In early December, U.S. ambassador Karl Eikenberry attended a shura in the Zhari district of

Afghanistan's Kandahar province for the first time. "I've been to all 34 of Afghanistan's provinces, but I've

never been here before, because the Taliban prevented it," he told the local elders. "A year ago, I would

never have believed we could have this meeting, so I congratulate you on your courage."

Zhari district is in the heart of the Taliban homeland, an area so dangerous that the district governor's

office, where we were meeting, is located within the local U.S. military base, Forward Operating Base

Wilson. This was one of the first shura meetings there, since many of the elders had been too intimidated

(or committed to the Taliban) to gather publicly before. But NATO coalition troops had successfully

cleared the area over the past three months; significant weapons caches and bombmaking factories had

been found. The fighting had been fierce at times, extended firefights of a sort that was rare in this

hit-and-run war. Now the action had moved west, as the Taliban were pushed from their ancestral home.

There were still violent incidents — roadside bombs, suicide attacks, an occasional sniper — but the area

was safe enough for markets to begin reopening, and hundreds of Afghan civilians were now willing to

work for $5 a day on local development projects. In the past, they had been too frightened of Taliban

retribution to work for the Americans.

I had first visited the district in April, embedding with U.S. troops in the nearby town of Senjaray, and the

progress was remarkable. The Afghan National Army (ANA) had arrived in force and was conducting joint

patrols with the U.S. Forces — although most of the ANA troops were non-Pashtun, from the north and

west, and needed interpreters to communicate with the townspeople just as the Americans did. Still, I

walked several patrols with the joint forces, and we were able to enter areas that had been off-limits to

U.S. troops in April.

And now, in the district governor's office, I was witnessing the first stirrings of local governance — which

mostly consisted of the elders' demanding assistance from the U.S. government. Some of the demands

were reasonable: the elders wanted reparations for the damage done to local homesteads in the fighting. They also wanted major improvements to the local irrigation system, which channels water from the

Arghandab River into the rest of the valley, a particularly fecund agricultural area. Those projects were

already under way.

But the elders, especially several large absentee landholders from Kandahar city, were looking for more:

paved roads, electricity, cold-storage facilities for their crops. Eikenberry listened patiently to the requests

and promised to do what he could. Earlier, at Kandahar airport, he had listened to demands for elaborate

improvements to the civilian aviation facilities there. The ambassador listens to hundreds of similar

requests throughout the country every day, which raises several crucial questions: After 10 years of

fighting a war that now costs the U.S. upwards of $100 billion — $1 million per soldier — per year, where

do we draw the line? Once we've cleared the Taliban from an area, what remaining responsibilities do we

have — and what should the Afghans be doing for themselves? Do we really need to provide

cold-storage facilities to the world's fourth poorest country? Given the sour U.S. economy and budget

deficits, what to do about Afghanistan looms as a major domestic policy issue for President Barack

Obama this year.

Since returning from Afghanistan, I've posed the "cold storage" question to several senior military,

diplomatic and White House officials. It is a convenient litmus test for the larger questions: What is our

long-term strategic purpose in Afghanistan? How much longer are we going to stay there? How much

more money are we going to spend? There are strong arguments on both sides. "Yes, absolutely, we

should provide cold-storage facilities," a senior military official told me. "They're shipping pomegranates

from Kandahar airfield now. They need places to store them before shipment." (Afghan pomegranates

have assumed an almost mythic value among U.S. officials, since they're the most valuable cash crop

after opium poppies and a suitable replacement for them; the late Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special

envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was obsessed with them.)

"But how do you make things cold?" an Administration official responded. "In order to provide cold

storage, you need an electric power supply, which they don't have in Kandahar province. So do we build

that too? You need transportation facilities. We're spending nearly twice as much on Afghanistan as

we're spending on Homeland Security. We are going to have a serious budget discussion this year,

including the Pentagon budget. We have to look closely at our priorities."

Despite such disagreements, there is surprising unanimity about the military portion of the Afghan

endgame, especially after the successes of the past six months. Within two or three years — certainly by

the end of 2013 — the vast majority of U.S. troops in Afghanistan will depart. There will be a continuing

NATO presence, perhaps 25,000 (mostly U.S.) troops, to train, equip and provide logistics for the Afghan

National Security Forces and to continue special operations against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in both

Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. Kandahar and Bagram air bases will stage the operations and

remain under NATO control for the foreseeable future.

This process will begin, on schedule, in July 2011. It will start, Administration officials say, with a formal

statement from President Obama — a statement similar to his announcement in March 2009 that major

U.S. combat operations would end in Iraq by September 2010 and that U.S. troop levels would be

reduced to 50,000. In this case, the troop withdrawals will be minuscule at first. General David Petraeus

will have all of 2011 to solidify the gains NATO troops have made in the south this past year and attempt to stabilize the other main Taliban stronghold, in eastern Afghanistan. The Administration would like to

see significant numbers of troops return home in 2012, which is, perhaps not coincidentally, the year of

Obama's re-election campaign; Petraeus would like them to stay on for at least another year.

But even if Afghanistan can be stabilized militarily by Election Day in 2012 — an enormous if — the

situation could quickly unravel if the government of President Hamid Karzai remains as corrupt and

incompetent as it is now and if Afghanistan's neighbors India and Pakistan continue to see it as a pawn in

their never ending enmity. Whether the U.S. should even address those long-term questions is the quiet

fault line in the current Afghanistan-policy debate.

