Afghanistan there is not such a dramatic difference. In Kandahar, some girls are going to school. In Lashkar Gah, the girl's school is on a difficult footing.
On the question of when Canada should leave, we recommended that rather than set a date, we should set a list of measures of success — things that would be important to us that would allow us to say that we did the job we went there to do. Inside that, we recommend not only health care and food security but also the status of women and the availability of education for them.
We do not have a formal relationship with the UN. I commend to you my fellow Canadian, Christopher Alexander, a Deputy Special Representative for Afghanistan with the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, UNAMA. Mr. Alexander and I do not agree on everything, but since I first met him, every time I see him, despite our disagreements I am very proud of him as a fellow Canadian. He cares about Afghanistan and the Afghans. I hope he continues to stay and work in Afghanistan.
When we talk to the people on the ground and ask what they think about Karzai versus the Taliban, we learn that they care only about feeding their families and the safety and security of their families. They are truly not interested in politics. If our military and if the Karzai government were seen to be dealing with their urgent day-to-day issues, that would be important to them, just as it is important to Canadians. They are family people just like we are, but living in much more desperate circumstances.
We went there and said, "We are here to help build peace and prosperity. We are your friends. We will fight alongside you.'' They can see our wealth. They can see our military base, which senators are probably more familiar with than I am, that they have heard about. We are starting to show the people in Southern Afghanistan the difference between being rich and being poor. We have to close the gap between us and them.
Senator Nancy Ruth: I will follow on Senator Mitchell's questions about women and children. I was delighted to hear you ask for the same amount of money for aid as is provided for military. Everyone involved in the 3D approach thinks that diplomacy, defence and development should get the same budgets. I am with you on that.
Do you collect gender segregated data? Do you know what the men are saying and the women are saying?
Ms. MacDonald: Our survey of 17,000 Afghans was of 17,000 Afghan men. I am sorry to say that in the present circumstance in Southern Afghanistan we were not able to scientifically interview women. We made it quite clear that we were only interviewing men. It was a political survey, and the sad and unfortunate fact is that the political future of Southern Afghanistan is at the moment in the hands of the men. The women are in no way enfranchised or involved in decision making for the future of the country.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Does that mean it would be very difficult to collect information from them, because you would have to go into homes to get it?
Ms. MacDonald: You would have to get women to do it, whose families will allow them to work. Senlis Afghanistan has a continuing struggle to find families that are comfortable with women working within our organization in Kabul. It would be an effort to put together a team of female investigators who could go through Southern Afghanistan and interview women.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Is it an effort worth making when you are developing public policy?
Ms. MacDonald: If that were something within my power to do, I would be interested in doing it, yes.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Good luck to the Network of European Foundations, then.
Of the aid that Canada now gives, do you know what portion goes to families, to widows with children, or how it is broken out among such groupings?
Ms. MacDonald: In one report, we tried to trace CIDA's aid impact in Afghanistan. Mr. Zakhilwal was part of that. We called the report The Canadian International Development Agency in Kandahar: Unanswered Questions, because we could not trace CIDA development and aid money in Kandahar and we could not match what was on their website or the information they gave us with anything we could see on the ground, so I would say I am just as confused as you are, senator.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Can you tell us a bit more about your confusion with what you saw and what did not fit?
Ms. MacDonald: For example, we were told variously that Mirwais Hospital, which is to treat civilian casualties of the NATO bombings, was given $3 million or $5 million by CIDA. We have been in that hospital many times. On the video that you have we interviewed the doctors and were unable to find any evidence of $3 million or $5 million.
We were told, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs stated at the UN General Assembly, that Canada had financed a maternity project at that hospital. When we went looking for that, first we found an empty tent and the next day I found the tent was gone. That maternity project has never functioned and is not functioning now.
We have been told that there are millions of dollars going from CIDA into food aid in Southern Afghanistan. We were unable to find any substantial food aid project in Southern Afghanistan at all. We also have interviews of various community leaders in which we asked whether they had heard about a food aid program. We talked to the man who runs the largest mosque in Kandahar, surgeons, et cetera, and they told us they had not heard of it, and they would have heard of it.
We asked them for the location of food aid distribution points in Kandahar so that we could interview people who had received food aid financed by CIDA, and we have yet to receive any information about where those food aid distribution points are.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Do you do the same kind of due diligence regarding the aid of other countries, or is it because Canada is there?
Ms. MacDonald: We did the same in Lashkar Gah, and unfortunately I must report that DFID, the U.K.'s Department for International Development, was no better, and we have recommended that a combat DFID be undertaken by the British military.
Senator Nancy Ruth: You have not given us an analysis of why these anomalies are happening. Would you care even to circle around that?
Ms. MacDonald: I guess the money is leaving Ottawa. We regularly get reports that CIDA is going to do another X million dollars worth of food aid or development and aid, and I guess that somewhere between the announcement and Kandahar, the money goes elsewhere.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Who are the usual agents for CIDA in the Kandahar area?
Ms. MacDonald: UNICEF, the UN agencies and World Food Programme.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Dr. Zakhilwal, what are you doing here in Canada? You are giving academic talks to various communities. What impact is that having? Who is listening, and is it worthwhile?
Almas Bawar Zakhilwal, Canadian Country Director, The Senlis Council: The Senlis Council has given me a voice not only in Canada but to help my people and my country from Canada as a Canadian. As an Afghan, I believe in everything that The Senlis Council has said. As an Afghan, I will say that if we want to succeed in Afghanistan, especially in Southern Afghanistan, we will need more aid for those people. We have lost the hearts and minds of those people.
I have spoken to many of them and asked, "What do you need from the international community? What do you need from your government?'' The only answer I get is, "This government and the international community have been in power for six years. I have not seen any change in my life. My life is still the same as it was six years ago. I do not have school in my village or my district; I do not have work. My roads are still bad; my irrigation system is still the same. The Taliban are still present. Even if they are not in power, they are in the villages. What has the international community done for us? Nothing. How can I support them?''
When we speak of a hearts and minds strategy, we are not asking to provide them with big cars or big houses. We are asking for the basic things of life. In my interviews, I asked people, "What three things would you like to ask of the international community or Karzai's government?'' The top three things from the thousands of interviews we have done are clean water, food and shelter. How hard is it to give that to those people in order to succeed? I do not think that is hard. Are we willing to do that? Are we trying our best to do that? I think we are not trying.
We must look at this from the perspective of Afghans and what they think about Karzai's government and about Canadians, British and Americans. Afghans on the ground say that those countries are there for their own purpose and that when their purpose is fulfilled they will leave. Before that happens, we must show those people that we are not there just to fight, to destroy houses and mosques and to kill and injure people. We must show them that we are there to help them develop their lives and their country. We cannot say that just on paper or on the radio. They have to see it. Without seeing it, it is impossible for them to believe it.
