[Senate Hearing 117-226]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 117-226
AFGHANISTAN 2001 TO 2021:
U.S. POLICIES LESSONS LEARNED
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HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
NOVEMBER 17, 2021
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Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Relations
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available via http://www.govinfo.gov
__________
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
47-212 PDF WASHINGTON : 2022
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COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
ROBERT MENENDEZ, New Jersey, Chairman
BENJAMIN L. CARDIN, Maryland JAMES E. RISCH, Idaho
JEANNE SHAHEEN, New Hampshire MARCO RUBIO, Florida
CHRISTOPHER A. COONS, Delaware RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin
CHRISTOPHER MURPHY, Connecticut MITT ROMNEY, Utah
TIM KAINE, Virginia ROB PORTMAN, Ohio
EDWARD J. MARKEY, Massachusetts RAND PAUL, Kentucky
JEFF MERKLEY, Oregon TODD YOUNG, Indiana
CORY A. BOOKER, New Jersey JOHN BARRASSO, Wyoming
BRIAN SCHATZ, Hawaii TED CRUZ, Texas
CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland MIKE ROUNDS, South Dakota
BILL HAGERTY, Tennessee
Damian Murphy, Staff Director
Christopher M. Socha, Republican Staff Director
John Dutton, Chief Clerk
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
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Page
Menendez, Hon. Robert, U.S. Senator From New Jersey.............. 1
Risch, Hon. James E., U.S. Senator From Idaho.................... 3
Miller, Laurel E., Director of the Asia Program, International
Crisis Group, Washington, DC................................... 5
Prepared Statement........................................... 6
Crocker, Hon. Ryan, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, Washington, DC........................ 12
Prepared Statement........................................... 13
(iii)
AFGHANISTAN 2001 TO 2021:
U.S. POLICIES LESSONS LEARNED
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WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2021
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Foreign Relations,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:07 a.m., in
room SD-G50, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Robert
Menendez, chairman of the committee, presiding.
Present: Senators Menendez [presiding], Cardin, Shaheen,
Kaine, Booker, Van Hollen, Risch, Johnson, Romney, Paul,
Barrasso, Rounds, and Hagerty.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. ROBERT MENENDEZ,
U.S. SENATOR FROM NEW JERSEY
The Chairman. The hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee will come to order.
First of all, in fairness to all those who have arrived on
time and making sure that you are appropriately listed, and for
the order of questioning, we will so recognize that, and I am
going to briefly recess until the ranking member arrives.
We are in recess subject to the call of the chair.
[Recess.]
The Chairman. The committee will come to order. Let me
thank our witnesses for bearing with us as the voting takes
place.
In August, just before the fall of Kabul, the Inspector
General for Afghanistan Reconstruction released a report on the
past 20 years of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.
SIGAR estimated that the war and reconstruction efforts
cost American taxpayers more than $2 trillion. The war saw the
deaths of nearly 2,500 U.S. servicemen and women and more than
20,000 wounded. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians were
killed and countless others were injured, but despite that high
cost in blood and treasure, the United States struggled to
enact a coherent strategy that would secure Afghan democracy
and build strong governing institutions.
We are here today to examine the missteps and
miscalculations over the past 20 years that led to the ultimate
failure of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. The tragic events
of this past summer were the culmination of poor decision
making by both Republican and Democratic administrations, going
back to 2001.
The failure to cement democratic gains in Afghanistan and
to prevent the reemergence of a terrorist safe haven is a
collective failure. It is a tragedy with many authors and
origins.
We are here today to find out exactly who and what those
are. We have a distinguished panel of witnesses before us
today. My hope is that they will help us better understand why
successive administrations made so many of the same mistakes
repeatedly in Afghanistan.
Before turning to our witnesses, let me share my own views
on what those mistakes were.
First, the Bush administration took its eye off the ball
when it invaded Iraq, diverting desperately needed troops,
equipment, and humanitarian assistance from Afghanistan. That's
a war that I voted against.
Those resources could have made a difference in preventing
the resurgence of the Taliban and building up Afghan governing
institutions in their infancy.
Second, the Obama administration adopted a failed
counterinsurgency strategy after taking office. I was skeptical
from the very beginning that that strategy would work.
More than 33,000 troops were surged into Afghanistan, but
given an extremely short time frame, just 18 months, to prepare
the Afghan Government to take full control. That withdrawal
date was repeatedly delayed as the weaknesses of Afghan
institutions and security forces became all too clear.
Throughout the war, every Administration also,
unfortunately, bought into the fiction that Pakistan would be a
partner in peace in Afghanistan. Instead, Islamabad played a
double game, continuing to provide shelter to the Taliban even
as militants targeted and killed U.S. troops.
Third, the Trump administration signed a surrender deal
with the Taliban that set the stage for precipitous withdrawal.
That deal was built on a set of lies, chief among them that the
Taliban would sever their connection with al-Qaeda.
Throughout the negotiations, the Trump administration
excluded the Afghan Government and kept secret the details of
its agreements from our closest allies, many of whom fought and
died in the battlefield alongside us.
President Trump even traded away the release of 5,000
hardened Taliban fighters, boosting the militant group on the
battlefield this past summer. The political and security
environment for our withdrawal was a direct consequence of
Trump's surrender deal and we should never forget that.
Finally, throughout the entire war, the executive branch
failed to keep Congress adequately informed, particularly when
the war was going poorly. Officials of both parties either
misled or misrepresented the facts to Congress.
They told us that Afghan Security Forces could assume full
responsibility for Afghanistan's security. They told us that
the Afghan Government was taking corruption seriously and
gaining legitimacy in the provinces. They told us that regional
actors like Pakistan were playing a helpful role with respect
to the Taliban. None of that was true.
In closing, we are here to learn what mistakes were made in
the course of over a 20-year effort in Afghanistan. Only a full
accounting of the situation will help us avoid making the same
mistakes in the future.
We owe that to the American people. We owe that to our
troops. We owe it to those in the public and nonprofit sectors
who have dedicated years of their lives to improve Afghan
democracy and governance. We owe it to the people of
Afghanistan, women and girls, religious and ethnic minorities,
who are most affected by our departure.
Let me turn to the distinguished ranking member for his
opening comments.
STATEMENT OF HON. JAMES E. RISCH,
U.S. SENATOR FROM IDAHO
Senator Risch. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
As Congress wrestles with the fallout from the
Administration's Afghanistan withdrawal, we are faced with two
responsibilities. One is to look back and reflect on 20 years
of conflict and gather lessons learned. These lessons should
inform the future use of American power and, more importantly,
define its limits.
The collapse of the Afghan army after nearly 20 years of
enormous expenditures--enormous expenditures, as the chairman
pointed out--calls into question the efficacy of DoD's efforts
to build partner capacity.
Is it beneficial to build a foreign military in our own
image when it makes them over reliant on U.S. technology and
maintenance? What is the durability of these institutions in
countries that lack a formal military tradition, lacks a
central government, and place a priority on tribe or valley
over nation?
The collapse of portions of the Iraqi army in 2014 during
the Islamic State onslaught highlighted similar issues. DoD was
the lead for training and equipping in both Iraq and
Afghanistan and was unable to foster security sector reforms to
make these institutions more durable. The State Department must
and should take a larger role.
Our inability to effectively address Afghans' corruption
hampered our diplomatic development and military efforts. We
cannot accept corruption as a cost of doing business. Anti-
corruption must be central to strategies in the future.
If we look back in history, I think we have learned a
lesson from this. Shortly after World War II, we were very
successful in nation rebuilding in both Germany and Japan.
After the Korean conflict went on halt we were very successful
in South Korea doing the same thing.
We have been unsuccessful since then, and it is important
to note that the failures in those efforts were in countries
where corruption was endemic to the culture.
That focus on corruption has to be a very important focus
in the future as I think it will dictate what the possible
success of the country will look like after a conflict.
Additionally, the failure to administer our Special
Immigrant Visa program and assist American citizens on the
ground is astounding. We must bolster efforts to assist those
who served our country and improve any future versions of this
program.
Finally, our approach in Afghanistan suffered from a lack
of strategic coherence. What started successfully with a light
American footprint and a quick removal of the Taliban evolved
into more than 100,000 troops and a focus on counterinsurgency
and nation building.
We must better define our strategic objectives, assign
resources accordingly, and resist the temptations to do more
than is necessary.
The second and most urgent task in front of this body is to
look forward and mitigate the negative impacts of U.S.
withdrawal. This includes developing our counterterrorism plan,
human rights roadmap, and regional approaches. These deserve
the Senate's full attention, nothing less.
After all, the news from Afghanistan is jarring. According
to open source reports, the Islamic State will be in a position
to launch attacks outside of Afghanistan in a mere 6 months,
and al-Qaeda could be in a position to conduct external attacks
in just 2 years.
On the human rights front, women and girls in Afghanistan
are worse off today than they have been for a decade. We must
identify the right avenues to re-empower Afghanistan's women,
minority, and youth. Our USAID implementers must have
unfettered access to at-risk populations without Taliban
interference or diversion.
On foreign assistance, we should debate the limits of
practical engagement. As Afghanistan careens towards a
humanitarian catastrophe this winter, we must strike the
appropriate balance between helping ordinary Afghans and
preventing benefit to the Taliban.
Many of my colleagues want to turn away from Afghanistan
and focus on other issues. However, it is critically important
that we do not waver in our commitment to oversight.
I find it disappointing that the Secretary of Defense has
refused to testify before this committee. I hope this can be
addressed soon, as well as having additional briefings and
hearings from Secretary Blinken, Secretary Austin, and Director
Haines that will address the very real threats to Americans.
It has been almost 3 months since my initial request. I
look forward to working with the chairman to finalize these
important discussions.
Finally, I have introduced an Afghanistan oversight bill
that has the support of nearly 30 of our colleagues. This
legislation authorizes the task force responsible for the
continued evacuation of Americans and our Afghan partners.
It would also sanction the Taliban for human rights abuses,
terrorism, and drug trafficking. Additionally, this legislation
directs strategies to address the very real terror threat in
Afghanistan.
While we have held one initial meeting with the majority
staff on this matter, I would like to see this matter move more
quickly.
With that, thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you, Senator Risch.
With that, we will turn to our witnesses.
Ms. Laurel Miller, director of International Crisis Group's
Asia program and former Deputy and then Acting Special
Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and with us
virtually, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, a Diplomat in Residence in
Princeton University and also a former U.S. Ambassador to
Afghanistan, at various periods of time in Pakistan, among
other locations.
We thank them very much for sharing their insights. We
would ask you to summarize your testimony in about 5 minutes or
so, so members of the committee can have a conversation with
you.
We will start off with Ms. Miller.
STATEMENT OF LAUREL E. MILLER, DIRECTOR OF THE ASIA PROGRAM,
INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP, WASHINGTON, DC
Ms. Miller. Good morning, Chairman Menendez, Ranking Member
Risch, and distinguished members of the committee and thank you
for inviting me to offer this testimony in which I will
highlight five lessons to learn from the failure of U.S. policy
in Afghanistan.
First lesson. Be very wary of regime change. A narrative
has taken hold that because the invasion was motivated by
counterterrorism, the nation building that followed was mission
creep.
In reality, the decision to not only chase the perpetrators
of the 9/11 attacks, but also oust the Taliban regime meant it
would have been the height of irresponsibility to make little
effort to build something in its place.
The U.S. started with a strategy that assumed it could
eliminate the Taliban simply by killing many of them and then
other Afghan groups would come together and easily sort out
their political arrangements.
As reality hit, a shift to nation building began just 4
months into the mission. The die was cast. By adopting a policy
of creating a partner in Afghanistan and needing that partner
to succeed at governing, U.S. success became dependent on
Afghan Government success.
Second lesson. If your strategy depends on particular
conditions, be sure that you can control them. Instead of
shaping policy to avoid or adapt to obstacles, the U.S. adopted
a policy that required surmounting obstacles.
Foremost among these was Pakistan. From the first days
after 9/11, the U.S. relied on getting Pakistan to cooperate in
eliminating the Taliban, contrary to how Pakistan saw its own
interests.
Pakistani reluctance was perfectly clear. From the start,
they said they disagreed with the U.S. strategy of militarily
eliminating the Taliban and they wanted to see the Taliban
included in Afghanistan's governance.
There were naturally limits to how far the U.S. would or
could go to pressure Islamabad and they knew it. Because
strategic success in Afghanistan was not existentially
important to U.S. national security, it would have been
unwarranted and unrealistic for Washington to widen the war to
include military action against Pakistan, a nuclear-armed
nation of 225 million people some 8,000 miles away.
Third lesson. Recognize how much you do not know and
embrace what you do know. Early on, lack of understanding of
Afghanistan might be excused considering how little the U.S.
had been engaged there during the prior decade, but more
problematic was the failure to appreciate how poorly conditions
were understood and, therefore, how little confidence the U.S.
could have that a bold strategy made sense.
By the end, all the factors that led to the Government's
collapse had been well known for years, including the precarity
of state institutions, the Government's extraordinary aid
dependence, the bubble effects of a wartime economy, and
crucial weaknesses within the Afghan Security Forces, including
ones that would understandably affect will to fight.
Absorbing rather than resisting the facts in plain sight
should have led much earlier to a judgment that the war was not
likely to be won and that the main effort should be diplomacy,
seeking a negotiated end of the conflict or at least of
American involvement in it.
Fourth, aid conditionality does not work if your strategy
depends on the recipient's success. Because the U.S. was well
aware that corruption was fueling support for the insurgency
and political disunity was weakening the state, it tried
repeatedly to address such problems by conditioning aid.
Conditionality suffered from a fatal flaw. Because the U.S.
had a policy requiring the Government's success, cutting off
vital aid would have been self-defeating. Afghan leaders knew
that and, therefore, were not particularly motivated by
conditionality.
A fifth lesson. The mission proved politically
unsustainable in the end because the extent of the American
commitment exceeded the magnitude of the importance of the
mission to U.S. national security.