No one in the Administration who follows Afghanistan closely believes we can simply "get out," as critics

propose. The U.S. has significant national-security interests in the region. The first, oft stated, is to

prevent al-Qaeda from returning to a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and using it as a safe haven. But

that isn't nearly as important as the problem next door in Pakistan, with a wobbly civilian government that

has more than 80 nuclear weapons and a history of military coups, some of which have been led by

Islamists. Obama signaled his awareness of this larger issue in an interview with me just before the 2008

election: he said that Afghanistan was part of a regional problem and that he wanted to send a special

envoy to sort out the problems between India and Pakistan, especially the dispute over Kashmir. The

Indians, ever jealous regarding any interference in what they consider internal affairs, were infuriated by

what Obama said to me, and he was careful to drop India from the portfolio of Holbrooke, who laughingly

called Kashmir "the issue that dare not speak its name."

But spoken or not, the issue remains. If tensions between India and Pakistan remain high, the likelihood

of a military coup in Pakistan — perhaps one led by al-Qaeda or Pakistani Taliban sympathizers —

increases. And Afghanistan has been a central theater for those tensions. Pakistan's infamous

Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) helped create the Taliban to block an Indian beachhead in

Afghanistan after the Russians left in 1989. It was a clever ploy, putting Pakistan on the side of

Afghanistan's Pashtun majority. In response, the Indians and others supported the Northern Alliance, a

coalition of Afghanistan's various ethnic minorities. The ensuing civil war elevated the Taliban to power.

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, brought the U.S. into the fray and kicked the Taliban out. Ever

since, the Pakistanis have continued to quietly back the Taliban while nominally standing as a U.S. ally;

they remain unconvinced that the Americans will have the patience to stay the course in Afghanistan.

Just before he died, Holbrooke told me over dinner his hopes for an Afghan endgame. (Caveat lector:

Holbrooke was a close friend and my son's former boss and mentor in the State Department.) There

would be no solution, he believed, if the Pakistanis didn't think the U.S. was in Afghanistan for the long

haul. He despaired over working with Karzai's government, but he believed that a credible Afghan military

could be built — with good reason, since the current ANA is, in effect, a larger version of the old Northern

Alliance: more than 90% non-Pashtun. The U.S. has repeatedly assured the Pakistanis that NATO

funding of the ANA will keep the Indians out of the picture. If the Pakistanis perceive a reduced Indian

threat, they might reduce their support for the Taliban. The U.S. would foot the bill for the Afghan military:

$7 billion to $8 billion per year. "But that would be chump change compared to the $100 billion we're

spending now," an Administration official told me.Holbrooke believed tensions could not be reduced without a diplomatic solution. He wanted to cap his

long career with a final haggle — this one with the Taliban themselves, leading to a peace conference

celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Bonn accord, which established the Karzai government in

December 2001. He was at odds with Petraeus about that. The general was looking for something closer

to a surrender than a negotiation from the Taliban, and his remains the default position in the Obama

Administration. Holbrooke was also skeptical about the efficacy of maintaining a large U.S. force in

Afghanistan, although he was curious about what sort of progress I'd find when I visited the Taliban

heartland in December. (He collapsed before I could talk to him, on the morning I returned.) But

Holbrooke and Petraeus did agree on one aspect of the war: cold storage. Both were convinced that

there would never be real stability in Afghanistan until a strong agricultural economy returned. Having lost

his faith in the Karzai administration, Holbrooke hoped a credible government could emerge from the

bottom up, from local shuras like the one in Zhari that Eikenberry met with, from a rural populace that had

moved on from poppies — a funding source for both the Taliban and Karzai's friends — to pomegranates

and wheat.

The fighting season in Afghanistan, I've learned, begins after the opium harvest in April and ends with the

marijuana harvest in late November. When I visited Senjaray in December, marijuana was drying on flat

mud rooftops all over town. The fighting season in 2010 was the most successful for the U.S. since the

very first push, in 2001, that dislodged the Taliban from power but allowed Osama bin Laden to escape.

That initial success was not followed by any effective diplomatic, governmental or

economic-development action by George W. Bush's Administration, and the Taliban returned.

The Obama Administration is in a stronger position now, but still a fragile one. The U.S. military has

proved its ability to clear the Taliban from its best-defended areas; there is a fighting chance that the ANA

will be able to hold those positions. But the Karzai government remains a mess, and there is diplomatic

and development work still to be done. Petraeus is, once again, doing his job. But it is only half of the job

to be done. If the real U.S. national-security interest in Afghanistan is the stability of Pakistan, that is a job

for a master diplomat like Holbrooke — and the true portfolio is the one that Obama mentioned to me in

2008: Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

Obama handled Holbrooke badly, although Richard was — as his good friends know — a handful.

According to Leslie H. Gelb, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and Holbrooke's

closest friend, the President undercut Holbrooke from the very beginning. After Holbrooke read Karzai

the riot act, telling him that he would have to clean up his government and that funds would no longer flow

with no strings attached as they did during the Bush Administration, Karzai called the White House and

said he would no longer deal with Holbrooke. Instead of telling Karzai that he would deal with the U.S.

President's special representative or with no one at all, the Obama Administration caved. Holbrooke

wasn't part of the President's traveling party on two trips to Afghanistan; Karzai was massaged by

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Senator John Kerry instead; and the Afghan President treated both

Eikenberry and Petraeus with disdain.

The question of who will replace Holbrooke is now front and center. There isn't much appetite for the job

among senior diplomats. I'm told that Clinton asked the eminently qualified Thomas Pickering, former

ambassador to the U.N., to take the job but was turned down.Obama may get lucky. It is quite possible that he will have the appearance of an Afghan solution in place,

with tens of thousands of troops returning home, as he runs for re-election in 2012. But if he really wants

to stabilize South Asia and make it less likely that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal falls into the hands of

terrorists, he is going to have to hire a diplomat as skilled as Petraeus is at warfare and give him (or her)

the same amount of authority that Petraeus has. An unstable Pakistan is potentially the world's greatest

security threat. It can't be fudged. It has to be faced.