It may in fact be higher, and all of our personnel are geared toward the combat role.
I want to say just as an aside that one of the troubling things, and one of the things that makes me angry, is that we hear from the Conservatives in particular that we have something to prove as a country. Again, have we learned nothing from our history?
We proved that at Vimy. We proved that in Italy in the second world war. We proved it on the beaches of Normandy in the second world war. We can go down the list. Canada and our military personnel have nothing to prove to the world and it is an insult to the reputation of our military personnel to hear those kinds of comments, to hear that we have something to prove. We do not.
I do not know what it is about Canadian people, but when it is necessary, we step up. I have never quite understood that and I have studied it a lot, but that in fact is the reality. But that is not the factual situation we are dealing with in Afghanistan.
Other than, arguably, the Boer War back in the late 1800s, Canada has never been involved in an imperialist action, in occupying another country. We might ask, what about the first world war, when we were in Europe? What about the second world war? The significant difference between those and even the Korean war is that the areas we were in during those wars were areas where the people who lived in those areas wanted us to be there. We were in fact liberators. We were not occupiers.
It is quite obvious from the resistance and the insurgents that we are battling in Kandahar and in the south of Afghanistan that this it is not the case in Afghanistan.
Let me go back to the naïveté. We hear members on both sides of the House who are in support of this motion saying that we have to stay there, that “we have to stay there because”, and then they go through all of the tragic realities of Afghanistan. What it says to me, again, is that they should listen to themselves, that they should listen to what they are saying and then go back and look at what was being said in those few months before the Americans pulled out of Vietnam, in those few months before the Russians were forced to pull out of Afghanistan.
They should look at the quotes, whether they were from our military leaders, political people at the time or people on the ground. Always what we heard was, “We are just about there, we are just about to win it, and we just need to escalate a little bit more, so give us this”. Of course we know that did not happen in those cases.
If we move beyond those more well-known conflicts, there were any number of other times, and I particularly urge people to look at the number of insurgencies that were fought from the second world war on. The same thing happened in almost every single one of them. There is a lot of documentation on this. This is not something I am making up. It is not just my own observations and opinion.
In the vast majority of insurgencies being combated, that combat has been unsuccessful, in way over 75% of them. We are approaching 90% that have been unsuccessfully combated by using conventional military methodology, the same methodology that this motion would compel us to follow for the next three years. It failed in almost 90% of the cases.
We might ask, what about the 10%? Is this one of those where we are going to be successful? The reality is that when one looks at all of the objective evidence, it in fact is getting worse in Afghanistan.
The greatest military force in the history of the world, in the form of the United States, and the greatest military alliance in the history of the world, in the form of NATO, have been fighting in Afghanistan for seven years now, longer than the second world war and much longer than the first world war. The situation is worse today than it was when the initial invasion of Afghanistan occurred seven years ago.