[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 22]
[House]
[Pages 29727-29734]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      A DEFINABLE VICTORY IN IRAQ

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 
60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I appreciate being recognized and 
the privilege to address you here on the floor of the House of 
Representatives. And I've just returned within the last few hours from 
Afghanistan, arriving here this morning sometime around, oh, 7 or so 
after a long and very busy weekend in places in Afghanistan that we 
know as Kabul and Kandahar, Bagram, and also, a forward operating base 
called Spin Boldak.
  And it's been my opinion for a long time, and having made at least 
nine different visits over to theaters that we do call theaters of war, 
that would include six to Iraq and three trips to Afghanistan, there 
are some other trips along there that I haven't chronicled, Madam 
Speaker, but I've found that sitting in classified briefings here in 
the United States Congress, here in the Capitol Building or over in the 
secure building in Rayburn, or going out to briefings at the White 
House and listening to our top military officers, our top civilian 
officers, including the State Department officers, give us their 
briefing on what's taking place in a region like that is not a fair 
substitute for actually going into the theater and receiving the 
briefings there from the people that are hands-on, on the ground, in 
the field.
  And having an opportunity to sit down and eye-to-eye discuss these 
situations, generally with people from our home State, where we always 
have something in common and where we can get down to the frank matters 
of fact without hesitation because we more naturally trust each other, 
and we also know somebody that knows somebody, and whether we actually 
know the troops or not, we know the family members that are related to 
their family members, at a minimum. And so we build that level of trust 
and rapport.
  This trip was similar to a number in the past. It included briefings 
from top military personnel, top State Department and civilian 
personnel, included a meeting that lasted for an extended period of 
time with President Mohammed Karzai of Afghanistan in the palace in 
Kabul, and the trip, as I mentioned, out to the forward operating base 
south and a little bit east of Kandahar, right on the Pakistani border.
  The position that I have taken over these years has been a strong 
national defense position, Madam Speaker. And I would go back and 
catalog some of that for the benefit of your attention, and that is 
that, from the time we went into Iraq, and as I watched things, the 
liberation of Iraq and then the stagnation of our operations in Iraq, 
the war of attrition that we fought there for a while that wasn't 
coming to a successful conclusion.
  And on one of my trips into that area before the ``surge'' became a 
word that was used in the common vernacular here in the United States 
at least, I had worked through that policy and agreed with the officers 
who were about to request that President Bush order the surge in Iraq.
  So, in short, Madam Speaker, I was for the surge before the surge had 
a name. And it has proven itself, I believe, to be the successful 
tactic that's brought about what I have also defined in this Congress--
to have achieved a definable victory in Iraq. And I will get to 
Afghanistan. But I introduced a resolution in February of this year 
that defines the victory that we've achieved in Iraq. And it goes 
through the list or the chronology or the history of the incidents that 
took place in that country, the things that we and coalition forces did 
to liberate the Iraqi people, and the milestones along the way, the ups 
and the downs of the struggle that's taken place in Iraq.
  And yet, if you put it all together, and you look at the successful 
ratification of a Constitution, successful elections in Iraq, the 
emergence of the Iraqi security forces as becoming ever more proficient 
and ever more stable, the definition of what we were seeking to achieve 
in Iraq has been very closely achieved to this point. Now, there's no 
such thing as a locked in, guaranteed, free, and moderate people of any 
kind. There's not a guarantee in the United States. But by comparison 
with what Iraq was to what it is today, it's significantly more stable. 
And we expect there will be a continued transition of power in Iraq, a 
sharing of power in Iraq that will be brought about by legitimate 
elections.
  And so this accomplishment in Iraq, I bring out and make this point,

[[Page 29728]]

Madam Speaker, so that should I utter a contrast, I want you and 
everyone listening to understand the foundation that I build this 
judgment on, and that's that foundation that I believe we have achieved 
a definable victory in Iraq. And now, that being said, and I can 
certainly discount some of the things that are going on there, and I 
could lay some conditions on the statement like anyone who might choose 
to rebut such a position. But, by the same token, a lot's been 
achieved.
  And on my first trip into Afghanistan which was some time, I believe, 
in 2005, without checking the records, and perhaps 2004, but we were in 
some of the more difficult times in Iraq at the time that I first went 
to Afghanistan. But when I came back from Afghanistan, even then, in 
the middle part of this decade that we're in now, I said then that 
we'll be in Afghanistan a lot longer than we'll be in Iraq. It wasn't 
conventional wisdom at the time. People didn't know how we were going 
to get out of Iraq. They didn't know how we were going to achieve a 
definable victory there.
  But even then, I said we'll be in Afghanistan a lot longer because, 
Madam Speaker, Afghanistan is a lot closer to the Stone Age than is 
Iraq. Iraq has resources, they have oil, they have a tradition of 
education. They have a history of a more moderate and more modern 
government that has, actually, a central government that reached out to 
the corners of Iraq.
  Afghanistan has none of those traditions and none of those histories, 
and they don't have the natural resources at this point, at least, that 
have been developed that's going to help the treasury of Afghanistan. 
They had a gross domestic product, the previous time that I was there, 
I remember the briefing documents, of $7.5 billion. That's the gross 
domestic product of Afghanistan.
  Now it's reported it's gone up to around $11.4 billion in the GDP. 
That's only over the last couple of years. Almost a 50 percent 
increase. And I suspect, Madam Speaker, that some of that has to do, 
since it's measured in American dollars, with the fall of the American 
dollar, the diminishment of the value of our American dollar. And when 
that happens, it's going to automatically and inversely increase the 
GDP of any country that's indexed to it, such as Afghanistan. But the 
GDP of Afghanistan is very minimal.
  And at one time I compared Afghanistan's GDP to the value of the beer 
brewed in Wisconsin. They were about the same. A couple of years ago, 
the $7.5 billion GDP of Afghanistan and the value of the beer brewed in 
Wisconsin was $7 billion. So that gives you a sense of how tiny this 
economy is, not to disparage the beer brewers in Wisconsin of course, 
Madam Speaker. And this tiny little economy has struggled along. It's 
very much agriculture and agrarian-based, and a large percentage of the 
agricultural value output in Afghanistan is poppies, poppies from which 
heroin and opium are made, and that produce about half of the value of 
the ag products in Afghanistan, and perhaps more, if one were able to 
get an accurate accounting.
  The poppy business in Afghanistan, much of it in Helman province, and 
neighboring Kandahar province to a lesser degree, those poppies in 
Afghanistan represent about two-thirds of the world's supply of opium 
and heroin in the world. So Afghanistan has long been a producer of 
poppies. But the system that has emerged and developed, we knew it 
then, we knew when we went in to liberate Afghanistan in the late fall 
or early winter of 2001, that the heroin trade from poppies was a 
significant component of the funding of our enemies, the funding of the 
Taliban.

