An official from Sudan's National Elections Commission (left) helps a voter at a polling station in Juba, Sudan, Apr. 12, 2010. (UN Photo / Tim McKulka)

CTV.ca

In less than six months, Sudan will hold a referendum that experts say could produce a new country or spark a regional war. And as they prepare for the crucial vote, politicians from Africa’s largest country are seeking lessons from Canada.

Eight members of President Omar al Bashir’s ruling National Congress Party and three members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, which governs the country’s semi-autonomous south, visited Canada this week to learn how Ottawa conducts plebiscites.

Those two parties represent opposing sides of a now quiet civil war, which was fought mainly in the south of the country and claimed more than two million lives. (Another war in the western Darfur region has killed several hundred thousand more.)

Southern Sudan sits atop the country’s vital oil resources, and followers of Christianity and traditional African faiths there have resisted attempts to impose Islamic customs and beliefs on them by the Muslim north.

A 2005 peace agreement helped quell decades of fighting between the two sides. Under its terms, Sudanese authorities must hold a referendum by Jan. 9, 2011, to determine whether the south will secede.

Ottawa hosted the Sudanese delegation as part of an offer of “technical support” for the referendum, Foreign Affairs spokesperson Lisa Monette told CTV.ca in an email.

Over five days, the group stopped in Quebec City, Montreal and Ottawa. They heard presentations from a number of organizations including Elections Canada.

Nelson Wiseman, a politics professor at the University of Toronto, said Elections Canada is often asked to provide advice on democratic processes abroad. Canada is seen as having “a lot of expertise in electoral administration,” he said, and has participated in several hundred electoral missions overseas.

In the case of south Sudan, Ottawa hopes the delegation’s visit will make the outcome of the pending referendum “more likely to be accepted by all parties involved, to produce legitimate outcomes, and thus avoid unnecessary violence,” Monette said.

EJ Hogendoorn, the International Crisis Group’s project director for the Horn of Africa, applauded Ottawa’s offer to share its expertise on secession referendums (Quebec has held two votes on sovereignty).

“Any attempt to try to make this vote as transparent as possible — meaning that the people believe the results are in fact the will of the voters — the better it will be for stability in the country,” Hogendoorn said by phone from Nairobi, Kenya.

Sudan was the largest recipient of Canada’s humanitarian aid in 2008-2009. Ottawa has spent at least $760 million there over the past four years. That represents a “significant” financial footprint in the East African country, Hogendoorn said.

A few dozen members of the Canadian military are stationed across the south, the western region of Darfur and the northern capital of Khartoum as part of United Nations and African Union peacekeeping missions. Eighteen Canadian police officers are training local authorities, and troops deployed from nearby African states drive 105 armoured vehicles borrowed from the Canadian military.

About 60 countries are involved in humanitarian and security work in Sudan, under the auspices of the UN and the African Union. But Hogendoorn said the international community is still doing too little to help the country avoid another war.

“This is the largest threat to regional stability in Africa at the present time,” Hogendoorn said. “And if you were to compare the assistance going to Sudan to the assistance that’s gone to other war-torn countries, such as Bosnia and Cambodia, it’s not nearly as much.”

A months-old national election may hold clues about what to expect from the referendum. Bashir’s National Congress Party won the April vote — a process that election monitors from the Carter Center deemed “chaotic, non-transparent and vulnerable to electoral manipulation.”

More recently, a July report by rights group Global Witness warned that Sudan remains “alarmingly unprepared” for the referendum. Government authorities have yet to pinpoint where the new country’s borders would lie if the south opts for independence. No agreements have been reached on how to divide Sudan’s debt or share its natural resources. Meanwhile the Sudanese armed forces and the Southern People’s Liberation Army are said to be rearming.

www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20100806/sudan-comes-to-canada-100808

The sign outside Google China headquarters in Beijing, adorned with flowers and notes from local Internet users. (Mike Dong)

CTV.ca

For nearly two months, Internet users in China have been waiting anxiously to find out whether the world’s largest online search engine will close in their country.

As ecologist Xiong Zhenqin told the journal Nature recently: “Research without Google would be like life without electricity.”

The Internet giant announced in January it was reassessing whether to continue its operations in China, where 384 million people surf the Web under tight government controls.

Google discovered that hackers had broken into its popular Gmail application. The attacks appeared to originate from mainland China. The culprits were looking for information about Chinese human rights activists and that suggested government involvement, Google alleged.

Citing concerns over security, human rights and freedom of speech, the California-based Internet giant said it would either find a way to stop censoring its search results in China or leave.

Whether Google and Beijing are in negotiations is unclear, but the company has made no public decision on the matter. Meanwhile the cyber attacks, which Google said hit at least 20 other firms, have reverberated through Washington.

The U.S. National Security Agency probed where the hackers were based, tracing the attacks to servers in Taiwan, then reportedly to a pair of Chinese schools. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also demanded that Chinese authorities conduct a thorough and transparent investigation.

“The Google attacks were taken extremely seriously — more than just an incident of potential industrial espionage but a major body blow to the American political system,” said Ronald Deibert, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Toronto.

Deibert is one of the people Google has been soliciting advice from in its dealings with China. He delivered a presentation about the rise of cyberspace control at Google’s headquarters a week before the company uncovered the hack. And officials informed him of their discovery before they went public.

Deibert told CTV.ca the hackers went one step further than was widely reported, ostensibly trying to access directories of data that Google collects, as required by U.S. national security laws.

The company tapped Deibert’s expertise after he co-wrote a 2009 study into cyber attacks against the office of the Dalai Lama. Researchers uncovered an extensive online spy network dubbed GhostNet that they traced back to China. It had compromised 1,295 computers across 103 countries — including some in Canada.

Domestic appeal

Deibert says Canada needs to confront the issues of censorship and government intrigue on the Web that incidents like the Google hack raise.

In a paper published on Feb. 22 by the Canadian International Council think-tank, he called on Ottawa to develop a cyberspace strategy that includes:

• Fixing Canadian laws that foreign governments could use to justify controlling the Web, such as with content filtering or online surveillance
• Scrutinizing whether Canadian technology exports are being used by foreign governments to restrict Internet access
• Encouraging “arms control in cyberspace” by, for example, proposing a UN treaty to make the Web more open and peaceful

The idea of “arms control” may seem extreme, but governments have started using the Internet to help them wage war.