Now, looking forward, Afghanistan is headed toward being
the world's greatest humanitarian crisis. The country has
suffered an enormous economic shock. Suspension of U.S. and
Western aid, freeze of state assets, and effects of sanctions
have produced widespread joblessness, hunger, and a severe
liquidity crisis.
The disaster already underway shows it will not be possible
for the U.S. to both stand with the Afghan people and fully
isolate the regime governing them. The U.S. needs to be clear
eyed about how best to advance its interests in Afghanistan and
consider objectively the importance of helping millions of
Afghans.
Greater impoverishment of Afghanistan under the Taliban is
likely, but a glide path to a lower level of international
support would be more humane than allowing the economy and
public services to tip over a cliff.
This will require flexibility in providing aid beyond
strictly humanitarian and some easing of sanctions. As the
situation worsens in days and weeks to come, politically
difficult decisions will need to be made.
The Taliban cannot be made to be less Taliban, but there
are many Afghans who can be saved.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Miller follows:]
Prepared Statement of Laurel E. Miller
Good morning, Chairman Menendez, Ranking Member Risch, and
distinguished members of the Committee. Thank you for the invitation to
testify today on policy lessons that can be learned from American
involvement in Afghanistan over the last two decades, and on
recommendations for the immediate future of U.S. policy toward
Afghanistan.
In the aftermath of the U.S. failure--after enormous sacrifice of
lives and treasure--to defeat the Taliban, establish a self-sustaining
Afghan democracy and economy, and ensure the durability of health,
education, and other social gains, it may be too easy to assume the
United States will never do that again. But it is crucial not to brush
past an examination of how and why this failure happened. The future is
too uncertain to assume that the United States will never again
encounter circumstances analogous to those that impelled its leaders to
invest so heavily in Afghanistan for two decades. After the failed
American war in Vietnam, counter-insurgency was anathema in national
security policy; after nation-building in the Balkans, the George W.
Bush administration initially derided the concept as an inappropriate
use of U.S. resources, even though the policy had been relatively
successful. Yet both became central to the American intervention in
Afghanistan. `Never say never' may be the most basic lesson to learn
from Afghanistan at this time. Therefore, a thorough accounting will be
needed of U.S. policy decisions, the means chosen to implement them,
and their results.
Another basic lesson is that the United States could not have
achieved its goals in Afghanistan solely through its own policies and
actions, because both its partners and its adversaries had at least as
much influence over the course of events. Likewise, the failure is not
uniquely an American one. Nevertheless, there were strategic choices
that were controlled by the United States and were especially
consequential in leading to failure. I will focus my remarks on five
lessons that can be learned from errors in these choices.
five key lessons
1. Be Very, Very Wary of Regime Change
A narrative has taken hold that, because the motivation for the
U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was counter-terrorism, the nation-building
that ensued represented mission creep. In reality, the Bush
Administration's 2001 decision not only to chase and punish the
terrorist perpetrators of the September 11 attacks, but also to oust
the Taliban regime that had harbored Al Qaeda leaders, necessarily
required a nation-building mission.\1\ It would have been the height of
irresponsibility to wipe away the existing regime in Afghanistan and
make little effort to support the construction of a reasonably
functional state in its wake. Indeed, in the early years, the United
States was criticized for doing too little, not too much, to build up
an Afghan state, including indigenous security forces.
After initially assuming away the complexities of regime change,
the recognition quickly took hold that political disorder and the
absence of state institutions could give rise to the persistence of
conditions that led to Afghanistan being an exporter of security
threats. But Washington was unprepared for the implications of regime
change and struggled over how committed to be to managing them.
The United States started with a strategy based on the assumption
that it could eliminate the Taliban simply by killing them--as if
essentially all of them could be killed, with no replenishment of
ranks--and that, after the Taliban's elimination, other Afghan groups
and factions would come together and decide their own political
arrangements without much fuss.\2\ The central idea, in other words,
was that the United States could invade, wipe the political slate
clean, move on, and somehow the situation would sort itself out without
considerable U.S. effort, which was to turn to military involvement
elsewhere in the world. This idea was a theory with no empirical
support. As the theory quickly proved itself false, the U.S. shift to
nation-building began as early as April 2002.\3\
By choosing to engage in regime change and install a new regime
that would act in alignment with U.S. interests, the United States
chose to engage in nation-building.\4\ The specific aims and the
resources devoted to the mission expanded over time as recognition of
the challenges expanded and as paltry results seemed to demand greater
effort, and the ways and means of implementation evolved. But,
fundamentally, the policy die was cast at the very beginning. The
United States had adopted a policy of constructing an Afghan state, of
making a `partner' in Afghanistan, and of needing that partner to
succeed at governing in order for U.S. policy to succeed at leaving
Afghans, eventually, to sustain their own system and ensure their own
security in accord with U.S. security interests. U.S. policy became
dependent on Afghan Government success.
2. If Your Strategy's Success Depends on Particular Conditions, Be Sure
You Can Create or Control Those Conditions
Several essential conditions for success of the U.S. military and
civilian missions in Afghanistan were no mystery to U.S. policy makers,
and yet the implausibility of creating those conditions was never
adequately factored into shaping strategy. Instead of adjusting policy
to reflect obstacles that were unlikely to be surmounted, the United
States adopted a policy that required surmounting the obstacles, based
on the belief, or hope, that willpower, military might, and financial
wherewithal would prevail.
Foremost among these obstacles was Pakistan's policy. From the
first days after 9/11, the U.S. relied on its presumed ability to get
Pakistan to take steps to cooperate in eliminating the Taliban that
Pakistan had made quite clear it did not see in its own interests to
take.\5\ That clarity was evident in Pakistan's supportive relationship
with and material aid for the Taliban prior to 9/11,\6\ and also in
what Pakistani officials said to U.S. officials afterward. There was no
need to read between the lines, though there was a need to pay
attention to how seriously Pakistanis meant what they said. And what
they said consistently from the start and over the years since was that
they wanted a government in Kabul that would be amenable to Pakistani
interests, disagreed with a U.S. strategy of militarily eliminating the
Taliban, and wanted to see the Taliban included in Afghanistan's
political dispensation.\7\ Just 3 days after 9/11, Pakistani president
Pervez Musharraf agreed to cooperate with the United States in counter-
terrorism, but said there would be implementation details to work out,
including that ``Islamabad, [Musharraf] said, wants a friendly
government in Kabul.'' \8\ There should have been no misunderstanding
that ``friendly'' meant including the Taliban.
Pakistan's consistent pursuit of its interests in Afghanistan as it
perceived them--regardless of U.S. diplomatic remonstrances or
financial enticements intended to convince Islamabad to change its
national security calculations--contributed significantly to U.S.
failure in Afghanistan. To be sure, Islamabad also facilitated the U.S.
war, especially by providing air and land access to land-locked
Afghanistan. But this duality of Pakistani policy only reflected that
Islamabad had two distinct and irreconcilable policy goals: on one
hand, maintain a constructive relationship with Washington beyond
Afghanistan matters, and on the other, see the Taliban return to at
least a substantial share of power in Kabul.
Although Pakistan enabled the United States to fight the Taliban,
its officials regularly stated explicitly that Pakistan itself would
not fight the Afghan war on Pakistani soil--meaning that Pakistan would
not take steps to make the Taliban its own adversary. As a result, the
Taliban enjoyed the crucial benefit for an insurgency of safe haven in
a neighboring state. Pakistani officials occasionally denied safe haven
existed, but the denials were virtually irrelevant because the reality
was known to the United States and Pakistan never suggested it would
dismantle the safe havens that it generally declined to acknowledge.
Sharing a long frontier with Afghanistan and being well-practiced
in opaque means of providing support to the Taliban, helping the
insurgency to survive and thrive was not difficult for Pakistan.
Getting Pakistan to switch to a policy of opposing the Taliban proved
unrealistic; there were naturally limits to how far the U.S. would go
to pressure Islamabad, and the latter knew as much. Because strategic
success in Afghanistan was not existentially important to U.S. national
security, it would have been unwarranted and unrealistic for Washington
to widen the war to include military action against Pakistan, a
nuclear-armed nation of 225 million people some 8,000 miles away.
Being stymied in counter-insurgency as it was, the United States
could instead have changed its policy much sooner than it did from one
centered on war-fighting to one centered on diplomatic efforts to reach
a political settlement among Afghans, bringing the Taliban into a share
of power. That policy shift, from late 2018, was one that Pakistan,
unsurprisingly, embraced and supported. Unfortunately, however, by that
stage the Taliban had a clear upper-hand on the battlefield and U.S.
leverage was greatly diminished by having made it evident that U.S.
forces would be withdrawn sooner rather than later regardless of
whether a political settlement was reached. The effort to motivate the
Afghan contestants to negotiate the end of the war failed and, of
course, the U.S. military withdrew nonetheless, in accordance with a
bilateral deal signed between the U.S. and Taliban on February 29,
2020.\9\
A second key condition resistant to U.S. efforts to change it was
the weakness of the Afghan Government Washington helped build and saw
as its partner. The disunity and endemic corruption that plagued the
Afghan Government has been well-documented for many years.\10\ The
strategic error was not in failing to recognize those problems existed
but, rather, in expecting that they could be sufficiently ameliorated
fast enough to deprive the insurgency of fuel and to align with any
plausible duration of American political willingness to prop up the
Kabul Government. The political disunity reflected a competition for
power driven by Afghan dynamics that the United States was unequipped
to modify. And there is simply no historical precedent for an external
actor to remake the patronage basis of a society through foreign policy
and foreign aid measures.\11\
A third condition outside the ambit of U.S. control was that
Afghanistan was in 2001, and remains, one of the poorest and least
institutionalized countries in the world, and one that is also land-
locked and historically dependent on external resources. There was
every reason to expect that the time-scale would be generational for
Afghanistan to develop a self-sustaining economy and a government able
to fully, or nearly so, provide for its own security and public
services. Decision makers often assumed, however, that these
developments could be sped up through funding and diplomatic pressure
to fit U.S. policy urgency.
3. Recognize How Much You Do Not Know, But Also Embrace What You Do
Know and Change Your Policy Accordingly
Looking back at the earliest strategy decisions related to regime
change cited above, policy makers appear woefully naive about what the
United States could achieve in Afghanistan. Perhaps U.S. lack of
understanding of conditions within Afghanistan could be excused
considering how little the United States had been engaged there during
the preceding decade and the consequent paucity of U.S. Government
expertise regarding the country. What was more problematic--and where a
lesson for future U.S. policy lies--was the failure to appreciate how
little the conditions were understood and, therefore, the lack of a
firm basis for confidence that the U.S. strategy made sense. The less
you know, the greater the uncertainty about policy effects, and the
greater the risk of unintended consequences.
As the U.S. intervention wore on, many essential facts emerged into
view. Indeed, the seeds of failure were present for many years, and
none of the factors that ultimately produced the collapse of the Kabul
Government and the disintegration of U.S. policy were unknown. Even if
the specific timing of the Afghan Government's collapse could not be
predicted, it was widely anticipated as at least a plausible scenario.
The precarity of state institutions, the Government's extraordinary aid
dependency (about 75 percent of public spending was donor financed),
the bubble effects of a wartime economy, and crucial weaknesses within
the Afghan security forces were all well known. Within the Afghan
security forces, problems that would naturally affect morale and will
to fight, such as irregularity of pay and inadequacy of equipment,
living conditions and other forms of support, were regularly observed
and publicly pointed to as critical weaknesses.\12\ These problems were
not left unfixed because they were obscure; rather, they were very
difficult to fix, through very slow processes at best.
The amalgamation of these and other problems led to routinely
pessimistic publicly reported assessments by the U.S. intelligence
community for the last dozen years, at least. Instead of shaping policy
in accordance with these assessments, until the final push toward exit,
decision makers shaped policy in accordance with a hoped-for ability to
prove the assessments wrong.
Although there were routine claims, including in testimony to the
U.S. Congress, that progress was being achieved in improving the
capabilities of the Afghan security forces and in setting a course
toward winning the war, some called out the war as unwinnable as early
as 2009.\13\ Public reporting of steady Taliban battlefield gains has
been plentiful, especially since the major U.S. military drawdown of
2014. There was no shortage of public reporting, too, of the U.S.
intelligence community's negative assessments of the sustainability of
Afghan Government and security forces without a continued U.S. military
presence and exceptional scale of financial support, as well as
warnings more generally of the impending failure of U.S. policy.\14\
Embracing rather than resisting the facts in plain sight should
have led much earlier to a judgment that the war was not likely to be
won and that the main effort should have been diplomacy, seeking a
negotiated end of the conflict or at least of American involvement in
it, years earlier than occurred.
4. Aid Conditionality Does not Work if Your Strategy Depends on the
Recipient's
Success
Because the United States was well aware that corruption in
Afghanistan was fueling support for the Taliban insurgency and
political disunity was weakening the state, it tried repeatedly to
address these and related problems by conditioning aid disbursements on
improvements in these areas. The latest iteration of conditionality was
the Afghanistan Partnership Framework agreed upon by the Kabul
Government and donors in November 2020.\15\
The use of conditionality in Afghanistan suffered from a fatal
flaw: Because the United States had a policy that required the success
of the Afghan Government (as discussed earlier), it could not deprive
the Government of resources considered essential to ensure that
success. Given the policy in place, cutting off vital aid would have
been self-defeating. Afghan counterparts, of course, were well aware of
this conundrum, and, understanding the limits of conditionality, were
not highly motivated by it. The leverage, in other words, operated in
both directions.
5. Recognize the Limits of U.S. Ability To Impose its Will Where Doing
So is not
Existentially Vital
An over-arching lesson to draw from Afghanistan, and one that will
require rigorous examination to define thoroughly, is that the
experience shows the limits of America's ability to impose its will.
Those limits can be seen in some of the more specific points
highlighted above. But there are also broader questions to explore
about the political judgments that were made to support the invasion
and regime change in the first place, to sustain the military effort
against the evidence of its poor results, and to end the intervention
through the 2020 U.S.-Taliban agreement in a way that virtually assured
the Taliban's return to power.
