The international meetings in the next week--both the meeting in the Hague, presided over by UN special representative Kai Eide, and the NATO meeting--have some common objectives. They're objectives that have been Canadian objectives since the Prime Minister attended the NATO Summit in Riga more than two years ago.
First, Canada is seeking, and I think we are now seeing, a greater international effort. That's an effort not just in terms of troop commitments, although we're seeing that with the Americans and certainly the French and many others in southern Afghanistan, but also in terms of more partners coming to the table. You've talked about some of that. Because there is a burden sharing to be done in terms of funding, training, and capacity building as well, the meeting in the Hague is referred to the big tent meeting. That has been and is an objective of ours.
The second issue is coherence. How do you bring all of that together in a way that actually leads to results? That has been a Canadian objective. We were very successful in focusing NATO last year at Bucharest. We'll be working very hard this year to make sure that as all of these actors come onto the stage, we do it in a coherent way. The leadership of the UN and Kai Eide is tremendously important.
As you indicated, Kai's number two for political affairs was a Canadian, Chris Alexander, who used to be our ambassador in Kabul. He'll be replaced by Mr. Galbraith, who also has some Canadian lineage through John Kenneth Galbraith. We continue to support the leadership of the UN in that sense.
The third objective is to have a chance to share best practices. We have different actors doing different things in Afghanistan. It's really important that we take time out to learn what's working. There, both in the Hague and at NATO, Canada will have a good story to tell. There is increasing interest from other countries in deploying civilians. If you want to do governance and development in a big way, you need to have civilians who are specialists in that, so we're getting a lot of questions in terms of how we have done what we have done in southern Afghanistan.
There are also a lot of questions about benchmarking. The UN itself is now talking about benchmarking.
Finally, there are questions about how you stand up the Afghan national security forces. The Canadian Forces in particular have a very good story to tell. They're among the very best in terms of training the Afghan National Army. This will be a stock-taking, and Canada can share some real success stories.