Ottawa has earmarked an extra $515 million for Canada's military mission in Afghanistan in the next bookkeeping year, keeping it on track, by one outside estimate, to reach a cost of about $9 billion by the end of the current Canadian commitment in 2009.

The figures do not count human costs, including the deaths of 42 Canadian soldiers and a diplomat since 2002.

Canadian troops take positions on a roof of a rural compound on Nov. 20 during a joint operation with the Afghan National Army to search for Taliban fighters in Kandahar province.
(David Guttenfelder/Associated Press)

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's fall fiscal update, released on Thursday, lists a total of $721 million in military costs beyond those projected in the May federal budget.

Of that sum, $206 million is to be spent in the current fiscal year — which ends next March 31 — and $515 million in 2007-08.

The $206 million figure appears to reflect spending announced in the government's supplementary estimates in October, when more than $200 million was set aside to bolster the Afghanistan force, partly by sending Leopard C2 tanks to give it extra firepower.

The Polaris Institute, an Ottawa study group that is critical of the Afghan mission, calculated in May that Canada had spent $4.1 billion on it between late 2001 and this past March.

Steve Staples of the Ottawa-based Polaris Institute says the 2001-2009 cost of the Afghan mission could approach $9 billion.
(CBC)

Steve Staples, director of the institute's ceasefire project, told CBC Online on Friday that he expects the price tag in the current fiscal year, which began in April, to be about $1.6 billion.

"We've said that they will be approaching $9 billion by the end of it at the rate they're spending," he said.

Staples specified that he was using full-cost figures (including such things as soldiers' pay and equipment depreciation), rather than incremental costs, which reflect the difference between the cost of deploying troops and keeping them at home.

The Department of National Defence uses both measures but politicians sometimes prefer to cite incremental costs, which may be half as large as full costs, he said.

Prime Minister Jean Chrétien committed troops to Afghanistan in 2001, a move widely seen as intended to placate Washington while Canada steered clear of U.S. plans for an invasion of Iraq.

The Canadian troops took on a tougher job in 2005, moving from the capital, Kabul, to the Kandahar area, where Taliban insurgents and suicide bombers proved to be deadly foes.

When the Conservatives came to power in February 2006, the force was committed until February 2007. In April, Parliament authorized an extension to the mission to February 2009.

The fiscal update projections do not include numbers for the final year of the mission, 2008-09.

With files from the Canadian Press