The Foreign Service Journal, September 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2021 37 The embassy was at this time build- ing up to receive the dozens of new staff needed to manage U.S. interests. But already our attention was drifting. Like many of my colleagues, I would be in Iraq nine months later. For a decade the sheriffs and nation- builders vied for primacy in U.S. policy, with Afghanistan at times treated like a partner and at others used as a platform. After the willful neglect of the post-2002 period led to whole swaths of the country falling to Taliban control, the U.S. and NATO adopted more of a nation-building model starting in 2006, with a surge in forces that by 2009 totaled 100,000. Diplo- mats, agricultural advisers and aid workers conducted their own surge, increasing from 340 in 2008 to more than 1,300 in 2012, many working on provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) across the country with their military and NATO colleagues. PRTs were led by a military contingent providing security and mentoring local security forces while their civilian counterparts carried out development and agricultural assistance, institution building and local engagement, and political and economic reporting. The Afghans could do little more than hold on to the roller coaster we had strapped them to, realizing that the seat belt did not unbuckle until the end of the ride. Warlords and Youth: A Decade of Progress I returned to Afghanistan as consul general in Mazar-e Sharif in the spring of 2012, the peak of “expeditionary diplomacy,” to manage U.S. efforts across the nine provinces of northern Afghanistan. Ambassador Crocker had returned, as well, structur- ing our presence around four regional consulates in Herat, Mazar, Kandahar and Jalalabad. Frustrated by the persistent complaint that we had not done enough, we produced a fact sheet on the country’s progress over the last decade: four democratic elections; Afghanistan’s first two appearances in the Olympics in 20 years, with its first two med- als ever; telephone use from 1 million to 12 million; a tripling of access to electricity; education from a million boys and zero girls to 5.4 million boys and 3 million girls; and a wheat harvest that went from 2 million to 3.8 million metric tons a year. It was, by any measure of human progress, extraordinary. And yet it was all very tenuous, and it was matched on the negative side by persistently high levels of violence, a grinding political instability born in large measure of corruption that included high levels of drug trafficking, and structural dependence on outside funding and support. Significantly, the struggle for political pri- macy between the Pashtuns and Panjshiris, and for cultural pri- macy between traditionalists and moderns, remained unresolved. During my travels to each of the nine provinces, I always visited the local university and met with youth, who as part of the Afghan university network came from all over the country, a natu- ral mixing pot of ethnic groups and social classes. The students were bright, hopeful and determined, often traveling at great personal and family cost to attend school. In one encounter we tried to explain the U.S. electoral system, which they found both baffling and encouraging; certainly their much simpler system, they thought, would one day yield a good outcome. Afghans’ determination to pursue an education was not new, but it was something that finally found expression. We also spent a good deal of time with the power brokers and warlords who had controlled the country for the past decades, generally with ruinous results. In one engagement I spent a day We Americans had inserted ourselves between two worlds: one seeking a progressive modern existence for the country and one determined to impose a narrow version of tradition. KEITHMINES The Noh Gumbad Mosque restoration project, shown in April 2013, in Balkh province was funded by the U.S. embassy.