                              {time}  1345

  Glad it remains that way today, and in some respects it may be worse 
than it was before. And yet there has been an effort under way to 
reduce the production of poppies in Afghanistan and thereby reducing 
the amount of dollars that go to the people that we declare to be our 
enemies. And these would be presumably the people who have attacked the 
United States, or plotted to do so.
  I advocated, Madam Speaker, that on the day we went into Afghanistan, 
the time that American forces arrived there and became a predominant 
force there on the ground in Afghanistan was the time that we should 
have gone in and taken out the poppies. Just sprayed them. We can 
eradicate most any kind of foliage if we want to do that. And I've made 
this argument with every United States ambassador--and with one 
exception, their representative instead because the ambassador wasn't 
available--that we've had in Afghanistan since the beginning. And their 
response to me has been, We can't upset the economy in Afghanistan by 
taking them out of the poppy business. And besides, do I, as a Member 
of Congress, who advocates such a thing, understand the difficulty and 
logistics of spraying that many poppies?
  And certainly I do understand the difficulty. I'm not sure the 
ambassadors do. They lay out a comparison that it would be something 
like four football fields wide, all the way around the Earth at the 
equator, the equivalent of taking out that much crop. Well, that's an 
awful lot of crop, Madam Speaker. But we sprayed almost the entire crop 
in Iowa on average more than once just last summer, and we have a few 
squadrons of spray planes in Iowa that have the capability of going in 
and taking out that poppy crop. And if we did that, that would shut 
down billions of dollars that go into the hands of the Taliban and al 
Qaeda, billions of dollars that are used against the United States.
  Now, some of these briefings will say it's somewhere between $70 
million and $120 million. Well, if that's the case, I would ask the 
question, If it's $3 billion, $3.5 billion worth of poppies altogether, 
if that's what the crop is worth, how does only $70 million to $120 
million get into the hands of the Taliban or al Qaeda, and where does 
the rest of the money go?
  I'll submit, I think it's a lot more money than that. I don't think 
it's possible for us to track that money. And I don't accept the values 
that have been put on it with such confidence in places like 
Afghanistan when I can't, Madam Speaker, find out from the director of 
the Drug Enforcement Agency here in the United States how many dollars 
are spent on illegal drugs in the streets of America in a year.
  When they tell me, We don't know; we don't know what the drugs are 
worth that are bought and sold and used and go in people's bloodstream 
and up the noses of Americans, we can't put a value on that within a 
billion dollars, how can the State Department tell me in a country that 
is that close to the Stone Age that doesn't have communications like we 
have, doesn't have a transportation network as anybody would imagine 
for any kind of a country, how can we get that estimate close in 
Afghanistan but we can't even guess at it in the United States?
  So I will submit this: if they're right, the poppy crop is worth 
about half of the GDP of Afghanistan 2 years ago, may or may not be 
right, then we should be thinking of it in terms of roughly half the 
GDP in Afghanistan today.
  In any case, it's lots of money. It's tens of millions at a very 
minimum, more likely hundreds of millions and maybe billions of 
dollars, and large shares of that go into the coffers of the Taliban 
and al Qaeda; and that money is used to pay the people that they 
recruit that plot and plan and train against us and to provide for them 
supplies, munitions, weaponry that get used around this world in 
terrorist plots.
  So the number one effort to eradicate the terrorists that are in the 
breeding and training grounds in the areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan 
would be to shut off the money that comes from the illegal drugs that 
come from the poppy trade.
  So instead, we have State Department personnel, USAID and USDA and 
other personnel that are seeking to negotiate with Afghan farmers to 
encourage them to raise pomegranates and fruits and nuts of all kinds, 
especially vines and trees, so they have to invest in longer than an 
annual crop, a perennial crop that makes them stick with that crop a 
little bit longer.

