Afghanistan is, at its core, aspirational, and transformational on the most radical levels---change everything, create new stuff, make things happen which never happened (or even been dreamed of happening before), and do it very fast with people who are not ready for it, and with institutions and structures yet to be defined or created.
I'm not sure that a lot of folks on the military side really understand the profundity of what is being proposed as the civilian foundation for their efforts. Somewhere, there is always a pitch that the real work has to be done elsewhere by somebody else (State Department? USAID? Karzai?) but there is never any clear connection to an actual plan or resource to do this stuff.
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