[Senate Hearing 111-321]
[From the U.S. Government Printing Office]
S. Hrg. 111-321
EXPLORING THREE STRATEGIES
FOR AFGHANISTAN
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HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
SEPTEMBER 16, 2009
__________
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COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
JOHN F. KERRY, Massachusetts, Chairman
CHRISTOPHER J. DODD, Connecticut RICHARD G. LUGAR, Indiana
RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD, Wisconsin BOB CORKER, Tennessee
BARBARA BOXER, California JOHNNY ISAKSON, Georgia
ROBERT MENENDEZ, New Jersey JAMES E. RISCH, Idaho
BENJAMIN L. CARDIN, Maryland JIM DeMINT, South Carolina
ROBERT P. CASEY, Jr., Pennsylvania JOHN BARRASSO, Wyoming
JIM WEBB, Virginia ROGER F. WICKER, Mississippi
JEANNE SHAHEEN, New Hampshire JAMES M. INHOFE, Oklahoma
EDWARD E. KAUFMAN, Delaware
KIRSTEN E. GILLIBRAND, New York
David McKean, Staff Director
Kenneth A. Myers, Jr., Republican Staff Director
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
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Page
Biddle, Dr. Stephen, senior fellow for defense policy, Council on
Foreign Relations, Washington, DC.............................. 15
Prepared statement........................................... 16
Kerry, Hon. John F., U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, opening
statement...................................................... 1
Lugar, Hon. Richard G., U.S. Senator from Indiana, opening
statement...................................................... 5
Nagl, Dr. John, president, Center for a New American Security,
Washington, DC................................................. 7
Prepared statement........................................... 9
Stewart, Rory, director, Carr Center on Human Rights Policy,
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.............................. 24
Prepared statement........................................... 26
Additional Material Submitted for the Record
Menendez, Hon. Robert, U.S. Senator from New Jersey, prepared
statement...................................................... 14
(iii)
EXPLORING THREE STRATEGIES FOR AFGHANISTAN
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WESNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2009
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Foreign Relations,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:35 p.m., in
room SD-419, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. John F. Kerry
(chairman of the committee) presiding.
Present: Senators Kerry, Feingold, Menendez, Cardin, Casey,
Shaheen, Kaufman, Lugar, Corker, and Risch.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN F. KERRY,
U.S. SENATOR FROM MASSACHUSETTS
The Chairman. This hearing of the Foreign Relations
Committee will now come to order.
Delighted to welcome our distinguished panel, and
appreciate very much their taking time to come and share this
first hearing in a series of hearings on the subject of
Afghanistan.
I also want to welcome--I am told we have a group of
members of the Afghan Parliament who are here, and maybe they
would just stand up and be recognized. Where are they, right
back here? Thank you very much. We appreciate your being here,
and we hope that this is helpful to you, as it will be,
hopefully, to us.
The future course of our mission in Afghanistan has become
one of the most important and one of the most difficult
questions that we face. In the weeks ahead, this committee will
hold a series of hearings to study the situation in greater
depth and to weigh our options going forward. I know that all
of my colleagues on this committee and in Congress take that
responsibility seriously, and I look forward to using this
venue to ask some tough questions and, hopefully, to uncover
some answers together.
Frankly, I am concerned by where we are today in
Afghanistan, about the rising number of casualties among our
troops and those of our allies, about the deeply flawed
Presidential voting that just took place, about the impunity
with which drug traffickers have been to operate, and about the
rampant corruption undermining the faith of Afghans in their
government and ours. And most of all, I am concerned because,
at the very moment when our troops and our allies' troops are
sacrificing more and more, our plan, our path, our progress
seem to be growing less and less clear.
Nearly all of us agree that it was right to go into
Afghanistan when we originally did. There is no such consensus
about what comes next. The eighth anniversary of our presence
in Afghanistan approaches at a time of growing doubts about our
mission, at home and abroad. I've heard some of my colleagues
express reservations in many different ways about different
aspects of what we are engaged in, ranging from the size of our
military commitment, and our Afghan and NATO partners'
commitment, to what is possible, to fundamental questions about
the underlying presumptions of our presence there.
It's very easy to understand why some people have become
skeptical. We appeared to achieve our key objectives very early
and very easily. We toppled the Taliban, and we drove out al-
Qaeda's leaders, although obviously the intent was to either
capture or kill them. But, we didn't drive them very far--only
a 100 miles or so across the border into Pakistan, from where
they have been able to organize and perpetuate their activities
in perhaps as many as 60 countries around the globe.
Year after year, while many of us warned that our mission
was not just adrift, but even slipping out of control, the last
administration's focus was definitively elsewhere; in Iraq. In
fact, many military people complained to me at various times
about the diversion of resources and of strategic thinking from
Afghanistan to Iraq.
Now the window is closing. Today, we face a tougher foe, a
more educated foe, in a sense, to our practices, an insurgency
that has adapted to our tactics and honed its own deadly
methods. Afghans, who once welcomed Americans with open arms,
have, in many cases, grown suspicious. American and allied
populations are suspicious, too. They want a clearer
explanation of our goals, of our methodology, our plans. And so
do we, here.
Each time I visit Afghanistan--and I intend to go again in
October--I return with a renewed appreciation for our troops.
In Kunar and Zabul, I have seen the Provincial Reconstruction
Teams weave their way through the complex web of tribal
alliances to empower local governments to deliver basic
services to the Afghan people. I've seen a Navy commander and
an Army lieutenant colonel directing unbelievable activities,
engaging in being mayor, psychologist, judge, diplomat, and
soldier, all at the same time.
What our troops are doing is extraordinary, and
extraordinarily difficult. We have an obligation to make
certain that we give them a strategy that is worthy of their
sacrifice. President Obama has promised to weigh the
recommendations of the top commander in Afghanistan--GEN
Stanley McChrystal--on whether to commit more troops to this
effort. We don't know what the answer will be. But, we do know
that August was the deadliest month on record for United States
troops in Afghanistan.
We also know, and we know this definitively, that this
should not become a partisan issue. Democrats and Republicans
alike can best support the President, and our country, by not
acting as a rubberstamp. We can help him best by asking tough
questions, just as he is doing, and partnering with the
administration to craft policies that reflect the answers.
Secretary Clinton has committed to testify before the
committee next month, once the President has finalized some of
these choices that he faces. And I know that all of my
colleagues will welcome the chance to further this dialogue
with her.
So far, the limited debate has really focused on absolute
numbers and on different kinds of metrics: How many United
States and allied troops are required; how many Afghan soldiers
and police do we need to train; how many more billions do we
need to invest in a moment of enormous need here at home. Of
course, no amount of money, no rise in troop levels, and no
clever metrics will matter if the mission itself is ill-defined
or ill-conceived. That's why we need to expand the discussion
to grapple with fundamental questions and examine core
assumptions. We need to agree on a clear definition of the
mission and of what is possible. We need to decide what is
achievable and what is an acceptable goal for the future shape
of Afghanistan. We need to know the size of the footprint--
military footprint--that that goal will demand. We need to
weigh the probabilities and the cost of getting there.
I believe that certain principles must guide this thinking,
and I will say to you that--there was an interesting article in
today's Washington Post, and it's one that sort of reflected
some of the thinking that I and others have shared recently,
which is--I mean, I recall full well, in 1964 and 1965, being
one of those troops who responded to the call to augment our
presence in Vietnam, and there was this constant refrain from
President Johnson and from General Westmoreland to, you know,
``Give us more troops. We just need X more, and we'll get the
job done.'' But, in fact, some of the core assumptions were not
being examined--about the domino theory, about the nature of
the civil war, and the structure.
This is the kind of thinking we need to apply now to this
challenge. And I believe certain principles must guide our
thinking.
First, it will be the Afghans who must ultimately win or
lose the struggle with the Taliban. We need to ensure that the
Afghan people feel a sense of ownership, not of occupation.
Second, as I warned, back in February, in an op-ed piece in
the Washington Post, we need to recognize that we are in a race
against time. In a region suspicious of foreign troops, an
open-ended obligation of large numbers of United States troops
risks consigning us to the same fate as others who've tried to
master Afghanistan. No matter how long we remain there, history
should teach us that there will be no purely military solution
in that country. What's needed instead is a comprehensive
strategy, one that emphasizes the need for the right level of
civilian effort as much as for the right military deployment to
provide security for that other effort to take hold.
We must also understand Afghan realities, and recognize the
decentralized nature of Afghan society. I won't go into it all
right now, but there is a distinction between Iraq and the
civil structure that existed in Iraq and the capacity of that
civil structure, and the system that existed, and the level of
education, and the commerce, and the development--a clear
distinction between that and what exists in Afghanistan, one of
the poorest countries in the world.
So, we need to understand this decentralized nature of
Afghan society and the history of its monarchy and its
relationship to a centralized government, and that requires us,
I think, to be flexible. Afghanistan is a very diverse place,
and we need to understand that what works in Mazar-e Sharif, a
predominantly Uzbek city that fought the Taliban tooth and nail
in the 1990s, is very different from what works in Kandahar, a
Pashtun city that welcomed the Taliban with open arms. It also
requires us to be humble about our ability to bring large-scale
change to other societies. That was true in Iraq, it remains
true in Iraq, and it is even more true in Afghanistan. We have
to weigh our choices against what is possible.
We also need to consider our mission in Afghanistan in the
context of a highly volatile and strategically vital region.
And I emphasize that this is a very important part of our
thinking--Pakistan, Iran, and other questions. These permeable
borders are straddled by clans, ethnic groups, and militants,
where what happens in one country can have profound
implications for the security of its neighbors. It is also true
that the Pashtun represent a people divided by an artificial
line, many years ago by Sir Durand and the British, which was
drawn right down the center, putting part of them in Pakistan,
part of them in Afghanistan, but it is a border that they have
never recognized.
We also face the continued stability of Pakistan, and those
issues, a nuclear-armed nation in an existential struggle with
extremists and insurgents. I might add, Pakistan has made a
significant advance from where it was a year ago. And where
many people thought that, in fact, Pakistan was the problem
without a solution at that point in time, they have been
surprised by the results. And I think we need to take note of
that as we think about these mutual implications.
We also need to set realistic goals. The purpose of our
mission, is what the President said it was: To prevent
Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven or sanctuary for al-
Qaeda, and to make sure al-Qaeda is not there in Afghanistan,
and, therefore, a destabilizing force in the region. I do not
believe that we are in Afghanistan to create a carbon copy of
American-style democracy or to impose a strong central
government in a nation that has never had one. We need to
ensure that we not only set realistic goals, but also align
them with our chosen strategy.
In a week when U.S. commandos killed a top al-Qaeda leader
in Somalia without a major troop presence, we should be asking
ourselves, How much counterinsurgency and nation-building are
required to meet a sufficient set of goals to achieve America's
objectives with respect to counterinsurgency? And whatever
approach we decide on, we do need to find a clear set of
metrics to measure the progress.
And finally, we need to ask ourselves the questions that
General Petraeus famously asked in 2003 during the invasion of
Iraq, How does this end? Supporters and opponents of this war
should agree, we need to have this discussion. It may be that
we will decide that there need to be additional troops. I don't
know the answer to that question until we ask all of these
other questions. But, we should not do it in a knee-jerk,
automatic, predisposed way that has not thoroughly examined the
assumptions and the possibilities. Therefore, this discussion
is essential. We've already lost 827 Americans in Operation
Enduring Freedom. We have spent over $200 billion. And all of
us have attended the funerals and met with families of those
who have been lost. We have an obligation to make certain that
their sacrifice is not forgotten, but also not in vain, and
that we give them a strategy that is worthy of the sacrifice
they've made.
For the first time, the Pentagon has requested more war
funding next year for Afghanistan than for Iraq. It is critical
for us to communicate a clear goal, and begin to show progress
toward achieving it. And we risk losing support for our
mission, not just in Afghanistan, but here at home, if we don't
undertake that effort.
Dr. John Nagl is a retired Army lieutenant colonel and
president of the Center for New American Security. He was
selected by General Petraeus to coauthor the Army's
Counterinsurgency Field Manual. And we appreciate him being
here today.
Dr. Stephen Biddle is a senior fellow at the Council on
Foreign Relations, an independent thinker and an incisive
military analyst. He spent a month in Afghanistan this summer
as a member of General McChrystal's assessment team.
And our last witness, Rory Stewart, got the ultimate ground
education on Afghanistan by walking straight across the country
from Herat to Jalalabad right after the Taliban's fall. He is
director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at
Harvard's Kennedy School, a former British diplomat and
soldier, an early and eloquent critic of our Afghan strategy.
So, I welcome you--each of you today, and look forward to your
testimony.
Senator Lugar.
Senator Lugar. Mr. Chairman, I'd like to ask permission to
vote at this point. We're about halfway through the rollcall.
The Chairman. I think that's wise. And----
Senator Lugar. And then, as I come back, I'll commence my
statement, if that's permissible.
The Chairman. Absolutely. We will--in fact, what I'd like
to do, because I think it's important for everybody to hear
your statement, we will recess until we return from this vote.
And we stand in recess until such time. It will probably be
about 10 minutes, folks. Thanks.
We stand in recess.
[Recess.]
The Chairman. The hearing will come back to order.
I apologize to everybody. We had two votes, not one, so it
took us a little longer, and I apologize to our witnesses and
those watching.
Senator Lugar, we look forward to your opening. Thank you.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. RICHARD G. LUGAR,
U.S. SENATOR FROM INDIANA
Senator Lugar. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I
join you in welcoming our distinguished panel.
Having reviewed the range of strategies suggested by our
experts, it's evident that each has his own perspective on
international military forces in Afghanistan. What they have in
common is acknowledging the important role for international
civilian agencies in Afghanistan to help create stability. This
hearing provides an opportunity to review progress on a key
asset that I've long sought in our foreign policy efforts, a
coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization in the State
Department.
The story of the development of this office, which began
under the previous administration and continues today, is a
discouraging one, unfortunately. Despite the long-evident need
for a coherent and efficient civilian coordination capacity to
assist our troops in crisis response, we still don't have one
and continue to rely solely upon the Defense Department to
provide personnel, equipment, resources, and ideas.
In 2003, I convened a series of Policy Analysis Group
meetings of senior officials from within our government and
beyond to discuss the appropriate role for civilian agencies in
post-conflict or crisis situations. Since 1989 and the fall of
the Berlin Wall, we've been engaged in post-conflict situations
in the first gulf war, Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, Iraq,
Liberia, and, of course, Afghanistan. Each crisis required the
deployment of technically proficient civilians familiar with
unstable situations. Each situation was hampered by the
inability to identify and to deploy such skilled civilians,
either independently or as part of a multilateral or military
operation.
In 2004, then-Senator Biden and I introduced legislation to
create a civilian reconstruction office, but that legislation
was not championed initially by the previous administration.
Belatedly, the value of this effort was recognized, but despite
the Bush administration's 2009 budget request of $249 million
to fund the Civilian Stabilization Initiative and the new
administration's increased 2010 budget request of $323 million
for the same purposes, Congress has sharply cut these funds.
As a result, as President Obama determines the strategic
and tactical approach for Afghanistan and the region, he and
his commanders and ambassadors are constrained by the inability
to provide all the tools necessary. Ambassador Holbrooke was
hired by this administration to improve our policy impact in
Afghanistan and Pakistan. He determined that he would need a
team of experts and the means to wield decisionmaking authority
over human and financial resources. I would have hoped that by
2009, some 6 years after I broached the idea with then-
Secretary of State Colin Powell, Ambassador Holbrooke could
turn to the coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization,
Ambassador John Herbst, and an integrated civilian organization
capable of assembling a large contingent of specialists.
Instead, Ambassador Holbrooke concluded the capacity of these
folks was not sufficient to perform the mission. Ambassador
Holbrooke has instead established, within his own office of the
Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, what is,
in essence, a central coordinating function for civilian
agencies involved in the crisis. He's built a team that now
competes in size with the State Department CRS, and dwarfs that
entity in its ability to empower and to employ personnel.
The Department of Defense shares my concern over this gap
in our civilian post-conflict capabilities. A variety of
experienced military leaders have said the lack of an effective
civilian partner is hurting our national interests. Secretary
Gates has made clear that our national security is as dependent
upon our foreign assistance budget and authorities as it is on
our defense budget. Congress must now prioritize these parallel
budgets and authorities in order to strengthen our
effectiveness in the realm of diplomacy and defense.
Afghanistan is the priority our President has identified.
It is in this engagement that we must provide the civilian
resources and skills to complement our military effort,
whatever shape the military posture may take.
I look forward to hearing our witnesses. And I thank you,
Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you, Senator Lugar, that's a very
thoughtful statement, and we appreciate it.
We're going to start with you, Dr. Nagl, and then Dr.
Biddle, and finally Rory Stewart. Your full testimonies will be
placed in the record in full, as if read in full; if you want
to summarize and give us a little more time to have a dialogue.
