[House Hearing, 111 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
TROOPS, DIPLOMATS, AND AID: ASSESSING STRATEGIC RESOURCES FOR
AFGHANISTAN
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY
AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS
of the
COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT
AND GOVERNMENT REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
MARCH 26, 2009
__________
Serial No. 111-81
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
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COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM
EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York, Chairman
PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania DARRELL E. ISSA, California
CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York DAN BURTON, Indiana
ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland JOHN M. McHUGH, New York
DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio JOHN L. MICA, Florida
JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana
WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania
DIANE E. WATSON, California JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee
STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio
JIM COOPER, Tennessee LYNN A. WESTMORELAND, Georgia
GERALD E. CONNOLLY, Virginia PATRICK T. McHENRY, North Carolina
ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of BRIAN P. BILBRAY, California
Columbia JIM JORDAN, Ohio
PATRICK J. KENNEDY, Rhode Island JEFF FLAKE, Arizona
DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois JEFF FORTENBERRY, Nebraska
CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland JASON CHAFFETZ, Utah
HENRY CUELLAR, Texas AARON SCHOCK, Illinois
PAUL W. HODES, New Hampshire
CHRISTOPHER S. MURPHY, Connecticut
PETER WELCH, Vermont
BILL FOSTER, Illinois
JACKIE SPEIER, California
STEVE DRIEHAUS, Ohio
------ ------
------ ------
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Ron Stroman, Staff Director
Michael McCarthy, Deputy Staff Director
Carla Hultberg, Chief Clerk
Larry Brady, Minority Staff Director
Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs
JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts, Chairman
CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York JEFF FLAKE, Arizona
PATRICK J. KENNEDY, Rhode Island TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania
CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland DAN BURTON, Indiana
PAUL W. HODES, New Hampshire JOHN L. MICA, Florida
CHRISTOPHER S. MURPHY, Connecticut JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee
PETER WELCH, Vermont MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio
BILL FOSTER, Illinois LYNN A. WESTMORELAND, Georgia
STEVE DRIEHAUS, Ohio PATRICK T. McHENRY, North Carolina
STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts JIM JORDAN, Ohio
HENRY CUELLAR, Texas JEFF FORTENBERRY, Nebraska
DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio
Andrew Wright, Staff Director
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on March 26, 2009................................... 1
Statement of:
Barno, David W., Lieutenant General, retired, U.S. Army, and
Director, Near East South Asia Center for Strategic
Studies, National Defense University; James Dobbins,
director, Center for International Security and Defense
Policy, RAND Corp.; Frederick W. Kagan, Ph.D., resident
scholar, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy
Research; and David Kilcullen, Ph.D., senior non-resident
fellow, Center for a New American Security, and partner,
Crumpton Group............................................. 5
Barno, David W........................................... 5
Dobbins, James........................................... 38
Kagan, Frederick W....................................... 53
Kilcullen, David......................................... 60
Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:
Barno, David W., Lieutenant General, retired, U.S. Army, and
Director, Near East South Asia Center for Strategic
Studies, National Defense University, prepared statement of 8
Dobbins, James, director, Center for International Security
and Defense Policy, RAND Corp., prepared statement of...... 41
Kagan, Frederick W., Ph.D., resident scholar, American
Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, prepared
statement of............................................... 55
Kilcullen, David, Ph.D., senior non-resident fellow, Center
for a New American Security, and partner, Crumpton Group,
prepared statement of...................................... 63
TROOPS, DIPLOMATS, AND AID: ASSESSING STRATEGIC RESOURCES FOR
AFGHANISTAN
----------
THURSDAY, MARCH 26, 2009
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign
Affairs,
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 a.m., in
room 2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. John F. Tierney
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Tierney, Welch, Driehaus, Cuellar,
Kucinich, Flake, and Jordan.
Staff present: Dave Turk, staff director; Elliot Gillerman,
clerk; Andy Wright, counsel; Alex McKnight, State Department
fellow; Margaret Costa, intern; John Cuaderes, minority deputy
staff director; Dan Blankenburg, minority director of outreach
and senior advisor; Adam Fromm, minority chief clerk and Member
liaison; Tom Alexander, minority senior counsel; Dr.
Christopher Bright, minority senior professional staff member;
and Glenn Sanders, minority Defense fellow.
Mr. Tierney. Good morning. I apologize for being just a
touch late. I have to say, I had my jokes all prepared on
General Barno. I was going to say how he was late. With all
that logistical work that he had been doing over in Afghanistan
and Pakistan, he couldn't get here on time. And you ended up
being on time and I ended up being late. So much for that.
I thank all of our witnesses for being here. I thank Mr.
Flake as well. Before we get started, I do just want to mention
that we have a particular guest with us here this morning.
Representative Carolyn Maloney, who does an incredible amount
of work on human rights particularly in this South Asia area of
the world, has a guest in town and that is Dr. Samar. I just
want to introduce her and thank her for her attendance. She is
working hard to guarantee the equality for Afghan women
throughout Afghanistan and doing quite a bit of work on that on
the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. So thank
you for your work and thank you for joining us here this
morning.
We have a quorum present so we are going to begin our
hearing which is entitled, ``Troops, Diplomats, and Aid:
Assessing Strategic Resources for Afghanistan.'' The meeting
will come to order. And I ask unanimous consent that only the
chairman and the ranking member of the subcommittee be allowed
to make opening statements. Without objection, so ordered.
And I ask unanimous consent that the hearing record be kept
open for 5 business days so that all members of the
subcommittee may be allowed to submit a written statement for
the record. Without objection, so ordered.
This morning we are continuing what has been somewhat of a
sustained oversight on this committee with regard to
Afghanistan and Pakistan. We all understand that the challenges
that we face in South Asia are breathtakingly complex.
Oversight of U.S. programs, deployments, and spending requires
an appreciation of the underlying ethnic tensions, historical
grievances, and regional dynamics. The lines of conflict and
the aspirations of the people have unique characteristics that
call for serious consideration by U.S. policymakers charged
with achieving U.S. national security interests.
Problems this complex require that we use both a microscope
and a telescope. As such, the subcommittee has spent
significant time during this opening congressional work period
to examine and investigate Afghanistan and Pakistan from a
variety of different lenses. I know Mr. Kilcullen has noted
that we don't have the usual 9 months that it takes for a
President to transition into office and get his key people in
place. Consequently, just as the President is moving quickly on
this, Congress has to get itself in a position to react to
whatever proposals the administration may make.
Two weeks ago we held a public hearing featuring a panel of
experts explaining the nature of the threats emanating from
Afghanistan and Pakistan. Last week we followed up with a
classified briefing conducted by the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence. Next Tuesday we will hold a hearing
entitled Afghanistan and Pakistan: Understanding and Engaging
Regional Stakeholders that will explore those countries through
the lens of geopolitics and regional tensions and
opportunities.
Today we turn our attention to the kind of footprint the
United States should have in Afghanistan. How many troops, how
many diplomats, how many aid workers do we need? These
questions, all of which involve deployment of U.S. citizens to
a war zone, weigh heavily on those of us with the
responsibility of public service. But at their core, these
questions should be preceded by one fundamental question: What
are we trying to achieve in Afghanistan?
We hold this hearing as the administration prepares to
release its Afghanistan and Pakistan strategic review. Ranking
Member Flake and I have been in communication with the
administration to ensure that the subcommittee receives a full
briefing once this review is finalized.
While the particulars of the administration's strategic
review are still being sorted out, we do know some things. For
instance, President Obama has already authorized the deployment
of an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan. The nature of
any recommendations for increased deployments of military or
civilian personnel beyond this remains a subject of great
speculation and debate, although reports have leaked that
President Obama is planning some kind of civilian surge as
well. Other leaks indicate that the administration new plan
will aim to significantly boost Afghan army and police forces
and to expand covert warfare including air strikes in western
Pakistan.
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let us return for
a moment to what is the most fundamental of questions. What do
we seek to achieve in Afghanistan? One of our recent witnesses
described that our effort in Afghanistan should be a counter-
sanctuary objective. I know some of our witnesses here today
will address that. Under that approach, we would need to
prevent Al Qaeda or like-minded international terrorists from
establishing a safe haven from which they can plan and execute
attacks against U.S. citizens at home or abroad. Putting aside
the fact that Al Qaeda appears to have established a safe haven
in western Pakistan, or has or could likely do so in any number
of other places in the world, and that 9/11 was largely planned
in Hamburg and Miami, it strikes me that a counter-sanctuary
strategy differs greatly from a counter-insurgency strategy.
Eliminating sanctuaries requires a fairly small military or
covert footprint that is focused on disruption and containment.
Counter-insurgency would require huge amounts of personnel and
resources to ensure security and to support indigenous efforts
to exert police power and extend social benefits to an
ambivalent or resistant population.
I have stated before that we find ourselves at an ideal
moment for fundamental reevaluation of our goals in Afghanistan
and our efforts to protect U.S. citizens from international
terrorists. I do not seek to prejudge our witnesses or the
administration's strategic review.
However, I do think that with precious blood and scarce
treasure at stake, it is incumbent on the administration to
come forward with a compelling case for any U.S. commitments.
And it is incumbent on those of us in the Congress to conduct
thorough and thoughtful oversight and to ask tough questions.
In the end, we use the microscope and the telescope to ensure
that we do not use a machete where a scalpel will do.
With that, I defer to my counterpart, Mr. Flake, for his
opening remarks.
Mr. Flake. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Today's hearing is
especially important and timely given what the administration
is going through now with this review.
As we all know, this conflict is in its 8th year. During
that time we have seen progress and we have seen regress. In
the wake of the 2001 invasion, we saw significant security
gains. The Taliban network was largely disrupted. Al Qaeda fled
to the hills. A short time later we saw Afghans actually elect
a democratic government. But in a rather swift timeframe our
military and diplomatic effort, which seemed to be paying off
at that time, but since 2006, progress has deteriorated. Having
visited in 2004 and again this past December, I can say that
the contrast was stark.
As I am sure our witnesses will describe, security has
declined and the Taliban seems to be regrouping. This, of
course, raises serious questions whether Al Qaeda will be
resurgent as well. If the Taliban is, perhaps Al Qaeda is. With
an estimated 1,400 NGO's operating in Afghanistan--and I found
that number difficult to believe but I am told that is
correct--some 1,400 NGO's operating, nearly 38,000 U.S. troops
on the ground, and billions spent, we need to be getting it
right. It is time for a fresh look.
