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

National Defence committee  Right. Honestly, I'd have to get back to you on CANCAP and the civilians, on anything to do with that.

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 properl

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 sec

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

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 talk

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 l

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 i

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

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. A

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

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.