First of all, we are not responsible for the whole of Afghanistan, and some parts of your premise I disagree with. If you look at all of Afghanistan, I may have the number off by one or two, but there are about 34 provinces in Afghanistan. If you look at the 34 provinces, in about 24 or 25 of them you have relative stability. Every once in a while you have an incident, but you have relative stability. Where the increased insurgency has occurred in the last year or so is in some of the provinces in the south and in the east, in the five or six provinces.
Because we're in Kandahar, the reports we get are from the Kandahar area. We don't get to see the whole of the country. But I'm saying the majority of the country is relatively stable and is starting to improve.
In the south, the insurgency has increased in the last six months or so. One of the reasons is that, for instance, when we got into the Kandahar province we didn't sit in the camp in Kandahar; we started to move out and to clear the Taliban out of the villages throughout the province. We're trying to make sure the Taliban don't take over the province and impose their authority on the various tribes. We have been out there, in the Kandahar province, flushing out the Taliban, and of course when you flush them out they fight back. That's a large part of this increase you're seeing.
It's the same in the Helmand province, beside us. The British did the same thing. The British went in there and have started to root out the Taliban. The Dutch have just about stabilized in the province north of us, and you're going to start to see more and more engagements by the Dutch in the north—and the Americans, of course, to the east of us.
What we're trying to do is to root out the Taliban. So it may not be that in absolute terms there are more Taliban in the south than there were before. But we're not sitting in the camps just letting them take over the countryside; we're moving out to try to suppress them.