Sure. Let me take the second part of your question first.
Again I caution that I haven't been there; I haven't seen the ground over which Operation Medusa was fought; I haven't read any of the after-action reports, or the war diaries, or whatever. But just reading between the lines from what I know about military operations in general, had there been a large number of troops, let's say a mobile brigade, that could have blocked off the escape routes of the Taliban forces across the border into Pakistan, then, to put it very bluntly, there would have been a much higher destruction of the enemy than apparently occurred.
Those forces are not available. NATO simply does not have the kind of mass in the southern or southeastern area of Afghanistan that it requires to do the heavy fighting that is necessary to defeat a Taliban insurgency. So I'm not saying doing more of the same, I am saying doing something a little different, which is to bring to bear sufficient troops to be able to do the job properly.
As far as our NATO allies are concerned, you're pointing to a major problem. I'm not sure that they don't want to “increase the cycle of violence” in Afghanistan, so much as each of those that have significant caveats have them for a variety of political reasons—some of them internal, some of them having to do with the politics of the European Union, some of them having to do with the current government in the United States, who knows? I don't know. But what I do know is that if they are not prepared, if NATO is not prepared to save this mission, to do whatever is necessary to save this mission, then NATO's aspirations to be, in a sense, a force to protect democracy around the world is dead. NATO is either going to save itself or it isn't.
In Canada, we will be able to say we did everything we could. It's very, very important that we be able to say that, not only if NATO succeeds, but especially if it fails: we tried our best to save it.