Mr. Chairman, if I may, I'd like to address that in reverse order. I want to talk about the challenge of the population first. I agree with a number of things you said here, and it is an issue of balance.
I'm not a medical man, but let me use a medical analogy, if I may. We're all familiar with streptococcus A infection, this flesh-eating disease that gets hold of the body fairly quickly, such that surgeons have to operate pretty intricately to stop the thing killing the patient. In many respects what we're dealing with in Afghanistan is not dissimilar. You make the point that we can't win hearts and minds by bombing villages, and you're 100% right, but if you don't sometimes do that and get the disease out—which is the terrorist—it's only a matter of time before the body is going to die. That's exactly the situation we're facing here.
It isn't that the military commanders want necessarily to use force; it's trying to find that balance. But when the Taliban and the insurgents are regaining strength or re-establishing in certain areas, and then re-establishing their hold on the local populace, you don't have an environment that allows stability operations to occur—to get reconstruction, to develop, to seek and find political solutions to the problem—because that cancer, if you will, is in the middle of the body. Therein lies the challenge.
You're right; finding that balance is the essence of it. There will be from time to time regions in Afghanistan, as in other insurgency campaigns, where the balance is going to be wrong, because security issues will demand a greater use of force. The challenge is to do it as quickly as possible and get back to a balanced approach and ensure that it doesn't infect the rest of the country.
How do you define success? I don't know how you do that. I certainly couldn't give you in a nice academic, objective manner, a “do this, do this, and once you achieve x, y, and z, this is what you're going to achieve”. But I can give you a sense, I think, of the kind of thing we need to be looking for.
First and foremost, we must have an ongoing commitment from the western world—not rhetoric, but real, displayed commitment—that will provide to the government and the people of Afghanistan a sense that we're not going to leave them high and dry. I think that's a big problem right now; there is all of that constant worry.
As is happening now, the organs of government have to be established: the political, which you ladies and gentlemen know about far better than I, but that's clearly a large part of it; the security organs of the state; the military; the police; the rule of law—those are the kinds of things that need to be in place.
Basically the international support, certainly from the military point of view, needs to transition from being in the front line to supporting, to being available. We're still very much in the front line. A lot of our effort is being put on trying to get the Afghan national army and its police force to a stage where it can be in the front line. Once you get there, that's a measure that we're having success, that we're moving forward. It's a judgment call whether at that stage you reduce the amount of force you have. It's a judgment call to decide when you start to run your forces down. But you need clear progress in those kinds of things in order to say that you're making a success.