National Defence committee  Could I augment that? I'm going to speak from a very personal perspective here. When I was there in July, I was subjected to a suicide vehicle-borne IED attack, which my driver and I walked away from. But 10 people in the crowd didn't. I later found out that a stringer who was associated with a Canadian media outlet allegedly filmed the attack, knowing full well we were going to be attacked.

National Defence committee  Yes. I think we should have Predator B.

National Defence committee  Yes, we can do a lot more in those areas, specifically ANA training, specifically police training--absolutely. I can give you specific numbers. When I was there in December 2005, we had two RCMP officers from Kandahar at the PRT. That was increased to ten, of which eight were deployed.

National Defence committee  It's an unmanned aerial vehicle capable of delivering Hellfire munitions and of performing surveillance. Or we could have AH-64, possibly, the attack helicopter. I'd go for Predator. I'd get rid of the existing tactical UAVs that are there, and I would definitely get Predator B, right now.

National Defence committee  This gets into my rant about where al-Qaeda fits into all this. When you talk about several enemies, the Taliban are only one of the enemies we're engaged with. We're engaged with the al-Qaeda movement, an organization called HIG, run by Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, and we've got the Khani tribal organizations.

National Defence committee  The whole country is not in as bad shape as the south. The Taliban do not control the bulk of the country; they control part of the country.

National Defence committee  The closest model we have right now is Bosnia. We were there 14 years. Bosnia was simple compared to Afghanistan, so I would be very hesitant to put a date or timeframe on this. It's going to be at least a decade, and we've already been there five years. We were in Cypress from about 1964 to 1993, so we can handle protracted conflict.

National Defence committee  Let me address it in this fashion. Any counter-insurgency war is a psychological war. We've focused on dealing with the psychology of the population; let's talk about the psychology of the enemy, and the psychology of our population, and the psychology of our friends. Let me backtrack.

National Defence committee  Oh, forget it. Our provincial reconstruction team would have absolutely no credibility with the Afghans, with the government, with our allies, and we wouldn't get the resources to do what we need to do. Again, it all works together. You cannot just have a PRT there and no combat force.

National Defence committee  Absolutely.

National Defence committee  Oh no, we do. I'm just talking about how, if an average Canadian goes on the web and starts looking at this stuff--I'm not quite sure--it might look like just a news story to them when in fact it may be a jihadist message.

National Defence committee  I am very familiar with the enemy monitoring what we do. They keep very close track of what goes on here. We suspect, for example, that the suicide campaign in Kandahar that started in 2005 may have been an attempt to convince the IMF not to commit funds to the country by generating artificial instability and making it look like Kandahar was out of control and therefore the whole country was out of control.

National Defence committee  Yes, absolutely. We have very good Afghani contacts in this regard.

National Defence committee  Let me describe what I mean by counter-insurgency. There is a lot of confusion in the electorate, particularly, about the terminology we use to describe missions. The way I teach it at RMC is this. On the spectrum of what we're dealing with, there is interpositionary peacekeeping, which would be like Suez in 1956, where we have two countries and we have, by political agreement, a UN force that's lightly armed separating them.

National Defence committee  I'll get to that. The next phase, counter-insurgency, is a particular mission type that closely resembles stabilization operations but in fact uses higher levels of force, has a much more integrated approach, and like in Afghanistan, is usually in support of a sovereign country.