Mr. Chair, I thank the hon. member for his comments which are obviously based upon a distinguished military career and a great deal of knowledge of this subject and I thank him for his observations.
I will have an opportunity to discuss these issues further as the debate goes on, but I want to assure him that his list was comprehensive in terms of exactly where we should be going and I hope that I can assure members of the House that we have taken into consideration the important matters the member raised.
However, it would be helpful if the member could help the House when he says that we have no strategy in terms of time. He will recall that Bosnia was a situation where we had to go in without an exact knowledge of how long it would take. It took about 10 years really before we were able to turn this over to the Europeans.
I am not saying we are going to be in Afghanistan anything like 10 years, but I hope the hon. member would agree with me that we must remain there long enough at least allow President Karzai's government to have control over the situation in that own country. If we do not pacify that region and if we do not deal with that particular region, the chances of stabilization in Afghanistan will never take place. That is obviously the strategic reason that caused us to go there and we will discuss that further in the debate tonight.
The second observation I would like to draw from the member is the fact that when we talk about equipment and what we are doing there, the member will be aware that this is a multilateral mission. We will be with professional troops from Britain, America and other allies, all of whom will bring their own expertise and their own equipment. We will be allying ourselves with other well equipped members of NATO with whom we will share our equipment in a way that will make the force effective.