Since taking office, President Obama seems to have shifted
policy in Afghanistan. On February 17th, he ordered 17,000
additional troops. This will bring the number of U.S. troops to
approximately 55,000, the largest number ever deployed in that
country. After having ordered these troops into combat,
however, the President will receive the results of a high level
review of U.S. policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan. It seems
that following the decision to dispatch additional troops, the
administration will determine what the policy should be. And as
we mentioned in the last hearing, it seems a little backward to
be planning to deploy troops before we have a strategy. But I
hope that this hearing will shed some light on that.
Today I think we are hearing from what is probably the most
qualified group that has addressed this issue in a while. Dr.
Kagan in particular just returned from 8 days, I know, in
Afghanistan on the ground. With the encouragement and support
of General David Petraeus, Dr. Kagan and the other experts in
his party were able to travel widely and observe many aspects
of ongoing operations. He has published a lengthy review of his
findings and I look forward to hearing his testimony today. And
that goes for all of the witnesses as well.
As you mentioned, Mr. Chairman, we have contacted those in
the administration and hope to be apprised as the details
emerge on this new strategy. I look forward to this hearing and
thank you for convening it.
Mr. Tierney. Thank you very much. Again, I want to receive
testimony now from the witnesses that are here. Mr. Flake makes
an excellent point that all of you spent a considerable amount
of time in theater. I think that sometimes the public doesn't
really get that the people that we invite in to give us advice
and counsel actually take very risky assignments over there for
lengthy periods of time. You go places oftentimes where Members
of Congress aren't able to go or don't have the time to really
focus on and spend as much concerted effort there as you have
done. So we appreciate the risks that you take and the efforts
that you make.
I am going to introduce the panel right across the board
here, and then we will start going from my left to right.
But first with us is Lieutenant General David W. Barno of
the U.S. Army, retired. He is the Director of the Near East
South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense
University. From 2003 to 2005, General Barno commanded over
20,000 United States and Coalition forces in the Combined
Forces Command-Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring
Freedom. General Barno holds a Bachelor of Science from the
U.S. Military Academy at West Point and a Masters in National
Security Studies from Georgetown University.
Ambassador James Dobbins joins us again here. He is the
Director of the International Security and Defense Policy
Center at the RAND Corp. Ambassador Dobbins concluded his last
stint of distinguished Government service as Special Envoy for
Afghanistan and then as representative to the Afghan opposition
following September 11, 2001. Ambassador Dobbins holds a B.S.
in International Affairs from Georgetown University School of
Foreign Service. He has testified previously before our
subcommittee. We welcome you back.
Dr. Frederick W. Kagan is a Resident Scholar at the
American Enterprise Institute. He served as an Associate
Professor of Military History at the U.S. Military Academy at
West Point. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Soviet and
East European Studies and a Ph.D. in Russian and Soviet
Military History from Yale University.
Dr. David Kilcullen is a partner at the Crumpton Group, a
strategic advisory firm based in Washington, DC. He has
previously served as a Senior Counter-Insurgency Advisor to the
Multinational Force-Iraq under the command of General Petraeus
and as a Counter-Insurgency Advisor to then Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice. A native of Australia, Dr. Kilcullen holds a
Ph.D. in Politics from the University of New South Wales.
Again, I want to thank all of you for making yourselves
available today and for sharing your substantial expertise. It
is the policy of the subcommittee to swear you in before you
testify so I ask you to please stand and raise your right
hands. I don't think any of you have anybody else that is
assisting in your testimony.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Tierney. Thank you. The record will reflect that all of
the witnesses answered in the affirmative.
I will just tell those of you, I think you all know that
your full written statement will be put into the hearing
record. Some of the statements are quite long. In fact, some
have introduced a chapter in a book. I suspect we are not going
to listen to the entire chapter on that. But we ask that you
keep your remarks as close to 5 minutes as you can. We are as
liberal as we can be on that because we want to hear what you
have to say. Then we will move to questions and answers.
General, if we could start with you, please?
STATEMENTS OF DAVID W. BARNO, LIEUTENANT GENERAL, RETIRED, U.S.
ARMY, AND DIRECTOR, NEAR EAST SOUTH ASIA CENTER FOR STRATEGIC
STUDIES, NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY; JAMES DOBBINS, DIRECTOR,
CENTER FOR INTERNATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE POLICY, RAND
CORP.; FREDERICK W. KAGAN, PH.D., RESIDENT SCHOLAR, AMERICAN
ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH; AND DAVID
KILCULLEN, PH.D., SENIOR NON-RESIDENT FELLOW, CENTER FOR A NEW
AMERICAN SECURITY, AND PARTNER, CRUMPTON GROUP
STATEMENT OF LIEUTENANT GENERAL DAVID W. BARNO
General Barno. Thank you, Chairman Tierney and Ranking
Member Flake. Thank you for the invitation to offer my views
today on looking at strategic options on the way ahead in
Afghanistan and Pakistan.
I continue to serve in the Defense Department in my current
position, but my views that I will express today are my own
personal outlooks. They are informed not only by my 19 months
in Afghanistan from October 2003 to May 2005 as the overall
U.S. commander but also from continued engagement and visits
there including a 3-day trip in January of this year to
Regional Command-South, Kandahar Province, Zabul Province, and
Helmand Province. More importantly, my youngest son just
returned from a 1-year tour in Afghanistan where he served as
an Air Calvary scout helicopter platoon leader in 101 Airborne
Division with 6 months in Regional Command-East in Jalalabad
and six more months in and around Kandahar. So I appreciate
this not only from the perspective of a former commander there
but also now as the father of a soldier, as are so many fathers
and mothers out there of our troops that are serving oversees.
And I anticipate he will be returning to the theater sometime
in the next year and a half or so.
I will try and touch on some of my more extensive written
comments in my observations up front here this morning. First
and foremost, I would characterize a bit of diagnosis. I think,
as I have looked at this over the last several years, in part
in the aftermath of the transition to NATO which happened at
the end of 2006, that the overall enterprise in Afghanistan in
many ways has been drifting toward failure. I think the
trajectory that we are on today--hopefully which will be
changed dramatically by the President's planned announcement I
believe tomorrow--the trajectory that we are on today is not a
success trajectory. We have to make some substantial changes in
our approach and the overall, you know, leadership, outlook,
and organization perhaps in the effort to move us toward
success.
I think first we need to talk a bit about what are the
goals in Afghanistan and, to the chairman's question, what are
we trying to achieve in Afghanistan. I generally would
characterize those as five key goals that I think are unchanged
for the United States in many ways from our earliest days
there. The first of those and the most important is that the
Taliban and Al Qaeda are defeated in the region and denied
usable sanctuary in that part of the world. The purpose of
that, of course, is to prevent further attacks on the United
States and our allies. Second, I think Pakistan has to be
stabilized as a long term partner to the United States. It must
be economically viable, friendly to our interests, no longer an
active base for international terrorism, and in control of its
territory and its nuclear weapons. Third, I think a stable and
sustainable Afghan government has to exist that is legitimate
in the eyes of the Afghan people, capable of exercising
effective governance, and in control of its territory. Fourth,
I think NATO must succeed. We have made a commitment that is
irreversible at this point that the military mission is going
to be led through the NATO alliance in Afghanistan. We cannot
allow that to fail. And we must ensure that our objectives
there are cast such that trans-Atlantic alliance is preserved
and that U.S. leadership in that alliance helps us to deliver
success. Finally, I think that we have to ensure the region is
confident of American staying power and commitment as a long
term partner, one that is not going to leave as we have done in
the past but stays there and shares the challenges in front of
our many friends in the region there.
There are three basic first principles that I think we need
to touch on to accomplish this as we look at perhaps some
changes in our approach in the next several years. Some of
these are well known but they tend to be absent in some cases
when implemented. First is the Afghan people have to be the
center of gravity of this effort. We have to focus, I think,
our upcoming counter-insurgency efforts on securing the
population, providing them the time and space to have economic
and political growth, and ensuring that their day to day lives
are viable and that they have hope for their future. Second, I
think we need to focus on creating true unity of effort in the
overall military and civil enterprise in Afghanistan. And that
is not only between the military effort and the civil effort,
but also even within the military effort where we have 41
different troop contributing nations. In some cases we almost
see 41 different approaches to the fight in Afghanistan. We
have to meld that into a singular approach. I think U.S.
leadership is key in doing that. Then finally, I think we have
to take a simultaneous top-down from Kabul and bottom-up from
provinces and districts approach to build success at the
grassroots level. This is often led by our military units,
especially in the southern half of the country which is the
most dangerous portion, what I term the counter-insurgency
zone. We have to build this from the bottom-up and the top-
down, not simply achieve greater success in Kabul.
I think I will pause there and I will defer my comments on
Pakistan until we get into the questions and answers. But
Pakistan is obviously part of the problem and part of the
solution. I don't accept the idea that we can't achieve
progress in Afghanistan unless we achieve success in Pakistan.
But the two of those nations are very clearly interrelated so
we have to have an interrelated policy that addresses both,
recognizing that they are individual nation-states. And I will
again defer further comments until questions and answers. Thank
you.
[The prepared statement of Lieutenant General Barno
follows:]
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Mr. Tierney. Thank you very much, General. Ambassador.
STATEMENT OF JAMES DOBBINS
Mr. Dobbins. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for inviting me back.
You know, it was only 2 years ago that Iraq was hopeless and
Afghanistan was the good war. Today, Iraq is the success and
Afghanistan is the quagmire. I think it is worth reflecting on
this. What it demonstrates is that dramatic change is possible
and that turnarounds are possible. I think what we have to
focus on is how we can turn around the situation in
Afghanistan.
Now, there are reasons to be cautious. Afghanistan is
larger and more populous than Iraq. It is more isolated and
inaccessible. It is far poorer and less developed. And it has
been in civil war for 30 years.
Yet we still have advantages in Afghanistan that we lacked
in Iraq. First of all, the American presence in Afghanistan
remains more popular than it ever has been in Iraq. Second,
Karzai retains more popularity as a leader in Afghanistan than
any Iraqi leader has yet been able to secure. Third, we have
far more international support for our efforts in Afghanistan
than we ever have in Iraq. Fourth, levels of violence have
remained much lower in Afghanistan than they were or indeed
still are in Iraq. That is right. The levels of violence in
Afghanistan are still somewhat lower than they are in Iraq.
Fifth, Afghanistan's neighbors and near neighbors, with the
partial exception of Pakistan, helped form the Karzai
government, fully accept its legitimacy, and wish to see it
succeed. Finally, sectarian animosities in Afghanistan are less
intense than in Iraq.
