Thank you very much.
While I share my colleague's dismay at not having an opportunity to really get into a substantive question and answer period, it was interesting to hear you, Mr. Appathurai, talk about the media not telling the story. The fact of the matter is the Canadian media and most international media are embedded with the military and they tell the story that the military allows to be told from any objective perspective.
I also had some trouble listening to you talk about the casualties that other countries have suffered, because I don't take any comfort that other countries may have suffered higher casualties than Canadians have. I found that a disturbing comparison.
I'm wondering how often you've been in the area of Kandahar where the Canadians are right now, specifically to the internally displaced persons camps, where we see in the media--this is one thing we have seen in the media--people who are obviously not getting enough food aid. That's not getting through. Perhaps Mr. Alexander would respond to that. Why isn't food and clean water reaching the people in these internally displaced camps to the level they obviously need?
You also talked about the situation with Pakistan. You raise it, everybody raises it, but we need to find some solutions for it, and we need to find some action that's going to prevent the insurgents from going back and forth across the border. It's not enough just to raise it; we need some answers to that.
The other question I wanted to raise is around the issue of the detainees. Mr. Alexander, perhaps you can respond to this. Maybe if you don't get time you could do it in writing, also.
What are the conditions of the Afghan prisons? What kinds of situations are we turning people over to? We've been told about torture. We've been told about abysmal conditions. I would like to have some kind of report on exactly what the state of the Afghan prisons are at this point, where people are being turned over.
We know there are investigations going on now by Canadian authorities into this. We know the agreement that was signed by General Hillier is not up to the standards of the agreements that were signed by the Dutch and by the British in terms of following the care or the treatment of prisoners as they go through the system in Afghanistan and whether they're being transferred over to other nations as well. We don't know that, we really don't know that, and I think that's a big problem.
Finally, in terms of the numbers who are serving in southern Afghanistan, you talked about that. I've tried to question our own minister and officials around how the NATO mission meshes with Operation Enduring Freedom, which is still going on. There are still a large number of American soldiers fighting in southern Afghanistan, independent of the NATO mission. We don't have any information about how those things mesh.
We know that the two-week training program for the Afghan national auxiliary police is simply a two-week program and then--out into the field. It's worrisome. You acknowledge that the training of police is way behind. We were told, when we were in Afghanistan, it was seven years to ten years behind the training of the Afghan National Army, which really is not progressive and not, I think, at the rate the international community had hoped for.
So those are some of my observations. I'm sorry we don't have time for some back and forth.