[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 64 (Friday, May 17, 2002)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4530-S4532]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         AFGHAN SECURITY FORCE

  Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I rise to speak on a matter at the very 
heart of our war on terror: the deteriorating security conditions in 
Afghanistan. If current trends continue, we may soon find that our 
hard-won success on the battlefield has melted away with the winter 
snow.
  In the eastern part of the country, brutal warlords are openly 
defying the authority of the central government and slaughtering 
innocent civilians.
  ``Kill them all: men, women, children, even the chickens.'' Those 
were the orders of warlord Bacha Khan when

[[Page S4531]]

a rival drove him out of the city of Gardez in January. Three weeks ago 
he returned, and rained 200 rockets on the sorry city. About 30 
civilians were killed and 70 others wounded, most of them women and 
children. Today, this thug's tanks still occupy the streets of Gardez, 
his bandits terrorize the inhabitants of nearby Khost, and the central 
government can do nothing but watch.
  Chairman Karzai, the legitimate leader of Afghanistan, sees his 
authority openly flouted, while his Defense Minister weighs the pros 
and cons of obeying his superior's lawful orders. Meanwhile, the 
helpless governor of the province warns that the chaos is rapidly 
turning the local population against both the Karzai administration and 
America. He's hardly alone: journalists quote many local residents 
blaming the United States for the deterioration of security, and even 
longing for the order of the Taliban period.
  ``America has replaced the Taliban with the warlords,'' one villager 
told the New York Times, ``and what we have is the death of 
innocents.''
  Nor is Gardez an isolated example. In Mazar-e Sharif, at the other 
side of the country, clashes between two rival warlords killed half a 
dozen people earlier this month. Both of these warlords were, and still 
are, on the U.S. payroll, but that hasn't brought a cessation of 
violation. Just last week, the airport at Jalalabad came under missile 
attack, for the first time since the Taliban vacated the city in 
November.
  What is going on? What happened to the images of Afghans dancing in 
the street that we all remember from the liberation of Kabul last fall? 
What happened to the widespread joy and optimism that I encountered 
during my own visit to Afghanistan in January? Why are people actually 
looking back on the Taliban era with nostalgia rather than horror? It 
is simple: the very same conditions that enabled the Taliban to come to 
power in the mid-1990s are rapidly emerging again. Let's remember why 
the Taliban were able to make their regime stick. It wasn't their 
military prowess--we found that out in November. It wasn't the 
popularity of their oppressive ideology--we found that out last fall as 
well. What enabled the Taliban to hold power was simply that, for a 
critical mass of the Afghan people, they represented the least-bad 
option. For many Afghans, the cruel order of the Taliban was preferably 
to cruel of warlords.

  And now this same disorder is overtaking Afghanistan once again. Not 
only is the United States failing to rein in the warlords, we are 
actually making them the centerpiece of our strategy. Unless we take a 
serious look at our policy, I greatly fear we may be setting the stage 
for a tragic replay of recent Afghan history.
  Why do the people of Gardez blame America for the vicious actions of 
warlords like Bacha Khan? Well, maybe it is due to the fact that this 
killer is on the U.S. payroll. He has been taking our money since 
December, when his troops stood by and let al-Qaeda terrorist escape 
from Tora Bora; many U.S. military sources believe that Osama bin Laden 
himself escaped, due to the double-dealing of Bacha Khan and his 
comrades. Granted, the war effort in Afghanistan forces us to rely on 
some unsavory characters. I am under no illusions here. Sometimes, in 
warfare, you have got to make a deal with the Devil. But sometimes the 
Devil just takes your money and laughs. Bacha Khan is a perfect 
example. After letting al-Qaeda troops escape from Tora Bora, he conned 
the U.S. military into bombing his personal rivals--by labeling them 
al-Qaeda.
  He, and other warlords like him, are supposedly helping us hunt down 
Taliban remnants, but with allies like than, who needs enemies? I 
regret to say that this is exactly the question many Afghans are asking 
about us. The United States, and the world community, have pledged 
billions of dollars to the recovery of Afghanistan. But all the money 
in the world won't do much good without one overriding thing: security.

