I do agree. I think that's in fact where we have to go. You have to put the money on the table; you have to put your people on the table at the same time; you have to accept the possibility that there will be casualties; and you have to accept the possibility that a few countries cannot always bear the burden.
Again, as I said earlier, Canada has not always been the best of NATO members. We have done our job in Afghanistan. It has been a costly job. We've done it well. We deserve credit for that, but the complaints we have raised about other countries ring a little hollow, given our past record in the alliance. So I think we have done well. I think we can legitimately point our fingers at some of our friends in the alliance, but what we must draw from this is how we can fix the alliance.
The new strategic concept, it seems to me, really must deal with this head-on and face it, and recognize that burden-sharing is real. We can't expect the Americans to do it all; we shouldn't expect Canadians to carry the entire burden for as long as we did in Kandahar. At minimum, it is scandalous that those German troops won't go out after eight o'clock. You could have rapid reaction forces within Afghanistan that could move quickly by helicopter to an area where there is a crisis. To me, that would seem to be a minimum response one could have, where you have different provinces with different nations running them.
Let's be clear: the NATO operation in Afghanistan has not exactly been a huge success in terms of coordinating different training methods, different operational methods. Some of the flaws in the alliance have shown up rather clearly, and one of the obvious fixes, it seems to me, is to create a NATO civil operations branch, a secretariat or directorate, so that we don't make the same kinds of mistakes we made in Afghanistan the next time around.