over all or part of this country again after what presumably would be a very bloody civil war. different countries in the regions take side. again, the prospect is, i think, is pretty frightening. if we succeed on the other hand, obviously, we are, again, succeeding in a region that has implications and links to the security issues throughout the world. if afghanistan can become the central asian round-about to use karzai s term to where it can be the new silk road, think of the implications for that. we re calling that afghanistan is blessed with the presence of what are trillions with an s on the end, trillions of dollars worth of minerals if and only if you can get the technology and human capital operated and lines of communication to enable you to get it out of the country and all of the rest of that. very big if. there s a foundation of security
on that. obviously that was not the most popular move at the time having been in the center of that and it was a very tough call and we went through a number of very difficult months as you recall because of the level of violence that went up quite considerably as surge forces arrived and as they went into offensive operations to take away the sanctuaries from the enemy that al qaeda in iraq had enjoyed for a couple of years in some cases. it s not unlike a bit of what is playing out here albeit not quite the same scale throughout the country because again the situation here is quite different. when it comes to iran and its effect in this country, are you now considering active talks with iran as it applies to the future of afghanistan? i am certainly not. obviously that would be a huge policy decision but the fact is that president karzai has had discussions with iran. there are areas of convergence.
outlook for the future here. america s history in the region is long but it s also short sided. even as america has a more robust commitment to the war now, i sense a certain weariness and even doubt about what is ultimately possible here with deep debates about whether nation building can work and whether the conflict will end in anything other than stalemate. general petraeus is a military leader with great commitment and great intellectual rigor but you have to wonder whether he has enough time politically to achieve what he thinks is possible here. president bush told people before leaving office privately that succeeding here in afghanistan would be vastly more difficult than even iraq and here we are still fighting in what general petraeus himself said five years ago would be the longest campaign in the long war. the question now for the american public is whether it has the stomach and the will to
if you will, really just began this spring, late spring was when we started to see the operations in central hellman province truly were starting to improve security. taliban fighting hard as we took away important sanctuaries from them and now you can see it expanding into kandahar province and then other areas around the country in the northwest up in the north and all of these are small pockets of progress. can t you understand the american people for nine years have been hearing about incremental progress in afghanistan and remain confused, frustrated, and not invested. i can understand it. in fact, that s why i have sought to explain over the last 18 months what we have sought to do in afghanistan is get the inputs right for the first time. a lot of us came out of iraq in late 2008 and started looking
afghan good enough is good enough and that means having traditional social organizing structures as part of the ultimate solution, if you will, with tribal councils which are quite democratic. they then connect at the district or province level with what goes up to kabul and comes out as well. afghanistan good enough, does that entail redefining, defining down some of the goals for rebuilding the nation? i think some of that was done last year actually during the course of the process that president obama and the new administration led. i think there was a refinement of objectives. a recognition of realities on the ground that need to be measured in what it is that we can actually achieve. that s where this concept again of not trying to turn afghanistan into a western industrialized democracy in five to ten years. if the outcome is like iraq,