That's a good question, Mr. Rae. There are perhaps two parts to it. At the beginning, in 2006—our first reports were in May and June 2006—the Canadian effort in Afghanistan was a bit disorganized, a bit under-resourced and a little bit disjointed. The military was very strong in Kandahar, but CIDA and DFAIT were strong in Kabul.
It seemed to me that the military wanted to run things the way they wanted them to be run. They weren't very interested in civilian input, and there was a resistance to outsiders, DFAIT people and others, telling them things they didn't want to hear. I think they had a system in mind that they had created, and they wished to continue that system.
At the same time, DFAIT had not yet come to terms with the scope of the challenge in Afghanistan. It was not resourcing the effort sufficiently. There were very few of us in the field, and at the senior policy levels.... My feeling in 2006 was that there was no real champion. There was nobody you could turn to who would fight these kinds of issues. In terms of personalities, my impression, in talking to people, was that General Hillier was quite a dominant figure. There was a reluctance to take him on, I think, at senior levels.
On these issues, I'm giving you impressionistic answers because it wasn't always clear to us in Kandahar and Kabul what was actually happening at those senior levels. But the sense in 2006 was that across a gamut of issues, there was not much response to problems.