The Bush administration decided to invade Afghanistan not only to
go after Al Qaeda but to punish the Taliban and make an example of
them. It did not invade because Afghanistan itself was a place central
to U.S. national security interests. For the next 20 years, the
intervention cost nearly 2,500 American lives, tens of thousands of
Afghan lives, enormous financial resources, and the time and energies
of thousands of U.S. service members, diplomats, aid workers, and
others. And yet it remained--except for the threat of terrorism, to
which the nation-building work was only tangentially related--
peripheral to U.S. interests. That is not a circumstance conducive to
success at so difficult a set of tasks. Afghanistan was, for most of
twenty years, considered too important to fail but, ultimately, not
important enough to stay forever, staving off the Taliban's return.
what to do now
In the wake of the U.S. military withdrawal, the Afghan
Government's collapse, and the Taliban's August 15 take-over, the
United States must now entirely reformulate its policy. I will briefly
suggest a few ideas related only to immediate steps.
Afghanistan is headed toward becoming the world's greatest
humanitarian crisis. Drought, increased displacement due to conflict,
economic deterioration, the COVID-19 pandemic, and other factors were
worsening the humanitarian situation even prior to August 15. Since
then, the country has suffered an enormous economic shock. The
suspension of U.S. and other foreign aid, freeze of state assets, and
effects of sanctions have produced widespread joblessness, hunger, and
a severe liquidity crisis.\16\
A collision has occurred between two long-standing themes of U.S.
policy. For years, U.S. officials told the Taliban that if they gained
power through military means, rather than through a negotiated
political settlement, they would rule only as a pariah regime, starved
of resources. At the same time, the United States offered regular
assurances that it would not abandon the Afghan people and that the
lesson had been learned from the post-Soviet withdrawal period in the
1990s that washing its hands of Afghanistan could ultimately come to
harm U.S. security interests. The humanitarian and economic crisis
already emerging in Afghanistan shows that it will not be possible to
both stand with the Afghan people in any practical sense while
isolating the regime governing them.
It will be important for the United States now to be clear-eyed
about how best to advance its interests in Afghanistan, not allowing
the pain and distastefulness of losing the war to stand in the way of
an objective assessment of the importance of helping millions of
Afghans. Greater impoverishment of Afghanistan under the Taliban is
likely, but a glide path to a much lower level of international support
rather than allowing the economy and public services to tip over a
cliff would be more humane. That approach--which would entail some
relaxation of sanctions and easing the complete cut-off of development
aid--would also take account of U.S. participation in enabling over the
last 20 years Afghanistan's extreme aid dependency and, thus, the
state's precariousness.
An at least modestly more-engaged approach--in terms of diplomacy
and development--would also take account of the reality that isolation
of the Taliban regime is not likely to produce results favorable to
U.S. interests. Having proved resilient in the face of significant U.S.
military pressure, the Taliban are highly unlikely to shape core
policies or modify their ideology in response to financial pressure or
the use of aid as leverage. They might, however, cooperate in limited
areas, even potentially (if only secretly) on counter-terrorism--or at
least such cooperation is a possibility to probe through engagement.
Isolation, on the other hand, holds no chance of producing cooperation.
As the humanitarian and economic situation worsens in Afghanistan
in the days and weeks ahead, politically difficult decisions will need
to be made, and robust diplomacy will be needed to bring into alignment
with U.S. policy, as much as possible, the policies of allies and of
Afghanistan's influential neighbors. The U.S. policy agility and
pragmatism now needed in dealing with Afghanistan's new rulers requires
the support of the U.S. Congress.
----------------
Notes
\1\ For a more detailed version of this argument, see Laurel
Miller, ``Biden's Afghanistan Withdrawal: A Verdict on the Limits of
American Power,'' Survival, May 25, 2021.
\2\ Office of the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld
``snowflake'' to Douglas Feith, ``Strategy,'' October 30, 2001, with
Attachment, ``U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan,'' https://
nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/24546-office-secretary-defense-donald-
rumsfeld-snowflake-douglas-feith-strategy-october-30.
\3\ Office of the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld
``snowflake'' to Doug Feith (cc to Paul Wolfowitz, Gen. Dick Myers,
Gen. Pete Pace), Subject: ``Afghanistan,'' April 17, 2002, https://
nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/24548-office-secretary-defense-donald-
rumsfeld-snowflake-doug-feith-cc-paul-wolfowitz-gen (see also
contextual discussion at this linked page by the National Security
Archive).
\4\ In Libya, after toppling Gaddafi, the U.S. did not follow
regime change with large-scale nation-building, but instead adopted
more of a hope-for-the-best model. U.S. counter-terrorism concerns in
Afghanistan in the immediate post-9/11 period made this approach
implausible there.
\5\ Office of the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld
``snowflake'' to Douglas Feith, ``Strategy,'' October 30, 2001, with
Attachment, ``U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan,'' https://
nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/24546-office-secretary-defense-donald-
rumsfeld-snowflake-douglas-feith-strategy-october-30.
\6\ Sajit Gandhi, ed., The National Security Archive, ``The Taliban
File Part III: Pakistan Provided Millions of Dollars, Arms, and `Buses
Full of Adolescent Mujahid' to the Taliban in the 1990's,'' March 19,
2004, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB97/index4.htm.
\7\ A memorandum from Secretary of State Colin Powell to President
Bush describing Powell's Oct 15-16, 2001, visit to Islamabad noted that
``Musharraf is pressing for a future government supportive of its
interests,'' and that Powell assured Musharraf that ``the U.S. supports
the formation of a broad-based government in Afghanistan, friendly to
its neighbors.'' https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB358a/
doc21.pdf. Over the years since, Pakistani officials have referred to
the need for broad-based or inclusive governments as a way of
indicating the perceived importance of including the Taliban.
\8\ U.S. Embassy Islamabad cable, ``Musharraf Accepts the Seven
Points,'' September 14, 2001, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/
NSAEBB358a/doc08.pdf.
\9\ ``Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan between the
Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognized by the United
States as a state and is known as the Taliban and the United States of
America,'' February 29, 2020, https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/
2020/02/Agreement-For-Bringing-Peace-to-Afghanistan-02.29.20.pdf.
\10\ See, e.g., Special Inspector General for Afghanistan
Reconstruction, ``Corruption in Conflict: Lessons From the U.S.
Experience in Afghanistan,'' September 2016, https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/
lessonslearned/SIGAR-16-58-LL.pdf.
\11\ For an excellent treatment of this subject, see Alina Mungiu-
Pippidi, The Quest for Good Governance: How Societies Develop Control
of Corruption, Cambridge University Press, 2015.
\12\ See Jonathan Schroden, ``Lessons from the Collapse of
Afghanistan's Security Forces,'' CTC Sentinel, October 2021, Vol. 14,
Issue 8.
\13\ Gordon M. Goldstein and Fredrik Logevall, ``We Need Richard
Holbrooke More than Ever,'' Politico Magazine, December 6, 2015,
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/12/afghanistan-isis-
richard-holbrooke-213416/. In 2010, the U.S. intelligence community
reportedly expressed skepticism about winning the war, citing
corruption and Pakistan as factors: Mark Hosenball, ``US intelligence
pessimistic on Afghan war success,'' Reuters, December 15, 2010,
https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-afghanistan/us-intelligence-
pessimistic-on-afghan-war-success-idUSN1517095920101215
\14\ Ernesto Londono, Karen DeYoung and Greg Miller, ``Afghanistan
gains will be lost quickly after drawdown, U.S. intelligence estimate
warns,'' The Washington Post, December 28, 2013, https://
www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/afghanistan-gains-will-
be-lost-quickly-after-drawdown-us-intelligence-estimate-warns/2013/12/
28/ac609f90-6f32-11e3-aecc-85cb037b7236_story.html?tid=a_inl_manual;
Dion Nissenbaum and Gordon Lubold, ``Military Believes Trump's Afghan
War Plan is Working, but Spy Agencies Are Pessimistic,'' The Wall
Street Journal, August 31, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/military-
believes-trumps-afghan-war-plan-is-working-but-spy-agencies-are-
pessimistic-1535707923.
\15\ See Afghanistan Study Group Final Report, February 2021, p.
27, https://www.usip.org/publications/2021/02/afghanistan-study-group-
final-report-pathway-peace-afghanistan.
\16\ International Crisis Group, ``Thinking Through the Dilemmas of
Aid to Afghanistan,'' 7 October 2021, https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/
south-asia/afghanistan/thinking-through-dilemmas-aid-afghanistan-0;
International Crisis Group, ``Afghanistan's Growing Humanitarian
Crisis,'' 2 September 2021, https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-
asia/afghanistan/afghanistans-growing-humanitarian-crisis.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
Ambassador Crocker, who is with us virtually.
STATEMENT OF HON. RYAN CROCKER, NONRESIDENT SENIOR FELLOW,
CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE, WASHINGTON, DC
Ambassador Crocker. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member
Risch, for convening this important hearing. These are weighty
issues and they will be weighty issues for a long time to come.
I would give you two lessons learned and they sound pretty
simple. Be careful what you get into, particularly if it
involves military forces, as we have seen in Afghanistan and
especially in Iraq.
The consequences of a military intervention are not just to
the third and fourth order. They go to the thirtieth and
fortieth, and that we did not really seem to appreciate.
The second lesson, be careful what you get out of, that a
withdrawal of a U.S. military presence--indeed, diplomatic
presence in this case--can have consequences as grave or graver
than the original intervention.
The third is the issue of strategic patience. That
overarches, I think, the previous two lessons and has been a
huge, huge problem for the United States, not only in
Afghanistan.
Be careful getting in. In Afghanistan, I think we did what
we needed to do, that we were responding to 9/11. We did so
with the minimal force. I had the privilege of establishing our
embassy there January 2002, just weeks after President Karzai
was named in Bonn as the chairman of the Afghan interim
authority.
We knew why we were there, to ensure that there was never
again an attack on the United States from Afghanistan. 9/11 was
seared into our brains at that time and, subsequently, for me.
It was about American national security. That was the mission.
It was the mission when I opened the Embassy. It was the
mission when I visited Afghanistan from Pakistan in the years
2005-2006. It was the mission when I returned as ambassador to
Afghanistan 2011-2012.
The ways and means of achieving that goal, of course,
prompted a lot of debate, a lot of mistakes, and confusion on
the way forward, but the fundamental goal never changed.
Mr. Chairman, if we did reasonably well going in, we did
exceptionally poorly going out. We have all seen the images
from August seared in--again, into our brains of desperate
Afghans clinging to a C-17 as it took off. Does not get much
worse than that.
That was the conclusion of our endeavor. Now, as you
rightly said, both parties and both administrations, President
Trump and President Biden, bear a great responsibility.
When President Trump authorized talks with the Taliban
without the Afghan Government, and I said this publicly at the
time, these are surrender talks. These are not peace
negotiations, and that is exactly how this has played out in
the time since 2019.
The February 2020 agreement that was, again, a surrender
document. We delegitimized the Government that we had said we
supported. It is no wonder to me that there was no fight left
in the Afghan military as they saw the United States disappear
over the horizon.
Briefly, looking ahead, what we have seen will have
consequences in many places for many years. We have emboldened
Islamic extremist movements everywhere, in particular in
Pakistan where that country now faces a threat from groups like
the Pakistan Taliban that aim at the overthrow of the
Government in Islamabad. We will be fighting these struggles
for a very long time.
Finally, to return to the issue of strategic patience, this
is one of our greatest failings, I think, as a nation.
Afghanistan was not the first time. We had pulled out of
Afghanistan after the defeat of the Soviets.
The Pakistanis, according to their narrative, were left
with the exploding Afghan civil war and came to mistrust, as
many others now have, the staying power of the United States.
I heard it during my 3 years there over and over: we are
with you on al-Qaeda, but do not expect us to turn the Taliban
into a mortal enemy because someday you are going to get on a
plane again--that is what you do--and we are going to be left
with the mess.
Pakistanis felt vindicated, I think, for about 15 minutes,
and then realized that the threat to them was graver than it
had ever been with, again, emboldened Islamic militants within
their own borders.
Going forward, I hope we do find levers. We will need to
work with others, obviously. We will need to work with the
United Nations. We will need to work with our NATO partners who
also felt betrayed by our swift decision to leave the country.
We need to stay engaged. We need to do what we can to
support the vulnerable populations. I ask myself, did we make a
huge mistake educating girls and asking women to step forward
into the military, into Parliament, into business, saying,
effectively, we have got your back, until we did not?
We have accrued a great debt there. That extends also to
the thousands of Afghans who helped us in their mission. The
SIV process has let them down. I am a member of the Advisory
Committee for a group called No One Left Behind that has for
years sought to move interpreters to safety. We left thousands
behind and that, I think, is a stain, again, on our national
honor.
We need to figure out ways to go ahead. It will not be
easy. We gave up the leverage we had, but we cannot give up the
fight that goes on without us.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Crocker follows:]
Prepared Statement of Ryan Crocker
Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Risch, it is a privilege to appear
before you today to discuss the lessons learned from 20 years of U.S.
engagement in Afghanistan post 9/11. The consequences of our
intervention, our presence and our departure will reverberate in the
region and beyond in the years to come, in ways we may not even be able
to imagine today. These are grave and complex issues that bear directly
on American security and American values, and I commend the Committee
for focusing attention on them. Your initiative will inform and
illuminate questions that are of great significance for all Americans.
In that spirit, I will impart to this Committee all of the lessons
that I learned during my professional engagement in the broader Middle
East spanning almost 40 years. Actually, there are only two, plus one
overarching principle: strategic patience, or in our case, the lack
thereof. They are deceptively simple. The first is to be careful about
what you get into. Military interventions bring consequences not just
of the third and fourth order, but the thirtieth and fortieth,
consequences that we cannot even imagine, let alone plan for. So the
good you seek to achieve, or the bad you wish to eliminate must be of a
magnitude sufficient to justify not just the dangers you can foresee,
but also those you can't. I learned this not in Afghanistan or Iraq,
but in Lebanon at the time of the Israeli invasion in 1982. That
operation, aimed at eliminating the ability of the PLO to attack
Israel's northern border areas. That goal was achieved within days. And
then came the unforeseen consequences: the massacre of Palestinians in
the Shatila refugee camp, the return of our Marines without a clearly
defined mission, the bombings of the American Embassy and the Marine
barracks in Beirut in 1983. That was enough for us--the Marines were
withdrawn in 1984, ending our military presence in Lebanon. Israel hung
on for 16 more years, losing over 1,100 IDF soldiers before withdrawing
in 2000 with nothing to show for it. Unintended consequences.
