Ottawa, June 18 (ANI): The Chief of Canada’s Defence Staff has said that he regrets the fact that intelligence services did not provide information that could have thwarted the jail-break in Kandahar last week that freed nearly 400 Taliban. 

He said that in future Canadian forces deployed in Afghanistan should be more active in collecting intelligence inputs.

“Obviously we would have liked to have known so we could have pre-empted or helped, more accurately, the Afghans to pre-empt that kind of thing,” globeandmail.com quoted Gen. Rick Hillier as telling reporters after meeting with the Commons Defence Committee last evening.

He added: “Clearly we did not. And so we just tend to sort of put our elbows down and get to work to make sure we try to get an even better perspective of what we think might occur in the future so we can pro-actively pre-empt it in a variety of ways.”

The Canadian General's comments came a day after the country’s Foreign Affairs Minister David Emerson said that there will be an investigation to determine why Canadian intelligence heard nothing before the elaborate attack.

But Gen. Hillier said war zones are not always predictable. “We're in a complex environment there. The Taliban have had good operational security in the past. Not always, and that's why we've had some very real successes. In this case their operational security for that specific attack was obviously pretty good,” he said, and added: “The Taliban have obviously demonstrated numerous times that they can organize things in Kandahar province. This one was obviously a bigger even than some of the others that we've seen. We'll learn some lessons from this also. We'll help the Afghans learn some lessons.” (ANI)

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