[[Page 29729]]

  We're investing millions in that, and we're providing subsidies to 
Afghanistan of significant dollars. Now, here I will just pose this 
number: a billion dollars, a billion U.S. dollars invested in subsidies 
in Afghanistan to try to convince them that there are crops that pay 
better than raising the illegal poppy crop.
  Well, I think a big degree of this is poppycock, Madam Speaker, to 
think that we can negotiate with people that are raising illegal drugs 
and convince them if we just gave them enough subsidy, they will stop 
doing that. They will always do what pays the best. That's the way 
things work.
  And the world does have a free market economy. Can you imagine going 
down to pay the people in Mexico and Central and South America not to 
raise coca or not to raise the tree that produces cocaine, and can we 
convince them not to raise marijuana crops? Can we convince them not to 
convert the products that are now smuggled in from China or shipped 
directly into the United States into methamphetamines because there is 
something that pays better? It will always find its way to the market.
  So we need to raise the cost of transaction. If we raise the cost of 
transaction, that means knock out these poppies. They will blossom. 
It's the nature of a poppy. They're easy to see from the air. I know we 
have poppies growing in places where we don't go with our military, and 
we're looking at perhaps as much as 90 percent of the poppies raised in 
Afghanistan, which is someplace two-thirds or more of the world 
production of poppies taking place in Helmand province down there where 
we are going to send reinforcements.
  And, Madam Speaker, I applaud the President for finally making the 
decision after 3 months of--what shall I say--floating trial balloons 
and deliberating, and having discussions at the White House and 
deliberations. When the request that emerged in the public, a request 
that was submitted by General McChrystal--and if my date is correct it 
would be August 30 of this year--and by September 23, that report was 
leaked into the media. Who knows where it came from, Madam Speaker, and 
I'm generally a harsh critic of people inside the military system that 
would leak anything that's classified information.
  Now, I don't know if this request was classified, but it was leaked. 
And I have not heard anyone report how it was leaked, but I suspect it 
was somebody who wanted the American people to know the request was 
made by General McChrystal. And I suspect that if that request of 
General McChrystal, at least the substance of that request that was 
leaked, that was put out into the press that was reported to be 40,000 
troops necessary or risk failure in Afghanistan, if that report, if 
that request had not been submitted, Madam Speaker, I suspect that we 
would have never found out what General McChrystal's actual request 
was.
  In fact, back channels tell me that was the lowest number that 
General McChrystal asked for. And back channels tell me that the number 
between 40,000 and 80,000 was incrementally dialed in so that if there 
were 80,000 troops sent rather than 40,000, the odds of success 
increased in proportion with the number of troops. Less than 40,000, we 
risk failure; and 80,000 troops would bring us to the highest 
probability of success. It could be dialed down from 80,000 and still 
have success, taking the risks, of course, in proportion. But dialed 
down below 40,000, I don't understand that General McChrystal 
entertained the thought that 30,000 troops would be enough to do the 
job.
  However, our military, being the brave and noble warriors that they 
are, do keep a stiff upper lip, and none of them would not utter these 
things to me because they know what their orders are from the Commander 
in Chief by rights, by the rights of the Constitution, by the rights of 
the results of the election, the President of the United States is the 
Commander in Chief of our military; and implicitly in the Constitution, 
the President sets the foreign policy.
  Our foreign policy now is 30,000 more troops deployed into 
Afghanistan starting sometime in January and then with a look at 18 
months as a period of time to start to withdraw troops out of 
Afghanistan. And having achieved the goals that have been defined to 
the American people in the speech the President gave over a little over 
a week ago--and again, I would reiterate that I was part of the first 
delegation of Members of Congress to arrive in Afghanistan after the 
President's speech when he announced he would send an additional 30,000 
troops--this deployment of 30,000 troops and the stiff upper lip that's 
being kept by our military requires one to read between the lines to 
draw conclusions of what their real judgment is because they have their 
orders, and they will make due.
  But when I see that the lowest number--and again this is back-channel 
information to me; it's not classified and it's not a briefing. Back 
channel information to me says 40,000 was the lowest number asked for 
by General McChrystal. General McChrystal and our troops in Afghanistan 
got a number that was 75 percent of the minimum number I believe was 
offered as a necessary number of troops to conduct the operations in 
Afghanistan with prospects of, let me say, avoiding mission failure in 
Afghanistan.
  So they will make do with what they have. And we have gone out and 
negotiated with some of our NATO partners; and I saw troops there from 
Germany and Great Britain and from Canada and a number of other 
countries that are part of our NATO partners. They are there. And 
they're working hand-in-glove with American troops.
  So the additional anticipation of 7,000 or more coming from the NATO 
section will be very helpful, Madam Speaker. And it doesn't substitute 
for the request, I don't believe. I don't think we get to say now it's 
37,000. I would have rather seen--if it's going to be the minimum 
number asked for by General McChrystal, I don't think his request was, 
Oh, by the way, you don't need to send me any if NATO will come up with 
40,000. I don't think that was part of the equation at all because our 
commanders value--and they should--our American troops as being more 
effective than the troops that are put together in the coalitions from 
NATO themselves, even though we have valuable partners and even though 
they send some very, very good people there.
  A little aside: I looked around the airport in Kandahar, and I hadn't 
thought about the Europeans that were deployed there in Kandahar. It'd 
been a little over a year since I'd been there. But when I saw all of 
these bicycles out there, I knew that I actually was in a place where 
there were a lot of Europeans that were deployed, and that turned out 
to be the case, Madam Speaker.
  In any case, it will be 30,000 troops, not a minimum of 40,000. It 
certainly won't be 80,000. One might argue we're 50,000 troops short of 
what the optimum would have been, as back channels say would have been 
the best wish list for General McChrystal.
  And now what I find on the ground is this: the city of Kabul is more 
stable than I have seen it. The streets of Kabul seem to have a certain 
order to them. If you watch the people who are moving around, they're 
not looking over their shoulder, they're not worried about IEDs going 
off. They're conducting the business there as they have for centuries 
in Kabul. Little markets, meat hanging on hooks out in the open air 
collecting that Afghan dust. And if there is one word I would use to 
describe Afghanistan, it's always been ``dust.'' Dust everywhere, dust 
all the time. And if it rains, there's dust underneath the little layer 
of crust that forms if it rains a little bit in Afghanistan. Dust there 
all the time. But the streets of Kabul being, I think, as stable and 
orderly as I have seen them and the signs of war have diminished some 
in Kabul.
  Same would go to Kandahar to a certain degree, although Kandahar not 
being quite as safe in the sense that you get in Kabul itself.
  That tells me that we've made some progress. Two-thirds of the 
population of Afghanistan can be influenced around those urban zones 
that I have mentioned, the cities in Afghanistan.

