The stability of the Afghan Government still is plagued with corruption and plagued with a number of difficulties.

Those gains are fragile and reversible because the problems with the Afghan Government remain.

I fear that the totality of the President's interest on Afghanistan is simply to do what is necessary to finish the job and withdraw.

Absolutely.

It has been challenged. I mean, witness the drone strikes and some other things.

I think this hearing is incredibly important as well. We are struggling with a very, very difficult national security and policy challenge.

But how do we contain that? Which groups are the greatest threat?

We don't have the ability to walk in and say we are going to fix this because there just isn't U.S. credibility in those parts of the world.

I want to emphasize though that although we agree that some degree of conditional military assistance is an appropriate way forward, the scale of leverage we can develop through assistance of the kind that any of us are interested in…

At the end of the day, it is simple to say that what we need to do is we need to win the ideological war.

I am telling you, this is really, really poorly drafted in terms of narrowing it down to a specific set of purposes.