Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Ambassador Ludin, for being here. It's good to see you again.
First of all, I want to congratulate you. Even with a million votes invalidated, from the numbers you gave that's still a 41% turnout. We've had an election in Alberta, in my city of Edmonton, and the turnout was 33%. So congratulations on the progress you're making there.
Obviously, voting is fundamental to a functioning democracy. One of the other things that's fundamental is the justice system. I'd like to talk about that a little bit, since you raised the private sector. We've thought often in terms of Canada's support of, obviously, military and CIDA and the whole-of-government approach, and that's all great, but we've got a huge capacity in this country in the private sector for capacity building and training and mentoring and whatever else. The justice system, obviously...you know, you can have an army and you can have a police force and all the rest of that stuff, but if you don't have a basic functioning justice system to bring criminals to justice in an appropriate length of time and in an appropriate way, then you're never going to get past being a lawless state.
The NDS is a key to that. It's obviously a lot smaller than the Afghan army and a lot smaller than the Afghan National Police. It's something that maybe a country like Canada could help get its arms around with our capacity for that kind of thing.
One of the things we did hear in June, when we visited Kabul, from Ahmad Nader Nadery of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, was that, you know, the NDS is far from perfect, but how much better they are than they used to be, the progress they've made and the fact that they are probably one of the better institutions in Afghanistan.
Could you comment on that, on perhaps something that Canada could do in general terms? You're very familiar with our private sector and how we operate. Would it be things like providing something for the NDS to get them to that next level where they can be a solid part of a functioning justice system?