We are at the stage that if we do not act now and win the hearts and minds of those people, Karzai and the international community will lose support and Afghanistan will be the same as it was six years ago.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Thank you.
Ms. MacDonald, I am particularly interested in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security. What evidence do you see of this being worked on in the Kandahar region?
Ms. MacDonald: We recently supported that resolution as well. I am sorry to say that it is so minimal as to be nonexistent.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Do you ever hear anyone talking about it, including my good friend from Toronto, UNAMA's Christopher Alexander?
Ms. MacDonald: I have not, but I must emphasize that I live in Southern Afghanistan, so I do not attend many UN meetings and such things; I think my evidence on that point is not particularly weighty.
Senator Nancy Ruth: To be clear, am I hearing that no one has been talking about this when you are in the field?
Ms. MacDonald: No, but I am with Afghan civilians. I am not part of the UN community. I am not going to those meetings. Therefore, my evidence on that point is not particularly telling.
Senator Moore: Senator Day asked, in view of your evidence, if we are simply seeing again what happened when the British and Russians were there. In every book we read about Afghanistan, the basic attitude of the locals towards the people who are in their country trying to help or to hurt is that you have the watch but we have the time. Sooner or later, you will be gone and we will have our way. Is that what is at the root of this?
I do not feel any great change here. I want to get into some specifics when you answer that.
Ms. MacDonald: We planted the seeds of peace, prosperity and democracy in Afghanistan, but we did not water those seeds and we are not looking after the garden. The Taliban and al Qaeda have taken advantage of our lapses in our policy in that regard — our errors in counter-narcotics policy, the lack of development and aid, the reliance on the bombing campaigns. To the Afghan people, that story — that it is all a question of foreigners in their land — is false; it is a question of peace, prosperity and democracy for the people of Afghanistan.
On the grassroots political agenda, we are allowing them to define it the way you described it and we should not have done that. We have to fight back on that for the sake of the Karzai government and for our own national security reasons. I would be concerned that the situation be defined that way, because that is a success for their political propaganda.
Senator Moore: You mentioned the figure of $3.1 billion as having been the amount spent by the military, did you not?
Ms. MacDonald: I think one of your fellow senators gave you that statistic.
Senator Moore: Do you agree with that?
Ms. MacDonald: I would have to check against our numbers.
Senator Moore: I do not know whether that was in total. I hope it was not Canada's portion.
Senator Day: No, it was $1 billion.
Senator Moore: This committee was there last December, as you probably are aware. We were there in September and tried to get in but we got there in December. We were told then by the Commanding Officer, Brigadier-General Grant, that it was costing Canada $30 million a month, exclusive of salaries. Do you have any idea of the costs? This is military only, Ms. MacDonald.
Ms. MacDonald: We have some statistics, but our statistics include all the NATO troops, not specifically Canadian.
Senator Moore: When we were there, we were told by CIDA that it was investing $400,000 in the construction and operation of a maternity hospital. You are saying that no such thing took place, is that right?
Ms. MacDonald: It does not exist at Mirwais Hospital.
Mr. Zakhilwal: I have interviewed the doctor of the maternity ward. I have asked him, "Where is the maternity ward that Canada promised you six months ago?'' He said, "I have heard of it, but I have never seen it.'' That is the place where it is supposed to be, but it is not there.
Senator Moore: Corruption was a big issue. We heard that from everyone when we were there. You say not to lay that at the feet of the Afghan people or at the feet of the Karzai government. We were also told that Canada's aid, $100 million a year, goes to the World Bank. I do not know where it goes from there.
We were told that we cannot put little Canadian flags on those dollars. We do not want to have these people think that we are in there trying to help them. This has to come from the ground up, from them.
Where is the money going and who is at fault? We heard stories of corruption at the central government level, but you say no, not at the feet of the Karzai government. Where is our money going? Someone has to be responsible. There is a big gap here.
Ms. MacDonald: My point is that if you have a list of people who have control and responsibility for money — say you were the minister of development and —
Senator Moore: In the Karzai government?
Ms. MacDonald: No, the Canadian government. The budget gives you $100 million.
Senator Moore: The $100 million is only one part of it, but let us stick with that figure.
Ms. MacDonald: Okay, you have $100 million, and somehow, between your signing off on wherever it is going and Kandahar Province, it goes missing. According to me as a Canadian, you are responsible for that. The other Canadians who are in the chain of management are responsible for that.
No one lets hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash float around Southern Afghanistan without proper safeguards. You should not do it with food either, because food is money. Food is power in Southern Afghanistan. The government is responsible for Canadian taxpayers' dollars. You have to come up with a system that has proper management and controls.
They are giving hundreds of thousands of dollars generally. I do not know what CIDA is doing with their money in the management process. However, you cannot give hundreds of thousands of dollars into a system that is full of extremely poor people who live in an incredibly unstable country, who have seen governments change every five years, without proper management and control systems.
When I say, "Do not put that at the feet of the Afghan people or the Karzai government,'' I am saying, "Whose money is it and who is responsible for it?'' CIDA, that minister and ultimately the Prime Minister, are responsible for how that money is managed in a war zone in an unstable country. The civil servants in Afghanistan are getting paid $60 a month. If you float $500,000 into a ministerial bank account and say, "Will you please buy a bunch of food and distribute it in Southern Afghanistan,'' and it goes missing, who is responsible for that? That is just bad management.
Senator Moore: I thought we had advisers working within that government to show them how to set up these structures and how to handle this. I am not hearing that from you.
Ms. MacDonald: If that is the case, they are not doing their job, are they?
Senator Moore: Obviously not, if what you say is correct.
Ms. MacDonald: It is not Alberta we are dealing with here — or Nova Scotia or Saskatchewan, my home province. Let us be sensible. When the money does not show up, you cannot blame the Afghans.
The Chair: Colleagues, you have put me in a dilemma. We have a second panel of witnesses and we are running 10 minutes over.
Senator Moore: This is interesting, having been there and now hearing this. It amazes me.
One thing we have not spent much time on, but which is prevalent in everything that seems to take place in Afghanistan, is Pakistan. What is the overriding interest for the Government of Pakistan? Is it to see a stable, democratic Afghanistan?
Everything we read indicates that the ISI, the secret service in Pakistan, is quite happy with this upheaval and wants to keep it like that. They do not want a strong democracy next door. What part does that play in all of this?
Mr. Zakhilwal: I will explain again what the Afghans think of Pakistan in the region. Those are the people who are important. Their thoughts are important if they live there and that is their country.
Since the Soviet war, and when the mujahedeen took over the government and then the Taliban, the saying has been that Pakistan does not want a stable, strong government in Afghanistan, where they can ask for their rights and they can move on in a democratic country. Local Afghans will provide a list of reasons behind that — perhaps some realistic, some not realistic.