Now, these conditions are changing and for the most part
they are changing for the worse. Afghans are becoming
increasingly critical of our presence. President Karzai is
losing domestic and international support. Violence is
increasing and civilian casualties are climbing, threatening to
generate new refugee flows and exacerbate tensions among ethnic
groups. Thus the shift in attention from Iraq to Afghanistan
has come none too soon.
In my written testimony I have suggested eight different
tacks that we should be taking, some of which I think the
administration either has or is about to embrace. I will only
name them here and be happy to go into greater detail in
response to questions. First of all, I think we need to unify
the NATO and American command chains. At the moment, General
Petraeus is in command of only about half of the forces in
Afghanistan. If we expect Holbrooke and Petraeus to pull off in
Afghanistan what Petraeus and Crocker pulled off in Iraq, I
think we have to make sure that the military side of our effort
and the Allied effort is under his control. Second, I think we
need to do the same on the civilian side. Congressman Flake
noted that we have 1,400--or was it 14,000, I can't quite
remember--NGO's. That is just symptomatic of the effort that is
needed to coordinate the civilian effort. Third, we need to
bolster both the civilian as well as the American military
presence in Afghanistan. I do think that is underway. Fourth,
we need to institute a bottom-up component to our counter-
insurgency strategy to complement the top-down approach we have
followed to date. This involves empowering local Afghans to
help defend themselves. It also involves trying to do what we
did in Anbar with the Sunnis, that is to co-opt at least some
components of the insurgency and put them on our payroll
instead of the Taliban's. Fifth, we have to pay more attention
to Afghan insurgent activities in the Pakistani province of
Balochistan as well as the attention we are already paying to
their activities in the North-West Frontier Province. Sixth, we
need to support the upcoming Afghan elections while remaining
scrupulously neutral among the possible candidates. That means
neither supporting Karzai nor criticizing him to the point
where it looks like we are actually opposing his candidacy.
Seventh, we need to intensify our engagement with Afghanistan's
neighbors. Eighth, we need make stabilizing and pacifying
Pakistan a global priority, not just an American priority.
President Obama and other administration officials have
stated that the United States should scale back its objectives
in Afghanistan. If this means matching our rhetoric to our
resource commitments, I am all for it. If it means allowing
Afghanistan's downward spiral into civil war to continue, I am
not. It is possible that a more modest statement of American
objectives in Afghanistan, one focused on ensuring that the
country does not again become a sanctuary for international
terrorists, can help in coopting some of the insurgents who may
be willing to break their ties with Al Qaeda. Such an effort
has to be approached very carefully, however, let it open new
fissures in the country even as others are healed. If
Afghanistan's Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara populations--backed as
they will be by Russia, India, and Iranian patrons--conclude
that the United States is reducing its support for the national
government in Kabul in order to accommodate Pakistani-backed
Pashtun insurgents, then we are likely to see a resumption of
the large scale civil war along a north/south divide which
racked Afghanistan throughout the 1990's and led to Al Qaeda's
introduction in the first place. American commanders may have
local opportunities to bring insurgent elements over to our
side and they should be encouraged to do so. But any effort to
engage the insurgent leadership at a national level needs to be
conducted by the government in Kabul with the support of the
larger international community if this effort is not to tear
the country apart.
How then should we describe America's purpose in
Afghanistan? Our job is neither to defeat the Taliban nor to
determine the future shape of Afghan society. While free
elections, rule of law, capacity building, counter-narcotics,
and economic development may not be our objectives, they are
important components of a strategy designed to protect the
population and win its support. The American purpose should be
to reverse the currently negative security trends and ensure
that fewer Afghans are killed next year than this year. In any
counter-insurgency campaign, this is the difference between
winning or losing. If more Afghans are killed in 2010 than
2009, we will be losing. If less are getting killed, we will be
winning. That is how we will know. If as a result of our
efforts the current rise in violence is reversed and the
populous made more secure, the Afghan people will be able to
determine their own future through peaceful rather than violent
competition of ideas, people, and political factions. This has
already begun to happen in Iraq. Our objective should be to
give the Afghans the same chance.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Dobbins follows:]
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Mr. Tierney. Thank you, Ambassador. Dr. Kagan.
STATEMENT OF FREDERICK W. KAGAN
Mr. Kagan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and thank you, Mr.
Flake, for inviting me to participate in this hearing on this
outstanding panel where I suspect we will find not a tremendous
amount of disagreement.
Mr. Tierney. That is too bad because we really thought we
were going to get a lot of disagreement. But in other words, it
might not be too bad after all.
Mr. Kagan. Well, it is a little hard because I think if you
look at this problem, there are elements of it that are
incredibly complicated and there are elements of it that are
fairly straightforward. If the problem were simply preventing
Al Qaeda from reestablishing safe havens in Afghanistan--and I
don't think it is--and if it were the case that it was possible
to do that with some sort of counter-terrorism approach that
relied primarily on Special Forces and long range missile
strikes--which I don't believe is the case--then we could
actually have a discussion, I think, about alternatives. But
unfortunately the problem in Afghanistan is much greater than
that. It is more significant than that. Also, unfortunately, I
am not really aware of a case in the last 10 years when the
pure counter-terrorism approach has worked. So I don't find
that to be an appealing intellectual alternative to try to
pursue because it has been tried on a number of occasions and
it has failed. Al Qaeda is not actually susceptible to that
sort of defeat, in my view.
But stepping back from it, I think it absolutely right to
ask the questions, why are we in Afghanistan and what are we
trying to achieve? I would submit that the reason we are in
Afghanistan is because of the extremely important geopolitical
role that Afghanistan actually plays in an area that
encompasses a billion and a half people with a lot of nuclear
weapons. The key point here is that what you are seeing in
Afghanistan, among other things, is a great game being played
out between India, Pakistan, Russia, Iran, China, and now us
for regional objectives.
We know well that the Pakistanis are supporting elements of
the enemy groups--both the Quetta shura Taliban and the Haqqani
network--which are, I think, the greatest threat to stability
in Afghanistan. They are doing that for a variety of reasons
but largely because it is a part of the competition with India.
And I don't think that they will stop doing that unless it is
made clear to them that those groups will not succeed and that
there will, in fact, be a stable Afghan state backed by the
West, not just the United States but backed by the West, that
will make impossible the success of the proxies that the
Pakistanis are preferring. And I think it is important to
phrase it in that way because I think that unfortunately it is
not just the case that the Pakistanis are acting defensively
here out of fear that we will leave, although they are doing
that. Even if we were not going to leave, even if they knew
that we were not going to leave, the Pakistanis will still be
concerned about the degree of Indian influence in Afghanistan,
which will be significant. Indian companies invest in
Afghanistan. India has an embassy there which was, not
coincidentally, attacked some time ago. This is not something
that would easily go away. The Pakistanis have to be convinced
not just that there will be a government that they are happy
with in Kabul but that their preferred proxies will lose. This
is an incredibly important thing for Pakistan. And that is one
of the things that I want to emphasize here.
We have gotten into the habit because we have forces
fighting and dying in Afghanistan of thinking about Pakistan as
the country that we need to help us in Afghanistan. The problem
is that has it reversed. The truth of the matter is that
Pakistan is more important to us strategically than
Afghanistan. It is a country of 173 million people and 100
nuclear weapons. And it is host to at least four major
terrorist organizations, two of which are focused on
destabilizing Pakistan, one of which is focused on
destabilizing the entire region, and one of which is focused on
destabilizing the entire world. Now the question is, how can we
best influence what goes on in Pakistan? How can we best
understand what these groups are trying to do? And how can we
best try to address the problem?
Right now we have the advantage of being in contact with
the rear areas of all four of those groups in Afghanistan. When
I was east of the Kunar River a short walk--for an Afghan, not
for me--away from the Pakistani border, it was very apparent
that the degree of visibility that we have on groups like the
TNSM, like Baitullah Mehsud's Pakistani Taliban, like the
Lashkar-e-Taiba, and like Al Qaeda from Afghanistan is
something that is irreplaceable. And if we were to withdraw
prematurely from Afghanistan, if we were to abandon our efforts
there, not only would those groups flourish but we would lose
an ability to understand what they are doing, to influence
their behavior, and to influence also Pakistani behavior toward
them.
That is why I think it is time for us to stop focusing so
much on the region as it can help us in Afghanistan. We need to
understand also the upside benefits of getting it right in
Afghanistan, which include helping generate leverage vis-a-vis
Pakistan in a variety of ways, helping us to get the Pakistanis
to focus on their own internal issues--which we have to be very
concerned about--and also keeping us in close contact with
enemy groups that are a real threat to global stability in a
very fundamental way.
Last, I just want to say, and I know that the committee is
aware of this but I am not sure that the American people are,
the situation in Afghanistan right now is nowhere near as bad
as the situation in Iraq was at the end of 2006. Just to put a
number on the table, the height of attacks in Afghanistan is
less than a quarter of the height of attacks that we saw in
Iraq. I was in Iraq in May 2007 at pretty much at the peak.
Dave Kilcullen was there in much more dangerous positions than
I for much longer in that period. And we both know, he more
than I, what that kind of violence looks like in a society.
That is not going on in Afghanistan right now. And I think that
if we pursue a sound policy and resource it appropriately,
there is no reason why that should happen in Afghanistan. Thank
you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Kagan and the report from
Newsweek follow:]
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Mr. Tierney. Thank you very much. Dr. Kilcullen.
STATEMENT OF DAVID KILCULLEN
Mr. Kilcullen. Thank you. We have four basic problems in
Afghanistan. I thought I would just talk about them quickly and
then directly address your issue about counter-sanctuary versus
counter-insurgency.
I think that there are four key things. First, we failed to
effectively protect the Afghan population. We haven't made them
feel safe. That is especially true in the Pashtun parts of the
country which is basically the bottom half, the southern half
of Afghanistan. Second, we failed to deliver the rule of law
and effective governance to the Afghan people. That is
something that has happened across most of the country. When I
say we, here, I am not just talking about the United States. I
am talking about the whole international community as the
Afghan government because we all have responsibility in that.
The third problem is we failed to deal effectively with the
active sanctuary for the Taliban in Pakistan. I want to echo
what Fred Kagan just said about those points. Finally, we
failed to organize resources or structure ourselves to do any
of those three things. So we are not securing the people, we
are not delivering governance, we are not dealing with the
Pakistan problem, and we are not structured or organized to do
any of those things.
So there is a requirement to reorganize the effort and
there is a requirement to resource it adequately. But we also
have to look at what is our strategy? What are we trying to do
here and is it effectively delivering on those three
requirements that I first talked about?
