Sir, the basis for your question is absolutely logical and sound. The ability of President Karzai or his key ministers, extraordinary leaders all of them, to turn their visions for their country, through policy, into a plan, and to implement that plan with a civil service, is extremely low. The Taliban either killed all those bureaucrats or drove them out of their country. They're living in the United States or Canada or western Europe.
So any help they can get at all is incredibly valuable. It allows their capacity to be built to actually govern effectively their country better than they can do now.
They have numerous agencies helping, including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank Group, the Asian Development Fund, and the United States Agency for International Development. We have put in a small strategic advisory team, as the minister referred to, composed of about 15 military officers who are simply planners. We have the advantage, I believe, of being the only institution in our country that spends a long time in training, educating, and developing people to plan--from the strategic right down to the tactical in terms of how to take a vision and bring it down to implementation.
They are working for the president's chief of staff and his policy action group, under the over-watch of our ambassador there, to actually help those people turn their vision through a process, just through a process, into something that they actually get an effect from. They're actually walking through how they plan and set up something to deliver their vision, and articulate it clearly in that plan, to put money against it and then deliver it.
We have had incredible feedback on that plan from the Afghan government, from President Karzai himself, with whom I've discussed this numerous times when I was the commander there, and from our NATO allies, who say it's one of the most novel things they've seen, perhaps the most valuable thing they've seen, in the last couple of years in that mission.
So we think we've made a small impact there with planners who simply help plan.