That's a really good question. It's a difficult one to answer in a couple of minutes, but I'll do my best.
Back in 2005, of course there were no Canadians in the south of Afghanistan. There was an Operation Enduring Freedom mission, and there were provincial reconstruction teams that were led by Americans in four of the provinces, and there were, essentially, two battalions' worth of troops, one in Zabul province and one in Kandahar province, operating throughout the area together with special forces. Their presence was obviously much less than it is today.
How much they were aware of what was actually happening across the south of Afghanistan back then is not obvious to me, because you don't know what you don't know.
The mission has evolved since then. We've had many, many forces deploying to the south of Afghanistan. NATO assumed command on the 31st of July, 2006. Our engagement was predicated on that, on the fact that there would be a transition to NATO command and that it would be a NATO mission. All we did prior to that was to try to set the conditions for that to happen.
I would say, over time, the larger number of international forces coming into the area, into areas where, quite frankly, there was no presence previously, has certainly attracted the attention of those who oppose the government of Afghanistan, Helman in particular. We call them insurgents, we call them Taliban, but it's more complicated than that. Of course there's a connection to narcotics and a number of other things; it's criminality as well as insurgence.
I referred to the progress as I see it in terms of evolution. I'm not sure if the question was about progress so much as the military footprint on the ground. The military footprint has grown. I would say that governance capacity at the district level and even down to the community level—you may have had a chance to see some of that in Afghanistan during your visits—is much more robust and organized than it was previously, with community development councils and district development assemblies. In some cases, not across the board but in some cases, there is more effective leadership at the district level, more effective leadership at the governance level.
But we still have a tough security environment underlying all the other efforts we're engaged in. The challenge, of course, is to be able to focus sufficiently in those areas where there are greatest prospects of success, so you get synergy between what we're doing on the security front and what we're doing with governance and with development. That's what we will see, I'm pretty confident, in Kandahar province relatively soon.