Message from the Editor

A Precarious Posture

His arms akimbo in frustration, his forehead tipped in contemplation, his stance steady despite the crumbling world at his feet, the man on the cover of this RAND Review scans the unstable Afghan capital of Kabul and gazes toward the unruly mountains beyond, as if to ask, “What have we wrought? Where have we gone wrong? Where are we headed?”

He could be speaking for the entire world, or at least for the United States, NATO, and several Central Asian countries that seemed so ready to rally around a shared commitment to redeem Afghanistan in the months following the 9/11 terrorist attacks of six years ago. Back then, swiftly upon the defeat of the Taliban, there were pledges of so much more than troops and money. There were pledges of “This time, we must not walk away.” There were pledges of “We will stay until the mission is done.”

“Has all that been forgotten?” the man appears to ponder as he peers over the precipice. “What, if anything, has been gained?”

Afghanistan today teeters on the knife-sharp edge between victory and defeat, which means that much of the world teeters on the same precarious edge. “The urban areas of the country have seen some improvement,” explains Seth Jones in our cover story, “but not the rural areas. So the population in rural areas end up giving up, and that’s most of the country.”

A political scientist who has traveled through Afghanistan seven times in the past three years, Jones delineates the types of international commitments and diplomatic interventions that have succeeded in the past and that are now required to bring stability to Afghanistan and its volatile border regions. His message, like the demeanor of the man on the cover, is firm yet anxious, as if to assert, “We should know better, so why the delay?”

—John Godges