During the 2008 conflict in Georgia, hackers took down key government websites in the capital of Tbilisi while Russian tanks rolled across the border. Military powers including France, Israel and the U.S. have adopted such cyberwar tactics as part of their defence policies.

The Internet is “entering a dangerous and chaotic phase, essentially a cyber-arms race,” Deibert said, and that’s led to spiralling computer espionage and computer network attacks.

“We need at least some government to stand up and say ‘how are we going to restrain this?’”

Policy ‘vacuum’

Stephen Harper’s Conservative government pledged, in this week’s throne speech, to create a cybersecurity strategy that would protect Canada’s “digital infrastructure.”

So far, however, there has been a “surprising vacuum in Canadian policy around cyberspace generally,” Deibert says.

Ottawa has been considering legislation on the issue. “The Investigative Powers of the 21st Century Act” was tabled last June. It proposed that Internet service providers be required to hand over data and personal information about their customers to police. But the bill hadn’t become law by the time Parliament was prorogued.

The federal government’s existing cybersecurity efforts are organized around Public Safety Canada. For example, CSIS and the RCMP’s technological crime unit probe Web-based threats or attacks and report to Public Safety.

The department is also “leading cross-government efforts to produce a cybersecurity strategy,” David Charbonneau, a spokesperson for Public Safety Canada, told CTV.ca by email.

The strategy will incorporate input from private companies and foreign governments, Charbonneau wrote, “and will build on significant efforts that have been underway.”

Meanwhile south of the border, U.S. President Barack Obama appointed a White House cybersecurity co-ordinator in January. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security created a similar position in 2005, and Washington unveiled a national cybersecurity plan in 2008.

As governments in North America and elsewhere develop policies on cyberspace, they’re influencing how the Internet will evolve.

“The dominant trend right now is the growing militarization of cyberspace,” Deibert said. “That leads down a path towards islands of territorialized Internet that are not connected to each other.”

“Another path I’d prefer to see is one where there’s perhaps a treaty articulated by countries of the world that lays out basic principles for how cyberspace should be governed,” he added. “Hopefully that would be in an open, public way.”

For the time being, efforts to keep the World Wide Web peaceful and open are centring on China, which passed a new round of Internet controls last week.

Without an international cyberspace treaty, the U.S. government is considering whether to lodge a complaint about China’s online censorship with the World Trade Organization.

But China isn’t alone. The list of countries where Internet censorship has become a hot-button issue has grown to include democracies like Germany, France and Australia.

Saudi Arabia's Assistant Minister of Defense and Aviation arrives at the Pentagon for talks on Yemen, Nov. 17, 2009. (DoD / R. D. Ward)

CTV.ca

It’s a pattern that governments fighting Islamic extremism don’t want to see repeated — success cracking down on militants in one country boosts terrorism elsewhere.

In Afghanistan, for example, the U.S. invasion prompted al Qaeda’s leadership to seek shelter in the tribal areas of Pakistan, beyond the reach of the central government in Islamabad.

Similarly, experts say al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula, the group that claimed responsibility for the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound flight on Dec. 25, was formed in Yemen partly because of Saudi Arabia’s success at abolishing militant groups next door.

Saudi authorities have been waging a campaign to rehabilitate, imprison or kill suspected extremists since a wave of terrorist attacks wracked the country in 2003 and 2004. But some militants fled south to Yemen, where AQAP was created last January.

“There was a balloon effect,” said Letta Tayler, a terrorism and counterterrorism researcher with Human Rights Watch. “It’s a much more hospitable environment for al Qaeda than Saudi Arabia was following the crackdown.”

The American military had been helping Yemen combat al Qaeda before Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian who had taken Arabic classes in Yemen, allegedly tried to detonate a bomb on board Flight 253.

Earlier in December, the U.S. military assisted with two air strikes on Yemeni territory. They were reportedly aimed at suspected al Qaeda leaders and killed several dozen civilians. The second strike took place a day before Abdulmutallab boarded a flight to Detroit.

The U.S. also provided nearly US$70 million in military aid to Yemen in 2009. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, has said the Department of Defense will double that amount this year.

Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that his government, along with the U.S., will help Yemen fund a new counterterorrism force.

Later this month, the British capital will also host two simultaneous international conferences, one on Afghanistan and the other on Yemen.

Tayler said that countries seeking to combat radicalization in Yemen would do well to learn from U.S. General Stanley McChrystal, NATO’s top commander in Afghanistan.

To defeat the Taliban and keep al Qaeda from returning to Kabul, McChrystal has recommended that U.S. troops use “courageous restraint.”

“At the end of the day, the success of this operation will be determined in the minds of the Afghan people,” McChrystal said last month. “It’s not the number of people you kill. It’s the number of people you convince. It’s the number of people that don’t get killed. It’s the number of houses that aren’t destroyed.”

As with Afghanistan, experts say there’s no easy solution to countering al Qaeda in Yemen.

Joost Hiltermann, deputy program director with International Crisis Group’s Middle East and North Africa arm, warned that military intervention could weaken the central government, allowing al Qaeda more free rein there.

“In a situation as fragile as in Yemen, to put a major external military force could be fatal,” Hiltermann told CTV.ca. “The country may not be able to sustain it.”

Complex problems

Yemen is a semi-mountainous country on the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula with a fast-growing population of some 22 million people.

One of the least developed countries outside sub-Saharan Africa, the UN Human Development Index estimates that 35 per cent of Yemenis live in poverty. Malnourishment is a common affliction for children and nearly half the population is illiterate.

Oil, which brings in three-quarters of the national income, is running out. Tourism was touted as a possible alternative revenue generator (Yemen houses four UNESCO heritage sites). But visitor numbers have dropped due to attacks on foreigners, and political instability.

About 150,000 people have been displaced by a civil war that has been raging intermittently near Saada, in the north of the country, since 2004. The Yemeni government has been accused of indiscriminate bombing in the conflict, which Hiltermann says “is clearly escalating.”