       Anyone knows that without security, very little else is 
     possible; humanitarian workers can't move around, internally 
     displaced people won't go back to their homes, refugees won't 
     return to the country, the Afghan diaspora won't be willing 
     to send money in and send in themselves to try to help put 
     structure back into that terribly war-torn nation.

  This is not just my opinion; it is a direct quote from Secretary of 
State Rumsfeld, on April 22. So why does the administration steadfastly 
resist any expansion of the U.N.-mandated International Security 
Assistance force, or ISAF?
  Afghan leader Hamid Karzai, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and 
just about every expert on the map has called for an expansion of ISAF, 
in both scope--it is currently confined to Kabul--and tenure. Its 
mandate expires long before the transition to democratic government is 
scheduled to take place.

  The long-term solution is to rebuild Afghanistan's army and police 
force, and we have taken our first steps in this process. But it can't 
happen overnight: it will take at least 18 months, more likely several 
years, just to train and equip a barebones force capable of bringing 
basic order to the country. In the meantime, there are only three 
alternatives: having American troops to serve as peacekeepers, building 
up a robust international force, or permitting Afghanistan to revert to 
bloody chaos.
  The first option can be described as status quo-minus. U.S. forces 
are currently imposing a rough order in the country, but, as the 
current chaos in Gardez shows, not on any consistent basis. They are 
spread thin, and they are not officially tasked to perform this 
function. ``Our mission here is to capture or kill al-Qaeda and senior 
Taliban,'' said a U.S. military spokesman, as the rockets fell on 
Gardez, ``But particular factional fighting? I don't think it's for us 
to get into.''
  In the coming months, U.S. forces will be even less able to serve as 
de facto peacekeepers. As large scale offensive operations shift to 
smaller scale Special Forces deployments, the number of U.S. troops 
available will drop accordingly. There are currently about 7,000 
American soldiers in Afghanistan--far too few to serve as peacekeepers 
as well as warfighters--and the assets are already being redeployed. In 
April the Pentagon cut its naval force commitment to Operation Enduring 
Freedom in half, to one carrier and 2,000 marines afloat. This month, 
eight B-1 bombers based in Oman began returning home to Dyess Air Force 
Base in Texas. The redeployment says good things about our success 
against al-Qaeda--but does not signal a strong commitment to stay the 
course.
  Soon the crunch time could come in a matter of months and our policy 
will be put to the test. As local warlords keep probing our resolve, we 
will either have to re-task more and more U.S. troops to de facto 
peacekeeping operations, or we will have to retreat. Wouldn't it be 
better to let allies share the burden? An international security force 
is clearly in our national interest: if we want our military presence 
in Afghanistan to be focused on fighting al-Qaeda and Taliban holdouts, 
we should be eager for other countries to take the lead in 
peacekeeping. We should be lending our full support to ISAF expansion, 
to view it as a force-multiplier. Instead, the administration treats it 
as an impediment to ongoing operations. One administration source even 
described ISAF expansion as a ``cancer that could metastasize'' 
throughout the country. Is it any surprise, given this attitude, that 
other nations are reluctant to help fill the security void? Without 
strong, decisive U.S. leadership, including, but not limited to, an 
ironclad commitment to back up our allies militarily if their troops 
come under enemy attack, no international force can possibly succeed.
  So what about option three--placing our trust in the hands of the 
warlords? Maybe we can bribe and cajole them into turning themselves 
into good citizens. Maybe they will behave better in the future than 
they have in the past, better than they are behaving today. Maybe--but 
I wouldn't bet on it. Yet this bet--the wager that the warlords will 
halt their deprivations during the 2 years before an Afghan army can be 
trained--seems to be the totality of the administration's strategy.
  Three weeks ago, on April 22, Secretary Rumsfeld essentially admitted 
as much: ``How ought security to evolve in that country depends on 
really two things,'' he said. ``One is what the interim government 
decides they think ought to happen, what the warlord forces in the 
country decide they

