[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 79 (Monday, May 24, 2010)]
[House]
[Page H3727]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              WE BROKE IT . . . DO WE KNOW HOW TO OWN IT?

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. WOOLSEY. Mr. Speaker, the United States' troops will be on the 
front lines of the surge in Kandahar, and they are just now deploying, 
and they are learning the lay of the land. But, ironically, the cloud 
of smoke over Iceland is delaying many arrivals, according to an 
article in The Washington Post last week, an inauspicious beginning of 
the most important battle of this war.
  The task at hand in Kandahar, however, is less intensive militarily. 
Frank Ruggiero, our top civilian official in Afghanistan, has said that 
``Kandahar is a political problem. And the campaign in Kandahar will be 
led by governance.'' While it's a comfort to know our troops may not 
face the gravest possible danger, Mr. Ruggiero's assessment is very 
troubling because political and governance problems are exactly the 
ones that this mission has failed miserably.
  This campaign is called Operation Enduring Freedom, but the only way 
we can help the Afghan people enjoy enduring freedom is if we help them 
build durable, sustainable, democratic governing institutions that will 
thrive long after our military occupation is over. By neglecting that 
critical task, Mr. Speaker, we are creating a power vacuum that the 
Taliban and other warlords and strongmen are only too eager to fill.
  If the Taliban has proved resilient in Marja, and they definitely 
have after we supposedly drove them out a few months ago, then just 
imagine how hard it will be to vanquish them completely from Kandahar, 
their spiritual home.
  We have proven our military muscle. We have shown that we can invade 
and conquer. But, Mr. Speaker, that can't be the end game. What are we 
leaving behind that will actually allow Afghanistan to thrive and its 
people to prosper? To paraphrase the old Pottery Barn rule from the 
run-up to the Iraq war, we're good at breaking it, we just don't know 
what to do once we own it. Or to use the vocabulary of 
counterinsurgency doctrine, we know how to clear; it's the holding, and 
especially the building, that we are botching.
  Things don't look promising, Mr. Speaker. Even General McChrystal 
conceded last week that we're not currently winning the war. Gilles 
Dorronsoro, an expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International 
Peace, is even more frank. He says, ``Nothing is working. All the 
information is that the military campaign against the Taliban in 
Kandahar is not working and it's not going to work.''
  What I believe, Mr. Speaker, will work is the one thing we haven't 
tried in the last 8\1/2\ years, ending this war once and for all. Of 
course we won't abandon Afghanistan, far from it. In fact, to address 
the enormous governance challenges we ought to launch a new kind of 
surge, a civilian surge. That would mean devoting the energy and the 
investment to development--democracy-building and other humanitarian 
efforts--that we have invested in the war, because our continued 
military presence cannot solve Afghanistan's problems. It can only 
exacerbate them.
  It's time, it's time, it's time to bring our troops home.

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