The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2008

J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 31 he United States is cur- rently employing all elements of national power to help Afghanistan overcome the legacy of three decades of war and to keep it from ever again serving as a launching pad for terrorism. For those of us here, every day is a 9/11 anniversary. As a constant reminder of our task, two small memorial stones in front of Embassy Kabul mark the resting place of rubble from the Twin Trade Towers. Our strategy is focused on three main efforts: improv- ing security, fostering economic development and strengthening governance. Our challenges are formidable. By comparison with Iraq, Afghanistan is larger and more populous, possesses a forbidding topography and a monumental narcotics problem, and is profoundly poor. The effort is made even more difficult by the lack of infrastructure and by weakened and distorted societal institutions. Finally, we face a hodgepodge of insurgent groups, including the Taliban, derivative Soviet-era resistance groups, cross- border tribes and al-Qaida. While our goal is to help build Afghanistan into a nation that can serve as a force for regional stability, warfighting is still a major part of our activity. Approximately 28,000 U.S. troops, split between Opera- tion Enduring Freedom and the International Security and Assistance Force, and 28,000 NATO/ISAF troops are deployed around the country to fight the insurgency and provide the security necessary to ensure the fur- therance of governance and development. Combat power alone, however, will not lead us to our desired end-state. Its role is to separate the population from the insurgents, providing space for the extension of good government, provision of essential services and stimulation of economic development — our most potent weapons. Our Asymmetric Advantage There has been much ink spilled over the last seven years about how the enemy wages “asymmetric warfare” against us. In his book The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (Vintage, 2008), British General Rupert Smith notes that asymmetry simply means that one side doesn’t play to the other side’s strengths. It is, moreover, a strategy that both sides can employ. For their part, the insurgents use terror to bring about their dark vision of an order imposed by the gun according to half-understood tenets of Islamic law. This F O C U S O N A F G H A N I S TA N PRT S IN A FGHANISTAN : A R EPORT FROM THE I NSIDE T HE CHALLENGES FOR A MERICAN POLICY IN A FGHANISTAN , WHERE THE P ROVINCIAL R ECONSTRUCTION T EAM CONCEPT WAS BORN , REMAIN FORMIDABLE . B Y B RUCE R OGERS , J IM H OPE AND R OBERT K EMP T Bruce Rogers is director and Robert Kemp is deputy director of the Provincial Reconstruction and Local Governance Section in Embassy Kabul, while Jim Hope is director of the USAID PRT Section there.