I don't know whether I'd want to be Rick Hillier, Prime Minister, or either. They are dreadful jobs, actually.
For those who had difficulty hearing me when I made my introductory remarks because we had problems with the microphones, the answer to your first question is something like this. When people ask if the Canadian deployment to Afghanistan is the right policy for Canada, the mission supports four inseparable and longstanding objectives of Canadian foreign policy. They are: the defence of Canada as far from our shores as possible; the support of the United Nations, especially the authority of the Security Council; the maintenance of NATO and the alliance of like-minded states; and most critical of all, support to the reasonable security interests of the United States in our own interest, because the United States provides the source for our economic well-being and our national defence.
If I had my hands on the lever, Canadians might not like it, but then who knows.
Seriously, Canadians at the political and bureaucratic levels need to understand that we're in the situation we haven't been in for a very long time of having to find out how to manage a war. The bureaucrats in this town don't understand that, and they're learning very slowly. We can have slogans like three Ds, and that's all they are--slogans. We need the other slogan, “whole of government approach”, which some of us have talked about for a long time, to bring the efforts of the foreign ministry, the defence ministry, the Department of Transport, Corrections Canada--maybe not the Department of Fisheries and Oceans--and all the parts of the government together so they work in a coherent way under a strategy. The Canadian political community, with respect, hasn't got around to understanding how to manage a war that is being waged in Canada's interests broadly defined. We need to do that.
We also need to mobilize a great deal of our resources in financing police, military capabilities, diplomatic capabilities, and humanitarian capabilities. That takes a lot of money and effort. On that conversation for the most part over the years--and Walter might agree with me--going back to the intervention in the Balkans in the early 1990s, we still haven't got it. We still don't understand that those are the wars of the present and the wars of the future. We haven't adjusted the Canadian bureaucracy to the steady piece of the commitments to NATO and UN peacekeeping.
UN peacekeeping has a lot of merits, but one of its faults is that it's still kind of stuck in the idea of state-directed warfare, intervention between states, and so on. Many countries, especially in the west, haven't got used to the idea that continuous warfare is not abnormal. It's not asymmetric warfare or irregular warfare; it's the real thing. It's the new regular warfare. So we need to think about how we are going to handle that politically, bureaucratically, and with all the instruments of government.
If I had my hands on the levers, I'd just go and do that.