Contrasts: Canada’s troops have earned respect while politicians deny and deceive

Two senior Canadian officials who sought to block Skyreporter.com’s early investigations into corruption within the Karzai regime have been named by a government whistleblower as imposing “a wall of secrecy” around “hot potato” issues cast up by Canada’s military mission to Afghanistan.

Richard Colvin, a top political officer with Canada’s Foreign Affairs department, yesterday revealed to a parliamentary committee in Ottawa that David Mulroney, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s point man on the Afghan mission, and Arif Lalani, the former Canadian Ambassador to Kabul, censored his reports on the abuse of prisoners handed over by Canadian troops to the Karzai government’s National Directorate of Security.

In the same timeframe, specifically from March of 2007, Mulroney and Lalani obstructed Skyreporter’s search for information from Canadian government departments regarding two of President Karzai’s most controversial officials: Attorney General Abdul Jabar Sabet and Interior Minister Zarar Muqbul.

Both men were eventually removed from their posts amid accusations of gross misconduct - and both are prime candidates for investigation following the pledge of the current Afghan Attorney General to bring crooked former ministers to justice.

In the autumn of 2007, sources within Canada’s foreign affairs department, who have requested anonymity out of concern for their jobs, informed this reporter that he had been effectively blacklisted by officials in Prime Minister’s Office, who like Mulroney and Lalani had refused to respond to Skyreporter’s calls and emails.

The PMO’s intent, the sources said, was to stonewall anyone working to reveal Kabul’s darker secrets.

This theme was reflected in our July, 2007 article for Canada’s leading public policy monthly, Policy Options, titled “Covering Up Karzai & Co.” The article concluded with the section reproduced below.

Some months after the publication, on Oct. 27, 2007, this reporter appeared as a Domain and Subject Matter Expert before the Government of Canada’s independent review of the Afghan mission, chaired by former Deputy Prime Minister John Manley.

David Mulroney, still head of Harper’s Afghan Task Force, was in the room.

Coming up on Skyreporter:  what I told Mr. Mulroney of his government’s tactics and behaviour - and how the Manley panel, listening and watching, responded.

Also, the rewards of blind loyalty:  David Mulroney moves onward and upward to become Canada’s Ambassador to China.

And the perils of honesty:  how Harper’s Conservative MPs have attacked Richard Colvin with McCarthy-like zeal.

Excerpt from “Cashing In On Karzai & Co.”

Policy Options, July 2007:

In this context, Canadians and other foreign sponsors of the Karzai regime need not wonder where so many of their tax dollars are winding up. The cash is in the hands of criminals in high office, who cover their tracks and sustain their grip on power through a complex web of connections, many of which are well known by Western political, diplomatic and military authorities.

The footnote to this litany of wrongdoing is the damage it is inflicting on Canada’s own political culture. Governments can be expected to spin and evade and make every effort to keep the public in the dark about the grimy underside of contentious issues. Journalists depend upon this kind of official evasion. It gives us a raison d’etre, a mission to reveal and explain.

But it would be remiss of this correspondent, after 28 years of reporting regularly from Afghanistan, to fail to point out the remarkable degree of secrecy maintained by the Harper government regarding Canada’s Afghan initiatives. Even the Kremlin was less manic in its information control during the Soviet occupation of the 1980’s. It is regrettable to report that perhaps the only undisputed policy success in Afghanistan chalked up by the Prime Minister’s Office is the complete stifling of virtually every public servant concerned with any aspect of the mission.

In Ottawa, one high-ranking official with oversight responsibilities in several of the areas covered by this article contacted me after hours, “ashamed,” he said, to have to request anonymity. “The PMO spends more energy trying to control people than accomplishing goals,” he said. “Here’s how things work:  questions come to us, people want us to explain the mission. We call the PMO to ask approval. They tell us to put it writing, in an email. We send it in, and wait. Usually the approval never comes.”

He went on: “We have to constantly fight the system. But if you’re not going to let people do their jobs, what’s the point? We’re being handcuffed.”

A more senior figure at an Ottawa-based agency states:  “This Prime Minister’s approach, and that of his staff, is a considerable impediment to the public’s ability to comprehend what the government is doing. It’s really a different way of doing business than anything we’ve experienced before.

“The PM and his advisors treat every issue as if it’s his own, as if it’s personal. It’s just very strange, and it results in a management style that blocks every door, including the ones that might actually take the government forward.”