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Five reasons David Cameron’s coalition government is not a harbinger for Canada

There has been considerable discussion about what British coalition government means for Canadian politics. Most points to it laying the procedural and ideological precedent for a future coalition government here. While the process may indeed now be more palpable to Canadians, there are at least five reasons why we are unlikely see a similar parliamentary outcome.

1. The New Democrats are not the Liberal Democrats, rather they are more like a relatively unsuccessful Labour Party, one still encumbered by a version of Labour’s Clause Four. When Tony Blair took over, he aggressively signalled his reform agenda by immediately repealing the clause in the party’s constitution that linked them to both the union movement and to a socialist agenda. A similar break has not, and is unlikely to, occur in the NDP. As long as New Democrats remain at their core an anti-liberal party, it is unlikely they will be able to merge with either the Liberal Party or the Conservative Party.

2. The Green Party is the closest thing we have to the Liberal Democrats. Like Nick Clegg’s Lib-Dems, Elizabeth May’s Greens pull policies from across the political spectrum and both are fiscally liberal and socially progressive. However, unless we see electoral reform (allowing the Greens a number of seats proportional to their popular vote), or the Green Party radically alters its electoral strategy (perhaps by ceasing to run candidates in every riding), then they remain highly unlikely to gain the number MPs necessary to hold the balance of power.

3. Stephen Harper is not David Cameron, and the CPC has little in common with the current iteration of the British Tories. Part of what made the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition possible was that Mr. Cameron ran on a quite radical conservative platform. Drawing heavily on the civic communitarian red toryism of Philip Blond, he assuaged Thatcherite economics for what he called “The Big Society.” While voters remained confused by what precisely this entailed, which was part of the reason he fell short of a majority, Mr. Cameron’s deviation from dogmatic free-market conservatism laid the groundwork for the possibility of negotiating with the Lib-Dems. Mr. Harper has of course done no such thing, and as long as the Reform Party wing wields control of the Conservative Party, such a fundamental ideological shift remains highly unlikely.

4. Perhaps the closest equivalent to the British coalition government would be if a liberal faction of the Liberal Party broke off and merged with a re-constituted Progressive Conservative party. This merger, likely to include many Greens, would form a strong fiscally and socially liberal alliance, and would allow for the Reform Party and the NDP to remain true to their ideological pedigrees – a fiscally and socially conservative party, and a socialist democratic party respectively. As long as both the LPC and the CPC still hold hopes (however delusional) of forming a majority government, the odds of such a reconfiguration are nil.

5. Possibly the main lesson of the British coalition is procedural. Brits have once again shown Canadians that they take parliamentary democracy seriously. There was no talk of coalitions with socialists and separatists, Gordon Brown stepped aside with dignity, Mr. Cameron and Mr. Clegg authored an incredibly thorough agreement that has a legitimate chance of lasting, and the media overall treated the historic events with substance rather than gamesmanship. In short, they were adults.

While the possibility of coalitions governments should at least be part of the Canadian political discourse, unless we see significant electoral reform or a radical reconfiguration of the ideological spectrum and parties that inhabit it, then minorities remain the far more likely outcome.

UPDATE:

6. The Bloc. Despite the fact that the CPC once flirted with a coalition with the Bloc, the tenor of the ‘deal with the separatists’ rhetoric in the 2008 coalition talks makes it hard to imagine anyone entertaining even a voting agreement with them, let alone a coalition government. This of course makes a Liberal-NDP agreement even more unlikely. It is worth noting that only having three main parties made the UK coalition much more manageable, for both negotiators, and the public.

1. Gordon Brown is out, and formal Lib-Lab talks have begun. This was obviously the only choice Brown had. And it stems from the really tough spot that Nick Clegg was initially in. He had to choose between siding with a winner who represented change, but getting no electoral reform, and siding with a loser and getting electoral reform. By forcing Brown out, he can at least argue that he got electoral reform and forced change on the Labour party. This is far from a certain outcome, but Brown’s departure makes it possible.