[[Page 29730]]

The balance of that is out there in the countryside: people that live 
in the valleys and mountains. And those that have an agricultural base 
and foundation whether they're raising a crop out of the soil or 
whether they're herding the sheep or their goats, that rural agrarian 
Afghanistan is the hardest part to reach out to. They have never had a 
centralized powerful government in Afghanistan. They've never been able 
to project power out of Kabul out to the corners of Afghanistan. And, 
today, that's our challenge.
  Our challenge, as has been laid out by the President, is to rebuild 
and in some cases just simply go out and construct the institutions in 
Afghanistan that are necessary to get government services out to the 
corners of Afghanistan.
  And to provide first for security. We have learned--and it has been 
true, I believe, for all of human experience--and sometimes we have to 
relearn that we can't put down insurrection if we can't provide for 
stability and security. Security is number one. And then once you 
establish security, then you can establish the institution of 
government, the institutions of education, the institutions of a 
peaceful society.
  But without safety, without security, nothing can flow from it when 
you have only anarchy and that bloody clash of the power struggles that 
take place, if there's a vacuum for power.

                              {time}  1400

  So the charge for President Karzai, for our American people, and for 
the NATO people is to be able to clear those areas that the Taliban now 
occupy and control, where the Taliban are providing actually some 
function of government, including dispute resolution. However brutal it 
might be, the Taliban are providing some dispute resolution. We need to 
clear those areas--this is going to sound familiar, Madam Speaker--
clear and hold and build, and then transfer.
  First we need to clear those areas of the Taliban and to whatever 
extent al Qaeda might exist in Afghanistan, and we need to hold them. 
Once we clear a place, we can't leave it. We found out in Iraq that if 
we would go in and clear al Qaeda, or any of the militia, out of a 
community in Iraq and then pull our troops out of there, they would 
just form back again. I don't know why we ever thought that that could 
be successful.
  I remember hearing reports that there was a city or two in Iraq that 
were controlled by the enemy. And I was astonished that we would go in, 
liberate a country, and then tolerate the enemy coming into the cities, 
setting up shop and running the government there, and more or less 
setting up a fortress and a training camp right there within those 
cities in Iraq. We learned that lesson the hard way, and we had to go 
in with the surge and clean out these cities and restabilize.
  According to General Petraeus, we brought our own troops in and 
essentially bunked them right there in the community so they were 
invested in the security 24/7; not a patrol that just went in and 
pulled back out again, but Americans that lived right there and 
provided 24/7 security for the people in those communities. We are 
going to have to do some of that in Afghanistan as well. But in Iraq we 
had to go in under the surge, clear and hold those communities and not 
give that real estate back, clear it and hold it, and then we needed to 
rebuild some infrastructure.
  It's not as big a job to rebuild infrastructure to prewar conditions 
in Afghanistan as it is probably anyplace else I can think of. We have 
to rebuild infrastructure, establish the institutions of local 
government, and any educational institutions that we can set up, 
outreach to the farmers to try to do the things that we can do with 
American advisers and whatever comes from the NATO people, establish a 
stability of security and the stability of the unity of the 
institutions and hold that area. And while that is going on, we need to 
go to other areas and clear and hold and build and set it up so we 
could transfer then to full Afghan control.
  Well, here are some contrasts, again, between Iraq and Afghanistan. 
Iraq has a population of 28 million. Afghanistan has a population of 28 
million. It's the same population, as close as we can count.
  The geographical area of Iraq is about the size of California. The 
geographical area of Afghanistan is about the size of Texas. And so 
those are the differences. It means the Afghans are stretched out a 
little more thinly in their population density.
  The geography is significantly different in some of the areas. The 
Iraq geography we know--desert and sand. When you get into the north, 
then you run into some mountains and some greenness up there in the 
Kurdish area. But a lot of Iraq looks the same to me when I see it.
  In Afghanistan there is a sharper difference in the topography across 
the country. There are a lot of stark, brutal, bold, stone mountains in 
the east, around to the south and over towards the west. But also, the 
further west you go, the more high plains and dust you have out that 
way. It is a forbidding topography in Afghanistan as compared to that 
in Iraq.
  But on the security side, in Iraq we have managed to, working with 
our partners and with the full cooperation and support of the Iraqi 
people and the Iraqi Government, including President Maliki, now 
provide a number of over 600,000 trained security personnel in Iraq 
with Iraqi military and Iraqi police forces joined together. I have 
watched them drill and watched some of their special forces operations. 
And even though the best that the Iraqis have to offer doesn't match up 
with the best America has to offer, they look pretty good. There are 
just over 600,000. The last number I saw was 609,000 Iraqis trained and 
on line and up and running for the security personnel.
  But in Afghanistan, and I'm going to have to work off of memory here, 
Madam Speaker, because it looks as though my notes don't include these 
numbers. But in Afghanistan, we are struggling to put together a 
100,000 Afghan Army and, at the same time, around 130,000 Afghan 
police. The Afghan police have significant difficulty in achieving 
credibility. The people's lack of confidence in the Afghan police comes 
because of a long history of corruption. The police have been, I will 
say, not paid a lot, except when it came to bribes. They supplemented 
their income with bribes. The corruption that has been there in the 
Afghan police makes it very hard to stand them up and think that they 
are going to look like, say, New York's Finest, for example. They will 
never be that. And the culture and the history of the country won't 
allow that.
  But we need to get the Afghan police to be as good as they can be and 
the Afghan Army to be as good as they can be. And even then, our best 
hopes are, by the time the President has scheduled a beginning of the 
drawdown of troops in Afghanistan, the 18 months takes us into the 
summer of 2011, by that period of time, the goal, the target, is about 
230,000 Afghanistan Army and Afghan police that will be providing the 
security in a country that is spread out more than Iraq is with the 
same population of Iraq. Where Iraq has 609,000, Afghanistan would have 
presumably 230,000, a good number of them just trained within the last 
18 months.
  We know there will be turnover. We know there will be corruption. We 
know some of them will have to be pulled out by their roots and made an 
example of, and others will need to be created. And those that have 
credibility, honor, and integrity will have to be lifted up and 
promoted.
  When we look at an Afghan Army that is perhaps 100,000 strong and an 
army that has not functioned in a fashion that we would imagine, and we 
think of the Afghan Army as something that goes out and operates 
independently, but, truthfully, they are operating with American and 
NATO advisers in almost every case. An army of 100,000 for a population 
of 28 million compared to an army of around 400,000, a little more than 
that in Iraq, for a population of 28 million.
  We have many times listened to our military advisers tell us how long 
it takes to stand up a brigade commander, and they will tell us it 
takes

