Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Welcome, Brigadier-General, to the committee.
First of all, I want to say that we too, in the NDP, are very concerned about the losses our Canadian troops have suffered, in particular in the last few days when four individuals have died in the service of their country. We support their efforts on behalf of the job the government has given them to do. One of the individuals, in fact, was from my own province of Newfoundland and Labrador, which has contributed mightily to this force.
Moving to our questions about your report, I do have to say, though, that we've had the Prime Minister recently indicate that he thought the gains we've made thus far in Afghanistan have been modest and could be lost. I'm looking at the report released at the end of December—which I'm assuming is the quarterly report that we're dealing with here—and I see that in some of the areas, such as increasing the number of Afghan National Army units capable of being involved in their own security, the gains have been extremely modest. In fact, there have been losses in terms of the Afghan National Army's responsibility for security in the six key districts of Kandahar. In June they had responsibility for one of six key districts; as of the end of December there are now no key districts for which the ANA is responsible for security.
In terms of support for the police services in Afghanistan, the Afghan National Police, it now seems that only one out of 17 police units is capable of conducting basic law and order operations, which is only 6% of the total. And the suggestion is that the support for the police is riddled by changes in staffing, high desertion, and casualty rates.
It seems that if one of the goals of this mission is to have the Afghan National Army and Police capable of looking after their own defence, not only are we seeing a deterioration in security and humanitarian ability, but we are also seeing very little or no progress—in fact, deterioration—in our ability to assist the Afghan National Police and Army in looking after their own defence and policing.