2. Rumours are that David Cameron has offered Clegg a referendum on alternative voting, but not on single transferable vote. AV is, of course, not proportional representation, but it would benefit the Lib Dems electorally, as they moved from approximately 170 second-place finishes to 240 in this election. I have not seen a calculation of their projected seat count under both systems, but I presume it would be higher using STV. It is, however, unclear whether the Lib Dem base would accept AV. And for reform advocates, is it really wise to have a referendum on a system that none of the parties want or find ideal? Clegg would be wise to pay heed to the B.C. and Ontario experiences with electoral reform referendums in which the proposed changes were voted down. One lesson is you need committed political buy-in to convince people to shift from the status quo. It is not clear whether that exists in the U.K., particularly with regard to AV.

The problem for Cameron of course, is that he simply cannot offer STV. As one Conservative minister reportedly said this morning, “I want to help David. And, to be frank, I want to be a minister even more. But I just can’t live with proportional representation. My seat would be torn up. I could lose my job. And the party would split. It’s a concession too far.” It is unclear whether Cameron can get caucus support for the house vote needed to hold a referendum on either reform, but certainly not STV.

3. It is important to remember that Cameron and Clegg are both more centrist than their respective parties. I’m sure this in part explains what happened this weekend. They may have hammered out the framework of a deal between the two of them, but when they took it to their caucuses on Sunday, the political realities pushed back. Clegg had no choice but to play the Labour card in order to explore the possibility of getting the STV referendum that his caucus and base see as paramount.

4. If a Lib-Lab coalition emerges under a new Labour leader (likely David Miliband or Alan Johnson), it will be the second time in a row that the U.K. will have an appointed Prime Minister. Cameron will have a field day with this, and I bet that Miliband in particular is wary of jumping in now.

5. Which brings up the reality that there are distinct advantages for both the Conservatives and Labour to not hold power at this moment. For Cameron, he could allow a disjointed Lib-Lab-Others coalition to emerge, force them to wear the devastating emergency budget that is inevitable, and then go for a majority in a year or so. For Labour, they could have a leadership race in the fall, allowing time for Miliband to prep the party and manifesto to go up against Cameron after one to two years of deep spending cuts, which, while inevitable, happen to fit nicely into an anti-Thatcherite Labour platform.

No doubt these thoughts will all be irrelevant by dinner. It’s certainly fun to watch though.

Oped is here, and below.

LEARNING FROM BRITAIN’S THREE GREAT DEBATES

After last night’s third and final debate, there is now no doubt that televised leaders’ debates have proven their value to the British electorate. Snappy, substantive and high-stakes, they have made for great television.

By elevating a third party, and shining light on Prime Minister Gordon Brown, they have provided a vital character analysis of the prospective leaders–a prolonged stress test that you simply don’t get in press conferences and media scrums. As the PM said in his closing remarks, “these debates are the answer to everyone who says that politics doesn’t matter.”

However, we should remember that the very holding of the debates was a matter of happenstance. The United Kingdom, like Canada, has left all aspects of debate planning to the will of the main political parties. As such, these first ever British debates occurred only because the incumbent leader, Brown, was looking for a political game-changer. Going into the election, Brown was down in the polls. He needed a way to restore the electorate’s rattled faith in politics following the MP spending scandal.

Once Brown endorsed the debates, 12 representatives (two from each of the parties and networks) spent four months negotiating, in private, all of the details — a process described by one participant as “mind-numbingly detailed.” Yet the results were a success.

Why leave the negotiation of future debates, including whether to have them at all, to the whim of the party and leader who is ahead in the polls at election time? After the success of the UK debates, Canadians must ask themselves the very same question.

Unlike the U.K., we have a history of election debates. However, they have been, almost without exception, predictable and dull. Our debates are stultifying because the negotiating process surrounding the planning occurs only once an election has been called, and because the party ahead in the polls wants, and gets, the safest (i. e., most boring) format, and generally nixes the holding of multiple debates.

How would we design an election debate process that put the interests of the electorate ahead of the parties’ preferences? One way to accomplish this would be the establishment of an independent election debate commission.

Having reviewed relevant international comparisons, we believe the guiding principles of such a commission must be independence and transparency. This means, first and foremost, that it must operate as an independent charitable civic institution, rather than either a part of Elections Canada or a new government bureaucracy. This would look much like the League of Women’s Voters, which independently ran the U.S. presidential debates until they were co-opted by the political parties.