[[Page 29731]]

about 20 years of training and active duty to stand up a brigade 
commander for our military. And yet, the charge is that we take an 
army, an Afghan Army that doesn't have the traditions that the United 
States has nor the knowledge nor the command and control structure, and 
many times they have illiterate troops that can't read or write. In 
fact, the literacy rate among Afghans is about 20 percent among the men 
and 1 or 2 percent among the women. So it's awfully hard to educate 
someone who can't read and write in their own language. It is hard to 
identify the best talent in the population if they can't take the 
written exam. They can only be given an oral exam. It's pretty hard to 
command troops if you can't read. So, naturally, the literate Afghans 
will be the ones that will move up through the chain of command. And we 
have a whole society that needs to be educated and taught to function 
in a literate fashion.
  But to imagine that we can stand up an army in Afghanistan and do so 
in 18 months by training brigade commanders and on up, officers to do 
that in an 18-month period of time when it takes 20 years in the United 
States, and do so in a language that they understand many of them only 
orally, that they can't read and write in, it boggles the mind to think 
about how difficult this task will be to reach this goal where we can 
start to draw troops down in a year and a half.
  I listened to the strategy of clear and hold and build and transfer. 
I'm not surprised to hear it. I expected that's what I would hear.
  I have looked at the numbers of troops that we've committed and the 
numbers that we hope to recruit out of Afghanistan and the numbers that 
we hope to be able to convince to come to Afghanistan from the other 
NATO countries, and it looks like we've got at least a verbal agreement 
on that, roughly 7,000 additional troops. I have looked at the 
geography being stretched out the way it is, and I stand and look at 
the Pakistani border and realize that even though we can control most 
of the real estate in Afghanistan and probably will control all the 
real estate in Afghanistan, by the time those additional 30,000 troops 
arrive, we won't have a license to go into Pakistan. They still have a 
sanctuary in the neighboring country of Pakistan. Pakistan has a 
population of, I believe, 173 million. The number indicates a lot of 
high population in Pakistan and more resources in Pakistan. There are a 
lot of big mountains there.
  The Pakistanis themselves are like people everywhere. They are going 
to look out for their own interests. Well, their own interests aren't 
necessarily to put all their resources in defeating the Taliban and 
rooting out what is left of al Qaeda in the mountains in Pakistan. 
Their interests are in protecting the Pakistani people. There aren't a 
lot of them up in the mountains where we think their military needs to 
go. And their interests are in protecting the Pakistani Government and 
not overreaching so that the Pakistani Government doesn't get 
overthrown by the Taliban. That's the struggle that is going on there. 
So they will take on the Taliban that threatened the Pakistanis, but 
they don't want to go out and pick a new fight with those elements that 
are there whose primary objective is to damage the United States and 
damage the rest of the free world.
  So in a lot of the cases, Madam Speaker, it's where you sit is where 
you stand, that the position that each country takes is a lot like the 
position that individuals take. We will make our argument at the table 
for the things that advantage us. And we are pretty creative, and we 
can self-rationalize and sit down at the table and make the arguments 
that defend our interests. It's true with people, it's true in this 
Congress, and it's true when nations negotiate with nations.
  So we should always look at what is the interests of Afghanistan; 
what are the interests of Mohammed Karzai, the President. He would like 
to stay in power. He would like to serve out his second full term. He 
is the one that says that he was not reelected, that there was an 
election. He regrets the corruption, but because his nearest opponent 
pulled out of the race, he was awarded the election by default. He does 
regret that, Madam Speaker; at least, those are the words he used to 
speak to us on this.
  But President Karzai has his interests, and the Afghan people that 
have influence with President Karzai and the Afghan Government have 
their interests. Taliban have their interests and al Qaeda theirs. 
There are different groups of the Taliban and other groups that we are 
fighting as well. It is very complicated, and it is not simple, and 
it's not at all completely militarily tactical. It's very much how do 
we put together the solutions of first providing security, maintaining 
that security, building the institutions and the infrastructure that 
are necessary so that the central government in Afghanistan can reach 
out to the corners of the country, such as the place where I was just 
yesterday at Spin Boldak down on the Pakistani border, and other 
places.
  All of that needs to happen, Madam Speaker. And as General Petraeus 
said, the enemy gets a vote, too, and they will be working against us 
and mounting operations where they can. But my general overall 
impressions are this: I believe that the strategy that has been put 
together is one where we have to thread the needle. We have the very 
minimal amount of resources necessary to provide the security. If 
everything works according to time frame and schedule, there is a 
chance this can be successful.
  But I do not see, when I look at the plan, that there is a redundancy 
that's built in, that there is a fallback position, that there's an 
overbuild that comes in. The ``just in case'' resources don't appear to 
be there.
  Now, I have spent a lot of my life planning logistics and taking on 
projects. No, not directing wars. But, for example, if I would go into 
a construction site, and it might be 40 acres of cornfield, and we need 
to turn it into a school complex, there are a lot of challenges that go 
on. Things go wrong. The weather works against you. You have people 
with different interests that are undermining the overall goal. They 
are breaking up the sequence of the scheduling you set up. Machines 
break down. And sometimes they throw a wrench in the works, a permit 
that wasn't required before. You have to plan. You set a schedule. You 
plan to meet the schedule, and you have to have reserve resources to 
make sure you can make up for the difference. It might be bring in more 
men, more workers we say now. It might be bring in more machines. It 
might be overlap the duties that are assigned from contractor to 
contractor. It might be go to a different supplier if one of them can't 
get the materials in time for you. It might be work 7 days a week. It 
might be work 24/7. It might be double up with crews and go 24/7. But 
however it is when you have to meet the deadline, when you have the 
goal, you have to be planning what you'll do if things don't work out.

