U.S. Needs a Stronger Commitment to Improving Afghan Governance

Interviewee:
Stephen Biddle, Senior Fellow for Defense Policy, Council on Foreign Relations
Interviewer:
Greg Bruno, Staff Writer, CFR.org

Full Interview here:

http://www.cfr.org/publication/19936...overnance.html

EXCERPT:

Q: Some of the experts who traveled with you on the assessment group
have already written about their observations. Anthony Cordesman [from the Center for Strategic and International Studies] believes victory is possible if the parameters of victory are properly defined. Did you come away convinced that victory is possible?

Biddle: It is possible, and certainly, the "graveyard of empires" school [referring to the many previous military efforts in Afghanistan that have failed] overstates the degree of difficulty involved. We have some important advantages in this war relative to other counterinsurgents in Afghanistan, especially the Soviet Union. I do think it's possible to succeed. [But] there are two very different requirements for success. One is providing security; the other is providing enough of an improvement in Afghan governance to enable the country to function without us. We can keep the patient on life support by providing security assistance indefinitely, but if you don't get an improvement in governance, you'll never be able to take the patient off the
ventilator. Of those two challenges, providing security we know how to do: It's expensive, it's hard, it takes a long time, but if we invest the resources there's a substantial probability that we can provide security through our assistance. Governance improvement is a more uncertain undertaking. There are a lot of things we can do that we have not yet done to improve governance, but ultimately the more uncertain of the two requirements is the governance part.