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Afghanistan has seen the undoing of more than a few foreign visitors during the past 31 years of war, but historians will have a hard time citing a more unseemly collapse than that sustained by Canada’s Conservative government this past week.
Thursday marked a turning point for Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his cabinet colleagues – and it wasn’t easy viewing. Only Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit could have led Canadians down a more bewildering path through their TV looking glasses.
Coverage from Kabul showed Canada’s Foreign Minister, Lawrence Cannon, endorsing the reinstallation of an unrepentant ballot fraudster as president of Afghanistan, then cut to a packed House of Commons in Ottawa, where Cannon’s colleagues were busy savaging the credibility of one of their own senior diplomats.
Cannon declared Hamid Karzai “a legitimate president,” while Defence Minister Peter MacKay loudly denounced Richard Colvin, a Foreign Affairs intelligence officer. Colvin’s reports about prisoner abuse, MacKay shouted, were marred by “incredible holes” and phoney allegations served up by the Taliban.
Karzai good, Colvin bad - and parliament in an uproar. All that was missing was Alice gazing down from the public gallery, trying to make sense of it all.
In truth, this clash of political and diplomatic heavyweights has been coming for some years. At last the long simmering tensions between diligent foreign affairs officials and their control-obsessed political masters has erupted into the open.
This particular issue should have been resolved in 2007, when Colvin’s reports (as MacKay has reluctantly conceded) contributed to the amended prisoner transfer agreement between Ottawa and Kabul.
Instead, Harper’s operatives have focused their energies on covering up the darker tendencies of the regime’s National Directorate of Security - and for that matter all the other flawed precincts of the Karzai regime.
Without question it is anger at being outed over the suppression of unflattering news that accounts for much of the blistering severity of the government’s assault on Colvin’s credibility.
Like MacKay, the angry pack of Tory MPs who set upon the officer immediately after his testimony before a parliamentary committee on Wednesday were reading from the same talking points – notably the claim that Colvin had fallen victim to Taliban disinformation.
The scene was eerily similar to the barracking suffered by British weapons inspector David Kelly before his own country’s MPs in 2003. Tony Blair’s government had been embarrassed by Kelly’s admissions to the BBC over “sexed-up” intelligence about Iraq’s pre-war weaponry. Kelly was found dead within days of his visit to parliament, allegedly by his own hand.
While Richard Colvin shows no sign of buckling under his masters’ whip, he hasn’t been quoted by journalists since his appearance Wednesday, and did not respond to an email request for an interview for this article.
MacKay has eased off somewhat, stating that he won’t have Colvin fired from his current post at Canada’s embassy in Washington D.C., likely after reflecting on the perils of a Kelly-like scenario. At least one Harper government minister has been cautioned that the government tirade is approaching critical mass.
However the Conservatives’ bluster has achieved one of its goals. Attacking Colvin has shifted focus away from the two officials who deserve the keenest public scrutiny in this debacle: David Mulroney, former head of the Afghan Task Force; and Arif Lalani, Canada’s former ambassador to Kabul.
Skyreporter can reveal that Mulroney was known as “the rodent” among frustrated senior officials at the departments of National Defence and Foreign Affairs, among others, and even within his own task force staff.
“Mulroney took Harper’s orders and ran with them,” comments one veteran, who requests not to be named for fear of government reprisal. “He’d gnaw into anything that looked off-script, and hide it someplace deep and dark.”
According to Colvin, Mulroney didn’t want to hear his claims that prisoners transferred by Canadian troops to Afghan jails, many of them innocent civilians, faced torture. When Colvin began putting his reports in writing, he was told in future not to put things on paper, but to use the telephone instead.
The Foreign Affairs staffer started his investigations from his post at Canada’s Kandahar PRT in 2006, and continued reporting when he moved to Kabul as second-in-command at the Canadian Embassy.
Ambassador Lalani, Colvin testified this week, “censored” his reports, in one instance cutting from 75 to five the number of Canadian officials on Colvin’s distribution list.