However, Pakistan plays a major role in Afghanistan. We need to bring Pakistan to the table. We need to move into Pakistan to defeat insurgency. You cannot defeat insurgency while fighting in a village when they run away and recruit in Pakistan, spend a month, rest, sleep, eat well and come back to fight you.
Senator Moore: It is the aid they get there in addition to there being a border.
Mr. Zakhilwal: If they run, you have to follow them. NATO troops are not allowed to cross the border. Why cannot NATO cross the border, follow them to their home bases, defeat them there and then come back to Afghanistan?
Senator Moore: You are calling upon NATO to go into Pakistan when necessary?
Ms. MacDonald: Yes, alongside the Pakistani army.
Senator Moore: Did you see the paper by Nipa Banerjee written in response to your report?
Ms. MacDonald: No, but I know Ms. Banerjee.
Senator Moore: You can have my copy. It is not flattering to your work and you should have this.
The Chair: Thank you very much to the witnesses. We are very appreciative of your coming here and of your time. It is clear from the interest of the members of the committee that we could go on for a couple more hours and we would still have questions.
Before we change witnesses, we have a brief motion on the budget for the Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs.
Senator Meighen: I move that the following budget for the Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs of the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2007, be concurred in and that the chair submit the same to the Standing Senate Committee on Internal Economy, Budgets and Administration. In summary, the budget contains the following: professional and other services, $13,400; transportation and communications, $25,130; all other expenses, $11,500, for a total of $50,030.
The Chair: Are there any comments? All those in favour?
Senator Tkachuk: With regard to courier services, is that in addition to the $10,000 in this committee's budget for courier services?
The Chair: Yes, it is.
Senator Tkachuk: Therefore, do we have $20,000 for courier services?
Senator Day: This budget under consideration is for the subcommittee's work only. We cannot take that and include it in this committee's budget, so you should not add them.
Senator Tkachuk: I do add them. It is one committee.
Senator Meighen: It is in addition, but if it is not used it gets turned back.
Senator Tkachuk: I understand. That is fine. Thank you.
The Chair: Other comments? Those in favour?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: Those opposed? Abstained? Motion carried.
I am pleased now to introduce Senator David Tkachuk, from Saskatchewan. He was appointed to the Senate in 1993. He is the deputy chair of this committee and he is also a member of the Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce and the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications. Over the years he has been a businessman, a public servant and a teacher.
We are pleased to welcome witnesses representing CANADEM. One of CANADEM's mandates is to assist international organizations in identifying and engaging skilled Canadian individuals. Since 2001, funding over 150 CANADEM experts through either CIDA or DFAIT has assisted in rebuilding Afghanistan. CANADEM remains one of the Government of Canada's primary recruitment focal points for Canadian experts wishing to assist in Afghanistan reconstruction.
Speaking on their behalf, we have Mr. Paul LaRose-Edwards, Executive Director. Mr. LaRose-Edwards has been an international human rights lawyer for 25 years dealing with the politics of advancing rights. He has worked in mission areas and in countries such as Rwanda, Kosovo, Croatia, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Indonesia. A former Canadian Armoured Corps officer and a Royal Military College graduate, Mr. LaRose-Edwards' recent work with militaries includes the human rights training manual of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Canadian Forces College and the Peace Support Training Centre, and NATO's Allied Command Transformation.
With him is Ms. Christine Vincent, Deputy Executive Director. She helped to establish CANADEM in 1997 and has worked to promote the vast expertise and the civilian reserve roster since then. Holding a Master's of Sociology with PhD coursework, she has worked on emigration, refugee and humanitarian issues for over 20 years, much of that time focusing on women and peace building.
Welcome to you both.
Paul LaRose-Edwards, Executive Director, CANADEM: It is a delight to be here. Another of our colleagues, Ms. Fattana Atayee, Program Officer, is also with us today. She is an Afghan-Canadian.
CANADEM is a not-for-profit, non-governmental organization and acts as Canada's civilian reserve for international service. I will briefly give a couple of vignettes of Canada in Afghanistan and a new initiative that is in the works. More importantly, in light of the Senate's and this committee's oft-stated mission of looking to the future and looking broadly, our Afghan activities reflect that CANADEM is a growing tool for advancing Canadian security and defence.
Speaking as an ex-armoured corps officer — and I hope you will not hold that against me — and as evidenced in Afghanistan, there are no military solutions per se. Civilian solutions in politics are, as always, paramount. Advancing and defending Canadian values and interests is best done by civilian and military boots on the ground — individual Canadians.
The traditional vehicles for putting civilian boots on the ground include DFAIT embassies and CIDA representatives. While these remain essential, they are far from sufficient. I would suggest that the operational or field component of the international community is essential and probably the most important line of security for Canada.
Each and every day, there are more individual Canadians working internationally on issues of peace and security than there are Canadian government officials or military personnel working internationally. That much larger number of individual Canadians is embedded throughout the United Nations; in the Organization for Security and Co- operation in Europe, OSCE; in the Commonwealth, the Francophonie, the Organization of American States, OAS; and in a multitude of other intergovernmental organizations. Other individual Canadians are embedded in non- governmental organizations, both Canadian NGOs working overseas and increasingly international NGOs. As well, a small but growing number of relevant private sector initiatives is populated by individual Canadians.
CANADEM has 9,000 civilian reservists, of which an estimated 3,500 are working abroad at any one time. CANADEM's 9,000 sectoral experts include 2,100 human rights experts, 2,500 governance experts, 900 police reform experts and 2,200 development experts. Over 50 per cent of the 9,000 — 4,500 Canadians that we know of — are prepared to deploy to conflict situations. Over 30 per cent — 2,700 people — are prepared to deploy to Afghanistan specifically.
Speaking narrowly to our activities, I will refer to Afghanistan. To date, CANADEM has put forward 1,522 candidates to over 70 agencies. About 150 individuals have been engaged to work in Afghanistan, and currently there are 41 in Afghanistan. In 2002, CANADEM anticipated a need for Afghan-Canadians and started recruiting. We have 425 Afghan-Canadians registered with us and we are starting to recruit from the larger international diaspora, with a view to ultimately handing over that roster to an Afghan agency. Those hiring Afghan-Canadians have included DFAIT, CIDA, the Canadian Forces, the Afghan government, the UN and other international agencies.
On programming in the country, CANADEM, with CIDA funding, initiated its first Afghan deployment in 2002, sending out a police reform unit. Its early impact was in large part enabled by rapid reaction by CIDA's Peacebuilding Fund under Susan Brown. The CIDA Peacebuilding Fund had fast-track procedures, which enabled it to take action literally within weeks. Four weeks after our proposal was in, CIDA gave us a grant of $1 million and three weeks later there were CANADEM mission personnel on the ground. That stellar speed by CIDA, and the Canadian police reform presence itself, soon hit the sands of normal, standard CIDA programming. Following-on programming had to meet normal CIDA procedures, which mired CIDA decision-making in red tape that effectively brought that police reform project to a halt. A residual member of the initial team, Tonita Murray, remains in Afghanistan and is embedded in the Afghan Ministry of the Interior.
