Archive for February, 2009

Canada’s aviation “tragedy” and “disappointment”

Posted on: February 24th, 2009 by Ernie Regehr

This being February, Canadians have once again been treated to the annual paean to the Avro Arrow. It is a memorial that leaves a question: Why has the Avro Jetliner never received the same attention?

A CBC web report had some Canadians in “mourning” this week over the demise of the Avro Arrow fifty years ago.[i] The Toronto Star had an A.V. Roe company worker who worked on the Arrow in the 1950s “gazing in adoration” at a replica of the experimental but highly advanced fighter aircraft now on display at the new Canadian Air and Space Museum.[ii]

The Ottawa Citizen carried an interesting and informative survey of Canadian aviation history which characterized the Avro Arrow episode as a “tragedy.”[iii] The Avro Jetliner made it into the story, but its demise is recorded only as a “disappointment.” Both planes represented advances in aviation that were unmatched at the time, both showed the extraordinary acumen of Canadian industry, and both were cancelled by government order and destroyed.

The Avro Arrow story is well known. A Canadian designed fighter aircraft, the Avro Arrow was tested and refined over a number of years, at great and growing expense. It could fly at almost twice the speed of sound, at very high altitudes and in all weather, and was highly maneuverable – ideal for intercepting Soviet bombers in Canada’s north.

On February 20, 1959 it was abruptly cancelled and all of the test planes destroyed and cut into pieces. Thousands of workers were laid off. Costs had been escalating and it was clear that it would be far too expensive to put into production if it had to rely on Canadian orders alone. The United States, the most likely customer, was not about to buy a centre piece of its military arsenal, an advanced fighter aircraft, from Canada and thus, the argument in Washington went, make its national security vulnerable to imports.

The story of the Avro Jetliner follows the same basic plotline.[iv]

The Avro Jetliner was not the first civilian passenger jet to fly; the British Comet beat it by two weeks in 1949. But it was the Avro Jetliner that set the standard. Designed to carry up to 40 passengers, it took its first flight on August 10, 1949. It continued to be tested and refined and by 1950 it had reached a speed of 500 miles per hour and an altitude of more than 39,000 feet.

The single Jetliner flew for seven years – used in various roles, including as a VIP transport and an aerial photo platform, it carried the world’s first jet airmail from Toronto to New York. It caught the attention of Howard Hughes who wanted to start a US production line under license and deliver the plane to his TWA airline.

On December 10, 1956 the Jetliner was abruptly cancelled and cut into pieces, with only the cockpit left intact.

Like the Arrow, the Jetliner involves a complicated story behind the simple facts. It was in particular a victim of the Korean War, during which all Canadian aircraft production facilities were pressed into service turning out aircraft for the war effort. The same pressure is also what prevented Howard Hughes from putting it into production in the US. In Canada the government decided to focus on producing the CF100 fighter aircraft.

A question endures. Why does December 10, 1956 not enjoy the same infamy as February 20, 1959?

eregehr@ploughshares.ca

Notes

[i] Emily Chung, “Remembering the death of the Avro Arrow,” 20 February 2009.

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/02/20/f-avro-arrow.html.

[ii] Jason Miller, “Avro Arrow to spread wings in new museum,” 21 February 2009.

http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/591011.

[iii] Peter Pigott, “How 100 years of flight transformed a nation,” 23 February 2009.

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/years+flight+transformed+nation/1319042/story.html.

[iv] Websites the tell the story include:

Avroland – http://www.avroland.ca/al-c102.html

Arrow Recovery Canada – http://www.avroarrow.org/Jetliner/JetlinerIntro.html

Wikipedia — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_Jetliner.

