It's a great question.
I was with the minister in Munich on the weekend. We had a number of bilaterals with the Americans, the Poles, the Germans, the Bulgarians, and other people. The interesting thing is that whole of government makes a lot of sense. It's easy to write down on a piece of paper but hard to execute. As much as we kind of struggle ourselves with understanding why it's not easier to make it work, the reality is that we are light years ahead of all of our Afghanistan partners that I have come across. Vice-President Biden was there. General Jim Jones, the new national security advisor, was also there and talked about how the National Security Council is remaking itself to deal with whole of government.
While we have an Afghanistan task force--the Privy Council Office--we have had growing pains. I think you'll see, in the quarterly report that's expected to be tabled toward the end of this month or perhaps a little sooner, just how much progress we really are making. The reality is that a year ago this was probably as much rhetoric as it was substance, but today this is considerably more substance than rhetoric. In a situation where you're trying to fight a war and create space for your diplomatic community and your development community, is it difficult to do the things they need done to turn this into a sustainable effort? Absolutely. It's extremely difficult. But I was astonished, and I kept saying to the minister, let's talk to them about how we're actually doing this in Canada, because we are way ahead of where any of those folks are.
The Americans have a phenomenal story about whole of government in RC-East. I was there last spring. It turns out that the whole of government is the military: “It's okay, thanks, we'll do it all here. We're good. We'll do that whole-of-government thing”. “And I always have a policy adviser beside me”, says the colonel. They're pretty impressive, but by and large it's military.
Somebody talked earlier about the role the military plays. It's not just the fight; there's a lot of reconstruction as well up there in RC-East, Bagram and those places. The military is doing a lot of that reconstruction effort, but it's a whole-of-government story told by only one partner, and there's only one partner at the table. I think the Americans will really want to change that. We have a number of meetings scheduled with them, and I think they'll really want to hear how we actually do that.
So we not only have nothing to be ashamed of in how we do this; we are way ahead of all the allies I've spoken to.