I'm sure I can address that on a number of planes.
One of the problems we have is that many Canadians have a vision of what's going on in Afghanistan through the media and not actual ground experience. Part of the media's problem is that it tends to focus on the more exciting aspects and not the unexciting aspects of it, which involve the things you're talking about, such as school construction, etc. However, if you have enemy forces wandering around--and I've encountered this myself--they will assassinate doctors and cut the heads off schoolteachers unless there's some form of security. This is what I was talking about before. There's a yin and yang here between combat operations, non-combat operations, and how all this fits together.
So the media has not done its job in conveying these unexciting aspects. We have tunnel vision on a number of issues here.
Let's talk about democracy for a minute. The Afghans have their own form of government at the district and village level that is almost like ancient Greek democracy. We don't want to tamper with that and we're not trying to. So there are already governance mechanisms there that are not Taliban-like and that we don't even have to encourage.
Indiscriminate use of firepower will cause all sorts of problems with the population. That's what the Soviets ran into, and that's what the Americans ran into in Vietnam. We're not doing that here. It may look indiscriminate, but again we're dealing with a media perception of it through a camera lens or somebody describing it. We don't have people who go out and try to get into the heads of the people who are on the ground, in terms of the media, and then convey that to people in Canada. So I think we really need to be careful about the information we're deriving from these perceptions.
We're not out there just to generate a body count, but sometimes you have to kill these people. You have to kill them effectively and give them a bloody nose. How are you going to do that? You just cannot have reconstruction and development unless there's security. It all works together.