Mr. Speaker, I want to respond to the mixed message that we are getting today from the Liberals. They keep saying over and over that they support the troops and that is great. They are the ones who actually sent the troops over there in the first place. I suppose their willingness now to say that we are going to pull them out and give notice right now is a contradiction, at least in my mind.
Last Sunday I was at the Holocaust memorial remembrance. It impressed me to see the pain that those people are feeling a generation or two after the events of the Holocaust.
The people in Afghanistan right now are experiencing the same thing. I believe that we have an obligation and, indeed, even a privilege, as our troops did in World War II, to go there and to stand between victims and their oppressors. The tyrannical Taliban regime needs to be wiped out.
How can the Liberals and that member in particular justify even contemplating pulling out until the job is done? We need to ensure we are focused on the task, not on some arbitrary date on which we are simply going to say that we are pulling out. That would be to admit defeat in advance. In fact, I believe it would be, in a sense, planning that defeat and we ought not to do that.