Thank you, Minister, for your presentation this morning and for taking the time to come and brief the defence committee. We appreciate your doing that.
At recent updates that we've had from the Department of National Defence, and also from other witnesses, they've come and shown us slides of people who were obviously starving, children who were starving, on the outskirts of Kandahar City. Also, the department showed us slides of horrible flooding that seems to have impeded a lot of the work that was going on by Canadians in Afghanistan. I wonder if you could give us any details right now in terms of specific numbers, the number of internally displaced people in the camps outside Kandahar and the number of people who are in desperate need of food aid.
Further to that, I'm curious about who in the camps for the internally displaced is providing the assistance for those people. Is it NGOs? Is it multilateral groups? Is it CIDA specifically?
We've also heard from witnesses who've appeared at this committee about a real concern that NGOs have with the militarization of aid. They've expressed very strong concerns about that. So which NGOs are working on the ground in Kandahar right now? Is CIDA having difficulty finding partners to work with, other NGOs to work with CIDA?
The last question I have along this vein is, how are the other countries doing in terms of living up to the commitments they made in Bonn, and do you have a comparison of how other nations are doing in relation to how Canada is doing in living up to the Bonn commitments?