 The U.S. went to Afghanistan, of course, after 9-11 and al-Qaeda attacks. Our objective all along has been to try to ensure that Afghanistan remains stable and does not once again become a safe haven for terrorist groups that can attack the U.S. And that situation remains the same, and to me, that's still the rationale as to why the U.S. should remain engaged in Afghanistan and not repeat the mistakes of the past of exiting too quickly and forgetting about Afghanistan because it has a habit of coming back to haunt you. And so, for me, the single most important thing for the U.S. now is to make a commitment to remain engaged in Afghanistan for the longer term, but at more sustainable levels. I think in the past we were probably trying to do too much in Afghanistan, and I think it's important that we not go from that extreme to the other extreme of doing too little. Right now I'd give close to a failing grade to the national unity government. But I would have to put that in the context that they were dealt a very difficult hand, which is an agreement that basically created a bit of a two-headed government with the president, President Ghani, and then a chief executive officer, Abdullah, and an agreement to share power and share positions, which basically set the two groups up to fight. So the government's largely been ineffective, you know, certainly from the perspective of the majority of Afghans because it's not addressing some of the key challenges that ordinary Afghans are facing. Instead there's a perception that the government's basically arguing internally about who's going to get this ministry and who's going to get that ministry. We've always known that when sort of the war and aid economic bubble bursts, it's going to be painful. You know, a very high percentage of Afghans listed economy was contracting for the military and for the aid agencies, and that has gone down dramatically. I mean, a few years ago we had 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and today we have 9,800, and that's had a major impact on the economy. In addition to that, the deteriorating security situation has discouraged other investors from coming in and investing, and many rich Afghans are keeping their money offshore because there's not a good business climate to bring their money back and invest in Afghanistan. So a number of these factors, the uncertainty of where things are heading, deteriorating security, the political gridlock, are leading everyone with resources to take a wait and see attitude, and the international community at the same time sharply withdrawing resources, which has contributed to the sharp downturn of the economy from, again, averaging 8 to 9 percent growth rates in the last decade to only about 1.3 percent last year, and that's being felt in terms of, in particular, urban areas where there's high unemployment rates, and you're seeing that very tangibly demonstrated with the number of Afghans we're now trying to leave, and the number of passport applications has gone up from 3,000 to 8,000 per month in Kabul, because so many young men in particular are trying to go abroad to earn a livelihood. It's a very confusing time for the peace process right now, and a challenging time. There's clearly not a military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan. Ultimately, if there is going to be a solution, it has to be an inclusive political process that leads to some kind of political agreement. That's not to say there's not a role for the military. I think the military actually plays an important role as one of the tools in that kind of negotiating process. But the situation is confused now, because for one, there was some progress towards a peace process in talks, which then got completely derailed when the news that Mullah Omar had been dead for the last couple years emerged, and that led to sort of an internal leadership struggles within the Taliban, which are still not fully resolved. Today, we're just hearing the news, even reports still unconfirmed that the new leader who took over from Mullah Omar, Mullah Mansour, was himself shot in an internal Taliban dispute and was reportedly injured. So it's, again, hard to negotiate with the Taliban when they're still trying to sort out some of their own leadership issues. It's also difficult for President Ghani, because one of the first things he did after becoming elected was reach out to Pakistan with the assumption that he really needs to have peace with Pakistan to get them on board to then use their influence to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table. And President Ghani made many compromises and discussions, but there's a strong assumption in Afghanistan that he did not get much in return from Pakistan in that regard. And so he lost, he spent a lot of political capital in that peace process effort, which, and now I think is a bit gun-shy in terms of doing that all over again. My own view is that the situation is too complex and the various groups are too fragmented to have a grand bargain. I think more realistically, you're going to have a series of agreements with this faction of the Taliban or that faction of the Taliban. But even getting unity within the Afghan government is difficult. We have different groups within the Afghan government with different views on the peace process. And it's still not completely clear what Pakistan's end objective is in this regard. So I think there's a lot of, again, confusion, lack of clarity about what the interests of all the different groups are. We certainly need me to believe that this is going to be a long process, peace process, as most peace processes are. And we should not be expecting, again, a grand bargain in the short term.