Thank you.
You're absolutely right that the police are a central core component of the overall security institutions and rebuilding efforts we have undertaken. Unfortunately, for the first three to four years of this effort we relied on weak means of doing the job and a half-cooked approach that did not provide the police forces with the capacity they needed--the skills, knowledge, equipment, logistics, and so on--and, more importantly, the salaries needed to keep them honest and in the service of the people.
We realized this a couple of years ago. Right now we are in the midst of a very deep change taking place, with billions of dollars of resources having been committed by various countries to do this job, including Europeans, the U.S., and Canada. So we are in the process of bringing change.
I hope that within the next year or two we will see the results of this change. Everybody from the President down, and all our friends across the world, are as concerned as you are about this issue, and we are doing our best to manage this. I remain optimistic that in the same manner that the Afghan National Army is relatively successful because of some very clear reasons and the work that was put into the army, we can do the same with the police.
Every day I read--and it happens every day--that so many young Afghan policemen have died as the result of Taliban attacks. I think about their families. We have had thousands of young policemen die in the line of duty. While I acknowledge that it's easy to target them and call them corrupt, inefficient, and so on, I think that's a generalization. We should avoid that, because the Afghan police have also shown great courage and have made great sacrifices. There are thousands of families in mourning because their sons, and on some occasions their daughters, have died.