Thank you.
First of all, I find myself alarmed that my colleague to the left put words in my mouth. I certainly didn't describe the Taliban in the words he used. I made the point that not all fighters are Taliban and that it's simplistic to view this war as just a fight against the Taliban, the enemy. It's overly simplistic. We adopt that model to our peril.
Secondly, I challenge him when he says that NATO has statistically liberated more people than anybody else. I can count in my head over half a billion people in which UN operations, over 62 of them in the history of the world, have brought people to peace. You have to ask where NATO was actually deployed in areas that were subsequently liberated. I just don't believe, on either of those cases, they have a factual basis.
On the issues of contributing substantially to NATO, yes, absolutely, we have to contribute substantially to NATO, and we have to do so for the long term. I believe the answer is not that the NATO strategy is completely flawed, but the overly offensive approach used in southern Afghanistan is flawed. That is tied in with the global war on terror, as you say, because this is a strategy brought in. When we moved into Kandahar, the campaign plan was designed in the United States and authorized by Donald Rumsfeld. This was part of the GWOT, the global war on terrorism, Operation Enduring Freedom. So I think we came in on the wrong foot. We should have come in on a much more impartial, objective, consensual, and minimum use of force basis rather than on an offensive basis in which our motives are questioned.
General Hillier did bring the three-block war concept. He brought it from the United States, where, as you mentioned, he spent so many years, but he transformed it from something that was never meant to be, as many U.S. officers will tell me. The three-block war was meant to describe the dilemma in which the United States found themselves during their operation in Somalia, in which they were primarily there to help the people and they might find themselves in combat. So you had to deal with the dilemma where you were forced to do combat. That's necessarily combat, and in responding to the attack against you, all of a sudden, you are alienating some people. That's a completely different problem. We're going in and saying, “Your strategic goal is to commit combat”, and that's the combat if necessary but not necessarily combat approach. You only engage in combat as a last resort, with a minimum use of force.