Mr. Chair, thank you for the questions.
Let me just say that I did tell Mr. Manley and his panel that we needed another manoeuvre battalion group in the south, specifically in Kandahar province. The first thing that led me to say that was that NATO had done the assessment almost two years ago and had said the structure in Kandahar province should include two battalion groups, and we had one. My point was to have us help NATO coalesce its efforts to fill its own structure, which it had laid out two years previously but had not been able to do.
We're doing some very good things now and making some very good progress. If we get more troops, we can make more progress more quickly and possibly at less risk to our soldiers and other security folks, including Afghan folks involved in that mission. The more troops you get in Kandahar province in the shorter term, the better you can actually improve things and the better space you can get to allow development like roads and electricity to take place. Then you can start winning the population over irreversibly to a non-violent approach, to a democratically elected government approach for their country for the future.
So the 1,000 troops, based on the assessment NATO had done and also based on our assessments, would give us a much greater capability and allow more progress to take place quickly.
Actually, it's a growing realization that the more troops you have, even beyond that, the better you can do. That's one of the reasons we're trying to build an Afghan National Army brigade with the Afghans in the south. As I mentioned, too, 18 months ago there were no Afghan soldiers there. We went through Medusa and we had none with us, despite our desire to start building that capacity.
Now we have the three battalions. We have what we call a combat support battalion, which is artillery, engineers, and those kinds of things. We also have a combat service support battalion, which is the beans, the bullets, and the medical assistance. And then we have headquarters over that. Those battalions are not all at the strength they're going to be yet. They don't all have the equipment they need yet. And they have a variety of training issues and leadership challenges, because they're still very new in their development. We know in the Canadian Forces just how long it takes to rebuild a brigade or a battalion after you've emasculated it over a period of time or to change it if you already have it in place. It's a long-term process developing leaders at the level of Brigadier-General David Fraser, for example. That's a 20-year product. There are leaders like that there. How can we enable them over the shorter term?
Let me just tell you this. We had a training team over the last two years in Kabul that worked at the Kabul manoeuvre training centre. They took every single battalion coming through during that timeframe and ran them through a three-week final exercise. They trained some 30,000-plus soldiers with Canadian NCOs and Canadian officers. That was their sort of graduation exercise. Those soldiers went out in the battalions, and over the last 18 months, that brigade showed up in Kandahar.
We now have an OMLT team of about 25 to 27, depending on the battalion, with those battalions. We've helped equip them with the C7 rifle, which is certainly a significant step up from where they are right now. We've helped them build an operational, training, and recuperation cycle, because those same soldiers have now been in the fight for 18 months. You understand that they need a break from intense operations. Many of their families are located all around Afghanistan. If you keep them away continuously, you'll destroy them. Also, when they get the first opportunity, they'll leave and vote with their feet and go back to their families. We've helped them get pretty close to a sustainable cycle, thereby reducing attrition and increasing their capability to the point that when we did operations in the Arghandab, just before Christmas, that battalion, which we had move into that area, did most of the planning for it--yes, with our assistance--and did most of the lead in the operations.
The second part that's given us some great measure of what they are capable of doing is that in Zhari district we have withdrawn our significant combat team that was there and moved it to Arghandab. We have left Zhari district security, by and large, to the Afghan National Army battalion and to the Afghan National Police. They've reached a decent level of training. Yes, they are supported by us in a variety of ways. Yes, we're ready to go back in if they meet something that's beyond their capacity, but we've brought them to that level.
The third part, which we're now moving to, and this is from NATO and from SACEUR, Supreme Allied Command Europe, where they want to focus in the future, is not just the OMLT team with the Afghan battalions; it's partnering our units, our rifle companies, for example, with their battalions and operating together. We provide a bit of a core for them to do things and stretch past what they're doing normally, so that they have confidence that they can actually go out and do something and that they have the right stuff with them.
We're moving towards that now. That's part of what the marine unit will do when it comes in.
We've made good progress. We have a long way to go. It takes a long time to build an army. We're building a brigade of that army. We don't control all the pieces that come into it. If the Afghans can't recruit and the Americans move a battalion out, all things change. But with what we're doing, we're making great progress in building our army.
Truthfully, I've seen an amazing move forward over the past six months. When they'll be able to take over complete security for themselves is something I can't say. We have just moved one of their battalions up a level of validation because of the progress they've made, and we keep working that one hard.