Let me start.
I absolutely respect the type of work that you were doing prior to your entry into politics, and I have to commend you for that.
I absolutely, secondly, hope you are right in that particular context.
My hope is that what you have said is exactly that we will see the Afghanistan central government extending its reach into the provincial regions, that in fact we will see the moderate individuals that we tend to broad-brush as Taliban—and you know better than anyone else that to say there is one Taliban is just simply wrong—can then be brought in, that we can see development of a type of regime or society that will respect rule of law, that we can wean away from the extremism of the Taliban regime.
My fear is that we are basically entering into a situation that is being exasperated by these international economic drivers, so that we say we're there, we're done, now we're seeing.... We get into the mindset that the Afghans don't appreciate us; look at how quickly they're attacking us on all these issues, for right or wrong reasons. You know better than anyone else that's a misperception, but at what point do we wash our hands and say that's it, just as we did when...? You know the history. You know once the Soviets were pushed out, one of the biggest problems of the west was that our attention went totally away from Afghanistan, and that allowed the Taliban to come in.
Will we repeat that mistake, and then will it be a Taliban...? My suspicion would be they will call themselves something different, because if they call themselves Taliban, that will get people's attention. They'll call themselves something different, but go back to the fundamentalist problem that was created with the filling of that vacuum after the Soviets withdrew in the first place, which ultimately places us back.... Then you combine that with a collapsing Pakistan and all of a sudden we're back into a worse situation than if we had never intervened in the first place.
So that's what I see as the steps that would lead to a military defeat of what NATO was trying to do in that context, following on what you very properly elicited as our objectives.