No, we did not anticipate the ferocity of the insurgency that we faced when we got there.
The death of Glyn Berry in January was a tragedy to all of us, but it also set back our efforts to deploy more civilians for many months as we looked at duty-of-care issues and how to deploy them safely.
By the summer of 2006, the Canadian Forces were facing the Taliban massed in the hundreds, and were fighting in some of the biggest engagements since Korea. So it was a very, very chaotic year. It was a terrible year. At the same time, DFAIT and DND were working out the delineation of responsibilities on detainees. DFAIT was engaging with the relevant international organizations. Correctional Service Canada had started to do its first visits into Afghan prisons to determine what they needed by way of additional capacity.
Should we have moved even faster in that period? Should we have put in place in 2006 the agreement we had in 2007? Afghanistan was an evolving theatre of war, and we realized in early 2007 that we needed to make changes. I arrived in late February, and by early May we had a new arrangement in place.
