Mr. Speaker, I am sure the hon. member, as well as myself and others, had an opportunity to talk to a lot of veterans or people from the military who have been in Afghanistan, who know what is going on and have been on the front lines. There is one person I talk to extensively about it. He spent over a year there. He is a pretty close member of my family.
In 2006 there was a vote in the House that said we would stay in Afghanistan till 2009. The first question I had from some of the people who had been there was, “Whatever makes people in the House of Commons think that by 2009 it would be the time to move out? Whatever put it in their heads that would be the time to leave Afghanistan?”
One person was seriously aggravated, asking if we were saying that we should pull out of Afghanistan at a specific time, that we should give the enemy enough time to survive until then and let them rebuild and become very strong so maybe they could bring the battle to the soil of Canada, to the North American continent. He asked if we did not realize that the Taliban and al-Qaeda were trying to destroy western civilization. He wondered why we were saying there would be an end when we would have to pull back. He said that they would be on our soil and that we would have to defend our people on our land. If that was the case, why were we not going after them?