Mr. Speaker, I simply want to point out that I appreciated hearing my colleague from Timmins—James Bay recount the wisdom that his grandmother shared with him.
I too would like to begin my comment and then my question by saying that my father volunteered to go to the second world war in 1939. He stayed for the whole term and ended up coming home in late 1945.
The second world war had the country seized for what seemed like an eternity but in actual fact was six years. We have been in Afghanistan longer than my father was away in the second world war, a war that engaged the entire world and almost levelled Europe.
We need to ask ourselves the same questions that we began asking in 2001-02, which I remember well. The questions we were putting to the government about our engaged in Afghanistan were: How how long will we be there; what is the end strategy and what is the yardstick by which we will measure progress? Those seemed like reasonable and simple questions. If the government were asking us to engage in an open war, then it would seem reasonable that it could at least answer those three questions clearly.
Could the member share with me at this point in time, seven years later, whether we any closer to answers on those three basic questions?