If I could just take up the first point about insurgencies dissolving, I'd have to say that it's not a rapid dissolution process in Afghanistan. One of the difficulties there is that it won't be dissolved by a general appeal to a population. There is an insurgency that has a political base, a political organization, in fact, multiple organizations. I think one of the lessons is that those organizations need to be engaged.
One of the experiences of engagement with insurgencies is that the more they are engaged at a diplomatic level, the more they modify their demands and move from the fringes into the mainstream. When diplomats first made contact with RENAMO in Mozambique, to use an example of an old conflict, those forces were heinous in the extreme and were understood to be that. There were no redeeming features of a political program on their part, but as we know, that force was ultimately engaged, fought an election, didn't win the election, and abided by the results of the election.
Obviously no two conditions are the same. But I think it reinforces the point made, including by General McChrystal, about a high-level settlement. This is not about a corporal making a deal with a village elder; this is about leadership making high-level political settlements, and I think that's one of the areas in which we've failed in Afghanistan.
In the future, when we talk about Canadian engagement in other theatres, I think that's a fundamental thing that we have to understand. We're not going into military operations primarily or into peace-building operations primarily, but we're going into a whole-of-government or three-D effort, the whole thing across. As Foreign Affairs has said, we should not be entering on a conflict prevention basis or an actual intervention basis without a very clear commitment to the high-level political engagement of our diplomats in the process.