Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Ambassador, for coming. It's always nice to hear your perspective.
I'm very happy that you did mention the London compact and the benchmarks that need to be reached to rebuild Afghanistan. As you rightly pointed out, it's not one single approach to building Afghanistan. It's a multi-level approach that requires all players, including the governments, NGOs, security components, all of this to rebuild Afghanistan. You can't have a one-track mind...and which is the London compact. So all this attention that says we need to concentrate on only one aspect and stop the other aspects is not going to work. You rightly pointed out about the region.
What I find amazing regarding an organization like the Senlis Council is that we still need to know what its objective really is. It comes out with reports that are so narrowly focused and so narrowly defined, giving a totally wrong picture of what is actually happening, then that gets picked up. Today's article by Nipa Banerjee in the Ottawa Citizen very rightly gives the whole picture of what is wrong with Senlis Council's narrow approach of coming out and saying that things are wrong here, and let's do this here, and not taking into account.
What I find quite interesting in the Senlis report is the suggestion that NATO should now move into Pakistan. I don't understand why, all of a sudden, this organization is going to urge a move into another country. To do what? Getting into this debate, to solve the problem of Afghanistan? Yet it comes in front of the committee on this thing.
Now, the dynamics in Pakistan...and I'm not trying to put you in conflict. Obviously you have to work multilaterally with Pakistan and and so on. But what I would like to hear from you is an assurance that all multi-faceted aspects of development in Afghanistan are moving forward, not as the Senlis report comes out, cherry-picking here and there, to say that this is wrong and this is not.
We never hear about the northern part of Afghanistan. We never hear of the regions, what they are doing and what is happening there. All we hear about is what is going on around here.
So perhaps you want to give us what the international community...and where, and how assuring it is to the Canadians that...thinks that Canadians put money down in development, all these things, is working for Afghanistan.