In the south, a secessionist movement flared up last spring, bringing hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets.

A female Yemeni SWAT team on a training exercise. (BBC World Service)

“The bottom line is, the country’s in chaos,” Tayler said. “There are no prospects for youth and most citizens are concerned about how to get the next meal.”

As Yemen’s troubles mount, President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s government is losing more control. His reach, which doesn’t extend to many parts of the country, is weakening further.

Marisa L. Porges, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who advises on counterterrorism for the U.S. Department of Defense, travelled to Yemen in the fall.

“There are so many domestic problems that al Qaeda isn’t a top priority,” Porges said by phone from Washington.

“In private conversations, many officials say ‘we’re already there — the state has failed.’” she added. “This is the pervading sense now.”

Confronting al Qaeda

AQAP launched several attacks last year, including an attempt to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism chief, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, and two attacks against South Korean tourists and dignitaries — all using suicide bombers.

But the attempted Dec. 25 airliner attack seems to represent the group’s first plot against a target outside the region.

While that incident focused the international community’s attention on AQAP, experts say it will be hard if not impossible to keep such groups off Yemeni territory without addressing the country’s other problems.

Jane Novak, an American analyst and expert on Yemen, warned that President Saleh may simply use military aid from the U.S. to oppress his opponents, while the country goes down.

“It’s such a complex situation,” she said. “It’s very difficult in Yemen to find anyone there to work with.”

Convincing Saleh, who has ruled the country for three decades, to implement political reforms could help make the country less hospitable for terrorist groups by boosting loyalty to the government, Novak said.

“Basically in Yemen they consider (the Saleh regime) a tyranny, and an incompetent one as well,” she said. “To reduce the instability, the ungoverned regions, they need to somehow force power-sharing and the respect for civil rights.”

Tayler echoed that view, saying policies that reduce oppression and boost faith in the government are needed to fight al Qaeda there effectively.

“You need a holistic approach,” Tayler said. “Otherwise, the counterterrorism policy will simply backfire — whether it’s Pakistan, whether it’s Yemen, whether it’s Afghanistan.”

A boy sits on a piece of rubble somewhere in or near Gaza City, February 2009. (Andreas H. Lunde)

CTV.ca

After flying to Cairo and bussing a few hundred kilometers eastward, Montreal engineer Ehab Lotayef will try to enter the Gaza Strip from a border crossing at Rafah, Egypt, on Dec. 28.

For months, the 52-year-old Canadian-Egyptian has been helping to organize a massive trip to the Palestinian territory that will include some 1,300 people from 42 countries.

The trip, which is the brainchild of American peace group Code Pink, has won celebrity endorsements from the likes of Alice Walker, Oliver Stone, Gore Vidal, Naomi Klein and Alexandre Trudeau.

Organizers hope to hold a demonstration in Gaza City on Dec. 31, alongside thousands of local residents, to commemorate the war last year and to demand Israel lift a blockade against the movement of goods in and out of the territory.

“It’s an accumulated problem,” Lotayef said by phone. “No one is really supporting the Palestinians’ rights as they should be, to guarantee peace for both sides.”

Lotayef’s concern has been echoed by a number of rights groups and United Nations agencies over the past year, which have called attention to worsening living conditions inside the 10-by-40-kilometre strip.

In September, the UN Environment Programme issued a report warning that the aquifer that 1.5 million Gazans drink from, and grow crops with, is failing. Overuse is making the water supply saltier, it said, and pollution from sewage and fertilizers is high enough to put young children in jeopardy of nitrate poisoning.

Last year’s fighting — in addition to killing 1,300, injuring 5,300 and creating 600,000 tons of rubble – “exacerbated environmental degradation that has been years in the making,” the report stated. Repairing the water system will require US$1.5 billion over two decades, the agency estimates.

According to Joe Stork, deputy director of Human Rights Watch for Middle East and North Africa, such difficulties are made worse by the Israeli blockade because it keeps vital goods such as cooking oil and diesel fuel from reaching Gazans.

Stork said the blockade represents a violation of international law because it punishes Palestinian civilians as well as militants.

“There’s been next to no allowance for construction materials to get in,” he added. “So you have people in some cases still living out in the open, in the sense of not being in any kind of permanent shelter.”

The Red Cross has been equally critical of Israel keeping humanitarian and reconstruction supplies out. In a June report, it said neighbourhoods in Gaza that were badly damaged in the war, “will continue to look like the epicenter of a massive earthquake unless vast quantities of cement, steel and other building materials are allowed into the territory.”

Canada’s role

Last January, Ottawa pledged $4 million to help rebuild Gaza, and issued several statements expressing concern about the war’s effect on people living there.

But New Democrat MP Libby Davies, who travelled to Gaza in August as part of a Parliamentary delegation, told CTV.ca that many people she spoke to during the trip were worried Canada would cut aid to the Palestinians this year.

Women and children in a Gaza Strip refugee camp named Karama (Dignity), February, 2009. (ISM)

“When we spoke to various representatives in the West Bank, they were very concerned that Canada is going to in effect default on its spending commitment to UNRWA,” Davies said, referring to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which assists refugees in the territories.

An official at the Canadian International Development Agency told CTV.ca in an email that, as of Dec. 14, the agency had approved $20 million for UNRWA in 2009. That’s 28 per cent less compared to the 2008 total of $28 million.

Critics charge that, because the blockade is contributing to harsh living conditions, cutting aid to Gaza would leave Ottawa’s record on human rights open to criticism.

Tom Woodley, who heads a national non-profit group that’s been lobbying Ottawa to change its policies on various Middle East countries, said protecting that record in Gaza and elsewhere is key to protecting Canada’s international influence.

“Diplomatically, Canada needs to firmly support international law,” Woodley said. “It’s not just because we’re nice guys. It’s also because it’s in our best interest. On the world stage we’re a little guy. If someone tries to infringe on Canadian rights in the far north some day, we’re not going to be able to oppose them militarily. We’re going to have to call on international law.”

Similarly, Lotayef sees the trip to Gaza this month as an opportunity to press Ottawa to change its position on the conflict.

