Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Mali mission is really beginning to sound a lot like Afghanistan. We had the Taliban there, and here we have the Tuaregs, al Qaeda, and then new actors altogether. This sounds more like an anti-insurgency, counter-terrorism operation, and the statement was even made, “It's a war zone.”
The difference is our mission, of course. In Afghanistan we didn't have the helicopters to do this type of mission, and that of course goes back to the cancellation of the EH101 contract. When we had military commanders here last week, they even said that in protecting the helicopters, they would be using the same provisions they had used in Afghanistan with respect to air protection.
It really sounds as though the difference between this mission and Afghanistan is that we were in Afghanistan because a NATO member country was attacked by somebody who was trained in Afghanistan, and we don't know that there's been a terrorist attack by somebody trained in Mali. It's all being repackaged under the rubric of peacekeeping because that's more palatable to the public, and of course the government can avoid debate.
What's really difficult to see—and granted, we do have mining companies present there—is how this mission is in the national interest. The intangible benefit of spreading this government's Canadian values has many people unconvinced that it's going to be worth the blood and treasury.
My questions will be based along the lines of the experience we've had in peacekeeping missions. Again, that's what we're concerned about. When it's a UN mission, the chain of command has not been as reliable as we've seen in, for instance, NATO missions.
The question I'd like to first ask is to Dr. Zahar, and it relates to her experience there.
Canada lost 159 troops in Afghanistan, and among them 132 were lost because of explosives. They had direct fire, suicide attacks by the Islamic militants. How would you characterize the capabilities and threat levels of the terrorist groups who are taking the fight to the UN forces in Mali? They're targeting peacekeepers.