022 – Transcript

Just Right Episode 022

Air Date: September 13, 2007

Host: Bob Metz

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this program are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of 94.9 CHRW.

Clip (Star Trek: The Next Generation S05E03):
Keeve Falor: We are not a violent race captain. Just passionate about our cause. And that passion has led some to take up arms.
Captain Picard: You know where we can find Orta?
Keeve Falor: I’m afraid not.
Captain Picard: Can you help us to locate him?
Keeve Falor: I’m sorry, I don’t wish to help you. Don’t misunderstand. I, for one, believe the raid on the Federation outpost was poor judgment. You are innocent bystanders. And I cannot condone violence against those who are not our enemies.
Captain Picard: Then I don’t understand why you’re unwilling.
Keeve Falor: Because you are innocent bystanders. You are innocent bystanders for decades.

Bob Metz: Good morning London. It is Thursday, September 13th. I’m Bob Metz and this is Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM where we will be with you from now till noon. No, no, not right wing. Just right. Welcome to the show here at CHRW radio. 519-661-3600 is the number you can call if you want to join in our conversation today, or write us justrightchrw@gmail.com with your comments suggestions or anything you might want to see discussed on the show.

Little bit of a different show today. We’re going to stick to a single theme. Just a couple of days ago I believe was the sixth anniversary of 9/11 and in those short six years Canada has found itself in a very unpredictable place that six years ago no one would ever have guessed, and that of course is in Afghanistan.

I am very pleased this morning to be joined by my guest. And you may have heard this name before. Arthur Majoor, who, if that name sounds familiar to you, was the same Arthur Majoor who ran for mayor in the last municipal election. He’s been in the municipal election here in the city of London. But he’s not here to talk about politics today, at least not Canadian politics in the local sense. He’s a sergeant in the Canadian Armed Forces. He works at 31 Brigade headquarters here in London. And he’s just returned from Afghanistan just a couple weeks ago where he has been for the better part of the last year. Welcome to the show, Arthur.

Arthur Majoor: Thank you for having me on.

Bob Metz: When did you actually get back from Afghanistan?

Arthur Majoor: I returned just towards the end of August. I’ve been there since February the 9th. So it was a six month tour in Kandahar province.

Bob Metz: And it must seem pretty weird, like coming back to Canada. Is it like night and day to you? Or is it, what’s the impression, how do you feel coming back from what to me sounds like an almost alien environment to us?

Arthur Majoor: Well, it is. There’s a lot of differences. The landscape, the terrain is much different. Kandahar province is right in the foothills of the Hindu Kush Mountains. So from the base, you can see that. Also from the base, you can see the edge of the Red Desert. So the terrain is very mountainous, is very dry, very little vegetation. The temperature, the weather is quite extreme compared to here. Stepping off the plane when it was plus 30, it actually seemed rather cool. Coming back to here.

Bob Metz: And you were telling me, what was the temperature when you left Afghanistan?

Arthur Majoor: The daytime temperature was in the 50s, low 50s.

Bob Metz: How do you take heat? Can you stand that stuff? Or how do you keep cool? Or you just don’t even think about it?

Arthur Majoor: Well, I’m not telling me it’s a dry heat. Actually it is a dry heat. But there’s numerous sinks. Obviously you limit your physical activity during the day. I worked in force protection on the base itself, so I spent a lot of my time basically indoors in an air-conditioned environment. And gradually your body adapts too. So when you step outside and it’s plus 50, you know, it just wills immediately. It’s something you…

Bob Metz: I know the experience I spent a summer in Trinidad once, and that was the first time ever understood what heat was, because we don’t feel that kind of heat up here at all.

Now, when we first contacted each other talking about what we might discuss today, you suggested in our off-air conversations that, you know, the Canadian media and American media, etc., has really emphasized most of the combat issues of the mission. And, you know, you can go over that grounds over and over again, but you’re saying that’s not exactly the main mission of what Canada is doing there.

Arthur Majoor: It’s not really the main mission. It’s just a portion of the mission. And this is the thing that kind of disturbs me when I read Canadian newspapers or look at Canadian media about Afghanistan. This whole debate is being conducted almost in a vacuum. I mean, there’s whole areas that are virtually untouched. And it’s very difficult for Canadians to understand what’s going on or to make any sort of informed decisions about where we should go or what we should do if they don’t even hear about all these other things.

Bob Metz: Well, hopefully we can sort of create a sort of an image or a feel for Afghanistan after talking about it for about an hour today. You know, what we see here in Canada, I imagine when you’re over there, do you get the Canadian newspapers? Do you get an idea of what Canadians are seeing in the papers when you’re over there?

Arthur Majoor: Yes, we do. Canadian newspapers are brought to us, although, you know, because they have to be shipped over through the supply chain. They’re usually a bit out of date.

Bob Metz: So you find out what’s been going on in Afghanistan three weeks later?

Arthur Majoor: Something like that. But there’s also Canadian media feeds. You can go to the Welfare Trailer and access the internet. And of course, talking to your family at home or talking to friends at home, you find out what’s being said over here.

Bob Metz: So you get the sense that, okay, they know a little bit about what’s happening, but there’s so much more that should be said and should be talked about?

Arthur Majoor: Well, that’s interesting.

Bob Metz: I just was looking at a national post editorial by John Iveson and just appeared on September 8th. And he sort of, just to read the pertinent parts of it, he says here, the gloomy but prevailing view of Canada’s combat mission in Afghanistan is that it will end when the current mandate runs its course in February 2009, at which point no other country will take our place in the line, and Kandahar province will slide back into chaos, he thinks. The feeling from government sources in Ottawa is that Canada can credibly argue the NATO alliance should be a division of labour and that 18 months from now it will be time to trade its combat role for another that concentrates on institution building. And Iveson goes on to say that if and when Canadian forces do redeploy from Kandahar, potential roles could include bolstering the rule of law. Canada has already helped train police, judges and prosecutors as well as building correctional facilities or helping to manage the Afghan-Pakistan border crossing.

