Thank you very much, Chair.
Thank you, General, for appearing today. I especially want to thank you for your frankness. Without it, the whole system we have here can't work, so it's very much appreciated.
I want to pick up on a couple of things. In part, you said you believed we should stay and “get the job done”, even though you expressed that you had some initial misgivings about going in. Again, I appreciate your frankness on that.
I will be putting a couple more pieces on the table, but I will be asking you how would you define “getting the job done”. In other words, when X is accomplished, how can we say “mission accomplished”, if you will?
I want to come back to quoting some thinking of others who've been involved in this for some time, starting with Leo Docherty, a former aide-de-camp to the British commander who called the mission “a textbook case of how to screw up a counter-insurgency”; our current Minister of National Defence, who said, “There is no military solution there”; and also an Afghan commander, who said publicly, “The foreigners came here and said they would help the poor people and improve the economic situation, and they only spend money on their military operations. The poor people are poorer now than when the Taliban were the government. We don't trust them anymore. We would be fools to continue to believe their lies.” The second last quote is from President Karzai, who of course was here last week. He said, “Bombings in Afghanistan are no solution to the Taliban. You do not destroy terrorism by bombing villages.”
That brings me to quote one of your other points, which is that it's crucial to get the population on your side. I didn't write down what you said, but I think the essence was that you're in big trouble if you don't, that it's key to do it.
We're now sending in more tanks. We're in the process of destroying an awful lot of infrastructure and villages as a result of the force that we've needed to use to counter what we've met, and by its very nature, of course, that is leaving a lot of Afghan people wondering how we are their friends. We want to help, but it's after we've gone in and blown everything up. And now we're sending tanks over there.
So my question is, with all of this in front of you, how do we, one, establish what is a successful mission; and two, how are we going to get the population on our side if the process right now of fighting is destroying everything around them and, for many of them, leaving them worse off than they were before? How do you see Canada's forces squaring that circle?