On the future role of CANADEM, we are in the final stages of being awarded a multi-year contract to send more Canadian experts to Afghanistan to be embedded in various Afghan ministries and key components of the international presence in Afghanistan. However, this contracting process will have taken nine months. Similar time challenges apply to DFAIT and the Stabilization and Reconstruction Task Force, START.
My question has been out there for quite some time: Why has the Canadian government proven to be so slow in deploying or funding the deployment of Canadian civilians to Afghanistan and elsewhere? We have great civil servants in CIDA and DFAIT. There is the political will to be present in Afghanistan. The government has the requisite funds. Yet, Canadian government-sponsored civilian response still happens with glacial speed. I am convinced that in the past eight years the Canadian government, on the whole, has become more fearful of international failure and increasingly risk averse.
Your committee has the ability to rescue politicians, DFAIT and CIDA and, by extension, many of us working internationally. This committee is in a position to convince the whole of government that advancing national security and defence, affecting change internationally, is by definition risky. By taking risks to better advance Canadian values and interests and effect change in conflict situations or fragile states, we will have a greater share of successes and failures. Arguably, if we have no failures, then we are not making much of an effort.
This committee is particularly well placed to emphasize that, as important as the military is, there are no military solutions per se and that government civilian response times must be faster. Note that faster government civilian- boots-on-the-ground response time does not refer to getting more bureaucrats into the field but rather to facilitating the deployments of Canadian non-governmental agencies and individual Canadians. Fast decisions, fast deployments and civilian boots on the ground beyond the traditional responses will strengthen Canada's image and impact.
CANADEM is quietly getting more civilian boots on the ground. Since starting 11 years ago, CANADEM has put forward over 15,000 candidates and has directly or indirectly enabled the deployment of over 4,000 individuals. CANADEM has been identified by the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations, DPKO, as the biggest and best civilian reserve worldwide. CANADEM has played a role in increasing Canadian civilian representation on UN peace operations to the point that Canada is tied with the U.S. on the percentage of representation at 6 per cent each. In other words, there are the same number of Canadian and American civilians in UN missions. In comparison with our 6 per cent market share, the next closest Western countries are the U.K. at 4 per cent, France at 4 per cent, Australia at 2 per cent, Germany at 2 per cent, and Italy at 1 per cent. The others are below that.
In conclusion, CANADEM's success is based on getting the right individuals into the field. We would like to see this happen faster. We look forward to working with the committee to increase Canada's international impact, which will increase the security of ourselves and others.
The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. LaRose-Edwards.
Senator Banks: Thank you very much for being here today. On your last point, Mr. LaRose-Edwards, when we were in some parts of Afghanistan we did not see many NGOs or civilians doing much of anything. It was explained to us that that was because there were people there who would kill them and there must be security in place before the NGOs can do anything.
I do not know how many people you said you have put into Afghanistan, but are many or any of them in the hot spots? Are they in Kabul doing things, where there is less of a problem? We did not see any in Kandahar. We met a couple of people from CIDA who were doing their best in impossible circumstances.
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: If there are funds to go into conflict areas, there are many civilians who are prepared to deploy. We have a large number who are prepared to deploy. The greater problem tends to be getting that funding through various pipelines, be it CIDA or DFAIT pipelines, specific to Canada. The issue is not having sufficient people prepared to go into difficult areas, but rather finding ways to fund them.
My experience has shown that NGOs and others will find ways to work in difficult situations. You will always find some Canadian civilians, including various Canadian organizations, who will have the temerity to go into almost any situation, whether or not there is military there. It is sometimes safer when the military are not around.
Senator Banks: They had virtually all left Kandahar when we were there.
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: We know of a specific organization, Development Works, that was there. Development Works was in Kandahar dating back to 2002.
Senator Moore: They were not there when we were there.
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: I suggest you talk to Drew Gilmour of Development Works. He was on standby for eight months waiting for funding to come through the CIDA pipeline in order to go back into Kandahar on a project.
The Chair: Could you give us his coordinates after the meeting?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: Absolutely.
Senator Banks: We will track him down.
Our experience has not shown us that that kind of effort exists, but that is for another time.
I must confess to complete ignorance on CANADEM. I have been in the Senate for seven years and have traipsed around this and many other countries with this committee, and I have never heard of CANADEM. You, like the Senate, have a really bad PR department.
I will ask you the tombstone questions, because I am genuinely ignorant of this. You say that you are a non-profit agency and that you are the civilian reserve, but formally what are you? Are you a society? Are you an agency of government?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: We are an NGO. When I recommended this concept to Foreign Affairs at the end of 1995 or in early 1996, there was a discussion about whether this should be set up within Foreign Affairs or outside of it. I suggested that for a number of reasons it would be far cheaper and more effective if it were outside.
Senator Banks: Is it a society?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: No, it is a non-profit, non-governmental organization. We have our own board.
Senator Banks: Is it a non-profit corporation or a foundation?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: It is a corporation.
Senator Banks: It is a non-profit corporation. Who funds it?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: Most of the funding has been from the Canadian government.
Senator Banks: To whom does it report its Canadian public spending?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: Ms. Vincent and I report to a board. We get funded on a project basis by the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and the Canadian International Development Agency.
Senator Banks: Do you report to a minister?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: We have the normal reporting obligations to CIDA, DFAIT or the Department of National Defence when they are contracting us to do work.
Senator Banks: Does CANADEM report directly to the minister or do you report to the minister through CIDA?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: We do not report to anyone other than our board.
Christine Vincent, Deputy Executive Director, CANADEM: We file quarterly reports to program officers within CIDA.
Senator Banks: Are you audited by the Auditor General of Canada?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: We are audited by CIDA and by DFAIT.
Senator Banks: Are you subject to the Financial Administration Act and all of its provisions?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: No. As for any NGO, that is the advantage of sitting outside of government.
Senator Banks: You are exempted from that because you are a non-profit corporation?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: That is right. One of our strengths is that when we are collecting information on individuals and asking for comments about people they may work with in the field, in a strange sense our information is more confidential because we do not fall under the Access to Information Act.
Senator Banks: If I wanted to find an audited annual general statement of CANADEM, would I be able to do so?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: Absolutely.
Senator Banks: Where?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: We would send you an electronic copy or a hard copy.
Senator Banks: It is not something that is tabled in Parliament as part of the minister's annual report to Parliament?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: No.
Senator Banks: How many people do you have working at CANADEM as staff people?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: There are currently 22 individuals.
