Sarah Chayes, who has lived in Afghanistan since 2001, spoke at the Westminster Town Hall Forum at noon Thursday. Her talk was smart but felt like a reminder of how difficult it is for us, who don't live there, to think clearly about a mess like the tangled U.S.-Nato role in Afghanistan. It also left me wondering whether Chayes was thinking clearly about the balance of costs and benefits to the United States of burrowing in deeper to the country she has adopted.

Chayes started out in mythbuster mode, and I realized that I subscribed to most of the myths she was busting. Here are three:

• that Afghans don't like foreigners tromping around their country
• that Afghanistan isn't so much a nation as an ungovernable collection of tribes and
• that corruption is endemic to the Afghan government.

None of these are true, said Chayes, who originally came to Afghanistan as an NPR correspondent, left journalism to stay and try to help the country, founded a co-op that has something to with agriculture and something to do with soap-making, and now serves as an adviser to the U.S.-led Nato forces.  (Chayes does not, by the way, think that the U.S. military should pull out.)

When she first arrived, in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion, the Afghans she met were not xenophobic. On the contrary, she said, they enthusiastically welcomed the international community, realizing that their country needed a lot of help to overcome the previous decades of Soviet occupation, civil war and Taliban rule.

What makes Afghanistan appear xenophobic to some, she said, is that they are unhappy with what has happened since the multinational troops and the foreign aid workers have arrived.

That unhappiness, as Chayes presented it, has a lot to do with the deeply corrupt government that has run Afghanistan since that time. Since the onset of the Karzai government occurred under U.S. auspices, and since the corruption consists largely of the looting by corrupt government officials of international development aid that is supposed to be helping Afghans to a better life, Afghans associate the international community somewhat with the corruption.

Afghans are, in fact, deeply outraged by the government-by-bribery under which they live, which Chayes takes as evidence that this level of corruption is not what Afghans consider normal. In fact, she said, anger over the corruption is feeding support for the anti-government insurgency.

Afghans do have tribal loyalties, Chayes said, but they also have an Afghan national identity. The Afghan nation, she said, was founded in 1747 which, she pointed out, makes it a bit older than the United States. Afghans do not find the tension between their tribal and their national identity to be irreconciliable, said Chayes.

Chayes does not subscribe to the view that U.S. troops have to stay in Afghanistan because the return of the Taliban might somehow make it likelier that the Pakistani nukes will fall into terrorist hands. But she nonetheless thinks the West has to make a success of its project in Afghanistan. Why? She said the struggle with Al Qaida is not about control of territory. It is a war of ideas or perhaps two competing visions of the best way forward for a people like the Afghans. America and the West cannot afford to have its vision be run out of town, Chayes beliees.

I would like to hear more about how this works in Chayes' thinking. But I am concerned that taking on such an analysis would open the United States and its alllies to perpetual wars and occupations and unlimited spending in blood and treasure.