Thank you very much to the witnesses here today.
I am not going to ask a question. I'm just going to highlight something that is happening and answer some of the questions. Tomorrow afternoon, I leave for New Delhi in India to attend the Second Regional Economic Cooperation Conference on Afghanistan.
This conference deals with the players around Afghanistan. Every country has been invited; plus the G8 countries are going in there. The blueprint for this conference has a massive economic reconstruction plan, including a pipeline coming in from northern Turkistan all the way through Afghanistan into Pakistan and India. They have a massive project for highway construction going on. They have a massive electricity program. These modules were set up for the reconstruction of the whole of Afghanistan by the surrounding countries, whose vested interests—as you said, Professor—can only go up one level, but they have to take it. The countries in that region have decided that Afghanistan's security and reconstruction are far more important for them.
They are also going to have a business conference in that part of the world, parallel to this reconstruction conference, to get private businesses to go there. Canadian businesses are invited to go in there to invest in the opportunity areas.
These things are happening, but they're not coming out. I was not aware until I was told to lead this delegation. When I looked in depth at what has happened since last year, I was quite surprised at the amount of work that has been done in Afghanistan,
As the professor said, a massive war has been going on there. It's not going to be an overnight thing, but yes, the point is that there is goodwill within the surrounding regional countries. There is not one country in the whole region surrounding Afghanistan that does not believe that reconstruction is the most important aspect. They don't have military there. Iran doesn't have a military there; China doesn't have a military there. But they're all part of the reconstruction going on over there.
Now, in reference to Pakistan, we have been engaged—including me—with Pakistan for the last three weeks. Today, unfortunately over forty Pakistani soldiers lost their lives in a suicide bombing, so it is also dawning on Pakistanis that they had better go after this menace, because it has now come home to roost. Today they lost their soldiers and said yes, we're going to fight this menace at our porous border.
So things are changing, yes. We have a challenge, yes. There are things out there that are not very right at this time, yes. The Karzai government is weak, but there is goodwill from all these surrounding countries, including Canada, to work towards building this reconstruction.
Thank you.