Just on base of what I read there, is that ring with you at all in any way or is it sound accurate or sort of what you see happening over there?

Arthur Majoor: Is that accurate in the sense that if political events in Canada cause us to withdraw then certain events could happen in Afghanistan? But what I think the real problem is people are trying to draw a sharp distinction between reconstruction work and security work, and in the current environment in Afghanistan there’s really not that sort of hard and fast distinction. Our biggest advantage in Afghanistan is right now we’re running the provincial reconstruction team in Kandahar. And without the security that the battle group can provide and the mobility that they provide so that the PRT can get around to all the different places, these institutional rebuilding and these infrastructure rebuilding and all these projects that we’re doing really can’t take place. Or in the worst case of course you go in and you do something and as soon as you leave without leaving security in place the Taliban will come and simply attempt to destroy what you’ve done. So it’s more a case of these two things go together, they’re parts of the whole, and it’s not a case that, oh okay we can decide that we’re going to do one thing but not the other thing.

Bob Metz: Right, I noticed in one of the website links you directed me to and I’ll quote from there, it says, Well it’s exactly true. The Taliban essentially are interested in pure power. And they’re not interested in the kind of peace that the Afghan people seek. And that’s sort of what we’re talking about, that the Afghan people seek. To what end?

Arthur Majoor: Well, not to any sort of grand end like conquering the world or anything like that, but just simply the ability to be in a village, be in a province, dictate what everyone’s going to do. Essentially when they were in charge of Afghanistan, the entire country was being run by a rather singular vision of Mullah Omar, economic and developmental. And every sort of thing was just basically geared to whatever ends that the Taliban wanted. Now what we’re trying to do is create a modern country, consensual government, running by the rule of law, where the people of Afghanistan have their own choices of what they want to do, what ends they want to achieve, what goals they want to seek.

Bob Metz: So, now that’s an interesting observation in and of itself in that, even if you have a representative democracy in a country like that, would it not then represent whatever the values of its citizens are? And isn’t that where a lot of the source of the problem is? What if the citizens are just bent on destroying each other? What kind of representative democracy can they possibly acquire out of that? Or is that not what you’re hearing being right down there with the people? Is there a whole different picture there than what we’re seeing?

Arthur Majoor: Maybe what we need to do is really kind of backtrack a bit and look at the history of Afghanistan.

Bob Metz: I think that’s a good place to start. Let’s create a bigger picture here about how the country is. You know, I just took a quick look. I have a book that’s about seven or eight years old. It just sort of gives an idea of some of the main stats. Now, I guess Afghanistan has a population around 20, 21 million. Does that sound about right?

Arthur Majoor: That’s about correct, yeah.

Bob Metz: And capitals Kabul has the highest point, Nowshak, 24,000 some odd feet. Official languages, Pashto and Dari, is that correct?

Arthur Majoor: Yes, that’s right.

Bob Metz: And the main religion is Islam. Currency is the Afghani. Now, interesting, I mentioned this earlier. This reference shows that the government is a single party republic, whereas an older reference I looked at described it as a constitutional monarchy back around 1950. And of course, the per capita GNP is estimated under US $700. So, you know, when I just see those stats thrown at me, I see a very poor country that has obviously had a turbulent history. It’s gone from a supposed constitutional monarchy to a single party republic. Maybe you could give us a little bit of background on how that sort of evolved, and we can do this in stages.

Arthur Majoor: Okay, well, the constitutional monarchy was the government of Afghanistan for quite some time, actually. The society started becoming unstable, and a lot of factional infighting took place during the 1970s. The Soviet Union essentially culminated things by taking advantage of that and invading in 1979 to support the Afghan communists. And from there, of course, was the infamous Afghan war, where the United States and almost the West supported the Mujahideen to fight against the Soviet Union. Once the Soviets were ejected in 1989, the Mujahideen started fighting amongst themselves, essentially strong men vying for power.

Bob Metz: Now, just quickly, that period in the 70s, I noticed in one of my reference books that Afghanistan had suffered a serious famine around 71, 72, something like that.

Arthur Majoor: Yeah, there was a series of droughts, which essentially the constitutional monarchy and the whole machinery of government was really quite primitive, of course, so they were not really able to respond to these famines, and that’s essentially what triggered the factional infighting.

Bob Metz: Well, it’s interesting because in one of those atlases I was showing, you know, state-of-the-world kind of atlases that described the government there as a substantially disintegrated authority, which almost, to me, might be another word for anarchy or something like that. Would that describe it?

Arthur Majoor: Well, that describes the period of the civil wars in the early 1990s. Now, the Taliban are actually a post-Soviet phenomena. Essentially what was happening was the strong men were fighting each other to try and become the power of Afghanistan. And the local people, the villagers, the city people, the civilians, the fewer, basically were getting a little sick of all this infighting, this constant struggle for power. The Taliban essentially arose as another force that claimed that they would stop the fighting, they would impose order and peace, and that’s basically where they started getting their support from. People, villagers looking for some quiet, some security, and then to the fighting.

Bob Metz: And did they succeed in any regard at all at any level?

