“There is pressure on Pakistan to change,” said Scott Worden, the director of Afghanistan and Central Asia programs at the U.S. Institute for Peace. “That’s been tried in the past. A lot will depend on what carrots and sticks are offered to see whether it marks a change."

Afghanistan’s government remains weak, and the Taliban and the Haqqani, another insurgent network, have sanctuary in neighboring Pakistan, making a U.S.-led military victory largely out of reach, said Scott Worden, an analyst at the U.S. Institute for Peace.

U.S. Institute of Peace Vice President Andrew Wilder appeared on BBC News on August 22, 2017 to discuss the Trump administration’s revised Afghanistan strategy. He talked about the strategy's regional approach, including its focus on India and whether it will draw sharp criticism from Pakistan.

Sending more U.S. troops could "buy time for the Afghan government to increase its legitimacy and gain support for the Afghans, which will help them negotiate an end of the conflict,” said Scott Worden, an expert with the U.S. Institute for Peace. But Worden, also speaking before Trump's speech, said more U.S. troops "alone are not going to outright defeat the Taliban. The military components of the strategy have to be coupled with an equal - if not greater - emphasis on managing the politics of Afghanistan and the politics of the region."

“We are there to make sure that we don’t have another 9/11 originate in Afghanistan,” Andrew Wilder, an Afghanistan expert at the US Institute of Peace, told me. He was referring to how al-Qaeda was able to plan the attacks in Afghanistan’s ungoverned places. That’s why he feels it is important to commit US troops to the region: to ensure al-Qaeda or other groups don’t have the time and space to plan that kind of strike again. Trump alluded to 9/11 a few times in his speech, citing the same concerns.

To walk us through what the U.S. faces: Andrew Wilder is vice president of Asia Programs at the United States Institute of Peace.

Trump said we’re not in the business of nation building, but he shouldn’t discount it, either, said Andrew Wilder of the United States Institute of Peace. “Having a democracy there is an important, fundamental to exit strategy from Afghanistan,” Wilder told PBS NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff. “Just killing bad guys — we’ve done a lot of that over 16 years,” Wilder said, but more important is ensuring the country’s 2019 presidential election is legitimate. Otherwise, we’ll see “a descent into anarchy with no legitimate government,” he said.

For the rest, resources have been prey to what William Byrd, a development economist with the United States Institute of Peace, has dubbed "industrial-scale looting".