Well, if nothing else, I might not be right, but at least I'm consistent in saying for the last three years that come 2011, we will not be in a position to leave the battle group there. We've ground the army into the ground, and we just don't have the numbers to maintain these fourth, fifth, and six rotations of a lot of people.
But we have a tremendous cadre of operationally astute leaders at every level, from the NCO level through the warrant level, from the officers to the commanding officers. So the training role just falls naturally. Considering they're short about 50% of all the trainers they need—NATO is in the thousands short of trainers—to satisfy the perception of the Canadian public that if the army is in Afghanistan it's under intense risk, I would say that a lot of us in here have wandered around the training area without flak jackets and helmets on. That is, it's the safest environment in Afghanistan, period, because what idiot would take on that particular well-located area?
So I hope and pray we will post a significant cadre of trainers—not Omleters, the operational mentoring and liaison teams, as that would get terribly controversial in the House, because they actually go out and do the high-tech stuff with the Afghan troops as they're fighting the Taliban. But individual training of privates and NCOs and officers, and collective training on how to fight together as a group of 30 or 100, or 600 in the case of a battalion--there's nobody in the world that would be better at it than we are.