NOVI SAD, Serbia — As Afghans await the results of the April 5 presidential poll, policy makers in Washington are fretting about whether a new president in Kabul will help clear the way for a long-deferred bilateral security agreement, which would keep a small contingent of American troops in Afghanistan beyond the end of 2014.

The real issue, however, is not whether the new Afghan president will endorse the agreement (all candidates have indicated their intention to sign it), but whether those troops will help protect the many increasingly endangered aid workers who remain.

More than 12 years after America’s longest war began, tens of billions of dollars have been spent on aid and reconstruction projects designed to shore up support for the government of Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai. But for those of us who have worked there — and have seen too many colleagues killed or wounded — the safety of aid workers is just as important a gauge of America’s legacy in Afghanistan as any security agreement. The troops that stay must help secure ongoing development efforts; anything else would be a dereliction of America’s responsibilities.

In 2010, I was working in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz for a consulting company contracted by the United States Agency for International Development. I had been dispatched, with six colleagues, from Kabul; our mandate was to disburse small grants to help earn community support for the fledgling — and often slow-going — efforts of local Afghan government officials to bolster their credibility. We called it “stabilization.”