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Afghanistan is still an unstable country. It is armed to the teeth: one of the biggest arsenals of weapons and munitions anywhere in the world still. And when the embassy opened here, military power was to a very large extend not in the hands of the new nascent government, but still in the hands of an army that had fought the Taliban but that had been put together on a pretty ad hoc basis, with commanders who had made their names in the Jihad, in the civil war, running the shop. These people are conventionally known as warlords; their rule isn't really as glorious even as that word sounds, but they were calling the shots. One of our challenges as Canadians, when we hit the ground, was to try to give the whole idea of demilitarizing Afghanistan some traction. It was clear armed conflict was not going to break out again. A low level of insurgency was continuing, the Taliban continuing to infiltrate parts of the country and attack any targets they could find, but large-scale war was over. The question was: how were we going to create space for civilian institutions and for the economic life that so badly needs to be restored in this country?

This story has been told before, but it is worth repeating. In August 2003, one of the most obvious shortcomings of the situation at the time that struck Andrew Leslie, Deputy Commander of ISAF, a Canadian and two-star General, as well as those of us in the embassy and other Canadians who were looking at the situation with fresh eyes, was that there were hundreds of tanks, artillery systems and other heavy weapons in Kabul that were not under state control. They were literally sitting in garrisons loyal to factions often determined by ethnic affiliation, led by commanders who were in one way or another loyal to these warlords. As long as the heavy weapons remained in their hands, the leverage, the influence, the impunity of these warlords would remain large.

We raised the issue: shouldn't some sort of cantonment take place? And the initial answer came back from friends and allies who have been here longer than we have. They thought "it might be a little ambitious for the time being," "not sure if the traffic can bear it," it "might be destabilizing," and "these people are quite attached to their weapons after all." We had to go back to the argument several times over, and to be fair there were quite a few people in town who liked the idea and wished they had thought of it themselves.

It took weeks and months to build a small international consensus that this was a policy initiative to pursue. And then it took until the end of the year to get the first heavy weapons moving. But when it happened, it was highly symbolic. It helped to put flesh onto the bone of this idea of demilitarization-that people could and should actually be asked to disarm after 25 years of war. And that by shrinking the space occupied by military forces and by unifying the command under the state instead of a diffuse array of commanders, you could rebalance power inside the country and give the economy, social sectors, civilian sectors of life a shot in the arm.

Eighteen months later, 9,000 heavy weapons around the country are all in cantonment. It took the better part of six months to do the job in Kabul. We thought it would be a couple of hundred weapons systems; it ended up being well over a thousand. On the basis of the momentum of success generated here in Kabul, the international community-and the Afghans as well-fell over itself to extend the concept to the whole country. We stuck with the program, continued to fund it, continued to champion it whenever we could and provide a policy and the pulse required. But in the end it was done nationally, not by ISAF and not with a credible threat of military force, but by Afghans with support from the UN. That showed how quickly this idea gained credibility as people started to realize how much sense it made. And it is a huge achievement. It is one of the headline achievements for the whole demilitarization agenda in this country.