It's set within the context of a multi-faceted, multidisciplinary solution to a state that is nearly stateless. How do you establish a reasonable framework, from a peace agreement that is flawed, in order to protect the civilians and bring in capacity to build that nation's ability to take on its own future?
We're just part of a long-term exercise. Going into these countries where so much has been destroyed and so on, you're into that for years and years, if not decades, so you can't assess the effectiveness of a peacekeeping mission or a mission from the UN from a short-term four-year span of your being in power, or months. It has to be looked at as a long-term investment in how we engage in that endeavour.
Mali is a good training ground. It seems we're going to disagree because I would say that 50% of the Canadian population still doesn't think that Mali is a worthwhile exercise. There are two reasons for that, I believe. One is that people don't think it's in our self-interest. There isn't a conflict in the world that's not going to affect us. With large-scale refugee campaigns and internally displaced camps, they're going to have pandemics. The rage and the extremism, and ultimately, terrorism that come out of those camps is going to spread. The diasporas are going to be affected in our country. Remember the Tamil in Toronto when they didn't like what we did? They got caught up in the maelstrom of that. Every conflict has an impact on our self-interests, strategically. That's the first thing.
The second thing is that people still fear casualties. Even though we were magnificent in handling the casualties of Afghanistan in that overt exercise, peacekeeping is still thought of as something from which we'll all come back safely, and it's because people want us there. It's not necessarily so, depending on the mandate. Yes, there are risks, but that is our era. That's why I argue that I think the people are still thinking of another era, when in fact ultimately the belligerents really had resolutions, while we now see belligerents still trying to figure out what the resolution might be.