Time for more public service backbone

When it comes to Afghanistan, Canada's problems began with the decision in 2005 to redeploy our soldiers to the Pashtun province of Kandahar, where the Taliban was regrouping for a fight.

The danger was not apparent when the new and charismatic chief of the defence staff, then general Rick Hillier, was on his knees on the carpet at 24 Sussex Drive with magic markers and a spreadsheet.

He was there to reassure then prime minister Paul Martin and his awed advisers that his forces could pull it off — and have enough left over for a proposed peacekeeping campaign in Sudan, which was closer to Martin's heart. (More pertinent: a Sudan mission was also closer to the heart of renegade MP David Kilgour, whose vote Martin needed to stay in office.)

I'm convinced Martin didn't take us to Kandahar in 2006 to compensate for Canada not going to Iraq.

There were vital NATO interests in stabilizing Afghanistan and Pakistan next door. And by then, the Iraq occupation was in tatters and losing support in the U.S. itself.

But by the time of the Kandahar deployment, it was accepted that military force alone couldn't defeat the Taliban, even as Hillier described them as "scumbags."

The military campaign became tied up with the long-term needs to win hearts and minds, and to help Afghans build up the governing capacity to fend for themselves.

But the mere fact of occupation became fuel for the insurgents, who have steadily expanded the territory they control, at least by night.

Rain on the parade

Hillier was a great team leader, if not much of a policy strategist.

Railing — once Martin was replaced by Stephen Harper — against the "decade of darkness" that Martin's successive budget cuts had wrought on defence spending, Hillier welcomed the chance to re-build hard combat capability after 50 years of UN peacekeeping and pacification.

In Ottawa, until an oversight unit was created in 2006 in the Privy Council Office, a pumped-up National Defence HQ ran the robust Afghan show.

In Kabul, DND advisers improbably tutored the Hamid Karzai government on how to run those parts of the country that its often corrupt officials more or less controlled.

Meanwhile, on the ground in Kandahar, Canada's military units continued to perform valiantly, even when losses began to accumulate from Taliban bombs.

The result, though, was that Afghanistan became the sum total of Canadian foreign policy.

For Conservative Stephen Harper, it was what he and his Canada stood for. Embassies in Europe were told that 90 per cent of their message to foreign audiences was to be on our role in Afghanistan.

Who was going to rain on this proud parade? Enter Richard Colvin.

No surprise

It should have surprised no one that Afghan security units were torturing prisoners brought to them by NATO units.

In 2005, Hillier had signed a transfer of prisoners agreement after photos emerged of Canadian forces turning detainees over to U.S. forces, which was politically unpalatable in Canada.

That first agreement, prior to the Kandahar deployment, had no provision for monitoring prisoners' treatment after they were turned over.

When diplomat and intelligence officer Richard Colvin was in Kandahar in 2006-07, he set for himself the task of protecting the integrity of the expanded prisoner-taking our deployment had produced.

He interviewed prisoners, local officials and the Red Cross delegates, who complained the Canadian military weren't returning calls or reporting prisoners in a timely way, hardly surprising given Hillier's disdain for multilateral agencies, which comes out so clearly in his new book.

Hillier calls Colvin's reports "baying at the moon." Almost anybody else would call them professional advice in support of international humanitarian law, requiring verification and remedial action as necessary.

Instead, Colvin has testified, he was told by superiors at Foreign Affairs to shut up.

Bad blood

This sounds more awful than it may have been and probably had more to do with fraught relations in Ottawa at the time between National Defence and Foreign Affairs.

At the working level, Colvin was known for strong positions that rubbed DND the wrong way and his Foreign Affairs managers had been told to massage the sore parts of the relationship.

From the start of our mission, Foreign Affairs officials pressed DND on the need to examine transfer practices because of allegations of torture. And, over time, DND did so, modifying transfer agreements and even interrupting detainee transfers when doubts re-emerged.

That is why these denials by ministers and generals about there being "no solid facts" about torture are so ludicrous.

The charges by credible agencies, and by journalist Graeme Smith of the Globe and Mail, of torture going on at Afghanistan's National Directorate for Security, which Canada hand-picked as its incarceration partner (because of its mandate for intelligence rather than policing) were widespread and required serious attention.

They certainly require more than the vicious attacks denigrating Colvin today by Conservative ministers.

The personal smears of Colvin as a "suspect" source dishing out "Taliban propaganda" are taken from the Conservative's partisan playbook of framing an opponent in the public mind with a negative and untrustworthy image.

Whatever you think of it in the partisan arena, taking the technique to a mere civil servant such as Colvin is overkill and can only further poison the mistrust that seems to exist between this government and much of its bureaucracy.

Think again

Colvin is not a "whistle-blower." He was subpoenaed to answer questions before a parliamentary committee.

The Department of Justice tried to stop him testifying, even threatening him with prosecution under the Canada Evidence Act. That was despite the protection offered him under the Conservative's own Accountability Act, whose meanings are still being worked out.

For Canadians who thought the Department of Justice lawyers represented them and their rights, think again.

They are legal advocates of the government and their principal preoccupation is to protect the government from liability. This tendency didn't start with this Conservative administration, though it may have deepened.

But there is a thin line between legal liability and political liability.

I can't imagine former deputy ministers of defence, people such as Bob Fowler or Louise Frechette, not telling someone like Peter MacKay in forceful terms not to smear Colvin. As Joe Clark would have put it, "That's not who we are."

Which brings me to the crux of the matter: the absence of officials willing to speak truth to power.

Today's deputy ministers know they are only tolerated as long as they execute in the spirit of competent obedience. This government doesn't want their advice. Purveyors of bad news are neither trusted nor promoted.

That is how Finance Minister Jim Flaherty could give such an absurdly off-reality economic update in November.

That is how the brand new Chief of Defence Staff, Gen. Walter Natynczyk could give a first-visit-to-Afghanistan assessment so rosy that the eyes of anyone conversant with the facts rolled out of their sockets?

But in keeping their heads down (except for Colvin), the battered public service helps to make Canadians the losers.

Richard Colvin has raised issues about the recent past that deserve airing. If paper trails show that something went wrong, it's likely to be because there was too much willingness to say only what the boss wanted to hear.

If there's any future benefit from this sad story, it may be that other civil servants will re-discover their backbones and re-validate the notion that the public service is a public safeguard as well as a tool of government.