Beetle:

All good thought pieces, but problems abound.

The underpinnings of effective governance lie in the ends, ways and means of delivering it.

Assuming the night of long knives occurred, what then?

A handful of MSI contractors might engage the Afghan ministries to show them what they know? How to optimize profit performance under a US AID contract mechanism? How to capture a greater share of CERP?

At its core, our civilian effort (both by DoS and DoD) is an "expeditionary" one. Short-term people with quick objectives facing a country with long-term development needs that, in part, are not helped by pushing billions of US dollars into the current civilian reconstruction bureaucracy.

We have a hammer. but is Afghan civil governance a problem for which a hammer can achieve desired results?

Maybe we need a different tool, or a different problem definition?

Steve