That's a fair comment. It's really not an easy place to get around. It's like a lot of societies that are tribal-based. It's very rural, with very austere conditions. There are people who have never left their village, ever. There are families that have been in that village for generations, and somebody may have gone to the village next door. They haven't gone as far as Edmonton to St. Albert or that kind of thing. So there is that.
More importantly, though, they have started to take control of their own destiny and their own fate. People aren't rushing to go and join these guys, the insurgents. I won't call them Taliban on purpose, because that does elevate some of the criminals to a level they shouldn't be at.
The example that I think of happened on May 29. A two-phased riot occurred in Kabul when there was an American vehicle accident. Stage one was clearly a spontaneous response to a tragic accident. That stuff happens. It's probably not going to happen in downtown Ottawa, but that stuff happens in lots of parts of the world. And phase two of the riot in the afternoon was clearly an event orchestrated by certain groups that wanted to get things going.
Everybody was afraid this would carry on. The next day, nothing happened, but not only because of the big Afghan National Army presence on the street. We went to work the next day and sat with our Afghan counterparts and they were in shock. They were angered about the riot. They could not believe this could happen in Kabul. Down in their souls, they said that if this was the harbinger of things going bad again, they wanted nothing to do with it. Essentially, the people got a grip on it. When 5,000 people in a city of 3.5 million riot, I'm not sure we should panic, but you could feel it.
And it was not only the professionals we were working with. The one-eyed, half-an-arm plumber who seemed to live in our house because we always had something broken was in as big a shock as everybody else. He just did not want this to happen. But they are taking control, and that election day last year was pretty impressive.