Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for South Shore—St. Margaret's for his support of this motion.
It is important to remind Canadians why we are in Afghanistan. We are in Afghanistan to ensure that a government friendly to organizations like al-Qaeda does not re-establish itself and provide a safe haven to allow those organizations to train, to plan their attacks, to threaten our interests here in Canada. That is the reason we are engaged in Afghanistan.
It is also equally important to remind Canadians that the very province in which we are presently engaged, Kandahar province, is the province from which the Taliban rose in the early 1990s, after the Soviets had left, to take over the government of Afghanistan and establish their own very brutal and totalitarian form of government. We are not only in Afghanistan to protect our interests, we are in fact in that region in Afghanistan from which our interests had been so seriously challenged during the events of 2001. That is the reason we are there, and I think everything else, frankly, is secondary. That is why it is important that Canada stay the course.
As I mentioned before, any other party who suggests that we can unilaterally withdraw from Afghanistan, unilaterally withdraw our military from Afghanistan and be consistent with Canada's engagement multilaterally and otherwise in the world, and be consistent with Canada's commitment to development and diplomacy, I think, is completely naive.