You put up the dichotomy between counter-sanctuary and
counter-insurgency. That is exactly the debate that I think has
been happening in Washington for the last couple of weeks, so
it is an accurate reflection of the issue. I would characterize
what some people have called counter-terrorism plus as the idea
that we just want to deny an Al Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan
or Pakistan and that what we need to is essentially be able to
strike and disrupt terrorist targets that emerge in that
region. There are a couple of problems with that. I think that
it is kind of a false dichotomy because you actually cannot do
counter-terrorism without also doing a fairly substantial
amount of counter-insurgency.
I hope you will bear with me but I used to do this stuff
for a living so I want to explain to you what happens when an
intelligence asset is working with a Special Forces asset to
target a terrorist. Your intelligence asset has to have eyes on
the terrorist target and it has to know where the target will
be, not now, but in flight time plus preparation time plus
approval time for the strike asset. So if I am the intelligence
asset and my strike asset is a Special Forces unit, if the
Special Forces unit is close by, if it is a 10 minute flight
away and it takes half an hour to get ready and it takes 5
minutes to get approval, then I have to know where the
terrorist target is going to be in 45 minutes time from now.
That is hard but it is possible. If my strike asset is a naval
ship in the Indian Ocean and my strike method is cruise
missiles and it takes me eight to twelve hours to get approval
out of Washington, then I need to know not where the target is
going to be in 45 minutes but where it is going to be tonight.
That is almost always impossible. That is why we didn't get
Osama Bin Laden during the 1990's. That was the setup. We had
intelligence assets on the ground, approval from Washington,
and our strike assets were in the Indian Ocean.
So that means that if you are going to do effective
counter-terrorism, you have to have bases close to the target.
And let us say the strike asset that you are talking about is a
Special Forces unit of 50 people. That means that you have to
have those guys on a base and you have to protect them
effectively, which is probably going to take about a
battalion--about 600 people--and you will need to have lines of
communication, logistics units, and all sorts of support assets
like helicopters and airfields and so on to make that work. And
that means that you need to have a relationship with the local
population because if you are going to have a base in someone's
area, you have to have some kind of relationship with them
where they are willing to give you the information to find the
enemy and so you don't have to continually defend the base
against attack. And that means that you have to deliver to the
population some kind of quid pro quo. Most fundamentally, you
have to protect them against terrorist retaliation for them
tolerating your presence or helping you. But you also have to
help them with governance, development, rule of law, and a
certain variety of other things in order to just function in
the environment.
So what all of that long-winded explanation means is that
it turns out that if you are going to do counter-terrorism
effectively, you need bases in Afghanistan. If you are going to
have bases in Afghanistan, you have to do a certain minimum
amount of counter-insurgency for those bases to be viable. And
it turns out that minimum level is quite high.
The logic that I have just gone through is exactly the
logic that the United States used in establishing air bases in
Vietnam in 1965. We wanted to strike the North Vietnamese using
aircraft. We needed to protect the aircraft. We needed to
secure the areas around the bases. And we found ourselves
dragged in gradually to a much larger commitment than was
initially envisioned.
So the reason I am laying this out for you is to say we can
pretend that we are doing counter-sanctuary. We will actually
be doing counter-insurgency. And I think it is better that we
don't pretend, that we think up front about what the
requirements are likely to be.
The final point would be to say that the numbers of troops
deployed, the numbers of diplomats that you put in the field
and the aid spent--how many dollars you are spending--the
overall raw number of those figures is actually less important
than the effectiveness of their delivery on the ground. Right
now some aid agencies that are working in Afghanistan are
spending 80 percent in overhead and only 20 percent of their
effort is actually reaching the Afghan population. Similarly we
have some allies who are sitting on forward operating bases and
extremely rarely are they getting out and dealing with the
population. An Afghan provincial Governor said to me, look, you
have enough troops to secure my province, you just have to get
off the FOB, the forward operating base. Another meeting that I
was in was between an European ally and an Afghan provincial
Governor. The Allied commander said, you know, we are not sure
that you guys are ready to take control of the province if we
leave. The Afghan Governor laughed in his face and said, if you
left tomorrow the only difference it would make would be that
we would inherit your base. You don't actually get out of your
base and do anything. So it is not just how many troops we
have, it is what those troops do. They have to focus on
securing the population. That means close interaction with
people and delivering effective governance, rule of law, human
rights, all those sorts of things that we need to deliver so
that we can deal with the terrorist threat.
So I will stop there and perhaps put forward to questions
and answers.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Kilcullen and the report
from the New Yorker follow:]
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Mr. Tierney. Thank you, Doctor. Thank all of you for your
enlightening testimony. On that, we are going to go into our
question period here which you are all familiar with.
Unfortunately, we are still stuck in this 5 minute rule but we
will try to relax it as much as we can. And I don't mind if any
of my colleagues have a followup question they want to
interrupt me with on this so we get a subject matter all the
way out.
First of all, you started where we ended with the need to
have cooperation amongst our allies. On these bases we visit at
various times different PRTs and they are operated differently.
You know, wherever you go there are some that never get off the
base. I won't mention any countries but, you know, some have
wine for lunch. You know, they are in there for a 5-month
turnaround period, they hang around, and the locals say they
never get off the base and that as soon as they came into the
rotation and the other people left, the insurgents came back.
Then you have other people who come in and they say this other
group came in and they were very effective in protecting us.
Are we going to be able to exert the kind of leadership
that the United States historically has had with NATO and other
international efforts or are the relationships so poisoned that
is going to interfere with our ability to do that? And if that
is the case, how successful can we be?
Mr. Kagan. Well, the short answer is that the
relationships, I think, are not so poisoned that this cannot be
dealt with. One of the things that I found very cheering on
this last trip on my visit to RC-South was the staff down there
where you have a Dutch commander and a British deputy and an
American deputy and a hodgepodge staff like that. I think there
is an understanding in that area that we have to coordinate our
efforts better and we have to make this work. And I think that
plans to bring in a British Division headquarters down there
will make that easier.
We should remember that we do have allies who are willing
to get off the bases and who are willing to go fight very hard,
particularly in RC-South but also in RC-East. The French fight
very hard without caveats in RC-East. The Poles fight very hard
without any caveats in RC-East. And I think that progress can
be made in RC-South where the biggest fight is. So I think the
relationships are not poisoned to the extent that this is not
fixable.
I think, however, that the command relationships in the
theater are such that this is very difficult. I want to
highlight a point that I think all of us are concerned about,
that the absence of a three star American headquarters in
Afghanistan parallel to the position that Lieutenant General
Odierno held in Iraq under General Petraeus during the Surge is
a major problem. It puts a tremendous amount of burden on
General McKiernan to not only do all of the political
coordination with 41 different nations and 1,400 NGO's but also
to do all of the military coordination among all of the
different units that are going on with an inadequate staff and
with no subordinate operational commander. I think that is one
of the biggest problems that we have had in coordinating this
effort, frankly. And I think that is something that really
needs to be addressed as a matter of priority as we think about
changing our strategy and fixing this problem.
Mr. Tierney. Thank you. Well, to use General McNeil's
favorite term--kinetic--there are a lot of populations of some
of our allies who are sending a clear message politically to
their leadership that they don't want their forces getting
involved kinetically on this. General, what do you think about
the prospects of changing that local atmosphere to enable some
of these governments politically to change the relationship
there?
General Barno. I think the structure we have in Afghanistan
today is basically split between north and south. The northern
part of Afghanistan--and you could draw a line right across the
country, an equator, if you will--north of the equator is what
I would characterize as the stability zone or the peacekeeping
zone. The NATO countries that have selected to go there have
done so very deliberately because their populations, and in
many cases their governments, are only willing to have their
forces in Afghanistan to do peacekeeping.
I was at the Munich Security Conference in February and I
picked up one of the Conference newspapers. There was an
article written by the German Defense Minister. The title of
the article, and it had a picture of German troops in
Afghanistan, the title of the article was Bundeswehr: A
Peacekeeping Force, Bundeswehr being the German military. But
that would have been unthinkable 10, 15, 20 years ago. That was
not what the Bundeswehr was. But then European militaries in
many cases, not in all cases, but in a number of cases have
moved into a political world where their support is only
contingent on the type of missions they do and the only
justification is peacekeeping in the view of their populations.
So if you are in the north, I don't think your population
or your government are going to change and suddenly drop your
caveats and be willing to fight in the south. If you are in the
south, and as Fred points out we have a number of very capable
allies down there with us in the south, they are going to
continue to support that. But they are on a timeline as well.
They are very concerned, from what I heard at Munich, about the
popular will of their nations to continue this fight. So I
think the United States is going to have to continue, and
really I hope the new strategy that comes out will really
highlight reasserted American leadership in Afghanistan. This
will not work without us being behind the steering wheel--with
our friends and allies there--but we are going to have to be
behind the steering wheel. And we in some ways have not been
for the last couple of years.
Mr. Tierney. Do you want to say anything, Doctor?
Mr. Kilcullen. Yes, just a quick comment. I think that we
have spent a lot of time in the last 2 or 3 years, certainly I
did when I was working for Secretary Rice, trying to convince
the Europeans to fight in Afghanistan. I think we have a better
chance of doing that now that there is a much more receptive
attitude to the United States in European capitals than there
was even 6 months ago. But I think ultimately we are not going
to get very far by asking the Europeans to do something that is
politically impossible for them. We should be focusing on
things that they are willing to do which would include
governance assets and aid dollars, but also police. The
Europeans have a very substantial, about 5,000 person
organization that does stability policing, kind of gendarmarie,
carabinieri kind of capability. I expect that to be discussed
in Strasbourg next week.
And more police effort would be an extremely important way
of shifting the effort away from chasing the bad guys toward
protecting the population and displacing the Taliban from their
current de facto role of law and order in the south of the
country. So I think the allies are very important. We should be
focusing them on police, aid, governance. And hey, if they can
give us more military assets that is great, but I don't think
it is particularly likely prospect.
Mr. Tierney. Ambassador, with Mr. Flake's indulgence, we
will let you weigh in.
Mr. Dobbins. Just briefly, I made a couple of suggestions
in my written testimony designed to address the difficulty of
coordination. One would be to create a multinationally staffed
office in Kabul, the function of which would be to coordinate,
standardize, resource, and support the two dozen PRTs in the
country, over half of which are not American. They need a
coordinating mechanism. NATO can't do it because NATO doesn't
do economic affairs. The U.N. isn't going to do it because it
is essentially a mixed military/civilian mission. So it will
have to be ad hoc, something special. We created these kinds of
institutions in Bosnia. We can create one that can funnel
resources and standardize their approaches to the extent that
is possible.
