The Paul Wells Show - Trouble Man: A Canadian diplomat's life in the world's hot spots

Episode Date: October 21, 2026

Paul Wells interviews Ben Rowswell, whose 25-year diplomatic career saw him work in a bunch of the world's toughest conflict zones. He was in Somalia as a student while a UN peacekeeping effort was falling apart. He served in Iraq, Afghanistan and Venezuela. As Canada ponders a more assertive international stance, Rowswell's career is a reminder that the world doesn't always wait until you're ready for it. Remember to hit LIke and Subscribe for more of The Paul Wells Show. For more writing from Paul Wells, go to paulwells.substack.com

This week, Ben Rosewell, a veteran diplomat with a knack for landing in global hotspots. What I learned on the ground is that Canadians and Americans actually have significant reservations of a democracy. I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to the Paul Wells Show. I've got my own private nickname for this week's guest. I think of Ben Rosewell as Troubleman after the old Marvin Gay album. I don't know anyone whose work has taken him to more global hotspots than this guy. Even before his long diplomatic career began, he found himself in Mogadishu, Somalia, as a student, just as the international effort to pacify that war-torn country was falling apart spectacularly.

After that, he worked in Iraq, right after the fall of Saddam Hussein, when the Americans were figuring out that that wouldn't be the end of things. And Afghanistan, where he was the top-ranking Canadian civilian in Kandahar. Venezuela, where he was Canada's ambassador under both Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau. I know Ben Roswell isn't a household name, but I wanted to have him on the show because Canada's foreign policy ambitions are growing. And Rosewell knows that the world doesn't become a gentler place just because Canadians want to get out and look around. The lesson from a guy like this isn't that Canada should hide from the world. It's the Canadians should always go out into the

world with their eyes open. This guy did, so he's seen a lot. Here's my conversation with Ben. Ben Roswell. Ball Welsho was presented by the Transition Accelerator. The energy transition is disrupting global power, and Canada needs to act now to secure its place in the emerging clean economy. With its rigorous, independent analysis and uniquely strategic approach, the Transition Accelerator is putting Canada on a path to win, economically and geopolitically. Visit Transitionaccelerator.ca.ca.a.

to learn more. While Wells Show is presented by Camico, a nuclear energy company proudly operating in Saskatchewan and Ontario for nearly four decades. Energy security, national security, and climate security are driving increased demand for safe, carbon-free nuclear energy.

With Tier 1 uranium assets, critical fuel manufacturing capabilities, and best-in-class reactor like the AP-1000 reactor, Camico plays a large role across the nuclear value chain to deliver power to the grid. Camico is thriving as a global leader

and Canadian nuclear champion. It's meeting the moment for nuclear new builds at home and around the world. From ground to grid, Camaco is powering Canada forward. Ben Rosewell, thank you for joining me. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. We were chatting before we turn on the microphones.

We've sort of known each other for a long time because I was hovering around Afghanistan when you were in Afghanistan. but this is our first long conversation. I'm glad for it. And I should say off the bat, I wanted to have you on this show even though there's like a subordinate clause missing,

which is normally I can say, I'm talking to Bob Ray, who, as you know, was Ontario's first NDP Premier and our ambassador to the UN, or I'm talking to Michael Lewis, who, as you know, wrote the Big Short and Moneyball. There's no, as you know, about you.

But I think of you as Troubleman because you have been posted. I like the moniker. Yeah. It was a great movie from 1972. But everywhere you go, it turns up trouble. Just to position you in current reality, you're now working at Catalyze 4, which is Andrew Bevin's new government relations shop. Yeah, it's a strategic advisory helping companies get. on to the nation building bandwagon.

What's it like working at a startup, especially one that was built by a guy as well connected as Andrew Bevan, who ran the legal campaign last year? Well, actually, it's a fantastic team. There's a whole bunch of really top-notch people from business as well. It's sort of a combination of people that have been very deeply involved in politics,

Ontario and federal, so conservative and liberal, but also people that are longtime entrepreneurs, serial entrepreneurs, so they understand how to build things and the whole theme of Canada at this moment is we need to build. And so we help to combine the government and the private sector involvement in that. And, you know, working for people that caliber makes the job a lot easier. Yeah, people definitely return your phone calls. I think everyone who deals with government is sort of scrambling right now because the government's trying to figure out what kind of government it wants to be for what kind of Canada it wants to be. It's not business as usual anywhere around politics

and government in Canada these days. Yeah, I tend to focus on the defense sector in there. There's just like widespread consensus from the military, from the government and from Canadians as a whole. Like the support for this really expensive military buildup is kind of extraordinary. I'm not sure how long that's going to last, but for now everyone's kind of rowing in the same. same direction. And it's an exciting time of actually building up the means for Canada to be a more powerful country. And then the main reason I wanted to talk to you is because you've spent your career in international hotspots and trouble spots. And it's a handy reminder to those people who sort of to say grandly, it would be great if we had Canada out in the world in a bigger way.

that the world is sometimes a scary and disappointing place. And so, I mean, let's go through. Well, you have at key moments in your career, been in Somalia, in Iraq, in Iran, in Afghanistan, where you had a prominent role for an extended period of time, in Egypt, during the Arab Spring revolutions, and in Venezuela, all of that. Venezuela, you were ambassador in Caracas during the Harper government and then a little bit after Trudeau became prime minister?

Sort of half and a half. I was appointed by the Harper government and then stayed there through the first two years of the Trudeau government. And so I got to see the flavor of the two and the reaction of the Chivista regime to the different messages coming out of Ottawa. And I want to talk a lot about that because suddenly they seem to be our main competitor for oil supply to the Americans. And the business models are substantially different. I look at that list, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt, Venezuela. And I think, my God, don't send Ben Roswell anywhere.

I like to think that the trouble precedes my arrival. It doesn't follow it. She'll point out the sequence here. When you're in your early 20s, was that the career path that you wanted to follow? Like, go wherever things are at their worst and see, what can be done? Yeah, very much. In fact, that Somalia period that you mentioned was before I joined the Foreign Service.

So I studied international relations. I was really interested in the, or seized with the problem of war, like how they start, how to stop them, how to prevent them from happening again. And so the minute I graduated, I managed to find my way to Mogadishu to be a contractor on the ground in Mogadishu Airport working for a UN contractor, basically, the least planes. And it was there that I got the call that I had passed the Foreign Service exam. So I was already kind of doing that even before I became a diplomat. Now, you graduated from Georgetown.

