Throughout my experience on this file, I think there has been a clear understanding of the obligations on the part of all Canadian officials and that we had to do everything we could to try to minimize any risks, that we had to develop a process—and it did evolve over time, as we ramped up our involvement in Afghanistan—to do everything we could to try to minimize risk to make sure we left Afghanistan in a better state than it was when we started.
On December 2nd, 2009. See this statement in context.