The Foreign Service Journal, March 2006

capacity-building programs, which the international com- munity has implemented far too slowly. There is one area of capacity-building that has enor- mous potential but has enjoyed little attention from the PRTs, or from any other source: governance — specifical- ly, provincial administrator training and civil society devel- opment. Effective security forces must operate in the context of good governance for the United States to truly declare success in Afghanistan. The U.N., U.S. and other donors are implementing some training and mentoring programs at the central-government level, but at the provincial and district level there are teacher training pro- grams and very little else. Broadly assessed against these measures, the PRTs are clearly having a positive impact in Afghanistan. But this assessment is still only partially better than the “smiles on Afghan faces” methodology. More robust metrics are needed to fully determine the effectiveness of the PRT program, individual teams and specific initiatives. Such metrics are under development. Finally, for such an assessment to be truly useful, it must not only measure the effectiveness of individual PRTs, but it must look at the relevance of the program to the overall stabilization and reconstruction mission. Will PRTs eventually be viewed as having made a small but positive contribution, or will they be seen as an integral component of stabilization and reconstruction operations in Afghanistan? Unless their civilian component (person- nel and funding) is strengthened and the number of PRTs or their reach is increased dramatically, the answer will probably be the former rather than the latter. While civilians now play a larger role on the PRTs, they still lack adequate resources and too often play more of an advisory role than a leadership role. Moreover, even after the addition of four PRTs in the summer of 2005, there were only 13 coalition and nine ISAF PRTs. Given Afghanistan’s size (almost as large as Texas), brutal geog- raphy, factional complexities, and continued insecurity, PRTs should have a presence in all but a couple of its 34 provinces, plus in a number of high-priority districts. n F O C U S 72 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 0 6