National Defence committee  Thank you.

National Defence committee  I can answer that very briefly with almost certainly yes. There are a number of reasons to increase the role of women in peacekeeping. There's a principled reason, but I'll stick with the effectiveness. In many of these settings, access to communities, understanding of communiti

National Defence committee  All of them and from the top down, including leadership of the mission. I think there's a relatively small number now but, absolutely, political, military and police leadership, across the board.

National Defence committee  In the context of broad budgetary cuts, what you see in a lot of missions—and I have 30 seconds to do this—is that the static sites in the deep field are being taken away and are being replaced by quick reaction forces, air assets and unmanned aerial surveillance. When I look at

National Defence committee  I think I put it "so-called jihadis". There are a couple of ways. One is they tend to be isolated from the political process. In Mali, for example, there are the compliant armed groups and so-called terrorist armed groups, so it's difficult as a political entry point. The second

National Defence committee  There are different levels to that question. Taking your last point, I think that Canada is uniquely placed to communicate well with the allies in part on linguistic grounds but also because of a long history in peacekeeping. Where I do see a problem with communication across d

National Defence committee  My understanding is that most troops, when they are deployed, have a self-protection aspect to them. You run a team site, and that team site is patrolled by Canadian troops. My understanding is that most of the time you don't tend to rely on other troops for the immediate physica

National Defence committee  To be honest, I don't have any direct experience with this on the ground, and so I think Richard's points cover it.

National Defence committee  That's quite a difficult question, teed up by Ameerah's point. One of the things that the UN has tried to do particularly in the Horn of Africa is work with the AU so that the political agreements are tied to the economic subagreements. I think there has been some success on th

National Defence committee  Yes. I think what you tend to have in a mission mandate is a broad political agenda that talks about national level reforms building on a peace agreement, the kind of things you see in Congo in 2002 or in the peace agreement that was signed after the election in Mali. Then you h

National Defence committee  I think pushing for a Security Council mandating process that is driven from the ground and not driven from New York, advocating that council members send a small team to settings ahead of time and identifying what the meaningful and realistic political objectives are in the shor

National Defence committee  Not only is it practical, but it's actually been done. Ian Martin went to the head of the formal formation of the mission and wrote a report that essentially informed headquarters as to what the viable outcomes could be. Libya fell apart, but that isn't a shortcoming of that proc

National Defence committee  Okay.

National Defence committee  We can both take a stab at that one. Just to address the Chinese question, they actually came with very well-prepared and equipped troops to do the tasks that I saw them doing. That was in Darfur. My experience with them has been relatively positive. There is an obvious concern

National Defence committee  There is a lot of inter-agency planning work done on the ground. In a place like eastern Congo, OCHA, UNDP and the missions sit together very regularly. I think there are tensions, though, that could be explored around the issue of humanitarian space and peace operations, and rea