I wouldn't presume to say what the government's responsibility is. I think citizens would expect the government to talk to its professional advisers, to other advisers from other parts of foreign policy, to advisers from the international community, and maybe even to good old academics once in a while, and then form an opinion about the kind of mission we are capable of doing, how we can do it, and so on. They would be looking into the future force. We talk a lot about the present force; we've got to think about the future force.
I would hope that, just as this committee is doing, governments will assemble a history and an experience of what has happened in Afghanistan--how it changed and moved, and how we responded to that--so that we can conduct the next operation more smoothly.
I am encouraged, and maybe Jocelyn is too, at meeting so many young bureaucrats from the Government of Canada, CIDA, and others, in Kandahar and in other places and in the field in other parts of the world. These are foreign policy guys, young people who are getting right into the war business and international operations. They're going to be the civil service cadre of the future who will say to an officer, “I remember when we were together in Afghanistan; we did this and we learned about that, so let's do that again.”
That's what was missing when we went into the post-Cold War era, because hardly anybody outside the military had been involved in any of these kinds of operations.