The second, and I mentioned this in my earlier testimony,
would be to create a major NATO command in Tampa to give
Petraeus a major NATO command and to make him responsible to
the North Atlantic Council as well as to the President of the
United States. Thus McKiernan would come under one command
chain rather than the two command chains that he currently
comes under.
Mr. Tierney. Thank you. Mr. Flake.
Mr. Flake. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank all of you. This
was very enlightening. I heard some things that I hadn't
thought of before at all. The first one was Dr. Kagan mentioned
the influence, or the worry from Pakistan about the influence
of India in Afghanistan. How do we address that? Is there a way
for the United States to address that, to mitigate fears that
the Pakistanis may have about Indian influence?
Mr. Kagan. With the caveat that I am not a South Asia
specialist and certainly not an India specialist, I think the
short answer is no. I think that, you know, we have to keep in
mind that Pakistan as a state and the Pakistani military in
particular are defined by the threat from India and opposition
to India. And I think that it is a multigenerational task to
wean Pakistani leadership away from that sense. I think that we
can certainly make efforts and we should certainly make
efforts. People have spoken about a regional security
architecture, trying to find ways of having the Indians and the
Pakistanis reassure each other. But I am skeptical about any
short term benefit from that. So that is why I think the key is
to demonstrate to the Pakistanis first and foremost that the
current strategy they are using--that is, destabilizing
Afghanistan against our interests--will fail, not that it is
not desirable necessarily from their standpoint but, that it
simply is impossible.
Mr. Flake. Thank you. Ambassador Dobbins, I liked what you
said about coordination of the PRTs. I think those of us who
have visited Afghanistan and have seen and met with some of the
individuals involved or have been briefed by them here
recognize that there is very little coordination even among our
own, let alone among the other nationalities that are there.
There seems to be very little sharing of best practices among
them and very little coordination. So it seems to me that we
are wasting a lot of resources. So your idea of having some
kind of coordinating arm seems to make a lot of sense to me.
With regard to the counter-sanctuary, Dr. Kilcullen, you
mentioned that is kind of what we did or tried to do in Vietnam
for a while. What other examples are there of this strategy
being employed? And are there any successful examples? Anybody,
General if you want to chime in or anybody else? Are there
successful examples of that strategy being employed?
Mr. Kilcullen. It depends upon how you define success. But
I would characterize our approach to Somalia as one of
basically counter-sanctuary, also right now and at various
other times in the past, actually, in relation to the Horn of
Africa. The problem with the counter-sanctuary approach is that
one of two things happens. Either you end up focusing solely on
killing the terrorists and forgetting about the stability of
the general region where you are working, and ultimately the
problem gets bigger, or you get dragged into stabilization
operations as we did in Somalia in 1992 and as we did in
Vietnam in 1965, that are designed to support strike or support
counter-sanctuary. And they kind of drag you in which means
that you don't think ahead to what the resources are likely to
be that are required. So I am not aware of any successful
examples long term of a pure counter-sanctuary approach. But we
have tried it in various places. In fact it is a preference
that most Western democratic powers have because we like to
avoid commitments of heavy troop numbers on the ground. It is
not exactly counter-sanctuary but one of the things that we did
in Bosnia in the early part of the fighting in the Balkans was
designed almost like counter-sanctuary, just to contain the
problem and prevent it from spilling over and not ultimately
deal with the main causes of it. Of course, that failed and we
had to engage much more heavily in order to deal with the
problem. You could also characterize what we did in 2005 and
2006 in Iraq as an attempt to walk back to a counter-sanctuary
approach. Again, that dramatically failed and we had to get in
and take control of the environment.
Mr. Flake. General, do you have any thoughts on that?
General Barno. Very briefly, I think in effect what
Pakistan is doing today in their tribal areas is a failing
counter-sanctuary strategy. Because they are not able to or
they have chosen not to have a population centered counter-
insurgency strategy, they are operating simply with strike
operations out there. The effect is that the terrain is still
not inhospitable and the population is not inhospitable to the
terrorists because, you know, the terrorists occupy that
terrain far more than the Pakistani military and security
forces do. So it is a very, very difficult strategy to be able
to execute successfully. I think that most if not all of us
would agree that there is a place within your counter-
insurgency strategy for a counter-terrorism pillar or counter-
sanctuary pillar, but counter-sanctuary in and of itself most
of us I think would say can't be a successful strategy, at
least in the circumstances we have today out there.
Mr. Kagan. May I comment?
Mr. Flake. OK, go ahead.
Mr. Kagan. Thank you. I think just to put a very fine point
on this, we killed many, many senior Al Qaeda leaders in Iraq,
including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2006, and we discovered that
the insurgency or the terrorist groups are able to replace
their leadership faster than we can kill them in many
circumstances. I have heard similar quotes from guys involved
in the counter-terrorism effort in Afghanistan. They are
saying, hey, we have killed 22 HVTs and, you know, they just
bring new ones.
I am not aware of any case where this has worked. We have
tried it at levels ranging from no U.S. troop presence
including, as Dave Kilcullen pointed out, the 1990's in
Afghanistan and recently in Somalia where it doesn't seem to be
working--and it certainly didn't work in Afghanistan--to high
U.S. troop presence surrounding bases with a lot of Special
Forces guys going around and actually killing a lot of leaders
as in Iraq and as the Pakistanis have done in their tribal
areas. It has failed there, too. So I think that it really is
time to say that we have tested this method and that there is a
lot of empirical evidence to think that it will fail.
Mr. Flake. I will wait for the second round for some more.
Thank you.
Mr. Tierney. Thank you. Mr. Driehaus, you are recognized
for 5 minutes.
Mr. Driehaus. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And thank
you gentlemen so much for coming here today. I think you have
appropriately explored the complexities of the situation in
Afghanistan. I had the opportunity to visit Afghanistan a few
weeks ago for the first time and as a former Peace Corps
volunteer who has spent many years in sub-Saharan Africa, I was
profoundly impacted by the poverty that exists in Afghanistan
as well as the complexity of the long term economic
sustainability of the country. That is really what I would like
to get at.
I believe that a surge in troops can, in fact, provide
temporary security for the Afghan populations. However, I am
very concerned about the long term sustainability of our
efforts. I would like to approach it from two different angles,
really: the economic development sustainability over the long
term and also the rule of law.
I was saddened to learn of almost a complete breakdown in
the rule of law. And it doesn't seem to me that our efforts are
very sustainable over the long term without establishing
significant rule of law. Now, that doesn't necessarily have to
be centralized. It could be a decentralized structure similar
to what they have in Botswana where there is a traditional
structure that mirrors a centralized structure.
But when I looked at the PRTs, there didn't seem to be a
lot of consistency with regard to the PRTs. And there is the
ability or the temptation, perhaps, for a great deal of
corruption when it comes to the PRTs dealing with the local
population. When I heard stories of literally bags of cash
being used in development efforts, little alarm bells were
going off all over.
So I guess what I am asking is what do you suggest when you
look at the PRTs and you look at the economic sustainability of
some of these efforts? What steps do you think have to be taken
in order to lead us down a path where the funding is being
accounted for with the appropriate mix between military and NGO
and AID resources? What do you believe is necessary for long
term sustainability on the economic side?
Mr. Kilcullen. I might pick up the rule of law piece if
that is all right, sir.
Mr. Driehaus. That is fine, we will start with that one.
Mr. Kilcullen. Right now in Afghanistan, the Taliban are
running 13 sharia law courts across the south of the country.
When you hear the term sharia law court you think of women
getting stoned for adultery and hands getting cutoff and so on.
That does happen, but actually about 95 percent of the work
that these courts are involved in is what we would call civil
or commercial law. They issue i.d. cards; they issue title
deeds to land; they sort out disputes relating to water,
grazing rights, properties; they do divorce law. They are
essentially delivering the rule of law, mediation, and dispute
resolution at the local level to villages, districts, and
tribal groups.
This has been a very important source of their control
because in a counter-insurgency environment or in a civil war
environment, the population feels lethally destabilized and it
feels like it has no way to be safe. These guys are providing,
you know, a normative system with rules to follow. And if you
follow these rules you will be safe. That is one of the things
that gives them an enormous amount of attraction to the Afghan
population. If you contrast that with our approach----
Mr. Driehaus. Could I ask just for a second, if I might,
Mr. Chairman, the sharia law is obviously based on the
traditional Islamic law. Are there more traditional judicial
structures that exist in the countryside that are based upon
the traditional norms versus sharia law?
Mr. Kilcullen. There are. However, the tribal structure and
the community structure in a lot of parts of Afghanistan is
very heavily eroded by several decades of war and conflict at
this stage. Tribal custom, in some Pashtun parts of the country
a very specific code of behavior, is still valid. But what the
Taliban have tended to do is come in and replace a lot of that
with their own control through a sharia system.
If you contrast that to what we did, the Taliban are
focused on delivering a service to the population at the local
level. What we did after the Bonn Conference, the Italians were
given responsibility for the justice sector and the Germans
were given responsibility for the police. Both those countries
started building institutions at the level of the central
state. So we set up a supreme court and we trained supreme
court judges; we wrote a law code; we trained prosecutors and
attorneys. This is all happening at the central level.
Meanwhile, the Taliban were in at the grassroots delivering
something to the population.
In terms of the police, we built a police academy and
structures of command and control and so on in Kabul but we
didn't deliver effective police, community policing, to the
population at the local level. The Taliban also took that on.
The United States got tired of the German approach in 2005 and
we took it over. We actually made it worse by turning the
police into a counter-insurgency force and sending them off to
fight the insurgents out in the countryside instead of being in
with the population in local areas delivering, you know,
fairness, rule of law, and justice to the population.
So I think we need to be taking is a much more bottom-up
approach that focuses on competing with the Taliban. And you
have to compete with the Taliban on the basis of an agreed set
of, you know, human rights, rule of law principles. The PRT
officers who are doing the rule of law program are hampered by
the overall structural approach that we have taken which has
been top-down. We need to move to more of a bottom-up where we
negotiate with local populations, come to an agreement, and
enforce protection and population security at the local level.
Mr. Tierney. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Driehaus.
Ambassador.
Mr. Dobbins. Just on delivery of assistance and public
services, one of the most effective delivery methods is called
the National Solidarity Program, which is an Afghan run program
to deliver small level projects to villages and towns based on
what councils in those villages and towns say they want. So it
is a bottom-up approach defining the projects and then the
Afghan government delivers the resources. Naturally, it is
being funded by international assistance and so far the United
States has only put in 5 percent of the total and we are 50
percent of the total aid for Afghanistan. So that is a very low
allocation. I think one of the things we ought to be doing is
increasing the resources available to this Afghan run
institution and then using the PRTs to support and facilitate
its activity in areas that are contested.