STATEMENT OF JOHN NAGL, PRESIDENT, CENTER FOR A NEW AMERICAN
SECURITY, WASHINGTON, DC
Dr. Nagl. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Chairman, Senator Lugar, members of the committee, I
thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to
discuss U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. Achieving an outcome in
Afghanistan advantageous to our national security interest
demands a careful appraisal of what America is trying to
accomplish, and an appreciation for the resources required to
get there, and I am honored to be there as part of that
important discussion.
Preventing the return of the Taliban to control of
Afghanistan, maintaining stability in Pakistan, and keeping up
the pressure against al-Qaeda are all objectives very worthy of
American effort. U.S. policymakers must, of course, weigh all
strategic actions against America's global interests and
against our opportunity costs. In Afghanistan and Pakistan,
low-cost strategies do not have an encouraging track record of
success, since the initial successes of Operation Enduring
Freedom. Drone attacks, which are very useful for their ability
to eliminate Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders, have not prevented
militant forces from making threatening advances in both
Afghanistan and Pakistan. The light-footprint option has failed
to secure U.S. objectives, as the Obama administration and the
American military leadership have recognized. It is well past
time for a different approach.
Preventing Afghanistan from again serving as a sanctuary
for terrorists with global reach or as the catalyst for a
broader regional security meltdown are the key objectives of
our campaign there. Securing these objectives requires helping
the Afghans to build a sustainable system of governance that
can adequately ensure stability and security for the Afghan
people, the keystone upon which a successful exit strategy
depends.
While an expanded international commitment of security and
development forces can assist in the achievement of these goals
in the short term, ultimately Afghans must ensure security and
stability in their own country. The development of a state that
is able to provide a modicum of security and governance to its
people is necessary to ensure that American security interests
will be preserved without a major U.S. ground presence. And the
classic clear-hold-build counterinsurgency strategy offers the
best way to achieve that objective.
The first requirement for success in a counterinsurgency
campaign is the ability to secure the population, but at
present there are insufficient Afghan soldiers and police to
implement that approach by holding areas that had been cleared
of insurgents by United States and international forces. As a
result, American troops have had to clear the same areas
repeatedly, paying a price for each operation, both in American
lives and in Afghan public support, which suffers each time we
clear and leave. More United States combat soldiers are
required now to implement a clear, hold, and build
counterinsurgency strategy, but, over time, responsibility must
transition to the Afghans to secure their own country.
Ultimately, therefore, much of the focus on the direct
counterinsurgency role of United States forces should shift to
a focus on developing Afghan security forces. The preexisting
numerical targets for the development of Afghan security forces
are not based on the actual security requirements for the
country. The current end-strength targets for the Afghan
National Army and National Police are 134,000 and 82,000
respectively, about half what would be required to provide
adequate security in a war-torn country of over 30 million
people with very rough terrain. The United States should
initiate a greater international effort to expand the Afghan
national security forces. If that means the U.S. Government and
the international community has to pay for them, then so be it.
Doing so will be far cheaper than maintaining substantial
numbers of American and international forces in Afghanistan for
an even longer period of time to do the jobs that Afghans
should do. Building Afghan security forces will be a long-term
effort that will require United States and international
assistance and advisers for many years.
Security must come first, but these wars are not only won
with bullets, so a renewed U.S. commitment to development
assistance must also be initiated. And Senator Lugar has
mentioned the fact that we simply don't have the expeditionary
capability we need in the civilian agencies of government here
in this country, and therefore, I'm afraid, much of that burden
for development will have to continue to be borne by the U.S.
military.
In particular, I'd like to highlight the contributions of
the National Security Program in Afghanistan, perhaps the best
investment of dollars we've made there. Ultimately, the NSP is
an important step toward the defeat of the insurgency, which we
will see when the Afghan people know that a non-Taliban
political order can offer them a modicum of security and
governance.
St. Augustine teaches us that the purpose of war is to
build a better peace, but America built nothing in Afghanistan
after the Soviet withdrawal, and the Taliban filled the vacuum.
Afghanistan became the vipers' nest in which al-Qaeda grew, and
the United States paid a heavy price for its strategic neglect
of Afghanistan.
Over the next 5 years, we want to create an Afghanistan
from which al-Qaeda has been displaced and from which we can
continue to attack its remnants. By that point, the Government
of Afghanistan should be able, with only minimal external help,
to secure itself from internal threats like the Taliban or the
return of al-Qaeda. It should have the support of its people,
earned through reduced corruption and the provision of a
reasonable level of government services, particularly security
and an improving economy, and it should be determined to never
again provide a safe haven for terror. These are difficult
tasks, but the American military has a long history of
demonstrating that ``hard'' is not ``impossible'' as long as
the American people stand behind it.
Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Nagl follows:]
Prepared Statement of Dr. John Nagl, President, Center for a New
American Security, Washington, DC
Mr. Chairman, Senator Lugar, and members of the committee, I thank
you for the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss U.S.
strategy in Afghanistan. Achieving an outcome in Afghanistan
advantageous to our national security interests demands a careful
appraisal of what America is trying to accomplish and an appreciation
for the resources required to get there.\1\
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\1\ This testimony draws upon John A. Nagl, ``A Better War in
Afghanistan,'' to be published in Joint Force Quarterly in November
2009. The author thanks Brian M. Burton of the Center for a New
American Security for his assistance in the preparation of this
testimony.
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the ends: no sanctuary for terrorists and no regional meltdown \2\
Coalition forces invaded Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 with the
objective of toppling the Taliban government and defeating al-Qaeda.
The Bonn Agreement and subsequent accords expanded Afghan and coalition
aims far beyond these original objectives. After 7 years of strategic
drift, coalition efforts have failed to persuade many Afghans that it
is wise or safe to defy the Taliban.\3\ Just as ominously, the
prolonged nature of the conflict, mounting casualties and financial
costs, and the lack of demonstrable progress have combined to weaken
popular support for the mission in many NATO nations, even in the
United States. But the fact that progress has been hampered by confused
strategy and insufficient resources is an indictment of the conduct of
this war, not its objectives. It does not mean that the campaign in
Afghanistan is fruitless or that America's interests in this part of
the world are unimportant.
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\2\ This section draws upon Nathaniel C. Fick, David Kilcullen,
John A. Nagl, and Vikram J. Singh, ``Tell Me Why We're There? Enduring
Interests in Afghanistan (and Pakistan),'' Center for a New American
Security Policy Brief, 22 January 2009; and John A. Nagl, ``Surge In
Afghanistan Can Work, With Right Resources, Enough Time,'' U.S. News
and World Report, 23 February 2009.
\3\ Ann Scott Tyson, ``In Helmand, Caught Between U.S., Taliban;
`Skittish' Afghans Wary of Both Sides,'' The Washington Post, August
15, 2009.
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The primary objective of American efforts in Pakistan and
Afghanistan remains the elimination of the al-Qaeda-associated
sanctuaries and, if possible, top leaders that support transnational
terrorist operations. Originally based in Afghanistan but squeezed by
allied military operations, many in this shadowy alliance have shifted
to Pakistan's cities and frontier areas, beyond easy reach of the
coalition. American efforts now focus on Pakistan as a launching pad
for transnational terrorists and insurgents fighting in Afghanistan.
But the problem runs both ways: A failed Afghanistan would become a
base from which Taliban and al-Qaeda militants could work to further
destabilize the surrounding region. Al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban
have served as an inspiration and sometime-ally of violent extremist
groups targeting resource-rich states of Central Asia.\4\ More
dangerously, they also have ties to the insurgents seeking to overthrow
Pakistan, and the ultimate prize in that contest would be not another
ridge or valley, but possibly access to the Pakistani nuclear arsenal.
An unraveling, whether gradual or unexpectedly rapid, of Pakistan in
the face of the Taliban insurgency could spark a cascading regional
meltdown and lead to nuclear arms falling into the hands of a terrorist
group that would use them against the United States or its allies. This
is, to be sure, widely considered a low-probability event, but the
security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons is hardly clear and U.S.
visibility into events there is fairly low.\5\
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\4\ See Ahmed Rashid ``Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and
Fundamentalism in Central Asia'' (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2001) and Ahmed Rashid, ``Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central
Asia'' (New York: Penguin Books, 2003).
\5\ See David Sanger, ``Obama's Worst Pakistan Nightmare,'' New
York Times Magazine, January 11, 2009.
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Because these threats of terrorist sanctuary and regional
instability emanate from territory shared by Pakistan and Afghanistan,
Pakistan must be encouraged to confront terrorism within its borders
and curtail its military's clandestine support for extremist factions.
Stepping back America's commitment to the theater would be a
particularly odd choice at the present time, given the recent
improvement in Pakistani efforts to conduct counterinsurgency against
its own radical elements and in American-Pakistani intelligence-
sharing. The course of 2009 has seen dramatic changes in the Pakistani
willingness to wage war against insurgents who increasingly threaten
the survival of the government. In that sense, the alarming advances of
Taliban-aligned forces in Pakistan during the early months of 2009
proved to be something of a blessing in disguise: The militants'
attacks into heartland provinces like Swat and Buner galvanized a
previously indifferent Pakistani public and military to stand up to the
militants and drive them back.\6\ This is momentum toward that the
United States should seek to encourage while working to overcome
decades of Pakistani mistrust of an America that has not been perceived
as a reliable or supportive partner.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\6\ See Haider Ali Hussein Mullick, ``Lions and Jackals: Pakistan's
Emerging Counterinsurgency Strategy,'' Foreign Affairs (online only),
July 15, 2009, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/65191/haider-ali-
hussein-mullick/lions-and-jackals.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in the late 1980s,
the United States curtailed virtually all of its assistance to Pakistan
and was perceived by a generation of Pakistani leaders as having
abandoned the region. In sharp contrast to the close security
relationship that prevailed for the preceding decade, Washington
quickly moved to distance itself from engagement and support of
Pakistan, culminating in decisions to impose sanctions and ban
military-to-military exchanges with Pakistan over its nuclear weapons
programs and tests. Pakistani leaders, military officers, and policy
elites have not forgotten these events, and our actions ensured that
U.S. policymakers lost one of our most significant sources of
understanding and levers of influence over events in the region for a
generation.\7\ The improving but still fragile relationship of
cooperation on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency would be damaged
by an American pullback now: The Pakistani leadership would be further
convinced that the United States cannot be relied upon and encouraged
to maintain its ties to Islamist militant groups as a strategic hedge,
both dangerous developments from a U.S. national security standpoint.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\7\ See, for example, Hussain Haqqani, ``Pakistan: Between Mosque
and Military'' (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, 2005), 282-99.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Preventing the return of the Taliban to control of Afghanistan,
maintaining stability in Pakistan, and keeping up the pressure against
al-Qaeda are objectives worthy of American effort. U.S. policymakers
must, of course, weigh all strategic actions against America's global
interests and possible opportunity costs. But in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, the low-cost strategies do not have an encouraging track
record of success since the initial success of Operation Enduring
Freedom. After the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, the United
States sought to limit its own involvement by working by, with, and
through militia or tribal commanders to provide security and mop up the
remaining al-Qaeda presence. But in many cases this approach empowered
these commanders to act abusively and unaccountably, which alienated an
Afghan population that had been promised a new ``Marshall Plan'' by the
United States and thereby facilitated the Taliban's reemergence as an
insurgency against the new government and international presence.\8\
Drone attacks, which have been highly touted for their ability to
eliminate Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders,\9\ have certainly killed
numerous terrorists and insurgents. But they have not prevented
militant forces from making threatening advances in both Afghanistan
and Pakistan. This is not to say that drone strikes or alliances of
convenience with tribal and militia commanders should not have a role
in the U.S. campaign, but neither should form the primary basis for our
strategy going forward. The ``light footprint'' option has failed to
secure U.S. objectives; as the Obama administration and the U.S.
military leadership have recognized, it is well past time for a
different approach.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\8\ See Antonio Giustozzi, ``Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop: The
Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan'' (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2008), 15-21.
\9\ See Greg Miller, ``U.S. Missile Strikes Said to Take Heavy Toll
on Al Qaeda,'' Los Angeles Times, March 22, 2009.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
toward a ``better war'' in afghanistan
Preventing Afghanistan from again serving as a sanctuary for
terrorists with global reach or serving as the catalyst for a broader
regional security meltdown are the key objectives of the campaign
there. Securing these objectives requires helping the Afghans to build
a sustainable system of governance that can adequately ensure security
for the Afghan people--the keystone upon which a successful exit
strategy depends. In order to achieve this objective, the coalition and
its Afghan partners must seek to build a state that reconciles some
degree of centralized governance with the traditional tribal and
religious power structures that hold sway outside Kabul. An internal
balance between centralized and traditional power centers--not central
government control everywhere--is a practical basis for assuring the
country's stability, much as it was in the years prior to the Soviet
invasion. Achieving these minimal goals will require more military
forces, but also a much greater commitment to good governance and to
providing for the needs of the Afghan people where they live. The
coalition will need to use its considerable leverage to counter Afghan
Government corruption at every level.
While an expanded international commitment of security and
development forces can assist in the achievement of these goals in the
short term, ultimately Afghans must ensure stability and security in
their own country. The development of a rudimentary state, even a
highly flawed one, that is able to provide a modicum of security and
governance to its people is necessary to ensure that American security
interests will be preserved without a major U.S. ground presence. The
successful implementation of a better-resourced effort to build Iraqi
security forces, after years of floundering, is now enabling the
drawdown of American forces from that country as Iraqi forces
increasingly take responsibility for their own security; a similar
situation will be the definition of success in Afghanistan, some years
from now.
The ``clear, hold, and build'' counterinsurgency model was
relearned over several painful years in Iraq, but at present there are
insufficient Afghan soldiers and police to implement that approach by
holding areas that have been cleared of insurgents. As a result,
American troops have had to clear the same areas repeatedly--paying a
price for each operation in both American lives and in Afghan public
support, which suffers from Taliban reprisals whenever we ``clear and
leave.''
These lessons are well-understood, but the question remains whether
U.S., NATO, and Afghan forces can execute them. The paucity of Afghan
security forces relative to U.S. Marines involved in the summer 2009
offensive in Helmand province was troubling and indicative of a
security force assistance effort that has not been taken seriously
enough for much of the past 8 years.\10\ After an area is cleared of
insurgents, it must be held by Afghan troops supported by international
advisers and combat multipliers, including artillery and air support.
These operations are intended to create the conditions that facilitate
Afghan central government reconciliation with traditional local power
structures to establish better-secured communities that ``freeze out''
future Taliban infiltration. Since the additional troops we have
deployed in 2009 won't be enough to secure the whole country, ISAF and
Afghan commanders will have to select the most important population
centers, such as Kandahar, to secure first. These ``oil spots'' of
security will then spread over time as more Afghan forces come online
and gain more competence.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\10\ See Rajiv Chandrasekaran, ``A Fight for Ordinary Peace,''
Washington Post, July 11, 2009.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ultimately, therefore, much of the focus on the direct
counterinsurgency role of U.S. forces should shift over time to a clear
focus on developing Afghan security forces. More U.S. soldiers are
required now to implement a ``Clear, Hold, and Build''
counterinsurgency strategy, but over time responsibility must
transition to the Afghans to secure their own country. If the first
requirement for success in a counterinsurgency campaign is the ability
to secure the population, the counterinsurgent requires boots on the
ground and plenty of them.
The long-term answer is a significantly expanded, and more
effective, Afghan security apparatus. The preexisting numerical targets
for the development of Afghan security forces are not based on the
actual security requirements for the country. The current end strength
targets for the Afghan National Army and National Police are 134,000
and 82,000 men, respectively--not nearly enough to provide adequate
security in a war-torn country of over 30 million people with very
rough terrain. The Obama administration's interagency policy review
team recommended a substantial expansion of the effort to build these
forces up to those prescribed end strengths, but that will not be
sufficient.\11\ Some argue that the international community should not
develop an Afghan security force larger than what that country's
economy can support. Under peacetime conditions that concern would be
important, but basing our security force assistance efforts on the
Afghan economy rather than a realistic estimate of the numbers needed
to impose a reasonable level of security is not the appropriate course
of action now. The United States should initiate a greater
international effort to expand the Afghan national security forces. If
that means the U.S. Government and the international community has to
help pay for them, that is what should be done--it will still be far
cheaper than maintaining substantial numbers of American and
international forces in Afghanistan for an even longer period of time
to do the jobs that Afghans should do.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\11\ The White House, ``White Paper of the Interagency Policy
Group's Report on U.S. Strategy Toward Afghanistan and Pakistan,''
March 27, 2009, 3.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Building Afghan security forces will be a long-term effort that
will require U.S. and international assistance and advisers for many
years. Unfortunately, the advisory mission has long been treated as a
low priority in practice if not in rhetoric, with advisory teams being
assembled in an ad hoc fashion and provided with insufficient training
and resources before deploying.\12\ The Obama administration has
bolstered the effort with the deployment of 4,000 additional troops to
serve as advisors.\13\ But it remains unclear whether the U.S.
military--and our government as a whole--has truly cracked the code on
effectively developing host nation security forces. It is as important
to address the qualitative problems with the current security force
assistance program as it is to solve the quantitative ones. Combined
Security Transition Command-Afghanistan (CSTC-A) must be reviewed to
ensure that it has the best organization and sufficient capacity to do
its job. The advisory effort must have access to the most talented and
experienced personnel available--not just those left over after the
regular units have picked first. It must be structured in a way that
incorporates best practices for security force assistance and is most
suited to the specific demands of the Afghan operating environment--not
simply assembled in the fashion that is most convenient for America's
existing unit structure. It must focus on developing an Afghan security
force that can fulfill the mission of countering the insurgency and
providing a sufficient, if imperfect, level of internal security--not
on mirror-imaging the force structure of a more advanced Western army
dedicated to external defense. And ultimately the entire effort must be
judged on the quality of its outputs--professional, competent, reliable
Afghan forces--rather than simply how many armed men in uniform come
out of its training centers, an approach that clearly produced poor
results in the first 4 years of the Iraq war.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\12\ See Captain Daniel Helmer, ``Twelve Urgent Steps for the
Advisor Mission in Afghanistan,'' Military Review, July/August 2008,
73-81.
