The events of September 11 and what has happened since have made people understand that even a small, distant and far away country like Afghanistan cannot be left to break up into anarchy and chaos without consequences for the whole world.
The mandate you go with is intimidating and also is a source of respect that you gain, because you have come with this mandate from the United Nations.
The third point is that for some time the UN has been talking about helping Afghanistan in the reconstruction of the country but there has never been any real commitment by the international community to provide resources for that.
There is a firm, clear commitment to provide resources and ideas to enable us to organize the Afghans towards starting the process of rehabilitation and reconstruction.
There is a story which is not being told strongly enough of the Afghan employees of the UN inside the country who are saving hundreds of thousands of lives everyday by their bravery and nobody talks of them.
There is also a natural and very, very strong empathy with the underdog, with people who have suffered, people who have been pushed around by foreigners in particular, but also by their own people.
There is an element of luck, there is an element of trial and error, sometimes you fail, sometimes you succeed. It's not as beautifully simple as it may seem when we are talking about it.
There is an expression now that is commonly used about these so-called internal conflicts which are not really internal, because they have connections to the outside world.
What again I tell my people is that no matter how much you know, it's never enough. You will always discover, after the fact, that you've missed something.
You are dealing with people who have taken the responsibility of killing their own because they think that they are right, they think that they are serving the interests of their people. They not going to give that up easily, just because you've shown up.
