Mr. Chair, identifying enemy forces in this kind of situation is difficult, and everybody understands that. It's forcing me to go back and read the stuff I used to like to read in the 1970s, of revolutionary warfare and so on. It's very interesting.
There are many factions within the Taliban. There are people who are simple criminals and there are other kinds of people around. I think for the soldiers on the ground, the guys I talk to, they know the enemy: it's the person who's shooting at them. And it is a difficult problem, but the Taliban soldiers are not ten feet tall. They're scared and they're hungry and they're tired, and they're going to live in the mountains this winter. They have their own sets of problems, and we should exploit those.
As we are now doing, and I think as NATO is doing, we should be negotiating with the Taliban, not in the sense of saying, “We'll allow you to abuse 50% of the women if you'll stop fighting”, but negotiating with them to put down their arms, to quit their units, to run away, to surrender to us, and so on. We do that in all kinds of wars.
I don't mean to be trivial, but you could take the question of “How do we identify the bad guys?” to the level of Canadian cities. How do the police identify the criminals on the street before they've done something? It's a problem, and there isn't any straight answer.
I don't think I said the mission is perfect; I said I support it because it's the right mission to do. I think the balance is right, but it's never stable, and it has to be changed. As the demand changes, you change the resources, as the Chief of the Defence Staff is doing on the military side right now. Some people in the House might want to look at CIDA operations, which we seem to have done a great deal of over the years. But I'll let that slide.
So what can we do? At home we need to look at this as a war management problem of the whole of the Government of Canada. This is not a mission of the Canadian armed forces or the Department of National Defence, or even just CIDA and the foreign affairs department. The people of this town, the public servants and others, have to understand that this is a whole of government operation, not a three-D operation. We need to have some committees--of the House, perhaps, and, dare I say, of the other place--that deal with the management of Canadian interests in wartime. That's an important thing to do. We need to bring to the Canadian people, through the media if necessary, the work that's being done to give them a resolute picture of what's happening.
My recommendation to government is that they don't take grey-haired men in suits from the academy or old generals out to talk to Canadians about what's going on; they should go to the field and bring home young men and women, captains and majors and sergeant-majors and so on, and stand them in front of Canadians. They will put people like Mr. Staples in his place. I did that at Queen's University a couple of times with my graduate students, and it was a wonderful experience.
I think we should be involving, as I said, more of government and so on. In the field are very experienced officers who have been fighting these kinds of wars since 1990. They've been promoted through the ranks because of their merit and their ability, and I think governments and other people ought to listen to them. They know better than I do what kinds of tactics and stuff they need in the field.
What we need to do, if we're into a long-term operation--and we are--is change the recruiting system, change the laws governing recruiting. We need to have the House of Commons rapidly okay procurement projects at all kinds of levels, not just major airplanes but all sorts of places. We need more money put into the operation.
Here is where I think the government, and the House of Commons especially, can lead. We need to make the Taliban and these other people afraid of a liberal democracy that's upset. That's what we've done in our history. There's nothing more fearsome than a liberal democracy that's working together against these kinds of people.