Angry in the Great White North

Denis Coderre, the Liberal Party defence critic, is on his way to Afghanistan to check out the situation in that war-torn country, where Canadian troops are working hard to stabilize Kandahar province:

Better late than never, Liberal Defence critic Denis Coderre is due in Kandahar, Afghanistan, on Monday on his own impromptu visit with the Canadian military.

"I'm going to go to Kandahar, meet the troops and visit the infrastructure and send a clear message of solidarity to the troops,'' Coderre said in a telephone interview from Kabul.

Now the focus has been on the arrangements Coderre has made. A vocal critic of the Canadian military in Afghanistan, Coderre organized his trip outside of regular channels. But it is Coderre's inspection of the infrastructure I find interesting:

Coderre met a number of people in Kabul, including a senior infrastructure specialist from the World Bank and members of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, an independent research organization based in the Afghan capital.

The AREU is an NGO that takes funding from a number of different sources, including Canada, through the Canada Fund, a funding channel managed by the Canadian International Development Agency.

But the AREU is hardly a Canadian operation. Canada's funding is a drop in the bucket, as detailed in the 2006 Annual Report for the AREU:

Donor	Percentage	Expenditure (in USD)
DFID (UK)	28.19%	847,808
European Commission	28.02%	842,649
UNAMA	11.86%	356,752
Switzerland	8.15%	245,235
UNHCR	6.50%	195,739
Denmark	6.35%	191,054
Norway	4.21%	126,639
Sweden	2.58%	77,796
USIP	1.78%	53,693
World Bank	1.24%	37,550
Canada	0.62%	18,662
UNESCO	0.28%	8,623
GTZ	0.05%	1,690
Miscellaneous income		3,103
TOTAL		3,006,993

The AREU is a UK/Scandinavian/EU operation. Canada's contribution is less than 1% of the total budget, an amount totalling less than US$20,000.

The total CIDA contribution to Afghanistan starting from 2001 will total over $616,000,000 through 2009. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has added another $100 million annually, promising that funding through 2011.

More funding, amounting to over $200 million, has been added the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund, to microfinancing, to police reform, de-mining, and so on and so forth.

Canada is in the top-ten list when it comes to nations moving vast amounts of money into Afghanistan in order to rebuild the country, even as the Canadian military is shouldering the burden of keeping the Taliban at bay in Kanadahar province, a critical mission that must succeed if the positive effects of reconstruction can take root.

But Denis Coderre comes all this way in order to report back to the Liberal Party on what is being accomplished by a European research unit with twenty grand of Canadian money kicked in to the three million annual budget?

What happened? None of the Canadian operations wanted to talk to Coderre? Or is Denis Coderre determined to come back and say he saw little evidence of what good Canada is doing in Afghanistan when it comes to reconstruction, proving the Liberal Party allegation that the mission is focused on the military?