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NATO summit: a chance to kick the nuclear habit

Posted on: February 18th, 2009 by Ernie Regehr

While Afghanistan will certainly dominate the talk at the 60th Anniversary NATO Summit in April, leaders are also scheduled to launch a process to review the Alliance’s Strategic Concept, a key element of which is a controversial and outdated nuclear doctrine.[i]

The Strategic Concept – the current version of which was adopted in 1999 – is the Alliance’s official statement of purpose and outlines its force posture and approach to collective security. Nine of its 65 paragraphs refer to nuclear weapons, the central claim being that the nuclear arsenals of the United States in particular, but also of the United Kingdom and France, are “essential to preserve peace” and are “an essential political and military link between the European and North American members They are supposed to keep your sexual life intact! viagra sales in india jealt.mx treats erectile dysfunction effectively, which is a condition characterized by the inability to achieve or maintain an erection for intercourse. This is because they normally have uncontrolled sugar in their blood system, which slows down the symptom of erectile dysfunction by inhibiting http://www.jealt.mx/servicios-dictamenes.html generic viagra discount PDE 5 enzymes and supporting cyclic GMP. This means there should be some form of sexual stimulation, whether it jealt.mx viagra without side effects is thinking about having great sex, or lightly stroking one another. Regular use of NF Cure capsule with Shilajit capsule improves vitality, cialis 5 mg vigor and energy levels. of the Alliance.”[ii]

Firmly rooted in east-west deterrence and nuclear war-fighting assumptions, NATO doctrine is markedly out of sync with the new anti-nuclear counsel from such Cold War stalwarts as Henry Kissinger, Helmut Schmidt, Richard Burt and a host of other government leaders and security professionals now calling for accelerated nuclear disarmament.

In his recent speech to the 45th Munich Security Conference, Mr. Kissinger reaffirmed his earlier call for the pursuit of a world without nuclear weapons, pointing out that “any use of nuclear weapons is certain to involve a level of casualties and devastation out of proportion to foreseeable foreign policy objectives.”

Richard Burt, the senior arms control official in the Administration of the first President Bush, now works through the Global Zero initiative, supported by The Simons Foundation of Canada and a broad range of public figures, for the abolition of nuclear weapons. The group is pledged to work “for a legally binding verifiable agreement, including all nations, to eliminate nuclear weapons by a date certain.”

Even the Alliance leader is now committed, as the Obama White House website puts it, to pursuing the “goal of a world without nuclear weapons.”

All of these statements represent a rather a large shift away from NATO’s claim that nuclear weapons are “the supreme guarantee of the security of the Allies.”

This recent wave of nuclear abolition statements by mainstream security professionals is rooted in two linked concerns.

First, the 20,000-plus nuclear warheads remaining in current arsenals, several thousand of them poised on missiles ready for firing at a moment’s notice, represent an ongoing threat of mass indiscriminate destruction to the point of global annihilation.

Second, that threat is heightened by the growing risk that nuclear weapons, as well as weapons-friendly technologies and nuclear materials, will spread to more states, and even to non-state groups.

NATO thus has the opportunity to fashion a new strategic doctrine that, on the one hand, takes full account of the threats posed by nuclear weapons, and, on the other hand, takes full advantage of the political momentum that is now finally available to allow states to get serious about doing something about that threat. Rather than continuing to insist, for example, that nuclear weapons “preserve peace,” NATO doctrine would do well to follow the new realism of former Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s assessment that “with every passing year [nuclear weapons] make our security more precarious.”

Inasmuch as all NATO members are signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), a good place to start would be for the new Strategic Concept to welcome the groundswell of calls for the world without nuclear weapons that the NPT envisions. Responding to those calls NATO should then reaffirm its commitment to implementing the disarmament and nonproliferation priorities and procedures elaborated through the NPT review process.

One important measure of NATO’s sincerity will be its handling of the 150-250 US tactical nuclear weapons that remain in Europe. If it were to take up the proposal of former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt that those now in Germany be removed, and then also remove those in the four other European states that currently host them, NATO would earn important disarmament bona fides and give a major boost of confidence to a seriously flagging non-proliferation regime. It would also honor the longstanding international call that all nuclear weapons be returned to the territories of the states that own them.

Non-nuclear weapon states of the NPT that are not part of NATO rightly regard the removal of nuclear weapons from the territories of European non-nuclear weapon states as essential for full compliance with Article I of the Treaty. The NPT requires that “each nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly.”

The nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation regime is currently under severe stress. The failure of nuclear weapon states to fully implement the disarmament provisions of Article VI of the NPT, along with NATO’s ongoing claim that it plans to rely on nuclear weapons for the foreseeable future, has entrenched the double standard of nuclear “have” and “have not” countries. In the long run, that double standard is not sustainable. NATO cannot credibly claim that the security of NATO states sheltered within a peaceful Europe requires nuclear weapons, while at the same time calling on all other states, including those in conflict zones such as South Asia or the Middle East, to fully and unconditionally reject nuclear weapons.

At the coming Summit NATO has an opportunity to begin the process of reinventing its security doctrine, to take new initiatives to end its reliance on nuclear weapons, and to engage other states with nuclear weapons in the serious pursuit of reciprocal disarmament, and in the process revitalize the NPT.

eregehr@ploughshares.ca

Notes

[i] This article appeared in the February 18, 2009 issue of Embassy. http://www.embassymag.ca/page/view/nato_summit-2-18-2009.

[ii] Detailed references for all quotes and sources are available in Ploughshares Briefing 09-1: Ernie Regehr, NATO’s Strategic Concept and the Nuclear Abolition Imperative. February 2009. http://www.ploughshares.ca/libraries/Briefings/brf091.pdf.

Tracking Canada’s automatic weapons gift to Afghanistan

Posted on: February 16th, 2009 by Ernie Regehr

By testimony of the Department of National Defence (DND), Canada has taken significant care in the transfer of 2,500 C7 automatic rifles from the Canadian Forces to the Afghan National Army. At the same time, a new US study shows that the security system into which those rifles have now gone is seriously deficient in its ability to ensure that guns intended for the Afghan Army will not join the millions of other weapons that get diverted to illicit users and uses.

The Canadian weapons were provided a year ago under a program of the Combined Security Transition Command – Afghanistan (CSTC-A).[i] The CSTC-A focuses on the training and development of Afghan security forces and one objective has been to switch Afghanistan from the 7.62 calibre AK-47 to 5.56 calibre automatic weapons, the NATO standard.

The US has transferred over 242,000 small arms and light weapons (SALW) under the program to the Afghan forces (army and police) – in addition to machine guns they include grenade launchers, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, mortars, pistols, rifles, and shotguns. Other countries have provided another 135,000 weapons, of which 2,500 are the Canadian C7 automatic rifles or machine guns.

An investigation by the US Government Accounting Office (GAO)[ii] concludes that the program has failed to meet basic inventory control standards in the supply of these weapons – both because the US forces failed to monitor weapons effectively during the transfers, and because there continued to be a serious risk of theft and loss once the Afghan forces took custody of the weapons. Mark Sedra of the Centre for International Governance Innovation has written extensively about small arms circulation in Afghanistan and the importance of developing a reliable procurement process.[iii]

Whatever the merits of delivering still more arms to a country already awash with as many as 10 million small arms,[iv] the transfers raise important questions about the process by which weapons are delivered to Afghan security forces, and about the capacity of Afghan forces to prevent them leaking away to illicit users.

The Canadian process is considered below, but first a brief look at the GAO report.[v] More than a third of the weapons supplied by the US were not effectively accounted for even by the US at the time of the transfer. Of 242,000 weapons transferred, serial numbers were not recorded for 46,000. Another 41,000, for which serial numbers were recorded, were not registered or documented in any way when they were transferred to Afghan forces and there is no way of knowing where they are now (p. 14).

Furthermore, the GAO says, “CSTC-A did not record the serial numbers for the weapons it received from international donors and stored in the central depots in Kabul for eventual distribution to the [Afghan security forces]” – this did not include the Canadian rifles which were transferred directly to Afghan National Army (ANA) units. The CSTC-A “could not verify the delivery and subsequent control of weapons in Afghanistan” (p. 15). Weapons received from international donors at Kabul’s International Airport were, without documentation, loaded into the custody of the ANA “for unescorted transport from the airport to the central depots in Kabul.” As the GAO report puts it, rather mildly given the evidence, the “CSTC-A had limited ability to ensure that weapons were not lost or stolen in transit to the depots.” (p. 16)

Canada, according to DND’s own account in written response to a series of questions,[vi] put in place a much more effective process for managing the initial transfer to the ANA of the 2,500 C7s.

