-My name is Martin Rust and I’m with the Security and Policy Institute of Professional
Development, here, at the University of Ottawa. My guest today is Kamran Bokhari, and
Kamran is the advisor to Stratfor on the Middle East and South Asia, and author of
"Political Islam in the Age of Democratization". Thank you, Kamran, for being here.
-Thank you.
-We’ve taking about ISIS and global terrorism. I want to switch our focus to Canada and
Canada’s response to what’s been going on in other parts of the world and indeed,
many geopolitical events. And could you characterize
the Canadian response today?
-I would say that the Canadian response is reactive and when you are in reactive mode,
you know, by definition, you don’t really have your handle on the situation. You’re
just sort of, you know, you’re late in the game,
and there are reasons for that, you know. We
don’t really engage in a whole lot of foreign policy, we’ve relied heavily as, you know,
on our … you know, southern border … our
southern neighbour to, you know, fulfil many of
foreign policy commitments, be it intelligence, military … And therefore, we don’t have
that kind of a signature or a footprint around the world. What that does is that now,
we’re not really prepared. We don’t really know what’s going on out there directly
and we are not able to react to situations. So,
for example, you know, a lot of questions all of
a sudden are being raised that … you know, how can Canadians, you know, do what
they did in Ottawa and in Montreal. And going back to last fall with those terrorist
attacks, granted, those … one of those individuals was mentally ill but nonetheless, we
live in a dangerous age and we can’t continue to prosper and live in our comfort zones
when the world around us is sort of in a meltdown mode or changing so rapidly.
-I think there’s a sense that, you know, as events unfold, you know, we’re use to
watching them on TV, in the media, in the press and we think of them as taking place
in some far off land, that it’s not here, it’s
not part of our immediate environment and yet,
this is different. What’s happening today with ISIS, what’s happening today with global
terrorism and the reaction to geopolitical events is very meaningful today, I think,
to Canada. It’s not what’s happening over
there, it’s what’s happening here. Would you
agree with that?
-I would agree with that. So, if you go back to the 1980s, when the Soviets invaded
Afghanistan, at that point in time, we could of made the argument that, you know, "Oh,
it’s happening thousands of miles away. How does it really affect me, living here,
in Toronto?" Or, you know, Halifax or Montreal
or, you know, much less, Vancouver. We don’t live in that world anymore. That world
is gone for good. The world that we live in is very interconnected. We have immigrants
coming over in very large numbers, to our country. The world is connected in ways, you
know, that it wasn’t back then. There is no
"out there" anymore. It’s everywhere. You know, we’re everywhere, the world is
everywhere. Everything is mixed up. We just cannot think that, you know, that it’s not
going to affect us. It is affecting us and it’s going to increasingly affect us. The
question is: how quickly are we going to be able to
bring ourselves to a point where we can manage crises.
-And so, if you’re a policy maker or a decision maker in government, here, in Canada
today, what are those sort of 2 or 3 critical things you need to be thinking about as you
consider policy and options, going forward?
-I think our immigration policy has to be somehow revised to … not to say that we
don’t … we’re going to stop immigration, hardly.
We need immigrants. How we bring them in and then integrate them into mainstream Canadian
life is something we’re not really dealing with, right now, in a very effective
way. There’s a lot of work that needs to be
done on that end. We need a foreign intelligence service. We cannot expect CSIS to do
domestic and foreign at the same time in a world that is changing so rapidly, and the
demands of keeping an eye on things is going up, you know, pretty much by the day if
you look at the world’s events and how they unfold. We need to somehow beef up our
military capabilities and foremost, we need to educate ourselves as a nation. We need
to develop an epistemic community of individuals,
of institutions that understand the world and can continue to enlighten our country
and policy makers.
-Well, I think you’ve just hit on the mandate and the mission of the Security and Policy
Institute, and why we exist today. I’m Martin Rust, I’m with the Security and Policy
Institute of Professional Development, here, at the University of Ottawa. My guest today
is Kamran Bokhari, advisor to Stratfor on the Middle East and South Asia, and author
of "Political Islam in the Age of Democratization".
Thank you, Kamran.
-Thank you.