Yeah. That's a big university in Washington. I believe that was one of Bill Clinton's alma maters. Yeah, in fact, my last year that I was there, he got elected as president, and he came back to do a little victory lap with his former, well, students 25 years later, but it was very much a Bill Clinton kind of atmosphere. Does studying at Georgetown come with a set of assumptions about about what a country can do in the world, especially if it's the United States? Is it a big, a big-boned kind of place or a high strategy kind of shop?

The study of international relations is quite different between Canada and the U.S. and the U.K., I did my graduate degree in the U.K. In Canada, to oversimplify international relations in the 1990s, we study what should be in, The United Kingdom, they study what was, what's happened because we've been here before. There's nothing new under the sun. That sort of thing is a very strong historical emphasis. And with the United States, the question is, how should we use our power? That was actually quite helpful as a Canadian to be studying there because it's not a concept that's all that common in Canadian foreign policy thinking.

Like what is our power and how do we project it? How do we build it? Those are not, that's not the kind of vocabulary you use in the Foreign Service. But it is very much in American both studies and practice. And I think that stayed with me throughout my career. I was always interested in analyzing things from a perspective of what power we had and how we would use it. I know at Yale there has forever been a course called Grand Strategy that if you're serious about going out and making your way in the world, you've got to take the Grand Strategy course. and I studied a science poe in Paris.

And again, similarly, there's an expectation that the world is a theater of operations and not just a thing to be observed and worried about. Yeah. Yeah. Grand Strategy, for example, is virtually absent, I think, in Canadian international relations. We haven't really pushed ourselves. to ask the big questions. But I noted at least in one university I visited recently,

at the Collège Militre Royale, Saint-Jean, they're actually starting a grand strategy course. And I think it's like high time, because Canada can play a role at that level if we choose to. So you get to Mogadishu. Yeah. I mean, I was studying in Paris that year. I remember the Marines going ashore at Mogadishu

under the TV lights, because all of the reporters had gotten there ahead of them. What was the conflict and what the hell brought you there as a young man? Well, I think all Canadians who were studying international relations at that time were obsessed with peacekeeping. And so there was a Canadian peacekeeping contingent to the United Nations mission called the Unisome. It had actually been pulled out before I got there, but it was very much the talk of how Canada's going to make a difference in the world is through peacekeeping. In 1991, the Somali government collapsed and essentially no one took over, so it dissolved into like a state of nature, kind of utter chaos. Two years into that, the UN was trying to piece together a new government.

It never succeeded. I think it's still pretty chaotic in Somalia. What we found at the time was that peacekeeping doesn't make any sense in the context of utter chaos. You have to have like two armies that have agreed to a true. truce and then like separate and then the peacekeepers go between. But this was like a war of all against all. So it was pretty messy. It was by far the most lethal situation I've been in in my subsequent war zones.

Even as you began to that exposition, I just wrote recently about peacekeeping. And I think it can often be useful. But Somalia in 1992, 93 would have been almost the worst possible case application of the model of peacekeeping. Yeah. There's no, there aren't two industrial armies to stand between. No, and it totally fell apart. I mean, some people will have seen the movie Black Hawk Down. Yeah.

And the scenes of utter devastation there, just of like open massacres, were quite accurate. That incident actually happened about six weeks after I left. So I was there in that period of time. And I think that gives you a sense of what the warfare of the 1990s look like compared to what we had seen during the relative stability of the Cold War. Did you see any examples of what soldiers called troops in contact shooting? Well, we were living in a tent right beside the landing strip of the airport because the violence was so bad that the UN, the biggest perimeter that they could create

was basically just a loop around the landing strip. And so that was the only place we could go. We couldn't move more than 50 meters in any one direction. Well, except for on the lining strip where you don't want to spend a lot of time. And we were getting shelled constantly. There was mortar fire every single night from what I can remember. I did take one trip outside the wire where I accompanied a bunch of journalists. As you probably know, war correspondents are always the craziest people.

I only did that once. But yeah, I mean, it was a lot of. It was a constant fact. There was, you know, bullets and mortars flying around all the time. You're next. So then you get into defate, as it was called then, GAC, as we call it these days. And a series of desk jobs and kind of a calmer existence? Well, because I was really interested in conflict,

I used that time to learn a language that I thought would be helpful to get me posted back into conflict zones, which was Arabic. and that proved to be a pretty good investment of time. So I got up to an intermediate level of Arabic, and I was supposed to to Egypt. Now, Egypt wasn't at war in the 1990s, but I saw it in the depths of the Mubarak dictatorship and started to develop an expertise in doing human rights reporting

and analysis and democracy reporting, which came in very handy. So it wasn't time wasted. I can imagine not. And in those days, it would be essentially a military dictator's, that was starting to be harassed by a more purely Islamic fundamentalist movement? Is that kind of the geometry? There was a brutal dictatorship that invoked the threat of Islamism in order to justify its repression.

The Islamists were violent. They weren't particularly strong. They weren't a major threat to the regime. But that was the dynamic. There had been that Islamist civil war in Algeria. previous to that. And so the Egyptian government, all the Arab countries of the day, were really cracking down hard on their population for fear of another Islamist insurgency. Okay. September 11th, 2001 happens. Yeah.

It was an astonishing shock to just about everyone, but with a few days hindsight, was it entirely surprising to you? Or like, I mean, how people who've been following, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism across the Arab world since 1979, were maybe a little less surprised than... No, I think it's still a surprise to this day. I mean, just the tactical sophistication of the attack, their ability to kind of infiltrate into our own society and our own infrastructure,

you know, to get onto airplanes in the numbers that they did was quite astonishing. The level of Islamist anger was not as surprising. to me having served in the Middle East, but their ability to project that violence, that, you know, project the power that they had directly into Canada and the United States was a well-justified shock. I mean, I'm not sure we could have been more prepared for that. It really was a sort of Black Swan type of an event. Now, George W. Bush had just gotten elected president a year earlier. He had hoped that his presidency could be about school success. Yeah. And now, resource.

Home ownership. Yeah. The soft, bigotry of low expectations and a really aggressive push to develop natural resources under Dick Cheney. Suddenly, his presidency was about an awful lot of other things. And the relationship between Canada, the United States, changes. Where were you? And what did you see in that time?

