I'm going to answer this as a fairly long-serving military professional. I'll answer part of the last part first.
I don't think we'd be there if we didn't think we could defeat that insurgency or control that insurgency. As I stated before, you're never going to get to Ottawa levels of security. That's just not that part of the world. We have well-led, well-trained troops down there. We have a plan. The Government of Afghanistan has a plan, but it takes time. Any counter-insurgency operation in military history takes time. The Malaysian emergency--and they kept calling it an emergency--I think started in 1948 and ended in the mid-1960s. It resulted in the establishment of the State of Malaysia. That was a very different world at that time. Counter-insurgency takes time and patience.
What has changed? I guess the four-word answer is “boots on the ground”. Unfortunately, in this kind of operation there's no white flag hoisted. There's no instrument or surrender sign. There's no big ceremony on a rail car to sign up. You're dealing with groups that aren't really under any hierarchical military control as we know it. When you really analyze it--and it was probably later into 2002, after the operations at Tora Bora and those places were over with--there were probably fewer than 1,000 American boots out on the ground, in the streets, in south and southeast Afghanistan.
They showed up--and I talked about our equipment and forces before--and they were operating on the ground in armoured HUMVEEs with machine guns or 40-millimetre grenade launchers on the top. With part of the NATO transition plan, all of a sudden now in those main provinces, in the six provinces that are under Brigadier-General Fraser's command, there are around 8,000 troops. We essentially found ourselves standing in what had been a security vacuum. They had their run down there. They weren't being chased on a day-to-day basis. They weren't running up against American troops on a day-to-day basis.