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The fourth question. "Should Central Asian states do more to bring about stability in
Afghanistan? Should their role increase after the Alliance's withdrawal?"
I sort of addressed this in the last question. But let me make another couple of points.
The Central Asian countries are concerned that when 2014 arrives and the Alliance has
a much smaller and different presence in Afghanistan, that they will be left with a problem or a
growing problem of instability, and terrorism, and extremism, and drugs.
So it's very important that the Alliance is clear with them, including me, that we will
have a presence beyond the end of the combat mission. That we are committed for the long
term to Afghanistan's stability. And committed not just rhetorically or politically, we will
have people on the ground doing work to help the Afghans stabilize their own country.
But we will also work with the Central Asian countries so that they can protect themselves
better, fight against and defend against these many threats. So we're going to offer them
more consultation, more exercises, more joint training to help them beef up their own capacity
to handle these problems. And in doing that, we want to create a situation where the Central
Asian countries can engage productively with Afghanistan, and they are trying to do that
to help Afghanistan find its own feet. We don't want to return to a situation that we
hand in the past where, for reasons of insecurity, individual nations of the region took individual
approaches to Afghanistan, which didn't do anybody in the end any good.