So very shortly after 9-11, the United States effectively closed the border with Canada. and caused massive economic disruption. Somewhat reminiscent now with the terrorists, but it was justified by their fear of terrorists coming across the northern border. And so we stood up a task force to negotiate with the White House to get the border reopened and then to work out some kind of border security regime

that was called the Smart Border Team. So I actually got called in to work on that team. It was led by John Manley, it was deputy prime minister at the time, and he negotiated with the Homeland Security lead. inside the White House. And so that was, I essentially then spent the next two years in very small teams negotiating with the United States to, from our perspective, save our economy and from

the U.S. perspective, harden their borders so that they would not have to face that kind of debate, that attack again. It was a pretty heady time, actually, because a lot of the systems that we now have in place to protect the continent date from 2001. Canada also developed its first and only national security strategy at that time. So we were forced to kind of rapidly learn about security and what kind of security we wanted as an open society. And to some extent, like the measures that we worked out then in full cooperation with the Americans held for, you know, 15 years until Donald Trump came along. Our only national security strategy.

I think it dates from 2004. 2004, yeah. So it was created by our team on the basis of what we had learned negotiating with the United States. States, Graham Flack, who was the Director General-level official at the time, later president of the Treasury Board. He led the initial drafting exercise, like how to extrapolate from what we had learned, how we could hold our home with, you know, negotiating with the White House, all of the security agencies of the United States about what's required for the security of our shared continent

and then to build out from there from some of the same principles. It's not entirely true, but it's pretty close to true that in relations with Canada, the United States doesn't do anything that it doesn't want to do. And they were scared and nervous and desperate to avoid a sequel to 9-11. So that must have made them hard to deal with. You know, what I learned in those negotiations with the U.S. is that, Canada actually holds its own quite well in the Canada-US relationship. It's true that they had the imperative of protecting their country from another attack. So their level of motivation was very high.

Obviously, their level of resources is very high. But they don't have the advantage of having one relationship, which is more important than any other. And so they don't always put their best people on it. Or their best people are kind of spread out and distracted. with all the different crises, whereas we put our best and bright. So it was the same thing, just as last round of negotiations. I mean, Janice Sherrod, a two-time clerk of the Privy Council. Like, there's no one better in Canada to lead those negotiations.

Those negotiations unfortunately haven't turned out the way we wanted to. But I think it's a sign. Like, we felt that in 2001. We had, like, the A-team. And because we were not only had high-calibre negotiators, we had the undivided attention of the Prime Minister in the cabinet and the full support. Not only the government, but in moments of crisis like that,

there's remarkable degrees of unity between provinces and the federal government, and that we're seeing again as well. The United States can never be as unified or as coherent or as strategic as Canada because they're too big and too spread out and they have too many other interests. And so when something really matters to us, we're able to hold our own against them in reopening the border in 2001. And I'm confident in... managing a relationship with a predatory United States now.

Now, I got to know you when you were in Afghanistan, but between 9-1-1 and Afghanistan, you spent some time in Iraq and Iran, is that correct? In Iraq in particular, I did Iran work later on, but the Iraq work was, so having worked very closely on smart border issues with the United States, we could see the American attention start to wander from Afghanistan, which, where it deployed troops right after 9-11 and started to wander towards Iraq. I knew that was going to be controversial. I spoke Arabic. I was by then an expert in the Middle East, and so I was really anxious to be on the ground

to see how that was going to play out. Canada did not participate in the coalition. We condemned it, but we still needed to find out what was happening. So there was an opportunity for a junior diplomat to be the eyes and ears of Canada on the ground. And I was like, me, me, me, me, me, me. Turns out there wasn't a lot of competition. So, you know, off I went.

I spent two years on the ground in Baghdad for some of that period of time actually embedded in the U.S. operation itself. It was called the Coalition Provisional Authority. So I got to see the, you know, the imperial control of the Iraqi government by American forces up close. I spent a little time then with an NGO so that I could get out of that constriction and to, So what years is this? This is 2003 to 2005. So just after the fall of Saddam Hussein, through the beginning of the insurgency in 2004,

and then by 2005 it was a full-scale civil war between the Sunni and the Shiite parts of the population. So this is the period described in Thomas Ricks' book, Fiasco, when the sort of triumphant route of the Iraqi forces by the American forces leads to, an increasingly crappy occupation that...

It made spectacular of their feet. Yeah. So I think the big takeaway for me for theirs, this is obviously a situation where the U.S. is supremely powerful. It's military advantages

over the Iraqi army and then once it was occupying over any commerce was so dramatic that you would think the U.S. would just get its way. But in fact, military power is not a very effective tool to get what you want. You can change things, but you could very rarely change it for precisely what you want to have happen.

And so Iraq really was for me the story of how even the power of the United States doesn't really serve it very well. So having that proponents of power doesn't always guarantee the outcomes that you want. They made some really dumb errors partially because they were very ideologically driven. partially because they had shoved some of the experts out of the way. And there was a real distrust of Arabs and Muslims and, you know, the people who they were actually running. So they tried to bring in Iraqis who had been in the United States for 20 or 30 years and who thought like them, but had no sense of what was going on on the ground. One of the most telling signs to me, I had a friend who was called Ali,

who was one of the American diplomats about my age. We would, you know, go for drinks after the day was over or whatever. I only found out at the very end that he was called Ali because he was a Saudi second generation immigrant who spoke so in Arabic, but he was too afraid to let his superiors know that he spoke Arabic and that he was in fact of Arab background. It was like white passing. But I thought, my God, this is an occupying force, which isn't even able to communicate with the people that it's occupying. And the people who are are too scared to admit. At that point, you could see how they made such. catastrophic errors, disbanding the army, which basically just fed the insurgent army,

trying to attack both extremists on the Sunni and the Shia side as they were starting to come into conflict with the other. Their overly aggressive approach temporarily turned both the Sunni radicals and the Shia radicals against the United States and made a kind of unlikely alliance, and that's when the violence really shot up. I have this one dramatic memory of sitting on the top of the hotel where we were holed up at the time just listening to all the all the insurgents starting to drive around the the city firing their weapons in the in the air and basically looking for any americans that they could get their hands on i thought this is crazy the most powerful military in the world has completely lost control of this broken country just because of how

stupidly they're they're exercising their power so unanswerable question um Was there a way to handle the post-invasion Iraq that would have gone a lot better? Yeah. They should have brought in. Jeez, you answered that unanswerable question. It's not that unanswerable. Well, I should say any attempt to reconstruct the country after conflict is fiendishly difficult and probably takes a commitment of several generations.

