Thanks for the question.
Afghanistan, as you can understand, is a challenging mission. I don't think we could pick any more demanding from a logistics perspective in terms of how you sustain a force that is in combat, or it was up until the summer and now we're transitioning to a training missing, so the sustainment of peace is real.
It does highlight the earlier question when you talked about how we coordinate with others. Very clearly, as we went into the Afghan mission—and getting back to the point that Afghanistan, in the 2001 moving forward timeframe, was very basic in terms of its capabilities from an industrial perspective. Therefore, when we go in, and we understand that, for us to have the effect that government wants, of course we have to be operational. In simple terms we need to ensure that the support to the soldiers is coordinated.
An example of what we ended up doing ISAF-partner specific is the fuel. Fuel is a huge commodity in a mission such as this. It's not resident in Afghanistan; we have to move it in. That ended up being--or it is today--a NATO-managed contract through headquarters that runs from one of the task forces, the ISAF task force headquarters, that manages the fuel delivery into ISAF. Millions of litres of fuel in a year are being consumed. That is an example of how, instead of all independent nations working independently to bring in their own fuel, which would have challenged each and every nation, working collectively to come together, to have a construct together for that, works. In addition you end up with contracted solutions. For instance, Kandahar, where the Canadians were employed...in the evolution of that support, you ended up actually giving a contracted solution for some of what we call real-life support, so the feeding, for instance, and some of the other basic services in and around the air field.
That combination of complex contracting, or coalition contracting, in line with agreements with other nations as you come together to solve problems is really important and essential in today's dynamic, and specifically in coalition ops.