Mr. Chairman, it is a pleasure to speak to this particular issue. It has been over a month since September 11 and it is time that we discussed a number of issues that were largely overlooked in this situation.
The bombing taking place now in Afghanistan is perhaps the simplest of all the aspects in the war against terrorism. A much more complex challenge though is what we are faced with today. It is the challenge of how we combat urban terrorism.
The killings in New York City in actuality were a form of urban terrorism. We know that Osama bin Laden has been training up to 11,000 people in training camps in the Middle East and Afghanistan in particular, to spread throughout the world and kill people.
We know this from Ahmed Ressam who lived in Montreal for four years. We know this from those who were responsible for the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. We know these people were inserted into these countries to lie low as moles for months if not years until the call came, the call from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to engage in a holy jihad and kill innocent civilians in their objective, which is to drive western influence from the Middle East.
We must make no mistake about the fact that this is a war against individuals who have chosen not to sit at the negotiating table but to blow it up. Therefore there is no negotiating with these individuals and a military option is the only option.
However, in combating the scourge of urban terrorism we must be intelligent. It will be a long and complex battle and it will require our police forces, CSIS and the international community of mutuals.
A bill was introduced today and the bill must have the following components. It must involve powers for the RCMP and CSIS in terms of surveillance, in terms of being able to monitor Internet and telephone communications, and in terms of search and seizure provisions.
It will be a balancing act not only between our individual rights under the charter but also the right for us to be secure. It will be a difficult challenge but it is one that we must face. We will work with the Minister of Justice to accomplish this objective.
We also need to cut the financial underpinnings from those organizations, more than 27 of which operate in Canada today, that are responsible for raising and sending money to not only Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and the organizations that support them but to a wide variety of other terrorist organizations that have found Canada a haven for raising funds for terrorist activities abroad. We must give the financial institutions the tools to not only freeze but also seize the financial assets of these particular organizations.
We also need to secure our borders by ensuring that people coming to this country are true refugees and true immigrants and that those who are terrorists and criminals are kept out.
What is appalling is that individuals are allowed to fly into our airports and claim refugee status without any form of identification. They should be sent back to their country of origin. These individuals obviously got on a plane with identification but got off without it. Somewhere between boarding the plane and leaving it they destroyed their identification papers. Under those circumstances they should be sent home. They are not true refugees. They are economic refugees or other people trying to get into the country.
In another vein, we have an incredible opportunity. In my view we have not had an opportunity like this since World War II to bring peace and security to the international community.
In the building of the coalition that we are engaged in today who would have thought that we would be working with Pakistan, who would have thought that 1,000 American rangers would be deposited in Uzbekistan? We have the possibility of bringing together Russia and the west, Arab countries and the west, the CIS countries in the southern part of Russia and the west, Pakistan and the west, and to build bridges between Pakistan and India to try to resolve the conflict over Kashmir which is a deadly and potentially lethal one because both are nuclear capable.
We could do this by modelling it after World War II. After World War II the international community had a choice. It could have acted punitively against Germany but it chose to implement the Marshall plan which brought longstanding peace and security to Europe and enabled Germany to become a peaceful neighbour and a participant in the world.
We need to do that now. In doing so we would not have to deal with people like Osama bin Laden where only the military option is required. We would be able to deal with the masses of hopeless unemployed, usually men in the Middle East, where Osama bin Laden finds his shock troops. By improving the economic situation on the ground for these individuals it would prevent them from looking toward bin Laden and to look toward more peaceful ways in which to exercise their basic rights.
It would also involve the international community trying to offset the virulent propaganda that has fed these individuals from childhood. We know that one of the first things that happens in conflicts is that negative, hateful propaganda is used to turn a group of people against another. That is what has happened in these areas and what Osama bin Laden and his supporters did. They went into areas with a fertile ground of unemployed, hopeless individuals who only knew conflict and fed them a virulent message of hateful propaganda.
We must change that and the only way to change it is to introduce the truth about what the west has done, how it has helped Muslims and the marsh Arabs in southern Iraq, how it has tried to save the Kurds in northern Iraq, the Muslims in Kosovo and Bosnia, and its efforts to bring peace to the Sudan. We must let everyone know about these efforts that the west has supported.
We need to use new tools and build the bridges of diplomacy. There is also an enormous opportunity for rapprochement in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine.
As an international community we must tell the Palestinian authorities and the PLO that they must not allow Hamas and the Islamic jihad to engage in killings. It poisons the peace process. They must clean out the Palestinian authority of the corruption that exists within it.
On the other hand, the west, especially the U.S., must tell the Israelis that they must remove their settlements from Palestinian held territories, that they must acknowledge the presence of a Palestinian state that is independent and that they must work quickly toward the formation of borders for a free Palestinian state in the Middle East.
We must do that today. If we do not do that we cannot secure a long term peace in that area in the future. To secure that peace we would require a number of different economic and political avenues and diplomatic initiatives. Here at home we would require support for the military, the RCMP and CSIS. We would also need to give the financial institutions the tools to undercut and remove the financial underpinnings that support terrorist organizations.
This will be a long drawn out battle. It will not be won tomorrow. The most difficult aspect of the battle will not be the so-called war in Afghanistan. Our challenge will be to weed out the octopus of terrorist cells that exist all over the world. It will be difficult but by working with our neighbours and international security organizations we will be able to do it. There will be killings and there will be death but unfortunately that is the fact of life that we have today.
It is unfortunate that it has taken two years for the government to act. It knew this was going to happen and it knew these terrorist cells were operating. The writing was on the wall and it chose to ignore it.
Similarly, as my colleagues across the way in the House have mentioned, we need to support our military. Cuts and political indifference to the military have not enabled us to participate in the manner that we should.
In closing, we need to increase our military manpower to a minimum of 60,000. We need to increase the number of effective troops on the sharp edge and give them the equipment they need to do the job and to offset the rust out in our equipment that is occurring today.
In closing, I know all of us join in saying a prayer for our men and women in uniform half a world away. We wish them Godspeed. We pray that they will be protected. We will work hard to protect them, as well as the civilians in Canada, from being in harm's way.