Senator Banks: Are they all in Ottawa?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: There are two in Perth.
Senator Banks: You do not have an Australian branch?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: No, Perth just outside Ottawa.
Senator Banks: You have a very specific list of the kinds of things that people can do. Would you be able to provide either a demographic or a geographic breakdown of who these people are and where they come from? Are they from all across the country?
Ms. Vincent: They are fairly representative of the Canadian population. Representation is a bit high from Quebec and Ontario, but we have reasonable representation by percentage of population of the Western provinces and the Maritime provinces. About 25 per cent are francophone, but almost 60 per cent in the database have multiple languages, with over 60 different languages. I believe that about 43 per cent are women.
Senator Banks: You said you have done an examination of that kind of breakdown, including gender. Is it on paper that you could send to our clerk?
Ms. Vincent: Yes.
Senator Banks: I would be grateful if you would do that.
Are these people paid on the basis of what their comparable salary would be given their skill level in the public sector?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: No. The way to think of us, in most instances, is as matchmakers. We match people with the requesting organization, be it CIDA, DFAIT or, most often, the UN, and that organization will then engage them. In the UN, salaries range from very good, at the diplomatic level, to not so great if you are working with UN volunteers, for example.
We deploy election observers; we deploy police experts to Haiti and Sudan; and we deploy other experts in instances where the Canadian government has given us the funds to do those deployments, as we do in Afghanistan.
Senator Banks: In those cases are they working for you?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: We issue them contracts. Ms. Tonita Murray is currently working in the Ministry of the Interior in Kabul, Afghanistan. On behalf of the Canadian government, we negotiate a salary and terms of service. We give her a contract, get her insurance and do all of the other things that you would do with a contract consultant.
Senator Banks: Would some of the people you deploy be working on a contract and be paid by you?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: Yes.
Senator Banks: Some would be working for the UN, UNESCO, the Government of Haiti or whatever?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: Yes.
Senator Banks: Thank you very much. I am much better informed about you than I was.
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: We take your point about needing better public relations. We tend to focus most of our efforts internationally. We are very well known internationally and not so well known in Canada.
Senator Banks: We focus all our efforts in Canada and we are not well known here.
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: Maybe we can get together on getting a public relations team working for us.
Senator Tkachuk: I am interested in how a program starts. You say you have all of these people — 9,500 or whatever the number was — and so many are civil servants, et cetera. Let us start with developing the program. Do you get a call from CIDA or DFAIT that they want to do something? How does it start, in particular in Afghanistan, which is what we are studying?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: In Afghanistan, obviously the government indicates that it is interested in certain kinds of programming activities. Sometimes it will put out a request for proposals and we will respond. Other times, we anticipate that there may be a certain need for an activity that the government might want to fund, in which case we put in an unsolicited proposal. We have done that twice in Afghanistan. We put the police proposal forward to the peace-building unit. They looked at it and said it is the kind of thing they would like to fund, and they proceeded to fund us.
Senator Tkachuk: Did you say something like training? Did they come up with the program first, that is, we need police training in Afghanistan? Is there a bidding war among NGOs who are applying to go there? I am still not sure how it works.
Ms. Vincent: Police training was called for, and we are the only agency that does police training. We created a roster of civilian police who are serving and retired, municipal and provincial, for the RCMP. We have over 900 police experts registered with us. There is no other roster in Canada like that.
We were first called into Afghanistan because we have an Afghan-Canadian working with us and we were following the circumstances. We contacted UNICEF and let them know that we had a security officer with Pakistan experience. He was one of the first people to go in, and he did some of the groundwork to lay preparations for the UN to move back into Afghanistan out of Pakistan.
Then we did work with the United Nations' volunteer program. We had Afghan-Canadians going in to do support for the new ministers in the new government there and to do humanitarian work with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for returning refugees. We are very proactive. We look to see where the international community needs Canadian experts; then we go there and tell them we have these experts. We basically market Canadian expertise.
Senator Tkachuk: Before you existed, before 1995, how did the federal government do that? How did they send police to Haiti?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: Not very well. This actually came out of the Rwanda years.
Senator Tkachuk: Would the RCMP generate this?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: Civilian bureaucrats and police, unlike the military, actually have full-time day jobs. It is very hard to generate civilians, whether they are police experts or CIDA or DFAIT officials, who can get on a plane and go out quickly. As a result, the international community recruits individuals to staff UN operations. Most international activity is staffed by individuals hired directly by organizations that are funded by Canada and other governments.
The problem is that if you do not have a way to recruit them quickly, you either cannot find people at all or you recruit the wrong ones. CANADEM came out of the Rwanda years. My background is international human rights. This was not during the genocide but the year following, when the UN was establishing an operation in Rwanda. I remember getting a call from the foreign affairs department asking if I could go to Rwanda or if I knew anyone else who was free. I pulled out my black book and looked. When I eventually did a report for foreign affairs on how well that mission did, I was critical of the UN because they hired the wrong people. At the same time, I was equally critical of Canada because we did not know who our experts were or where they were at the time.
That was the genesis of CANADEM. The human rights division at DFAIT said, "Paul, you are right: we should have had our own roster of Canadians who could have responded to this UN request. Will you start building this roster for us?''
The rest is history. CANADEM has grown in both size and breadth of experts. That is the concept behind it.
Senator Tkachuk: In your list, you talked about human rights experts, civil servants, government people. Yet the previous group of witnesses talked about the ordinary Afghan family needing food, water, jobs, agriculture, et cetera.
Do you think we are sending the right kind of people? Do the human rights experts have real jobs? Are they agriculture people, engineers and so on, or are they all lawyers? Do you think that Canada is sending people who actually know how to do stuff that would help the Afghan people? In other words, are we sending people who know something about agriculture, for example? Farmers, sewer and water experts, teachers, people who know how to build things, carpenters and engineers — people that I would want to help my community get going? The last person I would want is a government person, I am sorry to say. The people I would want are people who actually get things done. Are we focused enough as a federal government on that? Is that important to us or should it be more important to us?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: There are two questions there. Do we have them? Yes, we do. Is that who the government sends? Not always. Or is that what other organizations recruit? Not always.
It is getting a lot better, but I think at times organizations do not always reach out or look to recruit the right way. The UN continues to face a challenge.
Canada is one of the few countries that has this kind of roster; most countries do not. As a result, when they are looking to recruit other than Canadians, they have a real challenge. That is a separate issue.
I would suggest that sometimes the Canadian government does not always recruit the right people. I must admit I am slightly critical of the Canadian Forces Strategic Advisory Team in Afghanistan. Sending a lot of military personnel to do civil service reform was perhaps not the best option; perhaps they were not our strongest candidates to undertake that kind of activity. I can reassure you that we have over 2,000 governance experts, many of whom have worked in developing countries and know how to bring along an Afghan government in those early stages of developing a coherent government structure that works in Afghanistan, as opposed to in Canada. We have them.
