Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Goldring, you're absolutely right. A basic responsibility of any government, any country, including our own, has to be to provide security for their own people. Clearly there's an enormous responsibility within Afghanistan for them to build their own policing and security ability. We have been assisting in that regard, not only in the provision of uniforms and equipment—belts, utility belts, and other implements that go with policing—but also a lot on the training side. That includes first aid training. During my visit, we went to a graduation ceremony that came on the heels of this type of training for these young officers—men, in most cases, although there were a few women present. That's what eventually, we hope, will lead to a nationwide, capable, professional Afghanistan national police.
Because we are in this frenetic pace to try to speed up the development of policing and an Afghan army, in addition to our development work, we've tried to urge some of our other NATO partners to pick up the slack, to invest more of their own resources into those subject areas, policing most notably. But Canada has adopted the approach that one of the fundamental things we have to do, and we have done, is to make salaries available, and to make that money readily available to those police officers so that they see in that profession a reward, and see that by virtue of their choosing to join the Afghan police, they can feed their families and live a basic quality of life that is rewarding.
We have deployed a number of Canadian civilian police, RCMP officers, to Afghanistan, and they have participated in the training. They're doing commendable work there, trying to instill the strong traditions that exist within our own policing community here in Canada. Our effort is on police reform, to ensure that they're not corrupted, to ensure that the training that goes into these police is not lost by a conversion to the Taliban. We need to instill some of the same traditions, a sense of loyalty and commitment to country, that we have seen within our own police force in this country. So Canada has and is playing a significant role in that regard.
You were right in your earlier remarks about the numbers, numbers that are starting to grow in terms of vaccinations for children, in terms of those who are able to access education now, in terms of those who are accessing basic health services. For example, in terms of children being inoculated at medical facilities and being given vaccinations against childhood diseases, those numbers are incredible. We take so much of this for granted in Canada, that children will have those vaccinations through our schooling programs. That literally did not exist in Afghanistan a few short years ago. So there has been a sea of change in terms of people's access to basic social services in Afghanistan.
While much more has to be accomplished, and certainly we want to project the progress into the future, I would say that when you start looking at these figures in their totality, and look at the starting point and then where we are today, these are impressive numbers by any stretch—the number of teachers in the field, the number of health care workers. Of course we want to have Afghans themselves filling those positions. The object, the exit strategy, I would suggest, is to eventually have Afghans doing the policing, the security, the health provisions, the education. All of those things have to be assumed by the Afghan government and the people themselves so they can be self-sustainable and are able to walk on their own.