I haven't been there. All I can say is this. Afghanistan is clearly a mess, and it ought to be a mess, because it has been a place of constant warfare, insurgency, tribal conflict, Soviet invasion, etc., for decades and decades and decades. I don't think anyone should be surprised by the fact that in Afghanistan today we'll still find corruption and warlordism and all sorts of nasty things going on, and I think it's probably clear that we're going to find these things going on for the next 50 years.
But what is it that we're trying to achieve? We're trying to give that government, which was selected by the people of Afghanistan in votes that were held in front of international organizations that passed international scrutiny, a chance to begin to come back on the road to recovery. I have no doubt--I've read reports of journalists who have been there, I've talked to people who have been there--that people are impatient with the pace of recovery. I can certainly understand that. But we have to focus on what our particular mission is. We are a small country. We don't have very much in the way of resources. We need to focus on what it is we need to do. We need to play our part in the military role to establish security so that the reconstruction efforts can start and succeed, and we need to do what we can with regard to the reconstruction efforts. That's what we need to do. And we need to do it for a period of time that we can sustain, which is not forever, and I don't think it's for 20 years and I don't think it's for 10 years. That's all we can do.
As far as the Afghans themselves are concerned, I think that given time and given security, they will fix their own country. It's in their own interests to do so. I don't know that there's very much more that really can be said about it.
If we are expecting Afghanistan to turn into a liberal democracy overnight with a complete lack of corruption, I think we're expecting far too much and we're setting the bar far too high. If that's what our measure of success is, we'll never succeed. I think that's an unreasonable expectation.