Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
My first question goes to Ms. Mason.
In one of your presentations, you dealt with lessons learned in Afghanistan. You compared the roles of the UN and of NATO in these kinds of missions. Let me quote it in translation:
In short, a UN-led peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan would have been fundamentally different from the ISAF debacle. One cannot say for certain that a UN-led mission would have succeeded in helping the Afghan people reach a sustainable peace, but at least it would have had a greater possibility of doing so.
I am not now trying to redesign the mission with hypotheses and “what ifs”. But, in your comments, we can see that you are making a distinction between NATO and the UN as you look at their roles and their potential in terms of diplomacy and armed or peacekeeping operations.
In recent international operations, the distinction between the UN and NATO has tended to become a little lost. So I would like to know the basic differences that we must not forget as Canadians who are so committed to international security and diplomacy.