Planning of the debates would occur between elections, with the commission transparently negotiating the rules using the goal of a substantive policy debate as the primary interest. Models would draw on international best practices, and would likely include a range of debates, held throughout the campaign, on various policy issues.

Money to fund the debates would be raised privately through charitable contributions, releasing the networks and their shareholders from a not inconsiderable financial burden.

We expect that there will be intense pressure for political parties to participate in debates organized by an independent entity for the public good, which enjoys widespread public support.

Such a model would also relieve the TV networks from the uncomfortable position of having to negotiate with the squabbling political parties they are supposed to be covering impartially, and which regulate them once they form government.

If we want debates in Canada that can rival, in style and substance, their new U.K. counterparts, then we need a new model for their planning and execution. All it will take is a genuine citizens’ movement to reclaim Canada’s election debates so they serve the long-term public good as opposed to the short-term interests of our would-be leaders.

- Rudyard Griffiths and Taylor Owen are currently working on an initiative to reform the Canadian televised election debates

LET THE DEBATE BEGIN

Last night, the UK held its first ever televised election debate. Much like the British Question Time puts our equivalent to shame, so too did yesterday’s exchange.

The first of three debates between David Cameron, Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg — leaders, respectively, of Britain’s Conservatives, Labour Party and Liberal Democrats — was on domestic affairs. The second and third will be on the economy and international relations. Drilling down into a single topic allowed for a much more substantive debate than Canada’s one-off events.

The format agreed upon by the leaders encouraged, in the best British parliamentary traditions, aggressive questioning, substantive policy discussion, and very fast passed exchanges.

In contrast, Canadian election debates, despite being held since 1968, are seriously flawed in virtually all aspects - from planning, to format, to distribution, to ad hoc decisions as to who is included.

For starters, our federal debates are decisively not transparent. The debate details are negotiated between the representatives of five networks (under the rubric of the ominous sounding ‘Broadcasters Consortium’), and unelected representatives from each of the major federal parties. These closed-door negotiations encompasses all aspects of the debate, including whether to have a debate at all - in effect giving a veto to any one of the political parties (usually the one leading in the polls).

Second, this flawed negotiation process, unsurprisingly, creates a flawed debate format.

Robert Auer called the infamous 1960 US election debate between Kennedy and Nixon “a double public press conference for simultaneous interviewing.” This is of course the ideal outcome for a politician, and precisely what you get when they make the rules.

Why, for example, do we typically have only one traditional, press conference-style leaders debate (per official language), meant to cover all policy issues? The result is that no matter how the question is formed, a debater can revert to that issue’s talking points. Why not have a range of debates, each on a different issue — as in Britain this year?

But it is not only the parties which are to blame. The role of journalist as moderator also has to be considered. Jeff Greenfield argues that “the dominance of panels by journalists means that there are sharp limits to the degree of aggressiveness you can expect.”

Third, the sole medium used to disseminate the debates - television - is not in and of itself a sufficient way of stimulating public engagement.

If the desired goal of an election debate is public participation, it is retrograde to limit debates to a single live viewing on one medium. The distribution of debate content should be dramatically opened up by moving them online. In addition to allowing many more people to both watch and participate in the debates, this will also serve to democratize the commentary process, which research shows is often more influential than the debate itself.

Fourth, the considerable financial costs of holding the debates are born solely by the broadcasters and their shareholders. The 1997 debates cost $275,000 to produce, plus over $3,000,000 in lost advertising.

Because of this, there have, been elections where the political parties wanted more debates, but the broadcasters refused. If we consider debates to be an important part of the electoral system, it is strange that they are the only aspect not covered by electoral spending laws or by the public financing system.

Finally, language has been a thorny issues throughout the history of Canadian election debates. While the first debate in 1968 was simultaneously translated, we have since moved to having separate French and English debates. In 1993 and 1997 the unilingual Preston Manning argued for a return to simultaneous translation, but the networks argued that it slowed down the debate, made it longer, and less interesting to viewers.