Arthur Majoor: Well, the Taliban succeeded in ending fighting simply because by this point most of the Mujahideen groups had fought themselves to exhaustion, and the Taliban, as the strongest and most powerful of the militias, rolled over them until eventually they controlled most of Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the people suddenly realized that maybe they picked the wrong saviors because the Taliban imposed a very draconian rule, a very rigid and very unorthodox version of Islam on all the people of Afghanistan. And basically society was pretty much frozen. The Taliban, close with few schools, were remaining. Development, industry, all this sort of things that we take for granted were simply ignored by the Taliban.

Bob Metz: Did Afghanistan ever have any substantial industry? And all the references I saw, it was always in almost the bottom of the heap of all the countries in the world in terms of any kind of…

Arthur Majoor: Afghanistan was a poor country, but up until the 70s they were self-sufficient in food. It was a rural economy, so obviously people weren’t as wealthy as say an urbanized industrial economy in the West. But it was a self-sufficient country, the people weren’t obviously starving or… It wasn’t extreme poverty like you see in some other parts of the world. However, once the infrastructure was destroyed by a series of wars, once the Taliban basically refused to reconstitute the country, then things pretty much went from bad to worse. Once the Taliban were ejected in 2001, the new government basically is assembling the institutions of government again, starting to rebuild the infrastructure. And I think that’s the reason why it says it’s a one-party republic, because although Afghanistan is a republic, there’s no sort of political parties or any sort of machinery of politics that we understand here in the West. I mean, that’s evolving and it’ll probably take several years to come into fruition.

The biggest problem, and this is something that everyone should realize when they talk about the reconstruction of Afghanistan and why things are taking so long, is schools being out for 30 years. The Soviets took over and schools reconstituted basically to teach children about socialism and to make them radicals basically. Well, not radicals, but so they would fit into the Soviet vision of Afghanistan. During the Civil War, of course, strongmen were more interested in having riflemen to have educated people, so school was essentially ignored. Under the Taliban regime, whatever schools remained were closed, and the only schooling that was available was very limited, very restricted. Essentially, boys were encouraged to memorize the Quran, and that was it. Now, religious education was an important part of the overall education of a person, but it doesn’t prepare you for being a technician, an engineer, a doctor, or any of the skill trades that people need to function in a more modern economy or a more modern society.

So, one of the great triumphs of ISAF is that we now have about between six and seven million children in school. However, it’s going to take at least a decade for them to graduate, and only then can they start taking post-secondary education, learning skill trades, learning professions.

Bob Metz: Okay, let’s take a break just for a sec, and we’ll come back into the more modern, what is happening more currently, and we’ll be back in a moment just right after this.

Clip (Star Trek: The Next Generation S05E03):
Captain Picard: In an age, when their technology should be able to clothe and feed all of them, they should live like this.
Guinan: I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t.

Clip (Greg Proops): Yeah, you may have heard about the little co-dependent relationship America is having with Iraq right now. Yeah, there was something I never understood about the whole conflict from the very beginning, something that confused me. How did our oil get underneath their sand?

Bob Metz: Welcome back. It’s just right with Bob Metz and with Arthur Majoor, my guest today. 519-661-3600. If you’d like to call in and join us or ask a question. Afghanistan is, oil’s not an issue there, is it?

Arthur Majoor: No, it isn’t. And that’s another one of the mad things is to hear people conflate Afghanistan with the conflict in Iraq. I mean, virtually everything is different. ISAF is a…

Bob Metz: You mean it’s really not all about the oil?

Arthur Majoor: Well, for one thing, Afghanistan has very little oil. I believe there’s a few gas fields in northern Afghanistan close to the Kazakhstan border or someplace like that. Essentially, if you were to develop that, it would probably be enough for local consumption, but I don’t think they ever become a player in the world market. But the other thing is, there’s so many differences, it’s very difficult to begin. Let’s start with the fact that ISAF is a huge multinational alliance. There’s something like 38 nations in ISAF. Obviously, we have the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia as the big anglosphere players. The Netherlands has a large contingent. NATO has various contingents throughout. Eastern Europeans, partnership for peace nations, have some contingents like Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Slovenia, just some off the top of my head. And the role of ISAF is to assist the government, the currently existing government of Afghanistan, to maintain the security and to assist in redevelopment.

So ISAF has a lot of different projects besides the military security aspect. One of the interesting things I found was reforestation is actually one of the projects of ISAF. Afghanistan has something like 3% tree coverage before the start of the Civil War period due to infrastructure degradation. The fact that people were just cutting out trees for firewood and stuff. And a series of droughts, they’re down to almost 1%. So, you know, you can see ISAF is doing things like reforestation, rebuilding schools, rebuilding roads, electrical generation, irrigation. And the military security aspect is simply to make sure that these things can actually be carried out without being compromised, without being delayed and without being destroyed.

Bob Metz: So clearly if we were to pull out all of a sudden, that would undo the investment, wouldn’t it?

Arthur Majoor: Oh, certainly. Like I said, a lot of this stuff isn’t complete. I mean, it takes a lot of time to do these things. The Afghan people themselves, you know, they’re starting on these projects, but they don’t have the skills and trained people to actually, you know, keep them going. It’s kind of like if you build a road and then you don’t have engineers to maintain the road, you don’t have people to, you know, look at the road after storms or even just your daily maintenance after severe weather. The roads eventually are going to crumble away. So you build a road and we don’t have civil engineers in Afghanistan to maintain that road after we’re gone. You know, pretty soon the road’s going to disintegrate and there’s not going to be any east to anyone.

Bob Metz: So everything really depends upon establishing a functional government that can create an environment in which basically knowledge and science and technology can flourish. Isn’t that really, would that be a way of describing what the reconstruction is about in a way?