\13\ The White House, ``Remarks by the President on a New Strategy
for Afghanistan and Pakistan,'' transcript, March 27, 2009, http://
www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-on-a-New-
Strategy-for-Afghanistan-and-Pakistan/.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The United States and ISAF also need to get smarter about the way
they engage Afghan communities at the local level. Insurgencies can be
won or lost at the local level because securing the support of the
population requires understanding the specific issues that cause it to
sympathize with one side or another. Additionally, insurgencies are
rarely monolithic: they comprise numerous local factions and
individuals fighting for personal gain, revenge against real or
perceived slights, tribal loyalties, or other reasons that may have
little to do with the insurgency's professed cause. The Afghan
insurgency is no different in this regard.\14\ The Taliban is an
amalgam of local fighters and mercenary and criminal elements around a
hard core of committed jihadists; according to one detailed study,
approximately 40-50 percent of the insurgency is made up of ``local
allies'' fighting for tribal causes or opportunism.\15\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\14\ See Ganesh Sitaraman, ``The Land of 10,000 Wars,'' The New
York Times, 16 August 2009.
\15\ Antonio Giustozzi, ``Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop,'' 42-43.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Based on such analyses, U.S. commanders are interested in trying to
``flip'' less ideological factions and promoting the development of
local self-defense militias to encourage the Afghan tribes to defend
against Taliban infiltration.\16\ Exploiting divisions within an
insurgency paid dividends in Iraq, where the emergence of Anbar
Awakening and Sons of Iraq played a major role in crippling al-Qaeda in
Iraq (AQI) and dramatically reducing violence. Again, this is a simple
concept that is much harder in practice. Thus far, the insurgency has
proven less susceptible to cooptation than its fragmented nature might
suggest, partly because U.S. overtures have been limited and partly
because the Taliban still holds a level of legitimacy in certain parts
of the country. Even in the case of Iraq, the more secular insurgents
did not turn against the extremists until they were sufficiently
alienated by AQI's brutal tactics and disregard for local customs.\17\
The Taliban's leadership may not make the same mistakes.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\16\ See Fontini Christia and Michael Semple, ``Flipping the
Taliban,'' Foreign Affairs, July/
August 2009.
\17\ See John A. McCary, ``The Anbar Awakening: An Alliance of
Incentives,'' The Washington Quarterly, January 2009, 43-59; David
Kilcullen ,``The Accidental Guerrilla,'' (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2009), 158-76.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
This experience suggests that emphasizing tribal engagement or
``flipping'' less committed insurgents is not a panacea that will
enable the United States to achieve a modicum of security in
Afghanistan on the cheap. Local communities are unlikely to turn in
favor of ISAF and the Afghan Government until these entities
demonstrate that they are fully willing and able to drive out the
insurgents and provide some level of lasting security and competent
(read: Less corrupt) governance. They won't resist the Taliban or help
the security forces as long as the insurgency appears to hold the upper
hand while the government remains weak at best and abusive at worst.
Seizing the initiative from the Taliban and reestablishing the
political order's legitimacy requires securing the population and
developing a sophisticated, nuanced understanding of local communities,
particularly the conflicts within them that insurgents can exploit to
their own ends. Simply targeting militant leaders and foot soldiers and
then leaving won't solve the problem, because local populations know
that the insurgents will just go underground to avoid U.S. strikes and
then reemerge to take vengeance on those who collaborate with the
government once the security forces move on. Security forces that just
pass through on sweeps and raids will not gain the local knowledge
necessary to understand the particular drivers of the insurgency within
the community nor the ability to identify when that community is being
infiltrated by outside militants. Attempts to reassert central
government authority without a clear grasp of local power structures
and relationships will only engender more popular resentment against
Kabul that plays directly into the hands of the Taliban. In short,
until the Afghan Government, the United States, and ISAF get their
approach to local communities right, those communities will not
decisively turn against the insurgency. That means, of course, that
while developing anti-Taliban tribal militias and coopting nonextremist
elements of the insurgency will be aspects of the new Afghanistan
strategy, they cannot be its primary components.
Cultivating a limited Afghan state apparatus that is legitimate in
the eyes of its citizens and works with, rather than against, local
communities is a more important element of the American approach to
Afghanistan. Since 2001, presented with an Afghan central government
whose presence at the local level has often been either absent,
incompetent, or corrupt, the international community has turned
increasingly toward nongovernmental organizations for the delivery of
services. Yet this approach rarely strengthens the perceived legitimacy
of the government in the very communities whose loyalty to the
government is being contested. A renewed U.S. commitment to funding
grassroots development and governance in Afghanistan must accompany the
influx of troops. The Afghan Government's National Solidarity Program
(NSP) and other programs like it deserve much more American
support.\18\ The NSP has become one of the government's most successful
rural development projects. Under the program, the Afghan Ministry of
Rural Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD) disburses modest grants to
village-level elected organizations called Community Development
Councils (CDCs), which in turn identify local priorities and implement
small-scale development projects. A limited number of domestic and
international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) then assist the
CDCs. Once a CDC agrees on a venture, $200 per family (with a ceiling
of $60,000 per village) is distributed for project execution. Afghans
contribute 10 percent of project costs through cash, labor, or other
means.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\18\ This discussion of the NSP draws upon John Nagl, Andrew Exum,
and Ahmed A. Humayun, ``A Pathway to Success in Afghanistan: The
National Solidarity Program,'' Center for a New American Security
Policy Brief, 16 March 2009.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Under this model, the NSP has built schools for thousands of
children, constructed village water pumps that save many hours of
labor, and assembled irrigation networks that have enabled far higher
agricultural yields. More than 12,000 village development councils have
been elected, more than 19,000 project plans have been approved, and
nearly half of these projects have already been completed. The NSP is
the only government program functioning in all 34 provinces, and it has
affected nearly two-thirds of Afghanistan's rural population. Moreover,
women--whose inclusion is a mandatory component of the program--
constitute 35 percent of the elected CDC representatives.
The NSP provides one example of how to establish positive links
between the Afghan people and the government in Kabul, and there are
undoubtedly other models that might offer success stories of their own.
The point is that the insurgency and the international security threat
it represents will not be defeated simply with armed force, drone
strikes, and alliances of convenience with certain factions, although
all of those things will play a part. It will ultimately be defeated
when the Afghan people see tangible evidence that a non-Taliban
political order that really can offer them a modicum of security and
governance.
conclusion: learning from our mistakes
The United States played a role in creating the Taliban and al-
Qaeda: They grew and thrived amidst the chaos that followed the Soviet
withdrawal and subsequent international neglect. Saint Augustine taught
that ``the purpose of war is to build a better peace,'' but America
built nothing in Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal, and the
Taliban filled the vacuum that its inaction allowed. Afghanistan became
the viper's nest in which al-Qaeda grew, and the United States paid a
price for its inattention and strategic neglect of the region.
After the success of a lightning campaign that overthrew the
Taliban and chased al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan, American policy toward
the country returned to one of benign neglect. Too few soldiers to
secure the population, too little development assistance poorly
coordinated, and too little attention to the Pakistan side of the
Durand Line allowed the Taliban to regroup, gain strength, and return
to threaten the young Afghan Government that we created but did not
adequately support, particularly in the development of an Afghan Army
large enough to secure itself from its (and our) enemies.
The objectives of American policy in Afghanistan are clear,
although they have not been articulated as clearly as they should have.
Over the next 5 years, we want to create an Afghanistan from which al-
Qaeda has been displaced and from which it continues to suffer
disruptive attacks. The Government of Afghanistan should be able, with
minimal external help, to secure itself from internal threats like the
Taliban or the return of al-Qaeda; it should have the support of its
people, earned through the provision of a reasonable level of
government services (particularly security and an improving economy)
and reduced corruption, and be determined to never again provide a safe
haven for terror.
The question now is not how to achieve our goals in Afghanistan and
Pakistan--we know the answer to that question. The only remaining
question is whether America has the will to do what is necessary, or
whether we are again determined to abandon this supposedly
``unimportant'' region of the world in the hope that this time it won't
blow up in our face.
Senator Menendez. Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
Senator Menendez. Mr. Chairman----
The Chairman. Senator.
Senator Menendez [continuing]. If I may. Mr. Chairman,
unfortunately I have to go to the State Department, and,
between votes and everything, I don't know if I'll get back for
the hearing, so, I'd ask unanimous consent to include my
opening statement in the record, expressing my alarm at the
escalation that is proposed, as well as our focus of our policy
initiatives.
The Chairman. Without objection, that will be made part of
the record. And I think the people listening at the State
Department heard you say ``unfortunately you have to go down
there,'' so----
[Laughter.]
[The prepared statement of Senator Menendez follows:]
Prepared Statement of Hon. Robert Menendez, U.S. Senator From New
Jersey
Thank you, Chairman Kerry, for this important hearing, and I would
like to thank all the witnesses for coming here today to discuss this
important topic. I believe Afghanistan is a critical issue in our
overall foreign policy and that our ability to work with the
international community to successfully achieve sustainable stability
in both Afghanistan and Pakistan will be a key component to the success
of our overall foreign policy in the Middle East and our broader
efforts against terrorism.
I want to express my alarm with the prospect of a significant
buildup of U.S. forces in Afghanistan without a clear strategy and
metrics for success. I think we need to have a clear sense of what we
intend to accomplish, how we intend to accomplish it, and when we will
know if we have in fact accomplished it.
Thank you, Chairman Kerry, for your attention to this issue and I
look forward to working with all the members of the committee on this
moving forward.
The Chairman. Dr. Biddle.
STATEMENT OF STEPHEN BIDDLE, SENIOR FELLOW FOR DEFENSE POLICY,
COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS, WASHINGTON, DC
Dr. Biddle. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'd also like to thank
the committee for this opportunity to speak with you on an
issue that's obviously of vital national importance.
There are many important questions before the Nation with
respect to Afghanistan. Maybe the most important of them is
also the most fundamental of them: Is the war worth waging? The
written testimony that is submitted to the record provides my
answer in more detail, but my bottom line from the statement,
is that I think the case for waging war in Afghanistan is a
very close call on the merits. I think the war is neither the
obvious necessity that many of its strongest proponents argue,
nor the clear loser that some war opponents see it to be. I
think this conflict engages important, but indirect, U.S.
interests, and I think failure is not predetermined. On the
other hand, it'll clearly be a very costly war to wage; and,
while failure isn't guaranteed, neither is success; and the
result of that, I think, is a war that isn't an open-and-shut
case, on analytic grounds, either for or against. The case for
war, as a result, in this instance, turns on a value judgment
about excepting cost and risk.
For me, this balance of cost and risk suggest a close call,
but a war worth waging. Reasonable people, though, are going to
differ on close calls of this kind. And I think, in many ways,
the most important conclusion that analysis can offer is that
what we face here is inevitably a hard choice between
unattractive alternatives on either side that, at the end of
the day, turns on issues that cannot completely be resolved by
analysis alone. There is no easy way out of Afghanistan, either
way, in 2009.
With the remainder of my time, having summarized where I
come out, I want to pick up one particularly important aspect
of the problem, though, and that's the issue of the interests
we have at stake in the conflict.
There are many things to which we aspire for Afghanistan,
as we would for any country in the international system. We
would like Afghanistan to be ruled in accordance with the will
of the governed. We would like Afghanistan to respect the
rights of minorities and women. We would like Afghanistan's
children to be educated and its people to be prosperous.
Normally speaking, we pursue these objectives through means
other than the waging of war.
When it comes to pursuing U.S. interests abroad that
warrant the waging of war, there is typically a much narrower
subset of the things we hope for, for a country, that are
considered pertinent. And I think, with respect to Afghanistan,
those are largely twofold: First, that the country not be a
base for striking the United States or our allies in the West;
and second, that the country not be a base for destabilizing
its neighbors, and especially Pakistan.
Of these two interests, the first is the more talked about,
and, I believe, the second is the more important. Afghanistan
obviously can be a base for striking the United States. It was
in 2001, it could be again; but, so can many other places. So
could Yemen. So could Somalia. So could Djibouti. So could
potentially dozens of ill-governed spaces in South Asia, the
Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, or even Latin America. If we
are going to adopt a systematic strategy of deploying multiple
brigades of American combat forces to deny al-Qaeda potential
havens, we are going to run out of brigades a long time before
al-Qaeda runs out of havens. This is an important concern, but
it's not one that, in my view, constitutes a particularly
strong argument for waging war in Afghanistan.
But, while Afghanistan is not unique as a base for striking
the United States, it is unique as a basis for destabilizing
the region, and especially Pakistan, where it is located
precisely across the Durand Line. Pakistan is a clear vital
national security interest of the United States, for reasons
that I don't need to articulate to this committee. Moreover,
Pakistan, an actual ongoing nuclear weapons state, is in the
midst of an active insurgency against a collection of
heterogeneous insurgent groups, some of which are closely
aligned with the Quetta Shura Taliban and other factions that
we're fighting in Afghanistan. Should we fail in the
undertaking in Afghanistan, we run the risk of creating a
substantial base for a variety of insurgent groups whose
relationships with one another are complex, but potentially
dangerous, to destabilize a Pakistani state, whose security is
vital to the United States.
Note, however, that the more important of these two
interests is, thus, an indirect U.S. interest. What we care
about most is Pakistan. Our ability to directly influence what
happens in Pakistan, however, has important limits on it. We
cannot deploy 60,000 American soldiers to Pakistan to assist
them in a counterinsurgency campaign. We are politically
radioactive in Pakistan. Our ability to affect events directly
there has very important limits on it. Our aid can be
redirected in ways that we wouldn't like. Our influence is very
partial.
In a situation in which we see a country whose future is
terribly important to the United States, but whose fate we have
a very limited ability to deal with and affect directly,
perhaps the best strategy for us is to invoke the Hippocratic
Oath, and at least do no harm. And it seems to me that one
important way in which we could do harm for the prospects for
stability in Pakistan is by failing in our undertaking in
Afghanistan and allowing chaos, or a potential Taliban version
2.0 regime in Kabul, to be a source of instability for an
already dangerous and difficult situation on the other side of
the Durand Line.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Biddle follows:]
Prepared Statement of Dr. Stephen Biddle, Senior Fellow for Defense
Policy, Council on Foreign Relations, Washington, DC
The war in Afghanistan had been nearly invisible to the public
since 2001-02, but this is rapidly changing. In the process, basic
questions have reemerged in a very different light than they assumed
when this war began. What was once the ``good war'' to defeat a clear
and present danger from a state that harbored al-Qaeda has now become a
much more ambiguous struggle to preserve a deeply flawed successor
government from an insurgency allied with, but separate from, an al-
Qaeda that is now based across the border in Pakistan. Is this more
complex conflict still worth waging?
The answer is a close call on the merits. The debate often treats
Afghanistan in absolutes: It is either a graveyard of empires in which
no outsider can succeed and a country where we have no meaningful
interests at stake; or it is a war where victory can be assured if we
show sufficient resolve and where only success can avert a direct
threat of attack on the American homeland. In fact it is a harder call.
This war is neither the obvious necessity that its strongest supporters
claim, nor the clear loser that its opponents typically see. The war
engages important, but indirect, U.S. interests. It will be expensive
to wage properly, will require many years to resolve, and might
ultimately fail even if waged vigorously, but failure is not guaranteed
and the United States enjoys advantages that other outsiders in
Afghanistan have not.
Most defense decisions are ultimately value judgments on how much
risk we find tolerable and what price we are willing to pay to reduce a
risk. The war in Afghanistan poses this problem more starkly than most
given the scale of the costs and risks on both sides of the ledger
here. Analysis can illuminate the costs and identify the risks, but
especially in close calls it cannot predetermine value judgments on how
much cost to bear and how much risk to accept. What the analysis shows
here is that this ledger is close enough for reasonable people to
differ. For me, the balance of cost and risk suggests a war that is
worth waging, but only barely. What is clearest, however, is that
neither the case for the war nor the case against it is beyond
challenge or without important counterarguments.