With respect to Afghanistan after 9/11, there was no serious debate
over U.S. military intervention after the Taliban refused our demand to
hand over al-Qaida leaders. I was certainly all in. At the beginning of
January 2002, I reopened the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, shuttered for
security reasons since 1989. As Ambassador to Pakistan 2005-2007, I
visited Afghanistan several times at the invitation of Ron Neumann, my
colleague in Kabul, to meet with President Karzai. In 2011, I returned
to Afghanistan as Ambassador. These different visitations provided me
with different perspectives over time. But they also provided a very
important and consistent answer to the question of why we came to
Afghanistan and why we stayed: to insure that Afghan soil would never
again be used to launch an attack on the American homeland.
It is important to stress this point, Mr. Chairman. The sound and
fury swirling around the current debate on U.S. policy in Afghanistan
can create the mistaken impression that successive Administrations have
been confused over what that policy actually was. That is not the case.
It was not the case on March 11, 2002, 6 months after 9/11, when we
commemorated the placing of a fragment of the World Trade Center at the
base of the Embassy flagpole in Kabul. It had been brought to
Afghanistan by the commander of the Fifth Special Forces Group, Colonel
(later Lieutenant General) John F. Mulholland Jr. It was clear to me a
decade later when President Obama asked me to return to Afghanistan as
Ambassador and to negotiate a long term Strategic Partnership Agreement
with the Afghans that he could sign. He did so in May 2012 in Kabul.
So in my view at least, the end goal for the U.S. in Afghanistan
was clear from the beginning and never shifted: the security of the
United States. Everything else was about ways and means. That was on my
mind that first week in January 2002, driving from Bagram to Kabul (the
airport in Kabul was closed, its runways cratered and littered with
destroyed aircraft). The landscape was a total wasteland of abandoned
structures and endless fields of frozen mud. There were few signs of
life--plant, animal or human. Kabul was not much better. Entire city
blocks were destroyed, reminiscent of images from Berlin in 1945. Most
of this destruction came not from the Americans or the Soviets. It was
wrought by the Afghans themselves during the vicious civil war that
followed the Soviet retreat in 1989.
Hamid Karzai's Interim Administration had nothing--no army, police,
governmental institutions or rule of law. Long term stability in
Afghanistan, and security for America, would require focus on these
issues. Education was a top priority, especially for girls who had been
deprived of that opportunity when the Taliban took over. USAID moved
immediately to establish girls' schools, and that January, I took our
first Congressional visitor to see a first grade class. Ages ranged
from 6 to 12, the older girls having reached school age when the
Taliban was in power. Did it bother them that they were in a class with
girls literally half their ages? Not at all. They were just happy to be
in school. That visitor was Senator Joe Biden, then Chairman of this
Committee, and he offered solid support for our educational
initiatives. Through sustained effort over the years, the U.S. helped
Afghanistan move from some 800,000 students on 9/11, all of them boys,
to nearly eight million when I left as Ambassador in 2012, some 35
percent of them girls. That is a powerful tool for social change that
would transform the country, but it takes time. And patience. I want to
be clear. Education for Afghan girls and opportunities for women were
consistent with American values. These initiatives also supported our
key national security priority of an Afghanistan that would never again
threaten United States soil. If women's rights are human rights, it is
also true that women's security is national security. Dr. Valerie
Hudson at Texas A&M's Bush School and her colleagues have done
exhaustive research to support that hypothesis.
Part of the argument for a complete U.S. troop withdrawal was that
we were not ``winning'' in Afghanistan. And if we are not winning, we
should withdraw. Winning and losing, victory and defeat were terms that
I did not use in war zones such as Afghanistan and Iraq. In an era of
limited warfare, these terms lose their meaning. Take the word defeat.
It only has meaning if a people feel defeated. That is an argument put
forward to justify the Dresden raids of February 1945 and their heavy
civilian casualties. Coming just 2 months before the final German
surrender, the argument is that the attacks were primarily intended to
break the will of the German people. The same could be said of
Sherman's march through Georgia at the end of the Civil War. We do not
do total war anymore, with the consequence that the Taliban did not
feel defeated in Afghanistan. We saw the first signs of this during
Operation Anaconda against al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in a rugged
area in Afghanistan's northeast at the beginning of March 2002 when
young Afghans tried to penetrate our lines, not to get out of the fight
but to get into it. As was the case in Iraq as well, if an enemy does
not feel defeated, an insurgency is virtually inevitable.
This combines with another phenomenon in the broader Middle East.
Peoples of this region learned long ago that it is not possible to
prevail by force of arms over the better trained and equipped forces of
the West. So put up enough of a fight to save face, then scatter. Lie
low for a while, regroup, refresh and then, sometime after the western
power thinks it has won, start counterpunching. It happened to the
French in Morocco, the Italians in Libya, the British in Iraq, the
Brits, the Soviets and the Americans in Afghanistan. It has been an
enduring element of the region's political culture for several hundred
years and is unlikely to change anytime soon.
There are other consequences of armed intervention and regime
change we need to absorb. One is the likelihood of industrial strength
corruption in the wake of regime change, something I encountered in
Iraq as well as Afghanistan. Without respected institutions and the
rule of law, corruption will flourish. Institutions cannot be imported
and they do not grow overnight. Looking back, metastasizing corruption
seems as inevitable as the insurgencies themselves. If we look at our
own history, we can see how slow, uneven and painful the development of
such institutions is. When you add significant sums of money, you get
corruption, as inevitably as you get an insurgency. As our own history
shows, institutional development takes time, and a lot of it. But it is
also critical for a stable, pluralistic society. In my experience,
institutions are far more important to the building of a democracy than
elections, which can be counterproductive if conducted without a stable
institutional base. We have seen this too in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
This brings me to my second lesson: Be at least as careful in
deciding what you get out of. A withdrawal can have consequences as far
reaching and as serious as those of an intervention. We do not end a
war by withdrawing our forces. We simply cede the field to our
adversaries. In Iraq, there was a grace period. The last of our
deployed forces left the country at the end of 2011. Islamic State
forces swept through western and northern Iraq in June of 2014, 2 and a
half years later. That threat was met by the formation and
legitimization of Shia militias, most of them influenced by Iran. So
the space left by our withdrawal was filled by our two most potent
adversaries in the region. Not exactly the outcome we desired.
In Afghanistan, it was worse. We saw the horrific images of a
panicked mob chasing a C-17 taxiing for takeoff. Several clung to the
wheel wells. only to fall to their deaths minutes later when the plane
was airborne. There was no grace period. Taliban fighters ousted the
Afghan Government that we had supported before we had managed to get
out of town. It made the final evacuation of Saigon look orderly. We
were anything but careful in our withdrawal, with potential
consequences that could play out for years. It did not have to go this
way.
When I left Afghanistan as ambassador in the summer of 2012,
President Obama's surge had brought over 100,000 US troops to the
country. The Taliban controlled none of Afghanistan's 34 provincial
capitals. Beginning with President Obama and continuing under his
successor, troop levels steadily dropped. By the end of President
Obama's second term in 2017, there were around 15,000 US troops, and
still the Taliban controlled no provincial capitals. And when President
Trump left office, the number was just 2500. Only when President Biden
made clear that all forces would be withdrawn by a set date did the
Taliban begin to move.
Challenges to stability in Afghanistan such as endemic corruption
are real and they are serious. But they are not new. The one new and
decisive factor in the process that enabled the Taliban to move from
controlling none of Afghanistan's 34 provincial capitals to controlling
the entire country almost overnight was the final U.S. withdrawal.
President Biden owns the consequences of his withdrawal decision. But
the process that led there began under President Trump. In 2019,
President Trump authorized direct negotiations between the United
States and the Taliban without the participation of the Afghan
Government. It was a concession to a long-standing Taliban demand: they
were ready to talk to the Americans, but not with their illegitimate
puppet regime in the room.
This action delegitimized the Afghan Government and its security
forces, and began the process that culminated in the collapse of the
Government and the triumphant return of the Taliban. It was the
virtually certain outcome of a negotiation that was never about peace.
It was about American withdrawal and a Taliban return to power. In an
NPR interview in September 2019, almost 6 months before the conclusion
of the February 2020 U.S.-Taliban agreement, I said that a planned Camp
David meeting between the Taliban and President Trump that had been
cancelled by the President and the talks with the Taliban suspended
following a Taliban attack that killed an American might be a net
positive if the U.S. abandoned these negotiations with the Taliban
which were not peace talks but a discussion on the terms of a U.S.
surrender, reminiscent of the Paris peace talks on Vietnam in the
1970s. ``At the end of the day, there has to be a negotiated
settlement. You don't end wars without it. But the tack this
Administration has taken since the beginning of these talks was going
in absolutely the wrong direction.'' And so they did, bringing us the
horrific spectacles of August. It is a grim irony that two
Administrations so different in so many respects were united on a
disastrous policy in Afghanistan.
Mr. Chairman, this hearing as well as similar exercises elsewhere
will produce a number of lessons learned that will be important for our
future endeavors. But I believe there is a single overarching problem
that is at the root of what we have seen in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
It is the failure on our part to demonstrate strategic patience . This
is not new, and it is not unique to Afghanistan. But it has perhaps had
its greatest impact there and next door in Pakistan. Our allies have
come to fear our lack of strategic patience, and our adversaries to
count on it. A comment attributed to the Taliban has circulated for
years in Afghanistan: ``You Americans have the watches, but we have the
time.'' In Pakistan, where I served as ambassador 2004-2007, much of
the Taliban leadership enjoyed sanctuary, and it was a major source of
friction in our bilateral relationship. The Pakistani narrative on the
Taliban runs like this: We were close allies in the anti-Soviet jihad
of the 1980s in Afghanistan. But when we prevailed, you went home. And
once you no longer needed us, you stopped getting waivers for the
Pressler Amendment which stipulates the withholding of all U.S.
economic and military assistance to any country pursuing a nuclear
weapons program. So almost overnight we went from being the most allied
of allies to the most sanctioned of adversaries. And we were left with
a vicious Afghan civil war on our borders, threatening our own
stability. So when the Taliban emerged as a force that could stabilize
most of Afghanistan, they had our backing. Then 9/11 happened and
you're back. We're happy to see you, and we'll take whatever is on
offer while the taking is good. Because we know that at some point, you
will be leaving again--it's what you do. Oh--there you go now. We're so
happy we didn't turn the Taliban into a mortal enemy just to watch you
ride off into the sunset.
So the Pakistanis saw their strategic position vindicated. But I
doubt the high fiving in the corridors of power lasted more than 15
minutes or so. The U.S. withdrawal and the manner in which it was
conducted has emboldened Islamic radicals everywhere, not least in
Pakistan where the Pakistani Taliban seeks the overthrow of the
Government in Islamabad. Islamic destabilization of a state with
nuclear weapons is a terrifying prospect.
The list of damage to our national security and our values is long.
We have allowed the Taliban and al-Qaida to reunite. The threat this
poses to our own security is not theoretical--9/11 actually happened,
brought to us from Afghanistan by these same actors. At the same time,
our complete withdrawal has degraded our intelligence capabilities. The
strike in Kabul on what was supposed to be an Islamic State target but
wasn't foreshadows the future. We urged Afghan women and girls to step
forward, into parliament, private enterprise, the classroom and the
military. They did. And now they will pay the price for our lack of
strategic patience. That has already started. Afghan interpreters and
others provided direct assistance to our military and civilian
personnel. They were critical to our efforts, and put their lives and
those of their families at risk by working with us. We said we would
take care of them through the Special Immigrant Visa program, bringing
them to safety in our country. I am a member of the advisory board for
an NGO dedicated to fulfilling our promise to them--No One Left Behind.
We left thousands behind.
I will conclude on a personal note. One of the projects that had
the greatest impact in Afghanistan cost the least amount of money. It
was the reconstruction of Ghazi Stadium in Kabul to FIFA standards,
meaning that it could host World Cup matches. It was a joint endeavor
by International Security Assistance Forces Commander John Allen and
me. For a soccer mad country, this was huge. But there was a deeper
meaning. Ghazi Stadium was used by the Taliban to carry out public
punishments after Friday prayers, including beheadings and the stoning
of women. The reborn Ghazi stadium was the symbol of the new
Afghanistan. I wonder how long it will take the Taliban to turn it back
into a killing ground. We had agency, and we gave it up. We bear
responsibility for these consequences.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
We will start a round of 5-minute questionings. I will
start off.
Throughout the 20 years of our involvement in Afghanistan,
the United States shifted from a narrow counterterrorism
mission to a broader nation building effort. That effort cost
taxpayers, by SIGAR's estimate, $2.3 trillion. I would like to
talk about some of those key strategic decisions.
To both of you, do you believe that the Taliban should have
been included in the Bonn Conference in 2001? Did the Bush
administration miss an opportunity early on when the United
States was in the strongest possible position to demand Taliban
disarmament?
Ms. Miller. If you would like me to go first----
The Chairman. Sure.
Ms. Miller. --I could say, yes, in retrospect, the Taliban
should have been included in the political arrangements for
Afghanistan. They did represent a certain kind of constituency
there, and their potency might have been greatly diminished if
they had been included as just one of multiple factions. You
might never have had an insurgency in the first place.
However, I think to be fair, you have to look at what the
thinking was at that period of time: the fervor of the post-9/
11 period for counterterrorism, the anger at the Taliban for
not turning over Bin Laden, and the perception that there was
no more Taliban, that it was a quick victory, that they were
eliminated, and that it was only a mopping up operation.
