In response to your first question—continuity, and are we leaving too fast from mission areas?—obviously that's been a challenge from time immemorial. I suspect that's not going to disappear rapidly. There's a shortage of funds, and I think we'll constantly try to find ways around that.
My personal approach is I've always felt that internationals moving in should be rapidly training their replacements amongst the locals. In other words, assume that three or six months from now you'll be leaving and won't be coming back. If you want anything to be sustainable, you'd better be training the locals.
The international community falls into the trap of thinking they're going to go in with all the solutions and they'll direct things on the ground. Personally, I think that's the wrong way to look at it. I really do believe that the innate intelligence of the local host society is there. They can learn. They need a window of opportunity and some new ideas. In that lies a solution to the reality that we will never stay engaged in very many places for very long. It will be off and on, off and on.
A better solution is to make sure that from day one we're putting most of our resources into mentoring and bringing along the local host society, organizations, and government. In part, these are the kinds of individuals we like to roster and send out, who understand this, and they're not looking to make a career out of staying there for years on end; they're looking to develop local capacity.
I don't know if that gets to it, because I don't think there's an easy solution on the larger issue of funding.
In Afghanistan, we've been involved there and sending people over for almost five years now, quite apart from identifying experts for activities in Afghanistan. We deployed police experts and some judicial experts there. We're also a major route for DND to recruit what they call cultural interpreters. These are Afghan Canadians. We've got a roster of 200 Afghan Canadians registered with us and screened. So DND approaches us to pick up these individuals to deploy alongside Canadian troops as key force magnifiers out there.
This is actually a bit of a segue to something that we've been looking to do, where we can, with limited resources—tap into more of those new Canadians to draw on their skill sets for them to go back, not as returning Afghans or returning Congolese, but to go back as Canadians with a particular knowledge and awareness of local culture that those of us who are born and raised in Canada just couldn't possibly have. So our Afghan Canadians have been a huge success story. The Afghan government has picked them up directly from us, DND, Foreign Affairs, and a raft of international organizations.
For the future, there is discussion about sending police and other experts into the Kandahar area. It's good news, bad news. The bad news is that it's very dangerous in Kandahar and elsewhere. The good news is we have an incredible number of individuals, among our 8,000, who are prepared to go there, who understand the risks but also understand that somebody's got to step up, take those chances, and try to make a difference on the ground. So we've already been in contact with some of our police experts, and a surprising number have said, sure, I'll go to Kandahar, which was a bit of a shock for me, but that's great.