Mr. Speaker, it is difficult to rise in the chamber and speak on this motion from the perspective that we in the NDP bring without feeling a significant degree of anger, quite frankly, over the position Canada finds itself in at the present time, and with a great deal of frustration.
What it comes down to, in my opinion, is the incredible naïveté that I am seeing from both the government side and the official opposition side in support of the motion before us today. One wants to cry out, “Have we learned nothing from history?”
Have we forgotten the lessons? Let me be very specific. Have we forgotten the lessons of Vietnam? Have we forgotten the lessons of the Soviet experience in Afghanistan? Or we could go back historically to the British experience in Afghanistan, or all the way back to Alexander the Great's experience in Afghanistan, literally thousands of years ago.
When we see this motion and we see the support coming from both the government side and the official opposition side, the answer obviously has to be no, we have not learned anything, because we seem to be bound and determined to repeat the same mistakes.
We know, and there is no dispute on this, that we went into this combat mission with our eyes firmly closed or our heads looking in the wrong direction. There is no other explanation. That was under a former administration, not the current one, although with the support of the official opposition at that time.
We, the country and this legislature, were told at that time that this was really following Canada's traditional role, a role, quite frankly, that Canada more than any other country in the world developed, starting back in Suez in the 1950s and for any number of times since then, a role of using our military personnel and our other resources as a nation to promote peace. That in fact has turned out to be a lie.
That is not what we started doing in Afghanistan and it is certainly not what we continued to do in 2003 and in 2005 as we ramped up our involvement. That involvement, we have to be very clear, has been grossly weighted to a military combat role. It is undisputed by everybody in this House that nine out of every ten dollars we are spending in Afghanistan are being spent on the military side--