                              {time}  1415

  Now we have a plan in Afghanistan, 30,000 more troops, starting to 
insert them in January to get them in position for the beginning of the 
fighting season, which, I guess, nobody can really tell you when that 
is--that's when the enemy attacks us in a greater number than it is 
right now--but roughly mid-to-late March would be what we can 
anticipate. And that we have 18 months to clear any areas in 
Afghanistan that are held by our enemy--and I am going to define that 
enemy as they define the enemy to me, the Taliban; clear and hold, and 
build the institutions and rebuild the infrastructure, and then 
transfer in 18 months.
  Now, we've been there for 8 years, Madam Speaker, 8 years in 
Afghanistan. There has been a lot accomplished. And we should not 
diminish the accomplishments in Afghanistan. They have been significant 
in that Afghanistan has a Constitution that has been ratified, they 
have held successful national elections--and some here will object that 
there was voter fraud in the last election, and there was, no one 
denies that. And to the extent that the voter fraud was there, I would 
like to

[[Page 29732]]

know exactly how many votes were stolen or how many ballot boxes were 
stuffed by the supporters of either side. And I don't think Karzai 
would tell us that it didn't happen on his side--I think it's almost 
certain that it did. Were those numbers great enough to change the 
result of the election? Probably not.
  I will lament any ballot that is not a legitimate one, but the 
question then becomes: Is this government legitimate? Well, it is among 
the most legitimate governments that Afghanistan has ever had. We know 
that the first election electing nationwide offices and leaders on the 
soil in Afghanistan took place because American and NATO forces allowed 
that to happen. They provided the security so people could go to the 
polls.
  I remember that there were Iowa National Guard troops on the ground 
guarding the polling places for the first time in the history on that 
real estate for people to go to the polls and vote in a national 
election. It had never happened before. So they have come a long way, 
Madam Speaker, and we should not diminish the accomplishments.
  When you think of the United States of America establishing the 
Declaration of Independence in 1776, and we fought a war that went on 
for several years--I'll say 7 years or 8 years--the Treaty of Paris was 
signed by John Jay in, I think, 1783. By 1787, we produced a 
Constitution; by 1789 we ratified a Constitution. Thirteen years from 
the date of the Declaration of Independence until the ratification of 
the Constitution--which didn't guarantee the centuries-old existence of 
the United States; it laid down the foundation where we could continue 
to fight for liberty and fight for freedom and shape a Nation.
  I don't think it was imagined that the United States of America would 
become the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world. I don't think 
they knew where the Pacific Ocean was--in, fact I know they didn't. 
They had to guess how far it was. And Lewis and Clark chartered it in 
1803 and 1804, that's when we found out, not in 1789, when the 
Constitution was ratified.
  So this dream of manifest destiny, this dream of this great Nation, 
wasn't really in the imagination of the Founding Fathers. And yet in 13 
years we got where we did with a ratified Constitution from the time of 
the Declaration. When you look at Iraq and Afghanistan, both of those 
countries have outpaced the development speed of the United States of 
America itself, if you measure elections, and even if you measure 
legitimate elections, and if you measure the ratification of 
constitutions where there was no tradition before.
  So we should be, I think, respectful of the accomplishments that have 
been made in Iraq and in Afghanistan. It takes a long time to build 
institutions. We shouldn't just automatically think that because when 
we opened up the geography book when we were studying eighth-grade 
geography and looked at the map of the world, and that wooden pointer 
up there by the chalk board said, here's Pakistan, here's Afghanistan, 
here's Iran. When we looked at those borders, we envisioned them as 
borders like we would envision borders of the United States of America, 
at least. And those borders don't look like I anticipated that they 
would, Madam Speaker.
  But the borders of Afghanistan, especially with Pakistan, are not 
clearly defined. We have a place that we declare to be the border, but 
it's not recognized in the same fashion by the people that live near 
the border. They want to be able to move back and cross across the 
border and do commerce and trade like they always have. And the 
agreement on exactly where that is is not a handshake even between 
Afghanistan and Pakistan; there are still tensions there, there is 
distrust there. There is the worry that Pakistan focuses towards India 
with a fear of India as their primary enemy, and they're afraid that 
Afghanistan will make common cause with India. Those little tensions 
play out just like they play out between people and neighbors and other 
countries as well.
  But the difficulty of the task in Afghanistan needs to be measured 
with the reality of what is going on there on the ground and within the 
historical context of what we are living with today, and that is that a 
lot of progress has been made, and that the central government in Kabul 
has never reached out to those borders, those borders that we see on 
the map that aren't really at all like the borders we would imagine 
when we look at Afghanistan and look at the map itself.
  We need to understand that many of the enemy are living undisturbed 
in the mountains in Pakistan. And even though we get a report 
occasionally that an unmanned drone strayed across the border and 
dropped a missile in to a household that happened to have some al Qaeda 
terrorists in it, even though we get some reports of that, operations 
in Pakistan, if they exist, they don't exist formally and they don't 
exist in any kind of an organized tactical sense.
  And so I ask the question, Madam Speaker: Has there ever been an 
example in the history of the world where a foreign power went into 
another country and took on an insurgency that operated within that 
country that also had a sanctuary in a neighboring sovereign nation? In 
other words, as it was impossible to defeat the Vietnamese as long as 
they could pull back to North Vietnam or go back up the Ho Chi Minh 
trail, as long as they could choose the time of engagement and the 
method of engagement, as long as they had a sanctuary to hide in, a 
line across which we would not go, it was, I don't believe, possible to 
defeat the Vietnamese. Same with North Korea. We didn't go after them 
where they planned their operations, and therefore we ended up with a 
negotiated settlement.
  As I pose this question, I bring it out, Madam Speaker, so we 
understand here the great difficulty in defeating an enemy that has a 
sanctuary in a neighboring sovereignty. In other words, if al Qaeda or 
the Taliban can come into Afghanistan, attack American troops or attack 
the Afghan people or their military or their police, security 
personnel, and disengage and go back to Pakistan, and we can chase them 
to the border, and we've got to stop, and if the Pakistanis are not 
standing there to meet them, then they can choose the time and the 
place of their engagement. They can build up and train and gather 
munitions and then conduct those operations. They can plan operations 
all over the world, and they have, because they are protected in a 
sanctuary.
  So my argument here, Madam Speaker, is, there needs to be political 
support for going to the sanctuaries of our enemies, wherever they may 
be, to take out our enemies that have pledged to kill us. And I 
remember sitting through a whole weekend of analysis of this--it would 
have been in January or February of 2003--when we brought in experts. 
It was a bipartisan retreat weekend, Democrats and Republicans 
together. And in this retreat weekend, Tom Friedman gave the opening 
address and raised a series of questions. And we sat around all weekend 
going, What did we ever do to make them hate us? How can we make them 
like us again so they don't attack us like they did on September 11? 
What was wrong with us that caused them to attack us? Who do we repair 
who we are as Americans?
  Madam Speaker, that was the mindset going on here in the United 
States, especially over on this side of the aisle, and to some degree 
over on the Republican side of the aisle as well. What if there was 
nothing wrong with us? What if it was all that was wrong with them? We 
didn't anticipate in 2001 that there was an enemy that believed as 
strongly as they did that their path to salvation is in killing Jews, 
Christians and capitalists, probably in that order. And if they could 
get a twofer--and they almost always did--they counted that to be a 
very good thing.
  That's why they attacked the economic center of the United States, 
because they believed that they could kill capitalists at the same 
time. They despise freedom, they despise liberty, they despise 
capitalism, they despise Judeo-Christianity. All of that is the enemy 
of the radical jihadis that we