So when this has happened historically to some success, like think of Japan, 1945, Germany, 1945, the people that have won that conflict have stayed for three generations. So that's probably like the scale at which you need to be successful. But rule number one is you make sure that the people that are in the country have a stake in it, which means you move to elections relatively quickly so that there's a local government. Secondly, you try to bring in the neighbors of the country so that they have a stake in the success and the stability of the country, rather than bringing in, you know, Western countries from far away that don't really have any knowledge or any understanding.

And then where possible, because legitimacy is always the challenge. You want to work with international law and international institutions. It's not like a moral question, but whether you do things the way that international law says, it's just that the people that matter will watch if you've done it in a way that's consistent with, you know, historical practice, which where there's, you know, other parties have a say and what have you. Like, international law is just the pattern of how we've figured out as a species over time,

like what tends to work and what tends to not work. And so the fact that the Americans came in and were like, bah, international law, it basically meant, bah, experience, bah, wisdom, bah, experience. Like the hubris was out of control. There are always NGOs that are trying to make a different, in places like that. NDI National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute.

At that time, Canada had rights and democracy that was trying to... Can groups like that and the Germans all have a million of... The Stifton, I call them, our political party foundations. Can those kinds of groups find any purchase in a hot zone like that, or is it...

Yeah. Yeah. It's really hard. I actually worked for... The first one you mentioned, NDI, the American operation, because Canada never had its own version of that organization that does political party training. Rights and Democracy was quite small and did other stuff.

They hire Canadians like Left, right and center. I think they still do to the day. It's basically a Canadian operation. I have so many Canadian fans who've gone to work for one of the American NGOs abroad. So my experience at the time is I've spent some time as a Canadian government official in Iraq and then sometime as an NDI employee. And we were both doing democracy promotion. The Canadian funded project at the time was for election observation.

And it was an exercise that existed virtually only on paper. But we still spent $7 million and we made a lot of like headlines out of it because we were pretty good at communicating what was in fact something that had virtually no impact. There was only two international observers. And we still claimed that it was a legitimate international exercise. It's because we were, as a government, we were forced to say that we had been doing something useful and successful. And so we said it was useful and successful. And I think for the most part, Canadians kind of accepted it.

Whereas in contrast, NDI at the same time, fanned out across the country and found 10,000 Iraqi volunteers helped them understand how to run a domestic election observation effort. And so when the first democratic elections came, there were observers. There were no international observers, despite what we were funding to the tune of $7 million, but there were 10,000 Iraqis. And as a result, Iraqis largely accepted the legitimacy of that first election. It was extraordinarily violent. Like 36 voters, I think, were killed over the course of the day. But as a result, there was an Iraqi administration that was able to come into office.

And that, to be honest, NDI, this small NGO had a much. much bigger impact than Canada did. Because they were on the ground, because they had a specific expertise, they had a lot of experience. And I found it quite inspiring. I spent a good 10 years of my life after that trying to create a Canadian version of NDI so we could have Canadian democracy experts on the ground, working for us instead of working for them. And we were never able to pull that across the finish line. And I think my timing is right. Even more recently, under the Trudeau government, were attempts in the global affairs to stand up some sort of functioning and useful democracy promotion NGO?

Well, there were attempts in the manifest, I mean, in the platform of the party, the liberal. They promised it in 2019 and 2021. I think maybe even three elections in a row. Global affairs was never very enthusiastic. And so it got bogged down in competing priorities. said never actually happened because that kind of work requires a degree of distance. You have to be at a bit of an arm's length from your embassy because you're dealing with political parties across the spectrum

and you want to be very careful to show that you're not actually trying to influence the elections even as you're helping citizens vote. And so it can't be done directly under the control of a foreign ministry and yet foreign ministries like to control things. And so I don't think we were ever serious enough about democracy being a part of Canada's 's foreign policy for us to. actually developed the means to have an impact at the scale that NDI and some of these German political party foundations did.

Is that a decision that's worth revisiting? Yeah, very much so. I mean, the Kearney government is definitely not all that enthusiastic about democracy. That's not one of the, well, I mean, we're all supposed to be skeptical about values to begin with right now. And so democracy is seen as a value. That's the soft stuff. Like we're going to shove that to a side.

but ultimately major conflicts and they tend to end through politics and not through the military victory of one over the other. And the politics that needs to come together is the formation of a government that has enough credibility across enough swaths of the population for people that are unhappy to decide to wait to the next election instead of start shooting. And that essentially is the practice of democracy,

whether we call that Western or not. often like to think that we're the only like civilization that's ever figured out democracy and that there's something inherently Western about it. It's not really. I mean, when you give people a choice over who gets to run their government, that's actually a pretty universal aspiration. And there's lots of countries that have experiences to draw on. But generally that sort of whole category of international relations is one that Canada has chosen to step out of. We did it for many, many decades in the past, but post-Iraq, the George W. Bush invocation of democracy for the violence that it was committing in Iraq left a very poor taste in the mouths of most Canadians. And so we kind of

got out of the democracy business in 2003. But the world's a pretty dangerous place. These conflicts are not going to be resolved through military power. They're going to be, they're going to be. They're going to negotiated and negotiation will require some degree of expertise in democracy. So I think it's high time kind of get back into that business. While Welsho was presented by the transition accelerator, the energy transition is disrupting global power and Canada needs to act now to secure its place in the emerging clean economy. With its rigorous independent analysis and uniquely strategic approach, the transition accelerator is putting Canada on a path to which. economically and geopolitically.

Visit Transitionaccelerator.ca to learn more. While Wells Show is presented by Camico, a nuclear energy company proudly operating in Saskatchewan and Ontario for nearly four decades. Energy security, national security, and climate security are driving increased demand for safe, carbon-free nuclear energy. With Tier 1 uranium assets, critical fuel manufacturing capabilities, and best-in-class reactor technologies like the AP-1000 reactor, Camico plays a large role across the nuclear value chain

to deliver power to the grid. Camaco is thriving as a global leader and Canadian nuclear champion. It's meeting the moment for nuclear new builds at home and around the world. From ground to grid, Camico is powering Canada forward. On to Afghanistan. Back to Afghanistan, in some extent, in the sense that 9-11 was about the Taliban and al-Qaeda. And then by the mid-knots,

Afghanistan was turning out to be a much more difficult environment than anyone had anticipated. But 2006, the insurgency goes off the charts. Canadian casualties start to multiply beyond anything we'd seen in the first few years of that conflict. And there's a position created called the Rock, representative of Canada in Kandahar. Were the third one?

