After my admittedly scanty experience -- a week in a forward operating base in Arghandab, a district just north of Kandahar, and three days each in Kabul and the Kandahar Airfield, a huge coalition military base -- I am prepared to hazard a few generalizations. One is that Americans are a lot more hopeful than Afghans. Lt. Col. Guy Jones, commanding officer of the 2-508 Battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division, which operates out of Arghandab, assured me that the Taliban, a rural insurgency, was a losing proposition in the country's increasingly cosmopolitan urban centers, including Kandahar (which the Taliban now grips in a reign of terror). Kevin Melton, the very thoughtful, young, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) official who serves on Arghandab's three-man "district support team," is persuaded that the slow knitting-together of the sinews of governance that he sees there can be, and will be, duplicated across the country.

Plausible enough, but try telling that to the villagers who gather outside the district governor's office every morning. Their stories mostly have to do with "night letters" posted by the Taliban threatening those who collaborate with coalition forces, or corrupt contractors, or illiterate teachers. Try District Governor Haji Abdul Jabar himself, who assured me that the district shura -- his parliament -- was useless and security so bad he could barely travel around the area.

So did I come down on the side of the Afghans, who lived the "ground truth," as we say here at ForeignPolicy.com? Not altogether; both points of view felt predetermined. Americans are, of course, inveterate optimists, addicted to their own version of the mission civilisatrice. They approach each new venture with the blithe enthusiasm of a civil engineer mapping out a road through impassable terrain. Sometimes it works; mostly it doesn't. But hope springs eternal. Afghans, of course, are inured to, and conditioned by, failure. The foreigners will help the Afghan people? That's what the Russians said. And progress is an unfamiliar idea to people who have almost never experienced it. I once spent time in a village in northern India, asking people if things had gotten better over the years. Sir, no, nothing has changed. What about the paved road? OK, that's new. And the school? Yes, that too. And so on. Progress was something that happened elsewhere, to others.

Of course, not all Afghans despair of their future: The single most hopeful figure I met was Ashraf Ghani, the former finance minister and presidential candidate, who thinks that a combination of domestic entrepreneurs and a wired-up diaspora will fuel an economic boom -- if only the Americans get out of the way. And some Americans, like the USAID official I met at a party at the embassy who assured me that virtually everything her agency did was a grotesque waste of money, seemed almost as complacent in their sense of futility as others did in their optimism. The journalists I talked to generally viewed the civilian side of the effort in Afghanistan -- though not necessarily the military side -- as laughable. Journalists, of course, do see the ground truth. But we have a bias, too: We would much rather be caught out disbelieving than believing. Naiveté is the one unforgivable sin. Whose reputation has suffered for loudly insisting that the surge in Iraq was doomed to fail?

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