Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm terribly sorry to be late. That doesn't happen very often. As you mentioned, I had a minor accident while coming here. I left home much earlier to be here, but unfortunately couldn't make it.
I'm going to talk very briefly about the situation in Afghanistan, in hopes that we are going to have an exchange after that.
Afghanistan, as you know, is a country composed of different ethnic groups and regions.
Afghanistan is a country rich in history and events, that is going through a turbulent period which, unfortunately, has lasted a very long time. This country has always been the target of invasions from neighbouring regions. What is happening now is to some extent the continuation of these events.
In particular, there is what is known as the "Great Game", which lasted from the end of the XIXth century until the beginning of the XXth, during which the Russian and English empires squared off. The situation today is, of course, a continuation of what has happened since the Soviet invasion, and subsequently, the American invasion. And all of this happened in a context of the post September 11, 2001 world and the events that followed the collapse of the Taliban regime.
If we want really to understand what's going on now and how to prevent the kinds of errors that probably we are going to make in the future, we have to recognize the errors of the past. I enumerated a number of them. The first one, in my view, is the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001; it shouldn't have been done. The question of the Taliban and al-Qaeda could have been addressed differently. It wasn't the case, unfortunately.
The second error was this victorious celebration by neo-cons in Washington that everything is possible now that the Taliban are not in power, and then move on and go to the second one and so forth.
The third error the Americans made was the invasion of Iraq and distracting really the international community from the problems that existed in Afghanistan.
As for the problems today, we might be more concerned about those problems. The first one I can identify is the absence of viable institutions. In Afghanistan, the institutions--whatever exists that we can call an institution--are extremely weak. Afghanis need really to have institution-building. Some elections were held, but again, whatever was created is extremely weak and it should be reinforced.
What is needed is to have a very strong and efficient administration. We don't have that in Afghanistan, and it's one of the sources of the many problems we have. Other institutions that need to be reinforced are related to security, the army, the police, and so forth.
The enjeux principale, in my view, in Afghanistan is really to improve the life of the Afghani population. We know that the Taliban took over because of the failure of others, the Mujahadeen and others. It seems that what's going on in Afghanistan is really a kind of repetition of the same situation. So there is an accumulation of errors by a number of countries and institutions in Afghanistan. I should emphasize that those errors are simply reinforcing the position of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
We absolutely need to rebuild the trust of the people in Afghanistan. It used to be very strong, but unfortunately it is eroding. We need to rebuild the people's trust to achieve a better future, both from a material and security point of view. As Canadians, we are well aware of Afghanistan's security problems and of the problems faced in daily life by both individual Afghans and Afghan society.
But there are serious obstacles to rebuilding trust. There are a number of reasons for this. The first one is the lack of awareness of Afghanistan's priorities. I believe that democracy, individual freedoms and these types of concepts are extremely important. However, we have set up a window dressing type of democracy in Afghanistan instead of first making the country secure and then creating institutions which can function in a secure environment.
The second one is also very important, and it is something which has considerably weakened Afghanistan since October 2001, namely excessive corruption. At the beginning of the 1990s, the Taliban were successful at the expense of the Moudjahidine precisely because of the corruption issue and in-fighting among the Moudjahidine. But that is exactly what is still going on today in Afghanistan. There's no cohesion between ministers. There are problems.
The third obstacle is poverty among the masses and the wealth of a few. Schools are having a difficult time. We need to address these realities, including pay for teachers, policemen and other government employees.
The fourth one is political freedom and freedom of the press. These freedoms are now being threatened by the government and by the excessive actions of the Afghan police force.
The fifth obstacle is that the current government and the countries' presence in Afghanistan, including Canada, are, in my view, too dependent on the warlords, the very people who destroyed Afghanistan in the first place and who facilitated the Taliban comeback. It's the same problem all over again.
The sixth obstacle is Afghanistan's, and the entire region, problem with drugs. Lastly, there is a lack of coordination at the macro level in the areas of security and development.
I will stop here. There are other issues, but I'll come back to them later.