One of the points that Walter makes that's important is that there are some—it depends on whose stats you look at—70,000 or 80,000 so-called peacekeepers around the world. And that's great. More power to them. It makes a lot of money for a lot of nations. That's how they pay their soldiers.
The thing is, if there are that many soldiers available, why do we need to be there? Lots of people seem to be doing this job. The other side of that coin is, of course, if Canadians want to be involved everywhere and have an appetite for international affairs, as Paul Martin Sr. said, then pony up the resources.
There's no reason in this country, where we have 32 million people, that we only have 60,000 people in the armed forces. It's ridiculous. We can make a much bigger contribution if we actually believe in things like responsibility to protect.
Why aren't we doing something in Darfur? Well, because the United Nations won't let anybody do anything in Darfur. The Security Council has voted against it. The mission in Afghanistan, on the other hand, was sanctioned twice by unanimous vote of the United Nations Security Council and as a United Nations peacekeeping mission, employing appropriate operational means—three D and the CDS.
The Liberal government that appointed General Hillier as the CDS did so, in my conversations with all the defence ministers of the time and with the Prime Minister of the time before he was Prime Minister, with their eyes wide open. They believed not in three D as a three-block war—and we shouldn't get confused about that—but they believed, as Canadians have always exercised, whether it was in the Second World War or the First World War or Korea or anywhere else, and in UN peacekeeping, that you need military operations, humanitarian operations, and diplomacy. We've always done that. It's nothing new.
The point is—and the story hasn't been written yet—how did we get to Kandahar? I'd just say this. We got there because we were late. You can make that argument. There were ample opportunities for the government of the day to deploy a provincial reconstruction team in the northern, peaceful parts of the country. The government dithered around, did nothing, then realized they couldn't pull out of Afghanistan. So they deployed a provincial reconstruction team into a dangerous area, and then we had to protect it, and we've been protecting that kind of operation ever since.
So there's a long story here. It's complicated, it's not simple, and it's not a choice between this abstract idea of collective security under the UN or some three-D thing from the United States war college. It's much more complicated than that.