From Act III, Chapter 3

. . . What's provocative, though, about the man who runs ISAF--four-star general Dan McNeill, now on his second tour in the country--is that he's thinking less these days about force and its uses and more about the etiology of a commonly used phrase.

"So whose hearts and minds are we talking about?" he says, sitting in his office in a large colonial-style house at the center of the compound, his boots resting on the coffee table. "I sit here knowing the hearts and minds that I have to accommodate. First, it's the Afghan people. Then it's a group of Afghan--and I won't use the term elite--but they are set apart. . . . Then there are some hearts and minds that are just across the border, in both directions. Then there is North American hearts and minds . . . and European hearts and minds. They're all different. Their views are all different. Okay, so I often ask myself that rhetorical question: Whose hearts and minds?"

He knows that clarifying this struggle and engaging in it effectively should define America's actions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, and more broadly, its role in the world--though he's not exactly sure of a wise first step.

What is clearer--what he has learned six years into this mission--are the limits of what force can achieve. in an hour-and-a-half-long conversation, he runs through the array of lessons learned: the way NATO forces can defeat the Taliban in any head-to-head battle only to find the enemy popping up elsewhere in whack-a-mole fashion; that new roads and schools are used by insurgents for transportation and shelter; and the fact that Afghanistan's growth into an opium capital--providing 92 percent of the world's supply of all opiates--is fueling the insurgency and undermining U.S. efforts at every turn. That last dilemma doesn't necessarily respond to U.S. aid as you'd expect. Helmand Province--the site of both heavy fighting and heavy opium production--has received more U.S. aid in the past several years than all but four countries in the world. Yet, McNeill says, battles rage in Helmand, and the poppy still grows down there "like Kansas wheat." . . .

Dan McNeill was a U.S. general and the commanding officer of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan from early '07 until June 2008. McNeill talks about the experiences of his first year in The Way of the World, offering unvarnished assessments of his and America's role in the country as well as what, realistically, can be hoped for in Afghanistan in the coming years.