I think it's a deep, and in some respects worrying, question, or at least the answer is.
It's not just “our side”, if we can say it that way, that's learning lessons from these operations; so is the other side, or the many other sides. One of the lessons they may be learning is that we're not up to this kind of stuff; we will back off unless it's very close to home. It's very close to home in Mexico right now for the Americans.
The other idea that is worrying to some people is that the Cold War post-Second World War structure that we built for maintaining the security of liberal democracies is fracturing. I've just been thinking these days, given what's going on in Greece this morning and this week and what's going to go on for the next few weeks, that the European Union was a grand idea, and I use it in the past tense. Part of the grand idea was to have one economy--the euro--and that we would all be in it together. Well, now they're not so sure about that.
What is the experience with the Europeans in Afghanistan? Are we all in it for NATO? I'm not so sure about that.
Why are the Americans sending lots of forces into Afghanistan? It's because the other guys aren't going to send the forces in.
We may be approaching a situation where those who oppose liberal democracies see us as weak and divided, reinforced by the actions of ourselves and our allies and others that we are weak and divided.
If I just go back to Canadian....