No problem. I'll back up a little bit, just to underscore what you were saying.
The Afghan National Army basically started two years ahead of the Afghan National Police. That's why they are at the level they are today. For a country to achieve a level of stability and for the people to have confidence in their government and in their service and everything else, they do not want to see a soldier on the street, they want to see a policeman.
So the fact that they have been able to recruit 76,000-plus police officers so far is a measure of effectiveness in its own right, that they've gotten there. But you can't build a police force overnight. That is based on eight weeks of basic training and then putting them in on the ground into the communities, into the districts, into the police substations where we're working, and they're working hand in glove with the Afghan National Army. That is why we have put our police mentoring liaison team--six of them--and embedded those in with the police that are working in our key districts.
That next level of training, the American-led organization in Kabul, CSTC Alpha, has the mandate to provide that next level of professional training. What they've done is this. They've come in and they've taken, I believe, about 80 policemen out of our district and they've put some temporary police in place while they were there, taken them back to Kabul, and provided eight weeks of further professional training and policing.
The first cycle started in December. The people who went from Kandahar went about two months ago and they are expected to start coming back into our area within the next week or so. The proof will be in the pudding, on the ground, when we see the increased level of professionalism and how they act on the ground: I call it trust, but verify. That's why we work with them, with our police on this mentoring liaison team--which is soldiers and military police working in the checkpoints--so we can see they are making that necessary progress.
It will take time. I would love for us to be able to have 80 police on the training teams, but it is moving ahead and we are very encouraged by the operations that are taking place between the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police together. The one operation I talked about, led by the Afghan National Army, supported by the police, had an impact.
They're not there yet. It's a work-in-progress. It took a long time for us to build the RCMP and the OPP and the other police forces we have in our nation. They're a nation in a hurry. They want to get there and we just need to continue to help them, but, sir, it's going to take time, as you pointed out.