Minister, perhaps I could just say first, negotiations or encouraging defection--I didn't say that anybody was negotiating with the Taliban. That would presume that you were talking with them about what they would accept and maybe that you would hand over southern Afghanistan to them, etc. None of that, to my knowledge, is occurring anywhere, certainly not from the Government of Afghanistan.
What I talked about was a program they have, which is called peace through security, in which they encourage people to come out of the Taliban, defect to the political process, and use words in Parliament instead of bullets in Kandahar to achieve their ends and purposes. They have had some success with that program, and we have been on the periphery, on the margin, of seeing some of those things occur, and that's a very positive thing for the benefit of Afghanistan.
To define the Taliban we use our intelligent sources. We know where their commanders are; we know who they are; we know which units they have; we know where they're operating. And in southern Kandahar there is a very clear delineation of the Taliban from a variety of other groups that might be in the area or not. Those who are attacking us we have defined clearly as Taliban by that intelligence process, while working with the Afghans, working with the international community. As we look at the numbers in southern Afghanistan, they vary. And that's not to try to avoid your question or not answer it whatsoever, but they vary. They vary depending on whether they're trying to get more fighters into Helmand province or whether they're focused on Kandahar for a period of time.
During the operation that we called Operation Medusa in the Panjwai, we faced anywhere up to 1,000 Taliban fighters in that area. They augmented that number by coercing and forcing young men in the area who had no jobs, who had fear of the Taliban, who didn't want them there, to come and pick up a weapon and sometimes fight for them. We believe the number would be somewhere plus of 1,000 in the southern part of Afghanistan where we are. How many of those are exactly hard-core fighters? You simply can't determine.
But truly, we're after their leaders in that region--the folks who direct them, who facilitate them, who get them money, who get them weapons, who get them ammunition, and who direct them first of all at killing other Afghans and then at trying to kill our soldiers.