I present this argument in four parts: The interests at stake; the
war's likely costs; the prospects for success in securing the interests
if the costs are borne; and finally an assessment of the overall
balance of cost and risk in light of this.
u.s. interests at stake in afghanistan
The United States has many aspirations for Afghanistan, as we would
for any country. Americans would like Afghanistan to be ruled in
accordance with the will of the governed; we would like to see minority
and women's rights respected; we would like to see its youth educated
and its people prosperous. But while we surely wish these things for
any state, we do not ordinarily wage war to bring them about. The U.S.
national security interests that might warrant war to achieve here are
much narrower.
In fact, they are essentially twofold: That Afghanistan not become
a base for terrorism against the United States, and that chaos in
Afghanistan not destabilize its neighbors, especially Pakistan. Neither
of these two primary security interests can be dismissed, but both have
limits as casus belli.
The first interest is the most discussed--and the weakest argument
for waging war. The United States invaded Afghanistan in the first
place to destroy the
al-Qaeda safe haven there, and Afghanistan's role in the 9/11 attacks
clearly justified this. But al-Qaeda central is no longer based in
Afghanistan, nor has it been since early 2002. Bin Laden and his core
operation are, by all accounts, now based across the border in
Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). The Taliban
movement in Afghanistan is clearly linked with al-Qaeda and sympathetic
to it, but there is little evidence of al-Qaeda infrastructure within
Afghanistan today that could threaten the U.S. homeland in any direct
way. If today's Afghan Government collapsed, if it were replaced with a
neo-Taliban regime, or if the Taliban were able to secure real
political control over some major contiguous fraction of Afghan
territory then perhaps al-Qaeda could reestablish a real haven there.
But this risk is shared with a wide range of other weak states in
many parts of the world, from Yemen to Somalia to Djibouti to Eritrea
to Sudan to the Philippines or even parts of Latin America or Central,
West, or North Africa, among other possibilities. And of course Iraq
and Pakistan fit the description of weak states whose failure could
provide havens for al-Qaeda. Many of these--and especially Iraq and
Pakistan--offer bin Laden prospects superior in important ways to
Afghanistan's. Iraq and Pakistan, for example, are richer and far
better connected to the outside world than is primitive, land-locked
Afghanistan with its minimal communications and transportation systems.
Iraq is an Arab state in the very heart of the Middle East. Pakistan,
of course, is a nuclear power. Afghanistan does enjoy a historical
connection with al-Qaeda, familiarity to bin Laden, and proximity to
his current base in the FATA, and it is important to deny al-Qaeda
sanctuary on the Afghan side of the Durand Line. But its intrinsic
importance is no greater than many other potential havens--and probably
smaller than many. We clearly cannot afford to wage protracted warfare
with multiple brigades of American ground forces simply to deny al-
Qaeda potential safe havens; we would run out of brigades long before
bin Laden ran out of prospective sanctuaries.
The more important U.S. interest in Afghanistan is indirect: To
prevent Afghan chaos from destabilizing its Pakistani neighbor. With a
population of 173 million (five times Afghanistan's), a GDP of over
$160 billion (over 10 times Afghanistan's) and an actual, existing,
functional nuclear arsenal of perhaps 20-50 warheads, Pakistan is a
much more dangerous prospective state sanctuary for al-Qaeda, and one
where the likelihood of government collapse enabling such a sanctuary
may be in the same ballpark as Afghanistan, at least in the medium to
long term. Pakistan is already at war with internal Islamist insurgents
allied to al-Qaeda, and by most measures that war is not going well.
Should the Pakistani insurgency succeed in collapsing the state or
toppling the government, the risk of nuclear weapons falling into al-
Qaeda's hands would be grave indeed. In fact, given the difficulties
terrorists face in acquiring usable nuclear weapons, Pakistani state
collapse is the likeliest scenario for a nuclear-armed al-Qaeda.
Pakistani state collapse, moreover, is a danger over which the
United States has limited influence. The United States is now so
unpopular in Pakistan that we have no meaningful prospect of deploying
major ground forces there to assist the government in
counterinsurgency. U.S. air strikes can harass insurgents and
terrorists within Pakistan, but the inevitable collateral damage
arouses harsh public opposition that could itself threaten the weak
government's stability. U.S. aid is easily--and routinely--diverted to
purposes remote from countering Islamist insurgents, such as the
maintenance of military counterweights to India, graft and patronage,
or even support for Islamist groups seen by Pakistani authorities as
potential allies against their Indian neighbor. U.S. assistance can--
and should--be made conditional on progress in countering insurgents,
but harsh conditionality can induce rejection of the terms, and the
aid, by the Pakistanis, removing U.S. leverage in the process. The net
result is a major threat over which Americans have very limited
influence.
If the United States has few ways to make Pakistan any better, the
best policy may be to invoke the Hippocratic Oath: at least do no harm.
With so little actual leverage, the United States cannot afford to make
the problem any worse than it already is. And failure in Afghanistan
would make the problem in Pakistan much harder.
The Taliban are a transnational Pashtun movement that is active on
either side of the Durand Line and sympathetic to other Pakistani
Islamist insurgents. Their presence within Pakistan is thus already an
important threat to the regime in Islamabad. But if the Taliban
regained control of the Afghan state or even a major fraction of it,
their ability to use even a poor state's resources as a base to
destabilize secular government in Pakistan would enable a major
increase in the risk of state collapse there. Much has been made of the
threat Pakistani base camps pose to Afghan Government stability, but
this danger works both ways: Instability in Afghanistan poses a serious
threat to secular civilian government in Pakistan. And this is the
single greatest stake the United States has in Afghanistan: To prevent
it from aggravating Pakistan's internal problems and magnifying the
danger of an al-Qaeda nuclear sanctuary there.
These stakes are thus important. But they do not merit infinite
cost to secure. Afghanistan is just one of many possible al-Qaeda
sanctuaries. And Afghanistan's influence over Pakistan's future is
important, but incomplete and indirect. A Taliban Afghanistan is a real
possibility in the long run absent U.S. action, and makes Pakistani
collapse more likely, but it does not guarantee it. Nor would success
in Afghanistan guarantee success in Pakistan: There is a chance that we
could struggle our way to stability in Afghanistan at great cost and
sacrifice only to see Pakistan collapse anyway under the weight of its
own errors and internal divisions.
the cost
What will it cost to defeat the Taliban? No one really knows; war
is an uncertain business. But it is very hard to succeed at
counterinsurgency (COIN) on the cheap. Current U.S. Army doctrine is
very clear on this:
[M]aintaining security in an unstable environment requires
vast resources, whether host nation, U.S., or multinational. In
contrast, a small number of highly motivated insurgents with
simple weapons, good operations security, and even limited
mobility can undermine security over a large area. Thus,
successful COIN operations often require a high ratio of
security forces to the protected population. For that reason,
protracted COIN operations are hard to sustain. The effort
requires a firm political will and substantial patience by the
government, its people, and the countries providing support.\1\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ ``The U.S. Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual''
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), (republication of:
Headquarters, Department of the Army, ``FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency''),
p. 4.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Insurgencies are protracted by nature. Thus, COIN operations
always demand considerable expenditures of time and
resources.\2\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ Ibid., p. 43.
A proper analysis of troop requirements for Afghanistan is a more
complex undertaking than can be provided here; GEN McChrystal's staff
is now producing such an assessment. But it is safe to say that most
counterinsurgency theorists see COIN as an extremely labor-intensive
form of warfare. In fact, the doctrinal norm for troop requirements in
COIN is around 1 security provider per 50 civilians in the population
to be secured.\3\ If one simply applies the doctrinal rule of thumb to
Afghanistan, a state of roughly 32 million people, this crude yardstick
would imply a need for perhaps 640,000 trained soldiers and police.
Many argue that the doctrinal density need not be maintained across the
entire country; it is widely believed, for example, that the north and
west of the country are safer than the south and east. And of course a
sound estimate of resource needs would require a much more
discriminating mapping of troop needs to specific tasks in specific
places. But it is clear that COIN in a country the size of Afghanistan
can be very demanding of resources. Ideally most of these security
forces would be indigenous Afghans rather than foreign troops. But some
will clearly have to be Americans and other foreigners. And the
commitment could be very long: Successful counterinsurgency campaigns
commonly last 10 to 15 years or more.\4\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\3\ Ibid., p. 23.
\4\ Seth Jones, ``Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan,'' (Washington,
DC: RAND, 2008), p. 10.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
At least initially, the casualties to be expected from such an
effort would also be heavy. In Iraq, a force of 130,000-160,000 U.S.
troops averaged over 90 fatalities per month during the most intense
period of COIN operations in January to August of 2007. Depending on
the troop strength ultimately deployed and the intensity of the
fighting, it is not implausible to suppose that casualty rates in
Afghanistan could approach such levels. And it may well take longer for
those losses to reverse and decline in Afghanistan than in Iraq; it
would be prudent to assume that fatality rates in excess of 50 per
month could persist for many months, if not years.\5\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\5\ The financial costs are also likely to be large. The
Congressional Research Service estimates that the war in Afghanistan
cost $34 billion in FY 2008, and projects that this figure will
increase in coming years: Amy Belasco, ``The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan
and other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11'' (Washington, DC:
Congressional Research Service, October 15, 2008), RL33110, pp. 6, 19.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
the odds of success
The aggregate historical record of great power success in COIN is
not encouraging. The political scientists, Jason Lyall of Princeton and
Isaiah Wilson of West Point, estimate that since 1975, the success rate
of all government counterinsurgents has been just 25 percent.\6\ Given
the costs of trying, this average offers a sobering context.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\6\ Jason Lyall and Isaiah Wilson, ``Rage Against the Machines:
Explaining Outcomes in Counterinsurgency Wars,'' International
Organization, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Winter 2009), pp. 67-106 at 69-71. For
all counterinsurgencies since 1900, they find a government success rate
of 40 percent; hence the odds have been getting worse over time. See
also Ivan Arreguin-Toft, ``How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of
Asymmetric Conflict,'' International Security, Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 93-
128, and Arreguin-Toft, ``How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric
Conflict,'' (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), which finds
``strong actors'' winning only 45 of 100 asymmetric conflicts between
1950 and 1998: p. 97.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nor are current conditions in Afghanistan encouraging. Orthodox
COIN theory puts host government legitimacy at the heart of success and
failure, yet the Karzai government is widely seen as corrupt, inept,
inefficient, and en route to losing the support of its population. The
recent election's results are not yet clear, but widely reported
electoral fraud could easily reduce Karzai's perceived legitimacy if he
is ultimately declared the winner of a disputed contest. Economic and
political development prospects are constrained by Afghanistan's
forbidding geography, tribal social structure, lack of infrastructure,
and political history. The Taliban enjoy a cross-border sanctuary in
the FATA that the Pakistani Government seems unwilling or unable to
eliminate. Violence is up, perceptions of security are down, casualties
are increasing, and the Taliban is widely believed to be increasing its
freedom of movement and access to the population. And only some of
these challenges are things Americans can affect directly: The United
States can increase security by deploying more U.S. troops, it can
bolster the economy to a degree with U.S. economic aid, and it can
pressure Karzai to reform, but only the Afghans can create a legitimate
government, and only the Pakistanis can shut down the safe havens in
the FATA. Americans can influence these choices to a much greater
degree than we have so far. But the United States cannot itself
guarantee Afghan reform, and to date neither ally seems ready to do
what it takes.
But this does not make failure inevitable. The poor track record
for COIN overall is due partly to the inherent difficulty of the
undertaking, but most analysts also believe that many counterinsurgents
have made poor strategic choices, and that these poor choices have been
major contributors to failure. Strategies and methods can be changed--
it is possible to learn from experience. And the U.S. military has
learned a great deal about COIN in recent years.
The new Army/Marine counterinsurgency doctrine, for example, is the
product of a nearly unprecedented degree of internal debate, external
vetting, historical analysis, and direct recent combat experience.\7\
None of this makes it a magic silver bullet for COIN success, and in
important ways it makes underlying assumptions about the nature of
counterinsurgency that made it an awkward fit for conditions in
Iraq.\8\ But those same assumptions make it a much stronger fit for
Afghanistan, which is precisely the kind of war the manual was built
around. And there is some, albeit preliminary, empirical evidence to
suggest that the new doctrine's emphasis on population security as
opposed to insurgent attrition has been substantially more successful
historically than more-violent, attrition-oriented strategies: Andrew
Enterline and Joseph Magagnoli, for example, estimate that since World
War II, COIN strategies emphasizing population security over insurgent
attrition have succeeded almost 70 percent of the time.\9\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\7\ On the vetting and development process, see ``U.S. Army-Marine
Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual,'' pp. xlvii-xlviii.
\8\ In particular, the doctrine presumes an ideological struggle
for the allegiance of an uncommitted public, rather than a highly
mobilized ethnosectarian war of identity, as Iraq has been: for
details, see Jeffrey Isaac, editor, ``The New U.S. Army/Marine Corps
Counterinsurgency Field Manual as Political Science and Political
Praxis,'' Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 6, No. 2 (June 2008), pp. 347-
50 at 349-50.
\9\ See Andrew Enterline and Joseph Magagnoli, ``Is the Chance of
Success in Afghanistan Better Than a Coin Toss?'' Foreignpolicy.com
[accessed on August 27, 2009 at http://www.
foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/08/27/
is_the_chance_of_success_in_afghanistan_better_
than_a_coin_toss].
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of the doctrine's remaining shortcomings, moreover, is a
problem the Obama administration seems likely to address. The published
doctrine assumes a very close alignment of interests between the United
States and its host government: The manual assumes that the U.S. role
is to enable the host to realize its own best interest by making itself
into a legitimate defender of all its citizens' well-being, and that
the host will see it this way, too.\10\ In many ways, the Bush
administration shared this view, offering assistance with few
conditions or strings on the assumption that developing its allies'
capacity for good governance was all that would be needed to realize
better performance. In fact, though, many allies--notably including
Hamid Karzai and Pervez Musharraf, have had much more complex interests
that have led them to misdirect U.S. aid and fall far short of U.S.
hopes for their popular legitimacy. Some students of counterinsurgency
have thus emphasized the need for conditionality in outside assistance
to reduce this problem of moral hazard: The U.S. should not assume that
allies share all its interests, and Americans should impose conditions,
and combine carrots with sticks in order to push reluctant hosts toward
behavior that could better realize U.S. interests in their broader
legitimacy and thereby damp insurgencies.\11\ The Obama administration
has made it very clear that they intend to combine bigger carrots with
real sticks in the form of prospective aid withdrawals should the
recipients fail to adopt needed reforms. This is an important step
forward in competing for hearts and minds via effective host
governance.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\10\ See, for example, ``U.S. Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency
Field Manual,'' pp. 7-8, 25, 35, 37-39, 47 (e.g., paragraph 1-147:
``Support the Host Nation'').
\11\ For a more extensive discussion, see, esp., Daniel Byman,
``Friends Like These: Counterinsurgency and the War on Terrorism,''
International Security, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Fall 2006), pp. 79-115.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The U.S. military forces that implement this doctrine are also much
improved over their ancestors in Vietnam, or even their immediate
predecessors in Iraq in 2003-2004--and they are vastly superior in
training, equipment, and doctrine to the Soviet military that failed in
Afghanistan in the 1980s. Soviet methods in the 1980s made lavish use
of indiscriminate firepower that created enemies much faster than it
killed insurgents. Soviet troops, moreover, were so poorly trained and
motivated that their commanders were often forced to use elite commando
units to carry out routine missions; regular Soviet infantry often
could not be relied upon to do much more than passive garrison duty.
And Soviet equipment was almost entirely designed for major warfare
against NATO in central Europe--the Soviets never made a systematic
decision to reequip for counterinsurgency.\12\ By contrast, the U.S.
military of 2009 has adapted into an unusually proficient
counterinsurgency force. It did not begin the war this way, but hard
experience in Iraq, coupled with an almost preclusive training emphasis
on COIN since the early years of the Iraq war, a new doctrine with a
heavy focus on the population-defense methods that have proven most
effective historically, and systematic reequipment with new mine-
resistant armored vehicles and other ground-force equipment designed
for counterinsurgency has produced a vastly more effective military for
this mission than the Soviets ever fielded.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\12\ On Soviet methods in Afghanistan, see, e.g., Lester Grau,
``The Bear Went over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in
Afghanistan'' (New York: Routledge, 1998), 2nd ed.; Gregory Feifer,
``The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan'' (New York:
HarperCollins, 2009).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Perhaps most important, the United States is blessed with deeply
flawed enemies in Afghanistan. Afghans know the Taliban; they know what
life was like under their rule. And polling has consistently suggested
that few Afghans want to return to the medieval theocracy they endured
before. Most Afghans want education for their daughters; they want
access to media and ideas from abroad; they want freedom from thugs
enforcing fundamentalism for all under the aegis of a Ministry for the
Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Of course, these
preferences are secondary to the need for security. And many are
secondary to the desire for basic services such as courts free of
corruption or police who enforce the laws without demanding bribes
first. But because most Afghans oppose Taliban rule, the United States
and its allies enjoy a strong presumption in favor of the Afghan
Government as long as that government can be made to provide at least
basic services competently. The Taliban face an inherently uphill
battle to secure compliance with their policies that even a modestly
proficient government does not. And in a struggle for hearts and minds
this is an important advantage.
