Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you very much, Professor Lagassé, for your presentation.
I would like to take the issue that you raised about the general-purpose forces. We are the second-largest country in the world by territory, and we have a population of 33 million, 34 million people. We share a continent with the largest military power in the world. So in your opinion, is it a good idea to maintain this general-purpose force, or do you see something else happening in this scenario?
I want to avoid issues like the DEW line, for example. We didn't have much input on establishing the North American defence, but if there had been a general-purpose force, not necessarily a super big one, we could have had a different approach to these issues and we would have avoided environmental disasters and all that.
When you are speaking about cooperation with our allies on an international operation, it is a well-known and well-publicized idea that the other allies didn't step up to the plate in Afghanistan. In my opinion, that is not true, because we withdrew in 2003 from Afghanistan, and when we came back to Afghanistan, only the province of Kandahar was left for us. Other forces, like those of Italy or Germany, had 4,000 people deployed in different areas of operation. So when you are speaking about cooperation with other allies, we have all the junior NATO members, such as Romania, Hungary, Poland, and I don't think we cooperated according to our difference to the other nations. The U.K. used the Estonians, the U.K. worked with the Poles, and all the other allies tried to capitalize on these new NATO members as a force multiplier.
So we had 2,500 people deployed first in the province of Kandahar. We were not able to cover it and that was the birthplace of the Taliban.
If you recall, in 2010 we handed over command of the province of Kandahar to the U.S. force and we maintained command of two districts, Panjwai and Zhari, and we were able to make significant changes in that area; we also lost fewer personnel than when we covered the entire province of Kandahar. If you go to one place and then withdraw, it's reoccupied by the forces.