For centuries some regions have been ungovernable because they have none of the infrastructure that enhances communications and control and makes them governable.
At the time of the American Civil War America west of the Mississippi was still ungovernable. Afghanistan has been like the American West, a land of mountain ranges with few passes and plains cut by rivers without bridges best traversed by men who know the use of pack animals and rifles and understand the rules of the tribal territories they traverse and their various denizens.
The countries ring road encircles a central cluster of high mountain ranges that are virtually impossible to cross with vehicles or for that matter with small planes or helicopters
Today that challenge to govern is being met for better or worse with an effort to bring "progress" to shangri la with roads and bridges near the major cities but rarely extending into the hinterland leaving some afghan elders sceptical of our motivations for the last decade of disruption.
The construction projects do bring some jobs and with the jobs an alternative to working for the mujahadin and drug dealers which is somewhat stabilizing in those areas where the work is being done and they do facilitate the movement of goods and services.
There still aren't a lot of uniform international building codes, in evidence, not a lot of skilled or literate workers capable of reading a plan available if there were plans to work from, and very little money or equipment available except in and around the cities.
Villages tend to be very small, organic, isolated, parochial and not terribly well informed about events outside the mountains that encircle their valleys. Its likely that many of the most beautiful elements that survive that damage of war will end up being bulldozed because they are in the way of some city draftsman's plot of where a road should go.
A road being built to Tajikistan to help bring powerlines to the capital
is a part of where all the money we are spending on the war is going.
Some might wonder why the jobs stimulus for Afghanistan takes precedence over the jobs program for America, but the stabilization of this strategically important route for pipelines from the Caspian to China is a part of big picture diplomacy addressing issues like the start treaty with Russia, China's growing need for energy, climate change, fossil water, resource wars, facilitating USAID access to remote villages, ending the influence of mujahadin and drug dealers, breaking bread between the corrupt Karzai government and the Taliban in order to bring law and order to areas outside the walled cities on the ring road and offsets to the influence of Iran and other neighbors.
I think Obama has the big picture on this. Ending the war and bringing the troops home really isn't about the military, the drugs, the bandits, the theocracy we will ultimately leave in control, its really about how much modern infrastructure we can build before we go and how much of it can be maintained and used to get goods to market, sick kids to hospitals, relatives to a wedding celebration, election results returned in a day instead of a month.
In the US nation building took about 200 years, if we get Afghanistan into a condition where we can leave it with the infrastructure to govern, =we will leave it with a better chance to survive.