Mr. Chairman, my understanding of the purpose of the study on democratic development is to talk about principles, how aid is done, how we develop democratic societies in various parts of the globe. This motion to me seems to be more focused on issues outside of democratic development. Obviously Afghanistan has had a presidential election, successfully. They have had an election of a national assembly, very successfully. In terms of the development, we could say how successful or not democratic roots are in Afghanistan, etc.
In my view, this motion is to analyze the present government's policy on Afghanistan and to do a study as to whether or not the assistance of the Government of Canada and the actions of what we used to call the three pillars--military, development, and diplomacy--are working. If in fact what we really want to do is an evaluation of government policy in Afghanistan, then I think we need to say that. If in fact, however, the issue is that we're looking at a broader evaluation of democratic development, we may want to look at a couple of particular states, and we can certainly do that for two or three, or we don't have to necessarily do an in-depth study on any particular state.
I just want to get a sense that this is the direction of this motion, because it seems to be different from what we originally suggested we were going to be doing.