Third rock from the sun. What is the rock and what did the job entail? So in 2007, the Canadian government came to the conclusion that it was losing the war in Iraq is in Afghanistan. John Manley comes back into the picture, leads this report saying we've got to focus on governance and on development in addition to security. In order to do that, you need a major civilian team on the ground as well as the military. The military should train the Afghan army, the Afghan police, but then you need diplomats and aid workers to help rebuild the irrigation system. That's the basis of their agricultural sector and therefore their economy. You need to have schools that are reopened so that people are being – both boys and girls are being educated.

And then you need to work with the Kandahari government to allow them to kind of connect with the population and to communicate all the good work that was being done. So we flooded this combat zone with diplomats and aid workers. At a level, I don't think Canada has ever done since. I had never done previously, and I don't think it has ever done since. We had at one point 80 civilians in one of the most lethal environments in the world. I mean, contrasts that with now when there's fighting in a country, the very first thing we tend to do is close an embassy and bring all the diplomats.

We were doing the opposite. We were like sending diplomats out. And then in order to manage that team, the Manly report had suggested we create a senior civilian that would operate aside the senior general. So the senior general at that time was John Vance. He went on to be the chief of defense staff. And we had a joint headquarters of all of General Vance's commanders. And then the Rock, who was the senior ambassador, but only for this province, with the head

of the Foreign Service, the head of the, the, the, uh, general. development team, the head of the civilian police team. So it was an unusual experiment in military, civil cooperation. I'd say it worked. It didn't work in the sense that we didn't stabilize Kandahar, and Kandahar is now back under Taliban rule. So with that very important caveat. Yeah. Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln. It did take, it did take 10 years. I mean, whatever structure we were working with outlived us by 10 years. So that's not nothing. I would say it works in that by the time Obama comes into office in 2009, his administration decides we're all in on Afghanistan,

and in particular we're all in on Kandahar. And so in the time that I was there occupying that seat, 10,000 American troops were deployed into Kandahar, and they sent 100 diplomats and aid workers of their own. And it worked in that the United States had enough confidence in our operation that they folded under. They came in under our leadership. So we ran the provincial reconstruction team,

which was like the main team helping the provincial government. Instead of setting up their own team, they sent their officers to be part of our PRT. So it was a, you know, ultimately we were there for the alliance. We were there to show that we will stand up for our NATO allies and to contribute to an alliance integrity. So it worked in the sense that our ally voted with their feet by saying we agree, we support Canada's leadership of the effort here

in Kandahar, and we're going to back them up with our reinforcements. A little before you got there, I was in Kandahar talking to your predecessor, the first rock, Alyssa Goldberg, and to the military commander at the time. And one of my questions was, all of this may or may not help the Afghan people, but I get the impression it's great for the Canadian public service. And I don't think Alyssa liked that question at all. No, she wouldn't. The Army General kind of got where I was going.

Okay. It was, I mean, it was an unusual example of Canadian public services being tested and having to apply solutions in a very difficult situation. Yeah. Which can, I mean, there can be lessons applied. I'm not sure you. Yeah. No, it was certainly in terms of like us professionalizing the Foreign Service and developing. being in a capacity to operate in international security.

It was helpful. I do think it was helpful for the Afghans. I mean, I think we, as in the NATO alliance, got the politics of Afghanistan, right? We were so invested in the Karzai government and after that Ashrafgani that we empowered it and equipped it with untold riches and allowed it to not hold itself to account for the population. It would rig elections and we would just look the other way. Like we basically didn't ever think that Afghans were capable of democracy, and therefore when their democracy was undermined, we're like, nah. And Afghanistan like that very much rose up in anger against the government.

I mean, in retrospect, it all seems quite clear. But in terms of helping reconstruct a country, it's probably an effort that requires several decades of presence. In retrospect, NATO had no business being in Afghanistan. We should have built up a UN force to do that and brought in the Indians and brought in some of the local players that had a much longer, like they had perseverance. But we chose, the United States didn't like the UN at the time. And so decided not to go with the competent authorities and create its own structure.

NATO was very competent at stuff in Europe. And so they hoped that, you know, you could transplant it. to Central Asia and I would work out. So we didn't have the political will to last for the decades or generations that we would have. And so in the period of time that we had political will, I think we were going about things the right way. I saw the most amazing things there.

I would walk into the office. I say I was always one of a group of people who were being taken from place to place. Yeah, I was in these familiarization tours. So we would walk into the office of, fairly senior minister in the Afghan government. Yeah. And there would be a mountainous American army officer who would introduce himself as the minister's military advisor.

Yeah. And I would get a pretty strong sense that the minister was the minister for some things, but that the military advisor was the minister for a lot of other things. Yeah. And, you know, so it was a lot of kabuki theater. Yeah, there shouldn't be a lot of NATO influence in the way that the Afghan government was run. We would have been more successful if we had been able to disengage, or we had allowed ourselves to disengage. We are collectively, Americans, Canadians, and make sure that the Afghans would return to the Afghan government would

would participate in elections and allow the citizens to actually determine whether they're doing a good job or not. But what we did instead was saying, you know, these elections are kind of a Western implant. So you don't need to bother having real elections. We'll go through the Kabuki Theater of Elections as well. And that was, I think, the fatal flaw. What I learned on the ground is that Canadians and Americans

actually have significant reservations about democracy. we think it's okay in our country, but we're not entirely sure that it's appropriate for the rest of the world. And I think that was really the fatal flaw. Because we never fully trusted the Afghans to do things their way, we imposed rather too much of our own will on them. In a way that's also unsustainable, you know,

Rory Stewart was also quite prominent, both in Iraq and Afghanistan at the time, wrote extensively later on for leaders, of the Conservative Party. He's written quite extensively about how we could have remained in Afghanistan if we had maintained a very small presence over several decades as opposed to a really big presence for a very short amount of time. And I think there's a lot of truth to that. I was actually going to put that to you. He really started to get disillusioned as soon as his party, the Conservatives come to power. And David Cameron wants to go in big for a while.