The result is that the French version invariably becomes the “Quebec debate.” Despite network objections, there is absolutely no reason why debates cannot be simultaneously translated, allowing for policy issues to be spread over several debates. (If an aspiring Prime Minister chooses not to speak in both official languages, that’s their headache.)

Despite these flaws, election debates are worth reforming. Well executed, they serve to educate the electorate, provide a measure of accountability, are a critical public testing for candidates seeking our highest office, and in a singularly unique way, build public enthusiasm for elections.

But our election debate system needs wholesale reform.

This reform will not be driven by captive TV networks and self-interested political parties who together have concocted a string of debates that have demonstrably failed the very electorate they purport to inform.

Election debates are for the voters, not the politicians.

Perhaps after seeing the Brits outshine us in the sophistication of their public discourse, Canada will democratize our election debates and thereby elevate the tenor and substance of federal elections.

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Rudyard Griffiths and Taylor Owen are currently working on an initiative to organize a series of “critics” debates for the coming federal election.

The use of new media, directly integrated into the conference was one of the best i have ever seen. A real accomplishment. Ignatieff was blown away that people were asking questions live to panelists from Nunavut and Labrador. And he was right to be. This is a huge accomplishment for the web team, who have fought to get the freedom, flexibility and independence they need to engage properly in the new media world. After this conference, they have earned the space they need. Congrats go to my friend Marc Gendron, who leads the team.

Some of the panels were very good. The pensions session in particular was serious and presented a real range of diverse options. For the most part the Davos style worked very well. The buzz in the room was quite positive. If the Liberal party emerges from the conference with a clear sense that the health care status quo will bankrupt the provinces, and that the demographic shift has massive economy-wide implications (both of which were repeated over and over), then this is a positive on the policy front.

On the more critical side, I would have three comments.

First, the speakers were dominated by usual suspects. While some were great (Fortin, Dodge, Fowler and Stein in particular), others felt tired, and as if the party was looking back rather than forward. This could have been an ideal place to give voice to a new generation of policy thinkers - those the Liberal party will need to help them develop a 21st century agenda.

Second, the speakers generally outlined problems, rather than solutions. In the opening scene setting session, this was useful. Fortin’s powerful demographic prognosis was the bitter pill necessary to frame a serious conference. The subsequent thematic panels, however, would have been more effective had each speaker been asked for an innovative policy idea. These ideas could have then focused the discussion and provided focal points for post conference planning. What’s more, asking each speaker for innovative, out of the box ideas, could have identified policies and ideological perspectives that should be brought into the mainstream discourse. This is precisely what Cameron is doing in the UK - who in one year, has brought Philip Blond’s big society ideas from radical niche policy to a central pillar of his manifesto. In so doing, he is re-aligning the British political spectrum - exactly, in my opinion, what Ignatieff needs to do.

Third, while many friends were there and it was a lot of fun, the audience was the wrong demographic. They were overwhelmingly Liberal partisans, mostly from 1990s governments, a vast majority older male. This is undoubtedly due to the significant entrance fee, and the fact the payment had to be made to the party. The result is there was a feeling of reunion, rather than rejuvenation. Had the audience been more diverse - ideologically, professionally and demographically - then the conference could have legitimately claimed to be a non-partisan event. As Andrew Potter wryly called out in his scathing column on the media’s treatment of the conference, the partisanship of the audience became overwhelmingly clear during Ignatieff’s closing speech. The speech to me got the tone of the event wrong. It’s campaign style, and the drumbeat standing ovations from the crowd, surely made the few non-partisans present uncomfortable.

In the end, when the conference planning was moved into the OLO, I think a conscious decision was made to play it safe. To not go for a “game-changer”, but rather an incremental step in the policy development process. With this goal in mind, the conference should be deemed a success. And as I said, the use of new media has established a new standard for Canadian policy conferences. In my opinion, however, by focusing on problems rather than solutions, by relying on usual suspect speakers, and by inviting a partisan audience, the conference limited its reach and its potential to transform the political narrative outside of the political bubble.

There ended up being a lively and substantive conversation building on contributions from Mark Sedra, Major-General David Fraser, Sarah Jane Meharg, and Ben Rowswell. It is well worth checking out, here.