“Our government should take a more objective, more balanced position,” Lotayef said. “At this point in time we should increase our funding and at least contribute what we committed to contribute, to the Palestinian people.”

In this January 2009 photo, two Canadian officers, with members of the Afghan National Police and Afghan National Army, inspect Highway One, also known as the “Highway of Death.” (Sgt. Andy Cole / ISAF)

CTV.ca

As the United States and NATO prepare to ramp up their war effort in Afghanistan, military experts say Ottawa has already begun planning how to wind down its mission there.

Under the terms of a House of Commons motion from last year, Canadian troops are to begin withdrawing in June of 2011 and vacate the country by the end of that year. As recently as Dec. 8, General Walter Natynczyk, the chief of defense staff in Ottawa, affirmed that the Canadian forces would uphold that timeline.

Meanwhile, U.S. President Barack Obama has pledged to send in 30,000 additional troops by August of 2010, and NATO has said it hopes to find another 7,000 military personnel from member countries.

The additional soldiers will allow “more scope for aggressive action” by NATO forces, including the Canadians, according to Brian MacDonald, senior analyst with an industry group, the Conference of Defence Associations.

As the surge gets underway, Canada’s area of responsibility in Kandahar province will shrink. In theory, that should allow Canadian troops to focus more on reconstruction, and help them keep the Taliban away from the general population.

But Canadian commanders are also busy planning their withdrawal strategy, MacDonald said.

“It starts now,” he told CTV.ca.

In late September, Defence Minister Peter MacKay said Ottawa is considering “a number of options” on how to assist Afghans after 2011, including keeping Canada’s provincial reconstruction base in Kandahar open.

But transforming Canada’s mission to focus on reconstruction will be difficult, according to Kamran Bokhari, a Middle East and South Asia analyst with global intelligence firm Stratfor.

“It’s not going to work the way the Harper administration is trying to neatly relay and telegraph this to the Canadian public. I just don’t see the preconditions,” Bokhari said.

“There are objective ground realities that force the hand of any government,” he added. “Canada will have to adjust as we go along this course.”

Security gap

Canada’s withdrawal timeline may depend partly on how quickly Western forces can train, organize and equip the Afghan National Army, which the U.S. hopes will reach 134,000 soldiers before the end of 2011.

MacDonald, who visited Kabul and Kandahar on a NATO-sponsored trip in early October, said the training for low-level infantry has been going relatively well. But developing other areas of the army could take years.

“The problem is, of course, that it takes a long time to train a battalion commander,” he said. “This area of middle-grade officer, senior officers, is a weakness in the ANA and there’s nothing that can really change that except experience and time.”

MacDonald added that Afghanistan’s other major security force, the police, remain “a real source of difficulty” due to corruption problems.

At the same time, NATO commanders are hoping that an additional 37,000 Western troops will help weaken the Taliban.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave a blunt assessment of the war on Dec. 7, before a group of navy cadets in North Carolina. He said American troops have 18 to 24 months to reverse the war’s momentum.

“We are not winning, which means we are losing. And as we are losing, the message traffic out there to (insurgency) recruits keeps getting better and better, and more keep coming,” Mullen said.

Afghanistan’s drug trade poses a significant problem to fighting the Taliban effectively, security experts say.

Since the war began, Afghanistan has come to produce about 90 per cent of the world’s heroin. Narcotics are believed to be a prime source of income for Taliban insurgents, particularly money earned from protecting local drug lords.

The UN opened an anti-narcotics centre in Kazakhstan on Dec. 8 to try and stem Afghanistan’s heroin exports. Within the country’s borders, NATO forces have been using reconstruction programs and aid money to try to convince poppy farmers to grow other crops.

Two members of Canada's Provincial Reconstruction Team and an Afghan boy wait at a school in Kandahar as supplies are unloaded, Aug. 26, 2008. (Sgt. Jeffrey Duran / ISAF)

Development work

Building schools, roads, and government institutions will also help set the stage for Canada to withdraw and for the war to end, according to Paul O’Brien of Oxfam America.

“The real key to an exit strategy is systems and relationships in Afghanistan that might not be perfect, but are offering the Afghan people enough hope for the future that they’re going to invest in it,” he said.

O’Brien, who worked in Kabul for the ministry of finance from 2002 until 2007, said that more troops will be beneficial if they make Afghans safer. But they could also impede efforts to rebuild the country.

He argues that where possible, Afghans should lead development projects without direct assistance from foreigners because it’s more effective. As evidence, O’Brien singles out the National Solidarity Programme, run by the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development.

It has disbursed more than US$1 billion in grant money to 22,000 Afghan villages, O’Brien said. The World Bank and other international agencies oversee the program to minimize corruption, he said, while village elders choose what to build.

The projects are inexpensive because they don’t need military protection. And since the Taliban can’t challenge thousands of village leaders, the infrastructure being built doesn’t tend to come under attack.

“When we worked through local systems, I saw effective development happening all over the country,” O’Brien said. “Whereas if we go in with soldiers and build schools, those schools are a political statement, a flag from the international community.”

With the addition of more soldiers, “the risk is that you’re going to see increased militarization of development,” he added. “Our fear is that decisions are going to be made, not based on whether it’s the best development outcome for Afghans, but whether it’s the best short-term political outcome for the security effort.”

Bokhari sees the war from a different angle. Ending it will ultimately depend on whether Afghanistan could pose a risk to neighbouring countries once Western troops leave.

The biggest fear, he said, is that “transnational jihadists, not the Afghan Taliban but the people they are allied with or could be allied with in future,” would eventually use the country to launch attacks against Pakistan or Iran.

“The principle concern of all NATO allies is that this country should not become a source of instability in the region,” Bokhari said. “Let’s face it, we’re not about to turn the place into Wisconsin.”

A "fan photo" from Veterans Affairs' "Canada Remembers" Facebook page.

CTV.ca

Every year, the Department of Veterans Affairs in Ottawa organizes a week of activities to jog peoples’ memories in the days leading up to Nov. 11.

A persistent dilemma for the department, which is responsible for pensions and services for war veterans and retired RCMP officers, is how to capture the attention of young Canadians each Remembrance Day.

