Foreign Affairs committee  No. I'm speaking on thin ice here, but I don't think Canada is responsible for the payment. I think Canadian funds end up in the pool that goes to pay, but we don't physically.... We tried for a while at the police stations, where we have our men and women serving with the police

Foreign Affairs committee  You'll have to check with my wife for mine.

Foreign Affairs committee  I'm on record as saying that the force should have been doubled two years ago. In southern Afghanistan we needed 10,000 more, with 3,000 to 4,000 of those in Kandahar. But perhaps I can address the CIDA issue. I have maybe a different opinion on that. I think CIDA gets unneces

Foreign Affairs committee  I don't see it as the ideal solution, because the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping, who handles the military side in the UN, admitted a year and a half ago what the numbers have been saying for years: they're incapable of conducting military operations. What I would see

Foreign Affairs committee  But what I'm talking about is—

Foreign Affairs committee  —the Prime Minister calling to the President of France, to the President of the United States—

Foreign Affairs committee  That's the level it has to be. It's had a modest impact. Whether it'll have more, I don't know. The thing is that with fewer troops, you're going to continue to fight for a draw. You're not going to lose, but you're going to fight for a draw, and I don't know of any military all

Foreign Affairs committee  I would just say that it is disappointing to me when I hear this referred to as “Bush's war”, because just maybe he did something right in his presidency and maybe Afghanistan was one of those things. Not only that, I think half the Canadian population genuflects in the direction

Foreign Affairs committee  We are currently fighting for a draw, and with NATO it's unacceptable. The trick is how to change it, and so far that hasn't happened all that much. It's totally unacceptable that NATO nations put caveats on how their troops will be employed. I trained with NATO for almost my en

Foreign Affairs committee  I recommended 4,000, but with 1,000 more there would be more secure areas in which you could maintain security. Our problem up until now is that we move into an area, we secure it, and then we have to stay there and stop securing more areas. They were turning it over to maybe 10

Foreign Affairs committee  Well, Mr. Martin, ever since we started training the police, I believed it was not going to work. The reason I think it's not going to work is because they're trying to establish a national police force. The national army is working, but the national police force has problems, be

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, I must have misspoke on rotation. I don't believe in rotation. You waste all of the time and energy and money you've invested into contacts and knowledge of the area and getting to know the local people, the people who are going to win the insurgency. The rotation, in my wor

Foreign Affairs committee  No, no, I'm “Mister”. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much for the invitation, even though it came a bit late last night. I'd like to start off by saying that nobody is paying me for anything, and I didn't know I was the second choice on the list of people who were supposed to s