Arthur Majoor: Yeah, and, you know, the government institutions, see this is another thing, we concentrate so much on the military aspect, but within Canada is contingent in Canada, for example. We have some RCMP police officers and I believe one officer from the Charleston Police Force were there to train the local police. There was a contingent from Corrections Canada who were training with me in Canada when we were preparing to go. Their job was to go over and to help the Kandahar City Prison, you know, train the administration, train the guards and show them more efficient ways of running the prison. The CIDA are there supplying money for the PRT to do a lot of these projects. So there’s a lot of representation by other government agencies, so it’s not just the soldiers alone.

Bob Metz: Now the CIDA, that’s the Canadian International Development Agency.

Arthur Majoor: That’s correct.

Bob Metz: Now, according to what I found here, we’ve already, Canada is among the top donors supporting reconstruction and development in Afghanistan, has committed over $1.2 billion in aid over a 10-year period ending in 2011. And I know $1.2 billion sounds like a lot of money, but if you stretch it over 10 years, it’s about what, 100 million a year plus a little bit. Is this, do you think it’s being effective or is there progress being made? Because that’s certainly nothing that we really hear over here on any regular basis. We just hear about casualties and then every time a casualty comes back, it’s, you know, everyone goes into mourning and everybody wants to get out of there. They don’t know why they’re there, what we’re doing there. And imagine it has to be frustrating for a lot of the military over there.

Arthur Majoor: Well, it is. Now, to give you, to give you one of the reasons why we may not hear about it a lot of this is because Afghanistan is an undeveloped economy, you know, you can’t just pour huge amounts of money in there. All you do is trigger inflation and cause a lot of misery. The other thing, like I said, is there’s not that many trained and educated people in Afghanistan as a whole to run a lot of projects. You know, you can show up and do projects that require manual labor and it’s easy to find lots of manual laborers. But if you want to do something that’s fairly advanced, it’s very difficult to find a civil engineer, for example.

So our projects are geared at the village level and, you know, basically what we try and do is support community councils, if you will, have Shuras with the local village headman. Find out what they need and supply, you know, some stuff so they can do a lot of these projects themselves. One of the biggest things that is really needed is simply to reclaim agricultural infrastructure. So if the headman wants to do that, it’s quite simple for us to show up with picks and shovels and a little bit of cash to pay the local young men to go out and labor in the fields, you know, reclaim the silted up irrigation ditches and get the field back in production. Now it’s not very dramatic. It’s not very, you know, exciting in the media sense perhaps, but it has a huge impact on the village and it’s one of the most effective projects that’s out there. Similarly, building a school, you know, we’re not building a huge university like Western where we’re sitting here. We’re just building, you know, village schools, village medical clinics and doing things like that.

Bob Metz: You know, I’m reminded of that proverb, you know, give a man a fish and feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime.

Arthur Majoor: That’s exactly right.

Bob Metz: One, just to interrupt, but just to, you know, people in Canada do want to help, but sometimes when they do things like they send us buckets of school supplies or clothing and stuff, it’s wonderful from a sort of an immediate impacting, but it would be a lot better. What we try to do is we go and we try and find local Afghan businesses and sources for these things. You know, we’re, you know, it helps spur the local economy and get it started well. So we build a school and then we look around and okay, is there an Afghan carpenter who can build the desks? Is there a paper merchant who can supply school books for the children? All those little things and they have much more impact for the rural mission.

Bob Metz: Now, how is, who coordinates that? Is it, it’s not just the Canadian military doing this, right? It has to be some major effort. Is it the Afghanistan government itself that is somehow…

Arthur Majoor: Well, the government Afghanistan is structure or does it even really exist in the sense of the word that we think? The government of Afghanistan, you know, is responsible overall for the, for the nation. They have things that they want to get done, but like I said, their institutions are just brand new. Their institutions don’t have a lot of people to operate them. So in some senses…

Bob Metz: Are they not seen as a government that was more or less imposed by the West after 9-11 kind of thing or is not…

Arthur Majoor: No, not at all. Not at all. We drove out the Taliban. Okay, US military power drove out the Taliban, but the whole process of creating the Afghan government, you know, right from day one, involved the people of Afghanistan. The loya jirga was called. Candidates were called up from the jirgas. People were deciding, you know, who they wanted to represent them in the Kabul government. But just because you have a council or a jirga or whatever, you know, you still need the mechanics of government. You still need bureaucracy. You still need, you know, trained policemen. You still need judges. You still need all the different things so that the writ of the government actually runs throughout the country. And that’s the part that’s being built. That’s the part that’s being developed.

So in the interim, that’s where ISAF is coming in. One of the things a lot of people don’t understand is that this is actually United Nations mission. So, you know, this is the part that always boggles me. People who are telling us, oh, we should withdraw. And yet in the second breath they say we should be supporting the United Nations. Well, ladies and gentlemen, we already are. This is the way you do it. The UN basically subcontracted ISAF is the most capable group of people to actually go out and do this mission. And the other thing, which you actually mentioned, year 2011, Canada signed the Afghan Compact with 60 other nations. So we’re committed until 2011. Like we discussed earlier, it’s going to be extremely difficult in the short term to separate the security from the redevelopment mission. So to try and arbitrarily say, well, in 2009 or 2010 or today or any other time that we’re going to withdraw the combat troops, you know, you’re basically taking a unified whole and breaking it into pieces.

Bob Metz: Okay, I want to pick up on that point just after this next break because, you know, Afghanistan is stuck right in there between two what we might consider very volatile nations, Iran on the one side and Pakistan on the other. And we’ll pick up from your point just on the other side of this. We’ll be back in a couple of seconds.

Clip (Dave Broadfoot): Even though this country was voted the best country in the world to live in by over 600, you’ll have to wait for them. Was voted the best country in the world by over 600 war criminals.

