Okay. I don't have an easy answer to deal with that. Again, the institution Gerry Barr works at would probably give you a better.... I mean, we could do as some countries do, direct all our aid just to the poorest countries. I don't have an easy answer to that.
I think there are some reasons for us.... We're with countries we have historical associations with—some French speaking, some English speaking—and there are certain trade patterns. We may have contacts and historical connections with certain countries that we don't have with others, and it may well make sense for us to choose them perhaps over others. But basically, I guess my general criterion is that those in greatest need should get our greatest priority.
On the Afghanistan question, I'm kind of with you. I'm glad I'm not a politician today; I don't have to have an answer, in one sense.
Initially I supported the action, in an entirely different situation from Iraq—entirely different. You had a barbarous government that was supporting a barbarous international terrorist movement. There was a response to this—and one, I repeat, that I personally thought was appropriate.
Then you raised the question that we're in there now, and how do we deal with that terrible dilemma? On one hand, my friend and colleague Alexa was asking questions about the ratio of aid spending to defence spending. I don't know what the answer to that is, and I also frankly don't know what it should be, because I know there's both a security dimension that has to be dealt with and an aid dimension.
What Afghanistan illustrates, if I can put it a different way, in one sense with the advantage of 20/20 hindsight, is the wisdom of George Bush senior in the Gulf War. In the Gulf War, Mr. Bush senior was urged by a number of his, in this context, American conservative colleagues, some hawkish, to continue into Baghdad after Saddam Hussein was pushed out of Kuwait. He asked the appropriate question: “What'll I do when I get there?”—a very serious question. And he didn't go, because if he had gone, then there would have been under Bush senior the mess we now see in Iraq today.
Canada is involved, with our NATO partners and with UN sanction, in trying to square that circle of helping to create security so that we can put the emphasis on aid. And we're doing it in a country that, historically speaking—and I don't want to be misunderstood in this—is from the standpoint of democratic development behind even where Iraq was originally. There are much more complex and historically medieval structures in Afghanistan.
I just think it's a problem without a ready answer.