Afghanistan's ambassador denied Wednesday that Canadian military officials had anything to do with a speech that President Hamid Karzai delivered to Parliament last year, contradicting recent claims by the NDP.
Dawn Black, the NDP defence critic, said Tuesday that heavily censored access-to-information documents indicate military advisers were asked to prepare an initial draft of Karzai's speech on Sept. 22, 2006.
Ambassador to Canada Omar Samad, speaking on CTV's Canada AM on Wednesday, denied that was the case and said he himself helped write Karzai's speech.
"I was one of those who spent hours, along with other Afghan officials, with the president himself working on the speech, and the president himself was the last person who edited and finalized it, as is his style," Samad said.
"He's a president who, for the past six years, either gets up and speaks without notes or occasionally uses notes or has a mixture of notes and spontaneous talk. And as you saw in Parliament there were times when he spoke spontaneously without notes."
Samad said it is common for bilateral diplomatic talks, negotiations and preparations to occur between the officials from both countries leading up to such an address, but that's as far as it went.
NDP Defence Critic Dawn Black refused to back down, however, appearing on Canada AM just after Samad.
"All I can tell you is that through access-to-information, the documents I received say -- and I'll quote from them for you -- that the strategic advisory team in Afghanistan, the Canadian National Defence, did write the speech," Black said.
The document says Canadian military officials wrote the initial draft of the president's address to Parliament for September 22, Black said.
Reading from the heavily censored document, Black said it noted that guidance was given on key statistics, messages, themes and even the overall structure of Karzai's speech.
"So clearly, the initial speech was written by the Canadian military and I leave it to Canadians to decide, but I would say that that's not an appropriate role for the Canadian military."
In the speech, Karzai expressed his gratitude to the families of Canadian children killed in combat. He presented an optimistic but not rosy picture of Afghanistan's future.
He also slammed critics of Canada's combat role who say the emphasis should shift from combat to reconstruction -- a position held by NDP Leader Jack Layton.
Those points were not markedly different from other speeches by Karzai, who has called on NATO countries to boost and extend their troop commitments to Afghanistan.
But Black said the speech to Parliament differed greatly from Karzai's speech one day earlier in New York. During that address, she said, he asked the international forces to halt aerial bombings -- a concern that wasn't mentioned when he was in Ottawa.
Black stopped short of calling Samad a liar, but said the onus is now on the Canadian government to reveal all the documents that show whether the speech delivered by Karzai was different from the first draft she says was written by the Canadian military.
Meanwhile, Samad on Wednesday repeated the message that Karzai has been delivering to various nations, saying Canada's work has been "tremendous" but the job is not yet complete.
Canada's combat role will end in 2009 unless consensus is reached in Parliament to extend the mission.
