Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Minister, for coming.
First, before I go on I would like, on behalf of my colleagues on this side, to ask General Natynczyk and the minister to thank very much your forces in Afghanistan for the excellent arrangements they made for us, both for our security and in looking after us. They went out of their way to ensure that we got a very good picture. It was one of the best trips we have made, despite all the challenges, and we found that they face challenges with all this situation.
Let me just put it in a very simple form and say that it is a theatre of war. You have to be on the ground there to realize that you are actually in the middle of a war. It's not a place to go as a tourist destination. We were very proud of what our soldiers were doing, and on behalf of all my colleagues here I want to say thank you very much for the excellent job they're doing.