Afghanistan. The situation is deteriorating. The Taliban is resurgent; Al Qaeda’s presence is rising. The Center for American Progress convened a group of experts from the Pentagon, White House, State Department, and USAID. The Task: to engage in a simulation exercise on Afghanistan. The goal: to rethink the United States approach to foreign policy.

Ashraf Ghani (Chairman, Institute of State Effectiveness): A simulation can give us a learning environment about working together and being able to create the instruments that could marshal various aspects of US national power and translate it into the doctrine of smart power.

President Barack Obama: I am absolutely convinced that you cannot solve the problem of Afghanistan, the Taliban, the spread of extremism solely through military means. We’re going to have to use diplomacy; we’re going to have to use development.

Patrick Cronin (Director, Institute of National Strategic Studies): The three D’s, that’s short hand for a whole of government approach that combines defense, the security element, it involves diplomacy, that’s your foreign policy, and development, that’s your economic program. If you don’t have a whole government approach toward stabilizing a war torn country then its going to be very hard to succeed in the long term.

“Afghanistan has been known over the years as the graveyard of empires. We cannot take that history lightly.” —General David Petraeus

Clare Lockhart (Executive Director, Institute of State Effectiveness): In a space of two days we’re trying to cram a policy debate that would have happened over a year, or two years, in normal circumstances, or in ideal circumstances, but actually such is the enormity of the challenge of the moment is that senior policies are going to have to make.

Mike Waltz: We’re working on a time line that the insurgents and the Taliban and their allies are trying to drive and accelerate, wear the west down, and wear the Afghan government down and essentially out last us.

Vikram Singh, Senior Fellow (Center for New American Security): Afghanistan is probably at its tipping point today. It’s likely that by the end of the year we may have lost the battle for Afghanistan. We certainly won’t have won it, but we may have lost it.

“It’s going to be a long, difficult struggle. In my view, its going to be much tougher than Iraq.” —Richard Holbrooke, U.S. Special Envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan

J Alexander Thier (Senior Rule of Law Adviser, United States Institutes for Peace): We haven’t had the diplomacy on the ground in order to be able to tackle the challenges, particularly the challenges between Afghanistan and its neighbors.

Karin von Hippel (Co-Director, CSIS Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project): Simulations are really important because on the civilian side we do not plan enough in advance. We don’t test different scenarios out as much as we should. So we really need to improve our ability to anticipate, plan for, and really manage these types of operations and we’re so far from where we should be.

Eythan Sontag (Foreign Affairs Officer, Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization): Perhaps now with a new administration we’ll be able to reprioritize the civilian efforts to focus on things like governance, rule of law, and economic and social development.

Clare Lockhart (Executive Director, Institute of State Effectiveness): Most Afghans just want ordinary lives and we need to find as many mechanisms to make sure that we deliver on that. They want good governance, law, order, justice and we haven’t yet put enough focus on how to make those institutions work.

Dr. Reuben Brigety (Director, Sustainable Security Program Center for American Progress): The purpose of this simulation is to help us to understand what fundamental improvements we might get if were able to do things differently in Afghanistan. And I think we’ve been able to do that with a fantastic group of experts that will help us to see things much more clearly to change our policies in Afghanistan.