So when you talk to people who were involved in the
decision-making at that time, I think it is apparent that it
was not particularly realistic to expect that kind of
perceptivity about what events would unfold and how the
insurgency would arise.
I think you can look to somewhat later periods of time when
there were overtures in the several years that followed the
intervention.
There were some overtures from Taliban individuals who
sought to make accommodations with the Afghan Government, and
the U.S. at that time, I think, should have had a greater sense
of the value of allowing the Afghan Government--President
Karzai at the time--to make some Afghan style deals to
incorporate Taliban figures into governance and that might have
prevented the insurgency.
The Chairman. It makes me think, is there an intelligence
failure? We thought it was a mop up operation. We, obviously,
underestimated that reality.
Ambassador Crocker, do you believe Iraq, another place
where you served as ambassador, was deemed a higher priority by
the Bush White House? Did the Administration pay sufficient
attention to Afghanistan at a time that the Taliban were
regaining strength?
Ambassador Crocker. I was not in or engaged with Afghan
affairs at that time, Mr. Chairman. I was fully immersed in
Iraq as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State covering the Gulf,
including Iraq, in that period 2002-2003.
I would say this. We are the United States of America. We
actually can do more than one thing at once. We did so in World
War II. We were able to prosecute a total war and defeat both
Germany and Japan.
I find it a little difficult to believe that suddenly we do
not have the ability to focus on two regional conflicts at the
same time.
The other point I would make here is that we did not really
seem to understand what was possible and what was not.
As Ms. Miller has said, engaging the Taliban right away
would have been politically impossible also inside Afghanistan.
We would have had a Northern Alliance mutiny if we had done so.
I do not think that was a valid interpretation at all.
Again, had we surged more forces sooner into Afghanistan we
might have simply fueled a earlier and stronger insurgency.
Like almost every other question on the table about
Afghanistan, the issues are complex, they are difficult, and
they are multiple.
The Chairman. Yes. It seems to me we took our eye off the
prize, and we went to a place where there were supposedly
weapons of mass destruction and we found none. We may be the
United States and we may be a superpower, but when you have two
regional conflicts, but of significant consequence and you take
your eye off the main prize, which is where September 11
emanated from, I am not sure that was the greatest decision.
Let me ask one final question. President Trump's approach
towards Afghanistan was, from my view, erratic, first promising
a military victory before signing a surrender deal, as
Ambassador Crocker has said, that saw the release of 5,000
Taliban prisoners and the withdrawal of U.S. forces within 14
months and a deal that which the Taliban made good on none of
it.
Do you think that that deal was a good one? Did the Taliban
uphold their commitments? Is there any real way to have
enforced it, Ms. Miller?
Ms. Miller. A fundamental problem with the deal was one
that you pointed to yourself, Mr. Senator, which is that the
Afghan Government was excluded from the deal, that it was a
bilateral deal between the U.S. and the Taliban.
The reason why prior U.S. policy had been not to make a
separate deal between the U.S. and the Taliban was that it was
seen that that would greatly enhance the leverage and the
appearance of legitimacy of this insurgency group and it would
embolden them and strengthen them both at any subsequent
negotiating table with Afghans, but also on the battlefield,
too.
I think there is reason to criticize that approach, though
it has to be said that the prior efforts to get a negotiation
going among the Afghan Government and the Taliban and the U.S.
failed and I think that is why the Trump administration,
looking for a way to get out of Afghanistan, took that less
favorable route, one that was more advantageous to the Taliban.
I do also think that inclusion of the prisoner release was
a very serious error in the deal, and it is not particularly
because of the 5,000 individuals who were returned to the
battlefield.
It is because of what that signified. That had the United
States negotiating something that was not for the United States
to negotiate. This was not--these were not American prisoners.
These were Afghan Government prisoners and the Afghan
Government was not at the table.
So the U.S. making that agreement to release them was a
signal that it did not really matter what the Afghan Government
thought. It reinforced the Taliban perception that the
Government was just a puppet of the United States and the U.S.
could roll them over on any kind of agreement that it made.
Because of that dynamic, it led to a 6-month delay in any
kind of launch of peace negotiations, which was quite costly,
given how late in the game this was.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Senator Risch.
Senator Risch. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
First of all, let me say I think this is one of the more
important hearings that we will hold. I think it is really
important that we look back and analyze what happened and what
mistakes that we made.
So I am sure as history goes along there is going to be a
lot of books written about this. I hope both of you, from whom
I have heard some very introspective thoughts, I hope you will
be part of that discussion as history goes forward. One of the
important reasons, I think, why we need to do this is that the
United States is going to face these kind of decisions again in
the future.
Indeed, right now we are looking at some conflicts around
the globe that are beckoning the United States to get involved.
I think that as we act like the superpower we are on the
planet, I think all of these things that have happened in the
past are important to look at.
As I said in my opening statement, the culture in
Afghanistan was so different than the culture that we are used
to dealing with, and one of the things that--the corruption
issue is a huge issue as you try to stand up a nation and move
forward.
If you cannot get a handle on that, if it is endemic in the
culture, it is a problem. We have a tendency, I think, to look
at past successes as we did after World War II where we were,
importantly, involved in nation building in both Germany and
Japan, and then after the Korean conflict how we were involved
in South Korea, and they were wildly successful. Those
countries were stood up in our own democratic, freedom, human
rights interests.
Since then, we have been pretty much unsuccessful in doing
that, but we have been dealing with different cultures. I
suspect, and I think as I talk with people around the country,
we all have a tendency to weigh these things and view these
things using our own deep American interests that we have had
over so long a period of time in freedom, democracy, and the
rule of law and those kinds of things.
It is hard to swallow, but there are cultures on the planet
that do not want this or at least some of the culture does not
want it. Certainly, we all make speeches about how all around
the globe people hunger for the freedoms that we have--freedom
of speech, freedom of religion, all the other freedoms that we
have, and yet these freedoms are only widely practiced in a
small portion of the population of the globe.
As we think about the policies as we go forward, I think
every one of these instances is very different and I think
every one of these instances needs to be analyzed as we make
policy decisions, going forward.
It is pretty easy to sit here and criticize decisions that
were made over the last two decades. I mean, there is no
question that there were bad decisions made and there is also
no question that this is not a partisan issue. There were
people on both sides of the aisle that made decisions that were
not appropriate, but in any event, I would like to hear your
thoughts, briefly, because I am almost out of time, on the
issue regarding the difficulty in standing up a government in
our own image in a culture that does not reflect that.
Ms. Miller, I would like to hear your thoughts on that.
Ms. Miller. I think the point about corruption that you
made, I would say that if your strategy requires fixing
corruption in a society where it is endemic and where you have
a sort of patronage basis for society and politics, then change
your strategy.
Do not assume that you can fix the problem of corruption
because there is simply no historical precedent anywhere in the
world for fixing that problem in any policy relevant timeline
through foreign policy and foreign aid.
There just are no examples to point to. It is a
generational challenge that has to be dealt with through
organic and indigenous processes over time. It cannot be done
by the United States through foreign policy, to put it very
bluntly.
I think in terms of standing up the Government, I think it
was not entirely a question of standing up a government in our
own image. There were many aspects of the constitutional system
put in place and the way that politics operated in Afghanistan
that were, in fact, quite Afghan.
There was a lot of Afghan agency here in designing the
constitution, which was predominantly based on an earlier
constitution they had. It was an extremely centralized system
of government, far beyond ours or anything any American expert
would have advocated for Afghanistan. That reflected Afghan
preferences, too, and had a lot of negative consequences for
politics, for the competition for power and resources, and
relates to the point about corruption.
I do not think that it was a failure because we tried to
impose democracy in Afghanistan. I think there was a thirst for
choice among Afghans, who turned out in droves in the initial
elections there, and if democracy is principally about choice
then that is something that Afghans wanted to exercise, but
there are many other lessons we can draw from the specifics
beyond that.
Senator Risch. That is great insight.
Ambassador Crocker.
Ambassador Crocker. Senator Risch, you mentioned South
Korea. South Korea is, indeed, today a model of an economically
sound democracy, but it did not start that way.
What we were able to do in the case of Korea was exhibit
some strategic patience, to see this as a long-term problem, a
threat to our security, and that would need a long-term
commitment.
We made that commitment. Our forces are still there. It was
absolutely the opposite in Afghanistan, of course. We became
impatient when a government was unable to instantly create
viable rule of law and institutions that are respected. That
kind of thing takes years and years.
There are certain inevitabilities that come with that
process. One of them is corruption. If you have overthrown a
regime and swept away whatever law and institutions may have
existed, you are starting over. You are starting from scratch.
All of this takes a lot of time, and if you add large sums
of money to the void of respected institutions and rule of law,
bingo, you get corruption. You also have an inevitability of
insurgency if your opponent, your enemy, does not feel
defeated.
The Taliban did not feel defeated because they ran. That is
when the big guys come get under the porch, and that is exactly
what the Taliban did, taking a leaf from many chapters
previously where indigenous forces went to ground in the face
of a foreign military intervention only to emerge later in an
insurgency, and that is exactly what happened in Afghanistan.
One could see the early signs of that, Senator, when I was
in Afghanistan in that early period, March 2002, Operation
Anaconda, where we were undermanned and under-gunned for the
challenge that al-Qaeda and some Taliban gave to us.
We saw individual Afghans trying to get through our lines,
not to get out of the fight, but to get into it. That was an
issue and we were all aware of it, our military and our
civilians.
In the absence of total war, you can pretty well count on
an insurgency, and in the absence of strong stable
institutions, which can only be built over years, you are going
to get corruption, too.
Senator Risch. Thanks so much to both of you for your
insights on this. Thank you.
Senator Cardin [presiding]. Senator Menendez will be back
shortly. He had a vote in the Senate Finance Committee. I will
take my time at this particular moment, and let me just join
our chairman and ranking member in thanking our two panelists
for your service to our country.
I agree with much of what Senator Risch just said in
regards to mistakes made by four administrations, and in
hindsight it is a lot easier to see those mistakes, but in real
time it is more challenging, as everyone has pointed out.
I want to, first, underscore the point that Senator
Menendez made and that is the decision to go into Iraq when we
thought they had weapons of mass destruction. That was a
mistake of intelligence. At least, that is as it was presented
to us at the time.
There was no evidence that Iraq was involved in the 9/11
attacks. We changed our mission in the Middle East at that
time. Afghanistan is a result of the attack on our country.
Iraq distracted our military, at least, from the mission in
Afghanistan.
It is clear to me that that had an impact on our success in
Afghanistan if we would have not been also engaged at that time
in an act of war in Iraq and dealing with the challenges in
Iraq.
I recognize that America could do more than one thing at a
time, but when we are engaged in two recent military operations
and we had not completed the first, and the missions are
somewhat inconsistent, it does, to me, distract from our
ability to carry out our responsibility in Afghanistan.
I want to get to the issue of corruption. Ambassador
Crocker, I thought you made an excellent point. We recognize
that we could not change a society overnight. We did not
understand the patronage society. We recognize that, but where
America is filling a significant part of the financial needs of
a country, there seems to me that there could have been
safeguards put in place to make sure that the aid that we gave
went to the people and not just to fuel the corruption of the
principal leaders.
This was over a 20-year period that we were unable to reach
the people of Afghanistan to the extent necessary to get the
type of popular support for the type of governance that they
had, causing the counter insurgencies and the aftermath that we
see today.
Yes, I understand patience. Twenty years may not have been
long enough for some, but I think there was wasted time during
the 20 years in trying to establish a more responsive
government for the people of Afghanistan.
In the United States lessons learned, there has to be a way
that we can reinforce a governance where the people get the
benefit of our assistance rather than the corrupt leaders.
Ambassador Miller, I heard your point when you said never
in the history have we seen a successful example. Corruption
exists in all countries. I recognize that, but it seems to me
that our engagement in Afghanistan actually assisted the
corruption of the regime, causing significant dissatisfaction
among the populace for the United States presence.
Ms. Miller. I would agree that our assistance helped to
fuel corruption. It was just an enormous scale of money to be
pumping into a country with a very limited economy and where
there was a lot of competition for resources, especially on the
military side in terms of large-scale contracting for
transportation and fuel, which were just two of the areas where
a lot of corruption has been--a lot of siphoning off of
resources has been revealed, and there are a lot of Afghans who
became very wealthy as a result of American contracting there.
Villas in Dubai do not build themselves. That is, ultimately,
funded with American taxpayer resources.
I think part of the problem, and it is a real conundrum, is
that it is very difficult for us, given our system--our
political system and our foreign assistance system--to pace
ourselves in these kinds of interventions.
Initially, there were very small sums, relatively, spent in
Afghanistan. As the situation worsened and it became a higher
political priority, there was a perceived need and an
opportunity to gain appropriations of larger resources and then
to have to spend them within the timescale of those
appropriations.
So it leads to a dynamic where there is an impulse to get
as much funding as you can as quickly as you can and spend it
as quickly as you can when it is a political high priority,
knowing that that is going to fade and you are not going to be
able to sustain it over time.
It is very difficult for us to pace our spending in an
intervention like this with 1- and 2-year funding cycles as
opposed to longer-term funding cycles that some other
governments, for instance, the European Union, have in their
civilian assistance programs.
I do not have an answer to that. As I said, it is a
conundrum. If less had been spent at the peak, there probably
would have been criticism that not enough was being spent even
though the people involved in spending it knew the absorptive
capacity was just not there to spend that much money that
quickly and maintain the oversight that is necessary to prevent
corruption.
Senator Cardin. Lessons learned, as I see it, is that we
have to have a strategy to make sure that our engagement does
not reinforce the greed of corrupt leaders, and that was, I
think, absent in Afghanistan.
Senator Johnson.
Ambassador Crocker. If I could----
Senator Cardin. I am sorry. Ambassador Crocker, briefly?
Ambassador Crocker. Yes, if I could. Our most successful
programs in Afghanistan cost the least and went directly to the
Afghan people. Education and health care--the number of
students in Afghan schools when I arrived in 2002 was about
900,000, all boys, and when I left as ambassador in 2012, over
8 million, 35 percent girls.
