We may run a little over.
Those are important questions, and they're not easy questions.
Let me start by saying that I think the committee entirely agrees that those four pillars Mr. Martin referred to need to be accomplished.
We need to have reasonable expectations of what success will look like. We will not establish the Court of Queen's Bench in Kandahar province. We will need to rely heavily on traditional methods of dispute resolution, the wisdom of elders, and the respect people have in their own communities in order to see a reasonable system of justice established.
In the case of the police, it takes time to train police. It takes longer to train police than it takes to train soldiers. We need to recognize the fact that while everyone will tell you that the Afghan National Army is probably one of the great success stories of the last few years and is growing in its capacity, size, and ability, the police would not be described as a success story. There are some better things happening, but even the basic things, as I think Mr. Dewar referred to, like getting them paid, is problematic. There's no ATM machine at the Walmart in Kandahar. Getting them paid is really challenging. Well, if you don't pay your police, and they get killed at a faster rate than soldiers, it's not surprising if they set up a bit of a toll booth on the highway.
These are important problems. One of the reasons we called for a very active coordination of effort was to try to tackle some of those issues as well as the question, as you put it, of the culture of impunity, which we called corruption, that you see in the government. Once again, we're not going to get Afghanistan very high on Transparency International's list of countries, but we can make improvements.
The worry we have is that if we don't really insist, which is what we suggest needs to be done on a diplomatic level, that President Karzai and his ministers deal with the issue of corruption, we are seen--not just Canada, but the international community--as the sponsors of that government, and we become implicated in the corruption people see.
If you hear one thing on this question about support for the Taliban--and there is zero support for the Taliban--there is a recognition that the Taliban may have been a lot of things, but they weren't corrupt. We have to be concerned that if the effort isn't there to address those issues, support will be lost.