'The job in Afghanistan is not done'
By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 23, 2010 - 4 Comments
The Senate committee on national security and defence released its report on the Afghanistan mission this morning, including its recommendation for the post-2011 mandate.
If there is a recurring theme to what witnesses have told us, it is that the job in Afghanistan is not done and that Canadian troops should stay in some capacity. With the surge of NATO forces now underway, gains are at last being consolidated instead of lost. That surge of forces is importantly fighting alongside soldiers of the Afghan National Army. Ultimately, this fight against the Taliban is their fight. It will be a key part of Canada’s legacy in Afghanistan that Canadian soldiers helped prepare them for this fight.
Based upon the evidence, testimony, and suggestions we have heard; upon our deliberations; and given our concern for our nation’s standing among its allies, this Committee believes and recommends that Canada‟s important and highly-valued contribution to the development of the leadership, training and mentoring of the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police must continue beyond 2011, and that Parliament should, at its earliest opportunity, give careful consideration to the question of the role of the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan after 2011.
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The Board of Inquiry report (II)
By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, May 8, 2010 at 6:37 PM - 2 Comments
As Rear Admiral P.A. Maddison explained yesterday, there was apparently belief among Canadian Forces that violence was a “cultural norm” among Afghan authorities, but there was no “observation” or “expectation” that detainees were being abused.
Perhaps further to this point, Major General David Fraser testified last November at the Afghanistan committee that, while commander of Task Force Afghanistan in 2006, he received no report of abuse or torture. Speaking to the Board of Inquiry though, Major General Fraser (cited as Comd TFA) did, along with other sources, acknowledge some rather critical assessments of the Afghan National Security Forces. Those observations, found within Part III of the BOI report, are reprinted below. Continue…
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State of the Afghan army, police: not what you'd hope
By John Geddes - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 9:48 AM - 23 Comments
The federal government’s seventh quarterly report to Parliament on Canadian military and development work in Afghanistan was tabled late yesterday without fanfare. These reports have become routine, but through the bland, bureaucratic prose, they still provide a glimpse—often an unsettling one—of the situation in Kandahar.The most pressing question, as the 2011 deadline for bringing Canadian troops home approaches, is what progress is being made toward beefing up the Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP). When Canada pulls out entirely next year, and the U.S. begins a planned drawdown of its forces, the Afghans will have to shoulder more of their own security burden. Yesterday’s report doesn’t inspire confidence.
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The Last Surge
By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 11 Comments
Is Afghanistan ready to take its fate into its own hands? Not yet.
The first thing you notice about the Canadian mission in Afghanistan is how tired people are. At the embassy in Kabul, at the airfield and Provincial Reconstruction Team’s camp in Kandahar, even the military’s staging base Camp Mirage—they’re all going flat out, working 18-hour days, seven days a week.The second thing you notice is that everyone vibrates with a sort of high-strung urgency. A lot has been written in recent months about the military surge, thanks to Barack Obama’s decision to flood Afghanistan with 30,000 additional troops by summertime. But what you don’t get from the papers is a sense of the surge of effort and intensity from everyone involved—military personnel for sure, but also the diplomats, development workers, and civilian advisers who are all pitching in to the whole-of-government project of building a stable and functioning state.
After almost a decade of mucking about in Afghanistan, the next 12 to 18 months will decide the country’s fate. In one of the many sporting metaphors that people naturally slip into, one Canadian military official described it as “the last college try.”
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The pivotal paperwork (III)
By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 15, 2009 at 12:42 PM - 2 Comments
Still pursuing an answer from National Defence for the redacted reference to abuse in that 2006 field report. In the meantime, the Liberals are using that document to question the claim to national security.
“Here we had two versions of the same document written by an unidentified sergeant – but the version redacted by the Conservatives scrubbed out the critical piece of information that Afghan National Police were known to have assaulted detainees ‘in the past,’” said Mr. Dosanjh.
“Stating that the ANP had previously assaulted detainees is not a threat to our national security, so why should we trust the government to redact any documents when it’s clear that what they’re going to delete has nothing to do with national security?”
(Reminder: Tomorrow at 1pm, I’ll be chatting about the year in Parliament.)
