What's Your Problem?

Frontline is running a documentary on the War in Afghanistan. In it, they interview Andrew Exum (of Abu Muqawama fame). Here's a snippet of the Q&A:

One of the very difficult lessons that the military, and also the American people, have learned in both Iraq and Afghanistan is that you can't just throw the military at the problem and expect that things will be solved, especially not in political wars. If the problem is governance, if the problem is a lack of essential services being provided to a population, then the military can't solve that.

So you have to utilize other instruments of national power, whether it be the State Department, whether it be USAID [United States Agency for International Development], whether it be instruments that aren't national power but maybe non-governmental organizations, international organizations. ...

I think this is pretty indicative of why we're in the situation we're in. The problem of Afghanistan is no doubt poor governance, the lack of services, the lack of security, the lack of literacy, drugs, etc., etc. And indeed, for most of those problems, the military isn't the right answer. But this is also not the problem - in the sense that this has nothing to do with transnational terrorism of the type that led us into Afghanistan in the first place. We could shore up governance, provide services and security, and open schools in Afghanistan and we'd still have a major international terrorist problem on our hands.

(AP Photos)