Well, there are two things.
One is that when we and the international community and the UN started in Afghanistan and we had Mr. Brahimi as the head of the operation, we had a truly exceptional man running the operation. Even at that time, when we in Canada were trying to say that all of the authority should be invested in this person so that all the different countries would not be competing with each other and the different aid organizations would not be competing and conflicting and asking contradictory things of people, we weren't able to achieve that, and I would say that subsequently it's become only more difficult to do it.
One of the recommendations in the Manley commission was that there should be a senior UN person appointed. Of course there was talk of Paddy Ashdown being such a person. The Karzai government seemed to be the one that said they didn't want to do that. I'm not sure that should be their call, in fact. I think it would make a lot of sense to have such a person, a person invested with the authority of the international community. At the same time, while the job is not to contradict the local government and to enter into a conflict with it, it is to make sure the interests of the international community are also looked after.
On the issue of peacebuilding, that's one of the innovations the UN is carrying out, and it's one of the good things. It is still nascent, though, I'd have to say. Carolyn McAskie, who used to work for CIDA, is running that. It is not easy work to be doing, because a lot of countries don't think they need that kind of help. It's also very difficult to get the resources attributed to it that need to be there; I suppose that's where more of the diplomacy I was talking about should come in.
As for the number of troops we contribute to UN missions, I don't know where we stand now. The last time I looked, we were around 57th. I have my own view of that. If you included our 2,500 that are not included in that calculation, it would put us in the top 15, but it still wouldn't put us in the top 10. We are not in the business anymore of being a major troop contributor to UN activities. Although we have a monument to ourselves over by the National Gallery, I think those days seem to be over.