Ms. Vincent: Some of those are former civil servants, definitely.
Senator Tkachuk: I did not mean to make too light of it. I know time is running so I am done right now.
Senator Nancy Ruth: I have a few questions on how you got started and what you do. When you had that conversation with DFAIT back in the early 1990s and the decision was made that it should be outside of DFAIT, did they give you start-up monies? If so, how much and over what period of time?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: The first year, our budget was $126,000 and the funding has grown since then. We have consistently been funded in different ways by the Canadian government on a project-by-project basis.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Was this funding to do the administrative side of it?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: No, we were funded to assist the United Nations. When I say the United Nations, I mean the United Nations plus other intergovernmental organizations — the Commonwealth, the Francophonie, OSCE, international NGOs. We were funded to respond to the requests from the UN when they were looking for personnel.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Do they continue to given you an annual grant?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: No, it is not a grant. It is a contract, a contribution agreement. That funding ended in April. We fund ourselves in a number of different ways right now, but we also get contracts for creating specialized rosters.
Senator Nancy Ruth: From our government?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: Yes, from the Canadian government. We are also funded to do deployments. We recently sent a second deployment of 20 former police officers to Haiti to work with the UN mission on the ground there. We were contracted to identify them, equip them, arm them, train them and deploy them down to Haiti, and effectively second them to the UN for a year. They are about half way through their mission right now.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Would it be fair to say that the Canadian government funds you to find people to go to places that could not pay a finder's fee?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: Yes, exactly.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Would those agencies that can pay a finder's fee do so?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: Yes. We tend to focus on organizations that are not in a position to pay us a finder's fee. The UN is a good example. For a number of reasons, the UN is not in a position to pay us for the services that we provide to them. They point to us as the model that they hope every country would eventually follow, but they are not in a position to pay for our services. We do that pro bono for the UN. However, until recently that UN recruitment was funded by DFAIT.
Senator Nancy Ruth: What percentage of the contract would you charge as a finder's fee for those groups that can pay?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: Our fees are highly variable.
Senator Nancy Ruth: What would it be between 5 per cent and 30 per cent?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: Every once in a while we are approached by a commercial organization that is looking for someone. For example, there is an American outfit that has a big contract from USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, to deliver projects in Haiti. We charge them a finder's fee.
Ms. Vincent: In that case, it was a flat fee because it was based on recruiting 500 staff to help build the new addition to the UN mission in Sudan. That was a very large recruitment. For a smaller recruitment, it would be smaller. It depends on the NGO and the type of work they are doing.
Senator Nancy Ruth: You are struggling to answer the question, so we will leave it.
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: It is variable. We are sitting on this giant resource. We have 9,000 stellar people and we are trying to find a way to get them out there. If an organization approaches us and we charge too much, they may say, "Do not give us 10 candidates, just give us two.''
Senator Nancy Ruth: You are looking for deals?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: We are trying to strike the right balance, to charge enough to generate income but at the same time maximize the use of this roster of 9,000 people. That is why it is a tough question.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Is there any charge to a person like myself who says, "I have these skills, can you use me?'' If you put me on your roster, is there any charge for a contract that you might give me?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: No.
Senator Nancy Ruth: It is all floated out there?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: Yes.
Senator Nancy Ruth: You saw my face when I opened your package and your literature. I spent a long time in the NGO world, and I am struck by your paramilitary use of language, graphics and the phrase "civilian reserve.'' I find it freakish. That is not a question; that is just my comment.
You say that you do culture and gender sensitivity. Are you doing any of that in Afghanistan and in Kandahar? If so, what are you doing? Is it working? How do you measure it? I would like to know how you measure all your projects or is it the agency that you sub-contract to that does the evaluation? How does all that work?
Ms. Vincent: We have a police and gender adviser in Kabul. She has been there for almost three years. We have seen many major improvements over the years. She is there to facilitate and to foster a gender program within the ministry. She has increased the numbers of women police that have graduated over the past three years. She does recruitment, and she wrote a proposal that generated about $1 million in support from Switzerland for the ministry to fund the recruitment work.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Who is the ministry?
Ms. Vincent: The Ministry of the Interior in Kabul.
She travels out in the region. Recently, in Kandahar she was meeting with CIDA, the provincial reconstruction team and different people there. She also held an international Islamic police woman's conference. It was the first one in the world. They brought in women from Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan and Nepal. They got together to understand better the struggles that Islamic police women have around the world. There will now be an international Islamic police women's association formed.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Who paid for the conference?
Ms. Vincent: That was a combination from the German development agency, GTZ; UNIFEM; and Canada. Actually, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police put in some money. It is an interesting combination. That police and gender adviser is very dedicated.
Senator Nancy Ruth: How does she incorporate something like United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 into her work? Is she able to work it into areas that are not her work?
Ms. Vincent: She is there to provide more security for women and children. That is the major focus of her work. She is examining how, in an Islamic country, one can recruit more women to work with women, children and vulnerable populations. She was instrumental in having family violence units established. The first was done with U.S. funding. One of the first was attached to the police station in Kabul. Women can go in through a separate entrance and make reports regarding family violence. Since the assessment was completed, which was very positive, there are now 13 family violence units. Canada has been instrumental in supporting that.
There are parks that are for women only. She was instrumental in having security put into those parks, but found that there were problems with the women actually doing the security because they were not properly trained. She is now working to get appropriate training for those women. Women who are graduating from the police training in the outside areas have no uniforms; there are uniforms only for men. She helped coordinate with the RCMP to provide uniforms for female police. These are all baby steps to provide greater security for women and children in Afghanistan.
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: We take UN Resolution 1325 very seriously with regard to the people we have on our roster and whom we put forward. One of our female registrants was just selected as the head of human rights in Afghanistan. An example of how we work to advance the presence of women internationally is our internship program. Over the past 10 years, we put some 350 interns in the field, and about 75 per cent were young women. It is not that we consciously discriminate against men.
Senator Nancy Ruth: That is all right. You do not have to be like the universities with their programs.
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: This roster system actually advances Resolution 1325 in a number of ways.
Senator Nancy Ruth: What percentage of the 9,000 you have recruited would be female?
Ms. Vincent: Between 30 per cent and 40 per cent.
Senator Nancy Ruth: That is quite high.
Ms. Vincent: We work very hard at it. I was on the Women, Peace and Security Committee. I was one of the founding members.
There was an NGO working group that was to complement the work of the committee; we worked to try to get Resolution 1325 understood in Canada. It is a very specific resolution that affects the UN. It is directed totally towards the UN and its partners and focuses on gender mainstreaming. We have been trying to recruit more Canadian women, trying to find out what the obstacles are for women to work internationally and then to find out why we cannot get more women interested.