Clip (Star Trek: The Next Generation S05E03):
Keeve Falor: Well, I’m not here to debate federation policy with you, but I can offer you assistance. Simply because of one terrorist attack.
Ensign Ro Laren: Stop talking and listen.
Keeve Falor: You’ve had our problems with the Cardassians too. But now that we have a treaty, we’re in a position to help.
Captain Picard: Mr. Data, see that the replicators provide a blanket for every man, woman and child before nightfall.
Data: Aye, sir.
Captain Picard: Mr. Worf, determine what these people may have in the way of emergency needs and provide for them.
Worf: Yes, sir.
Keeve Falor: Thank you. Return to your ship. I will contact you when I have any information that might be of assistance to you. Ensign.
Ensign Ro Laren: You were helpful. The blankets were helpful. Nothing I said mattered. Thank you.

Bob Metz: And I think that point almost speaks to a little bit about what we’re doing over there. It’s a symbiotic relationship between the military combat role and the reconstruction role. But that’s got to be very difficult in view of where the country is located, as we said before, the break between Iran and Pakistan, who are, we hear that’s where a lot of the terrorism is being funded from. And they certainly would not have an interest in seeing Afghanistan reconstructed in the way the West would like to see.

Arthur Majoor: Well, perhaps it’s even, let’s look at it, sir, from a grand strategic point of view, Afghanistan sits at the crossroads of a lot of different places. Iran is in the West, Pakistan is to the Southwest, India is to the Southeast, China is to the East. We have the stans like Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan to the North, and then Russia just slightly to the North of that. So Afghanistan sitting on the border of three known nuclear powers. One wannabe nuclear power, and just to the South of yet another nuclear power. So instability in Afghanistan could spill over and adversely affect any of these other countries. We’re talking about an area in the world where literally billions of people live. So Canada has an interest just on that, just from that point of view alone.

Bob Metz: Well, let alone what happened on 9-11, and tracking that down to training grounds in Afghanistan. Was that basically the truth of the matter?

Arthur Majoor: Yes, it was. But the idea is, we want to basically snuff out those conditions, prevent people like Osama bin Laden from establishing themselves, prevent terrorism from growing and spreading. I mean, in a way it’s like fighting a disease. You have to track it down to the source, you have to reduce the infection as it were, and then you have to make the patient healthy again so that the infection doesn’t reoccur. So with Afghanistan, as time progresses, obviously our military role can be reduced, but I don’t think you can just draw an arbitrary line in the sand to say it’s going to be reduced on this particular day.

Bob Metz: Well, that’s very good. I think it’s going to be more of a phasing out.

Arthur Majoor: Even while it was there, the Afghan National Army was being trained by Canadian soldiers, the so-called OMLT, mentoring the liaison teams. And they started patrolling in platoon size, and eventually worked up to company size with Canadians, serve co-patrols. We have, at the time that left, we had about two battalions of ANA soldiers in Kandahar. By the time this boundary police, we should have five battalions trained. Now, once again, this is the same sort of problem we have with all the other reconstruction. It’s five battalions of very good soldiers, but they’re all riflemen basically. There’s no mechanics to operate or fix heavy machinery like the LAVs that Canadians use. The signallers, the information technology specialists.

Bob Metz: It’s funny how so many of the poor countries in the world, not just Afghanistan, are poor because of their lack of technology. They may have the labor, they may have even a willingness to want to change. But what’s keeping the technology out of the country besides destroying it? Is there an ideology that’s opposed to it? Or is, at least from the governing, or the terrorists or someone, where is that coming from and why are they not embracing technology far more readily?

Arthur Majoor: In Afghanistan as a whole, like I said, it’s because of 30 years of no school. So that’s a big gap to fill. Yeah, literally generations of people had very limited educations. If you showed up tomorrow morning with thousands of tractors, for example, farmers would love that for the first six months or so, but as the tractors gradually failed because of mechanical faults or whatever, there’s literally only a handful of mechanics who would be able to actually fix them. So for most farmers, it would be complete waste. There’d be a tractor rusting away in the field while they’re waiting for a mechanic to show up.

Bob Metz: So this is an example of the ultimate brain drain in a way, that there just isn’t the knowledge to maintain the infrastructure, which I think is a problem, by the way, globally, in terms of people not understanding the necessity of knowledge and of a constant advancement of science to keep the things that we already have. I wouldn’t be able to fix my television set for heaven’s sakes if it broke down. So you depend on for those things.

Arthur Majoor: Yeah, I don’t think I could fix my TV either. But the whole point is, they’re setting off down that road right now, but we can’t just abandon them because then they won’t be able to follow it to the finish. So as years progress, Canadians should be standing with the Afghan people. You know, we should be helping them in the short term.

Bob Metz: If I were to ask the question, yeah, what is Canada’s interest in it, if you’re going to look at it from the Canadian point of view? Why should we be interested in helping Afghanistan?

Arthur Majoor: Well, there’s multiple reasons, multiple interests. Like I said, this is the grand strategic interest because Afghanistan is at the crossroads of a very volatile part of the world. So instability in Afghanistan could potentially spill over and affect places like Pakistan, Iran, India, China, Russia. Part of it, I think, is… Or should be our own self-image. I mean, we’re constantly telling people that, you know, we support the United Nations, we support humanitarian initiatives, we support human rights. Well, here we are doing the biggest UN humanitarian and human rights initiative, possibly Canadian history. And now I hear people saying, well, we should stop. And it’s just mind boggling. You know, here’s our stated values and people are actually saying that, well, no, we shouldn’t be doing this after all. There’s humanitarian… Just humanitarianism. People of Afghanistan have suffered for a long time.