Mr. Tierney. Thank you. Mr. Kucinich, you are recognized
for 5 minutes.
Mr. Kucinich. I thank the gentleman. I would just like to
make some observations and ask for members of the panel to
respond.
In assessing the reports that we have received over the
last year from Afghanistan, I think it is fair to say that the
hoped for security that we wanted to bring to the people of
Afghanistan doesn't exist. We haven't achieved security for the
people. Currently there is no or limited capacity to hold the
borders. There is no or limited capacity to govern. There is no
real focus on Afghanistan and I would respectfully submit to
the administration that just sending 17,000 troops doesn't mean
that you have refocused the mission.
There are limited military resources available for the
United States of America. There are finite resources with
respect to our domestic economy. We have a poor track record
there with awful strategic thinking. We have a war and an
occupation in Iraq which wasn't necessary and a occupation in
Afghanistan that has been dubious. We still haven't looked at
the implications sufficiently of the fact that Pakistan seems
to be core to so many of these problems to begin with.
Does it cause any of you to start to rethink the underlying
assumptions about our military presence there and what is
achievable, particularly if you look at it though the lens of
historically the British and the Russians? I would just like to
hear your response.
General Barno. Maybe I can dispatch this briefly. I think
it is important also to reflect the broader context of our
participation there. Clearly we all recognize that it was
initiated because of 9/11. But I think the reason that it is
important for us to succeed in this area is because of the
strategic neighborhood showing up on that map there that this
represents. If we look at the global threats to American
security today, I think I could make a pretty reasonable
argument that the principal threat to American security, to the
security of the American people, comes from this region. So in
terms of having military forces there to prevent that threat
from being realized, to roll that back and to reduce that, to
help our civilian counterparts to be able to establish a stable
region that is economically viable and that has a reasonable
degree of governance and rule of law so that it doesn't go off
the edge of the cliff and become once again a launching ground
for attacks on the United States or our allies, I think that is
an extraordinarily important and valuable objective. And our
military forces, again in concert with the civilian dimensions
of this, are, I believe, essential in order to achieve that
objective. I don't see any other means by which to do that. We
certainly have had some problems which I clearly recognize in
the last 2 to 3 years in Afghanistan. But I have also seen what
success can look like in Afghanistan. I think with a revamped
effort here in the next 2 to 3 years we have great prospects to
turn this around.
Mr. Kucinich. Do you see any hazard in which a more
extended occupation would fuel a more extensive insurgency?
General Barno. I don't view this as an occupation. But more
importantly, the Afghans I talk to--and I had this discussion
with Afghan and Pakistani military officers yesterday here at
my Center in D.C.--the Afghans violently reject the idea that
this is an occupation. They want the international forces
there. The polling that is done even in the population very
much supports in the 50 to 60 plus percent range the presence
of international forces there as the only thing that can keep
Afghanistan from descending back into civil war and to chaos.
So this is not viewed that way even though we see a lot of
media reporting that would indicate that. The objective
measures in Afghanistan say that is not how it is looked at.
Mr. Kucinich. Does anyone else want to try to respond to
that?
Mr. Kilcullen. We often hear this graveyard and empires
argument. You know, the British couldn't hold Afghanistan; the
Russians couldn't hold Afghanistan; the Persians couldn't hold
Afghanistan. Why should we think that we will be able to
succeed in Afghanistan. The fundamental difference, which the
Russians never had and the British never had, is that we have a
very substantial level of support from the Afghan population.
There have been some recent polling figures that have
really supported that. I am going to quote to you from the less
positive one. The more positive ones are, you know, let us
discount them and go to the most negative which is the ABC,
BBC, and AID poll that was conducted on January 30th this year.
President Karzai's approval rating in Afghanistan at the moment
is 52 percent.
Mr. Kucinich. How do they poll the tribes?
Mr. Kilcullen. It is a poll across the whole of the country
and it is based on a cluster method. So it is not tribes they
are polling but villages and districts.
Mr. Kucinich. Mr. Chairman, I think it would be interesting
to look at the methodology of some of these polls since they
are being used to try to interpret public opinion.
Mr. Tierney. You should feel free to do so, Mr. Kucinich. I
am sure there are available publically.
Mr. Kilcullen. You can get the poll online and it has a
whole section on methodology, which is worth taking a look at.
There is extensive polling that happens in Afghanistan. I am
quoting from the least positive. Eighty-two percent of people
polled want the current government in power. Only 4 percent see
any benefit in the return of the Taliban. Eighty-five percent
of people think that the Taliban are the greatest threat to
stability in Afghanistan. Interestingly, 63 percent of people
support the presence of U.S. troops which is slightly higher
than those who support the presence of other international
troops. Sixty-three percent is enormous levels of support
compared to anything that we have ever had in Iraq or any of
the other campaigns that we have been in.
Mr. Kucinich. Do you know what the percentage was of the
American people who first supported the invasion of
Afghanistan?
Mr. Kilcullen. These numbers have gone down about 20
percent in the last 2 or 3 years so we are seeing a drop in
support. But it is a drop from an extremely high level. So I
think to say that the Afghans don't support the occupation is
just not based on fact. The Afghans do support the presence of
the international community.
Mr. Kucinich. I would respectfully dispute the relevance of
polling on these national security issues. That is on both
sides.
Mr. Kilcullen. Let me offer two other comments. I mean,
polling is one of the measures we have right now. It is not the
only measure. But if we are going to dispute the polling
numbers we have to have something other than polling numbers to
dispute them with. The other point I would make is American
popular support for the presence in Afghanistan is important
but America is 1 of 41 countries that are contributing to the
effort. The most important player is actually the Afghan
government, in my view.
Mr. Kucinich. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, thank you.
Mr. Tierney. Thank you, Mr. Kucinich. There are so many
questions we are going to ask and we have narrowed the panel
down here a little bit so I think Jeff and I will have a chance
to do that if you have the patience for us.
To keep Afghan support, would there be a recommendation to
limit the air strikes and the raids that have been going on? I
hear people talking about shifting our policy to more of one of
defensive, protective ideas and--correct me if I am going too
far--that we think that perhaps having the offensive, continual
strike aspect of it has not been terribly effective because
they keep replacing themselves over and over again.
But also we are getting the indigenous population more than
a little riled up about the collateral damage that occurs.
Whatever drop in those polls may have occurred may somewhat be
related to the effect of the air strikes and the raids, which
we heard earfuls of when we were over there on our last several
visits and that and seem to have a tremendous impact. That is
understandably not a poll, but it is just various groups that
we talked to.
Mr. Kagan. I agree with you. I think that what we have been
doing has been very problematic, not so much the approach of
going after key leaders, but I think it has to do with very
specific tactics that we have tended to use on the ground. At
the end of the day, night raids on villages are just a really
bad idea unless you really, really, really have to do it. You
run into old Pashtun views about how, you know, when the cattle
rustlers descend on the village at night, every red blooded
young man with an AK has to run out and fight them. And you can
explain to them all you want that cattle rustlers don't have
helicopters, but the fact remains that there is that instinct
to come out and do that. There are other ways of conducting
those kinds of raids. I think that the command is very
sensitive to this.
The issue of collateral damage is a very interesting one
and I would like to just drill down on that for 1 second
because this is a question of a major cultural difference
between Iraq and Afghanistan that we need to understand. The
amount of collateral damage that is being done in Afghanistan
is absolutely trivial compared to the amount of collateral
damage that was done in Iraq with infinitely less complaint
from the locals about the collateral damage. We rubbled
Fallujah and Ramadi and the complaint was not about the
collateral damage on the whole. One JDAM goes astray in
Afghanistan and you have a huge uproar about it. Now, part of
that is because the enemy we are facing has a magnificent
information operation campaign, the best in the world that I
have ever seen. We have not been able to counter that
effectively. But part of it is an Afghan tradition that is
different from Iraqi tradition, Iraqis are much more
comfortable fighting within their population. Afghans are very
uncomfortable fighting within their population centers. That is
why you see rural insurgencies in Afghanistan rather than urban
insurgencies.
So I think this is an issue that can be dealt with by
appropriately modifying our tactics, techniques, and procedures
for these kinds of raids. And I think that you will find over
time that the command has taken this onboard and that
appropriate changes will be made.
Mr. Tierney. Now, I think it is generally agreed across
this panel and the last panel that we talked to that most of Al
Qaeda if not all of Al Qaeda are situated now in Pakistan and
that what we see going on in Afghanistan is various
insurgencies that have more localized ambitions and tensions.
One of the principal arguments that we always hear for keeping
troops at higher levels in Afghanistan is that we can't let
Afghanistan fall to the insurgents because we are afraid they
will invite Al Qaeda back in and that Al Qaeda will have a safe
haven from which they will cause problems.
So I have two questions related to that and that I seek an
answer on. One is, I think that assumes that the problems of 9/
11 happened because of Afghanistan when, in fact, most of the
planning seems to have happened in Germany and Florida. It
certainly could have happened whether or not Al Qaeda was in
Afghanistan. Second, there are other ungoverned areas from
which Al Qaeda is operating right now in Pakistan. It could be
Somalia; it could be Sudan; it could be any number of countries
out there and I have not heard anybody make the recommendation
that we send enormous numbers of troops into those areas and
start any of this sort of tactics and strategies we talk about
here.
So if the principal threat to America, General, as you
said, comes from this region, how is that so? Why is the
principal threat from this region not just by nature the fact
that these people that have bad intentions toward America plan
in places like Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia, Algeria, or wherever
it might be? Why don't we treat Afghanistan the same way we
treat those regions in terms of what actions we take to be
defensive?
General Barno. I think that is a very good question. I
would argue that the threat, to put a fine point on it, is Al
Qaeda and Al Qaeda is resident in this region. They are not as
physically present today in Afghanistan as they have been in
the past but they are very interested in reasserting that
presence. They are in Pakistan because in some ways they have
been pushed out of Afghanistan, mostly as a result of our
response to 9/11. But they are still alive and active. And they
require a sanctuary to be effective. They require protected
areas to think, to plan, to train their operatives, and to have
essentially a home base. Our presence in Afghanistan is going
to prevent that from recurring if we sustain it in the country
of Afghanistan. It is also going to have a positive effect on
Pakistan and their ability to keep pressure on Al Qaeda. In an
unclassified setting we can't talk, obviously, about what the
United States may be doing directly against Al Qaeda inside
those tribal areas. We read about inferences in the newspaper
about that regularly. But I think our presence in Afghanistan
is an insurance policy against Al Qaeda resuming its full
capability in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. If we are not there,
the likelihood of the Pakistanis putting pressure on them and
being effective with that, I think, is extremely low. So
success in Afghanistan will give us a much stronger position
and likelihood of success in pressuring Al Qaeda and hopefully
disrupting and destroying Al Qaeda inside of Pakistan.
