Thank you, Mr. Chair.
First of all, I think the government members and ministers should stop making these offensive and demeaning remarks about where the opposition is coming from, where the Parliament of Canada is coming from, in supporting our troops in Afghanistan. It demeans everybody. Particularly, it demeans the ones who are making these remarks.
I want to continue by saying that our troops are doing everything we're asking, NATO is asking, and this country is asking them to do. One thing that it doesn't appear we are doing is this. The Taliban continuously recruit, and particularly in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, and we're told this is happening because we're not getting food to those populations that are supposed to be pacified. We're not getting the schools built in those two provinces. We're not getting health care centres built in those two provinces. We're not getting food anywhere within a couple of kilometres outside of Kandahar city. Why aren't we deploying more people through our development agencies and through our food agencies, and really making an impact and making our military success worthwhile? There's no point in having military success when we can't follow it up with civilian success on that side.
We're continually told that we are falling down on that. It's not just the Senlis group. There are other groups saying we're having very minimal impact outside of Kandahar city and Kabul, in the rest of Afghanistan. What are we doing in Helmand province and Kandahar province, where our soldiers are, in that regard?