The Taliban, moreover, are far from a unified opposition group. In
fact, to refer to the opposition in Afghanistan via a singular noun is
in many ways a misnomer. By contrast with the Viet Cong of 1964, for
example, where a common ideology bound the leadership together and
linked it to its fighters, the neo-Taliban of 2009 are a much looser,
much more heterogeneous, much more divided coalition of often fractious
and very independent actors. There is a hard core of committed Islamist
ideologues, centered on Mullah Omar and based in Quetta. But by all
accounts much of the Taliban's actual combat strength is provided by an
array of warlords and other factions with often much more secular
motivations, who side with the Taliban for reasons of profit, prestige,
or convenience, and who may or may not follow orders from the Quetta
Shura leadership. Americans often lament the challenges to unity of
effort that flow from a divided NATO command structure, but the Taliban
face difficulties on this score at least as severe and potentially much
worse: No NATO member is going to change sides and fight for the
Taliban, but the Taliban need to be constantly alert lest one or more
of their component factions leave the alliance for the government side.
And this makes it difficult for the Taliban to mount large-scale,
coordinated offensives of the kind that would be needed to conquer a
defended city, for example--such efforts would be hard for any one
faction or any one commander to accomplish without closely coordinated
assistance from others, yet such coordination can be hard to achieve in
such a decentralized, factionalized leadership structure.
The Taliban also face major constraints in extending their
influence beyond their ethnic base in southern and eastern Afghanistan.
The Taliban is an overwhelmingly Pashtun movement. Yet Pashtuns make up
less than 45 percent of Afghanistan's population overall, and
constitute only a small fraction of the population outside the south
and east. Afghanistan is not primarily an ethnosectarian war of
identity, as Iraq has been--most Taliban are Pashtuns, but most
Pashtuns are not Taliban (in fact the government is itself headed by a
Pashtun in President Hamid Karzai). Afghanistan is a war fought over
the Taliban's ideology for governing, not the hope for a Pashtun
government. But whereas the government has members from many ethnic
groups and a presumptive claim to the loyalty of all citizens, the
Taliban has a much more exclusivist identity and is especially
unpopular and unwelcome outside its geographic ethnic base. This in
turn will make it harder for them to conquer the north and west of the
country, and acts as a limiter on their expansion in the near term.
This is not to say that the north or west of Afghanistan are
permanently or inherently secure; on the contrary, recent trends there
are worrisome, and even these parts of the country will eventually
require attention to stabilize. But the Taliban's Pashtun ethnic
identity makes it harder for them to expand out of the south and east,
and this in turn buys time and reduces resource requirements for
effective counterinsurgency nationally. (It is worth noting that even
in their first rule, the Taliban never completely secured the north--it
was the unconquered ``Northern Alliance's'' hold over contiguous
territory in that part of Afghanistan that provided allies, a base, and
a jumpoff point for the American Special Forces who teamed with them to
topple the Taliban in 2001.)
Finally, by all accounts the enemy in Afghanistan today is much
less numerous than that faced by the Soviets, for example, in the late
1980s. Intelligence estimates on insurgents' order of battle are always
imprecise and uncertain. But most sources suggest that the Mujaheddin
opposing the Soviets by the late 1980s numbered around 150,000 armed
combatants.\13\ After 1986, these guerillas were also equipped with
increasingly sophisticated Western-supplied arms, and especially
shoulder-fired precision guided antiaircraft missiles. By contrast, the
Taliban today are usually assessed at a strength of 20-40,000 fighters,
of whom only around one-fourth are full-time combatants, and who have
to date deployed little or no precision weaponry.\14\ The size of the
insurgent force is not necessarily the most important variable in COIN,
but against the commonplace assumption that the Soviet experience will
be America's fate in Afghanistan, we must keep in mind that the
situation the United States faces is less dire in important respects--
including the strength of the insurgent enemy.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\13\ See, e.g., Olivier Roy, ``Islam and the Resistance in
Afghanistan'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 171,
176.
\14\ For estimates of Taliban combatant strength, see David
Kilcullen, ``The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst
of a Big One'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 48-49;
Antonio Giustozzi, ``Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban
Insurgency in Afghanistan'' (New York: Columbia University Press,
2008), pp. 33, 35, 68.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
assessment
Withdrawal advocates certainly have a case. The stakes are not
unlimited. The costs of pursuing them are high. And there is no
guarantee that even a high-cost pursuit of COIN in Afghanistan will
succeed given the inherent difficulties of the undertaking and the
particular challenges of this theater in 2009.
But while success is not guaranteed, neither is failure. Some
governments succeed in COIN, and the familiar comparisons of today with
the Soviets in Afghanistan or the United States in Vietnam pit apples
against oranges: In 2009, the U.S. military is much more proficient,
and the Taliban insurgency much less so, than their forebears. Great
powers do not always fail in COIN; the United States is an unusually
experienced counterinsurgent force today; the Taliban have serious
problems of their own; and astute strategic choices can make an
important difference. This combination gives the United States an
important possibility for successful counterinsurgency.
Moreover, U.S. withdrawal poses important risks, too--and
especially, it could easily cause an Afghan Government collapse with
potentially serious consequences for U.S. security. The Taliban's
weaknesses make it hard for them to overthrow a U.S.-supported
government while large Western military forces defend it. But without
those Western troops, the Afghan state would offer a much easier
target. Even with over 50,000 Western troops in its defense, the Karzai
government has proven unable to contain Taliban influence and prevent
insurgents from expanding their presence; if abandoned to its fate the
government would surely fare much worse. Nor would an orphaned Karzai
regime be in any position to negotiate a compromise settlement that
could deny the Taliban full control: With outright victory within their
grasp, it is hard to see why the Taliban would settle for anything less
than a complete restoration.
A Taliban restoration would put the resources of a state at their
disposal. Even the resources of a weak state would enable a major
increase in funding, freedom of operation, training opportunities,
planning capacity, recruitment potential, and military staging,
refitting, reconstitution and resupply for cross-border operations. The
result could afford al-Qaeda with an improved sanctuary for attacking
the United States. But even if it did not, it would almost certainly
afford Pashtun militants and their allies in Pakistan with a massive
sanctuary for destabilizing the regime in Islamabad, and thereby create
a major increase in the threat to the Pakistani Government and the
security of its nuclear arsenal. Even without a state haven in
Afghanistan, Pakistani insurgents might ultimately topple the
government in Islamabad, but with the additional resources of an openly
sympathetic state across the Durand Line this threat is even more
dangerous. And this threat constitutes one of the few really plausible
pathways by which al-Qaeda could obtain a useable nuclear weapon.
This danger is real, but it is not unlimited and should not be
exaggerated. For a U.S. withdrawal to result in a nuclear al-Qaeda
would require a chain of multiple intervening events: A Taliban
restoration in Kabul, collapse of secular government in Islamabad, and
loss of control over the Pakistani nuclear arsenal (or deliberate
transfer of weapons by sympathetic Pakistanis). None of these events
are certainties, and the compound probability is inherently lower than
the odds of any one step taken alone. Though these odds are hard to
estimate, analysts such as John Mueller make a persuasive case that
terrorists are more likely to fail in their efforts to obtain nuclear
weapons than they are to succeed, and the series of setbacks needed for
a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan to yield a useable al-Qaeda nuclear
capability probably implies a compound likelihood that is low in
absolute terms.\15\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\15\ John Mueller, ``Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism
Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them''
(New York: Free Press, 2006); idem, ``How Dangerous are the Taliban?
Why Afghanistan is the Wrong War,'' ForeignAffairs.com, April 15, 2009;
for a debate on this issue, see Paul Pillar, Fawaz Gerges, Jessica
Stern, James Fallows, and John Mueller, ``Are We Safe Yet?''
ForeignAffairs.com, September 7, 2006.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
But U.S. withdrawal increases all the probabilities at each stage.
And the consequences for U.S. security if the chain does play itself
out are very severe. Unlike the Soviet Union in the cold war (or even
contemporary states such as Iran),
al-Qaeda may be much less susceptible to deterrence, and considerably
more likely to use a nuclear weapon if they acquire it. One need not
accept ``one percent doctrines'' or other extremist versions of nuclear
threat-mongering to be concerned with the consequences of a potential
al-Qaeda nuclear capability.\16\ Nor does it resolve the issue simply
to find that al-Qaeda is ``unlikely'' to acquire nuclear weapons even
if the Karzai government falls. When the stakes are high, even low
probabilities of true disasters can be too high to accept: Most
Americans buy life insurance in a society in which the risk of death in
a given year is less than one-half of one percent for 45-54-year-olds;
it is clearly not unreasonable to consider accepting costs to address
low-probability events.\17\ If a nuclear al-Qaeda were impossible or
virtually so, then the prospect could simply be ignored. But otherwise
the issue inevitably comes back to a difficult value judgment on risk
tolerance. This is not a new problem. After all, a central feature of
U.S. security policy throughout the cold war was America's willingness
to expend large resources to reduce the odds of unlikely events: A
Soviet bolt-from-the-blue nuclear strike was surely never very likely,
but the consequences if it ever did happen would have been so severe
that the nation accepted huge costs to reduce the odds of such a
disaster from low to very low. Americans have long debated whether this
judgment was wise. But there is considerable precedent for American
governments, of both parties, displaying enough concern with unlikely
but dangerous scenarios to expend great effort to reduce the odds.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\16\ See Ron Susskind, ``The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside
America's Pursuit of its Enemies Since 9/11'' (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2006). Susskind argues that Vice President Cheney held that
any risk of a nuclear attack greater than one percent should be treated
as a certainty for purposes of U.S. policy.
\17\ On the death rate for 45-54 year olds, see M.P. Heron, D.L.
Hoyert, J.Q. Xu, C. Scott, and B. Tejada-Vera, ``Deaths: Preliminary
Data for 2006,'' National Vital Statistics Report, Vol. 56, No. 16
(2008), Table 1; on the rate of life insurance ownership among
Americans, see Anna Sachko Gandolfi and Laurence Miners, ``Gender-Based
Differences in Life Insurance Ownership,'' The Journal of Risk and
Insurance, Vol. 63, No. 4 (1996), pp. 683-693 at 691.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The net result is thus a difficult value judgment between
unattractive alternatives, rather than a clear cut, open-and-shut case
on analytical grounds. In this context, analysis can exclude certain
popular but overstated positions: In fact, COIN in Afghanistan is not
hopeless; the United States is not without important interests in the
conflict; to secure these interests does not require a modern,
centralized, Westernized Switzerland of the Hindu Kush; conversely,
success is not guaranteed if only we are resolute; U.S. interests in
Afghanistan are not unlimited; and the most important U.S. interests in
the conflict are indirect and concern Pakistan more than Afghanistan
per se. Analysis can also establish that the likely costs of pursuing
COIN success will be high, and it can illuminate the causal pathways by
which different outcomes can affect U.S. interests in general, or the
danger of a nuclear al-Qaeda in particular. But with important costs
and risks on both sides of the ledger, the answer for how much cost is
worth bearing for what reduction in risk is ultimately a value judgment
rather than an analytical finding. This is not a judgment on the value
of American lives or the moral worthiness of sacrifice or resolve.
Either course here involves risks to American lives--a choice to
withdraw is neither more nor less humanitarian, neither more nor less
respectful of sacrifice or service or others' suffering, than the
opposite. Rather, the judgment here is between accepting greater
casualties and sacrifices in the nearer term to reduce some probability
of higher casualties and sacrifices in the longer term. For me, this
balance is a close call but ultimately favors the waging of war in
Afghanistan. But reasonable people can differ on such judgments.
Perhaps the most important conclusion is instead that the choice is
unavoidably hard: What analysis can show is that there is no course
open to us that is without important downsides--there is no easy way
out of Afghanistan for the United States in 2009.
The Chairman. Thank you very much, Dr. Biddle. Very
important and competent summary of the challenge, and we'll
come back to it.
Rory Stewart, thank you again for being here. I failed to
mention your wonderful book that I enjoyed, ``The Places In
Between.'' And we look forward to your testimony.
STATEMENT OF RORY STEWART, DIRECTOR, CARR CENTER ON HUMAN
RIGHTS POLICY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY, CAMBRIDGE, MA
Mr. Stewart. Thank you all very, very much----
The Chairman. Can you pull the mike, and make sure----
Mr. Stewart. Thank you all very much, indeed, for having
me.
One of the bewildering elements in trying to develop policy
for Afghanistan at the moment is the very large number of
justifications which are being put forward at the moment for
our presence, so that there are people, recently, who have been
justifying our presence in terms of elections, in terms of
human rights; some who justify our presence in terms of the
credibility of the United States, the notion that we can't be
seen to be defeated, even if we can't win.
The administration's policy, however, focusing on
counterterrorism, and I just want to very quickly address Dr.
Biddle's statements about Pakistan.
It's very dangerous, I think, to mount an argument or
justification for our presence in Afghanistan based on our
interests in Pakistan. The relationships between those two
countries is, at best, as Dr. Biddle says, indirect. It's far
from clear that the most cost-effective way of deploying United
States resources to address Pakistan is for an attempt to build
a state in Afghanistan or defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan. In
fact, if we had more time, you could make a number of arguments
why United States operations in Afghanistan may, in fact,
contribute to the destabilization of Pakistan.
In reality, the attempt to create an Afghanistan/Pakistan
strategy seems to me a little bit as though we've gone into a
room with an angry cat and a tiger--the angry cat being
Afghanistan and the tiger being Pakistan--and we're beating the
cat. And when you say, ``Why are you beating the cat?'' the
answer is, ``Oh, it's a cat/tiger strategy. It's an
Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy.'' But, in fact, you're beating
the cat because you don't know what to do about the tiger. And
the connection between those two countries is somewhat
indirect.
So, to come to the administration's policy, a very minimal
target has been set of counterterrorism, and a very maximal
definition of how to achieve it. In other words, the
administration is suggesting that the way to achieve the
counterterrorist objective, is through the building of a state
and through a counterinsurgency campaign.
I believe the problem with this theory lies in the fact
that neither of those two means are achievable. We are neither
going to be able to defeat the Taliban through a
counterinsurgency campaign, nor is the United States or its
allies in a position to build a legitimate, effective, stabile
Afghan state. The reason for believing this relies on an
understanding of the lack of capacity in the Afghan Government,
demonstrated most dramatically recently, of course, through the
elections, but demonstrated also through the lack of progress
over the last 7 years. Our counterinsurgency policy, based, as
Dr. Nagl said, on a notion of ``clear, hold, build,''
unfortunately owes too much to an inaccurate analogy with Iraq.
Iraq has, in its government in Baghdad, mass political parties
behind al-Maliki. The Sunni tribes who've been driven out of
many areas of Baghdad; they felt under pressure, they were
coming to us, asking for assistance. Essentially, Iraqi
politics drove the success of the surge. Those political forces
are lacking in Afghanistan. In addition, it's a much more rural
country. It is completely implausible that, in a country about
the size of Texas, with 20,000 villages, we would be able, in
effect, to garrison the country; in other words, to clear and
hold it. Even were we to be able to clear and hold it, the
build element is extremely implausible. There simply are not
the resources within the Afghan Government or the Afghan state
to imagine that we would be able, in any realistic timeframe,
to create the kind of economic growth, governance, or stability
which this project imagines.
What, then, should we do? Well, I believe we should try to
adopt a much more modest position. The danger facing, I
believe, the United States and the international community, at
the moment, is that we're going to lurch from troop increases
to withdrawal, from engagement to isolation. What worries me
most about the increase in troops is that it's going to create
an unsustainable footprint on the ground. We already are in a
problem with public opinion. Our commitment, our will, and our
resources are limited. Afghan history suggests that the very
worst thing you can do for a country like Afghanistan, is to
attempt to go from electroshock therapy with huge amounts of
resources one year to none the next year. And yet, I fear,
that's where we may end up being in 5 or 10 years if we insist
on these kinds of immoderate increases. A light footprint is a
more sustainable footprint. That footprint should focus on just
two things: a very narrow counterterrorist objective, which
does not require the troop deployments that we're talking
about, and the humanitarian objective of contributing, in the
way that we do in many other countries, to making Afghanistan
more stable, prosperous, and humane in 30 years' time than it
is today.
So, a patient, tolerant, long-term relationship with the
international community, a sustainable presence, which requires
a light footprint.
Thank you all very much, indeed.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Stewart follows:]
Prepared Statement of Rory Stewart, Director, Carr Center on Human
Rights Policy, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
The administration's new policy on Afghanistan has a very narrow
focus--counterterrorism--and a very broad definition of how to achieve
it: No less than the fixing of the Afghan state and defeating the
Taliban insurgency. President Obama has presented this in a formal
argument. The final goal in the region is ``to disrupt, dismantle, and
defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their
return to either country in the future.'' A necessary condition of the
defeat of
al-Qaeda is the defeat of the Taliban because ``if the Afghan
Government falls to the Taliban, that country will again be a base for
terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly
can.'' He, therefore, proposes a counterinsurgency strategy, which
includes the deployment of more troops ``to take the fight to the
Taliban in the south and the east'' and a more comprehensive approach,
which aims to ``promote a more capable and accountable Afghan
Government . . . advance security, opportunity, and justice . . .
develop an economy that isn't dominated by illicit drugs.''