Wars may seem remote for children and teenagers, particularly if they have no living relatives who have served in the military on overseas missions. And in an increasingly wired world, capturing the interest of tech-savvy youngsters poses a challenge. But it’s an essential demographic in order to keep alive the tradition of commemorating Canadian soldiers who fought and died in wars far from home.

Previously, Veterans Affairs reached out to younger audiences indirectly by providing learning material to their school teachers. It still publishes background information on historical events, such as the campaign to liberate Italy from the Nazis, which teachers can use to instruct their students.

But in an effort to keep up with young Canadians who are spending more of their time online, the department has added a new strategy to the mix.

“We’re taking the message of remembrance to where youth are: social media,” Heather MacDonald, a spokesperson for Veterans Affairs, told CTV.ca. “It’s a big launch for us.”

The department has set up a webpage called “Canada Remembers” on the popular social networking website Facebook. It’s designed to relay details of events surrounding Nov. 11. It also serves as a venue where people can describe what Remembrance Day means to them.

Messages posted on the "Canada Remembers" Facebook page.

As of Friday evening more than 60,000 people had signed on as members of the webpage, a number that had been rising steadily over the past week.

The page houses more than 400 photos posted by users, and countless comments, the overwhelming majority of which were positive.

“I am an ex-British Royal Military Policeman, and was proud to have served with your country’s forces, proud and honourable soldiers, and now have the fortune to live in your great country,” wrote Shaun Hanson. “Exemplo Ducemus. We will not forget.”

Others paid their respects to soldiers sent more recently to Afghanistan.

“Our son, Myles Mansell, was a reservist and volunteered to go to Afghanistan because he thought it was the right thing to do and that maybe he could make a difference in this world. On April 22, 2006, he and three other soldiers were killed,” wrote Nancy Mansell. “We will always be so proud of him and what he was trying to accomplish.”

‘Report’ button still needed

But not all of the comments were so respectful and eloquent. At one point this week, a user appeared to confuse Nov. 11 with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. Angry users quickly made light of the mistake in a string of vulgar attacks.

The exchange was later removed from the page. And Veterans Affairs, which administers the site, said it is monitoring comments using internal guidelines, and those set by Facebook.

“We want to maintain the open environment found on social media networks, where people feel comfortable about sharing their thoughts on remembrance without being censored,” MacDonald wrote in an email. “However, inappropriate comments or postings that are offensive to and individual or an organization, rude in tone, or abusive will be removed.”

Alex Brown, a Facebook spokesperson in Toronto, told CTV.ca that the company’s staff also investigates reports of inappropriate comments, in line with its terms of service. The goal is “to strike a very delicate balance” that allows users to express their opinions while making sure everyone feels safe, Brown wrote in an email.

This isn’t the first year that Veterans Affairs has tried new mediums to encourage youth to get into the spirit of Remembrance Day. For the past several years the department has also been making Nov. 11-themed temporary tattoos, hoping that they would make a mark on a younger demographic.

But this is the first time the department has tried to harness the Internet to spread Remembrance Day to youth.

Veterans Affairs is also hosting a multimedia contest on its website. Users are encouraged to download photos, videos and audio clips to create “mashups” they can repost on the department’s website, the official Facebook page or the popular video site YouTube.

On television, Veterans Affairs has partnered with MuchMusic and MusiquePlus to get “modern day” veterans, meaning those who have served since the Korean War, in front of younger viewers on Nov. 11.

The show “VideoFlow,” for example, will be devoted to veterans who wish to request a favourite song or deliver a Remembrance Day message, MacDonald said.

Dutch soldiers on a three-day mission to conduct foot patrols through Afghan villages. (ISAF/John Collins, U.S. Navy)

CTV.ca

Next week in Washington, U.S. President Barack Obama will host a summit of European Union leaders to discuss a number of issues, including what to do next in Afghanistan.

Despite the presence of about 70,000 troops under NATO command, the central Asian country has become increasingly violent and unstable. NATO’s International Security Assistance Force has been looking for more troops in order to reverse course.

But NATO nations have so far come up short on offering troops, and now their alliance’s reputation is on the line.

NATO defence ministers met in Bratisalva, Slovakia, last week to discuss the war. They endorsed a recent assessment by ISAF’s commander, U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, that tens of thousands of additional troops are needed or NATO will lose to the Taliban.

However, the gathering of defence ministers stopped short of committing more troops. NATO said that discussing “the resource implications” of endorsing McChrystal’s assessment “will follow at a later stage.”

Growing concerns

While NATO’s 28 member countries grapple with how to improve their chances of beating the Taliban, the alliance is facing growing criticism over how the mission has been conducted and whether it can go on for much longer.

The autobiography of Rick Hillier, a retired Canadian general and former chief of defense staff in Ottawa, landed in book stores this week. In it, he provides a written attack on the alliance’s performance in Afghanistan from his time as commander of ISAF.

The mission’s leadership is “abysmal,” he writes. Staff at NATO’s headquarters in Kabul “had no strategy, no clear articulation of what they wanted to achieve, no political guidance and few forces.”

Afghanistan has shown that the alliance has become “a corpse, decomposing,” Hillier concludes. “Unless the alliance can snatch victory out of feeble efforts, it’s not going to be long in existence in its present form.”

Ret. Gen. Lewis MacKenzie, a Canadian who worked with the alliance in the early 1990s while he was in charge of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Bosnia, has voiced similar concerns.

“Forget about bombing Serbia from the safety of 20,000 feet,” he told CTV.ca earlier this month. “Now that we’re having blood being spilled, we have 28 different opinions as to how things should be done. You just can’t run an alliance that way.”

“It’s proven that it’s incapable,” he added.

Experts south of the border are also cautioning that the alliance may not survive its foray into central Asia.

Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at an influential American think-tank, warned the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Oct. 22 that NATO is at risk of being seen as ineffective.

“Unity of command has proved elusive, as has co-ordination between NATO and EU efforts,” he said. “Moreover, it will be no easy task maintaining the NATO coalition at current levels, with domestic pressure mounting in several member states for winding down of their national contributions.”