Issues of diversion are not directly addressed in Canadian export control laws, but the Export and Import Permits Act [Section 7.1.(a)] does require that the transfer not compromise “the safety or interests of the [recipient] State.” If the weapons were transferred into a system of obviously lax inventory control, where there would be a high likelihood that many of those weapons would get diverted to illicit users and uses, it could certainly be taken as a violation of export regulations.

In addition, Canada has signed on to the 2001 UN Program of Action on small arms, an international political agreement which calls on armed forces and other bodies authorized to possess small arms to “establish adequate and detailed standards and procedures relating to the management and security of their stocks of these weapons.” Such standards and procedures are to include “appropriate location for stockpiles; physical security measures; control of access to stocks; inventory management and accounting control; staff training; security, accounting and control of SALW held or transported by operational units or authorized personnel; and procedures and sanction in the event of thefts or loss.”[vii]

The Canadian C7s appear not to have gone through the central depot in Kabul where much of the control failed. Indeed, the transfer process itself seems to have largely followed the UN protocol and involved, as DND says, “a number of strict measures, including the marking of weapons, the establishment of a register of weapons, and the appropriate training of Afghan forces.”

The DND spokesperson explains further that

“the transfer of weapons is done on an incremental basis, prior to each kandak (unit) resuming operations after a two-month training period. This allows JTF-Afghanistan[viii] to mentor and train Afghans on the usage and maintenance of the weapon, as well as on storage procedures (weapons and ammunition), control measures (weapons and ammunition), human rights, second and third line maintenance, and developing trainers. All recipients also undergo basic security screening.

“Weapons are maintained under control of JTF-Afghanistan until the Commander is satisfied that the necessary control mechanisms are in place. Once the transfer has occurred, the Operational Mentoring and Liaison Team (OMLT) works to ensure that the Afghan National Army (ANA) enforce the standards that were taught to them.

“To facilitate training, mentoring and monitoring, weapons are slowly integrated as they are issued to one kandak (unit) at a time. For each block of donations, the Commander of the OMLT submits a detailed written report to Commander JTF-Afghanistan stating whether or not the recipients meet the stated requirements.”

While independent verification of these processes is not possible, DND’s account indicates a significant measure of care to prevent diversion of these weapons to unauthorized users and to promote responsible use – unlike the process followed by the CSTC-A.

There is a separate concern regarding the capacity of the ANA to continue to maintain control of the weapons once they have been transferred into the custody of Afghan security forces.

The CSTC-A has itself been lax in assessing the “equipment accountability capabilities” of the Afghan Forces (p. 19). Even so, the GAO reports that CSTC-A contractors “have documented significant weaknesses in the capacity of [Afghan forces] to safeguard and account for weapons. As a result, the weapons CSTC-A has provided are at serious risk of theft or loss.” The significance for Canada obviously is that despite its training and mentoring provisions, the risks of diversion remain considerable due to the overall level of accountability within Afghan forces – recognizing that control standards within the Afghan Army are reported to be much better than within the Afghan National Police.

A third issue in any transfer is the need to prevent the diversion of the AK-47s which the new guns replace. The danger of the old AK-47s drifting into the small arms supermarket that flourishes in Afghanistan is particularly real. There have even been reports of warlords linked to the pro-Government Northern Alliance selling some of their current surpluses to the Taliban.[ix]

The 2001 UN small arms Program of Action that Canada signed on to includes a provision that whenever new arms are provided, suppliers have an obligation to ensure that the old arms which become surplus are responsibly disposed of, “preferably through destruction.”[x] In this case the weapons which the C7s replace have not been declared as surplus by the ANA and thus will not be destroyed. Rather, they will stay in the ANA inventory – not a reassuring disposal plan.