Bob Metz: Is it possible some critics might be thinking, well, we’re pouring billions into a foreign country that may in the end not work out for us anyway because of the circumstances around it and the countries around it, the accompanying war over in Iraq, all the spill out there. Apparently the Americans are talking about pulling out now. And would that create more destabilization in the area? Or is it necessary that… Afghanistan is just one piece in the puzzle. There’s a huge conflict going on in the whole Middle East as I’m constantly reminded by John Thompson and the Mackenzie Institute. And he says they’re all kind of related.

Arthur Majoor: Well, perhaps they are. I’m not confident it’s really coming on that part. But if you do think of it as a puzzle, having a stable and secure and somewhat prosperous Afghanistan, we’ll have spillover effects on the other parts of the Middle East and Central Asia. Like right now, we are setting off on a good course. Afghanistan, for example, has the fastest growing economy in Asia. I think the last way I read was about 12% per year. So, they’re moving out of the poverty trap. They’re moving ahead.

Bob Metz: And is this visible to people? If they were there 10 years ago and came back now, would they see a difference in the infrastructure?

Arthur Majoor: No, they would see a huge difference. I mean, Highway 4 passes by the Kandahar airfield and it runs from the Pakistan border to Kandahar city. And we could observe it. And it was just constantly full of traffic. Highway 1, which is the…

Bob Metz: See, that’s an image I would never have of Afghanistan. Just what you just said right there. That there’s even any sense of modernity or cars even driving around or anything like that. Whenever you see TV shows, you see this bleak desert, some military action, and that’s about it. And that’s all the Canadians hear.

Arthur Majoor: Well, exactly. Is the media not there covering what’s happening at your end of things? Or do they not come around?

Bob Metz: Well, it’s hard to know just where this is coming from. Obviously, like I said, watching villagers clearing ditches so that they can get a field going, clearing the irrigation ditches. It doesn’t really make exciting televisions. And so perhaps editors and journalists simply look at that and pass it by. Whereas…

Arthur Majoor: Well, there are though editors and writers who are supportive of our role there. And yet even they, I find, don’t have a clear understanding of what we’re actually accomplishing there and why we should be there. And they aren’t really illustrating it to us, which you would think that they might make a greater effort to do to support their position in that sense. But I never see that kind of stuff.

Bob Metz: Yeah, and it’s very unfortunate. It’s very difficult to say why this is so. Like I said, for the bulk of the mainstream media, it’s all about exciting pictures, exciting sound bites. Just to give you an example, I was watching the news a couple of nights ago and they’re talking about Afghanistan. And I suddenly realized that the images they were showing were from Operation Medusa, which happened in the summer of 2006. But the reason they were showing that was because it was one of the largest combat operations the Canadian forces has been in since the Korean War. And yet if you were to go and film the Canadian soldiers out in the Kandahar Province now, you know, you just see routine patrols around Spin Boldak or someplace like that. So you know, the mindset of editors is, you know, we want something exciting, we want to draw the viewers in, you know, we want to get our ratings up. I guess it’s the best way to put it. So for them, it’s easier to show stock footage from a combat operation of a year ago as opposed to showing what’s happening today.

Arthur Majoor: And that’s always the image that burns into the minds of everyone too. That’s always what you see when you think about Afghanistan. And that actually has a good point because you’re talking about images. We’re kind of conditioned from, you know, watching movies and so on. That war is all about, you know, firefights and it’s about place names. You look at Canadian history, for example, we talk about, you know, the Plains of Abraham, we talk about Vimy Ridge or Ortona, the Medak pocket, we talk about all the battles that took place. But very little about the other things that happened. Modern war is no more about the human terrain as opposed to the physical terrain.

Bob Metz: Maybe it’s a fear driven thing that people would not, you know, I often wonder, would you want to be in a war, would you want to be on the front line, you know, you can almost see people projecting their own fears onto the military and saying, no, I wouldn’t want to be in that. They wouldn’t particularly fear a reconstruction effort or something like that. Where are the casualties happening? Are they far away from where you were stationed when you were there or could it happen anywhere in the country?

Arthur Majoor: Well, it could happen anywhere. And so when I was land mines and stuff are always a consideration no matter where you are.

Bob Metz: Well, yes, the Soviets, for example, basically seeded the country with millions and millions of land mines and demining is one of the other big tasks of ISAF, you know, just finding Soviet era mines and civil war mines and clearing the fields in the areas that have been, you know, in mind. The Taliban, of course, used to provide explosive devices, the infamous IEDs. And when they think they can make a point, they also show up in person in engaging battles.

Now, this is something that people may not be aware of. The Taliban are not, you know, just a primitive bunch of people hiding out in the hills. They also have access to information. I’m pretty sure that they, you know, maybe not directly in Kandahar province, but they have access to the internet. They can see what the Western people are seeing and saying and talking about in Afghanistan. And when they see defeatist things in the press, then they try and play upon that. Continuing to manipulate public opinion and push it the way they want it to go.

Arthur Majoor: Exactly. In a military sense, there’s no way the Taliban can defeat ISAF. You know, our soldiers are simply much better trained, much better supported. We have a force that, you know, that the Taliban can’t beat in a straight one-on-one fight. But if the Taliban can discourage our governments and force governments to withdraw our forces, then they have a free hand to take down the reconstruction efforts and to reimpose the rule.

Bob Metz: So it always comes down, doesn’t it, to it’s really a battle of ideas at the root of it.