The German question

Counterinsurgency experts say it would take a force of 400,000 to 500,000 to secure all of Afghanistan, a mountainous country larger than France or Ukraine. But keeping enough NATO troops on the ground to provide even scaled-back security in urban areas could be an uphill battle:

• Canada has pledged to stop its military operations there by the end of 2010.
• The Dutch parliament passed a motion earlier this month barring the renewal of its Afghan presence.
• And Denmark’s leader recently said his country’s commitment depends on whether Afghanistan’s Nov. 7 presidential runoff produces a credible leader.

Many European countries may follow whatever Germany decides to do. Europe’s most populous country has had a withdrawal plan in place since April, according to security analyst Sunil Ram. It also has the third-largest contingent of soldiers in Afghanistan.

“It’s a tough slog in Germany,” said Dan Hamilton, a NATO expert at the Center for Transatlantic Relations in Baltimore. “The image of German soldiers killing civilians haunts the debate, given their history.”

German forces have been stationed in a few northwest provinces that were relatively quiet until recently, but they’re now engaged in heavy fighting.

Some NATO and German officials have reportedly said the Taliban is targeting Germany, supposedly as a potential weak link in the alliance. Meanwhile, the Bundestag is scheduled to vote on the mission in December.

Winning votes

Obama is said to be waiting for Afghanistan’s political situation to stabilize, before announcing whether he will grant McChrystal’s request for more troops.

Already the U.S. has about as many soldiers in Afghanistan as the other 41 countries participating in ISAF put together. That proportion could rise much higher if Obama sends in more troops and other NATO choose not to, making the alliance look ineffective.

It’s not clear whether that will happen. But the debate over whether to send in more soldiers is creating growing tensions within the alliance, Ram said.

“You have a lot of NATO countries who don’t want to be there. They went in under the impression they were a stabilization force, similar to what they have done in the Balkans — only problem is, they walked into a war,” he said.

Public opinion is divided across Europe, the U.S. and Afghanistan about whether NATO forces should continue the war.

Poll results released in September by the German Marshall Fund, a non-profit group that has offices on both sides of the Atlantic, found that only 37 per cent of Afghans think NATO should remain in their country. Fifty per cent of Afghans polled said NATO forces should leave immediately.

In Europe, two-thirds of respondents said NATO is incapable of stabilizing the country. Even in the U.S., which initiated the war, the poll found that 56 per cent of Americans were optimistic about the mission.

Regardless of public opinion, if NATO fails to stamp out the Taliban it would raise questions about whether Western countries need the alliance at all, Hamilton said.

“(Afghanistan) is the most acute and direct security threat to Europeans and North Americans that we face in the world today,” he said. “If we aren’t able to master our most direct challenge, then what’s the alliance for?”

Canadian soldiers on a road in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, Feb. 20, 2009.

CTV.ca

Last week, U.S. President Barack Obama met with his top advisers on the war to decide how to proceed next. That meeting came days after Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the chief U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, issued a report saying the war will be lost unless 30,000 to 40,000 additional troops are sent there.

“We are going to have to do things dramatically differently, even uncomfortably differently,” McChrystal said during a speech in London, England, a day after his meeting with Obama. “We must redefine our fight.”

The U.S. review of the war is causing political fallout across its NATO countries, particularly in Canada, which has the fifth-largest number of soldiers deployed there.

Politicians on Parliament Hill have been saying they would bring Canadian forces home by the end of 2011, upholding a House of Commons motion from last year. But in recent weeks, Conservative leaders have suggested that Canada’s Afghanistan mission will continue, in some form, into 2012 and beyond.

Defence Minister Peter MacKay said on Tuesday that Ottawa is considering “a number of options” on how to assist Afghans after 2011, including keeping Canada’s provincial reconstruction base in Kandahar.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a similar statement during a press conference with Obama in Washington on Sept. 16.

“Canada is not leaving Afghanistan,” Harper said flatly. Instead the mission will move from a predominantly military one to “a civilian humanitarian development mission,” he said.

Ottawa can expect a range of requests from NATO about extending its mission, retired Maj. Gen. Lewis MacKenzie told CTV.ca. And not all of them will be for development purposes. On top of Canada’s 300-member provincial reconstruction team, the alliance may ask for the 150 infantry soldiers who protect them to stay, he said, as well as a helicopter battalion.

As many as 800 Canadian military personnel could continue serving there past 2011, MacKenzie estimates.

Surveying the damage

Yet there’s growing proof that Canadian soldiers, like the rest of the international force there, aren’t just fighting the Taliban or al Qaeda. They’re tackling problems that appear to be cascading with historic force.

The latest report to Parliament on Afghanistan, which was presented last month and covers April through June of 2009, paints a bleak picture. Security conditions “continued to deteriorate.” The number of insurgent attacks during May and June was greater than at any time since the 2001 invasion toppled the Taliban.

The report said Kandahar province, where most of Canada’s soldiers are stationed, experienced an “exceptionally high” number of security “incidents.” And the number of “incidents” with improvised explosive devices jumped by 108 per cent compared to the same period a year earlier.

Canadian Cpl. Shane Taylor waits as other soldiers speak with a local elder in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, Aug. 26, 2008. (ISAF / Staff Sgt. Jeffrey Duran)

Underpinning the violence is the country’s spectacular narcotics industry, which has flourished since the war began. Hilmand province alone produces more illicit drugs than any other country in the world, according to the United Nations.

Some experts fear Afghanistan is becoming a “narcostate” ruled by its opium industry. Narcotics exports are believed to fund the Taliban, at home and in neighbouring Pakistan. Drug money may also be feeding corruption in the Karzai government, which helped derail the country’s recent presidential election.

“How do you fight a war like that with conventional military forces? You can’t,” said Sunil Ram, an international defence and security analyst. Ram doesn’t believe development efforts have been working either, citing NATO’s own assessment.

“It’s fine to show happy Kabul, but the rest of the country is in chaos,” Ram said. An “out of control” rise in drug use among Afghans, he said, is evidence that international forces have failed to rebuild the country.

Searching for purpose

Over the summer, the U.S. more than tripled the number of troops it has stationed in southern Afghan provinces such as Kandahar.

