Thank you very much for this question.
I disagree with the description of the Afghanistan mission as a bottomless hole. It is not accurate.
Clearly, the costs of security and the fundamental requirements and responsibility that we have as members of Parliament, and members of the government, is to ensure that when we send people into a changing and volatile and urgent theatre of operation, we adapt with them to the security environment. That is to say, the challenges that were faced in Kandahar province versus the security threat and assessment that existed in Kabul at the beginning of the mission were fundamentally different.
I think there will be colleagues here who would be the first to acknowledge that when we deployed into Kandahar, the world changed entirely for the men and women on that mission. As a result, we became increasingly aware of the complex nature of the mission and the tenacity of the Taliban, and the proximity to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border became an enormous factor.
Kandahar, as my friend would know, is the birthplace and incubator of the Taliban. As a result, we saw much more kinetic activity. We saw increased use of IEDs. He mentioned the fact that the LAVs, for example, became subject to attacks from IEDs on the roads. These inevitably caused catastrophic damage not only to equipment but also to the soldiers. So the costs associated with that are directly attributable to the efforts on the part of the government and on the part of Parliament to respond with equipment that is going to protect and save lives.
I can't stress enough to my friend and to members of this committee that there is a direct connection between our ability to increase the security quotient and our ability to save lives and promote quality of life for Afghans. If the measuring stick applied to the success of this mission is the ability to have more development work done, more reconstruction work done, more programs delivered, then we are succeeding. For every young girl who gets an education now in Afghanistan as a result of the schools that we're able to build, the programs that we can deliver, and the teachers we can provide with the capacity to pass that education on; and for every eradication program that allows thousands of children to be immunized against polio; and for every effort that we make to give people job or trade skills, commerce, and access to micro-financing and roads that allow them to connect communities; and for all the issues related to water--the Dahla Dam project, for example--none of these things could happen without security.
Yes, this is an expensive mission, an expensive undertaking, on the part of our country, but if we truly believe in projecting outward those values of protecting people and promoting peace, freedom, and security and promoting a quality of life for these people, then we are succeeding. At the rate we would like? Perhaps not.
For example, there is the way in which the counter-insurgency is demonstrating adaptability to the tactics the Taliban have been using. To explain briefly, we had one experience while we were there that resulted in casualties. The Taliban are no longer placing these IEDs in culverts but are actually putting them to the side of culverts, which are much more difficult to detect when our road-clearing soldiers are out looking for these IEDs planted in roads. The tactics the Taliban have used have adapted, and we've had to adapt similarly. The type of equipment that we use, particularly for detecting IEDs, is very specialized and very expensive, and this is associated with increased costs.
I would also caution my friend that these figures of $8.9 billion differ from the incremental costs. We'll no doubt have further discussions about this, but there are costs associated with the mission itself, and there are costs associated with the regular budget of the Canadian Forces--their salaries, their health care, the equipment purchases that we would have made in any event, and the maintenance costs. But clearly, in the theatre of operations the maintenance is much more rigorous, as the environment in which the forces are operating is much more damaging to the equipment itself, and the costs of the increased kinetic activity also take their toll in terms of the resulting figures.