The long knives

The long knives in Ottawa are out for Canada's Strategic Advisory Team - Afghanistan (SAT-A), and the Globe & Mail eggs on those who would end this most effective mission:

The Globe's Christie Blatchford reported on Monday that Canadian diplomats have convinced officials at DFAIT and in the Prime Minister's Office to end the SAT's mission by the end of the year. There are suspicions that the push is intended to pre-empt the results of John Manley's report on the future of the Afghan mission. It is also suggested by some defenders of the SAT that internecine battles with other, civilian agencies of the Canadian government are responsible for the moves to shut the team down. Both are likely true. But regardless of the motivation behind any moves to end the mission, the decision is the right one. For all their talents, Canada's soldiers are best equipped to soldier.

From what I understand, all of it is true - except the part about it being the right decision. That's just not the case.

Oh, in a perfect world, you would have a self-sustaining Afghan civil service that could train their own. But after decades of war, the skill sets required to construct and operate a professional government bureaucracy simply aren't available indigenously. That's why Gen Rick Hillier set the team up in the first place (pdf):

An initiative of General Hillier, based on his International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) experience, the Strategic Advisory Team - Afghanistan (SAT-A) is a group of strategic planners that has been assigned to the Afghan Presidency to assist in the development of the kind of plans necessary to achieve the nation’s objectives. During his tenure in command of ISAF, General Hillier identified that Afghanistan had visionary leadership but that, at the same time, the machinery of government and the human capacity of the civil service had been decimated by three decades of conflict. To partially fill this critical gap, he provided military planners to the Afghan Minister of Finance to assist in the development of a both a long-term framework for development and the first post-Taliban national budget. This highly successful experiment was dropped by his more conventional successors in command and only rejuvenated after the now CDS visited Afghanistan and President Karzai in the Spring of 2005. During that visit, General Hillier committed to provide a small team for a year.

The help is largely mechanical - that is to say, the process-oriented planning so familiar to staff officers in professional militaries around the world:

It became clear that the people tasked to develop Afghanistan’s national development strategy were very bright but they had no planning experience. I told the team, stay out of the substance. We don’t know, for example, what this country needs in terms of the amount of water coming off the Hindu Kush each year; our job was to help put all of those inputs into a coherent plan.
...

There is a lot of international help in Kabul – technical assistance from big organizations such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, various UN agencies – but they tend to act as consultants. I decided early on that we did not want to be competing or in the way of these organizations. There was enough high-priced help mentoring cabinet ministers, and being special advisors. Where the Afghans most needed help was at the working level. We’d work right in their offices. And if they did not assign Afghan counterparts to work with us fulltime we’d go somewhere else. We were going to help them build capacity; we weren’t there to replace capacity.

That quickly earned us trust and respect. They realized we were serious, that in typical military fashion our team would show up for work every morning. The Afghans are not used to that with internationals. We ate lunch and bonded with them. In Ramadan, we respected their culture by not eating or drinking in their sight during daylight hours.

Most importantly, we did not do it for the Afghans. For example, when they started work on the ANDS, the Afghans were trying to figure out how to coordinate all the various inputs they were getting from cabinet ministers, the World Bank, IMF, UN, and various academics and experts on Afghanistan working out of places like New York and Delhi. A young helicopter pilot and an infantry officer created the framework for a database in which all these inputs could be populate and cross-referenced, but the Afghans had to do the actual work – we couldn’t do it because much of the material was in Dari.

That initial year has stretched in a multi-year operation, at the request of the Afghan government. And now the reining-in of the Canadian Forces by our government and their hired hands continues, for no real discernable reason other than that some in Ottawa are concerned the CF is getting too big for its britches.

Resistance to this operation has been apparent since its inception, as Col (ret'd) Mike Capstick tells us, while reminding doubters of the very sound reasons the team is so effective:

Although the team does include a senior Defence Scientist as our analyst and a capacity development expert contracted by CIDA, it is essentially staffed by the Canadian Forces. Some have questioned the legitimacy of using military planners in this role, and there have been suggestions that other agencies would be better suited to the task. Although this concern is understandable, there are practical advantages to using the CF as the basis of the SAT. In addition to the obvious education, training and experience in disciplined and rigorous strategic planning techniques that military officers bring to the table, the CF is really the only arm of the Canadian government that can quickly and continually generate the requisite numbers of people with the training and will to work in an austere and, at times, unstable environment. Most importantly, the SAT-A initiative is explicit recognition that the character of armed conflict has undergone a major transformation since the end of the Cold War and that traditional concepts for the use of armed force are insufficient to establish a lasting peace. [my emphasis]

The team includes both military and civilian personnel. The CF members on this rotation were a mix of Regulars and Reservists from all three components. The planning team members brought a very wide range of training, education and experience to the operation and quickly demonstrated the intellectual agility and adaptability demanded by today’s operations.

