Afghanistan's Background	3 minutes	Windows Media l QuickTime
Provincial Reconstruction Teams	5 minutes	Windows Media l QuickTime
Heavy Weapons Cantonment	6 minutes	Windows Media l QuickTime
Demining	4 minutes	Windows Media l QuickTime

(Video players are available here: QuickTime | Windows Media)

Transcript:

Afghanistan's Background

One of the secrets of Canada's success in Afghanistan to date is that our engagement, our commitments, have tended to be relentlessly relevant to the agenda at hand. When we were pursuing the Bonn agenda, the international road map for re-establishing Afghan institutions and central authority in the country, the focus was clearly on Kabul. We had to recreate ministries where there were none, ensure that the country hosted the Loya Jirga to fashion a new constitution -- Canadians were central to that -- and ensure that the interim president, President Karzai, competed in an election that met international standards, which he obviously did with great gusto and great success. But again the International Security Assistance Force and the international community here centrally in Kabul played a strong supporting role.

With parliamentary elections taking place in September (2005), the Bonn agenda starts to look complete. The international community is going to remain engaged here under UN leadership, with NATO and so forth, for years to come. And my own view is that the ultimate test of our willingness to put Afghanistan on a new path toward stability and prosperity is about to happen now in the post-Bonn era, when we will be challenged to maintain commitments beyond an emergency period of intervention, beyond an immediate post-conflict period of intervention.

We have been good around the world at the first few years after conflicts end; we haven't been as good necessarily at maintaining our commitment. But Canada is showing that it, for one, is willing to stay the course. It is willing to adjust, refashion, restructure its commitments to ensure that they are relevant, and to maintain them at quite a high level. And that's what Kandahar is about.

Provincial Reconstruction Teams

Former Ambassador Chris Alexander
Foreign Affairs Canada (FAC)
Provincial reconstruction teams did not exist in 2002 when we were last in Kandahar and only started to come into existence in 2003 and 2004. Today the PRT network is at the core of what international military forces are doing in

Afghanistan

. Combat is no longer the name of the game. Yes, some still takes place. Indeed, this spring people have been somewhat dismayed by the strength of the insurgency even after presidential elections had taken place. But that does not take away from the fact that it is still a low-level insurgency. Every one of these groups, once they are detected, faces very long odds of survival and they are unable to disrupt the activities in the Afghan government. We saw they were unable to disrupt the elections in any significant way.

The focus is on stabilization activities. Across the country, there are 21 provincial reconstruction teams covering 34 provinces-therefore in two out of three provinces-under ISAF and coalition command.

Canada

will be taking over command of one of those, one of the most important of them, from the

U.S.

, so initially under coalition command, with a view to preparing the way for assumption of command of three quarters of the country by NATO sometime in 2006.

Lt. Col. Jim Faldwell
Department of National Defence and Canadian Forces (DND/CF)
When we establish the PRT in August 2005, they will actually work for the Americans, who control the region down south, who respond to Combined Forces Command

Afghanistan

-the U.S.-led coalition force "war against terror." Then as ISAF and NATO transition and take control of the area to the south in February 2006, then

Canada

will step up and provide the regional command headquarters for that, as well as providing potentially a task force of up to 750 in addition to the PRT of 250.

We will have the element from CIDA and Foreign Affairs embedded right into the PRT, so it is completely a 3D team that we are taking down to Kandahar. Right now, because of the security situation, the military will sort of lead it with the biggest element, but realistically we do see in the future that the military requirement will lessen and the public and private sector reform portion will build.

Yannick Hingorani
Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)
We are also funding large programs like the Afghan Stabilization Program, which is a vehicle by which the government seeks to extend its administrative presence into the provinces by building up the government infrastructure, government buildings and courthouses, training civil servants and building their capacity to develop and design provincial development plans down the road. This is a huge program for CIDA. We have put in $12 million already, so it is quite significant. We will complement the work of the Canadian provincial reconstruction team, due to establish itself in Kandahar in August, the goals of which will be to stabilize the province and promote a level of stability that will allow development actors to come into Kandahar and start to operate.