This policy is rooted in the preset categories of counterterrorism,
counterinsurgency, state-building and economic development. These
categories are so closely linked that policymakers appear to put them
in almost any sequence or combination. You need to defeat the Taliban
to build a state and you need to build a state to defeat the Taliban.
There cannot be security without development, or development without
security. If you have the Taliban you have terrorists, if you don't
have development you have terrorists, and as Obama informed the New
Yorker, ``If you have ungoverned spaces, they become havens for
terrorists.'' These connections are global: In Obama's words, ``our
security and prosperity depend on the security and prosperity of
others.'' Indeed, at times it seems that all these activities--building
a state, defeating the Taliban, defeating al-Qaeda, and eliminating
poverty--are the same activity. The new U.S. Army and Marine Corps
counterinsurgency doctrine sounds like a World Bank policy document,
replete with commitments to the rule of law, economic development,
governance, state-building, and human rights. In Obama's words,
``security and humanitarian concerns are all part of one project.''
The fundamental problem with the strategy is that it is trying to
do the impossible. It is highly unlikely that the United States will be
able either to build an effective, legitimate state or to defeat a
Taliban insurgency. It needs to find another way of protecting the
United States against terrorist attack.
We claim to be engaged in a neutral, technocratic, universal
project of ``statebuilding'' but we don't know exactly what that means.
Those who see Afghanistan as reverting to the Taliban or becoming a
traditional autocratic state are referring to situations that existed
there in 1972 and 1994. But the international community's ambition
appears to be to create something that has not existed before. Obama
calls it ``a more capable and accountable Afghan Government.'' The
United States, the United Kingdom, and their allies agreed unanimously
at the NATO 60th anniversary summit in April to create ``a stronger
democratic state'' in Afghanistan.
Whatever this state is, it could come only from an Afghan national
movement, not as a gift from foreigners. As we have seen over the last
7 years--and most starkly in the recent election--Afghan Government is
certainly unlikely in the next 5 years to reflect U.S. ideas of
legitimacy, legal process, civil service function, rights, economic
behavior or even broader international assumption about development.
Even an aim as modest as ``stability'' is highly ambitious. Afghanistan
is a mountainous country, with strong traditions of local self-
government and autonomy, significant ethnic differences, but strong
shared moral values. A centralizing constitution may well be combined
with de facto local independence and Afghanistan is starting from a
very low base: 30 years of investment might allow its army, police,
civil service and economy to approach the levels of Pakistan. And
Pakistan clearly still does not have whatever mixture of state-
formation, legitimacy, accountability or effectiveness that is
apparently necessary to prevent the Taliban and al-Qaeda from
operating.
Nor is it clear that even if stronger central institutions were to
emerge that they would assist U.S. national security objectives. Osama
bin Laden is still in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. He chooses to be there
precisely because Pakistan can be more assertive in its state
sovereignty than Afghanistan and restricts U.S. operations. From a
narrow (and harsh) U.S. national security perspective, a poor failed
state could be easier to handle than a more developed one: Yemen is
less threatening than Iran, Somalia than Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan than
Pakistan.
Second, it is highly unlikely that the United States will be able
to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan. The ingredients of successful
counterinsurgency campaigns in places like Malaya--control of the
borders, large numbers of troops in relation to the population, strong
support from the majority ethnic groups, a long-term commitment and a
credible local government--are lacking in Afghanistan.
Nor is Afghanistan, comparable to Iraq. There are no mass political
parties in Afghanistan and the Kabul government lacks the base,
strength or legitimacy of the Baghdad government. Afghan tribal groups
lack the coherence of the Iraqi Sunni tribes and their relation to
state structures: They are not being driven out of neighbourhood after
neighbourhood and they do not have the same relation to the Taliban
that the Sunni groups had to ``al-Qaeda in Iraq.'' Afghans are weary of
the war but the Afghan chiefs are not approaching us, seeking a deal.
Since the political players and state structures in Afghanistan are
much more fragile than those in Iraq, they are less likely to play a
strong role in ending the insurgency.
A strategy of ``clear, hold, and build'' seems particularly
implausible in Afghanistan. In Iraq--which is a much more urban
society--it was possible for U.S. and Iraqi security forces around
Baghdad to ``clear and hold'' ground because the geographical area was
relatively limited. Afghanistan has an overwhelmingly rural population
scattered through an inhospitable terrain, the size of Texas and
encompassing perhaps thousand villages. Even 100,000 U.S. troops would
be far too few to hold or garrison even a fraction of such a vast area.
In Iraq, a tradition of strong central government and a much more
educated population with an indigenous resource base at least allowed
for the possibility of ``building,'' following the ``clear and hold.''
In Afghanistan the lack of the most basic education and capacity and
will in governmental structures (and even in the private sector) means
that very little of substance could be ``built'' during the time that
the United States and its allies attempted to ``hold.''
Meanwhile, the Taliban can exploit the ideology of religious
resistance that the West deliberately fostered in the 1980s to defeat
the Russians. They can portray the Kabul government as U.S. slaves,
NATO as an infidel occupying force and their own insurgency as a jihad.
Their complaints about corruption, human rights abuses, and aerial
bombardments appeal to a large audience. They are attracting Afghans to
their rural courts by giving quicker and more predictable rulings than
government judges. They can now easily exploit the corrupt practices in
the election to portray the Kabul government as fraudulent and
illegitimate. But our inability to inflict a final defeat on the
Taliban may not be as dangerous as policymakers imagine.
If the administration cannot create an effective, stable,
legitimate state and cannot defeat a Taliban insurgency it must find
another method of protecting U.S. national security and fulfilling our
obligations to the Afghan people. And if it is impossible to build a
state or defeat the Taliban, there is no point in deploying a hundred
thousand troops or spending hundreds of billions of dollars in
Afghanistan.
The best Afghan policy would be to reduce the number of foreign
troops from the current level of 90,000 to far fewer--perhaps 20,000.
In that case, two distinct objectives would remain for the
international community: Development and counterterrorism. Neither
would amount to the building of an Afghan state or winning a
counterinsurgency campaign. A reduction in troop numbers and a turn
away from state-building should not mean total withdrawal: Good
projects could continue to be undertaken in electricity, water,
irrigation, health, education, agriculture, rural development and in
other areas favoured by development agencies. Even a light U.S.
presence could continue to allow for aggressive operations against al-
Qaeda terrorists, in Afghanistan, who plan to attack the United States.
The United States has successfully prevent al-Qaeda from reestablishing
itself since 2001 (though the result has only been to move bin Laden
across the border). The U.S. military could also (with other forms of
assistance) support the Afghan military to prevent the Taliban from
seizing a city or taking over the country.
These twin objectives will require a very long-term presence, as
indeed is almost inevitable in a country which is as poor, as fragile
and traumatized as Afghanistan (and which lacks the internal capacity
at the moment to become independent of Foreign aid or control its
territory). But a long-term presence will in turn mean a much lighter
and more limited presence (if it is to retain U.S. domestic support).
We should not control and cannot predict the future of Afghanistan. It
may in the future become more violent, or find a decentralised
equilibrium or a new national unity, but if its communities continue to
want to work with us, we can, over 30 years, encourage the more
positive trends in Afghan society and help to contain the more
negative.
Such a policy can seem strained, unrealistic, counterintuitive, and
unappealing. They appear to betray the hopes of Afghans who trusted us
and to allow the Taliban to abuse district towns. No politician wants
to be perceived to have underestimated, or failed to address, a
terrorist threat; or to write off the ``blood and treasure'' that we
have sunk into Afghanistan; or to admit defeat. Americans are
particularly unwilling to believe that problems are insoluble; Obama's
motto is not ``no we can't''; soldiers are not trained to admit defeat
or to say a mission is impossible. And to suggest that what worked in
Iraq won't work in Afghanistan requires a detailed knowledge of each
country's past, a bold analysis of the causes of development and a
rigorous exposition of the differences, for which few have patience.
The greatest risk of our inflated ambitions and fears, encapsulated
in the current surge is that it will achieve the exact opposite of its
intentions and in fact precipitate a total withdrawal. The heavier our
footprint, and the more costly, the less we are likely to be able to
sustain it. Public opinion is already turning against it. NATO allies
are mostly staying in Afghanistan simply to please the United States
and have little confidence in our objectives or our reasons.
Contemporary political culture tends to encourage black and white
solutions: Either we garrison or we abandon.
While, I strongly oppose troop increases, I equally strongly oppose
a total flight. We are currently in danger of lurching from troop
increases to withdrawal and from engagement to isolation. We are
threatening to provide instant electro-shock therapy followed by
abandonment. This is the last thing Afghanistan needs. The
international community should aim to provide a patient, tolerant long-
term relationship with a country as poor and traumatized as
Afghanistan. Judging by comparable countries in the developing world
(and Afghanistan is very near the bottom of the U.N. Human Development
index), making Afghanistan more stable, prosperous, and humane is a
project which will take decades. It is a worthwhile project in the long
term for us and for Afghans but we will only be able to sustain our
presence if we massively reduce our investment and our ambitions and
begin to approach Afghanistan more as we do other poor countries in the
developing world. The best way of avoiding the mistakes of the 1980s
and 1990s--the familiar cycle of investment and abandonment which most
Afghans expect and fear and which have contributed so much to
instability and danger--is to husband and conserve our resources, limit
our objectives to counterterrorism and humanitarian assistance, and
work out how to work with fewer troops and less money over a longer
period. In Afghanistan in the long term, less will be more.
The Chairman. Thank you very much, Mr. Stewart and--let me
begin with this question. Is there not a distinction between
counterterrorism and counterinsurgency?
Dr. Nagl.
Dr. Nagl. There is, Senator. Counterterrorism is a
component of a counterinsurgency strategy. Counterterrorism
focuses on the enemy, where counterinsurgency focuses correctly
on protecting the people. So, in any effective
counterinsurgency strategy, you will conduct counterterrorism
as part of what you're trying to do, but it is only a part and
it's----
The Chairman. Counterinsurgency is a more expansive
strategy, is it not?
Dr. Nagl. That is correct, sir.
The Chairman. Dr. Biddle, do you agree with that?
Dr. Biddle. Yes.
The Chairman. Is it possible to wage a counterinsurgency
and/or a counterterrorist activity without it being a war?
Dr. Nagl. Senator, by definition, a counterinsurgency
campaign is an attempt to support a government that is
afflicted by those who are illegally using force to overthrow
the government or change its policies. So, counterinsurgency
demands insurgence; insurgence makes it a war.
The Chairman. Automatically?
Dr. Nagl. Yes, sir.
The Chairman. You agree with that, Dr. Biddle?
Dr. Biddle. I think, certainly, for the situation we see in
Afghanistan, it's important to regard it as a war, yes.
The Chairman. Mr. Stewart.
Mr. Stewart. I think this a very important question about
to what extent defeating the Taliban is a necessary or
sufficient part of protecting the United States against al-
Qaeda attack.
The Chairman. Now, let's come back, then, to, sort of,
basics, here. If it is a war, you want to win it. Is that
correct?
Dr. Nagl. That is correct, sir.
The Chairman. If you're going to deploy American troops and
ask them to sacrifice their lives, it's important that they do
so with the notion that there's a strategy to win.
Dr. Nagl. Yes, sir.
The Chairman. What does the counterinsurgency manual say is
the number of troops needed in Afghanistan to win?
Dr. Nagl. The counterinsurgency manual, based on historical
records of previous counterinsurgency campaigns, suggests some
600,000 counterinsurgents would be required to succeed in
Afghanistan.
The Chairman. Dr. Biddle, you agree with that?
Dr. Biddle. The figure in the counterinsurgency manual is a
reasonable rule of thumb, but is a very crude rule of thumb.
General McChrystal is in the process now of doing a much more
detailed troop-to-task analysis that I trust will have a much
stronger basis for a specific troop recommendation. If one is
going to apply the doctrinal rule of thumb, the doctrinal rule
of thumb in the manual is one trained, capable counterinsurgent
per 50 members of the population to be defended, which implies
a figure roughly in the neighborhood of what Dr. Nagl said,
yes.
The Chairman. Somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 troops.
Dr. Biddle. Well, yes. I mean, among the complications here
is that many people believe that the north and the west in
Afghanistan, for example, is less threatened than the south and
the east. And hence the need to----
The Chairman. It's less threatened today.
Dr. Biddle. Sorry?
The Chairman. Today.
Dr. Biddle. I actually think that that----
The Chairman. But, is it----
Dr. Biddle [continuing]. Assessment is seriously
problematic, and that the north and the west today are in many
ways--the best way to think about them is, they're where the
south and the east were in 2003, 2004. So, I share your
concern. But, important in generating----
The Chairman. Well, the point is, if you're going to think
about this policy intelligently, you can't just look at it
today and say, ``Well, the west and the east, or the west and
the north, are doing fine.'' The presumption is, if 27 percent
of the country was under Taliban a year or 2 ago, and now it's
37 percent, that's growing. So, you know, this troop
relationship to what is necessary is really fundamental to the
choices that we make about whether it is in our interest to
fight a counterterrorist activity versus a full-fledged
counter---you know, counterinsurgency, and whether or not one,
in fact, will allow the other. I mean, this is--really takes a
lot of discussion, and it's more than I'm going to get in the 7
minutes I have. But, you got to go down this trail. Do you need
to have X number of troops in order to provide sufficient
security so the counterinsurgency can take hold?
Yes.
Dr. Nagl. Yes, sir, I believe you do. The vast majority of
those forces should be Afghans, not Americans, so I would like
to see 400,000 Afghan National Security Forces, more than
double--roughly double what we were currently planning to
build, and I believe that those forces, with minimal American
assistance, advisers, air power, would be able to secure
Afghanistan. I believe that that's probably 5 years away.
The Chairman. And what would be the expectation of the
American people as we go forward, here, in terms of the cost
that you would envision over that 5-year period? And with what
level of, sort of, guarantee of success?
Dr. Nagl. Senator, I believe that we should expect to
spend, over the next 5 years of that effort, probably as much
as we have spent in lives and dollars over the preceding 8
years. I feel that cost very deeply, as I know you do. But, I
would point out that we have been spending that for 8 years in
Afghanistan to date, and the situation is getting worse. We've
tried the light-footprint counterterrorism option, and it has
not succeeded. There is no reason to believe that it would get
any better or any easier with the Taliban getting stronger.
The Chairman. But, let me stop you there for a minute.
Dr. Nagl. Yes, sir.
The Chairman. You say ``it has not succeeded.'' Al-Qaeda is
not in Afghanistan, is it?
Dr. Nagl. To my knowledge, it is not, sir.
The Chairman. And the goal of the President is to prevent
al-Qaeda from being in there and attacking the United States,
correct?
Dr. Nagl. Sir, that is one of the goals of the President.
The Chairman. The second goal is to prevent the
destabilization of Pakistan.
Dr. Nagl. Yes, sir.
The Chairman. Those are the principal goals.
Dr. Nagl. Yes, sir. I agree.
The Chairman. We are doing better in Pakistan.
Dr. Nagl. We are, yes, sir.
The Chairman. And there is no al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Dr. Nagl. That is correct, sir.
The Chairman. We just knocked out a major al-Qaeda figure
in Somalia without 67,000 troops on the ground. In fact, we
don't have any American troops on the ground, except for the
moment that they were there to do what they did.
Dr. Nagl. Correct, sir.
The Chairman. Does that tell us something about the
potential of a lighter footprint in Afghanistan?
Dr. Nagl. Sir, it tells us that you can conduct
counterterrorism with a light footprint; you cannot conduct
counterinsurgency with a light footprint, and----
The Chairman. Exactly the point I'm trying to----
Dr. Nagl. Yes, sir.
The Chairman [continuing]. Get at. But, isn't the
President's goal fundamentally counterterrorism, or is it
linked to the counterinsurgency that is critical to preventing
the destabilization? And is it, as Mr. Stewart has suggested,
in fact critical to that destabilization? And he actually
offered the notion that it might be possible that's it creating
more destabilization. Have we, in fact, thoroughly examined
that?
Dr. Nagl. Sir, we--I have, at least I believe--I do not
claim to be an expert on Pakistan. I agree with Steve that the
reason that counterterrorism will not work in Afghanistan,
although it does in Somalia, is because of the presence of
Pakistan next door to Afghanistan. Pakistan, I believe, is the
key to the puzzle. Pakistan is America's vital national
interest. And I am convinced that American counterinsurgency
and counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan have contributed to
the more effective Pakistani counterinsurgency campaign.
The Chairman. And let me make it clear. As I said in my
opening comments, Pakistan is central, and I agree with that
assessment. And I have--I'm not--you know, I haven't determined
that, in fact, the counterinsurgency component won't be
critical because of Taliban, but I think we have to examine
this. I mean, this is fundamental to what we have to really
come to some kind of firm conclusion on, because it is going to
be critical to the numbers of troops and to the type of
commitment that we make.
Mr. Stewart, if you'd just comment quickly on this question
of the destabilization, and then I want to turn to the other
Senators.
