Chair, I've followed members' opinions and ideas over many years, and I respect them, and I enjoy most of them.
I have anecdotes too that I could tell, if we had lots of time, of people coming to me from those parts of the world, from Afghanistan, saying, "God bless Canada. You saved my life. You saved my farm. You saved my village. Your guys are dying in our name. We want to be free from religious dogma. Thank you." I wish they were here to talk to the committee.
When we talk about peacekeeping--and again we can always have a theoretical argument--I can't find anybody who has a definition of what peacekeeping is. When peacekeeping failed miserably in the Balkans and led to the deaths of thousands of people--for instance, in Srebrenica--peacekeeping started to take on terms like robust peacekeeping, muscular peacekeeping, and so on. I think there is certainly a place for peacekeeping-type operations in warfare. But I just hope people don't get it confused with mythical peacekeeping.
As for negotiating with the Taliban, perhaps somebody can explain something to me. If you don't know who it is you're killing, and you call them Taliban, who is it that you're going to negotiate with? How do you know you're negotiating with somebody who is the Taliban? Who is the Taliban? Who are the leaders? I've got a little research money. I'll buy a one-way ticket for anybody in the House who wants to go to Afghanistan and drive off into the countryside and negotiate with the Taliban.
More seriously, I would like somebody in a responsible position to write down a list of the negotiating points. What is it that you're going to negotiate? On the hard side, is it the abuse of only 50% of the women in the country? What are you going to negotiate on when somebody has a gun at your head? Quite seriously, a paper on negotiating strategy with the Taliban would be useful.
The other point, of course, is that we don't like to beat up on third world countries, and Afghanistan is a third world country by any definition. So why should we be out there telling the Government of Afghanistan to negotiate with people who are trying to destroy their country and their government? I don't have answers to those. Perhaps somebody does.