Sir, let me just say that indiscriminate attacks by the Taliban have increased—and I emphasize the indiscriminate part. They've switched some of their attacks away from us, because we are a hard target, to the more vulnerable, the more fragile.... School teachers have been killed. In this past week three schools were attacked with explosives designed to destroy them. If they can, the Taliban focus on international members of the IOs or NGOs, but also local Afghan folks who work for these; and they also focus on the Afghan National Police where they possibly can. At one point last year, the minister of the interior told me that the casualty rate for his police across Afghanistan was 12 police officers killed a day, and that's because the Taliban focuses its indiscriminate attacks on those who are simply trying to bring sustainable security to Afghanistan.
So from that point of view, yes, the number of attacks overall has gone up, in part because we have more troops and police in the south and have really gone there to take the initiative away from the Taliban itself. So now we're having violent actions in areas where we didn't before, and sometimes—not always, but sometimes—it's because we've gone there to confront the Taliban with the Afghans and the police itself.
I'll say that the security situation for international civilians, folks who are trying to build the Government of Afghanistan out in those districts, folks who are trying to build a school or a hospital, is still very fragile, and it is going to remain that way for a while yet. In the Zhari district, despite the Afghan National Army battalion and the Afghan National Police largely having taken over security responsibility for the district, we are going to have, for the foreseeable future, the occasional IED attack; we're going to have suicide bombers, whether on foot, bike, or vehicle; and we're going to have the occasional ambush itself. Those kinds of things will continue to frighten away people who work with IOs and NGOs with the honourable intention of trying to help people who are desperately in need of help.
The indiscriminate part of the attacks is what I would emphasize. I think the Taliban has shown its true colours, and it is despicable.