That has allowed Canadian forces to scale back the territory they cover by about 60 per cent. Now there’s an opportunity to more effectively root out the Taliban, keep them from returning and engage in reconstruction, albeit over a smaller area.

But questions linger about the mission’s overall purpose. Former foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy told CTV.ca that the goal of helping to protect civilians has “been mixed up with ‘we’ve got to defeat the Taliban.”

Axworthy said he went to a fundraiser on Sept. 26 for a Canadian woman whose son died in Afghanistan last year. She still wanted to help, and was collecting money to send over a dog trained to de-mine roads.

“You could just tell the tragedy was so deep in her, but she still felt she could do something constructive,” Axworthy said. “I think there are a lot of Canadians who would like to think that they could do that, but I’m not sure what we’re putting out there right now offers that opportunity.”

Axworthy said he would like to see Parliament take a closer look at what Canada is doing in Afghanistan.

“Not in a partisan way, not in a finger-pointing way. But just say, ‘we’ve stuck it out this far, we’ve got a commitment to pull our troops out. But Afghanistan’s not going away. There are things that we may be able to contribute. Let’s find out what they are.’”

A woman walks through the ancient souk (market) at night in Sana'a, Yemen's capital. (Franco Pecchio)

Yemen is under threat from a wave of crises, forcing affluent Gulf states to consider how best to help a neighbor in need. (TRENDS magazine, June-August 2009)

The remote, mountainous stretch of desert between Yemen and Saudi Arabia seems an unlikely place for a political tug-of-war. But for years now, the Saudi government has been trying, in fits and starts, to fortify the 1,300 kilometers of barren land where the two countries meet.

In 2003, Riyadh began building a 10-foot high security barrier there, as part of a drive to crack down on terrorist attacks at home (after Saudi authorities traced explosives from recent attacks back to its southern neighbor).

But Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh argued the fence violated a three-year-old border agreement, so construction stopped. When building resumed briefly in 2008, it reportedly sparked a standoff between Yemeni border guards and Saudi troops.

The border-security issue is still far from settled. Last month, Riyadh was said to be in talks with the German-based aerospace and defense company EADS about a multibillion-dollar plan to make its southern boundary less porous. Details of the plan remain scarce – but Saudi Arabia has clearly become very worried about security threats arising from the tip of the Arabian peninsula.

“Border security on the Yemeni frontier is one of the kingdom’s greatest concerns,” says Christopher Boucek, an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

He believes that Yemen has become infamous in the region, “as a pathway for bad things; if it’s guns, if it’s drugs, if it’s illegal migration, if it’s cash or bombs – everything.”

In stark contrast to neighboring Gulf states – which have been busy setting up new home industries and buying up overseas investments, experts say that Yemen is in palpable danger of becoming trapped in a downward spiral. As that realization dawns on GCC states, it’s changing the way they engage with the Arabian peninsula’s most troubled country.

Culminating crises.

Since north and south Yemen united in 1990, the government in Sana’a has become accustomed to defusing crises. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, Yemen voted against the United Nations using force to repel Iraqi troops, and promptly had much of its foreign aid cut off. In 1994, a civil war broke out in the south that killed thousands of people. And in 2000, al-Qaeda bombed the USS Cole while it was docked at the port of Aden, killing 17 American sailors and curtailing Yemen’s tourism industry – a key economic driver.

But in 2009, Sana’a is facing what many fear is an overwhelming convergence of problems. “Yemenis will say, ‘we’ve been through bad things before and we’ll deal with this.’ But they haven’t had a series of crises culminating at the same point,” Boucek says. “Now two or three or four are all going to culminate at the same time. That’s what makes the current situation so devastating.”

Poverty is a familiar affliction for the country’s 22 million people, 60 percent of whom live on less than $2 a day. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has dubbed Yemen the Middle East’s most ‘food insecure’ territory. Yet the population is expected to double before 2030, and major cities like Sana’a are running out of water.

To make matters worse, the economy is fending off collapse. Oil, which funds 70 percent of the national budget, is expected to run dry within a decade. Tourism, a second crucial industry, is shrinking as political instability and isolated terrorist attacks keep foreigners from visiting the country’s ancient walled cities, medieval mountain forts and famous mud skyscrapers.

A boy waits in line for food at a Yemeni refugee camp, where people have fled fighting in Sa'ada province, Oct. 9, 2009. (Paul Stephens / IRIN)

President Saleh’s government is also wrestling with three big political problems. A Shi’a Zaidi sect in the north – that Sana’a has accused of conspiring to replace local elected councils with an Islamic imamate government – has been clashing with state-backed forces. Hundreds of people have been killed there since 2004, and thousands more have been displaced.

In the southern governorates, an increasingly vocal – and violent – secessionist movement has created a national crisis over the past few months. In the largest show of unrest since 2006, several hundred thousand people held protests there in March to commemorate the outbreak of civil war in 1994. Many southerners say the central government has marginalized them economically and politically, and one of President Saleh’s former allies, an influential southern sheikh, recently declared his support for the southern-secessionist cause.

Sana’a is taking the situation seriously enough that it recently sent troops and tanks to southern towns. In May, the Ministry of Information also closed down eight Yemeni newspapers that had been covering the sometimes violent rallies, sparking criticism from press freedom groups. President Saleh has also promised new government reforms to allay southern protesters.

“Yemen, Allah forbid, will not divide into two partitions, south and north, but into villages and small states,” Saleh warned at a rally on Apr. 27, in an attempt to diffuse the crisis. “People will be fighting with each other from door to door and from window to window.”

Last but not least, al-Qaeda announced in January that it’s consolidating regional operations on Yemeni soil. Thanks to Riyadh’s success at banishing al-Qaeda from the kingdom, and stoked by extremist fighters returning from Iraq, Yemen is “becoming terror central on the Arabian peninsula,” says Kamran Bokhari, director of Middle East analysis at Stratfor, a US-based global intelligence firm.

Over the past few months, the group has carried out headline-grabbing attacks on foreign tourists. In May, its leader, Naser Abdel Karim al-Wahishi, broadcast a message stating that he supports the country’s southern separatists, and demanding that Yemenis join forces to topple the government in Sana’a.

