$651m to end Afghan mission

OTTAWA — The cost of ending Canada’s war in Kandahar, bringing home all the military’s equipment and reconditioning it, is expected to top $651 million, according to figures and projections compiled by National Defence.

The Harper government has yet to deliver a final tally for the mission closeout costs, but a complete set of numbers could come with the release of a National Defence report to Parliament within weeks.

Packing up thousands of weapons, ammunition and hundreds of vehicles, including tanks and helicopters, was the biggest logistics operation for the military since the end of the Korean War in the early 1950s.

And the eye-popping estimate is only an incremental figure, the cost the federal government says it has paid over and above the routine expense of soldiers’ salaries and support. The full cost, when so-called routine expenses are considered, is roughly $924 million.

The numbers are being spread out over three budget years, according to documents obtained by The Canadian Press under access to information.

Approximately $21 million of the total was carved out of the 2010-11 federal budget, says a briefing note prepared for Defence Minister Peter MacKay. The rest was split up between last year’s budget and projected for the current year.

What remains unclear from the internal documents and from an email response by National Defence is how much of the price tag was driven by the diplomatic meltdown with the United Arab Emirates in late 2010. That disagreement that saw Canada ejected from its main staging base in the Middle East as the withdrawal was kicking into gear.

The Harper government was forced to move the military out of Camp Mirage, near Dubai, but eventually signed an arrangement with Kuwait to establish a replacement logistics hub in that country. The new base was not declared operational until Sept. 22, three months after the withdrawal was underway.