The recent head of human rights and the rule of law in Afghanistan is a woman we have been working with for many years. We submitted her name a year ago and were pleased to hear that she had been selected. We are seeing more women being recruited internationally. It is slow, but it is happening.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Resolution 1325 is not really about mainstreaming. We can have a debate later. I know another senator will deal with the evaluation of projects.
Senator Mitchell: Your core initiative is to be the ultimate international employment agency. That is to say, you place people.
Ms. Vincent: We tell everyone who registers with us that we are not an employment agency. We do not respond to individual needs. We market areas of expertise only in response to UN and international community needs. We go to the community, determine the needs and then find the appropriate person. We do not market individuals.
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: We are more like headhunters.
Senator Mitchell: I have the impression that you initiate projects and respond to requests from CIDA, for example, to staff a project. Once you have found the people, do you undertake to manage putting that project in place or would CIDA manage that project?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: Almost never. Every once in a while we will, but most of the time we do not. For example, the UN has hired a woman in Afghanistan as the senior human rights adviser. She is working directly for the UN. They assess her qualities and hire and fire her as they wish. At other times, when we have deployed people as police experts in Haiti, for example, we have a hand in tracking them, because we hold their contract and we pay them. However, the UN is using those people on a day-to-day basis, so it is up to them to give us feedback on whether these guys are good or to say that they are no good. When that happens, we take them home. We leave it up to the people on the ground to give us the kind of feedback we need to determine whether we have given them the right person as a connection or whether we have hired and seconded the right person.
Senator Mitchell: From what you are saying, it is clear that you would be very interested in the effectiveness and the quality of the people that you have found and placed. Do you evaluate the projects they work on? I will give you an example that arose with a previous witness. We were told that CIDA has funded a maternity ward in a hospital in Kandahar. Yet, there is no evidence of it. Would you by any chance be aware of that particular project? If you put people in to do that project, would you provide some evaluation of it? Are you concerned that people get into projects that are not effective?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: No. That is not our role. We want to hear back as to whether someone was good, bad or indifferent and put that into their record. We do a constant screening of people, but we do not assess the quality of a program on the ground, per se. If it is a UN or a CIDA program, we have to assume that individuals make their own determinations as to whether they want the job. They do an assessment and then vote with their feet. We do not have the expertise to track that.
Ms. Vincent: We assess outcomes, though. We ask that people report to us on the accomplishments, tasks and the final outcome of their project; and it has been positive feedback.
Senator Mitchell: Would you release those reports?
Ms. Vincent: Yes. We make quarterly and yearly reports, and I have a good one that I could send to you.
Senator Mitchell: I would be interested in reading it. Thank you.
Senator Meighen: I have two quick questions. Are there any places, jobs or organizations to whom you will not put forward the names of people? For example, suppose a road contractor in Iraq said that he wanted some ex-police to provide security. What would your response be?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: One of our board members is Warren Allmand. Those of you who know him will understand when I say that he watches with an eagle eye to see with whom we have dealings. Yes, there would be agencies that we would not and do not respond to, and for some other agencies we need to do a bit of due diligence to check them out and decide what is the appropriate response for us. We do not have many resources, so at the end of the day often we have to weigh the requests, perhaps one from the UN and another from the road builder in Afghanistan. The UN has priority, so we give them priority. Quite often, that process sifts out the ne'er-do-wells.
Senator Meighen: Would you respond to a private organization's need for expertise?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: Sometimes we would respond, and they would be paying serious money, to answer your earlier point. We look to them to subsidize what we are doing for the UN.
Senator Meighen: Do you have anyone on the ground in Kandahar?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: No, we do not have anyone in Kandahar, although Drew Gilmore, whom we talked about earlier, is on the ground. We will give you his coordinates.
Senator Meighen: Perhaps we will be there in the foreseeable future.
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: Mr. Gilmore is excellent. He will give you the unvarnished truth. He is a curious character. His organization is for-profit, and he takes more of an NGO approach to life by doing good stuff than certain NGOs that I know. He is doing it from the platform of his own firm.
Senator Meighen: Could you provide the clerk with his coordinates? What relationship, if any, do you have with Canadian Executive Service Organization and with CUSO?
Ms. Vincent: They both come to us and ask us to help them find people.
Senator Meighen: Is it not the other way around?
Ms. Vincent: We went to CESO, but they wanted to charge us and we did not have much money.
Senator Meighen: You do not charge CESO.
Ms. Vincent: No.
Senator Moore: Did CANADEM have any police trainers on the ground in Afghanistan in 2006?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: We have Tonita Murray.
Senator Moore: Was she there in December 2006?
Ms. Vincent: She left at the end of November to go on leave and she went back after that.
Senator Moore: Was there anyone else in place at the time from your organization?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: No, and this is our point. It got off to a fast start in 2002 with this fast-track funding mechanism from the CIDA Peacebuilding Fund, but then it hit the sands. The last time we checked, of our almost 800 police experts, 400 are prepared to go into Afghanistan, but they are not being picked up. We are trying to market them to the Americans and others now by letting them know we have people who are prepared to do stuff. Someone must be willing to pick them up, but for now, the long answer is no.
Senator Moore: That is interesting. This committee was there in December 2006, and we met with RCMP officers who were in charge of the training of Afghans to be policemen. There was no mention of your organization. We heard that the Americans and the Germans were there training the police. One company out of California was spending $5 billion per year to train police. Canada was spending around $2 million, although I forget the exact figure. The training was for a period of several weeks but most of the people left after five weeks. We asked why they would not stay for the full training, and they said they would get the money elsewhere, from a warlord or from the Taliban. Some of them were Taliban, but not strident members. Then again, they could get money from a minister in Kabul who would buy their loyalty.
Are you aware of all of that?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: Yes.
Senator Moore: Were you aware of those things going on?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: Yes.
Senator Moore: This is huge money, and I am surprised by such a company as that.
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: The company is DynCorp International.
Ms. Vincent: DynCorp International is funded by the U.S. government, so there is an issue with taking Canadians. Tonita Murray has written a critical article on police training in Kabul, which I would be happy to share with you. Ms. Murray was head of the Canadian Police College and worked with the Ministry of the Attorney General, so she has a lot of experience. She wrote a critical article on police training in general, and she felt that the international community had failed the Afghan national police force.
Senator Moore: It sounds to me like a story from Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, where the Americans say, "You need training of policemen; it will cost you $5 billion; we will give you the $5 billion; and you pay the company from California to do the work.'' The money goes through and none of it sticks to the Afghan economy.
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: It is a regular occurrence.
Senator Moore: Is it really?
Ms. Vincent: There has been a lot of criticism of DynCorp International from the time they were in Kosovo.