DND’s response to a question about the ultimate disposal of any weapons replaced by the C7s implies that Canada also has no serious capacity, or intention, to assess the Afghan forces’ ability to maintain control over the weapons. DND explains that “the AK-47s that the ANA were originally issued are the property of the Government of Afghanistan through their various line Ministries (Defence, Interior, etc…).” Hence, “the AK-47 rifles replaced by Canadian participation in the NATO 5.56 program (the C7 donation) are retained by the ANA and warehoused. The C7 donation is not a ‘one for one’ exchange.”

The failure to either assure the destruction of any weapons replaced by the C7s, or to verify the ANA’s effective inventory control over them, must be taken as a failure to fulfill the full intent of the Program of Action.

Of course, the US failure is much more egregious – tens of thousands of weapons unaccounted for, no confidence that the weapons that actually reached the ANA and ANP are neither diverted nor used for unlawful purposes, and no attempt made to destroy or control the arms replaced by the CSTC-A program of conversion to NATO calibre weapons. The GAO reports that CSTC-A is in the process of introducing improved monitoring, but the GAO also reports that the CSTC-A “noted it did not have sufficient staff or mentors to conduct the monitoring envisioned” (p. 25).

International forces in Afghanistan, and particularly weapons suppliers, should at a minimum make sure that transfers are taken as an occasion to actually implement the practices and procedures for effective small arms and light weapons inventory control prescribed in the UN Program of Action that all of them have adopted. That program includes commitments to assist states seeking to develop the necessary infrastructure and overall capacity for full compliance, and thus Canada should surely commit to assisting Afghanistan, not only in the management of the weapons received from Canada, but in the responsible management and use of all of the weapons held by Afghan security forces.

Whatever the true number and legal status of most of the millions of small arms in Afghanistan, they not only deny peace for now, they threaten to defer it for a long time to come. Any supplier that decides to add still more weapons to that super-saturated small arms environment had better be in a strong and confident position to ensure that none of those arms will be diverted to exacerbate the extraordinary challenge that the small arms already there present to a country not short on challenges.

eregehr@ploughshares.ca

Notes

[i] The CSTC-A works with the Government of Afghanistan and the International Security Assistance Force to train and develop Afghan security forces in order to “achieve security and stability in Afghanistan.” http://www.cstc-a.com/Mission.html.

[ii] Afghanistan Security: Lack of Systematic Tracking Raises Significant Accountability Concerns about Weapons Provided to Afghan National Security Forces. GAO (GAO-09-267), January 2009. http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09267.pdf.

[iii] Sedra, Mark. 2008. “Small arms and security sector reform.” Michael Bhatia and Mark Sedra, Afghanistan, Arms and Conflict: Armed groups, disarmament and security in post-ar society. Routledge, pp. 158-180.

[iv] The call for arms control: voices from Afghanistan. Oxfam Briefing Note, January 2006. Available at Oxfam, http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what_we_do/issues/conflict_disasters/downloads/bn_afghanistan.pdf,

or through the Council of Foreign Relations,

http://www.cfr.org/project/1294/council_special_report_on_small_arms_and_light_weapons.html

[v] Afghanistan Security: Lack of Systematic Tracking Raises Significant Accountability Concerns about Weapons Provided to Afghan National Security Forces. GAO (GAO-09-267), January 2009. http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09267.pdf.

[vi] See Regehr, Ernie. 2009. Canada’s Automatic Weapons Gift to Afghanistan: Were Canadian Military Export Regulations Followed? Ploughshares Briefing 09-2, February. http://www.ploughshares.ca/libraries/Briefings/brf092.pdf.

[vii] “Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects, 2001, UN Document A/CONF.192/15, Section II, Para 18

(http://disarmament.un.org/cab/poa.html).

[viii] The Canadian Joint Task Force Afghanistan.

[ix] Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, IWPR staff reporter in Mazar-e-Sharif , “The Northern Alliance may supply arms to Taliban, Institute for War and Peace Reporting, March 12, 2006 (http://www.rawa.org/arm-taliban.htm).

[x] “Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects, 2001, UN Document A/CONF.192/15, Section II, Para 18

(http://disarmament.un.org/cab/poa.html).

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