National Defence committee  Right, absolutely.

National Defence committee  But not in Pakistan, just to be absolutely....

National Defence committee  Thank you very much, Madam. If it's okay with you, I will answer in my mother tongue. There is a whole-of-government effort for Afghanistan to address the issues you raised. Ma'am, I don't want to deflect the issue, but I want to make sure that my area of expertise is properly represented.

National Defence committee  Thank you for your question, ma'am. It's always dangerous to get into speculation, but clearly the whole reason we're there doing the training is that if there is a flare-up in a particular region or a wider conflagration, or however you want to term it, the Afghan national security forces will be fully capable of managing those matters on their own.

National Defence committee  Absolutely. Another excellent question. As you can appreciate, an army is a diverse organism, so you have programs of instruction for everything from recruits to officers and senior officers even. So what I'll refer to is just a typical program of instruction that you would have, let's say, within the recruits.

National Defence committee  In response to that, I would say that I think we have to understand the nature of government in Afghanistan to draw the connections you're making. Certainly the potential is there. The events you've described are at the federal level, and there have been assassinations at local level, but the kind of support we require for the close-out that we're in now would be in a very localized area right now.

National Defence committee  Yes, sure.

National Defence committee  Right, absolutely. What I take from what you said is the absolute need for us to be invested fully the way we are. When we talk about Afghan values and ethos, we talk about the fact that we're not creating armed camps like we had in the immediate post-2001 environment. We're talking about an army just as you expect your army to act here: that it is an instrument of government and is not creating opportunities for warlords.

National Defence committee  Thanks for the questions, both really good ones. I was going to ask if you're a trainer by background, because those are excellent questions that we get involved with as we look at institutional training.

National Defence committee  The standardization of training is not that much of an issue between the allies because we're doing it within the framework of NATO, where our doctrine, our training, and our concepts are very closely aligned. What we represent as Canadians in that is a vast amount of expertise in the training domain and a lot of experience with respect to combat.

National Defence committee  I think what you've highlighted is an area of great concern. It's all about the leadership is another lesson that I learned in my time there. With strong, effective leadership great things are accomplished, particularly in that environment. The assassination of former president Rabbani yesterday did a couple of things.

National Defence committee  It's a combination of both regular and reserve in all locations, as far as I'm aware.

National Defence committee  We certainly are very conscious of tour numbers and how tours are managed, and that is something that is managed very, very carefully by the chain of command. So we start to hit thresholds. Once a guy has had a couple of tours, or three tours, it's very, very carefully managed. And we always make sure there is a set period of time between deployments that the individual has back in Canada so that his personal operational tempo is not placing him at risk for continual exposure to that environment.

National Defence committee  The overall number that we will eventually flow.... As I mentioned, we're sitting right now at just a little over 600 total trainers in theatre. We'll hit our total number, which will be just shy of about 950, by early November. The actual breakdown is heavily weighted right now to the ANA, with what I would say are the largest number of them being in places, as I mentioned, like the Kabul Military Training Centre and the Consolidated Fielding Centre.

National Defence committee  It's a fairly sizeable reduction in terms of our presence in Afghanistan from what we were maintaining before when we were responsible for a battle space in Kandahar Province.