I believe the two major national interests of Canada are our way of life both in terms of values and in terms of our economic prosperity. Can we show a direct link between many of the international operations we've engaged in, in the past, and those values and interests? Yes, we can. On the other hand, there are some of these other operations for which a direct link can't be shown.
In the future, certain operations that I believe we can show demonstrably do contribute to those interests would be first and foremost guarding sea lines of communication, which are vital for our trade and vital for our prosperity as a trading nation, and stability of major regions in which we have an interest, such as Europe, be it eastern or western; less so central Asia—I don't believe one can make a demonstrable link at this point between our major way of life and economic prosperity in that region—and the Pacific region in some areas. We can see that major instability in that area, particularly hostility between some of the greater powers in the region, would directly affect us, but we'd have to measure that at the same time against what we could actually contribute to resolving the situation.
A slight tangent to this would be to ask whether we need to also show a certain degree of camaraderie and a certain degree of solidarity with our major trading partner. Yes, we do. In certain cases it is important to show to the United States that we are a good ally and that we take their security seriously as well. That can often be a justification for contributing Canadian Forces; however, one needs to decide just how many of those forces we contribute and at what cost in order to show that we're a good ally. I'm not quite sure we've made that balance as effectively as we could in Afghanistan.