Mr. Tierney. Does somebody else want to take a stab at
that? Ambassador. I mean, I still have some questions left,
General, after you gave me that answer. Ambassador.
Mr. Dobbins. I will just say that the proximate danger is
not that Afghanistan is going to fall to the insurgents. That
probably wouldn't happen even if we left. The Indians, the
Russians, the Iranians would support the northern half of the
country.
Mr. Tierney. That was one of my next questions.
Mr. Dobbins. The proximate danger is that the country will
descend deeper into civil war, a civil war on the scale that we
saw in Iraq--which is 10 times higher than what it is today in
Afghanistan--or civil war such as we saw in the 1980's and
1990's--which was probably 10 times higher than what we saw in
Iraq--with five million refugees generated and a sense of
disorder that will invite in extremist elements. I mean, even
if the Taliban were to say, if you leave Afghanistan we will
abandon Al Qaeda, and we left, that wouldn't end it. That would
simply deepen the civil war and Al Qaeda would come right back
in with other extremist elements.
Mr. Tierney. But I guess my point is, you know, when I go
back to my district, here is what a lot of people say: Al Qaeda
is somewhere all the time. All right? They are either in
Pakistan or they are in Somalia or they are in Yemen or they
are in all these places or whatever. So if they go into
Afghanistan, they are just in one more place. You still have to
have a policy but the policy that you have in Afghanistan seems
to be radically different than the policy you have to deal with
the Al Qaeda presence in Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, and Pakistan.
You don't send troops in. You don't build bases. You don't do
all of those things there. That is the part that I am trying to
get at here. You know, you have this huge presence. You are
building who knows how many forts out there of various sizes,
sending in more troops, running around battling Taliban--that
we admit are not Al Qaeda--all in the prospect that Al Qaeda
might move back in. Meanwhile, they have set up residence in
other places and nobody is saying, well, it is in the U.S.
interest to go in full force with the military and the rest of
the Coalition into those places. That is something I never
really got a satisfactory answer to. And, you know, I think it
still begs the question on this. Doctor, do you want to give it
a shot?
Mr. Kagan. I do. I want to make the point first of all that
not all Al Qaeda is equal. There is an Al Qaeda global
leadership cell. It is located in this vicinity. It had
previously----
Mr. Tierney. Located in Pakistan.
Mr. Kagan. Yes. It had originally been located in
Afghanistan. Now it is located in Pakistan.
Mr. Tierney. And you don't recommend sending troops into
Pakistan in a full force of 17,000 or 50,000 and going after
them, do you?
Mr. Kagan. I don't recommend that, Congressman. But I would
say----
Mr. Tierney. But you recommend doing that in Afghanistan
where Al Qaeda leadership is not?
Mr. Kagan. I have never tried to sell the war in
Afghanistan on the basis of that is where Al Qaeda is and that
is where we have to fight them. I think it is unfortunate that
a lot of rhetoric, including from candidate Obama, focused on
that interpretation of the problem. I think that we have to be
able to take a broader geopolitical view of this.
But to address just the Al Qaeda question, we know that Al
Qaeda global senior leadership is in Pakistan. We are working
in a variety of ways to cajole and assist the Pakistanis to
address that problem. What I am here to tell you is that it is
inconceivable that the Pakistanis will be able successfully to
address that problem if we do not keep make Afghanistan
functional and stable. You can't separate these two issues in
that respect. So if you abandon Afghanistan, you are also
abandoning the effort to get the Pakistanis to----
Mr. Tierney. Can you tell me why that is?
Mr. Kagan. Absolutely.
Mr. Tierney. Let us suppose that Afghanistan reverts back
to its historical premise of fighting each other. This seems to
be their natural state in some instances or whatever. That
happens. Why is it all of a sudden Pakistan is that much worse
off than they have been in years past?
Mr. Kagan. Absolutely. First of all, I would make a serious
suggestion to the committee that you hold a classified briefing
and bring in as many of the intelligence analysts and experts
as you can from the theater. Have them lay out for you in
detail how all of the enemy groups there are----
Mr. Tierney. We had that last week. We did that with the
DNI and other people and supporting groups were there. I am on
the Intelligence Committee; I do it on a regular basis.
Mr. Kagan. OK. The groups are heavily interconnected. There
are groups on both sides of the border that are related to Al
Qaeda and related to other groups. In particular, the Haqqani
network is moving in the direction of playing a much greater
role with Al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba and these other very
radical groups than the Mullah Omar Quetta shura is. The
problem is that the Haqqani network has its base in Miram Shah
in the federally Administered Tribal Areas but it has a very
significant support zone in Afghanistan in the Zadran Arc in
Khost Province. Now, if we were to abandon Afghanistan, what
you would find is that the Haqqani network, as an example,
would absolutely reestablish itself in Khost Province--its
traditional strength--and it would then immediately, I can
promise you, provide facilitation and assistance to Lashkar-e-
Taiba and Al Qaeda and provide them refuge from any Pakistani
attempts to go after those groups.
If we can maintain Khost as we are now maintaining it, as
an area which is highly contested but where we are going after
these guys--and I frankly think we need to go after them more
in that area--then we create the possibility, and it is only a
possibility, but we create the possibility for Pakistani
success against Al Qaeda if we can move them in that direction
to actually be decisive in this area. If you don't maintain
control of Afghanistan, then I can assure you that any
Pakistani success on their side of the border will be
absolutely ephemeral.
Mr. Tierney. So you are trying to stop Al Qaeda from doing
in Afghanistan what they have already done in Pakistan and what
they have done in Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, and everywhere else
they have set up base and been able to operate in somewhat
ungoverned territories. You are just doing it in an entirely
different way. I mean, I hear what you are saying in terms of
the fears that they are all going to move in. I just still
don't make the distinction of how we treat all these different
areas.
The other part, Ambassador, going back to your comments, if
your argument is to put the Al Qaeda situation aside for a
second because there is a bigger, larger strategic need for the
United States to be there and mostly it is because we don't
want to see Afghanistan break down into civil war again, what
is your message to the American people? The American people are
absolutely beside themselves in the economic situation that is
going on right now, exhausted from all the time that we have
spent diddling around in Iraq which was a totally unnecessary
place to be, and have now spent 6 or 7 years in Afghanistan
that have turned out to be counterproductive to the point. How
do you sell them on the idea that we just don't want a civil
war in Afghanistan so spend another $50 or $100 billion and
send more of your children over there and maybe you can help
out?
Mr. Dobbins. Afghanistan is not a country which is
predisposed to civil war. It is a weak country surrounded by
powerful neighbors which is vulnerable to their manipulation.
Left to its own devices, the Afghans can get along. The ethnic
and religious and linguistic tensions are not as keen as they
are in Iraq, for instance, or as bad as they were in the
Balkans. It is a geopolitical question. Afghanistan will be at
peace when the Iranians, the Indians, the Pakistanis, and the
Russians agree that they have a common interest in a peaceful,
nonthreatening, functioning Afghanistan.
Mr. Tierney. But what are we doing in that regard? I mean,
I think that is a point you have made in previous testimonies
also. It an excellent point. But, you know, where are all these
countries that probably have a more immediate interest in this
area than the United States does? I mean, it is the drugs that
are going through Iran and India, up through Russian-stans and
into Europe. It is the unsettled area that affects them more
immediately than us. So where are they in all of this?
Mr. Dobbins. They have to be involved. In fact, Mrs.
Clinton has called a meeting of regional powers in the next
week or two in order to sustain a dialog. We had a very
successful engagement back in 2001 with most of these
countries. But Pakistan remained ambivalent and not ready to
really commit to the agenda that all the other countries were
willing to commit to.
There is no short term answer. The long term objective is
to create a regional balance in which all of Afghanistan's
neighbors recognize that a nonthreatening Afghanistan is in
their interests and don't use it to advance their interests
vis-a-vis the other countries of the region. In my testimony I
have a rather elaborate suggestion about how to do that in
terms of an international agreement in which Afghanistan
finally recognizes the border with Pakistan--which it refuses
to do and has consistently refused to do--Afghanistan and
Pakistan promise not to use their territory against the other,
the United States and NATO promise to leave as soon as these
other provisions are accepted, and Afghanistan is declared a
permanently neutral state.
I think this is a viable diplomatic objective. It is not
something that is going to come overnight. But sorting out
those differences is, I think, a key to pacifying the area and
thus reducing the sources that create these extremist groups
that transit the region and in at least one case have global
objectives.
Mr. Tierney. Thank you. One second as I get some
information on what the votes are here for us. There are going
to be seven votes. It will take about an hour on that part. So
do you want to do another 5 minutes and then break and ask
folks to come back or just come back?
Mr. Flake. I think we will have a hard time getting people
back. These are the last votes of the day.
Mr. Tierney. I am a person who will come back. I know you
will come back as well. So can we break for an hour while we
get these votes done? Is that something that you folks are
willing to do, come back for another half hour or so?
Mr. Kagan. Congressman, I am not going to be able to do
that. I have appointments.
Mr. Flake. Let me ask Dr. Kagan right now, if I can, about
the war on poppies there. Is it a necessary role for our
military--I know for the first time a while ago, NATO OKed the
use of strike force to go at these--or is it a distraction? I
noted a very different reaction from President Karzai when we
saw him in December than we did 4 years ago. Four years ago he
said this was the mother of all battles. This time he dismissed
it, saying it was not a problem. In your view, is this a battle
that we have to wage militarily now in order to succeed or is
it a distraction?
Mr. Kagan. Well, it is sort of a little more complicated
than that. I think the problem with the poppy eradication
effort is that it has been sold as a part of the counter-
insurgency strategy. I do not believe that it plays a positive
role in the counter-insurgency strategy. I recognize published
reports say that something like $500 million a year go from the
narco-trade to the Taliban. I expect that is true. When you
look at what the poppy eradication effort can do in terms of
how much money it can actually take out of their pockets a
year, the range is something between $25 and $50 million a
year. That is not going to make a significant dent in their
capabilities over the next few years. Therefore I don't think
that we should see this as part of the short term counter-
insurgency effort. And of course there are negative
consequences from the counter-insurgency point of view of
eradicating poppies and pissing people off.
