The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2008

rise of the Taliban. This has been bril- liantly documented by two Pulitzer Prize–winning writers: New Ameri- ca Foundation president and New Yorker staff writer Steve Coll and McClatchy newspapers’ foreign edi- tor Roy Gutman, among others. It is thus quite rational for Afghans to be skeptical about the depth of Western commitment to their con- cerns — as opposed to Western inter- est in dealing with the threat from al- Qaida. And as long as they remain doubtful, they will not throw their support fully behind Afghanistan’s transformation. It is therefore very important that NATO members signal, by both word and deed, that there will be no going back to the past. While NATO’s April 3, 2008, Bucharest Summit Declaration used the right words, Afghans will judge NATO mainly by its deeds. Here, they are following a funda- mental lesson set out more than 20 years ago in a very different context by a great American. In 1986, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard P. Feynmann was appointed to the com- mission that investigated the Jan. 28, 1986, loss of the Challenger space shuttle. His minority report made powerful reading when it was pub- lished, and its conclusion speaks to issues well beyond the realms of physics and engineering. “For a suc- cessful technology,” he wrote, “reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” The Afghans cannot be fooled, either. NATO’s abili- ty to match their needs with realistic responses will be an accurate measure of that institution’s value in the post–Cold War world. n F O C U S 40 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 8 The issue of poppy eradication has also become a point of friction between various NATO members and the government of Afghanistan.