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: This is always the big challenge of doing work in developing countries where you have to bring in experts. I have worked with the UN a number of times. In my last post as the Representative for the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Indonesia, I was very critical of the program that I took over because most of the money was geared to bringing in internationals. I said that there were many Indonesians who could do the job, and I reversed that approach dramatically.
It is always a challenge, and police training is a good example. If you do not have any police capacity in Afghanistan, how do you start — chicken or egg? Who do you bring in? It is very expensive to bring in expatriates, be they Canadians, Americans or Germans. If you do not, who will start the training? You had better get the people who will give the biggest bang for the buck. We work hard to find people who not only were police officers in Canada but know how to carry out capacity-building in a Third World context. That is what we look to identify when anyone asks us for police or any other experts.
Senator Moore: You have 400 people who would be willing to go there to assist in police training, and you cannot get them into the country?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: Not now, and that is the point. If an organization were given the funds to hire any or all of those 400, we have the 400 ready to go.
Senator Moore: What does the government in Kabul do with the several hundred million dollars that it is getting from the World Bank? Could they not use some of that for this?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: You are getting into the Law and Order Trust Fund and other wheels within wheels.
Senator Moore: They are Canadian dollars.
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: Yes. It is a huge challenge and it is risky. I heard your comments to the previous witnesses. There will be failures. We will try things that will not work. If the international community does not have 50 per cent failure in all projects in Afghanistan, then we are not trying very hard. When there are failures we need to acknowledge that we gave it a good shot and then move on to something else.
Senator Moore: Time is moving on. We should be building a track record and improving our chances, and I do not believe that is happening.
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: I have been doing international human rights work for 25 years, and this is very similar. When you are up against it, you say, "Will nothing ever get better?'' However, I do a lot of work with NATO and the Canadian Forces and others on civil military interaction and such things, and things are getting immeasurably better internationally. The kinds of programs they are trying to do in Afghanistan now are light years ahead of where they were ten years ago. We must all recognize that and cut organizations like UNAMA, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, a fair amount of slack. The likelihood of success in Afghanistan is not very good. That does not mean we will not try, but we must realize it may not work, at least not for the first 20 years.
Senator Moore: When we were there last year, we were told it will take anywhere from 20 to 100 years.
Senator Day: Have you done enough work in Afghanistan to make an assessment of whether the United Nations is playing the role it must play? We look at countries that are there under the NATO umbrella, and the development side of this was not the initial main thrust of the NATO contribution. The United Nations sanctioned this. NATO agreed to go in and do the military side of things. The United Nations has to play a role on the development side. Are they doing that?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: You also know the history of NATO. NATO was initially told by the Americans to stay out of the south, that they would handle the south. Of course the Americans turned around and said that they wanted NATO to take over all of Afghanistan. There is an increasing recognition that there is no military solution in Afghanistan, so by definition the UN and other international organizations will have a bigger role.
It is difficult to know how that will play out. We do not have the expertise to comment much more than that. You need to know people who are right in UNAMA and other organizations on the ground who can make those small nuanced decisions as to whether we are going in the right direction. That is probably as good as you will get.
Senator Day: I commend you for the placements you are doing with respect to trying to rebuild civil society. You heard the discussion we had earlier about rebuilding infrastructure, money being transferred and salaries not reaching the policemen. They do not have any uniforms or salary. The police stay for six or seven weeks and they are gone.
Is this generally your view of what is happening, other than the people you are placing who are paid by someone back here? They are okay and they are over there altruistically trying to rebuild civil society, but there has to be work done on physical infrastructure, and that is not being done to the extent we would like to see it. Is that your assessment of what is happening there now?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: We are spending a lot of military money, but we are not putting as many resources into the civilian side of changing Afghanistan, and perhaps there needs to be more balance there.
Senator Day: Does it have to be the same countries, or should there be a broader base of countries putting money into the rebuilding side of things as opposed to the NATO military arm? In addition to the $3 billion that Canada is putting in on the military side, should we have to do the development side as well?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: There is a certain logic in Canada or other countries being there in strength and other countries focusing on different countries. One of the biggest challenges for the Afghans, whether the Afghan government or civil society, is dealing with the plethora of international organizations and individuals that rotate through on a regular basis. They are continually trying to figure out who people are and what they are doing. No sooner do they get to know them than someone else moves in. Cutting it down to a smaller number of countries would not be such a bad thing. To have Canada work only there internationally for the next 20 years might be a nice model. It would never happen, but it might be a nice model.
Senator Day: Does Canada do that bilaterally with Afghanistan or do we do that through the United Nations?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: That happens already. CIDA is increasingly focusing where its aid money will go. The Norwegians, with a bigger aid budget than ours, deal with only eight countries, I believe. Over the years, as we have all got better at this business, we have realized that too many countries in a mission area just confuses things. The cluster approach on humanitarian aid is to consistently identify one organization as the cluster lead on an activity, or to identify one funder as the major funder, or a small consortium of funders, and the others can either not show up or just show up in a token sense. This is happening more and more in mission areas.
Senator Day: If CIDA said it was too dangerous to put people on the ground, you could put people on the ground who are prepared to take those risks and ensure that the money gets put to the use for which it is intended rather than its going to the Ministry of the Interior in Kabul where it disappears. Is that correct?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: Knowing exactly where all the money is going will always be a challenge. You have to trust the Afghans to run their own lives. This is their country, and they have to take responsibility for it. They will make mistakes. We will give them money and there will be corruption. However, there is corruption everywhere, just to greater or lesser degrees. That is not in itself a bad sign. These are mistakes that will occur and we have to move through them.
Senator Day: I would be interested in continuing this discussion, but we have run out of time.
Senator Zimmer: I want to pick up where Senator Moore was heading. You talked about failures. We hear different reports on successes and failures, and I like your motto that if you do not have any failures, you are not trying hard enough.
On the successes and failures of democratic development in Afghanistan, in your opinion what are realistic benchmarks for democratic development there, and are the expectations of the international community too high?
Mr. LaRose-Edwards: I have very low expectations for Afghanistan. I am surprised it has done as well as it has, and I am continually astounded. My goodness, it is actually getting better; things are improving. In a strange sense, I am optimistic about Afghanistan despite all the failures that we see. I have learned from working in international human rights for 27 years that you had better have a long time frame. If you try to assess things on a day-by-day, week-by- week or year-by-year basis, you will be in trouble. You have to assess on a decade-by-decade basis. If we look at Afghanistan in 2002, we see that we have come a long way since then. However, I do not yet know whether it will be a success.
Senator Zimmer: When these things occur, we immediately think that we will have success overnight, and if we do not see it we get anxious. Now that you have explained that success could be further down the road, it becomes more realistic.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. LaRose-Edwards and Ms. Vincent, for appearing here. Yours was a valuable contribution to the committee's studies. We are all wiser for having heard what you said, and we appreciate your taking the time to assist us with our work.
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The committee adjourned.