Here's the point. These are the most difficult areas of the world, and if you want to look for failure, you can find it. These are failed states. If you want to find a failure in a failed state, you can find it, but if you want to find successes and you do it the right way, you can find them as well.
There were some extraordinary successes in Afghanistan. Every year 40,000 or 50,000 children are alive who would have died under the old regime. Maternal mortality is still one of the highest in the world, but it's fallen by record rates. Not only are eight or nine million girls and boys in school, compared to a million under the Taliban, but about 500,000 are graduating from secondary school every year. The elements of the future are being laid. The point is, though, that it takes time and engagement.
I'll give you an example. As one of our flagship projects, we tried to build 50 schools in Kandahar. It was very difficult. They kept getting blown up. In the meantime, working with the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, BRAC, CIDA supported the creation of over a thousand schools in rural Afghanistan. That ended up having tremendous success, particularly for girls. Why was that done? It didn't have a Canadian flag. It worked with an NGO from Bangladesh who knew how to work with poor, rural, conservative Muslim communities, and it did it well.
That was interesting. We weren't trying to wave the flag. We were trying to change the conditions on the ground. We can do great things in these areas, but it requires senior leadership, as well as consistent, persistent support and a willingness to learn.
Interestingly, that article came because of a hatchet job that was done using reports that the CIDA team had commissioned to have third parties give them the unvarnished view of what was working and what wasn't working every six months. That's very unusual, but it was felt to be necessary. There was a learning curve. That's what was used to find criticisms, but that's the kind of approach one needs in order to succeed.
This will only work if it isn't a Liberal or whatever government initiative doing development, but a Canadian initiative with cross-partisan parliamentary support. If we're going to make a real difference in Afghanistan or Haiti, things will go wrong, so there'd better be strategic support for us to be engaged, or else we shouldn't try.