Heavy Weapons Cantonment

Afghanistan is still an unstable country. It is armed to the teeth: one of the biggest arsenals of weapons and munitions anywhere in the world still. And when the embassy opened here, military power was to a very large extend not in the hands of the new nascent government, but still in the hands of an army that had fought the Taliban but that had been put together on a pretty ad hoc basis, with commanders who had made their names in the Jihad, in the civil war, running the shop. These people are conventionally known as warlords; their rule isn't really as glorious even as that word sounds, but they were calling the shots. One of our challenges as Canadians, when we hit the ground, was to try to give the whole idea of demilitarizing

Afghanistan

some traction. It was clear armed conflict was not going to break out again. A low level of insurgency was continuing, the Taliban continuing to infiltrate parts of the country and attack any targets they could find, but large-scale war was over. The question was: how were we going to create space for civilian institutions and for the economic life that so badly needs to be restored in this country?

This story has been told before, but it is worth repeating. In August 2003, one of the most obvious shortcomings of the situation at the time that struck Andrew Leslie, Deputy Commander of ISAF, a Canadian and two-star General, as well as those of us in the embassy and other Canadians who were looking at the situation with fresh eyes, was that there were hundreds of tanks, artillery systems and other heavy weapons in Kabul that were not under state control. They were literally sitting in garrisons loyal to factions often determined by ethnic affiliation, led by commanders who were in one way or another loyal to these warlords. As long as the heavy weapons remained in their hands, the leverage, the influence, the impunity of these warlords would remain large.

We raised the issue: shouldn't some sort of cantonment take place? And the initial answer came back from friends and allies who have been here longer than we have. They thought "it might be a little ambitious for the time being," "not sure if the traffic can bear it," it "might be destabilizing," and "these people are quite attached to their weapons after all." We had to go back to the argument several times over, and to be fair there were quite a few people in town who liked the idea and wished they had thought of it themselves.

It took weeks and months to build a small international consensus that this was a policy initiative to pursue. And then it took until the end of the year to get the first heavy weapons moving. But when it happened, it was highly symbolic. It helped to put flesh onto the bone of this idea of demilitarization-that people could and should actually be asked to disarm after 25 years of war. And that by shrinking the space occupied by military forces and by unifying the command under the state instead of a diffuse array of commanders, you could rebalance power inside the country and give the economy, social sectors, civilian sectors of life a shot in the arm.

Eighteen months later, 9,000 heavy weapons around the country are all in cantonment. It took the better part of six months to do the job in Kabul. We thought it would be a couple of hundred weapons systems; it ended up being well over a thousand. On the basis of the momentum of success generated here in Kabul, the international community-and the Afghans as well-fell over itself to extend the concept to the whole country. We stuck with the program, continued to fund it, continued to champion it whenever we could and provide a policy and the pulse required. But in the end it was done nationally, not by ISAF and not with a credible threat of military force, but by Afghans with support from the UN. That showed how quickly this idea gained credibility as people started to realize how much sense it made. And it is a huge achievement. It is one of the headline achievements for the whole demilitarization agenda in this country.

Demining

Heavy weapons cantonment is one issue where Canada led and put its assets on the ground here to probably the best use that they could possibly be put. It's a textbook case. But the broader challenge in a country like this is demilitarization, and heavy weapons are just one component of a very long agenda in Afghanistan. The other area where we lead and have led in some respects since even before the Taliban fell is the area of mine action. I would argue that this is the most mine-affected country in the world. Some will say Angola and Cambodia, but in absolute terms, numbers of mines on the ground, no one will be able to cite an example that is more egregious than Afghanistan.

And it is not just mine-affected; it is a place where people die because of minefields and are injured because of minefields every day. The presence of mines represents a huge constraint to the recovery of the country because the minefields tend to be clustered around settled areas; the mines tend to affect arable fertile land, which is a tiny percentage of the country's overall territory. So there is real urgency with regard to dealing with mines in this country and the consequences of so many years of suffering. This is the country in the world that probably objectively has the largest number of people injured by mines using prostheses, having lost limbs, having been handicapped, debilitated, in one way or another, by mines. And dealing with that community is a huge challenge going forward.

So there is room for innovation and for investment in Afghanistan in all of those areas. Canada has been trying to galvanize the international effort in this field from the very beginning-and with a lot of success. The 7,000 people who work full-time to take mines out of the ground in this country represent the largest group anywhere in the world. They have made a huge amount of progress: between a third and a half of the mine-affected ground in this country has been remediated in one way or another. But these things are hard to measure, and new minefields are found every day because charting these things is not a perfect art. At the current pace, the goal of a mine-free Afghanistan will only be achieved by 2012.