[Senate Hearing 117-226]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]


                                                       S. Hrg. 117-226

                        AFGHANISTAN 2001 TO 2021: 
                     U.S. POLICIES LESSONS LEARNED

=======================================================================

                                HEARING

                               BEFORE THE

                     COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
                          UNITED STATES SENATE

                    ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS

                             FIRST SESSION

                               __________

                            NOVEMBER 17, 2021

                               __________

       Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Relations
       
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                  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

                              ----------                              


                     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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