When we're out and about, we're running into the Canadian military. For example, the road down to Panjwai is a paved road now, because it's always been known to be a troubled area. The military plan is to have proper and easy access into troubled areas. So there's a paved road out there. We spent a lot of time going into Panjwai to try to figure out what was going on there and what the people were doing. If you drive past, there's a desert on one side and a mountain on the other. The Canadian military often sits at the base of the mountain. So we would stop—not only to make sure that they understood who we were but also just to talk to them.
These are the most junior soldiers out on the ground. I'm not talking about representatives of the army. We told them we were doing food aid. They are very young men, in their early twenties, from the Maritimes, northern Ontario, or the suburbs of Edmonton. I would tell them where I was going. I would say I was going down to a certain camp. They said it was a mixed Taliban-controlled camp. I said we were going in with food aid, and that we'd been in and out of there before. I would ask them, “Do you know what the situation is?” They said they did. They could see it from where they were. They were concerned and they said they could see how desperately poor the people were. I asked them what they thought about food aid there, and they said they would like to help, because that's how they were brought up as Canadians, but of course that's not their military mission. It's not the responsibility of the young men and women on the ground to sort that problem out. Still, they told me that they talked about it every day. They see those people every day. They're obliged to go into Afghan villages and engage any Afghan male they see. They know they can't tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. They know that.
I'm very concerned about the environment the Canadian military is being asked to fight in, not only from the point of view of military strategy, but also because of what our young men and women are seeing and what they're being asked to do. I think it should concern us all.