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The Commons: John Baird exceeds himself
By Aaron Wherry - Monday, December 7, 2009 at 6:13 PM - 82 Comments
The Scene. The altogether undramatic sentence, taken from the notes of a Canadian soldier serving in Afghanistan, appeared more than halfway through a story in this morning’s paper. “Local ANP elements were in possession of a PUC detained by CDA troops and subsequently transferred to ANP custody.”The ANP, in this case, is the Afghan National Police. PUC is apparently short for person under control. And CDA would seem to be a quick way of saying “Canadian” with fewer consonants and vowels. While in the possession of the ANP, having been detained and transferred by the CDAs, it seems that the handcuffed PUC was beaten bloody with shoes. So much so that the CDAs felt it necessary to remove the PUC from the possession of the ANP, the entire incident apparently corroborated by the sorts of soldiers everyone has made clear they support.
This is problematic for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is this government’s repeated reassurances that “there has never been a single, solitary proven allegation of abuse involving a transferred prisoner from Canadian Forces.”
It was on such grounds that Michael Ignatieff rose at the start of Question Period this afternoon to inquire as to precisely what was going on here. And it was here that John Baird, outdoing even his own standards for rebuttal, seemed to imply that Mr. Ignatieff should cease with his inquiries on this file. Continue…
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The Commons: Afghanistan, now with pictures
By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, March 4, 2009 at 7:00 PM - 12 Comments
The Scene. It was the nice-seeming man from the civil service, briefing reporters before the official announcement by the government’s ministers, who struck the day’s most indisputably hopeful tone. The quarterly progress reports on Canada’s mission in Afghanistan, he noted, now featured colour photographs. Indeed, the fifth page of the latest report includes four pictures.
Perhaps not wanting to seem boastful, the official left unsaid the fact that the package distributed to reporters also included a bookmark.
“One of the many good suggestions from the Manley report was that there should be quarterly reporting, in terms of being able to measure progress, and also the identification of key goals,” Stockwell Day, the minister of international trade, later explained. “And the extensive report that you have before you … is a result of that.”
The minister then moved on to the discussion of Canada’s priority areas. But not before committing to the record one of the great understatements of our present time. “The backdrop for this, of course, is the very serious security situation,” he said. “There’s no question that the insurgency seems to move in cycles. And it’s had a high cycle of late.” Continue…
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Megapundit: Rosie DiManno vs. the U.S. Army
By selley - Monday, June 9, 2008 at 1:58 PM - 0 Comments
WEEKEND ROUNDUP
Must-reads: …Rosie DiManno on female police in Afghanistan, and on American troops’WEEKEND ROUNDUP
Must-reads: Rosie DiManno on female police in Afghanistan, and on American troops’ enemy-making skills; Scott Taylor on Kandahar prison; Daphne Bramham on the children of the FLDS: Lawrence Martin on Liberal incivility; Thomas Walkom on Roy Romanow; Dan Gardner on pesticides and science; Greg Weston on the lost promise of openness and accountability.
Ils accusent
It’s official: the pundits have absolutely nothing good to say about federal politics. And away we go…If anyone’s going to investigate the unlikely prospect that Maxime Bernier’s left-behind documents represented a security breach, Lysiane Gagnon suggests it be the foreign affairs department, and if necessary CSIS and the RCMP. Committee hearings would be “a joke,” she writes in The Globe and Mail—a “partisan circus,” just like they’ve been at the Schreibergelder hearings. If MPs are really this desperate for something to occupy their well-paid time, she suggests they discuss military equipment, Omar Khadr and the private members bills “that many fear might eventually lead to the criminalization of abortion.”
The Toronto Star‘s Chantal Hébert says Stephen Harper’s “crafting [of] a bipartisan consensus on the future of the Canadian mission in Kandahar” was a rare snapshot of successful “Conservative statesmanship”—a triumph of “finesse” over his manifest preference for “brute strength.” This recollection seems a tad airbrushed to us, but she’s quite right that the government’s been pretty much crap since then, if not before. The positive contributions of Jim Prentice and David Emerson in cabinet are routinely undone by Peter Van Loan’s “overly partisan tone,” she argues, and it’s needlessly damaging the government’s reputation.
