Nothing improves if we pull back

Richard Colvin's recent testimony before a parliamentary committee has caused quite the tempest:

All detainees transferred by Canadians to Afghan prisons were likely tortured by Afghan officials and many of the prisoners were innocent, says a former senior diplomat with Canada's mission in Afghanistan.

Appearing before a House of Commons committee Wednesday, Richard Colvin blasted the detainees policies of Canada and compared them with the policies of the British and the Netherlands.

...

He said unlike the British and Dutch, Canada did not monitor their conditions; took days, weeks or months to notify the Red Cross; kept poor records; and to prevent scrutiny, the Canadian Forces leadership concealed this behind "walls of secrecy."

"As I learned more about our detainee practices, I came to a conclusion they were contrary to Canada's values, contrary to Canada's interests, contrary to Canada's official policies and also contrary to international law. That is, they were un-Canadian, counterproductive and probably illegal.

I was asked to comment on the situation by the folks at CBC's Connect with Mark Kelley, and if you weren't...ahem...lucky enough to have it on at the time, you can catch the clip here. (My sister-in-law happened to see me on one of the TV's at the gym, but the sound was turned down. Fortunate for her: I'm told I make a much better impression when you can't hear me.)

I've already committed a lot of 1's and 0's to the topic of detainees here at The Torch. If you're not a regular reader, this post sums up most of my thoughts on the issue, and I think lays out the central problem in all of this a bit more clearly than I've seen it anywhere in the MSM. Follow the links there and you'll find other material that adds more context.

There are also a couple of points I didn't have a chance to make in the CBC video or here on the blog in specific reference to the detainee issue.

First, it's worth remembering that the underlying issue with treatment of detainees isn't our procedures, our tracking, or our paperwork. In fact, it's not our anything. It's the Afghan police, judiciary, and penal system.

And by the way, we're already working on improving that. For those who didn't read it at the time, you should meet Kevin Cluett, one of the many unheralded and tireless Canadians working to make Afghanistan a better place. When I was in Kandahar, he was one of only four Canadian corrections officers in all of Afghanistan: one worked with the national government in Kabul, one was a senior leadership mentor for the local prison warden and supervisor of the crew at the KPRT, and two were mentors and trainers to the guards at Sarposa prison. I don't know if this situation has changed, but that small cadre was putting in long and dangerous hours to fix the root of the problem: Afghan prisons. Nobody's talking about that, though - not sexy enough.

And would all those moaning and groaning about what a disgrace this is be willing to surge CSC officers into Kandahar to turbo-charge that valuable program? I doubt it. Even if all the outraged said "yes, we should send more good Canadians from Correctional Services Canada into harm's way," would they also be willing to bump up the number of force protection soldiers keeping them relatively safe, to take more casualties as more vehicles were running up and down the roads between our bases and camps and the Afghan prisons, and to keep the program going past 2011 so it had a realistic chance at effecting a long-term, sustainable cultural change within the Afghan system?

Hands up if you think that's a realistic scenario? Right then. As I've said previously:

It's a fantastic idea.

But here's the kicker: there are a million fantastic ideas to move Afghan society forward, and we simply can't do all of them.

Does it make more sense to spend money on rehabilitating irrigation canals for Afghan food crops so a village can feed itself, or to spend that money on a prison so that incarcerated Taliban fighters get three squares a day? Should we be more concerned with providing a Village Medical Outreach to a hamlet that hasn't seen a real doctor in a decade or more, or with providing basic electrical service to a town, or with stocking a hospital's maternity ward with supplies and equipment, or with training children how to avoid land-mines, or with teaching police how to conduct a decent checkpoint or investigation, or with digging a well and providing a clean water supply to a collection of families without one now, or with building a school where the future of Afghanistan learns to read and add, or with providing a secure pay system for essential workers like doctors and teachers to help curb graft and corruption, or should we really be most concerned with heating a jail in the winter?

That was a run-on sentence, because the list of projects we could undertake would make for a run-on mission if we let it.

At this point, we can't fix everything. We need to focus our efforts on a limited spread of achievable goals. Protecting detainees better than we do is certainly achievable if we want it to be - but what other goals will be sacrificed to make it so?

Right now, this mission is about choices for Canada. It's about the difficult process of triage for an entire nation. Civilized countries are meticulous about human rights, even those of detainees. Has Afghanistan progressed to the point where this is the highest priority?

The other point I wish I'd been able to make properly was actually best put by BruceR at Flit:

You think we had our own jails in Cyprus or Suez? Neve is really arguing that, contra Bono, the world does not, in fact, need more Canada, regardless of whatever future massive human rights violations might seem to warrant Canadian military intervention, because we can't trust the jails of any country that might benefit from that kind of presence.

I have no doubt the plight of detainees in Afghan jails could be improved. No doubt whatsoever.

I have yet to hear a compelling argument, however, that would justify diverting scarce money and attention into a realistic fix, let alone a commitment to putting forth the long-term resources that would be required for that solution.

To those who throw their hands up and say this is yet another reason we should get out altogether, I ask: where will those Afghan prisoners be if we stop trying to help the Afghans build their country's institutions? Better or worse off? Let your righteous indignation chew on that question for a moment.

I suspect that if you're honest with yourself, you'll come to the same unsatisfying conclusion I have: in Afghanistan, if we let the perfect be the enemy of the good, nothing will ever get better.

Update: As usual, BruceR at Flit has some valuable things to say about the Afghan detainee transfer brouhaha, including some personal anecdotes about avoiding the taking of detainees while he was over there mentoring the ANA. Too much paperwork, it seems...here's a snippet:

With detainees, we always seemed to be in one of those perfect catch-22s that typified the ISAF mission. Afghan law said all detainees had to be brought before a judge within 72 hours of capture. This was rigorously enforced. Unfortunately, that made it kind of difficult, given the IED situation and everything else, for mentors to establish any kind of evidentiary linkage with an IED attack or other insurgent activity that would justify their continued detention and deliver detainee and evidence by road to Kandahar in time (if it was ISAF-collected evidence, the declassification and translation processes each would have taken days if not weeks). So by Afghan law, nearly all detainees, both innocent and guilty as hell, should have been promptly released by the judge on sight, and certainly many were.

Perhaps Canadians, who've hadn't taken detainees in a counterinsurgency situation before this since, oh, about 1902, weren't the best people to be instructing the Afghans on how to do this right. And once again, really we were falling afoul of that early handover by the West of Afghan sovereignty, to the point where we really had no control over what normally would be essential processes in a counterinsurgency fight: the courts, the prison system, police questioning. And we tried not to notice how much that subverted our other efforts.

Need I say the whole thing is worth reading?