Globe and Mail: Some Canadians wish they had chosen Herat instead of Kandahar for PRT

Ex-minister denies Martin to blame for Kandahar mission
ALAN FREEMAN AND MICHAEL VALPY
From Tuesday’s Globe and Mail
October 16, 2007 at 4:10 AM EDT

OTTAWA and TORONTO — Bill Graham denied yesterday that indecisiveness by former prime minister Paul Martin led to Canada deploying troops in Afghanistan’s bloody Kandahar province, but he conceded that lengthy discussions within the government meant other NATO partners succeeded in being posted to less dangerous parts of the country.

Mr. Graham, foreign affairs minister and later defence minister, refused to take sides in the dispute touched off by former prime minister Jean Chrétien, who accused his successor Mr. Martin of putting the lives of Canadian soldiers in danger by taking too long to decide where the troops should be positioned in 2004-2005.

Mr. Graham pointed out that it was Mr. Chrétien himself who committed Canadian troops to Kabul and committed soldiers through NATO to the support and rebuilding of Afghanistan.

But he also said he believed Mr. Chrétien would not have agreed to send troops to Kandahar if he had remained prime minister. “Mr. Chrétien was very careful that way.”
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In the second volume of his memoirs appearing over the weekend, Mr. Chrétien said that because Mr. Martin took so long to make a decision, Canadian troops wound up being sent south to fight the Taliban “in the killing fields around Kandahar.”

Mr. Graham said in an interview: “I wouldn’t describe it as dithering. There was certainly a lot of discussions that went on at the lower levels about where Canada should be committed for a PRT [provincial reconstruction team to assist in rebuilding Afghanistan].

“And you can make the case for saying that because it took so long other people took other places that were more attractive from a security perspective and therefore there were fewer choices available when it came time for Canada to say yes.”

Kenneth Calder, at the time the assistant deputy minister of defence for policy, who is now retired, put the case more strongly, saying in an interview yesterday that there was no delay in decision-making either by Mr. Martin or defence and foreign affairs officials.

The issue, he said, moved forward rapidly.

Mr. Graham said the PRT choice at the end was between Herat in the western part of Afghanistan, where Canada would have served with Italy, and Kandahar province in the south.

Kandahar has showed itself to be much bloodier than Herat, but Mr. Graham said that was not the way it looked when the decision was taken in the spring of 2005.

“Kandahar didn’t have anywhere near the violence it does today,” he said, noting that “somebody had to be in the south.”

Nonetheless, the various accounts of what lay behind the Kandahar deployment pose major questions.

Mr. Chrétien in his memoirs writes that what led to troops being sent to Kandahar was Mr. Martin taking too long to make up his mind about whether Canada should extend its term with the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) positioned in Kabul and its environs.

Yet the book The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar, co-authored by University of Toronto scholar Janice Gross Stein and former top Liberal aide Eugene Lang, makes clear that Canada was only committed to ISAF for one year ending in the summer of 2004, a decision made when Mr. Chrétien was prime minister.

Prof. Stein, director of the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies, said in an interview yesterday that at no time was a significant extension of Canada’s commitment to ISAF under consideration.

Moreover, after Mr. Martin became prime minister in December of 2003, ISAF was being absorbed into NATO with Canada’s support.

The second question is how Mr. Martin could not have known for a whole year that his government’s delay in deciding where to locate its PRT was inevitably leading to Canadian troops being sent to Kandahar.

Prof. Stein says the issue of committing combat troops was not on the agenda during the year that officials in the departments of Foreign Affairs and Defence debated where to put the PRT (although one senior defence official says it was always on the agenda). And the location of a PRT was not high on anyone’s priority list – either for officials dealing with the Afghanistan file (there were far more important issues, such as bringing NATO into the country) or for the prime minister’s team preoccupied, among other things, with the Quebec sponsorship scandal.

The issue of combat troops in Kandahar went to the prime minister for decision only after General Rick Hillier became Chief of the Defence Staff in February, 2005, and recommended a Canadian commitment to Afghanistan much broader than a PRT.

He placed his proposal before Mr. Martin in March and the prime minister gave his approval in May.

Mr. Graham said Gen. Hillier was a keen backer of the Kandahar deployment, contingent on the Canadians being accompanied into the south by the British and the Dutch, who now serve in neighbouring provinces.

He also said that Afghan President Hamid Karzai had been pressing for a broader NATO presence in the south that was not simply American.