In my view, the essence of the mission in Afghanistan, stated or otherwise, is to provide and to develop and to maintain and secure the conditions that allow for good governance--maybe not peace, order, and good governance, but at least good governance--so that the individuals and the rural communities and the various parts of Afghanistan can go about their business with some degree of safety. The ultimate mission here, the objective, is to produce a society in which there is adequate governance and accountability for the people.
You can't do that, and we see that, without security. The Taliban, or whoever is directing these operations in Afghanistan, are students of revolutionary warfare and guerrilla warfare and so on. The first lesson enemy commanders understand in these circumstances is you attack the security forces, the police, the politicians, the guy who delivers the mail, the guys who pick up the garbage. You create such administrative chaos that the people feel frustrated, insecure, and frightened, and they leave the arena to the insurgents. That's the kind of mission we're in now. We're not looking for, or at least I wouldn't look for, peace in Afghanistan.
Saint Augustine, whom you may all know about, 1,500 years ago wrote in a nice book that you can have peace any time you want; you just have to do what the bad guy tells you to do. He didn't put it in such gross language, but it's the same principle. You can have peace any time you want.
The people of Afghanistan--or the few of them I spoke with when I was in theatre, mostly civilians, teachers, administrators, and others--don't want peace; they want liberty and stability so that they can run their country in a day-to-day mission. We can deliver some aspects of security for them, I hope, while we're there; what we do when we're not there is, of course, another question. We'll leave it to somebody else to do that.
If that's not too academic, Chair, I think that's the way I would approach that question.