A suspected Taliban prisoner has his hands strapped by a Canadian soldier after a raid on a compound in northern Kandahar in May 2006.JOHN D MCHUGH
The testimony of Richard Colvin to a House of Commons committee on Wednesday strongly suggests a stubborn indifference to the fate of the Afghan detainees, on the part of a number of key institutions of the Canadian government - not only politicians, but also the Privy Council Office, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, and senior personnel in the Canadian Armed Forces.
Peter MacKay, the Minister of Defence, and other Conservative MPs, have been impugning the solidity of Mr. Colvin's beliefs that many detainees have been tortured. Mr. Colvin does not stand alone in his conclusions; notably, Graeme Smith of The Globe and Mail, has assembled substantial evidence of such torture.
But that is not what is really new in what Mr. Colvin said this week. If his account is correct, the federal government was so determined to turn a blind eye to the treatment of the detainees by the Afghan National Directorate of Security and police that it discouraged record-keeping and other documentation - highly uncharacteristic behaviour in any bureaucracy. On this, Mr. Colvin gave evidence from his own direct experience, not hearsay.
This whole sequence of events goes back to before the Harper government took power. In hindsight, the Liberal government of Paul Martin may have been naive in taking the initiative to press for the transfer of detainees to the Afghan authorities, rather than continuing to hand them over to the armed forces of the United States. At the time, Canada was worried by the prospect that Afghans captured by Canadian soldiers might end up in the limbo - or worse - of Guantanamo, Cuba. The government of Afghanistan, having been recently democratically elected, appeared to be a more promising and appropriate recipient for Afghan citizens.
The Karzai government, though not opposed in principle to taking the detainees, was not in any hurry to do so, pointing out that it was not ready with adequate prison capacity. That should have been a hint that Afghan jailers might not meet Western professional corrections standards. But Canada pushed ahead with the transfer agreement, which was signed by General Rick Hillier on Canada's behalf in the last months of the Martin government.
Today, people in the Western world are no longer surprised by corruption and other abuses by officials of the Karzai government.
Mr. Colvin may be mistaken that, because Canadian soldiers took far more prisoners than the British or the Dutch, many of them may have been innocent bystanders (though a Canadian military board of inquiry that reported in February recognized that possibility). The explanation for the numbers detained may well be that, in the early months of the Kandahar mission, the Canadians went into areas that had been little touched by ISAF forces, dealt with some daunting challenges and suffered high casualties accordingly.
None of this controversy tarnishes the noble work of Canada's soldiers. On the contrary, the apparent callousness of the Canadian government undermines the goals of their mission, by frustrating the Forces' efforts win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. If partisan politicians were reluctant to think about an unpleasant problem, or to have to answer awkward questions in the House of Commons, that would be discreditable but understandable. If the military was annoyed by the concerns of a Foreign Affairs official such as Mr. Colvin, that in itself might have been unsurprising interdepartmental friction.
But Kevin Lynch, the clerk of the Privy Council at the time, set up a central task force for the whole Afghan mission, in a sensible attempt to overcome such conflicts among different institutions with different cultures. David Mulroney became the head of this task force. If Mr. Colvin's testimony is true, Mr. Mulroney was instead one of the main people discouraging the passage of information about the alleged mistreatment of the Afghan detainees. A consistent pattern of resistance to reports of torture, if confirmed, would say something disturbing about a whole group of Canadian institutions.
The word "cover-up," which evokes the Watergate scandal and a concealment of wrongdoing within an institution, or even obstruction of justice, may be excessive in this context. Instead, there is reason to believe that several parts of Canadian government preferred to look the other way, when informed that the Afghan government was abusing detainees, far from adhering to its side of the agreement.
This week, the dismissive antagonism of some Conservative MPs, including Mr. MacKay's parliamentary secretary, Laurie Hawn, in response to Mr. Colvin's testimony, raises a disappointing inference that partisanism continues to prevail over a sense of common humanity.