My introduction to the day’s questions, via video and text are below.

Introduction: Security and Reconstruction - Lessons from Afghanistan

Introduction to Security and Reconstruction: Lessons from Afghanistan from Canadian International Council on Vimeo.

It is my pleasure to welcome you to the second Canada International Council e-Conference. On March 11, 2010, we will spend the day discussing the mission in Afghanistan, and what it means for the future of Canadian engagement in failed and fragile states.

I just wanted to make a few introductory comments to help frame the questions we will be addressing at the conference.

Canada’s engagement in Afghanistan is at an interesting turning point. While for 8 years we have played an active combat role in a NATO and UN peacebuilding mission, we have also restructured our bureaucratic and operational capacity in order to do so.

But, it is important to remember that our parliament mandated an end to combat operations in December 2011, 10 months from now.

Our government has confirmed our withdrawal, but they have given little indication as to what this will look like, whether a military presence will remain to carry out the development and training tasks they assert will continue, or whether the US and the UK will fill the void.

Lt. General Andrew Leslie, the head of the Canadian army, stated in the fall that they “currently do not have any plans, or even any line diagrams on a blank sheet of paper for post-2011.”
While this has all certainly changed, whatever discussion is taking place is clearly going on behind closed doors.

This e-Conference, if it does nothing else, will hopefully re-invigorate a discussion on what we have done, and how Canadian policy in Afghanistan can and will evolve given the current parliamentary guidelines.

We hope to address four questions.

First, how should a successful mission in Afghanistan be defined?

There is no better indication of the problem than that we are still asking this question. And yet, our goals remain ill defined, and a matching of our objectives post-2011 with the resources and tactics needed to meet them, is far from clear.

As our mission in Afghanistan as evolved from post-911 invasion and regime change, to counterinsurgency war, to long term development and nationbuilding, a central challenge has persisted – what exactly is our objective?

We are at once, and disparately, perusing strikingly varied targets – killing Taliban, building schools, dams and roads, delivering government services, promoting democracy, protecting women’s rights. What’s more, depending on which goals are prioritized, policies likewise shift. If we are fighting the insurgents at all costs, we care less about the number of women in schools. If we are building government capacity, we have a higher threshold for corruption.

When our military leaves, this equation becomes somewhat clearer (we are no longer doing counterinsurgency), but how do we continue to do development when we do not have the means to protect the civilians doing the work?

In the US, President Obama has accepted General McCrystal’s recommended troop surge and tactical shift towards far greater civilian protection. He recognized that in order to achieve their objectives, they needed more troops, not less. In so doing, they are modeling much of their engagement after the Canadian experience in Kandahar.

So, the question remains, is our objective still the same, or has the parliamentary mandated change in tactics also changed our objectives?

Second, should NATO continue to be the vehicle through which Canada makes contributions to international security missions?

The International Security Assistance Force was initially charged with securing Kabul from Taliban and al Qaeda. Since 2003, however, the UN Security Council has authorized the expansion of the ISAF mission throughout Afghanistan, with a sweeping mandate set by the Bonn agreement.

But as the Manley report emphasized, there are “harmful shortcomings in the NATO counterinsurgency campaign” caused by “inadequate coordination between military and civilian programs for security, stabilization, reconstruction and development.” The conclusion that “these and other deficiencies reflect serious failures of strategic direction” could hardly have been clearer.

So is NATO really the most appropriate coordinating body for such mission? And what do we do when our tactics and objectives do not align with other NATO partners? With Canada and the Netherlands pulling out troops, this really will be, for all intents and purposes, a US and UK mission. What does this say about the relevance of NATO as an international institution?

Third, what have we learned from Canada’s experience in dealing with deeply fractured societies?

An emerging consensus now accepts that state failure is the product of a complex relationship between political and economic factors. Successful peacebuilding requires solutions to the full range of problems facing a failed state.

Canada has responded to this challenge through innovation. We have turned to a new form of peacebuilding that is both more ambitious and more demanding.

Rather than treat defence, diplomacy, and development as separate but related components of our broader engagement, Canada now seeks to do all three at once.