New relations.

Next door, GCC countries worry that Yemen’s converging problems will bleed across its borders. “They’re very concerned,” says Nicole Stracke, a researcher in the Security and Terrorism Department at the Gulf Research Center, a Dubai-based think tank. “The problem in Yemen is the government basically fights three conflicts – the south, the north and terrorism – and the resources they have are limited,” she adds. “Now with the oil price going down and the recession, their resources are going to be even more stretched.”

Yemen’s resource gap means President Saleh, who has governed the country since 1978, is unable to crack down on many of the criminals who use the country’s ungoverned areas for nefarious ends. Yet al-Qaeda’s local leadership has not just threatened the government in Sana’a, but Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states. “Yemen’s lack of capacity makes it the problem of the next country down the road. In this case, the GCC,” Boucek says. “The concern is, ‘how do we absorb what’s happening there?’”

One way is by throwing money at Yemen’s problems. At a donors’ conference held three years ago in London, the Gulf states pledged $2.5 billion to help bolster Saleh’s government (with Saudi Arabia making the largest donation promise by far). But Sana’a has only received a $12 million of the promised cash, according to the World Bank, mainly because of rampant corruption. Yemen ranked 141 out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s latest corruption index. So once the money leaves donors’ hands there are no guarantees as to how it will actually be spent.

Regional integration is another approach. But ties between the Gulf countries and their south-Arabian cousin haven’t always been strong. In the case of Saudi Arabia, for example, “there is a history of complicated relations” with Yemen, says Letta Tayler, a researcher on terrorism and counterterrorism with Human Rights Watch. “We hope that doesn’t block genuine efforts at cooperation on what is clearly a regional problem and needs regional solutions.”

Relations seem to be improving though. In August 2008, Qatar helped broker a peace deal between Sana’a and Yemen’s restive northern Shi’a Zaidi sect. When a local terrorist group attacked the US embassy in Sana’a last September, killing 17 people, Saudi King Abdullah invited Yemen’s president to Mecca and reportedly promised him support to combat al-Qaeda-linked groups. More recently, Saudi leaders have said they’re with Sana’a “all the way,” and “without reservation.” In May, Oman also revoked the citizenship of a former Yemeni leader for supporting recent protests and calling for an independent southern state.

Arabian countries are taking baby steps to bring Yemen into the GCC, too. In spite of such efforts though, Stracke says it won’t be Yemen’s resource-rich neighbors that decide how its problems play out, but Yemenis themselves. “It’s whether there’s enough capacity within Sana’a,” she says, “not whether the Arab neighbors are doing enough.”

“At the end of the day, you can only pour so much resources into something that has capacity. Can Yemen hold itself together and use external help from neighboring Arab countries to turn things around? That’s the question.”

U.S. troops approach a suspected pirate "mothership" off the coast of Somalia, May 13, 2009. (U.S. Navy / Eric L. Beauregard)

(TRENDS magazine, June-August 2009)

It seems like an easy problem to fix. Somali bandits are fishing for ransom money at sea by hijacking slow-moving ships between the Horn of Africa and the Arabian peninsula.

To stop them, navies from around the world have sent warships to police the area – but the pirates have redoubled their efforts instead of giving up. There have already been more attempted hijackings so far in 2009 than in all of last year, despite the military flotilla that has been collecting in Somalia’s backyard.

European legal experts are even warning that the military approach could backfire. In one instance, the Danish navy caught five Somalis in January after they allegedly attacked a Dutch-flagged ship. Now the accused pirates are awaiting trial in the Netherlands, and several of them have said they’ll seek asylum in the liberal European state rather than return to beleaguered Somalia.

A prominent Dutch legal expert has warned his government to treat the case carefully because it could encourage Somalis to use capture as a way to migrate to rich Western countries. “These trials may trigger other pirates to let themselves be arrested on purpose,” lawyer Geert-Jan Knoops told Volkskrant newspaper. “The Dutch justice department must be cautious.”

The same advice could apply to the German government, which is being sued by lawyers representing a Somali national recently captured by the German navy. The man was sent to Kenya for trial on piracy-related charges (as have more than 50 other Somalis this year). But because of Kenya’s spotty human rights record, the civil case stipulates that Germany is obliged to try its former captive at home.

On top of legal problems, the roots of Somali piracy make it even harder to fight. Somalia has been plagued by civil war since 1991, and fishing boats from Europe to South-East Asia took advantage of that conflict for years by fishing the African state’s territorial waters illegally. The UN envoy for Somalia has said foreign companies also dumped large quantities of toxic, including nuclear waste off the Somali coast (when the 2004 tsunami hit, rusting barrels of the stuff actually washed on its beaches).

With no coast guard or navy to lean on, local fishermen armed themselves to chase off the perpetrators. Those armed patrols have since evolved into a lucrative way for organized gangs to make money in a deeply impoverished, chaotic country. Somali pirates have been paid an estimated $80 million in ransom so far in 2009, and a microeconomy has sprung up around their exploits.

A recent UN report from the northern Somali city of Eyl, a pirate haven, sheds some light on how exactly those proceeds are divvied up. Sea-borne militia get a third of the money and they share it equally among themselves (although the first pirate to board a besieged vessel gets a double share, or a new vehicle). Whoever handles the money gets a fifth of it. The “sponsor” receives a third. Guards who patrol the pirates’ turf on land get 10 percent, as do local community leaders. If a pirate is killed during the operation, his family is even paid compensation.

Those involved with the hijackings can earn thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars in a country that had a per capita GDP of only $281 in 2007. There are few indications of the extent of poverty in Somalia, due to the lack of government. But UNICEF estimates that at least 15 percent of those living in central and southern parts of the country suffer from acute malnutrition.

The roots of Somali piracy and the depressed local economy are no excuse for capturing and threatening to kill innocent people at sea. But they do suggest that stamping out the problem will be hard, maybe impossible, without helping the country to get back on its feet.

The Italian government has said it will host a meeting of Somalia’s governing and opposition parties in mid-June, to search for ways of abolishing piracy by stabilizing the African country. With any luck, that meeting will mark a turning point towards lasting solutions and away from gunboat diplomacy.