The accountability rests with the commander, ultimately with me, regardless of what sector or domain of the operation we undertake. One of the strongest parts of our culture is the concept of accountability by commanders for every decision taken and for the results of the operations.
We have a planning mindset. It's deep in our DNA. We plan and we execute with the same people with whom we plan. As we put gender-based analysis plus into the mix, we will treat it the same way we treat the management of fires, manoeuvres, and protection against all perils. It will become a combat function, an action, one of the principal factors.
When we'd look at the intelligence picture of a place we were going to operate, we'd look at the ground, the topography, the infrastructure, and we'd understand the enemy. In Afghanistan, we learned to understand a wider range, the civilians, so we didn't just understand the red side of the equation; we started to understand other actors in that space. Friendly forces that aren't yours, that are from another country: civilians, civil society, NGOs, the list goes on. The commander, and I was one in Afghanistan, has to take all that into account as he or she considers prosecuting an operation. You're not just enemy-centric; you need to firmly understand what you're going to do as a result of a military action, and what you are going to leave as a result. What did you try to improve? If it's just a matter of destroying some part of the enemy, that's fine, but you can't do that in an irresponsible way that would somehow lead to civilian casualties or make it impossible for the civilian population to recover after the fact, so we hold our commanders accountable for the tasks we give them in operations. We are very good at assessing, because we plan, we execute, and we also have a strong assessment function: did you achieve what we asked you to achieve?
There's another whole body of work around running the armed forces as an institution. Being an institution within Canada and a respected one, the accountabilities still rest with people like General Whitecross and me, the leadership of the armed forces, to not only be able to conduct operations correctly in that chain of command, but also to run our institution wisely and correctly, and to take into account all aspects of gender-based analysis and the spirit behind the action plan for peace and security to make certain that we have an institution that's a good place for everybody to come to work. Holding ourselves accountable and being held accountable to that, I think, is and must be on a par with all the other objectives that we are to achieve in this institution, so it can't be buried. It can't be seen as a side bolt on part of what we do. It has to be fundamental to how we are held accountable.