Arthur Majoor: Well, that’s exactly so. That’s one of the reasons the Taliban, for example, are so ferocious when it comes to attacking schools. And, you know, attacking schools, attacking teachers, even, you know, this sounds pretty disgusting, but gunning down little girls as they go to and from school to discourage children from going to school, discourage parents from sending them to school.

Bob Metz: Even the worst despot, you know, I have to think in my mind, what can a person gain from that? What value is there? Even if you wanted to subjugate a population, wouldn’t you want to subjugate a population that could produce something? Where’s the value in that? If you can’t even have an educated person, you know, it’s, I can understand they’re wanting to destroy knowledge to make people dependent, perhaps, on them. And because they have been seen as a savior by some. And I know that part of the problem that the Western forces face is making the Taliban seem less attractive to the population. And that’s got to be mostly an ideological thing, doesn’t it?

Arthur Majoor: Well, actually, it’s very easy to make the Taliban seem unattractive. That’s not the impression we get here, you know, because we keep hearing, even here in the West, we’re having people who are joining terrorist groups and things like that. And the average person doesn’t understand what would motivate a person to do that.

Bob Metz: Well, truthfully, I don’t really understand what would motivate a person to do that either. But in terms of Afghanistan, the local villagers in the region around the Kandahar airfield where I was, you know, they would provide information to the ISAF forces about Taliban activity. It was dangerous for them to do so directly because the Taliban could still roam around at night and, you know, use an assassination squad or whatever to try and eliminate people who were informing. But we did have, and even some young people, very brave, come up to the front gate and say, you know, we’ve seen this or we’ve heard this. Some of the other things that would happen was farmers would, for example, find a rocket or, you know, cache of explosive material. And then in the middle of the night, they dig it up, they put it in a field so it would be visible from the road. Local patrol would go by, they’d see it, and then of course the explosive demolition team would come and examine it and then destroy it.

So, you know, the local farmers are actually on our side getting information about the Taliban to us or taking the Taliban’s weapons and explosives away, putting them in a place where the ISAF forces can see them and destroy them. There’s also, I’ve heard people talk about how villagers, village headsmen would actually call out the men, sort of like a local militia system in a way, to actually prevent the Taliban from coming to the village or to protect the infrastructure that has been created for them. So, the people themselves, you know, they know what’s to be gained at the Taliban, you know, basically ruled by fear and intimidation. We can show them the military power, but we also show up with dentists, engineers, teachers. And when the people look, they see it’s quite clear there’s a lot more to be gained for them.

Bob Metz: Certainly. This is not just a bunch of thugs coming over to beat us over the head and go home type of thing.

Arthur Majoor: Yeah, there’s a difference, for example, between, let’s say, the Hell’s Angels coming and taking over town or just staying with the local city hall.

Bob Metz: Right. Now, you know, in the whole reconstruction issue over there, there’s the three areas that you were talking about, security, governance, economic, and social development. Those are the areas that are outside, of course, the combat issues.

Arthur Majoor: Yeah, you got to remember that the whole economy. Security is part of the combat issue, isn’t it? The security is to provide the stable environment for those other things to take place. So governance we talked about, the government in Kabul is working on creating its, you know, the arms of government, basically.

Bob Metz: Now, on the site that you directed me to, they referred to that specifically as the rule of law and of human rights. Are those kind of ideas easy to introduce to a country like that? Is that something that meets resistance? Who actually teaches things like that? How is it done? Just through the school system? Is it done through the media? I’m curious about how you do actually physically, you know, when you’re down on the ground, wage a battle for ideas. I mean, you have to want to make the people even willing to listen to you to begin with.

Arthur Majoor: Well, from our end of things, and once again, I’m speaking from my own personal experience and the people that I’ve spoken to, you know, we’re working from the village level and working up. So reinforcing the authority of the local headman, for example. You know, when we show up to a village, you know, we announce our presence, we ask to speak to the headman, we hold what’s called a Shura, which is like a sort of a town council meeting. The headman decides what’s the most critical thing that he needs, and we attempt to provide those things, if at all possible. And because Afghanistan is a rural society, and because they don’t have sort of the widespread information infrastructure that we take for granted here, that’s probably the very best way of doing things.

And one of the sites they talk about the, what we’re doing, I’m just going to read from the, sure, from the site directly so I get the numbers right. 437 community development councils, including 110 for women. So the councils are basically reinforcing the local village structures. And we’re perhaps used to like a single vascular actually to try and do things. But in Afghanistan, that’s just not an efficient way of doing things. Having the local people take charge of their own lives. Having local people deciding for themselves. Having local people set their own goals. That’s the bottom up sort of aspect of Afghanistan.

Bob Metz: Now, in your experience with what you saw there, could you say in a sense, do they value what we would call, say, freedom? Because after all, if the major religion of the country is a form of Islam of some sort, is that almost not a state religion? Isn’t that almost contradictory to concepts of freedom and some of the things that are missing there?

Arthur Majoor: Well, not entirely. The fact that most people are Islamic is more of a sort of a historical and cultural thing than anything else. Islam doesn’t prohibit you from choosing to do a particular trade or listening to a radio show or going out and flying a kite if you think that’s fun. The Taliban, on the other hand, did and did so at the point of a gun. So, the whole issue of Islam, I think, is almost like a red herring. The real thing is the people of Afghanistan.

Bob Metz: Is the government there considered secular in the sense we might regard it?

Arthur Majoor: Yeah. I mean, the official title is the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. But in terms of how the government runs, you wouldn’t see anything that’s remarkably different from what you see right here in Canada, for example. You’d probably notice that things go a lot more slowly. There’s not enough people to answer the phone. There’s not enough clerks. There’s not enough IT specialists and not enough trained policemen and all the other things. But they’re working at it and they’re trying. And they’re trying for a fairly sort of neutral, I guess, the best way of doing things.

