Mr. Chair, I will indicate at the outset that I will be splitting my time with the member for Ottawa—Vanier.
Last week we got our first glimpse of the government's thinking on this conflict in Mali. It was instructive in a way that the government possibly did not intend it to be. When General Vance was asked what Canada's military goal in Mali is, he spent a lot of time sort of figuring out what our military goal is and finally settled on the notion that our military goal is actually to support France.
At one level, we actually do not have a military goal, other than to support France. I guess the follow-up question would be what is France's military goal in this region. We are left with the notion that, if we are supporting France, we have to hope that its military goal is the same as ours.
I would have preferred to have heard more directly from the government. There has been some dancing around by the parliamentary secretary and others, who are saying that the Sahel region is an area of significant interest to our security, and international and regional security.
Frankly, the parliamentary secretaries have been quite articulate. It would have been useful had the government, even a couple of weeks ago, articulated the issue of Islamicist insurrections, Islamist threats to the region and to the area, and articulated a plan to us. Thus far we have heard bits and pieces of this and that, but no overall plan of what we will actually be doing in this area.
It is in our security interest that the Islamist threat be contained, be degraded. I do not anticipate that it will actually ever be defeated, but certainly it can be put in a position where its ability to inflict harm on others is minimized to the greatest extent possible.
If there is a caution in all of this, it is to resist the temptation to be too ambitious. Mali is a bit of a mess, to put it delicately. There have been coups and counter-coups, and the rather shadowy Captain Sanogo operates on a level that is not entirely—and probably is not in any way—accountable, transparent or in any sense democratic.
He commands an army that is poorly trained and, frankly, is prone to taking into its own hands some extra-judicial killings. The Tuareg people do not recognize, at the best of times, the authority of the Bamako government. They are a very fierce and independent Berber group of people who have acquired, since the fall of Libya, a significant cache of armaments, and from time to time have hooked up with the jihadists to actually create a very formidable fighting force, which precipitated the intervention of the French just a few weeks ago
The whole situation with respect to the Tuareg is quite confusing. They do not recognize the Bamako authority. They make common cause with the jihadists, but as soon they try to declare the northern part of Mali as an independent Berber state, then the jihadists and they part company.
One of the things that has not been discussed this evening is the Islamist concept of time. This is a 7th century version of Islam, and we have a 21st century military. Our sense of time is not their sense of time. Their individual defeat, such as what they are experiencing currently at the hands of the French, is not important to them, because they are doing “God's will” and when they are doing God's will, they can never lose.
I am going to turn the balance of time over to my colleague. I look forward to a few questions from colleagues in the House.