But I do think that since we are concerned with
establishing a stable, legitimate government in Afghanistan and
since I do think that the popular sense of pervasive corruption
in that government stemming from the narco-trade is a major
problem in its legitimacy, we absolutely have to take this
onboard. I would say that I echo the sentiments of everyone who
has lamented the absence of an effective rule of law program in
Afghanistan. I too lament it and I think it should be a major
focus. I think that having the Afghans convict two senior
government officials--and one of them doesn't have to be
Karzai's brother--of narcotics related crimes would be more
effective than killing thousands of hectares of poppy in
helping establish the government's legitimacy.
Mr. Kilcullen. Could I just make a quick follow on comment?
Poppy production has flatlined in the last 2 years. It hasn't
actually gotten larger. And what we have seen is, in fact, a
very substantial shift in geographical focus where most of the
poppies are now being grown in enemy controlled areas,
particularly in Helmand Province. The other big shift, though,
that we have seen has been a vertical integration. Two or 3
years ago, they would take poppy and turn it into opium paste,
then export the opium paste for sale. Now they are actually
producing heroin in country. That actually creates an
opportunity for the military to be involved in interdiction as
distinct from eradication. Eradication hurts the farmers. If
you take two or three fields worth of poppy and boil them down
to 10 kilograms of heroin, the farmers have already been paid
if you interdict the 10 kilograms of heroin later on. So there
is a role for law enforcement and the military in the
interdiction part of the process. And that avoids a lot of the
eradication issues that we have had. The final point I want to
make is that it is a $4 billion industry. The Taliban gets
about $500 million out of that. The farmers get $800 million.
The biggest beneficiary of the narcotics trade is the Afghan
government, corrupt officials inside the Afghan government. So
until we change that, I don't think we are going to get much
progress.
Mr. Tierney. Thank you. I know that several of you have
difficulty coming back in an hour so I am going to try to fire
off some questions here. Will the Afghan elections be an
appropriate measure as to whether or not our plan is working?
How well they go, is that a metric that people will be able to
judge whether or not what we decide to do now is actually
working?
Mr. Kagan. No, I don't think so.
Mr. Tierney. Doctor.
Mr. Kilcullen. Yes, but I think we would perhaps disagree
less than it might appear. I think it is not a measure of
whether we are achieving security who gets elective, it is
whether the elections go off in a safe and transparent manner.
Mr. Tierney. That is what I meant.
Mr. Kilcullen. If that happens, I think we can say we have
done well.
Mr. Tierney. OK. Dr. Kagan, you disagreed. Ambassador
Dobbins.
Mr. Dobbins. One of the strengths we have there is we have
a legitimate government. We have a government that is
recognized throughout the world and by the vast majority of
Afghans as genuinely representative and legitimately elected.
That is a treasure. The government may be more corrupt than we
would like, it may be less competent than we would like, but it
is legitimate. If we lose that, if the election results are
contested or are inconclusive in a way that the result doesn't
clearly represent popular expression, it will be a major
setback.
General Barno. It is a partial metric and it is an
extremely important one. It is the strategic report card this
year on the entire enterprise so it has huge political
implications as well as military.
Mr. Tierney. Dr. Kilcullen quotes in his book Bernard Fall
who said in 1975 that if you are losing to an insurgency, you
are being out-governed, you are not being out-fought. I hear a
lot of comments that made it seem to me that people agree on
that. How are we going to get the Karzai government to be
better Governors? I think the similar question is in Pakistan,
how are we going to get that government to be a better
government? It goes back to some of the things the Ambassador
put in his written testimony about perhaps conditioning some of
the assistance. The only leverage we have is the money that we
are putting in there. And I am sure that you probably don't
want to condition the civilian development and assistance types
of things so much. But where the military has such a large play
in Pakistan and when we have to get Karzai to move in
Afghanistan, ought we to be conditioning the military aid that
we give to these countries?
Mr. Kilcullen. I think that is very true in the case of
Pakistan. In the case of Afghanistan, I think we can do a lot
with the partnering model where we have U.S. troops always
working with Afghan troops and Afghan police. One of the things
we found in Iraq and also in the parts of Afghanistan where we
have done this before is that when you do that, the performance
of all three elements improves. The U.S. troops have a better
understanding of the environment so they do better. The Afghan
troops have a model for how to operate so they do better. And
you have a police guy standing next to a military guy and the
military guy is saying, why are you taking a kickback from that
guy, why did you beat that old lady up, and enforcing a more
equitable situation.
Mr. Tierney. If we can get the people on, you have about a
1,500 mentor shortfall just on the police side of that.
Mr. Kilcullen. Yes. And so this is not instead of
mentoring. You don't necessarily send mentors. You have an
Afghan unit next to an American unit and the unit performs the
mentoring function.
Mr. Tierney. Doctor, you also said that we need to be
reducing overall force commitment everywhere, not just moving
troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. That would be tantamount to
unbogging ourselves from Iraq just so we can rebog ourselves in
Afghanistan. Is everybody fairly certain that we don't need to
be putting large additional amounts of troops into Afghanistan
to accomplish the counter-insurgency that you have all talked
about? Or are there some people that believe that we need to
put in some of the numbers that we have read like 400,000 or
600,000?
General Barno. I think you will probably find some
consensus that 400,000 number, the vast majority of which will
be new Afghan security forces, is probably a fairly good number
of police and Afghan national army. The U.S. troop
contribution, and we have seen the front end of that at least,
is 17,700. It is not clear exactly what will be announced
tomorrow. But I think we have to be very careful from a
military standpoint--and Dave Kilcullen and I have written and
talked about this--is we have to think about what we are trying
to achieve this year, next year, and the following year and how
much military force we are going to need to do that. Getting
that additional several hundred thousand Afghan security forces
together, generated, built, and trained is going to take some
time. The gap filler in a lot of ways will need to be American
forces.
Mr. Tierney. Dr. Kagan, do you want a shot at that?
Mr. Kagan. Yes. I just want to say, you know, it is very
hard for anyone to sit in Washington and make evaluations about
force requirements in Afghanistan. But I think when you do go
around to the theater and look at the threat problems and you
look at the gaps, I can see a requirement in Afghanistan for
maybe 10 American brigades starting next year and lasting for
maybe 12 to 18 months.
We had at the height of the Surge 22 brigades in Iraq. I
just don't see a requirement for a commitment of that size from
the United States or anything like it. But I do think that
there is a risk that we are going to lowball the estimate of
what we need, possibly in the President's statement, we will
see what he says, but certainly this year. But I also think
that we should not imagine that we are getting into the
slippery slope that leads us all the way up back to Iraq sort
of levels.
Mr. Tierney. Let me end with this. David Ignatius did an
article called the Roadmap for Afghanistan back on March 19th.
At one point he started talking about the typical Al Qaeda
situation. The process begins with infection as Al Qaeda
establishes a presence. Next comes contagion as Al Qaeda uses
its haven to mount attacks. Then follows intervention by the
United States to destroy Al Qaeda's sanctuary and its Taliban
protectors. And that produces rejection as the local population
allies with Al Qaeda and the Taliban against the foreign
invaders. For America it is a costly and self-defeating
exercise, which is precisely what Al Qaeda intends. Dr.
Kilcullen quotes a haunting 2004 statement by Osama Bin Laden.
All we have to do is send two mujahideen to the furthest point
east to raise a cloth on which is written Al Qaeda in order to
make the U.S. generals race there to cause America to suffer
human, economic, and political losses. So we are continuing
this policy of bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. I
think, you know, a lot of people are beginning to think that is
the case here. So how do we prevent the Yemens and Somalias and
the Sudans from being more of that bleeding at the same time
that you are recommending sort of following that pattern into
Afghanistan?
General Barno. Very briefly, I think this goes back to the
geopolitical issue that Ambassador Dobbins points out. Those
other locales you identified--the Yemens, the Somalias--I would
call those very small franchise operations of Al Qaeda.
Mr. Tierney. At present.
General Barno. Yes, correct. And I don't think they can
necessarily become Al Qaeda's core, Al Qaeda central, without
very obvious moves that we are going to see and detect. What in
this region we have to be concerned about is the entire region
becoming destabilized by a failure in Afghanistan and a return
to civil war, by a great game not played by the United States
but played by those regional nations in our absence. And the
destabilizing country of most worry, of course, is Pakistan.
Our efforts in Afghanistan are aimed and need to be aimed as
much at Pakistan, maintaining stability there, as they are
inside of Afghanistan.
Mr. Kilcullen. I will just make one comment. I think that
it is always a bad idea to invade a country because Al Qaeda is
there. It just creates many, many more problems than you solve
by going in. But we have to remember how we got to where we are
in Afghanistan. On the day that Kandahar fell, which was the
last major Taliban stronghold, there were 100 CIA and about 400
Special Forces in country. We didn't actually invade
Afghanistan in a large scale fashion to deal with Al Qaeda.
What happened was the international community got together in
the Bonn Agreement and later in the 2006 Afghanistan Compact
and made a commitment to the Afghan people to stabilize the
country.
So I don't believe that it is a good idea to go and invade
countries as you quoted because of Al Qaeda. I don't think that
is what we did in Afghanistan. I think we are there honoring a
commitment to the international community and to the Afghan
people. And I think it is a valid activity for the U.S.
Congress to say, all right, how much are we prepared to spend
on that? I think what we need to do is be very careful about
just escalating to success. We need to say, all right, how much
are we prepared to spend and that is a sufficient amount. So I
think this is a very valid activity.
Mr. Tierney. That is an interesting point. You know, I
think it was 1,300 Marines and about 1,000 Special Operations
people with some air strikes was the entire October 2001
enterprise there. A few weeks later, Kandahar was falling. So I
was interested to hear your take on why it is that we remain in
such numbers, and I suspect that is probably very accurate.
I think what I take out of this, first of all, is a great
appreciation for all of you for what you have done in terms of
trying to put this together and contextualize it in testimony.
I am personally left with the idea that there is no way out of
this thing without involvement of other people. It keeps going
back to Ambassador Dobbins. In previous hearings it was the
same thing. I mean, we are not going to resolve this without
Iran, India, China, Russia, the 'Stans, Europe, and all these
others understanding that they have to pony up and get involved
in this thing.
I appreciate what you said, Dr. Kilcullen about being there
because of the commitment that was made but it certainly looks
to a lot of us that the commitment is being paid with American
lives and dollars more so than some others who have probably a
more immediate problem there than we do. I am not sure how we
are going to address that, but I think that is something that
we have to address.
Again, thank you all very, very much. I appreciate all of
the efforts that you have made and your being here today. It
has been a substantial help to all of us. Meeting adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 11:45 a.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]