This approach has been called 3D, the Whole of Government Approach, and Integrated Peacebuilding.
Adopting this approach has lasting implications for how we conduct ourselves in the world. A large part of the test facing Canada in Afghanistan centres on how well we can adapt to these new demands. Perhaps even more importantly, how will our experience with this new form of peacebuilding shape future missions in failed and fragile states?

Finally, what has Afghanistan taught us about the role of development in conflict?

Traditionally, the safe and effective delivery of humanitarian assistance in conflict by international NGOs has been contingent upon respect for certain key principles: neutrality, impartiality, humanity and independence.

These principles have regulated the behavior of humanitarians and have been crucial in creating and accessing the ‘humanitarian space’ necessary for delivering assistance in the first place.

Yet, despite these strong legal and ethical norms, humanitarian actors are no longer a monolithic group. They include those willing to operate in conflict zones, those willing to accept government funding and military support, those that will operate only with full independence, and those who will no longer engage in certain conflict zones are all.

But what will the humanitarian and development landscape look like, particularly in Kandahar, when they no longer even have the option of force protection? Will those that want to continue work use US military support? Will they rely more on private security? Will they accept great risk? And most importantly, how has the radical transformation of humanitarian space, resulting from the mission in Afghanistan, affected the roles of development and humanitarian assistance in future conflicts?

We very much look forward to discussing these critical questions with you on March 11.

The Routledge Handbook of New Security Studies

This new Handbook gathers together state-of-the-art theoretical reflection and empirical research by a group of leading international scholars in the subdiscipline of Critical Security Studies.

In today’s globalised setting, the challenge of maintaining security is no longer limited to the traditional foreign-policy and military tools of the nation-state, and security and insecurity are no longer considered as dependent only upon geopolitics and military strength, but rather are also seen to depend upon social, economic, environmental, ethical models of analysis and tools of action. The contributors discuss and evaluate this fundamental shift in four key areas:

I. New security concepts
II. New security subjects
III. New security objects
IV. New security practices

Offering a comprehensive theoretical and empirical overview of this evolving field, this book will be essential reading for all students of critical security studies, human security, international/global security, political theory and IR in general.

The Second Generation of Human Security: Lessons from the UN and EU Experience

This article examines the divergence of human security narratives between the UN and the EU. It argues that the UN’s use of the concept ran aground owing to a triple problematic of lack of clarity, confusion between previously distinct policy streams on human rights and human development and conceptual overstretch. After assessing the EU experience with the concept to date, the article argues that future use of human security will require greater focus on how it deepens ideas of individual security, rather than treating it as an agenda for broadening security. As well as a need to project clarity on the conceptual definition of human security, there is also a need to associate human security with greater clarity of intent. If successful, this would contribute to establishing second generation human security as a new policy paradigm.

While I am keenly aware of the history this course, and didn’t want to radically change the syllabus, developed by some great canadian academics over the past 15 years, I did want to add a bit of my influence. So, one of the things we have done this year is entered into a partnership with The Mark News.

Student were divided into three groups (Afghanistan, DRC and Iran) and have together build a truly remarkable resource page for each of the three conflicts. The intro text and video of the site are below, but I really encourage anyone interested in or working on any of these countries to take a look.

Many have argued that the future of news is curatorial - that online media allows for new forms of collaboration with new levels of added value. We hope that our site provides precisely this.

Trudeau Center: Canada and Three Contemporary Conflicts

Welcome to a pilot project between the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies and The Mark News website. In September, students in Taylor Owen’s class embarked on a year-long trial in student research and online outreach. The goal was to dive deep into three contemporary conflicts partnering the students’ research skills with The Mark’s national reach. The project seeks to break down the silos between both research and policy and academics and journalism. For each conflict, we have provided summaries of the canonical works, leading analysis, Canadian history, and Canadian policy choices, as well as a regularly updated breaking news feed - all written by the students. Explore, learn, and enjoy!

The Mark Intro Video from The Mark News on Vimeo.

Opeds and video presentations from each of the participants are being hosted on an Afghanistan Topics page at The Mark News.