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think ought to happen, and the interaction between those two.'' I must 
disagree with the Secretary on this: we should let out policy be 
dictated by ``what the warlord forces think ought to happen.''
  Did we put American troops in harm's way merely to do the bidding of 
``the warlord forces''? Did we spend $17 billion in military 
expenditures in the Afghan campaign merely to serve the interests of 
``the warlord forces''? Did we decimate al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban 
from power merely to hand power over to ``the warlord forces''? Brutal, 
bloodthirsty, barbaric warlords are not the solution to Afghanistan's 
problems. These ``warlord forces'' are the source of Afghanistan's 
problems.
  Does this matter to America? What about the option of letting 
Afghanistan degenerate into the state of lawlessness that made way for 
the Taliban? That is obviously not in the interest of Afghanistan, but 
is preventing it a national priority for the United States? I submit 
that it most certainly is.
  After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, America turned 
its back as the country disintegrated into chaos. The President was 
right when, in his speech at the Virginia Military Institute last 
month, he promised not to repeat this mistake. The brutal disorder of 
the early 1990s created the Taliban--and if we permit this condition to 
return, the cycle will almost certainly repeat itself. Let's not forget 
why we went to war in the first place: Afghanistan had become a haven 
for the mass-murderers who attacked our homeland on September 11. 
Without internal security, the country will again become a den of 
terrorists, narcotics traffickers, and exporters of violent insurgency. 
The President was right to say, ``We will stay until the mission is 
done''--but I hope he understands what our mission really is. In 
concrete terms, our mission, in addition to ferreting out remnants of 
al-Qaeda and the Taliban, is ensuring basic security for the fledgling 
Afghan Government-- providing it protection from the vast array of 
internal and external threats to its very existence.

  For the immediate future, probably 2 years, that means an 
international armed presence, whether U.S. troops or an expanded ISAF. 
I believe ISAF makes much more sense, but however the force is 
constituted it must have the following components: It must be deployed 
throughout the country, controlling the five to seven major cities and 
the main highways connecting them. It must have robust rules of 
engagement, and the weapons to impose order on unruly warlords. These 
must be peacemakers as much as peacekeepers. It must have the full 
diplomatic, financial, and military support of the United States.
  Whether or not American troops are part of this force--they currently 
are not, but we shouldn't rule this option out--we must provide an 
unquestionable commitment to back up ISAF as it fulfils its mission. 
Other nations are willing to take on the dangerous work of patrolling 
the front lines--but not unless they know that the cavalry stands ready 
to ride to the rescue. It must have the assurance that the world 
community--and particularly the U.S.--will stay the course. We can't 
cut and run if resistance increases. The greater the uncertainty about 
American commitment to security, the greater incentive our enemies will 
have to challenge our resolve.
  Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has suggested that $130 million of 
funds previously appropriated to the Defense Department be devoted to a 
fund for quasi-diplomatic endeavors related to the war against 
terrorism. I suggest that the best use of this money would be to 
support peacekeeping efforts in Afghanistan, whether conducted by the 
Defense Department directly or by our coalition partners operating 
under an expanded ISAF. Funding an effective international security 
force in Afghanistan would not only free up American military assets 
for warmaking missions, it would also deter terrorist forces from 
reclaiming the ground they have so decisively lost. With the Loya Jirga 
process scheduled to start in mid-June and Afghanistan's nascent 
government under daily attack by enemies both internal and external, I 
can think of no better or more urgent use for these funds.
  We must, I submit, lead the way in guaranteeing the security of 
Afghanistan for the relatively brief period before it can stand on its 
own. We must do this to honor the promise that President Bush made, on 
behalf of all Americans. We must do this to demonstrate our values to 
the wrest of the world. We must do this to safeguard our own national 
security interests, to make sure that our military gains since 
September 11 are not all wiped away. We must do this because it is 
smart, because it is necessary, and because it is right.
  I believe that the best way to achieve this goal is through an 
expansion of ISAF. The immediate devotion of $130 million, money which 
the Defense Department stipulates that it does not require or want for 
the costs of war-fighting operations, would be an excellent place to 
start.

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