Similarly, in healthcare we reduced dramatically the death
rate from infant and maternal mortality. They worked, they cost
less, and they went directly to the Afghan people. We should
look for programs like that and avoid major infrastructure
projects.
I agree completely with Ms. Miller. We need to look at our
own budget processes. Our internal processes contribute a great
deal to waste and mismanagement in Afghanistan.
Senator Cardin. Thank you. I appreciate that response.
Senator Johnson.
Senator Johnson. Thank you, Senator Cardin. I also want to
thank the witnesses. Ambassador Crocker, thanks for your
service.
I read an interesting book well over 10 years ago. It was
written by members of our Special Ops that served in
Afghanistan. Their basic conclusion was that we pretty well
accomplished what we needed to accomplish before General Franks
ever stepped foot on the ground there.
In hindsight, it is kind of hard to really argue with their
conclusion, except for one point--Osama bin Laden had escaped
from Tora Bora--and I think there was a political imperative to
do everything we could to track him down and bring him to
justice.
Ambassador Crocker, I have two questions for you, one
looking back. This is, obviously, in retrospect. It is
important for us to examine what mistakes were made, but I
think, even more importantly, one looking forward having to do
with Pakistan.
First, the backward-looking question. To what extent was
Pakistan complicit in harboring Osama bin Laden? Then looking
forward, obviously, Pakistan is a nuclear power.
In your testimony, you mentioned that they are going to be
under pressure from the Taliban. It is almost unthinkable to
contemplate the Taliban getting hold of the Pakistani
Government and those nuclear weapons.
What do we need to do to prevent that? First, what do you
know about the complicity of Pakistan harboring Osama bin
Laden?
Ambassador Crocker. Senator, it is a great question to
which I do not have the answer. There has, obviously, been a
lot of speculation over that both before and after the
Abbottabad raid that killed him.
Pakistan was a reasonably good partner in the fight against
al-Qaeda leaders inside of Pakistan, including several ops
chiefs, number threes, in the al-Qaeda organization, and enough
pressure that while we did not find Osama bin Laden in those
years prior to his killing, he was not communicating.
I really cannot say that they were complicit in harboring
him, that they knew all about him and where he was. I just do
not know.
Going forward, I think it is critically important that we
do some listening as Afghanistan's neighbors gauge their own
risk and threat. As you say, it is an appalling thought that
the Pakistani Government could be so destabilized that they
would lose control over their nuclear weapons, and that is the
point I made earlier.
We have got to act like a global leader because, trust me,
this is now an absolute global problem. The enormous boost that
the fact and the nature of our withdrawal has emboldened
Islamic extremists everywhere, we are going to be dealing with
that for a long time and we are going to have to deal with it
collectively.
Senator Johnson. The reason I asked the questions in
combination, if we truly do not know Pakistan's--whether they
were complicit or not in harboring Osama bin Laden, based on
the imperative, moving forward, I think we have to give them
the benefit of the doubt and we need to do everything we can
now to assist Pakistan from being overrun by the Taliban. Would
you agree with that?
Ambassador Crocker. I would. Again, we have got to be
careful. We have got to be measured and we have got to be
suspicious, but I would judge the potential threat to
Pakistan's own stability to be so severe that we are going to
have to figure out--again, I would hope, collectively--how that
threat can be reduced.
Senator Johnson. Ms. Miller, I think many of us on this
committee--I know Senator Shaheen has been active in this issue
supporting the women in Afghanistan. I think we mourn their
upcoming, probably present, loss of freedoms that we helped
establish for them.
It is kind of hard to just turn away from that. It is hard
not to acknowledge the fact that America, despite all the
mistakes made, all the bad decisions made on a bipartisan
basis, our intentions were still good.
I know in your testimony you covered this, but could you
just reinforce again what can we do if--or is there nothing we
can do to try and reinforce the gains that the Afghan women
have made during our time there?
Ms. Miller. Yes. There are understandable reasons why it
might be the impulse in American policy now to isolate the
Taliban regime, to punish the regime, to make good on what the
United States long said to the Taliban, which is that if you
take power through military means rather than in a negotiated
settlement, you will be a pariah regime starved of resources.
On the other hand, I do think we have to consider what you
get out of a policy like that. What do the Afghan people, what
do Afghan women, get out of an isolation policy?
What does the United States get out of an isolation policy
vis-a-vis the Taliban? My conclusion, and it is a difficult
conclusion to make and I have personally struggled with it, is
you do not get anything at all.
If there is any prospect of even slightly moderating
Taliban policies, if there is any even slight prospect of
having some, perhaps, secret cooperation with the Taliban on
counterterrorism, it is not going to be by isolating them.
It can only be through some engagement and through some
relaxation of U.S. willingness to provide development aid that
is not directly to the Taliban government but that could have
the effect of helping them to reinforce their grip on power. We
have to recognize that.
The Taliban are resilient. They resisted enormous military
pressure by the United States over 20 years. They are perfectly
capable of resisting some financial pressure and efforts to use
aid as leverage.
So I come to the difficult conclusion that some degree of
engagement with the Taliban, avoiding particular individuals in
particular ministries, and some degree of aid to be able to
continue programs--for instance, to support women and girls in
Afghanistan--is what is in the greatest interest of the United
States as well as the Afghan people.
The Chairman [presiding]. Thank you.
Senator Johnson. Thank you, Ms. Miller. If I just may, just
quickly, Mr. Chairman.
I just want to make a comment because, I mean, in both
cases the answers to my questions indicate that as many as
mistakes were made in the past, we have to look at the reality
on the ground now and we need to do everything we can to move
positively forward.
That may be some pretty hard pills to swallow, but it is
extremely important for us to look at the reality of the
situation now and how can we make that reality better.
Thank you.
The Chairman. Senator Shaheen.
Senator Shaheen. Thank you to both of our witnesses for
being here.
Ms. Miller, I think I understood when you were giving your
fifth lesson learned from Afghanistan, I think I understood you
to say something like Afghanistan has not been critical enough
to U.S. security at this point for us to continue to stay. Is
that paraphrasing, basically, what you said?
Ms. Miller. I think one of the reasons why it has been hard
to have the strategic patience that Ambassador Crocker talked
about is because, at the end of the day, Afghanistan is not
central to U.S. national security interests, and I think
President Biden would not have made the decision to withdraw if
he had judged it to be essential to U.S. national security
interests.
Senator Shaheen. Thank you. I appreciate that. That is what
I thought you said.
Ambassador Crocker, as I understand, what you have said
about Afghanistan is that you think it is long term critical to
U.S. national security. Do I misunderstand?
Ambassador Crocker. You do not misunderstand, Senator. We
actively track threats around the world to our national
security. There are many groups out there that would like to
execute such attacks, but there is only one group that actually
did it, and that was al-Qaeda, sheltered under the Taliban. It
happened. These are the actors who brought it about.
We have already seen a return of at least one senior Bin
Laden assistant or aide into his hometown of Jalalabad. The
band is coming back together again, and there is absolutely no
reason to think that the Taliban now covering Afghanistan are
somehow kinder and gentler after two decades in the wilderness.
They will not give up their ideology. They will not give up
their al-Qaeda ally, and the Islamic State actions against
civilians, mainly, in Afghanistan now will virtually guarantee
that.
Islamic State may be an existential threat to the Taliban.
What they will not do in response is bargain away their
ideology. They will cling to it even tighter now, I think, with
the Islamic State threat.
Yes, I do believe that there is a threat to American
national security. Our defenses are far more robust than they
were in 2001, but you do not win a game relying exclusively on
defense, and I think that the decision made to pull our forces
out completely at a time when they were already minimal and
during which the Taliban controlled not a single provincial
capital, I think that has put our security at risk.
Senator Shaheen. Thank you. I share that view, and I would
argue that the strategic patience that you are talking about is
really dependent upon the extent to which we believe we have a
critical stake for our country and our national security in
continuing to support our military posture in a place, as you
pointed out with Senator Risch, like South Korea, like Japan,
like Germany after World War II and where we still have
significant troops.
I want to go back to the tragedy that a number of us have
mentioned around women and girls because, Ambassador Crocker, I
share your view that this is one of the most tragic aspects of
our time in Afghanistan.
A huge success story in that so many women were empowered,
were able to go to school, but a tragic outcome when we look at
the potential now for the Taliban to totally take away those
freedoms for women.
I wonder if either of you can speak to--and I share, Ms.
Miller, your view that we have got to continue to find a way to
get humanitarian aid to help the Afghan people even if that
means that, to some extent, we have to work with the Taliban,
but what leverage do we have at this point on the Taliban to
try and support freedoms for women in the country or at least a
better station in life for women in the country?
Ms. Miller. I think we have very little leverage over them.
I mean, it is not zero, and you see that in what the Taliban
are saying, if not entirely doing, so far.
They are trying to put a good face on their policies. They
are saying things unlike what they said in the 1990s about the
protections for women and girls, the role of women and girls,
girls' education, et cetera.
There are some women in the workplace still, particularly
in areas where they need to interact with other women, and in
other areas they are being excluded.
I by no means consider this to be something that should be
taken at face value and trusted, but there is the fact that
there is some distinction in the public narrative they are
trying to put out shows that they are aware of the interests of
foreign countries whose support they are trying to attract, and
that is at least a little bit to work with.
I would not want to exaggerate it by any means. I think
there is also a role for the United States through its
diplomacy to collaborate with other countries that have
influence over the Taliban, particularly Islamic countries, in
trying to influence their policies and press upon them the fact
that there are many Islamic countries around the world that
allow girls education and that have policies that are more open
than the Taliban's.
It will take a collective effort and some quite vigorous
diplomacy on the part of the United States to marshal that
collective effort.
Senator Shaheen. Thank you. In order to do that, it would
be helpful for us to have our diplomats in capitals around the
world, however, and not having them be on hold here in the
Senate because there are objections from our colleagues.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Senator Romney.
Senator Romney. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Ms. Miller, Ambassador Crocker, thank you very, very much
for your service for our country.
I want to talk about the very beginning of our decision to
go into Afghanistan and what we might have learned or done
differently.
I cannot move on to that without acknowledging the fact
that we have, in many respects, been showered with shame in the
way we left--one, I think, a disastrous decision by the prior
Administration to surrender through the talks and agreement
they entered into and the continuation of that decision by the
current Administration, and then, of course, its fateful
execution of the withdrawal.
We have left behind thousands, we have broken promises to
friends and allies, we have abandoned women and girls there
and, of course, we put America and our friends and our national
interests at much greater risk, as has been pointed out by
Senator Johnson and by others today.
By the way, I just note that when there is a poll that says
that most Americans want to leave Afghanistan, I wish that
political people would say, let us point out to the American
people do you really want to leave if there is going to be
abandonment of our principles, abandonment of girls, and a
degradation of our national security?
That, I think, might lead to a different poll answer, but
that is, obviously, a different point.
I want to turn to the question of what we could have done
at the beginning. Given the fact that we were attacked on 9/11,
that the Taliban was responsible for al-Qaeda having a base of
operations in their country, looking back, what should we have
done instead? What could we have done instead?
I mean, I remember I was in Afghanistan, actually, as
Ambassador Crocker was there and my wife said, are you getting
used to the, I do not know, 10 and a half hour time change
difference? I said, no, it is the 1,000 years' time change
difference that I am finding hard to get used to.
It struck me that our mission went from one of securing
America from potential future attack to trying to build a
democratic-styled country and that that was just a bridge far
too far.
Ms. Miller, perhaps you could begin with just what might we
have done differently? Was it the expansion of mission that was
the greatest error? Likewise, Ambassador Crocker, I would very
much value your opinion on that topic.
Ms. Miller. In the alternative history, I think what you
could imagine is that instead of deciding, as the Bush
administration did, that it had to make an example of the
Taliban to other would-be harborers of terrorist groups around
the world, that instead it made the decision to violate Afghan
sovereignty, chase the al-Qaeda perpetrators and punish the al-
Qaeda perpetrators and, essentially, ignore the Taliban or
perhaps inflict some punishment on them, but not to the point
of overthrowing them.
This was an approach that the Bush administration derided
as the old law enforcement approach to counterterrorism that
had been practiced during prior administrations--go after the
perpetrators--and it was a very explicit decision and not
without some, at least, small degree of controversy within the
Bush administration to take that approach.
I say small degree because there was, I think, in the State
Department some awareness that, in the words of Colin Powell,
you break it, you own it.
So if you are going to engage in regime change you had
better have the strategic patience that Ambassador Crocker
talked about if you are going to see it through because the
expansion of the mission all flowed from that initial decision
to engage in regime change.
Would it have worked just as well to go after the
perpetrators without overthrowing the Taliban? I mean, it is
hard to engage in these hypotheticals, but I think what we have
seen is that elsewhere around the world since that time that is
the approach that has been taken.
Senator Romney. Thank you.
Ambassador.
Ambassador Crocker. Senator, I do not think there was an
alternative. We gave the Taliban an out. We told them, hand
over al-Qaeda leadership to us and we will leave you alone.
They refused to do that, and I think that refusal left us with
no choice except to execute the mission as we did.
It would be pretty hard to justify at home or abroad that
the Taliban, having refused to give up the murderers of 9/11,
that we could somehow go after al-Qaeda and leave them alone
and when we are done doing that just say, thanks for your
hospitality, and to go home ourselves.
I do not think that was a viable approach either in
national security terms or in political terms.
Senator Romney. Help me understand. Did we make an error in
going from taking out the Taliban and removing al-Qaeda to a
decision to, if you will, create a democratic nation of sorts?
Was there a change in mission that suggested a doomed mission
from the outset?
Ambassador Crocker. I do not think so, Senator. Let us
recall that in the wake of 9/11 and the absolutely universal
support for the United States at that difficult time led to the
Bonn Conference in Germany in early December 2001 where the
international community came together under U.N. auspices to
set the stage for a new Afghanistan.
