Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you very much, gentlemen, for your interventions.
I think you started out on a rather pessimistic note about the perception of Afghans by both the successive military interventions, and more importantly, perhaps, the nation-building that is presently going on in their own country and the ability of their own institutions to respond to their needs.
I think if you were to travel across Canada and to speak to the Afghan diaspora, of which there is a substantial number in our country, they would confirm that. Whenever I speak to anyone in my own riding, and quite often they are taxi drivers in Toronto--and I'm not using this as a joke.... They are in daily telephone conversation with their families and friends in the communities there. In the last few years they have become progressively less enchanted and less hopeful about an ultimate good end to this. This is largely because of lack of security and lack of delivery of services, as both of you have pointed out. And it is attributable to the drug problem. There's no doubt about it.
I'd like to ask one question. Clearly there's a large debate among the military forces themselves at NATO meetings about this. What is the role of the military as opposed to local police? You have said that the American eradication program will not work. What is the chance that the U.S. administration will abandon that? It is being forced down the throats of every other NATO member, whether they like it or not, by the U.S. administration. If Colombia is any example, we're not likely to see them abandon it. If they don't abandon it, where does that take us?
Equally linked to that is perhaps something that hasn't been mentioned so far. A direct result and one consequence of it is the endemic corruption in the country, which is a huge inhibition to the delivery of the very services you said are essential if we're going to get the Afghan population believing that the right thing is being done. Most Afghans you speak to are very skeptical about the problem of corruption being helped. Is there some aid mechanism...? Have we ever found in a society that we can use aid to provide the public services with enough money that they don't have to be corrupt, or that we can eliminate corruption? That would be my principal question.
I have a second question. We haven't talked a lot about Russia; we've talked about every other neighbouring country. Whenever I've met with Sergei Ivanov, or any of the Russian authorities, they've always made a strong point that their intelligence authorities are very supportive of what we are doing in Afghanistan. They are very helpful to us. When I say that, I mean the western powers generally. Is that true, or is there another Russian agenda in the region?