Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Chair, the NDP has asked me a lot of questions here as he was questioning. So my issue coming out here is, do I actually answer Paul Dewar, or do I talk to the gentlemen who have come here?
I think we'll leave you to ask me questions in the House and we'll respond to all the accusations that you are making. I'm out here, so let me talk to these good gentlemen who have come over here and try to understand their point of view here.
Let me first start by saying that the Canadian Council of Churches and yourself have indeed an excellent experience working for development purposes and for governance all over the world. You do carry excellent credentials on that, so nobody is challenging your credentials or anything. But I want to follow up the line that my colleague Jim was following here.
I'm finding it quite strange why you have good experience in all these things, and basically your experiences are mostly based in countries that allow civil societies to come and do these things. But Afghanistan is an extremely different challenge. It's a Muslim country with their own rules and their own view of things and everything. You face tremendous challenges even putting your foot down into Afghanistan to get onto the ground over there without security or anything out there.
Let me say, I have visited all the regions around there, and you have to know the local politics out there. You have come along and you have stated quite clearly in many of your things what would be the ideal situation. There's no such thing as an ideal situation. There are local politics on the ground; there are local issues on the ground. You come and say let's talk to the Taliban, and Mullah Omar has just said he's not going to talk to anyone.
You have come along here and said that India and Pakistan should get the hell out of Afghanistan. You seem to forget that this was part of the region--all of these countries and all at one time--and they have their vested interests. For you to come along and say they should pack their bags and go--it's not going to happen.
So taking all this into account, the challenges that we are doing around here.... Forget about the development here.
And I'm trying to understand from you guys, all right? I'm not criticizing. I'm just saying that the politics and the situation of Afghanistan is very, very different from where your threats lie in Africa, in Latin America, and all the other countries that have a rule of law.
So in understanding all of these things here, when you bring all these things here, I wish you the best of luck, but I can tell you from the government's point of view here, we do take into account the local sensibility, the local sensitivity, the local regional politics into play.... Paul just said refered to the regional approach.
Canada has invested quite a lot. If you will look at the Manley report, we had signature projects that we have been working on out there for many years that are now coming to an end. So coming to say that the development aid is cutting down or something is not right. The whole Government of Canada approach now is going after 2011. The NDP keeps screaming to get the hell out of there. I don't know who the hell is going to provide security if we get the hell out of there. I mean, the matter is not resolved.
Just before you go on this thing, you have called for a UN special envoy. Canada believes that we have....