Thank you very much. I too support the mission, because I believe it represents Canadian values abroad, and it certainly serves Canadian interests.
I just want to let the committee know something they may not know, because I just spotted it on the CBC website about 10 minutes ago. The headline is: "Afghan women's official killed by gunmen. Two gunmen on a motorcycle shot and killed the head of a provincial women's affairs department near her home in Kandahar, Afghan government officials said Monday."
I don't think I need to say any more about that, because this is one of the main reasons why we are there. People lose focus of the extent to which trying to free the Afghan people from this extreme, fanatic religious intolerance is one of the reasons why we have committed ourselves to that mission. It's going to be a long battle, but I think it's very much worth it.
It certainly serves our pride to be there and to do this work. And it serves our interests. This is a country that is tying in to a whole variety of international obligations, whether they be obligations of trade or international law or diplomacy or sending troops to various parts of the world. We depend on international trade for 40 cents of every dollar in the pocket of every Canadian.
We can't pretend that we are isolated from the rest of the world. We can't pretend that there's anything moral about sitting back and letting others do the heavy lifting in protecting and defending the systems that nurture us while we ourselves live by the good grace of others. We can't do that. We have international obligations, both to the United Nations and to NATO. That seems to me fairly obvious, and it has been stressed a lot lately, especially by the Prime Minister in his speech to the General Assembly last week.
I want to talk about the evolving nature of the mission, more than anything else. I think Dr. Bland has discussed the details of the mission much better than I could. I just want to say this: in war, and this is a war, or whatever else we may call it, the enemy has a will and an intelligence of his own. He doesn't fight the war that you want him to fight. He fights the war that is most effective for the achievement of his objectives.
So the previous government decided to go into a very important part of Afghanistan, namely Kandahar, to do the diplomacy, development, and defence work that needed to be done. Dr. Bland has certainly spoken a great deal about that. I think one of the key points is that without the development work, this insurgency is going to continue. We need to help the Afghan government tie the outlying regions of Afghanistan to the government in Kabul. We need to help them do that. We need to help rebuild the country after years of war. But the other side doesn't want us to succeed, and that's the point. There is another side, there is an enemy, and they want to try to undermine, destroy, and disrupt our efforts to rebuild.
That's why the nature of this mission has changed over the last year or so. It's because their efforts to destroy what we have been doing need to be countered by our military operations. Eventually, the hope is that we will succeed in defeating the insurgency, and the emphasis will shift back to where we would like it to be, which is to the aid and development work.
I want to say something else, and that is that in the course of a struggle, in the course of a war, there will always be setbacks. There will always be times when the enemy will adjust his tactics so that he will take advantage of your weaknesses and will appear to have you on the defensive. I don't know whether that is the case or not, and certainly we've taken some casualties lately, and we all understand that. It is up to us to adjust and meet the challenges that the enemy is posing.
If the political objective of supporting the Karzai government and of keeping the Taliban from re-establishing themselves in office in Afghanistan is worthwhile, if it serves our national interests, if it serves our values—and I believe it does—then we must adjust, and we must regroup, and we must outsmart, and we must out-think, and we must outfight the enemy. And that's the way we will prevail in the long run. But to believe that because we have taken casualties here or casualties there, that they have us on the run and that this war is being lost, I think is just foolish.
It would have been very easy for someone to have declared on the morning of August 20, 1942, that Canada had been beaten and that this country was out of the Second World War because of the extreme losses we had suffered at Dieppe the day before. We know better. We know from our history and we know from our own hearts about this.
Finally, let me say this. Others have talked about other missions. Afghanistan is not the only place in the world that needs Canadian help, either Canadian aid or Canadian development work or Canadian troops. We have a small military right now, and I don't want to get into the partisan politics of why we do; we just do. We're doing the best we can with what we've got. This is a mission that is doable, it's a mission that's achievable, and it's a mission the Canadian Forces can do well. We have precious few troops left to do anything else.
But if we were to try, let's say, to intervene in Darfur, a worthy mission, of course, we'd have to fight our way in. That's what people forget. They say Darfur is a humanitarian operation and this is a war. Anyone who thinks we're going to get into Darfur to help the refugees there, to help in that civil war to try to avert the genocide that's taking place there, without fighting our way in and being engaged as heavily in combat as we are now, is kidding themselves. I would like to remind the committee that there are other missions. This is not the only important thing that needs to be done in the world, but right now it's something we can do and it's something we should do.
Thank you very much.