Yeah. And Rory Stewart says, well, no, we should have. gone in much lighter and essentially never left. Yeah. Would that have been sustainable politically? I think the UK is a different kettle of fish because they have like extensive experience in maintaining presence in other countries for a long time, often under a pretty awful institution. And it works great.

For Canada, no. I mean, we clearly were far, way too far away from Canada. We had virtually nothing in common with Afghanistan. We don't have any, uh, any long term reason to be in Afghanistan. I do think that the world's a dangerous place, states are going to fall apart. We will have a vested interest in stabilizing some countries, but we should be picking ones. I think one of the lessons from Afghanistan, if we're going to do this again, we should do it

in a country where we're willing, we have the commitment to stay forever, like a fellow democracy. You know, if a country, like, pick one of the Latin American democracies, if one of those countries was to go under and fall apart, that's an area where we have enough interest. and enough commitment that we could potentially be there for as long as it takes for that country to come back onto its feet, but not Central Asia. You've given an interview where you said that

in the flight home after serving as Rock, which is an incredibly intense engagement, you started to think that maybe it just simply hadn't worked, that we'd lost it. Yeah. Tell me about that thought process. So my biggest struggle when I was at the Rock was the activities of the brother of the president,

Brother-in-law of the president. Sorry, half-brother of the president. His name was Ahmed Wally Karzai. Yeah. And he was the worst abuser of human rights, the worst drug dealer, the worst kingpin. Powerbroker was the type of,

the very polite title we gave to him. But he was, he was single-handedly responsible. He was a big tug-thug. Yeah, he operated private prisons and if you crossed him on a commercial contract, he would throw you in his basement and he would have people torture you for weeks.

And we knew about this. and we chose not to confront him because he's the brother of the president. And we were foolishly, I think, had decided that the success of Karzai was the success of the NATO mission in Afghanistan. And then we convinced ourselves of a bunch of things that, you know, Afghans have different values. They don't mind being tortured in prison in basements, I guess. I don't know. They don't mind like their country being run by drug dealers or what have you. We convinced ourselves all these sort of cultural arguments that these people were very different.

and therefore we're not going to apply our standards. Over the course of the year that I was rock, I had led a few initiatives for us to confront Ahmed Wali Karzai and try to convince his brother. And there was a lot of allies within the U.S. military, not so much the U.S. embassy, but General McChrystal, who was commander of ISAF for a while, was very much an ally in that.

And that came to a head in January or February of 2010. and Karzai basically stood up to the combined NATO alliance and said, you need me more than I need you, and the NATO alliance blinked. And after that point, you could just see how the people of Kandahar lost any kind of hope in the NATO mission because they hated Ahmad Wally Karzai so much. And we were so closely tied. I mean, our big development project was to rebuild the dam that provides irrigation for the entire agriculture sector.

So we've had a lot weighing in this. You probably did an helicopter fly over the Dalla Dam. Yeah. Something like 30, 30% of all the money that Canada put into that dam was for security to make sure that it didn't get attacked. You know, the workers didn't get attacked or what have you. But it was essentially a protection racket by Ahmad Raleh Karsai. So he was powerful because of Canadian money. And I was conscious of those kind of contradictions.

I was very committed to the reconstruction of Afghanistan, felt that they deserved better and that we should have been there for the long haul, but that we shouldn't make artificial distinctions between things that matter in Canada and things that matter to other countries, like corruption, democracy, human rights, what have you. I mean that there's a falseness to that kind of,

that discourse that values don't matter. Like, Afghans don't agree. and as a result of them not agreeing, they overthrew the government that we propped up and now are being run by this horrific regime that's damaging to everyone. You said that part of the problem in Afghanistan was that we were really more preoccupied

with sort of alliance maintenance with being good NATO people than with the situation on the ground. Well, I think what I actually said was our primary strategic objective was alliance integrity. The way that Afghanistan related to Canada's national interests is that our security depends on NATO,

and when NATO needs us, we need to pay up. Afghanistan was one of the times that we very clearly were a net contributor to NATO and not a net sort of beneficiary. We were not pre-writing, for example. We were doing the opposite. We were showing the rest of the alliance that we would show up, and we would put our lives on the line no matter where they needed us. And that's what keeps Canada safe.

It's the alliance. what that meant in practice because that was like the Uber objective, the secondary objective of leaving in Afghanistan that was stable. Sometimes if those two were in competition, we favored alliance integrity, delivering on what was our national objective. And I don't necessarily find fault with that. I mean, we should be advancing our national interests where possible.

I think NATO made a mistake. in being the organization that was tasked with stabilizing Afghanistan, should have been the UN, would have been more effective it was the UN. But given that it was NATO and that we, you know, we are part of an alliance, we don't call the shots, we have to go with what our allies say. We did that. And I think as a result, Canada renewed our credibility as an ally that will stand up for the security of our fellow nations.

I've got listeners who are going to be saying, come on, the United Nations would have been more effective. There's a sense that the United Nations is just never effective. So the UN would have been more effective in the sense that it would have been able to establish a permanent presence without any question about this legitimacy because that's what it does. It would have been able to bring in some of the regional players. So it wasn't just a bunch of clueless Westerners from Europe and North America. It would have been people from Asia who really understand what's happening there. Now, a UN that has systematically been stripped of its funding and its credibility attacked by the United States and many other countries, no.

I mean, it's a country that's an organization that has not been operating to do what it's mandated by member states to do. The UN of 26 probably would not have been the right organization, but the UN of 2001, was a much more effective organization. It's difficult to work with because it responds to 195 countries. And so it's natural for countries like the United States to say, why bother working with the UN? We have to negotiate all this stuff. We have to make compromises.

But the benefit that comes with all that negotiation and compromises is that when you're able to generate a significant degree of consensus within a body that represents the entire world, you can get incredible things done. That UN hasn't existed since the mid-2000s. And so, yeah, I would not, like I've rushed to say, I'm not saying the UN of 2026, but the UN when it was running sort of as designed

in that period of the 1990s and 2000s would have been the safer bed than NATO with all its military competence, but its political cluelessness. Let's talk briefly about Venezuela. Okay. I'm going to have fewer reasons to interrupt you because I know much less about Venezuela. The Harper government sends you off to Caracas.

