Thank you very much.
Thank you, Chair and members, for the invitation to be here. I hope I can make a positive contribution to your deliberations.
I have just a few comments to make, and then I'll be at your disposal. I always liked the question period better than the presentation period.
I've been asked and have participated in numerous public debates about our operations in Afghanistan. One of the questions, a key question, people ask is whether the Canadian deployment to Afghanistan is the right policy for Canada. Let me give you reasons why I think it is.
First, the mission supports four inseparable long-standing objectives of Canadian foreign policy, and these are: first, to keep the defence of Canada and Canadians as far away from our shores as possible; second, to support the United Nations and especially support the authority of the Security Council; third, to maintain NATO and the NATO alliance with like-minded nations, which means, to me, strengthening the alliance of liberal democracies, which is key to our security interests; and, most critically of all, to support the reasonable security interests of the United States in our own interests, by which I mean that America is the source of our economic well-being and our national security.
Let me address one other question that's often raised directly or indirectly at these public meetings, and that is whether we should be doing something other than fighting the Taliban, or--and it's a second or third question, I guess--whether we should be doing something else somewhere else. My answer is this: Canada's diplomatic foreign assistance and military operations today in Afghanistan are fully consistent with Canada's policies and actions in these policy areas over most of Canada's history. Those who believe or choose to believe otherwise ought to heed I think the considered opinion of two prominent Canadians who were there at the birth of the United Nations and of NATO and who set out the fundamental parameters for Canada's foreign policy in the early period, 1947 to 1950.
Paul Martin Sr., then Minister of External Affairs, in remarks in 1964 criticizing the continued decline of Canada's military capabilities and the resulting loss of influence in international affairs generally and in the United Nations in particular, recalled that in the 1950s:
...many nations had an appetite for power without teeth, but Canada had developed both the appetite and the teeth for a new international role.
Martin's cabinet colleague, Brooke Claxton, Minister of National Defence from 1947 to 1956, in an address to Parliament shortly after the end of the Second World War, characterized Canada's participation in that great war as “the war of liberation” fought together with people who had the “will to be free”. Later in that address he provided the principle that guided Canada's international commitments, or that he hoped would guide Canada's international commitments, in the post-Second World War era. We will maintain, he said, a willingness “to carry out any undertakings which by our own voluntary act we may assume in cooperation with friendly nations or under any effective”--and he emphasized “effective”--“plan of collective action under the united nations.” What that principle meant, to paraphrase Mackenzie King, was commitments, if necessary, but not necessary commitments.