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PARIS – Three young Canadian diplomats are on the front line of a fierce political battle to defend the Afghanistan counter-insurgency and reconstruction mission, which has been pummelled over the summer by a string of Taliban military and propaganda coups.
United Nations senior Afghanistan political adviser Chris Alexander and North Atlantic Treaty Organization spokesman James Appathurai – who met as 13-year-old schoolboys in Toronto – and their friend, Arif Lalani, who just left his post as Canada’s ambassador in Kabul, are all high-profile mission defenders in the Canadian and international media.
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Because of their diverse backgrounds, the three friends collectively could be poster children for Canadian multiculturalism.
Alexander is a fifth-generation Canadian of Scottish, English and Irish descent. Appathurai is a first-generation Canadian whose parents immigrated from Sri Lanka.
Lalani came to Canada with his family as refugees in the early 1970s to escape crazed Ugandan dictator Idi Amin’s crackdown on the Ismaili Muslims there.
“People are seeing three very different faces of Canada,” said Lalani, 40, who until last month headed Canada’s fifth-largest embassy in the world, which oversees an annual aid budget in Afghanistan approaching $300 million.
“It’s kind of funny how it turned out, that we ended up in such prominent positions on the same file, but it’s good because we understand each other” and can reinforce each other’s public messaging, Lalani said.
Alexander and Appathurai, also both 40, first met as they entered their teen years at the University of Toronto Schools, a U of T feeder school for bright youngsters. They became friends with Lalani, a graduate of the University of B.C., when the three entered the Canadian public service in Ottawa during the early 1990s.
Lalani joined the Canadian foreign service in 1991 at the same time Alexander did. The two became fast friends.
Appathurai was a latecomer to the Canadian public service, joining the Department of National Defence as a policy officer in 1994. Four years later, Appathurai, who met Lalani through mutual friends in Ottawa, moved to NATO to become a speech writer.
All three talk about adrenalin-charged “public service moments” where they feel they’re influencing international developments.
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While no one challenges their qualifications for the NATO and UN posts, Lalani said both Appathurai and Alexander might have had a tougher time getting those positions had Canada stayed on the sidelines in Afghanistan.
“It does reflect that they (NATO and the UN) take Canada seriously,” Lalani said.
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Name: Arif Lalani
Born: Oct. 22, 1967, Mbarara, Uganda
Education: BA, University of B.C., (international relations), 1989.
In his own words: “For a kid who, at five years old, had to leave a country because of war and come to Canada, it always kind of gets to me when we’re able at least to look for that one kid whose life we changed because we managed to rehabilitate his school. It’s very personal. And this job allows you to do that.”
Ismailimail 