You asserted that it may be, in fact, that the presence of
these troops is, in fact, a destabilizing, rather than a
stabilizing, factor, and I want you to----
Mr. Stewart. Yes, I mean, I----
The Chairman [continuing]. That out.
Mr. Stewart [continuing]. I think it's destabilizing in two
potential ways. One of them is, as Pakistan military and the
Pakistan Government complains, it often involves this squeezing
and pushing insurgents across the border into Pakistan. And
second, it provides some of the material of ideological
resistance to the United States within Pakistan that we're
perceived by the majority of the Pakistani population to be
engaged in an occupation of Afghanistan.
But, more importantly, I think that the strongest argument
against this is that if it has some negative and positive
effects, those are very minor compared to the real drivers of
the problem in Pakistan. Pakistan will not stand or fall on
Afghanistan. It's about the Pakistani Government, it's about
the Pakistani military, it's about the Pakistani economy and
the Pakistani society. There may be some positive results,
there may be some negative results. But, by and large,
Afghanistan is far less important to the future of Pakistan
than we're suggesting.
The Chairman. And the final question--and I apologize to my
colleagues--Dr. Nagl, you helped write this field--this manual
on counterinsurgency.
Dr. Nagl. Yes, sir.
The Chairman. And General Petraeus adopted it, correct? So,
this is the military's current doctrine about troops needed for
counterinsurgency.
Dr. Nagl. Correct, sir.
The Chairman. So, when you say 500,000 to 600,000 in order
to guarantee success, we're not playing around with some sort
of light figure, here. This is something you guys sort of
settled on in a fairly rigid analysis.
Dr. Nagl. Sir, it is--as Steve suggested, it is more of a
rule of thumb than a guarantee. There are no guarantees in war.
But, historically, successful counterinsurgency campaigns have
relied on large numbers of troops on the ground to protect the
population, particularly host-nation security forces.
The Chairman. Well, if we're going to make the kind of
decision we're being called on to make, if I were President in
this circumstance, if we're studying the stakes the way we are,
I want a guarantee. You know, Roosevelt took his guarantee, in
a sense. Truman did. We were committed to that. And I--and as a
former troop, let me tell you something, that's one of the
things that I missed the most back then. And I would want to
make sure we have that for the troops today.
So, you know, I'm looking to make the soundest decision we
can with what's necessary. I think the American people have to
consider this, if that's what it's going to take to guarantee
success.
Senator Lugar.
Senator Lugar. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Without oversimplifying the problem that you've all
addressed, most Americans believe the United States entered
into conflict in Afghanistan because of the presence of al-
Qaeda training camps there that were believed to have played a
direct role in the attacks on Washington and New York on 9/11.
Now, the existence of such camps had been known before, and
they had been attacked at least once during the previous
administration. But, nevertheless, the camps were there, and
there were demands by our Government that the Taliban, who were
apparently, at least to us, running the country, ought not to
protect those camps, and that the United States should be able
to eliminate them. At the time, the Taliban resisted that idea,
and, as a result, we went in with military force not only to
enforce the closing of the camps, but also to involve ourselves
in the governance of the country.
Now, experts may have known more about the internal
situation in Afghanistan than most of us or the American
public, but, by and large, we discovered that the central
government was very weak, and there were so-called
``warlords,'' or provincial governments, that for all intents
and purposes were more meaningful for most citizens in many
areas of the country. This situation existed in part because of
transportation problems and other historical dilemmas.
Now, as a result, it seems to me we've attempted to do a
number of things; and you've talked about them today. We have
had some success in rooting out at least most of the al-Qaeda
that we know about, but, at the same time, we have not decided,
or maybe even discussed, what our feelings ought to be with
regard to the Taliban.
Now, generally our feelings are negative. But, I offer an
alternative thought--and I'll ask you, Mr. Stewart, to comment
first on this. What if we were to discover, as some writers
have discussed, that there are different degrees of Taliban, in
terms of their antipathy to the United States or their
responsibilities for Afghanistan--namely, some Taliban that we
could deal with in a pragmatic way? And what if we
rediscovered--we won't call them ``warlords,'' but various
authorities out in the hustings who, in fact, were doing some
governance work, and doing it at least fairly efficiently, even
if not democratically, and without the problems of people
looking in and seeing that there was a degree of corruption or
what have you?
I'm just probing as to if, Mr. Stewart, your theory that by
having a presence which becomes overwhelming, we create more
problems for ourselves without having any real effect on
Pakistan, is correct. If we had fewer people, and they were
more politically adept in weaving together a governance of
Afghanistan, and perhaps they said, ``We understand that
President Karzai may have some problems of personal or official
corruption; maybe his brother does, too; but that seems to be
fairly common in many governance positions all over the
country.'' We are probably not going to be able to cure this
problem altogether as much as we might abhor it. After all, we
say President Karzai is a national figure we ought to plan to
work with, as we do with the other regional leaders, in
addition to finding more partners such as the good Taliban or
whoever else.
Now, under those circumstances, is it conceivable that we
could pull together a situation in which Afghanistan did have
stable governance and thus posed less of a threat to its
neighbors? This would give us options, which we may already
have, of discovering that there may be Taliban in 30, 40, or 50
countries, depending upon the breadth of your imagination as to
where they are, thus making apparent that Afghanistan is not
the source of ``al-Qaeda in all these nations.'' The Taliban is
not the objective; it is still people who are plotting to bomb
Washington and New York City again, or to think of conspicuous
terrorism that would give advantage to whoever doesn't care for
us in the world.
Would you probe the politics of this situation as I've
tried to describe it?
Mr. Stewart. I think, Senator--I mean, you voice a very
important point. The Taliban are clearly an extremely, often
horrifying and unpleasant group. There are many things that we
object to very strongly about the Taliban. Unfortunately,
working in a country like Afghanistan, we need to have a vision
of a better future, but we need to have quite a pragmatic and
moderate path toward that future. Through brutal terms,
``ought'' implies ``can.'' We don't have a moral obligation to
do what we can't do. So, that will really mean working in
southern Afghanistan, particularly, trying to identify who the
most powerful, effective, legitimate figures are in those
areas. And some of those people may be associated with the
Taliban, and some of those figures, as you suggest, Senator,
are not, in fact, people who are of great concern to the United
States. The majority of the people that we're killing and
fighting are semiliterate villagers who would be pressed to
find the United States on a map. It also means, unfortunately,
that we may have to make compromises with the more progressive
members of the provincial powerholders, which is another way of
saying, in brutal terms, ``the better warlords.''
This doesn't mean that we should be working with everybody,
but, if we take the analogy of the Balkans, we are in a much,
much better position now than we were in the Balkans 12 years
ago. We worked in the Balkans with people who are now in The
Hague. We did that on a deliberate strategy, knowing that
things would improve, and that we weren't going to work with
those people forever. We did elections in the Balkans, which
were very flawed in the early days and which have got better
now.
So, what I'd like to see, following on from what you're
talking about, Senator, is, first, not to get to hypnotized by
the idea that these people are a critical threat to United
States national security; second, that, although we can perhaps
do less than we pretend, we can do more than we fear; and that
if we had a genuine long-term vision for how to move forward,
that accepted, as you said, that, fundamentally, the problems
in Afghanistan are political problems, they're problems that
are better addressed by political offices, and there's a real
danger that a heavy military footprint will create parallel
structures and undermine the sense of responsibility in the
Afghan Government to address these problems themselves.
Senator Lugar. I appreciate the answer. My time is up.
Many would say that the discussion I've suggested, and
you've conducted with me, offers a strategy that compromises
the usual tenets of American foreign policy. We are for human
rights, we're for democracy, we're for doing it the right way
in terms of elections, and all the rest of it. And it's not
that we've become obsessed with the thought that everybody else
must follow us, but many would find it very disappointing for
us to say, ``Let us take a look at warlords who may not be
quite so bad, but, nevertheless, may be effective,'' or to say
that, ``As a matter of fact, Taliban, with all of their
practices, are not exactly people we want in any governance in
the United States, but there may be elements of that group that
it would be pragmatic to work with.'' It must be pointed out
that we're now talking, as the chairman has pointed out, about
options involving hundreds of billions of dollars, which we
don't have in the United States--we're borrowing this from
other countries--to finance this war. We're risking American
troops, and talking about risking some more. These
circumstances suggest that some unorthodox thinking may be
required.
And I appreciate your colloquy with me. I wish we had more
time to visit along the panel.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Well, Senator, the question of time is
important here, and I'm going to consider, obviously, even, you
know, recalling a panel, if necessary, if we think that there's
more to be discussed, because I think this has to be thoroughly
vetted. It's very difficult sometimes in these settings, but
I've tried to do some of that in the roundtable manner that
we've done. We're going to continue this. I can promise people,
it will be thorough.
Senator Feingold.
Senator Feingold. Mr. Chairman, I really do want to thank
you for holding this hearing on the alternative strategies to
achieve our objectives in Afghanistan.
I want to thank the witnesses for agreeing to testify.
There has not been adequate discussion regarding the
significant risks associated with our current strategy in
Afghanistan, or about the potential alternatives, but I think
that's begun to change in the last month. And actually a
portion of the testimony and the hearing--of this hearing and
the comments by these two Senators, I think, could represent
something of a turning point with regard to this, as we look
forward.
My primary concern with our current strategy is that our
massive military footprint may be breeding militancy in the
region and could push militants into nuclear-armed Pakistan.
That is why I have mentioned the need for a flexible timetable
to drawdown our military presence in Afghanistan.
The support of both the American and the Afghan people may
well depend upon our clearly stating that we do not intend to
occupy that country indefinitely. Indeed, recent polls have
shown that 58 percent of Americans oppose the United States
mission in Afghanistan, and 51 percent of Afghans want the
United States forces to leave within 2 years.
Now, I want to be clear, no one is talking today about
abandoning Afghanistan. We are simply discussing the serious
possibility that our massive military operations may be
destabilizing the region. I happen to think the Taliban is
thriving primarily due to poor governance. We must carefully
evaluate whether, and to what extent, there is a military--a
military--solution to that problem. Meanwhile, our top priority
must be to develop the long-term strategy to keep pressure on
al-Qaeda globally.
And, you know, I was going to start off by asking what,
essentially, Senator Kerry and Senator Lugar have already had
you talk about, and that is that--whether or not military
operations in Afghanistan may, in fact, be creating more
militants in the region, and could be contributing to the
destabilization of Pakistan.
So, let me just ask Mr. Stewart the alternative--the
opposite. How would you respond to critics of your proposal who
argue that a smaller military presence would allow for
increased Taliban influence in Afghanistan, and that that, in
their argument, would actually destabilize Pakistan?
Mr. Stewart. That's very difficult. To start with, of
course, this is a very, very unpredictable country. Nobody
predicted the rise of the Taliban properly in 1994, 1995.
Nobody predicted that President Najib would stay in power after
the Soviet Union withdrew. So, I'm not going to stand here and
say that we can predict it. There's a significant risk that a
reduction in a military footprint would mean that the Taliban
could consolidate some of their holds, particularly in rural
areas in southern and eastern Afghanistan. And we need to make
a decision on that basis. We need to accept that risk. And we
need to think about what we're going to do with that risk.
Personally, I think the Taliban is not in a position to
capture a major city. They're not in a position to take over
the country. They're not the Taliban of 1994. They no longer
have powerful Pakistani military support or planes or artillery
or tanks. They discredited themselves when they were in
government. There's a much stronger opposition from the
minority groups in the north and the center. They're not in a
situation of civil war.
I believe, with United States support, financial support,
primarily to the Afghan Army, and a light American military
footprint, we should be able to prevent the Taliban from taking
major cities in the country without too much problem. All
right?
Is this Taliban presence going to destabilize Pakistan?
Well, for that we'd have to defer to the Pakistanis. But, my
sense, coming from the Government of Pakistan, is that they do
not see that as the primary threat to their country. They
believe that they can contain and manage the situation in
Afghanistan. As I say, Pakistan is a much, much larger country
than Afghanistan; it is the tiger to the cat. What destabilizes
Pakistan, of course, ranges all the way over to the Indian
border, and includes very basic social-economic indicators in
that country, and the movement of religion and ideology in that
country.
The presence of Afghanistan of some Taliban troops, I don't
think is likely to be the decisive factor in the collapse of
Pakistan.
Senator Feingold. I really appreciate that answer.
Dr. Biddle, if we were to pursue a middle-of-the-road
option, where we reduced the size of our footprint but remain
engaged, to support the Afghan security forces and then use our
leverage to contain any outside support for the Taliban, do you
believe that an outright defeat of the Afghan Government by the
Taliban would be likely?
Dr. Biddle. I think there are a variety of middle-way
options that are attractive. The trouble is, they all have
shortcomings, militarily, that I don't think have been
adequately discussed.
One of the them, for example, a shift in U.S. emphasis from
combat to training and advising, if it's done without a
substantial troop strength to do the training and advising and
mentoring and partnering, runs the substantial risk of allowing
the Taliban to gain control of the country while we're in the
process of training, and it also undermines the efficacy of the
training that we conduct.
In many ways, the business of building up an indigenous
military, where there is not one at the moment, is a poor
analogy to many kinds of educational activity. It requires a
great deal of learning by doing, and it requires a great deal
of close cooperation with Western mentors in the conduct of
actual combat operations.
I very much agree with Dr. Nagl, that the development of an
indigenous Afghan military force is absolutely necessary if
we're going to get out of this with our interests realized. To
do that, however, I think requires a more substantial U.S.
investment than many who would like to see a middle option are
prepared to provide.
Senator Feingold. Mr. Stewart, what percentage of the
people currently fighting alongside the Taliban would you
estimate share al-Qaeda's international terrorist agenda, and
what percentage are fighting us because we are there?
Mr. Stewart.
The Chairman. Can I just intervene? And I won't take it----
Senator Feingold. Yes, OK.
The Chairman [continuing]. From your time. But, could you
just quantify that, what you just said: ``It'll require a
substantially greater investment''? Can you put us----
Dr. Biddle. Well, again, I'm reluctant to prejudge General
McChrystal, who's now calculating precisely that number. Some
figures I've seen are on the order of one American per three
Afghans to be trained. But, again, there's a very detailed
analysis, now ongoing, that, unfortunately, as an outsider, I
don't have the resources to compete with. And I hope that
analysis will be made public shortly.
The Chairman. Thanks.
And thank you, Senator Feingold.
Senator Feingold. I'll just repeat, Mr. Stewart, the
question. What percentage of the people currently fighting
alongside the Taliban would you estimate share al-Qaeda's
international terrorist agenda, and what percentage are
fighting us because we are there?
Mr. Stewart. This is a very complicated question to answer,
of course. There are links between those two groups, but,
broadly speaking, there is a distinction which is worth
maintaining.
Al-Qaeda began, and remains to some extent, a non-Afghan
movement. In a sense, the people who are interested in
international terrorists attacks against the United States, and
who even would have the imagination to mount those kinds of
attacks, have tended to be people, in fact, from relatively
educated middle-class backgrounds. It's no accident that
Mohammad Atta was a German resident, or that Zawahiri, for
example, is a doctor and comes from an elite Egyptian family.
Most of the people we're fighting are, broadly speaking,
peasants and, broadly speaking--I don't mean that in an
offensive sense, but I mean in terms of their lifestyle and
their mindset and the way in which they view the world--they're
not particularly interested in international terrorism. And of
that small proportion that are, far fewer would ever be able to
have any serious chance of carrying out whatever ambitions they
might have in their fantasies.
So, I would repeat, in terms of protecting U.S. national
security, we're dealing with a very, very focused defense
against people who, by and large, should be distinguished from
the Taliban and distinguished from the people we're fighting on
a daily basis.
Thank you.
Senator Feingold. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you, Senator Feingold.
Senator Corker.
Senator Corker. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the hearing.
And thank you, as panelists, for being here. I think you
all have been very good.
You know, today we had a briefing, talking about metrics. I
know we're going to be talking about resources here in the near
future. One of the things that did occur in Iraq is, there was
a discussion about what victory might be, and people ended up
trying to envision what that might be, and we'll see if it
turns out that way. I hope it does. But, in Afghanistan, no one
has really been able to describe what victory is. You all have
different viewpoints here, at least there's two distinct ones.
And I wonder if, in a very brief way, you might be able to
describe to us what you think victory in Afghanistan would look
like?
Dr. Nagl. Sir, I would define victory in Afghanistan as an
Afghan state that is able to secure itself from internal
threats with minimal external help, that does not present a
security threat to the region, does not serve as a base for
attacks upon its neighbors, and that does not harbor al-Qaeda
and is opposed to the interests on al-Qaeda, worldwide.
Dr. Biddle. I would----
Senator Corker. So, sort of a three-tiered victory.
Yes, sir.
Dr. Biddle. I would articulate a minimalist conception of
what's necessary to secure our interests in Afghanistan. We
need only a country that is sufficiently in control of its
territory, that large contiguous blocks of meaningful
Afghanistan cannot be used as a base for attacking others.
Beyond that, our goals are aspirational. That is sufficient for
our purposes. I think that can be attained with a good deal
less than Switzerland and the Hindu Kush.
