Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the defence minister for his tremendous leadership on this historic matter.
I, too, was moved when I met the six women Afghan parliamentarians last week because it reminded me and, I think, all of us who had that opportunity, that we take so easily for granted our privileges and our rights. We go about this tremendous vocation of representing the people of this country without really giving it a second thought. Just the presence of these women reminded us that every day they literally risk their lives. If any member of the Taliban could get their hands on them, these women would be dragged away and God only knows what kind of violence would be inflicted upon them.
My colleagues throughout the debate have covered all the statistics about the millions of girls in school and the small businesses that Canadian aid has helped to develop for Afghan women and the fact that 38% of the Afghan parliament consists of women. We should at least know the statistics by now.
However, as a point of comparison, I want to reference this. Before the liberation of Afghanistan in 2001, we occasionally would see grainy videos from Afghanistan broadcast in the western world. We would see women getting rounded up, brought in to the soccer stadium at Kabul and shot in the back of the head or stoned. Members of the Bloc and NDP rightly stood up and asked what we were doing to stop this.
If we did what those members wanted and pulled out of Afghanistan, believe me when I say that hundreds more women like those would be dragged back into the soccer stadiums and public spaces of Afghanistan and brutally executed, stoned to death, half buried or shot in the back of the neck for the crime of walking down the street without covering their face or without a male escort or for having spoken up and fought for the rights of Afghan women.
I predict that if we and the ISAF nations were to pull out of Afghanistan and those atrocities happened again to these Afghan women, we would be hearing from the same voices in the NDP and the Bloc asking us what we were doing to stop it and to defend the women of Afghanistan.
We are there right now defending these women and ensuring they do not get dragged back into the kind of violence that they once did not so many years ago.