The Afghan interim authority was formed there with later
President Karzai as its chairman. I do not think it would have
been possible or conceivable for us to say we do not want to do
that. We are just going to go after the bad guys. Forget all
the rest of this stuff.
To me, that exists in some realm of science fiction,
frankly.
Senator Romney. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Senator Murphy.
Senator Murphy. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Ambassador Crocker, I have an immense degree of respect for
the dedication of your life to the security of this country.
I remember being a first-term, 33-year-old member of
Congress and going to Iraq for my first time meeting you and
being absolutely mesmerized by your complete control of the set
of facts on the ground there.
So that makes it pretty shocking to me to sort of listen to
what seems to be from you a complete lack of critical
assessment of our 20-year adventure in Afghanistan and your
answers to Senator Romney's question, an open-ended one, as to
what we would do differently. You seem to suggest we would not
have done anything differently, in retrospect.
Your writing on this, both for this committee and in
public, is about the theme of strategic patience, just doing
more of what we were doing for longer. I maybe want to just ask
the question one more time because that is the whole intent of
this hearing, to understand what went wrong.
Was there a design flaw in what we did in Afghanistan or
were the mistakes just around the margin? Because it is hard to
see what happened a few months ago--the complete overnight
disintegration of the Government and military all at once--and
read that we did not do anything wrong for 20 years.
I mean, let me just put that question to you again. Is your
testimony that, at its essence, our policy was right and we
just needed to do it for longer? Or do you find any central
flaws in our strategy and policy in Afghanistan over the course
of 20 years?
Ambassador Crocker. I thought I had been pretty clear on
that point, Senator, in saying that the process that President
Trump launched of negotiating with the Taliban and without the
Afghan Government and its subsequent embrace by President
Biden, who even kept the same Afghanistan envoy, was a horrific
mistake.
Does that mean that the status quo should just be
continued? Of course, it does not. Look, when I was ambassador
there 2011-2012, it was the height of the surge. We had over
100,000 American troops on the ground, and the Taliban was
active, but it did not control a single provincial capital.
Under the Obama administration and subsequently, we reduced
those numbers by 90 percent. At the time President Obama left
office, I think we had 14,000 troops on the ground and the
Taliban held no provincial capitals. Those numbers dropped from
there.
Indeed, looking at the reporting I have seen, in that
period between the end of the Obama administration and the
beginning of the Trump administration, the Taliban was on its
back foot with a hugely reduced number of troops.
I guess I just do not understand the point, Senator. We
were drawing down very, very significantly and yet still able
to support the Afghan National Security Forces in their effort
to ensure that the Taliban could not take and hold any urban
ground.
Senator Murphy. Your primary criticism comes in year 19 so
I am asking whether there was a flaw in design for years 1
through 18, and your focus on provincial capitals ignores the
fact that by 2017 the Taliban controlled 73 different
districts.
So you are right that they had chosen not to move on
provincial capitals, but they had control of sizable amounts of
territory.
Let me ask you the question this way. What does strategic
patience look like, moving forward? Had we decided to stay, how
much longer? If President Biden had said to the American
people, listen, we are going to stick around for longer, what
estimates should he had given as to how long would be long
enough?
Ambassador Crocker. That question, I think, Senator, is one
of the enduring problems we suffer from. Give us a date. Mark
the calendar. Tell us when we are done here. President Obama,
of course, when he announced the surge also announced the
withdrawal timetable.
I think that was a huge mistake. We cannot----
Senator Murphy. I hear you. I hear you. I hear you in that.
I hear you. Then let me give you the chance to answer
differently.
Then if the timeline is impossible, what are the
benchmarks? Why would we think that those benchmarks could be
achieved in another 5 years or 10 years if we were so far away
from those benchmarks being achieved in 20? What are the
benchmarks and why believe that another 10 would allow us to
achieve them?
Ambassador Crocker. Again, the critical mission throughout
those 20 years was ensuring that Afghan soil did not harbor
elements who could make another attack on the U.S. homeland.
Again, our ability to keep the Taliban off balance and on the
defensive with an ever reducing number of forces, well, that is
your answer.
You are not going to get total victory in an Afghan context
or anywhere else. We do not do total war. We do not get total
victories. We were managing a security challenge with a minimal
number of U.S. forces and a much reduced budget impact. That is
what I would have hoped we could continue.
For the President, either President, to say to the American
people, this is about conditions and not calendar, the irony
is, of course, that President Trump said exactly that. Had he
stuck with it we might be in a very different place today.
Senator Murphy. Mr. Chairman, ceding back, I think one of
the outstanding questions is whether you could have continued
with 2,500 troops, whether or not that was a sufficient number,
knowing that the Taliban was on the precipice of taking these
provincial capitals, especially had we violated the agreement
that President Trump had signed.
I think most observers would suggest that that number was
not going to be sufficient, but that is a topic for another set
of questions.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Senator Paul.
Senator Paul. Ambassador Crocker, your contention that the
policy never changed, that the original policy to go after the
people who attacked us on 9/11 and prevent them from attacking
us again, that it has never morphed into nation building, I
think, is accepted by virtually no one.
I think it is important to state that at the outset. The
al-Qaeda threat had dwindled to a handful of fighters. There
was absolutely no one giving us intelligence saying we were an
imminent threat from anyone in Afghanistan. It had definitely
morphed into nation building.
The lesson of the two-decade debacle in Afghanistan is not
that we did not stay long enough. It is that we stayed too
long. The lesson of nation building in Afghanistan is not that
it works but that in Afghanistan it conspicuously failed.
Billions of dollars were spent on nation building in
Afghanistan. In the end, hundreds of thousands of uniforms,
automatic weapons, armored personnel carriers, helicopters, and
planes were unceremoniously surrendered.
The 300,000-strong Afghan military and police laid down
their weapons with barely a whimper. The President absconded
and all the while maintained, hey, I did not steal that much,
as he fled.
You sit before us telling us that the lesson of America's
longest war is that we did not stay long enough? After 20 years
that we did not practice strategic patience?
In the Afghan Papers, your candid opinion was less
supportive of the Afghan nation-building experiment. You
complained that the Afghan police force was utterly
incompetent.
Others have commented on the graft of the Karzai family, on
the drug dealing and outright theft by his brothers. Others
have complained of provincial overlords so caught up in
fleecing their subjects that the people actually willingly
invited the Taliban in.
You think the lesson is that we should have stayed longer?
The Inspector General for Afghanistan has documented the
abundant waste of taxpayer dollars from a $45 million natural
gas station to a $60 million hotel that was never built, as the
contractor ran off with the money.
Even in the end, 20 years later, in this experiment that
you wish to strategically be patient with, we were sending $249
million in boxes of $100 bills every 3 months to Afghanistan.
It has been admitted by experts, even today by members of
this panel, that guess what, the aid does not fix corruption.
You think sending $249 billion in $100 bills to Afghanistan
every 3 months was somehow aiding and getting rid of corruption
and you want us to be patient?
The lesson of Afghanistan is not that nation building works
but that it is a colossal failure. Afghanistan never was South
Korea and the parallels are scant at best. The lesson of
Afghanistan is the same as it was for the British and for the
Soviets. Stone-age clannish cultures are quite resistant to
colonization and imposition of Western ways.
Biden's exit from Afghanistan was a military catastrophe.
No one can dispute that. It was an unmitigated disaster, but it
does not change the lesson that nation building is a fool's
errand.
The lesson of the two-decade debacle in Afghanistan is not
that we did not stay long enough; we stayed too long. You have
counseled that the U.S. should have more strategic patience. I
hope that does not mean you also advocate for sending troops
back into Afghanistan.
Do you suggest that we should return to Afghanistan?
Ambassador Crocker. Senator, I do not advocate nation
building. I said, rather, the opposite. The construction
projects were a bad idea, badly executed. The Afghans build
their own nation. We cannot do it for them. I never suggested
anything to the contrary.
I did say that our most successful programs did not involve
bricks and mortars and it did not involve widespread
corruption--the assistance we gave directly to the Afghan
people in terms of improved educational opportunities,
especially for women and girls, and for much better health
care.
Now, look, I am not going to say and would never say no, we
made a mistake. We should not have educated Afghans. We should
not have stepped up for Afghan girls and women and ensured that
they have the educational opportunities to be a full member of
their society. That is not nation building. That is national
security, Senator, and----
Senator Paul. You still argued in the very end and up to
this day that our mission was that it was a national security
mission to defend the country from al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Almost no one argues that.
People readily admit it morphed into another mission. That
is part of the problem. It morphed into nation building.
Sending over $249 million in cash every 3 months in $100 bills
is not exactly defending our national security.
I think your unwillingness to accept that the mission was
not about preventing from al-Qaeda and was nation building in
the end, really, I hope people will discount your opinion that
we should have stayed forever in Afghanistan.
Thank you.
The Chairman. Senator Kaine.
Senator Kaine. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member
Risch, and thanks to the witnesses for being here today.
A point and then a set of questions. One point is this.
Hearing about lessons learned from Afghanistan has kind of a
past tense tone to it and I think we have to acknowledge that
there--we are not talking purely in the past tense. There is an
ongoing chapter that is a very important chapter.
The United States military helped bring 70,000 Afghan
families--Afghans to the United States during this evacuation.
The last chapter is not people trying to get on planes. No,
there is an ongoing chapter about 70,000 Afghans who were
thrilled to have an opportunity for a life in the United States
and the ongoing need that we have as members of Congress to
make sure that their resettlement is as successful as possible.
Three of the bases where the Afghans have been relocated
during the resettlement process are in Virginia--Quantico, Fort
Pickett, and Fort Lee. The last Afghan left Fort Lee this
morning. They had around 2,000, and Fort Lee is now--there are
no Afghans there. We have resettled about 25,000 Afghans, have
45,000 still to resettle. Most are being resettled under a 2-
year DHS humanitarian parole.
Congress needs to figure out what is the next chapter for
these brave families who have helped the United States beyond
that 2-year period. We have work to do on that. We have work to
do to support the resettlement process.
I visited Fort Pickett last Wednesday, the day before
Veterans Day, and I visited with our troops and with our
contractors and with our physicians, but I also visited with a
lot of Afghan families.
I told them tomorrow is Veterans Day in the United States
and I got to give two Veterans Day speeches. If you were giving
the speeches instead of me, what would you say to American
troops and veterans? What I heard was so emotional, so
gratifying, so powerful.
One young man told me, the Americans saved my life three
times. I said, well, tell me what you mean by that. First, the
American troops saved my life by coming to Afghanistan and
rescuing us from chaos.
Second, the American troops saved my life. I started to
work for them, and when my life was in danger they talked me
into applying for an SIV and helped me get it, and I came to
the United States in 2017 and I am safe here.
I said, well, what about the third time? You came here in
2017. American troops saved my life a third time just 2 months
ago because U.S. Marines went out and found my mother and
father, and made sure that they got to the airport in Kabul and
now they are here with me. I never thought I would see them
again, and you saved my life a third time by reconnecting me
with my family.
As we talk about Afghanistan, I would not want to suggest
that the last chapter are those disturbing pictures of chaos at
the airport. No, the last chapter is the chapter we have to
write for 70,000 Afghans, about 45 percent of whom are
children, who we have brought to the United States, who we have
given a new opportunity for a life in a land of better
opportunity. We have to make sure that that resettlement
process works and I am going to do all I can to make sure that
it does.
I am going to pick up a little bit on Senator Paul's
questions about time, and there is many lessons learned.
One lesson that I hope we will explore is congressional
oversight of war. We are going to have a vote sometime in the
next day or so, I believe, about repeal of the Iraq War
authorizations. The war ended 10 years ago, but the
authorizations remain on the books, and we are going to have a
vote about whether we should repeal authorizations and not have
a pending war authorization against a country that we now work
as a partner with.
I worry a little bit about the war authorization for
Afghanistan. It was passed in the days after 9/11 and, clearly,
we needed to undertake military action to respond to that, but
the war authorization had no geographic limitation. It had no
real definition of what the mission was. It had no time limit
on it. I wonder if, in the future--and if either of the
witnesses have an opinion about this--we will be tested again
and we will probably have to pass war authorizations again
because it is a dangerous world.
I am pretty inclined to believe if we do these now we
should have review periods and sunset periods that force really
in-depth analysis of what is the mission now. How are we
defining success? What are the benchmarks? Should we continue
to invest American lives and treasure in this military mission?
I worry that the open-ended war authorizations that just
kind of allow the executive to carry out war on autopilot are
sort of an abdication of a congressional oversight
responsibility.
My time is almost up, Mr. Chair. If you would allow either
witness to answer that maybe. I would love to hear what they
have to say.
The Chairman. All right. The gentleman has adeptly used all
his time asking the question and positing the issues, but we
will let the witnesses answer.
Ms. Miller. I could offer a quick comment. I think what you
have pointed to is one part of a very worrisome phenomenon of
the over militarization of American foreign policy, and I think
there are a couple of respects beyond the one that you pointed
to where this was evident in Afghanistan.
One was that when you are militarily engaged in a country
there is no problem getting the resources and support for the
military effort, but there is still a lot of problem getting
the resources and support for the diplomatic effort.
There is just an enormous power imbalance not only in terms
of congressional policies and practices, but in terms of what
happens within the executive branch in the decision-making
processes, whose voices are loudest and more numerous at the
table in the National Security Council.
There is a reason why these people get so many stars on
their shoulder and it is because they have a kind of can-do
attitude that attracts support, and you want that in a general,
but that does not mean that they should have such a
determinative effect on U.S. foreign policy decisions.
The second way in which I saw it was that skepticism about
the plausibility of diplomatic initiatives, particularly peace
negotiation initiatives in earlier years, always got in the way
of real robust support for those initiatives in a way that
skepticism about the plausibility of winning the war never
seemed to get in the way of putting the warfighting effort
front and center in U.S. policy.
That is a problem beyond Congress, but I think one that you
can probably influence through your oversight.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Senator Barrasso.
Senator Barrasso. Thanks so much, Mr. Chairman.