Col George Petrolekas, another officer intimately involved with the genesis of the project, even provides a personal anecdote to illustrate the depth of the problem:

Former ambassador Chris Alexander, along with his key staff and high-ranking NATO officials whom I met to confirm Mr. Karzai's request, were unequivocal in endorsing the plan. Yet, even then, they cautioned that this team would become a lightning rod of envy for those who did not comprehend it or felt threatened by it. That warning sadly proved true, as ready access to the President's office, to important ministries and the unprecedented freedom that went with it, challenged the bureaucratic status quo. On one occasion, David Sproule, who succeeded Mr. Alexander as ambassador, had to send one of his staff back to Canada as this person objected to SAT members using the embassy swimming pool, not understanding that we are all Canadians in a foreign land.

The Globe & Mail's justifications for the potential disbanding of the team fall flat: that it's an inappropriate task for military officers to undertake. Everyone involved with the project, Afghan and Canadian, disagrees.

Col Capstick:

The level of influence, respect and access that Canada had in Kabul in 05-06 is directionally proportional to the reputations of the Canadians that senior Afghans know: you can’t talk to a senior Afghan without Gen Hiller, Gen Andrew Leslie, Chris Alexander or Nipa Banerjee being mentioned. Those people working together built Canada a superb reputation and gave us a lot of capital.

Equally important, this was a bilateral arrangement between Canada and the Government of Afghanistan; it was not part of the US coalition or ISAF. The minute Afghans learned that – that it wasn’t part of either of those two military headquarters in Kabul – doors opened that I’m sure would not have otherwise opened. We were not perceived as acting in NATO or US interests. It was a very interesting dynamic, and it would be hard to extract ourselves and still keep face.

Former CIDA team member Andy Tamas:

Gen. Hillier asked if the President wanted more of them, and when he said he did, the first formal SAT team was born. It included a CIDA contract officer, Andy Tamas, who was initially skeptical about how soldiers would manage the collaborative thinking traditional in the development field.

Mr. Tamas, who has more than three decades of development work under his belt, quickly became a convert, once saying, "The impact of their effort is plain as day. There's no doubt at all that it's very, very important. If what's needed to counter the insurgents is a functioning government, this [the SAT team] is probably the best return on investment that Canada or any other military is making."

Former CIDA head of aid for Afghanistan, Dr. Nipa Banerjee:

Ms. Banerjee, now a teacher at the University of Ottawa's graduate school of public and international affairs who returns to Afghanistan four times a year, was similarly dubious at the start.

"I'd never met an army person," she told The Globe yesterday. "In Canada, the army is invisible. I wasn't comfortable at first, but I decided I would try my best. And the army people were so co-operative.

"Civilians say they [soldiers] don't understand development, but I found they understand it better than many of us."

Ms. Banerjee also chalks up the internal efforts to disband the SAT to internecine jealousies, saying that because its members work on a daily basis with Afghans, "the army has access" that diplomats don't.

The Afghans themselves:

As I was present at the birth of this team, I was also privileged to be present in the last days of the first rotation. During a farewell party in Kabul, I was overwhelmed by the outpouring of affection from members of non-governmental organizations that were also working in the capital, from key embassy staff and, most importantly, from Afghan ministers and lower-level civil servants. On his last night in Kabul, I saw Andy Tamas, the CIDA representative on SAT, eyes watering with intense pride as he said farewell, expressing his profound gratitude for having been able to serve Afghans with his military colleagues. I was so intensely proud of the Canadian flag on my shoulder that day.

In a perfect world, Canadian civil servants would be the ones providing support to the Afghan civil service, as even Col Capstick agrees:

We kept bouncing around the idea of putting together a Canadian team that would include people with the expertise that we didn’t have – expertise from the Public Service Commission or other departments in HR processes and staffing, in administrative processes and organizational design. I would like nothing better than to have a big program that other countries could contribute to, led by somebody like a former clerk of the Privy Council.

But Afghanistan isn't a perfect world. The CF is the only Canadian governmental institution that can consistently generate a steady flow of individuals with the required skill sets to operate in such a difficult situation. That means from a security standpoint as well.

The idea that the SAT-A should be dismantled is nothing more than a cynical Ottawa power-play.

I give the last word on the subject to Col Petrolekas:

Critics of Canada's military mission casually label it a combat mission, conveniently ignoring the roads, irrigation ditches, bridges, causeways, schools and orphanages that Canadian soldiers have built, not to mention the strategic advice the SAT has provided. Canadian values of humility and assistance, which are emblematic of the SAT team, might very well be sacrificed on the altar of vanity, envy and perceived competition. It is no wonder that our allies sometimes raise an eyebrow with respect to Canada. It is equally wondrous that we permit such rivalries to make a great nation small.

Hear, hear.

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