Thank you, Chair.
I have one question for each of our witnesses. I am very grateful to both of them for their remarks. Because we just finished with Professor Windsor, I will start by asking him about his expertise on IEDs and the effort to counter IEDs and the extent to which we have institutionalized lessons and become more ready to counter both the technical threat—the threat to life and limb from IEDs—and the political threat.
I'd just like to remind him of an interview he did with Maclean's magazine in 2007 when the death toll for Canada was still at 66, when he said:
Really, the Taliban's target when they killed Captain Dawe and his men....
—that was the group of six that had recently died. I think it was the largest group—
...was you, the media. This is because the focus of all western media is on deaths and casualties rather than on successful aspects of the mission, like our reconstruction efforts. As long as the focus is on deaths, the Taliban will look to the Western media as a secret weapon that they can manipulate to bring public opinion to a tipping point of fear.
It was to try to get countries to pull out.
Do you think we've learned the political lesson as well as the technical lessons about how to counter IEDs as well as we should have? Do you think we are readier to encounter them in the field?