Ambassador Crocker, first, I really appreciate your taking
the time to join this discussion. I have great value for your
experience and service to our nation. You and I were together
in Baghdad in 2007 during the surge on Thanksgiving Day.
In September of this year, you discussed the situation in
Afghanistan stating this. You said, we have done grave damage
to our friends and allies inside of Afghanistan, to our own
national security interests, and to some of our most cherished
values as Americans. I completely agree with your assessment.
In August, President Biden oversaw the tragic and failed
withdrawal from Afghanistan. Due to this Administration's
weakness, incompetence, and mismanagement, the Taliban took
over Afghanistan in a matter of weeks.
Both General McKenzie and General Milley testified before
Congress that they advised the President not to withdraw
completely. They recommended keeping 2,500 troops in
Afghanistan.
Yet, President Biden refused to take their advice.
President Biden ordered a complete withdrawal and he abandoned
Bagram Airbase. Just days before the withdrawal, terrorists
killed 13 service members at the Kabul Airport.
One of those fallen heroes was Rylee McCollum of Wyoming.
It was the deadliest day for the U.S. military in a decade.
Media reports indicate the terrorist responsible had been
released from prison at Bagram Airbase when it fell to the
Taliban.
The consequences of President Biden's strategic failure
have not ended. There are still Americans stranded behind enemy
lines. The withdrawal was so rushed the Administration made
serious vetting mistakes.
Our allies and our partners are furious. Our enemies are
emboldened. It appears to many people that President Biden
still believes that it was, ``an extraordinary success.'' No
one has been fired over the withdrawal from Afghanistan. No one
has resigned. There has been no accountability.
I ask on behalf of so many veterans I saw in Wyoming the
last week over Veterans Day this question: Who at the
Department of State should be held accountable for the
strategic failures and disorganized plans?
[No response.]
Senator Barrasso. Ambassador Crocker, who should be held
responsible for the strategic failures and the disorganized
plans?
Ambassador Crocker. Senator, that is a question that
perhaps Congress could answer by holding other hearings,
because I do think that answer is important. I will give you an
historical parallel that I hope we do not pursue any further
than we already have.
I was in Lebanon in the early 1980s as a political
counselor. I was there when the embassy was bombed in 1983
April and I was there when the Marine barracks were bombed in
October.
The blame reached no higher than the commander of the MOU,
now a MEU--Marine Expeditionary Unit--Colonel Tim Geraghty. He
was the only one to pay a significant price. No one above him
in the chain of command, military or civilian, suffered any
consequences for that horrible lapse.
Fast forward all these years later, it is the Marines,
again, at an airport. It is the Marines, again, in a tactically
totally disadvantageous position who paid the price.
Those Marines were not born in 1983. Their parents probably
were not born in 1983, but I guarantee you every Marine out
there then knew the story exactly and they did their duty
anyway, and I hope that in assessing responsibility we will not
stop at the MEU commander or the division commander there at
the time.
Again, as I have said and as others have said, there is
plenty of blame to go around here. President Biden was the
sitting President who ordered the final withdrawal. He owns it,
but it is equally true that President Trump set us all on a
course that led to what we are dealing with now.
Senator Barrasso. Ambassador Crocker, after President
Biden's strategic failure in Afghanistan we have seen the
consequences of this weakness all across the world.
China has aggressively flown dozens of military planes over
Taiwan's air defense zones. China is also building up its
military, testing hypersonic weapons. An emboldened Putin is
amassing a large Russian military buildup with--they are doing
this on the border with Ukraine right now including an
estimated 100,000 troops.
Russia is threatening Europe's energy security, withholding
gas supplies to Europe. North Korea is launching ballistic
missiles from submarines and Iranian helicopters repeatedly
buzzed a U.S. naval ship. Iranian-backed Houthis stormed the
U.S. embassy in Yemen and held local U.S.-employed staff
hostage.
What actions, Ambassador Crocker, must the United States
take immediately to reestablish a deterrent and prevent the
destabilizing actions of so many adversaries around the world?
Ambassador Crocker. Senator, the United States needs to
reassert its position as a global leader. We led the world from
1945 up until the last two presidencies. President Biden said
that he would return us to the world stage in a leadership
role.
This would be a great time for him to take the concrete
steps toward that end to reassure our allies that America is
not withdrawing from the world and to do that, where necessary,
in concrete terms.
Look, everybody gets tired, I suppose, of leadership. We
have led the world. Not always for the best, but overall, I
think we have been a hugely positive force on the world stage
for over 70 years since World War II.
My view is we need to keep playing that role because if we
do not no one else will. It is not that the Chinese will
replace us. They cannot, and would not even try. It is that no
one will, and we then reenter a balance of power system, which
is great until it gets unbalanced, as we saw in World War I and
World War II.
It is this critical need for the U.S. to lead, for
President Biden--who has, certainly, talked the talk on that
and then did everything opposite in Afghanistan--for him to
reassert his intention for both our allies and our adversaries
that the United States is not withdrawing from the world.
Senator Barrasso. Thank you, Mr. Ambassador. Thank you, Mr.
Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Senator Van Hollen.
Senator Van Hollen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you both
for your service and your testimony.
I will start with you, Ms. Miller. I have been listening
carefully and we know the facts that President Biden inherited.
I think he inherited an impossible hand.
The Trump administration, first, pressured the Pakistani
Government to release top Taliban commanders who played a key
role in the ultimate takeover of Kabul. They then, as you have
testified, undercut entirely the Afghan Government by not
including them within the negotiations, signaling to the Afghan
people that we had no interest in the long run in supporting
that government.
Then we, essentially, ordered that government, strong-armed
that government, to releasing 5,000 prisoners that were in
their custody. Then we said to the Taliban, do not attack U.S.
forces, but continue to attack the Afghan forces with impunity.
Then we agreed to other measures that limited the scope of
our own operations, and then President Trump said, we are going
to have all U.S. forces out of Afghanistan in April and then
criticized President Biden when that date passed.
It was an impossible hand the President was dealt,
President Biden, by his predecessor, but let us look forward
now because the time to try to use our influence to pressure
the Taliban before the takeover of Kabul, obviously, has
passed.
The question is now how do you assess the prospects and
what do you think has to be our strategy in getting the Taliban
to agree to the conditions that we put forward and where we are
trying to rally the international community to continue to join
us?
Things like an inclusive government, things like protecting
the rights of women, girls, and minorities, and things like
making sure that Afghanistan is not used as a platform for
organizations to launch terrorist attacks against the United
States and others?
How do you assess, given what you know of the Taliban, what
the prospects are using the leverage of money and international
pressure to achieve those goals?
Ms. Miller. Thank you.
Senator, the Taliban are going to be Taliban. There is not
going to be any leverage that can be used against them that
will cause them to change their core ideology or their core
policies and practices.
I do not expect we are going to see elections in
Afghanistan. I think if there were any greater inclusivity in
the Government in the sense of appointing a few more
representatives of minority groups, those people would have no
power in the Government, even if that was done. They are a
small, secretive, cliquish group and they are going to govern
Afghanistan that way.
That said, there is some prospect of engaging with them on
a modest to-do list of items that could have some benefit for
women and girls and others in the population.
There is some prospect that they would allow some programs
and projects supporting women and girls to go ahead if there is
engagement with them in what they regard as a more positive
rather than punitive way.
I do not want to overstate it. I am not suggesting there is
going to be a transformation of the Taliban, but I do think
that there is some modest room for negotiation with them.
On the, I think--for the U.S. crucial question of
counterterrorism, I think there is scope for private nonpublic
engagement with them not to get them to expel al-Qaeda from the
country, not to get them to declare that they are breaking
ties, but to get them to do what they said they would do in the
agreement signed with the U.S., which was fairly limited, which
is keep a lid on them.
There is, I think, some prospect of that, but I do not
think we will hear about it publicly and it will not be
something you can use as a justification, therefore, for
engaging with them.
It is important to work closely, at least to talk
extensively with Pakistan and others about that, because other
countries in the region of Afghanistan are worried about the
terrorist threat, perhaps even more than the U.S., because it
is more immediate for them.
Senator Van Hollen. Thank you for that answer. I agree with
your skepticism on the Taliban, but we need to continue to use
the tools we have got.
Ambassador Crocker, I just have sort of a one-word question
to you. You mentioned in your testimony Pakistan. It seems to
me we should right now be engaging much more fully with the
Government of Pakistan with respect to the way forward in
Afghanistan and the region.
What is your assessment, as someone who has served as
ambassador there and many other places in the region?
Ambassador Crocker. Senator, I think it is critical for us
to step forward with Pakistan. They have a lot to answer for,
to say the least. We have to be very focused, though, on the
consequences for Pakistan and for the rest of the region and,
indeed, internationally if they are seriously weakened as a
government.
We have nominated a superb individual as Ambassador Don
Blome, who knows how to do this stuff. I served with him in
Iraq. It would be really great if the Senate could confirm him
and get him into position to lead those talks for the U.S.
inside of Pakistan.
Again, it is a nuclear-armed nation. It faces a threat, of
course, from the Pakistani Taliban as it does from the jihadi
forces focused on Kashmir, forces that were created by Pakistan
at the time of partition and now which they have lost control
of.
At the same time, it is a perfect storm, if you will. The
policies of Prime Minister Modi in India, in my personal view,
have angered and disenfranchised, if you will, the Muslim
population of Kashmir.
So here we are, a resurgent Taliban--everyone around is
taking notes--in a complex environment where the lid could
really blow off of this.
Yes, this is a moment for all-in diplomatic engagement,
talking in the region and talking beyond with our traditional
allies. We need to get on this. We are not going to be able to
do very much unilaterally in Afghanistan. We have given up that
leverage.
We need to work, again, with the United Nations, with
neighboring states, with our established alliances like NATO to
figure out how we are going to contain the forces that our
withdrawal from Afghanistan has set in motion.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
Senator Van Hollen. Thank you, Mr. Ambassador. Thank you,
Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Senator Hagerty.
Senator Hagerty. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Ms. Miller, thank
you for being here in person today.
Ambassador Crocker, thank you for your service and I
appreciate your participation. I want you to know that I wish
the very best for your wife's speedy recovery. I have her in my
prayers.
Ms. Miller, I would like to turn to you to, first, talk
about frozen Afghan assets that are present here in America.
As you know, the Biden administration has frozen some $10
billion worth of Afghan assets here. The Administration's hope
seems to be that through financial leverage they can somehow
control and moderate the way the Taliban governs and treats its
citizens.
In my view, the only leverage we have left with the Taliban
is the financial leverage that we have in place right now.
Sadly, all other aspects of leverage have been taken off the
table.
According to press reports, in October, Taliban negotiators
have asked the United States to unfreeze these $10 billion
dollars' worth of financial assets. In October, Deputy Treasury
Secretary Wally Adeyemo said that the sanctions would remain in
place and, at the same time, allow for the legitimate flow of
humanitarian assistance. This seemed to open a window.
I will come back to what the State Department said the
month prior in September. The State Department indicated that
they were going to send some $64 million worth of aid and
humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan via U.N. agencies.
I am very concerned about how this might happen. You, in
your own testimony, or you in your statements have said that
the Biden administration has now a sum of each policy, I
believe how you worded it. That is, some sort of effort toward
engagement, some toward isolation, and in your testimony you
noted that we are on a collision course between policies of
engagement and isolation.
My question for you, from your perspective, does the Biden
administration have a clear strategy with respect to
Afghanistan, one that will keep pressure where it belongs and
not enrich or bail out the Taliban at a time when its control
over the Government of Afghanistan is, frankly, quite
teetering?
I would be very interested in your analysis on what the
Biden administration might hope to achieve here and whether
they have a clear strategy to do that.
Ms. Miller. My observation is that we are in a phase of, I
would say, the Administration feeling its way toward a policy.
I do not think there have been any clear public pronouncements
yet that would make it evident what the policy is, though there
have been some statements of what the limitations are at the
moment of what the U.S. is prepared to do, such as the
statement from the Deputy Treasury Secretary that you
identified.
I think we are not seeing a lot of clarity publicly about
what the policy is because, well, my interpretation is it is
because the policy is still being formulated and that there is
a desire to continue to help Afghanistan through humanitarian
aid, and the United States has been generous with strictly
humanitarian aid, provided directly to Afghans through U.N. and
NGO agencies.
Beyond that, it is unclear how far they will go,
recognizing that humanitarian aid alone cannot prevent the kind
of humanitarian crisis and economic collapse that is already
happening.
If you are only giving humanitarian aid then you are in a
situation like this. You are pretty much guaranteeing a
perpetual humanitarian emergency because it does not provide
jobs. It does not get the economy started. It does not deal
with the fact that there is just a lack of cash in the Afghan
economy now.
There are a number of proposals that are under development
by the U.N., the World Bank, and others to find some ways short
of unfreezing the Central Bank assets of Afghanistan that could
inject some support and some money into the Afghan economy,
using the World Bank, using the U.N.
It is not a perfect solution, these ideas, and it cannot be
guaranteed that this would have zero positive effects for the
Taliban to consolidate their grip on power, but it could save a
lot of Afghan lives.
Senator Hagerty. I, certainly, appreciate the need to save
Afghan lives. We have seen far too many lost, based on the
failure of our execution there.
At the same time, we have an Afghan Government that is
teetering. They are infighting. They do not have experience
governing. The last thing I think we should do is provide any
avenue to bail them out right now, and I think we need to be
extraordinarily careful as we look at any step toward
unfreezing these assets at this point. I do not see any
appropriate way to do that.
Thank you very much for being here. Thank you, Mr.
Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you. Thank you to both of our witnesses
for some very important insights. There is a lot more ground to
cover, but the pressing time of other commitments will not
allow us to do so, but I think you have both provided some very
important insights.
The record for this hearing will remain open until the
close of business on Thursday, November 18, of 2021. I would
ask members to ensure that questions for the record are
submitted no later than Thursday.
We, certainly, would look forward to your answers as
further helping us understand what has happened over the last
20 years and what lessons are to be learned. I think we have
gleaned some today.
With the thanks of this committee, the hearing is
adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:11 p.m., the hearing was adjourned.]
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