Well, let me start by saying it's not about me. It's about Canadian soldiers. It's about this country, and it's about our support to the Afghans.
So we can throw up our arms, walk away, and say we gave it our best shot but it just didn't work, or we can acknowledge that we have never applied the correct number of resources to the issue at hand. And that really is the nub of the problem. We can sit here and fix the blame, or we can fix the problem.
I'm from the school that says we need to fix the problem. To fix the problem, you need to secure the population. And to secure the population, you need more Afghan national security forces, which takes us back to the reason both General Howard and I are here today: to talk about Afghan National Army training, formation, growth, etc., because that is the key to marginalizing the Taliban to the point where they have to become a political movement.
That's how you define, incidentally, victory in a counter-insurgency. It's not defined by seizing ground or holding cities or by whatever previous military objectives might have been. It's more about marginalizing a movement to the point where it's forced to put down its arms and engage in normal democratic practices. And we're a long way from that, because we really have yet to secure the civilian population.
To answer the question directly about civilian losses as a result of bombardments, artillery, or otherwise, I can tell you, as the NATO commander of Task Force Kandahar, with 850 U.S. soldiers under my command, that because of the targeting methodologies we use, there were zero civilian casualties as a result of any operations directed from my headquarters.
That's not to say that we tied our people's hands. They certainly had access to all the firepower they needed in order to have the desired effect on the battlefield.