You mentioned that you thought that in the last four or five or six months or so, your position differed from that of the Chief of the Defence Staff on where you thought that significant progress was being made on the ground in Afghanistan. I'm wondering if it has something to do with the size of the contingents there. I know the Canadians have about 2,500 people there. I think the entire international contingent there, from a military perspective, is only about 6,000, if that's correct.
In order to provide the peace and security that you would need for doing the provincial reconstruction, how many more forces do we need from the international community to actually deliver the result we are looking for, which is delivering reconstruction efforts, humanitarian aid, and still providing security?
There's nothing that frustrates me more than hearing a report that Canadian soldiers go into a village one day, deliver a bunch of aid, do some good work, and then drive on to the next village, and then the Taliban and al-Qaeda run down from the hills, steal all the blankets, and take all the food and everything like that. In order to be effective, what size of force are we going to really need there?
The second part of that is that I think that's going to have to come from the Afghans themselves. I think that's the idea, to train the Afghan people to work along with us. How close are we to getting a large enough contingent of both the nationals who are already there and the international troops that would be required in order to effectively bring peace, reconstruction, and stability to the region?