We hear reports that 150 or 300 Taliban have been killed, but it's hard to know who's the good guy and who's the bad guy when Afghan males are killed in a village. They look exactly the same and dress exactly the same, so you don't know who you've killed. There cannot be reliable body counts. If 150 Taliban are killed, you can go to a refugee camp where there are a thousand families and hire replacements in half an hour. We are living now inside a hostile population with recruits arriving every day.
If a member of my family were in the Canadian military in Kandahar, I would be very concerned about the environment in which they are being asked to fight. We, the international community, are doing things in Kandahar that put our military at risk and make their mission so much more dangerous than it should be.
I think we're all very well-intentioned when we're there, but there's a lot of blow-back going on from these other policies in other departments. This has to be coordinated. You need a proper counter-narcotics policy that actually addresses their situation. You need a proper development and aid policy that is matched up and supports the military. It all has to be coordinated in some way.