[[Page 29733]]

are seeking to psychoanalyze instead of defeat. And believing that we 
can rebuild institutions in 18 months that we haven't been able to 
rebuild in 8 years, it smacks of a significant degree of optimism, 
which I am willing to cautiously buy into provided we provide the 
resources to do that, and provided we are willing to go where the enemy 
is.
  If that is in Pakistan, I don't want to sit and wait for them to 
decide to come and attack American troops, or plant IEDs and take out 
Americans that are there trying to rebuild the institutions and allow 
the enemy to hide in a neighboring Pakistan. When Pancho Villa came 
into the United States and murdered about 17 people back in 1912--in 
fact, Madam Speaker, it might have been the other way around; it might 
have been 12 people murdered in 1917--we sent our military down there 
to chase Pancho Villa around because we wouldn't tolerate attacks that 
came from foreign countries. We knew we couldn't let them have a 
sanctuary.
  If we let our enemies have sanctuaries, they chose the time and the 
place that they attacked us. We knew that in the early part of the 20th 
century; we seem to have somehow forgotten that in the early part of 
the 21st century. We've got to go take the enemy on where they live, 
where they train, where they lay up, where their munitions are, where 
their equipment is. We've got to be willing to do that.
  And any country that will harbor terrorists doesn't deserve the 
support of the United States of America. I remember President Bush 
saying words to the effect of, If you harbor terrorists, you're a 
terrorist. You are either with us or against us. He made it very clear 
at the onset of this, and now we seem to be reluctant to even declare 
who our enemies are.
  Another component that I think is significant, Madam Speaker, for the 
American people to know is that there has been a significant 
diminishment in the focus on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. It seems as 
though the position today of the White House and the military is that 
al Qaeda no longer exists in any significant way in Afghanistan. I 
remember about two weeks ago or a little more, General Jones--a general 
handpicked by President Obama--said that the numbers of al Qaeda in 
Afghanistan are less than 100, less than 100 al Qaeda in Afghanistan. 
Now, maybe that's true, I don't know. I don't think we have a way of 
knowing. But if that is the best intelligence that we have, and that is 
the intelligence that's been delivered in public to the American people 
by General Jones, then I have to say I don't have any supplemental 
intelligence that trumps that number.
  It just doesn't seem plausible to me that we would mobilize all of 
this effort and focus ourselves on an enemy called al Qaeda, and have 
the President of the United States repeatedly, at least 40 times, 
declare his dedication to going after Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda and 
defeating them where they are. That was at least 40 times as candidate 
Obama, then United States Senator Obama, sold himself to the American 
people and sold his national security credentials to the American 
people. Forty times, at least, he said he would go after Osama bin 
Laden, and that he would defeat al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, and 
occasionally he added the Taliban to it.
  Now, al Qaeda has been pulled out of the dialogue with Afghanistan, 
Osama bin Laden's name has only been uttered four times by the 
President of the United States in the year and a month and 3 days since 
he has been elected President, and those four times, three of them were 
in response to direct questions asked by the press, and the other time 
he brought it into another discussion. But at no time has the President 
said, since he was elected in 1 year and 1 month and 3 days, I will go 
get Osama bin Laden, I will defeat bin Laden and al Qaeda in 
Afghanistan. That stopped. That rhetoric stopped abruptly. The 3rd of 
November, 2008 was the last time Barack Obama spoke of taking out Osama 
bin Laden. So that actually makes it 1 year, 1 month, and 4 days, to be 
precise, since the President has said he is going to take out Osama bin 
Laden.
  And now here we are with a minimum number of troops, minus about 25 
percent of the minimum number, to go in and stand up the security 
forces in Afghanistan, take those numbers up to around 230,000, and 
then have a goal to take that number up higher than that, but to get 
that recruitment done and the training done with the commanding 
officers necessary. Even though we know it takes 20 years to get them 
ready, we are going to do it in 18 months, with a minimum number of 
resources, and we are going to rebuild the institutions, we are going 
to clear, we are going to hold, we are going to build, and we are going 
to transfer.