Pretty good assigned into those days or what? This is another one of me going me, me, me, me, me, me. And not a lot of other people competing. So I get there in 2014. It's a year after Chavez has died. So Chavismo is still very popular. Maduro had been there for one year. And the level, the sort of economy was struggling,

but the quality of life was comparable to a lot of Latin American countries, really large disparity between the rich and the poor and some instability, a fair amount of crime. But it was livable. Chavez never had the authority. I'm sorry, Maduro never had the authority of Chavez, and so there were massive street protests. after an election that was pretty dubious.

And so I arrived in a city that had something like 100,000 protesters. Because in the 1990s, when we created our embassy, we decided to be in a really prominent position in one of the biggest squares of the eastern, so the eastern part of the city, we were engulfed by those protests because that was the principal plaza where people would protest called Plaza Altamira.

And so our embassy was essentially besieged. And that's why there was no one else who really wanted to go. Compared to Iraq and Afghanistan and Somalia, it was actually much safer, but still a tricky operation. We had to... A very basic question. Could you get around town in ordinary vehicles, or was it all up-armored convoys?

Well, so when the protests subsided, we were able to operate within... certain parts of the city and we would have a map that would show like which are the areas that are safe in which are the areas you need to avoid when you've got 100,000 people in the streets and all the police fighting back with tear gas then you basically have to withdraw to your to your houses or apartments and then just hunker down so we actually learned how to operate the entire embassy inside my residence because the official residence had had a big enough perimeter and so we were just sort of going back and forth between the two.

It was a permissive environment for us to operate. We had some armored vehicles, but people were also sometimes able to drive around in their soft shell vehicles. But we did spend a lot of time practicing an evacuation from the country. So we knew the route to the airport, like the back of our hand, and we would occasionally run drills of how to get out there. But with that, we were able to maintain quite a large embassy throughout some of the most tumultuous times of Venezuela in politics.

It is very possible. It's eminently doable for Canada to have civilians in almost any level of danger abroad as long as we think things through and we invest in our equipment. We don't always have to pull diplomats back at the first sign of trouble as we've done so much in the last few years. You think the GAC is a little timid? there's been an interpretation of the legal situation called the duty to consult, which makes sense on paper that you're the employer, you're going to make sure your employees are safe, whatever.

In practice, because that legal threat is quite significant, there isn't as much competing within the bureaucratic decision-making system with the duty to serve Canadians. But our diplomats are primarily there to serve Canadians. Venezuela is actually quite an important country to us. close to us. It was the largest economy in the Americas before Chavismo. Venezuelan migrants caused tremendous disruption throughout the hemisphere. So we really do need to be on the ground. But because the way that the current situation, how bureaucracy interprets the various pressures that it's under, we prioritize staff over citizens. And that's where

I think we need to rebalance, but I think it will require some confidence from Canadians that international relations matters, that diplomacy matters, that we've got interests at stake and that we need people on the ground to actually stand up for them. I was quite proud that we kept the embassy

fully operational throughout the entire time that I was there, in spite of quite a lot of pressure from Ottawa to evacuate people that close up shop. And we did that basically just by investing in, personal security, and also making the point, like the work the diplomats do have fundamental importance for Canada, so allow us to continue doing our job serving Canadians.

When did your tenure in Caracas end? 2017. So you saw a bit of, like the last time it showed up as a Canadian political file before last year was when Christopher Freeland was the new foreign minister and was sort of trying to attract attention and put diplomatic pressure on the Maduro regime to admit its shortcomings, prop up the opposition, things like that, with very little success. But it struck me as kind of a nice thing to try. I would take exception with propping up the opposition. There was never a point at which Canada expressed a political preference for certain parties.

We certainly did stand up for democracy itself. And so when every single party, apart from the governing party, united in a coalition, we did, our defense of democracy itself was interpreted as a support for this extremely broad coalition of parties. But we're very, very careful in Canadian foreign policy not to pick sides when it comes to the domestic politics. of the country. I do actually think this was a sign of Canada projecting powers. I mentioned at the very beginning. We don't tend to think about power in Canadian foreign policy, but we actually do have a fair amount of power. We have a lot of power when it comes to a country like Venezuela. It's a country that's very close to us where Canada's got a reputation from having played a

helpful role in human rights and democracy in many of the neighboring countries or other Latin American countries turn to us for support. And yes, a lot of democracy is words, but when we choose our words carefully, they can have an outsized impact. The Venezuela that I discovered when I landed there in 2014 was supposedly polarized, like 50% left, 50% right, and the two couldn't get along. What we actually learned on the ground was that it was very heavily critical of the government, more like 80% of the population wanted to change and 20% supported Chivismo. We found that out because we were the embassy that was the most present in all the Barrios, all these poor neighborhoods that were like Chivista strongholds.

We ran projects in every single one of those neighborhoods in Caracas, and we spent a lot of time driving around the country, getting to know other barrios, other sort of poor areas that traditionally had supported the Chavez. And we'd seen that the support for Chivismo had collapsed in the face. of all these economic crises. And so the rhetoric of the government was that it was engaged in a pitched battle between the forces of the rights,

supported by the United States and what have you, and that it was the genuine democratic force. Because of our presence on the ground, we were able to point out when they were taking measures that were actually opposed by the vast majority of Venezuela. So, for example, in 2014, it looked like there were.

about to arrest Maria Corina Machalo. At the time, not really well known in Canada. She went on to win the Peace Prize, and she's now the sort of great hope for a return to democracy in that country. We knew from all of our time in all these barrios that she was incredibly popular among the poor, as well as among the rich,

among people that were supposedly supposed to be Chavista as well as those supporting opposition parties. And so when we lifted our finger and said, we don't think that arresting her would be consistent with Venezuela, commitments under UN human rights treaties, supporting political participation, or what have you. It created outrage among the Venezuelan government, but they didn't arrest her. And over time, other countries started to follow our lead.

So by 2017, when Freeland was in power, she was the very first foreign minister to refer to the Venezuelan government as no longer a democracy. Maybe that's just a nuance, but it allowed the other Latin American foreign minutes just to start speaking the same way. And within weeks, the Venezuelan government was actually very isolated. It chose to live with its isolation, it increased its repression, and held on to power through just sheer brutality. But Canada did play a leading role in changing how the region, how Latin America approached the problem of democracy. in Venezuela. Simply by putting a name on things.

