Why should we care about the quality of governance in one of the most peripheral societies on earth? Or for that matter, why should we care at all about anything that happens in Afghanistan, let alone consider these to be questions which require onerous input from us? More to the point of this chapter, even if we should answer these questions in the affirmative, is there anything we can do to bring about pos- itive change under the conditions prevailing there? The large and growing degree of unease about the decade-long international engagement in Afghanistan shows that Western publics do in fact ask these questions, and that they are increasingly dissatisfied with the answers they are given by their military-political elites.