National Defence committee  I'd just add a word to that, because Kerry touched on what I think is the key issue, and that is the pre-deployment training. I think if there's anything that we really learned about how to prepare whole of integrated government teams, it was the training that we put people through, and it was really tough training.

National Defence committee  It is the Canada First defence strategy, and it assumes that it is embedded in a broader kind of Government of Canada approach. That is, CFDS doesn't say that we're going to go out and do everything all the time. It says that we have to be ready to look at this full spectrum of operations.

National Defence committee  Yes, we are, in fact. It's a really great question, and I think we've all been around long enough to say there's been a tremendous evolution in this relationship. What your question gets to is that there actually is a culture of integrated cooperation, and then there are the formal mechanisms through which we play that out.

National Defence committee  I just have a final word from my perspective. It's a great question, but it's all about broader societal change, right? It's all about culture, and that's what Marie's point is all about, that integrating women.... I think the Canadian example and the model, to get back to the earlier question, saying Canadian women in the Canadian Forces just....

National Defence committee  Mr. Chairman, may I supplement that? Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Strahl. What do we need to be ready for? Uncertainty. And I don't mean to be trite by that. If we just look at the news today, who would have thought we'd need to be getting ready to send a foreign minister to Burma, and who knew that we'd have to be getting ready for continuing revolutions in the Arab world, which are so very uncertain?

National Defence committee  Thanks for the follow-up question. Cultural training for the Canadian Forces at large is a central part of the pre-deployment phase of their preparation. Whether it's for female members of the Canadian Forces or male members of the Canadian Forces, there really is.... Again, I think Canada has a bit of the gold standard in terms of cultural preparation for these sorts of missions abroad.

National Defence committee  Mr. Chair, thank you for the question. I think Canada, in fact, and the CF lead the way in terms of having women integrated into the CF to begin with. If we look at the operations we've conducted in the south, and even our training now, we've had women who are specialists in civil-military interface, and they've gone into the communities and they've engaged with women specifically.

National Defence committee  Thanks very much, Mr. Chair. Good morning, committee members. It's my pleasure to be back here. Welcome. Thanks for the opportunity to be here, along with my colleagues from Foreign Affairs, for your continuing study on CF readiness. Over the course of your study, I know you've heard from a number of senior Canadian Forces personnel and officers about what readiness means from a military perspective: from generating capabilities, to employing them on operations, to coordinating the training and maintenance to keep the forces agile and flexible when needed.

National Defence committee  Just very quickly to stress again--and without getting into a debate around the many proclivities and dynamics within Pakistan, which is a very complex place--the very low value of material going through Pakistan. Other allies are also using the route through Pakistan much in the same way.

National Defence committee  Thanks for the question. We can certainly get you all the detailed numbers around the participation of NATO allies and ISAF partners in training. This is very much a shared responsibility. You've mentioned the United States and the United Kingdom in particular. As the general said, we're the second-largest contributor to the NATO training mission in Afghanistan.

National Defence committee  If you like, Mr. Chair, I'll start and then pass it to General King. The funding of security forces, as you point out, is enormously expensive, and there's no question that the Afghan government is going to need the support of the international community for a long time to come.

National Defence committee  If I might, just to have a go at it, to be very clear at the outset, Canada's military contribution, which is now a training contribution only, is to 2014. That's very, very clear, and there's nothing beyond that envisaged. In terms of where the international community goes vis-à-vis Afghanistan, beyond that I can't speculate.

National Defence committee  Thank you. I actually can't give you those precise timelines, Mr. Harris. I'd have to track back and see. But you asked about how this overall transition happened. I think those who have been following the issue will know that training, capacity-building, and Afghan ownership of the issue have been very high on the agenda from the outset.

National Defence committee  Thank you very much for the question. Just to track back and, as you say, Mr. Alexander, fill in some of the blanks, I think what needs to come through very clearly here, and as reaffirmed in the Security Council resolution, is that this is a UN-led process. Again, the new Security Council resolution puts the NTC, the Libyan authorities, firmly in the driver's seat of their future, and NATO, of course, is working in support of a UN mandate.

National Defence committee  I'll just supplement quickly. In fact the issue of weapons proliferation is featured in the new UN Security Council resolution precisely for the reasons that the general has raised and that you raised in your question. There were a lot of weapons in this country before the conflict and there are many more floating around now.