Yesterday was my lucky day. I casually switched on the TV and surfed to C-SPAN (yes, yes, you guessed my age right!). Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top US Commander in Afghanistan and US Ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry were testifying in front of the Armed Forces Services Committee about Afghanistan strategy.

Heavyweight Senators Carl Levin, John McCain, Joe Lieberman et all were ‘interrogating’ the two gentlemen from Afghanistan and as the two gentlemen from Afghanistan were answering the questions, Ambassador Eikenberry said a thing that shook me up.

This blog is about what Ambassador Eikenberry said and not the politics or anything else (is there anything else?) of the proceedings.

The Ambassador said that there were three pillars to the Afghanistan strategy. First was security, second was governance and third was progress.

It just sounded so logical, so sincere and so right.

As long as you don’t have security, nothing else matters. If you can die of a bomb attack or gun-fire sitting right where you are in your home or office and there is no reasonable protection against it, everything else is irrelevant. Any person or organization that has a  role to play must first focus totally on securing the place. There is probably nothing like 100% security but at least the citizen (or user, if you like) must have reasonable assurance that someone is in-charge, rogues can’t get in at will and when someone does attempt to get in, the organization will do everything it can to protect the citizen. The citizen knows and accepts that the organization may not always succeed.

Only when this is established, the organization can think of governing the place. Thinking of what you want to create in this place, putting the building blocks in place, training people, create oversight mechanisms to prevent abuse by carpetbaggers from both sides and build the basic tenets of a society such as trust, collaboration, discipline and accountability.

All this is great and necessary but it cannot put food on the tables of all people in the long run. The resources US can pour into Afghanistan are finite (some folks are yet to realize that) and ultimately, the country must generate its own products, income, jobs and life-sustaining conditions. And this is, simply stated, development.

Coming to what I do in my mundane life, Corporate Governance, Risk Management and Regulatory Compliance and I learned the simple progression that I must follow to help my customers:

1. Provide Security First (don’t even waste time blah-blahing before you do this and make the customer confident that this can work)
2. Establish a Governance framework – Think of the long-term architecture, put the building blocks in place, set the rules, identify and train people who can institutionalize it and build a few structures to address high priority items
3. Tell the customer how it all can be put to work to develop the business, service the customer in more ways and generate long-term, sustainable prosperity.

Brilliant, Mr. Ambassador. More so for the simplicity with which you said it.

I am going to take a break now and go back to C-SPAN.