Well, by having the credibility of having been on the ground and having developed relationships throughout Venezuela and society and then naming things is quite important in a communications environment in which authoritarian regimes now operate where they want to convince populations that they're divided and that your real enemy is that other guy down the street and not the government, to be able to pierce through that narrative, which is something that an embassy can do.

When you say something about a country, the eyes of that country kind of turn to you and you can reflect back a reality that they're aware of, but with the authority and the safety of international opinion. And so we were able to wield that in Venezuela. It turns out that the regime was so committed to stay in power that it was willing to do absolutely anything, including quite high levels of violence,

and to become an international priory, which it had been then for the next few years. But we took a stand, and we actually did have some impact on Venezuela and politics, when we chose to project power, as we did in 2017. What did Venezuela teach you about how democracies fail? That we need to be worried here in Canada. The way that they fail in places like Venezuela,

shows weaknesses in our own democracy. I learned this actually first in Egypt, having been in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian Revolution. At that time, social media was brand new as a political force. It had brought about the fall of the Mubarak regime, and so we were all very optimistic about it at the time. But the project I was working in that period of time for Stanford University involved working with

a broad coalition of actors that had brought Mubarak down. They were all operating through social media, Google sheets, like whatever the digital tools of the time were. And we could see how the interaction that they were having online was polarizing them into two different camps. They couldn't stand each other. At the time, I think when it fell apart, we're like, wow, Egyptian, you know, it's like some cultural reason why it couldn't be.

But it is actually because of social media. Social media has an inherent tendency to separate a population and to set people against each other. We could have learned that lesson if we had studied Egypt closely in 2011 and 2012, 2013. But we waited until the same dynamic was happening within our democracy and we're now dealing with the degrees of polarization from technology that's inherently divisive. So if we were to set aside our cultural kind of predilections that somehow Westerners are different or superior to other countries,

we could actually see the vulnerabilities that exist within our society as they're manifested in a place like Egypt or in Venezuela. Huh. I feel like that would be a whole other episode of the podcast. Paul Simon's got a song where in the last verse he says, what is the point of this story, what information pertains? What are the broad lessons that you might apply from all of these adventures over 30 years? And advice that you might have for a Canada that looks out into this crazy world and wants to do more of that sort of thing.

So my experience suggests that Canada has power. I guess we tend to think of ourselves in comparison in the United States. We have less power. But when you look at yourselves globally and when you're in these environments, We are the 10th largest economy. We're one of the few countries that can actually send expeditionary forces. We have tremendous stability and unity as a country, which makes us a force to be reckoned with.

And when Canada operates overseas, people pay attention. I think we do ourselves a disservice by assuming that Canada's weak. I think there is some incentive by those that wield power, senior officials or whatever, to suggest that we don't have power because it places a kind of burden of responsibility on them of how we should exercise it. But we do have it. We are able to operate. Yes, we have chosen to exercise that power by collaborating with the United States and with allies

and a roles-based international order. That's one way to exercise power is through cooperation. But we have that power and we have a responsibility. I think the government has a responsibility to build that power and to project it. I think what's lacking is just the language. We don't tend to think in terms of projecting power. And I think that would be the one takeaway from my career is that let's start talking in those terms so that we can actually serve the interests of Canadians properly.

Are you encouraged by the events in Canada over the last year and a half? Yeah, very much. I mean, I do think county government's focus on defense could be broadened out to form. policy as well, but on defense. I mean, this is a long time coming. We are developing the instruments of hard power. I would love to see that Canada's strong agenda now being applied to our foreign policy as well. I would recognize the standing that we have in the world, the influence they have, the way that other countries listen to us and are paying very close attention to what we do. We're the only country apart from China to have applied counter tariffs to the United States.

the world the rest of the have noticed. Yeah, and the rest of the world are like, how does Canada get away with that? There's an opportunity for Canada to bring others on board in building more of a a range of

allies. Not necessarily a new formal institution, but we can approach our difficult relationship with the United States collectively with other countries that find themselves in the same boat. That's the practice of foreign policy. And that would be Canada strong, I would think, in a diplomatic context. If we can make ourselves comfortable with the language of power and projecting power in the diplomatic

context and not just in the narrower context of the military. You are active without being addicted to social media. Every once in a while, I see that you are really concerned about Canada-U.S. relations and have strong opinions about how to play that. In the face of a country, that's always going to be our closest neighbor, always going to be our biggest commercial market, always going to be our closest strategic partner, and is openly belligerent day-to-day. How do you think Canada should play that strange, huge relationship? I think we should be conscious of our power and we should exercise it. My confidence is drawn from having been involved in negotiations with the United States.

I mentioned after 9-11 when they were hell-bent on making the borders as hard and difficult for our bad adult commercial relationship as possible, and we prevailed in that time. But I saw it also in Iraq. I saw it in Afghanistan where we collaborated very closely. I had Americans reporting to me as my role as head of the provincial reconstruction team. We hold our own with the Americans in all kinds of situations. We also have a very, very, very long history of dealing with them. I mean, the whole reason we exist as an independent country is that we have positioned

ourselves as the country that is not the United States. And so I am in my screeds on substack or what have you, trying to communicate to other Canadians. we are more powerful than we think. If we approach it from our lived experiences of practitioners like me, as opposed to how things might look at from a certain remove, let's just draw on the experience that we already have successfully negotiating with the Americans.

Now that it's a very different United States than it was in the era of George W. Bush, we're going to have to draw the line more often. We're going to have to bring in other allies. in a way that we wouldn't normally have done before, but we also had that capacity. And so we should be buckling up for the long haul and to fight for Canadian sovereignty

with every inch of our being. Well, this has been a great conversation. Thank you for that grand tour of just about every problem the world has seen in the last three years. There'll be many more to come, so hopefully Canada will be at the table. Ben Rosewell, I have a feeling we'll be talking again. Thanks very much.

I hope so. Thanks, Paul. Thank you to my presenting sponsor, the Transition Accelerator. Visit Transition Accelerator.cai to learn more. Thank you to my presenting sponsor, Camaco, a global leader and Canadian champion in nuclear energy, here at home and around the world. Camaco is powering Canada forward. And that's the Paul Welles show for this week. Remember to tell your friends about this podcast.

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