I was the vice-chief as we worked from the first agreement, in December 2005, through to that second agreement. The agreement with regard to detainee transfer was a best practice. We worked with the Department of Foreign Affairs and other justice colleagues so that we came up with what I thought, from my standpoint, was a very good, gold standard of a detainee transfer agreement.
The key issue, in terms of the environment in Afghanistan, is that the government has not passed a terror law. They can hold people who have been accused of a crime against the state. I'm not a lawyer. Some of you might be. It is very difficult to get a prosecution against an individual who has been accused of a crime against the state.
One of our challenges is that we have very sophisticated and classified means of intelligence to find out who the Taliban are. We don't turn over people, in my view and in my understanding, unless we have clear evidence that they have done something wrong. Again, we have seen people who we know, through intelligence, clearly have committed crimes. Or our soldiers have actually seen them on the ground having participated in an event, having gunshot residue, or having perpetrated an explosion of an improvised explosive device. Yet putting the evidence together such that a prosecutor and a judge can effect a prosecution so the person stays in jail is difficult in a country that doesn't have a terror law protecting the peace. That's why it's a constant challenge. And every case is different. I would just say to you that I am very confident in the process we've put together to put the cases together the best way we can. But we cannot expose those who have provided information to us or how we have garnered some of the intelligence to find out who the perpetrators of the insurgency are.