Good morning, and welcome.
This is meeting 49 of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development. We are reconvening, and it is April 19, 2007.
Today we have another briefing on the circumstances in Afghanistan. We're going to combine both of our witnesses.
We have with us Houchang Hassan-Yari, professor and head of the Department of Politics and Economics at the Royal Military College of Canada.
We welcome you, sir. We waited for you before, and we're glad that you made it. We heard you had a bit of an accident, and we're glad you're all right.
Dr. Hassan-Yari is professor in the Department of History at Queen's University, he is a senior fellow at the Queen's Centre for International Relations, and he has a lot of expertise in this area.
We also have journalist and writer David Van Praagh. He has specialized in reporting on and analyzing Asian developments for more than 40 years. He has written a number of publications and has written articles in newspapers in North America. He is well known to television audiences in Canada and around Ottawa, the nation's capital, in particular.
We welcome both of you here today, and we thank you for adjusting your schedules. This committee will go until 11 o'clock, at which time there is another committee. We'll invite you each to give an opening statement, and then there will be questions from our committee members.
Thank you.