Mr. Speaker, achieving a military success in Afghanistan certainly would not be done by packing up and going home.
This is the philosophy that is being put forward by the NDP in the House. I have sat here and listened to it for several months. Members of the NDP say: “Let us go over and negotiate, let us go over and talk to these people to see if we can find a resolution to the concerns we have”.
The Taliban are very difficult people to talk to, people who have abused children, abused women, and used them as shields to put forward their concerns. They have brought about injustices on the Afghan people over the past number of decades. How are we going to negotiate with them?
I challenge the NDP in the House to select four or five of its members to go to Afghanistan and carry out those negotiations, and carry out those consultations in the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and then come back and report to us, if they are lucky to get back out alive and tell us how the negotiations went so that maybe we can solve this crisis.
I doubt very much that they would go, and I certainly doubt that they would return. The Taliban are not interested in peace. They are not interested in giving people a chance to have a better life. They are interested in destroying the country and destroying the people.
We as Canadians will not sit idly by and let that happen. That is why we are in Afghanistan and that is why we are going to stay there until the job is done.