Participants included:
Chris Alexander (former Cnd Ambassador and Deputy Special Representatives of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan)
Ellisa Goldberg (former ROCK, Canada’s top civilian official in Kandahar)
Graham Fuller (former vice-chairman of the CIA National Intelligence Council and CIA Station Chief in Kabul)
Janice Stein (Director of the Munk Center for International Studies)
Graeme Smith (Globe and Mail)
Gordon Smith (Former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and Ambassador to NATO)
Michael Petrou (Maclean’s Magazine)
Mark Sedra (Senior Fellow, Centre for International Governance Innovation)
Robert Muggah (Research Director, The Small Arms Survey)
Lauryn Oates (Professional human rights advocate, women’s rights in Afghanistan)
Mirwais Nahzat (Sauvé Scholar examining Canada’s development policy towards Afghanistan)

Intro Remarks: Beyond 2011?
Emily Paddon and Taylor Owen

In Kabul, Washington, Brussels, London, Paris, and Amsterdam, the debate over NATO’s role in Afghanistan is building. President Obama is not only considering the possibility of General McChrystal’s recommended troop surge and tactical shift towards far greater civilian protection, but more importantly, he is reconsidering the broader strategic objectives of the mission. Is the goal to protect America from a resurgent al-Qaeda, to build an Afghan state that can hold the Taliban at bay, or to reconfigure both Afghanistan and Pakistan? The answer will drive his decision in the coming weeks. As the president deliberates, the U.S. media and public are increasingly engaged.

In Canada, while there is a similar conversation occurring behind the closed doors of government – our mandarins must decide what we will do after the 2011 deadline set by parliament in March 2008 – there has been an astonishing silence in the public domain. What should Canada be doing in Afghanistan post-2011?

The government of Canada has skirted this issue in public with various opaque statements by the prime minister, the minister of Defence and other members of the Conservative cabinet. They have confirmed our withdrawal but have given hardly any indication as to what this will look like, whether a military presence will remain to carry out the development and training tasks they assert will continue or whether the U.S. will fill the void. Meanwhile Lt. General Andrew Leslie, the head of the Canadian army, has stated that they “currently do not have any plans, or even any line diagrams on a blank sheet of paper for post-2011.”

Motivated by the belief that decisions need to be taken long before 2011, that we can’t just up and pull out – that there are substantial strategic, ethical, and financial considerations – last week we convened a roundtable at the University of British Columbia in order to discuss these critical issues. We started with our own “blank sheet” and to fill it in, several seasoned Canadian experts who have lived and breathed Afghanistan over the last eight years, including Gordon Smith, Chris Alexander, and Graeme Smith. We posed a series of guiding questions that we hoped would incite debate. They were as follows:

1) Public support for the Afghan mission stands at 37 per cent in Canada and roughly half of Canadians are in support of a civilian mission post-2011. How are domestic politics likely to influence the shape of Canada’s involvement? And what influence should they have?

2) The Canadian government has committed itself to a set of tasks for the benefit of the Afghan people. At the same time, the fighting has killed 131 Canadian soldiers and one diplomat. The war has cost between $11-12 billion. What responsibilities and obligations have we incurred? To the Afghan people? To NATO and the UN? To Canadians?

3) The Government has been unclear as to whether a contingent of Canadian forces will remain to protect delivery of assistance, or whether the ensuing void post-withdrawal will be covered by our U.S. and NATO allies. Moreover, does the withdrawal of a “mere” 2800 Canadians, compared with the U.S. 80,000, really mean a “gap”? What would assistance look like without military support? Can we “do” development without the military? What are the implications of a withdrawal for NATO and U.S. relations?

4) What are the options for our involvement? What are the costs and benefits of different options? What are the standards of evaluation? What is desirable? What is doable? How do we avoid what Gen. Hillier recently called “pie in the sky” ideas about Afghanistan? How do we avoid such ideas and ensure success in whatever it is that we commit ourselves to post-2011.

It is a tall order, we know, but we hope that this web forum, based on last week’s roundtable meeting, will be, at the very least, the start of a much needed discussion on these important issues.

All of the Opeds and Videos from the Workshop are available here