Mr. Chairman and Mr. Bachand, thank you. Merci beaucoup de la question.
First of all, it was a significant attack, but I'm not sure that 50 fighters were involved in it. I would wait until we get the details for what the exact number was.
But yes, I don't deny that it was a significantly large attack, and it did achieve surprise and obviously achieved their objective. Therefore they can crow about it, because it was one of their successful attacks. But to say that we absolutely therefore should have known about that one is to not show an understanding of the complexity of the situation on the ground. To be able to move, in that large area teeming with people, numbers of men with weapons in small vehicles and to show up in an area is actually relatively easy to do. The fact that most of the time—in fact, the majority of the time—we can proactively preempt that kind of movement is, I think, a testament to the incredible hard work and the success we already have.
Once in a while they'll get it through. We still have a lot of analysis to go through with the Ministry of Justice folks who were doing the security of that prison. That was their responsibility, not ours. We are working in the general context of conducting security operations, not focused on each key piece of infrastructure in and around Kandahar City itself, because we wouldn't have nearly enough troops if we were doing that.
We'll do the analysis with them. We're most interested ourselves in how the attack took place, and we'll learn some lessons from it that will simply make us more capable in the future.
I don't know, but I anticipate that CSC passed us some of the details about the need for security. But we would have started to work with the MOJ, as a Team Canada, to get that security in place as opposed to doing it specifically ourselves. That's not what we do—look at each piece of infrastructure there.
So yes, it was a significant attack. Yes, they did have some success. And guess what? We'll carry on the normal operations. We'll pay attention to that ourselves. I know the Afghans are going inside-out to make sure they learn the lessons and take corrective measures, and we'll simply be better off as we go forward in the future--although we wish it had not occurred, obviously.