The last visit I made was my tenth in two years. At the start, we had a very small civilian presence in Kandahar. One of the observations of the Manley panel was that we didn't have enough eyes on or enough ownership of our development and governance work; it was delivered out of Kabul or elsewhere, and we weren't getting the results we needed.
What I see now is that young foreign service officers and CIDA officers are out at the forward bases working with captains, setting up local councils and shuras, and really working creatively together. It's quite inspiring to see. I see Correctional Service officers and RCMP and DFAIT officers in Afghan prisons monitoring, training, and supervising infrastructure improvements.
I see a lot of work. For example, I mentioned the Dahla Dam. A key to success on the Dahla Dam will be not just doing our infrastructure improvements by 2011, but leaving some Afghan capacity behind to keep managing that. So I see civilians out working with the local communities that are responsible for water management in their particular regions and talking about what the dam will do and how we expect them to step up.
There has been a real change. It's partly the number. It's also that we're sending more senior civilians out there. We now have a civilian who is the counterpart to the brigadier general, known as the RoCK, and the current one is Ken Lewis. We have a senior civilian at the Provincial Reconstruction Team who is a counterpart to the colonel, and then we have senior people for each of the core departments. They're making a difference.