Seeking balance to Colvin’s statements, Skyreporter has spoken with a colleague of Messrs. Lalani and Mulroney who takes exception to Colvin’s testimony – and his style. This high-ranking career diplomat says that Colvin was confrontational with the Canadian military, and was given to arbitrary judgements that were insufficiently grounded in fact.
Against this, other evidence, including the reports accumulated here at Skyreporter since March of 2007, resonates with Colvin’s claim that Mulroney and Lalani actively stifled information critical of the Karzai regime.
This reporter has a good deal of history with both men, as mentioned in yesterday’s Breaking News report.
From March through June of 2007, Skyreporter on many occasions sought comment from a range of Canadian government ministries, and the Prime Minister’s Office, regarding stories revealed on this site. Whether the subject was the heroin trade, corruption in high office, the siphoning off of Canadian-financed Afghan National Police salaries or other legitimate topics of inquiry, we were met with closed doors.
Finally, after months of persistence, David Mulroney was served up as the only possible officially-approved source of background comment.
To put it generously, “the rodent” proved to be economical with the facts. After two phone conversations, it became clear that Skyreporter was to receive no tangible answers regarding Karzai’s crooked Interior Minister and Attorney General, the haemorrhaging of police salaries revealed by the governor of Zabul province, or the Kabul Airport heroin scandal.
Then in October of 2007, an invitation reached our inboxes.
An independent panel had been formed on Harper’s orders to review all aspects of Canada’s Afghan mission. Headed by former Deputy Prime Minister John Manley, the panel would hear evidence from a broad range of people with knowledge of the conflict and Canada’s role on the ground. This reporter was asked to be one of those witnesses.
On the morning of Saturday, Oct. 27, 2007, I was ushered into an Ottawa boardroom and introduced to the panel. It was a small room, and crowded in with John Manley and his panel members were a number of officials from DND, Foreign Affairs and other departments.
And there was a thin, rather tense man sitting by the door. “This is David Mulroney,” I was told, and we shook hands.
For the next hour, I unloaded before the panel – Pakistan safe havens, heroin smuggling, Karzai’s creeps, the works. At one point I spoke myself breathless. I had to get up and pace the room to get air into my lungs.
Then, in front of all assembled, I turned to Mr. Mulroney and told him what I thought about his boss’s way of doing things. The man went pale, and said not a word in response.
He said nothing when I told him that covering up for Karzai would inevitably backfire, and encourage greater corruption. Nor when I told him that Soviet-style information control was un-Canadian, and deeply offensive to his own public servants.
Nor when I said that submitting without question to the Bush administration’s foreign and military policies did violence to Canada’s hard-won martial heritage, earned in blood at places like Passchendaele and Dieppe.
Manley and his panel members listened closely. Several of them smiled, one even nodded: these were all seasoned veterans of Ottawa’s power structure, past and present.
I produced, for the panel, a list of names, a response to their request for suggestions of informed people to speak with regarding the Afghan mission. “They’re not the usual suspects,” I said, “not the sources Mr. Mulroney would approve of.”
“Don’t worry,” Manley said with a grin. “We’re going to take in as many points of view as possible.”
Which to their credit they did. And while the language of the panel’s findings is at times diplomatic to a fault, it was clear that other witnesses, too, had criticized the Harper government’s information control freakery.
The panel called for a “rebalancing” of the government’s communications practices, saying it “must engage Canadians in a continuous, frank and constructive dialogue…”
Or in plain English, quit blowing smoke over the critical weaknesses of the Afghan mission. Commenting upon the release of their recommendations, Manley and the panel members slammed the “gagging” of Foreign Affairs officials, which they said left Canadians confused about the mission.
Which bears a striking similarity to Richard Colvin’s testimony, does it not?
Just over a year after our meeting, Mr. Mulroney was rewarded with Canada’s ambassadorship to China – fittingly enough, only months after the Chinese zodiac’s year of the rat.
Coming up on skyreporter.com, Ambassador Arif Lalani’s take on the art of information control.
