Dr. Bland, I believe it's evident that our government wishes to take a balanced approached to the situation in Afghanistan, or indeed other regions of the world. Part of this balance involves some of your comments earlier about the state and condition of the armed forces. Coming from the Royal Canadian Air Force of the 1960s myself, I see a considerable difference between that and today. But we have been ordering heavy lift and are trying to catch up on it.
I think it's well recognized, from our earlier meetings here too, that the balanced approach requires, first of all, your security, and if that involves a robust military, then that's exactly what it takes to set the stage for doing your next stage of security, your policing, whether it's by international police or whether it's by the country's own police force. I note that we're doing much work with the Afghanistan police force, paying them, for example, so that they can provide this service on an ongoing basis.
The third part is the governance, and this is the whole discussion of this democracy that we have been involved with. There seems to be a very clear role in here to, at the same time--and this is the balanced approach--be working on bringing about a civil society structure of governance and helping it right out into the remote areas and remote communities, trying to get an understanding of it so that when the day comes that the military does leave, you have a much more in-depth rapport with these remote regions with the centralized government, and trying to help them grow through that and recognize the benefits of democracy. Could you comment on this as a balanced approach and on the importance of it?
I have one other short question on the democracy unit. I think there's been discussion on how to do this. How do you get it involved? Is it government-to-government or not? I think the sense is that we have a unit that is completely at arm's length from our government, and how that's structured and formulated.... The intent is to not supplant their form of governance with our own, but to work within that country to try to structure and to help them into a more democratic civil society.