One of the other historical facts of Afghanistan, you know, it’s been at the crossroads of many civilizations has been conquered many, many times, which by the way is another one of those myths that we just shake our heads at. Right. You know, the Afghans have never been conquered. Yeah. Kandahar is named after Alexander the Great who conquered this place in like 331 B.C. And since then, it’s been conquered by the Persians, it’s been conquered by the Mongols, empires from India, all kinds of different people have gone through there.

Bob Metz: Well, maybe that’s what some people mean by not being conquered. It’s been conquered so many times no one actually really took root there and stayed there long enough to say that this is the type of civilization in society that Afghanistan will be.

Arthur Majoor: Well, because of all these groups flowing through, depending on who you read, there could be up to 52 sort of ethnic and tribal groups inside the nation itself. And you know, there’s multiple languages, Pashto and Dari, the two main ones. But the government of Afghanistan is trying to act as a secular government, so it’s not going to be perceived as, you know, this tribe or that tribe or that group is taking over for everyone else.

Bob Metz: Now, so Canada’s been there, how long has the country actually been there working on the ground? If 9-11 occurred just six years ago really?

Arthur Majoor: Our first troops arrived. This is another thing. Because this is a very short time period really, you can even say that we’ve been there. Yeah, but the chronology, the chronology is interesting too because once again, it’s really missing from the debates about what we’re doing and why we should be there. Canada was first committed to Afghanistan and our troops arrived in 2002. The battle group actually arrived in Kandahar and they went into combat almost immediately in a place called the Shycott Valley. So, you know, like you said, this has never been a traditional peacekeeping mission. It’s always been a much more, I guess, peace enforcement or support mission. It might be a more appropriate term.

Bob Metz: I don’t even know that the term peacekeeping is appropriate applied to other areas either because it implies that you have to use force to keep the peace, which means something more.

Arthur Majoor: Well, the traditional definition of peacekeeping suggests that the two sides have an agreement and they want to keep the peace and where there’s, as the brokerage is, as it were. But that’s not the case in Afghanistan. But we were there in 2002. In 2003, we moved to the capital of Kabul. We did security operations, rents Kabul. And in late 2004 or early 2005, we went back to Kandahar. The then Defense Minister Bill Graham actually made a great point of going around and telling people that, yes, we’re going back to Kandahar, yes, the mission is going to be in a more difficult part of the country, and yes, we could possibly sustain casualties.

So, all these facts were or at least should have been well known for the longest time. And so, when I look at the debate and I see people have sort of completely forgotten or ignored this, it just tells me that this whole debate is being taken place in a sort of a sterile vacuum. They’re not looking at the larger historical context. They’re not looking at, okay, we’ve been there since 2002. We’ve been doing this reconstruction work pretty much since 2002. We’ve achieved a lot of very small scale but very widespread successes. And because nation building is a huge, huge project, we’re just on the road, we’re just starting on the road to making a stable and secure Afghanistan. I mean, this is a project that’s going to take decades.

If you look back at the end of World War II, Germany and Imperial Japan were pretty much smashed. You know, the infrastructure was bombed to rubble. The political institutions had been destroyed and discredited and so on. Germany’s economic miracle really dates to about the mid-60s. It took that long basically to rebuild Germany from 1945 to 1965. Yes. Japan. And there’s still American and Canadian military presences all around the world, even in Europe, everywhere.

Bob Metz: You know, I remember just after 9-11 saying that if we go over there, we’re going over there for a long time. You can’t just go in for a couple of years and go out. I don’t think people understand the enormity of the task. Believe it or not, our time is running down really quickly. We’re almost at the end of the show. We haven’t got to half of the stuff. But if there was a major message you’d want to leave listeners with in terms of, yes, the debates going on over here all the time. That’s perhaps why we’re isolated in the sterile environment away from where the quote, action end quote, is. What’s the most important thing you think Canadians should be aware of when they’re thinking of this issue, especially…

Arthur Majoor: I think we should look at it in terms of our own history and our own culture as it were. Canadians historically have gone out and taken on really huge challenges. And I’m not just talking about military challenges. I mean, building the CPR was almost an impossible job based on the technology of that day and the climate of the country and the terrain that they had to go through. And politically we’ve taken on huge challenges too. Louis Saint Laurent was the Prime Minister who created the modern security environment with NATO and NORAD and worked very hard to build the modern United Nations. And, you know, militarily, of course, we’ve also been taken on giant challenges that are much larger and more established armies could not or would not do. So the thing is, you know, Canadians historically have taken on huge challenges and have succeeded. This is probably the biggest challenge that we’re taking on in the 21st century. I think we can succeed. And I think Canadians should look at this as something that this is worth doing. It’s worth doing well and we should stay the course and do the job.

Bob Metz: Well, certainly I agree to the extent that we’ve committed to it. I think it’s something that we should do. And I guess that’s it. Arthur Majoor.

Clip (Greg Giraldo): I live in New York City and that’s, you know, you’re worried about terrorism all the time. The other day my son says to me, Daddy, how come the bad men hate us so much? How come the bad men hate us? How sad is that? I actually got tears in my eyes because he’s 18. What kind of a moron am I raising? I said, I don’t know why they hate us. Dummy, why don’t you read the paper and form your own opinions? But he’s not going to read the paper. Americans, let’s face it, Americans have no idea what goes on in other countries. Americans don’t know anything about other countries. We don’t read the paper. Well, I don’t, wait a minute, don’t turn me into the Dixie Chicks up here with that. I’m saying we don’t read the paper. I’m not saying, you know, we stink badly enough to deserve that ovation.