Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Rick Hillier made a surprise visit to Kandahar Monday and said he doesn't regret signing an agreement to hand detainees over to the Afghan government.
Hillier, who arrived just one day after Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor, signed the prisoner handover agreement in 2005.
It stipulates that detainees will not face execution after Canadian troops hand them over. It also requires that "accurate written records accounting for all detainees" be kept by both Canada and Afghanistan.
"We think we have a very good agreement with the Afghanistan government," Hillier said Monday.
The pact was criticized earlier this month when news broke that three Afghan prisoners, considered key witnesses in a probe into allegations of abuse by Canadian soldiers, had disappeared.
In response to the criticism, Canada finalized a deal with the Afghan Human Rights Commission to monitor the handovers.
Hillier said the monitoring was an additional opportunity to "improve the mechanics" of the initial agreement.
O'Connor was supposed to hold a meeting Monday with Abdul Noorzai, the head of the commission.
However, about an hour before the meeting was to take place in Kandahar city, military officials said Noorzai couldn't make it. It is unclear if the meeting will be rescheduled.
O'Connor has taken heat for claiming that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) monitored the treatment of the detainees and that they would report back to Canadian officials if anything was wrong.
The ICRC has denied the claims, saying they would never tell Ottawa about any abuses since they can only make known assessments or interventions to the government whose facilities they are visiting.
O'Connor did hold extensive meetings Monday with Canadian staff in an effort to fully understand how the prisoner transfer process works, CTV's Tom Clark reported from Kandahar.
"He has even gone to an Afghan prison today to personally see the conditions that some of the detainees would be put in," said Clark.
O'Connor and Hillier will also tour the frontlines Monday, meeting with Canadian soldiers in the region.
The pair are also expected to make an announcement, said Clark.
Since Canadian troops first arrived in Afghanistan in 2002, 45 Canadian soldiers have been killed.
The most recent death occurred last Tuesday when Cpl. Kevin Megeney, of Stellarton, N.S, was killed in his tent at the Kandahar base in a mysterious shooting.
With files from CTV's Tom Clark and The Canadian Press in Afghanistan
