National Defence committee  Yes, sir.

National Defence committee  Absolutely. And some of the challenges there are greater, because when you talk about it being a largely illiterate society, one of the difficulties I found--and I was mostly involved with the police--was they had received vehicles that would break down and they didn't know how t

National Defence committee  Yes, it's a recruited force. That's right.

National Defence committee  Yes, that's a really good point, and something that is taken very seriously because of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and its protocol on child soldiers. When I talked about the identification process, I can tell you from my experience that where something like ag

National Defence committee  I'd have to get a breakout number for you, ma'am. The total number I have is 1,400 between them both, so I'd have to get a subset of that for the police.

National Defence committee  I don't know, but under the Taliban rule, I would suspect.... I don't know, but my suspicion is that there were very few, if any.

National Defence committee  Absolutely. I would say that it varies across the country, because there are a lot of variables in this, but absolutely, the Afghans are taking the lead in their own operations. Absolutely, they're taking the lead in their own security and have been for a while. It's a question

National Defence committee  It's an elaborate process that has many layers. First of all, there is a lot of physical security, as we were discussing, to make sure that physical infiltration is not possible. The other thing that's done is that when a recruit comes in, there is a very elaborate process of

National Defence committee  These would be locals, Afghan and Pakistani. It would be a locally arranged contract.

National Defence committee  Right. In terms of our relationship with the Pakistan government, Canadian soldiers don't go where they're not invited, except where we have an international mandate to operate.

National Defence committee  This is all done through a contracted arrangement that is well established in terms of support. This is a well-established process that NATO has been using and what not. We're just leveraging the existing framework for that. To comment on Pakistan government involvement, they wo

National Defence committee  On the face of things, sir, I can understand your discomfort. Let me try to dispel some of that discomfort if I can. The first thing is we're not shipping anything very valuable through Pakistan. The things we are shipping through Pakistan, were they to be lost to banditry or wh

National Defence committee  Thank you for the question; it's a great one as well. First I'd like to make sure we're absolutely clear: there are no Canadian Forces personnel that are going through Pakistan as part of the redeployment exercise. What we're doing to recover our assets that are going on the gro

National Defence committee  Precisely, sir, no. I'll get back to you. If you want a scale, it would probably be in the neighbourhood of about a dozen locations or so, or thereabouts. Please don't quote me, and we'll get back to you.

National Defence committee  Thanks for the question. It's a good one. As we're looking at our deployment, there are three big issues that determine whether a mission is viable from a Canadian Forces standpoint. First, can we protect ourselves? It's force protection. Second, can we have assured medical supp