                              {time}  1430

  All of that sounds right, and it sounds good to me. I know a plan 
when I read one. I understand when I read the contingency plans the 
redundancies that are built in. I look for that because, for part of a 
success in a mission, it is necessary to make the contingency plans 
because things never go the way you plan them to be. There are always 
pitfalls along the way. There are always things that don't work well. 
Sometimes it's just bad luck.
  I know from my own experience, when I plan logistics as precisely as 
I can and when I build in the contingency plans and build in the 
redundancy, then things fall apart anyway. I have to go back and put 
together a new plan and present that new approach; but about the third 
time I do that, I finally get to that point where I realize I can keep 
throwing resources at this over and over again and always add just the 
minimum to get it done.
  Sometimes just the minimum to get it done is just enough to guarantee 
it isn't going to work. At a certain point, you have to pour enough 
resources in where you can say, by golly, this will fix it, and I'm 
done re-devising the plan, and I'm done dragging this out through days 
and months and weeks and years. We're going to solve this problem.
  We're going to solve it with enough resources. If we don't do that, 
we can't move on to the next thing, the next mission, the next 
challenge for America.
  So I'm going to stand here, proposing that we provide not only the 
resources that are necessary for our military to protect and to advance 
the destiny of America but that we provide backup plans, contingency 
plans, redundancy and that we're ready to alter this plan with more 
resources, if necessary, in order to achieve or to set about achieving 
in both Iraq and in Afghanistan a definable victory. We have done so in 
Iraq. We seek to do that in Afghanistan.
  President Karzai recognizes that the Bush doctrine remains intact, 
that promoting freedom and a stable self-governing country in 
Afghanistan lays out the foundation consistent with the Bush doctrine, 
which is to provide for that foundation of legitimate government. If 
that happens, the voice of the people is heard. When the voice of the 
people is heard through the ballot box and through other means of self-
expression--freedom of the press will be another one--then the tension 
diminishes.
  We don't have to have revolutions in America because we have 
elections in America. They don't have to have terrorists and 
revolutions in places like Iraq or Afghanistan if they have elections 
there, if the voice of the people is heard and if there is dispute 
resolution by a legitimate means under the rule of law.
  President Karzai understands the Bush doctrine is not dead. The Bush 
doctrine is very much alive. The directive of the strategy that was 
laid out by President Obama actually maintains and holds the Bush 
doctrine intact. It just does so with a minimum number of resources, 
and we're going to have to look forward to, I'll say, the utter 
excellence of our noble American troops to bring about an 
accomplishment there that, I think, could use more resources to ensure 
a successful result in Afghanistan.
  While this is going on, I want to, Madam Speaker, continue to press 
the President of the United States and the people in America to look at 
a strategy

[[Page 29734]]

that goes beyond this amorphous line around through the mountains and 
between Afghanistan and Pakistan that we cannot defeat an enemy that 
has a sovereign sanctuary, an enemy that can choose its time to attack 
us and to lay up and hold up and train.
  Furthermore, we'd better start paying attention to this global war on 
terror. It is not a police action. It is a war against people who 
ideologically oppose us. We are now raising in the United States 
terrorists from within the United States who are attacking free people 
in other parts of the world. We had five terrorist operations that 
emerged in a single day.
  There was one in Dallas, two in New York, one in Chicago, and another 
one in North Carolina. I think that covers most of them, homegrown to 
some extent. We have the Somali terrorists out of Minneapolis--
homegrown. We have the individual who was just arrested today, or 
charged today, with helping to plan the massacre that took place a 
little over a year ago in Mumbai. These are Americans who are now 
projecting terror around other parts of the world.
  We need to get with this and understand the enemy that we are 
fighting. We need to put a plan in place to clean this up in the United 
States of America, to eradicate the habitat that breeds terrorists like 
that, to defeat the culture that breeds people who believe their path 
to salvation is in killing freedom-loving, God-fearing people like we 
are here in the United States of America.
  This is not just a little bit of an engagement of our law 
enforcement. This is a clash of ideologies. They are committed. We need 
to be. We need to understand our enemy, Madam Speaker.
  That has been the purpose of my discussion here this afternoon. I 
appreciate your attention to this matter.
  To all of the Members of Congress, as you tune in and listen and to 
the American people who have the benefit of this open dialogue, I urge 
our attention to the matter, to the educational upgrade of all of the 
people in this country.

                          ____________________