Senator Corker. OK.
Yes, sir.
Mr. Stewart. I'd go even further in a minimal direction and
say that we have two very narrow objectives there. The most
important, from the point of view of the United States, would
simply be that Afghanistan does not in any way pose a majorly
increased terrorist threat to the United States. I don't think
we need to get into whether that's involved in state-building
or contiguous blocks of territory or safe havens. The question
is, Is there anything that they would gain in that country
which would make them better able to hurt the United States
than they're currently able to do in Pakistan? So, if we could
achieve that and, at the same time, follow a long and, I think,
honorable process of rebuilding Afghanistan, with a
humanitarian objective and obligation--not with a huge amount
of resources, but showing that the United States is serious
about helping the Afghan people and fulfilling our commitments
over the last 20 years--I think that would be enough. And,
broadly speaking, to follow on from Senator Kerry, what we'd be
looking at is a strategy which--I don't want to put it too
boldly, but would look on the counterterrorist side a little
bit like what we do in Somalia, and maybe, on the development
side, a little bit like what we do in countries like Nepal, but
maybe on a more generous level.
Thank you.
Senator Corker. Thank you. And obviously it's--I think it's
going to be imperative for us to first agree on what we think
that is, because these are very different views as to what
victory is.
So, let me move on to the second one. We've talked a lot
about military presence, here, and the administration has
talked about a much more narrow focus than being
counterterrorism. But, if you really look at the metrics that
they're looking at, I mean, this is all-out nation-building. I
mean, I was there on election day--I'm amazed that some of the
historic-site-rebuilding. I mean, we are nation-building right
now in Afghanistan.
So, I guess my question is, in addition to the security
piece--and I--you all have talked about different components of
counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, meaning keeping the
population safe--what degree of nation-building--economics,
highways, judicial systems, corruption--anticorruption
efforts--what degree of nation-building should be undertaken
with whatever military presence we have there?
Dr. Nagl. Senator, it's a commonly accepted principle of
counterinsurgency that, if you are losing a counterinsurgency
campaign, you're not being outfought, you're being outgoverned.
And what's happening now is that the Taliban is providing many
essential services to the Afghan people; in particular, in the
south and in the east. It's providing them with some degree of
security and some degree of justice. It's not necessarily a
justice or a security that they would choose if they had a
choice. And, in fact, those--when they're given the option,
they support the United States involvement at about 50 percent,
and they support the Taliban at about 5 percent. But, it is
better than what the Afghan Government is able to give them.
So, to succeed in this campaign, we have to build an Afghan
Government that can provide them with security first, and then
with some degree of justice and some degree of economic
potential, in order to provide a more positive alternative than
the Taliban presents.
Senator Corker. So, you have three goals for victory, and a
pretty all-out nation-building effort to go with it.
Dr. Nagl. Sir, I would not say that I'm trying to ``build a
nation'' as much as I'm trying to build a state that can secure
its people and care for its people and protect them against--I
consider--what I consider to be a pretty insidious, vicious,
and horrible alternative, called the Taliban.
Senator Corker. Thank you.
Dr. Biddle.
Dr. Biddle. I am minimalist with respect to what I think we
can accomplish in Afghanistan, but I'm also minimalist with
respect to what I think we need to accomplish in Afghanistan.
War, at the end of the day, is a competitive undertaking. One
doesn't need to meet some abstract, absolute standard. One
needs to do better than the enemy one's fighting with respect
to most dimensions of the problem, including governance. And
happily, I actually agree with Rory Stewart, that the Taliban
has very important weaknesses and shortcomings. I think that's
actually an important basis for my belief that failure is not
inevitable, is that our opponent in this conflict has very
important weaknesses and shortcomings; among them, their
ability to provide a form of governance that the Afghan people
actually want.
What's happening at the moment is that an unpopular
Taliban, with an unpopular form of governance, is in danger of
being in direct competition with a government that's becoming
almost as unpopular as they are.
What we need, at the end of the day, is simply to provide
an alternative to the population that is preferable to a
Taliban that they don't want. And I think that's a rather
modest standard which I--you know, subject to the uncertainties
of war and the difficulties of the undertaking, I think is, in
principle, achievable.
Senator Corker. Thank you.
Rory.
Mr. Stewart. I think that state-building is not a national
security priority for the United States in Afghanistan. I think
it's a good thing, for humanitarian reasons, it's a good thing
for the Afghan people, it's something we should support as a
development project over a long period. But, it is so
problematic. This country is so poor. The majority of civil
servants don't have a high school education. Forty percent of
the people in the country can't read and write. The government
is really lacking in legitimacy and popularity; the elections
have illustrated that. We could invest 30 years in Afghanistan
trying to develop the military and the civil service in the
state, and, if we were lucky, we would make Afghanistan and its
state structures resemble Pakistan. And I mean that. I mean any
Pakistani, I think, would confirm that the Pakistani military,
the Pakistani civil service, its government, its economy, its
society is in many ways, far advanced than that of Afghanistan.
And there's not a great United States national security
interest involved in trying to make Afghanistan become, over 20
or 30 years of investment, more like Pakistan. But, I think,
there could be a good humanitarian reason for improving things
in those directions, and it's one we should support, for
humanitarian reasons.
Senator Corker. Thank you.
Mr. Chairman, I know my time is up.
Thank you for your testimony and very diverse viewpoints.
The Chairman. Well, it's very, very important lines that I
think can be--are sort of defined in the three answers, and
there's sort of a matrix there, if you will, for some of the
choices. And we're going to try to set it up as such.
But, a really interesting question that we have to look at
more--and I'm not going to go in it--but, it's just this
question of the Taliban. We keep coming back to the Taliban and
to what their impact may or may not be. And I was very
interested in Dr. Biddle's answer, which came in at a slightly
different place from Dr. Nagl. And I think it begins to frame
the connections that we've got to look at here, you know. And
Rory Stewart very, you know, appropriately said, is it a
national security interest, in fact, or is it a--you know, some
other kind of interest? And that's something that we've got to
really think through carefully.
Senator Cardin. Well, Mr. Chairman----
The Chairman. Senator Cardin.
Senator Cardin [continuing]. Mr. Chairman, I'm going to
follow up on the Taliban in one moment, because I do think that
is an important factor in achieving our mission in Afghanistan.
You have pointed out many times that the al-Qaeda is not
indigenous to Afghanistan, and that the Taliban has been
somewhat of a support system for the terrorist activities.
You know, one of the things that concerns me is that--I
think you all have expressed minimalist expectations for what
we can achieve in Afghanistan, and that makes it difficult for
us to want to invest to increase combat troops in Afghanistan.
I think most of us support the President's mission of trying to
disrupt terrorist operations, and we want to see that done
effectively, but we don't see the endgame here, by adding more
combat troops. Of course, we're going to wait to see General
McChrystal's recommendations. But, one thing is clear: we need
to build up a more functioning society to take care of the
population's own needs. That's in everyone's interests. I think
we all agree on that point.
Now, Senator Levin has talked about increasing the amount
of national security forces within Afghanistan. He's also
talked about trying to reintegrate the Taliban into Afghan
society in a more constructive manner. And I think there is
support for this. I just want to understand how realistic this
is. At least it's our view that
al-Qaeda's not popular in Afghanistan. The Taliban are not
really zealous when it comes to wanting to fight; at least it
appears that it's more pragmatic and economic and political
than it is philosophical.
Our strategies in the Helmand region and elsewhere have
been to periodically destroy poppy crops, but not really to
provide alternative economic opportunities for the farmers. I
know that we're trying to change that strategy. It seems to me
that we could be effective in reducing the influence of the
Taliban if we could reintegrate those that are looking for a
better life for their families, with opportunities--real
opportunities--through a real concerted effort. To me, that
would have much more political support, but I haven't seen an
effective policy today.
Is there promise in trying to disrupt the growth of the
Taliban's influence in Afghanistan by directing alternatives to
those who have joined the Taliban forces--by offering
alternatives and other crops than poppy--and to really try to
deal with this in a much more sophisticated way? What's the
prognosis, here?
The Chairman. Before you answer, I need to apologize. I
need to go to a Finance Committee meeting on health care for a
brief moment. Senator Lugar will chair in my absence. I'm going
to try and get back, but I can't guarantee it.
Thanks.
Dr. Biddle. Reconciliation, as well as economic development
and the development of an indigenous military, is clearly an
important part of any successful outcome we might be able to
attain in Afghanistan. The issue is whether it's separable from
a larger counterinsurgency campaign. In many ways, it would be
nice if it would be, because it would enable us to do this at
much lower cost and much lower effort. The trouble is, the
pieces of the component problem tend to interact strongly with
one another.
Take, for example, economic development. It's very
difficult for us to provide economic development in an insecure
environment. The Taliban----
Senator Cardin. Well, part of Senator Levin's point is that
we need to significantly increase--and I think the
administration has agreed on this--significantly increase the
security forces, both military and police, in Afghanistan.
Dr. Biddle. Yes, and as we develop security forces that can
provide that degree of protection for the population, a variety
of other things become possible in lockstep, one being a better
prospect for economic development, another being better
prospect for reconciliation with reconcilable elements of the
Taliban. When we say ``the Taliban,'' it's in many ways a
misnomer. This is a very heterogeneous collection of factions
that have very different interests, very different motivations,
very different component parts and ways of working.
In principle, it should be possible to drive wedges between
these, and reach settlements with an important fraction of what
is now a collection of those who oppose us and oppose the
Government of Afghanistan. The trouble we face at the moment
is, the perception on that side of the frontier, if you like,
is that they are ascendant. And when they are ascendant, that
poses a variety of difficulties for a reconciliation strategy,
among which being, it's very dangerous to get caught on the
losing side in a negotiated end to a conflict like Afghanistan.
If the military tide begins to turn and perceptions of the
longer term trajectory of this conflict change from a high
expectation that the Karzai government is going fall and will
be replaced by a Quetta Shura-based alternative to something in
which there's an expectation that the Karzai government will
survive, and staying in the field simply means a long-grinding
stalemate, then it becomes much more possible for us to reach
reconciliation deals, either with faction leaders among this
collection of factions or with the individual foot soldiers
that comprise their armed forces in the field. It's very
difficult to persuade a $10 Taliban, a member of the village
who is simply fighting to feed his family, to side with us when
there's no expectation that the environment is going to be
secure and their erstwhile allies will come get them after they
accept our offer.
Senator Cardin. I agree with what you're saying, but I
think the weakness of your position is that it appears to say
that we're going to have a large international, primarily
United States, military combat mission for a long time and,
ultimately, the chances of success are unclear. This comes with
other negative impacts, with us being perceived as an
occupation force within Afghanistan. It seems that the proper
way to do this is to accelerate the training of Afghan security
forces and be realistic as to what regions we can secure and
make advancements in, rather than trying to have a military
combat solution to a problem where we're trying to build up
government capacity.
Dr. Biddle. Well, I do think that the prospects for
success, while--you know, while nonzero, involve a great deal
of cost, and potentially a great deal of time. And that's why I
see this as a close call on the merits. If I thought that we
could succeed without incurring this kind of cost, I would see
this as a clear argument for proceeding. If I thought that
success was impossible were we even--even were we to incur the
cost, I would see this as a clearly inappropriate mission. I
think what we've got is a very difficult, very costly
undertaking, which can succeed if we invest the cost and the
effort, and where we have nonnegligible stakes involved. And
that's preciously what makes this, I think, on the merits, such
a difficult case and such a close call.
Senator Cardin. Well, I'm not sure I agree that it's all or
nothing. We do have combat troops there now. We've increased
the number of combat troops. It seems to me we've not made
progress, and we haven't trained more troops. I think we have
squandered some time, but I don't want to see us continue this
current policy. And I'm not sure the circumstances on the
ground give us the prospect that you're referring to.
Dr. Nagl. Senator, can I talk to this from my personal
experience?
Senator Cardin. Well, my time has expired so----
Dr. Nagl. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Sir, I served in Al Anbar in 2003 and 2004 with the 1st
Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division. I tried to conduct a
comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign with insufficient
resources. I worked to build Iraqi security forces. I worked to
conduct economic development. I didn't have enough boots on the
ground to secure my area. The insurgents blew up all of my
economic development projects. They killed my battalion
commanders that I trained. I am not going to say we went
backward during my service in Al Anbar, but we certainly did
not make progress very rapidly. And I'm--I very--I agree with
Steve, I very much wish that, with economic development and
with training host-nation security forces, that that were
sufficient. But, the truth is that there is a base level of
security that has to be provided on the ground.
Senator Cardin. And I don't disagree with that. We have to
have security for the economics in the region to be successful.
The question is, Who supplies the security? I understand the
United States and international community have a responsibility
for training, but ultimately, the security has to be provided
by the Afghans.
Dr. Nagl. And, Senator, it's my contention that I've worked
with the Afghan security forces. They are good fighters. There
are far, far too few of them to do that now. So, I agree with
Senator Levin, we absolutely have to build more Afghan security
forces, but if we do not also provide more security on the
ground where we're doing that, an awful lot of those battalion
commanders will be killed by the Taliban.
Senator Cardin. Thank you.
Senator Lugar [presiding]. Thank you very much, Senator
Cardin.
Senator Casey.
Senator Casey. Thank you very much.
And I appreciate the time that all of you have put into
this, both your presence here today, your testimony in
answering questions, as well as the experience and scholarship
that you bring to this issue.
I want to try to focus on at least two areas, maybe three.
I, like a lot of other Senators, in the last couple of months
had a chance to go to both Afghanistan and Pakistan for a
limited period of time, but, even in a short amount of time,
you learn a lot, or at least you gain better insights. I was
particularly impressed by a lot of the fighting men and women
who were there starting with the briefing General McChrystal as
well as the nonmilitary folks gave us. Also, I was very
impressed by not just his appreciation for, and respect for,
but the General's demonstrable--of course, it's my own
assessment, but I think I can judge people pretty well--
integration of the State Department folks as well. It is one
team over there, people working from the Department of
Agriculture, DEA, you name it, USAID--go down the list--brave,
committed, capable Americans, both military and nonmilitary,
doing that work. And it's really early in their assignment. We
just changed strategy. So, I hope we all don't make conclusions
too early, here. I know, in Washington, they want us to. That's
what we do in Washington, we have very limited debates, and
people go into their political corners, and we don't often have
a full debate.
I was glad that Senator Kerry raised the question of how
important it is to have a full and substantive debate about
troop levels--not the usual political Washington debate, which,
candidly, sometimes people in both parties engage in. It's
critically important we get that right.
I think, prior to a serious consideration of the troop
question--since, technically, right now that's not before us
and there has been no recommendation beyond 17 plus 4--I think
it's very important, in my judgment, that we listen to and take
all information into consideration. I have spent a lot of time
with some of the questions raised by Senator Levin in his
speech.
To this end, the elevation of the number of Afghan Army and
police--we've already talked about that and Senator Cardin
mentioned it, as well. On this issue, I have two quick
questions, then I'll move to another one.
The question is, How and then, how many? How do we--if you
accept the premise that we're not moving fast enough on
developing army and police there, and I think that's an
imperative, for a whole variety of reasons--how do we
accelerate the training of the Afghan Army and police force?
And the second question is, How many do we need? Is there a
metric or is there a ratio that you can use for number of
trainers, either American or coalition forces, training Afghan
troops, or not?
And I'd start with Dr. Nagl, and we can go from there.
Dr. Nagl. Yes, sir.
I absolutely agree that we can, and should, accelerate the
training of the Afghan security forces. This has--frankly, this
has not been a success story for the United States over the
past 8 years. The effort to build Iraqi security forces also
suffered from a slow start, but has succeeded to a more than
reasonable degree at this point. And the Iraqis are
increasingly able to provide for their own security. There are
many lessons that can be drawn from the process of building the
Iraqi security forces that can, and should, be applied to
building the Afghan security forces.
It's important to note just what a low point we're at right
now, as we speak. So, currently, today, we have less than 50
percent of the advisers assigned to the Afghan Army that we
say--that the United States says are required to train them.
And we'll fill that role--those are the 4,000--the 17 plus 4--
those 4,000 will arrive in-country this month. I expect to see
a pretty substantial increase in the performance of the Afghan
security forces as those 4,000 advisers catch hold and, for the
first time in the 8-year war, we fully man our advisers to the
Afghan military. So, that's a huge step in the right direction.
I believe the right answer is approximately 250,000 Afghan
soldiers, 150,000 Afghan police. We are currently planning to
build to about half that level. I believe we can accelerate--we
can't quite double our rate of growth, but we can increase it
substantially, perhaps a third. I believe that doing so would
take the commitment of an additional 10,000 or so U.S. advisers
and trainers over the course of 2010.
But, I would like to echo something Steve said----
Senator Casey. You mean noncombat troops----
Dr. Nagl. Not in--those are----
Senator Casey. Right.
Dr. Nagl [continuing]. Those are advisers. But, frankly,
sir, many, if not--an appreciable number of the soldiers we've
lost in combat--and the chairman mentioned that August was the
worst month of the war for us--an appreciable number of the
soldiers we've lost have been advisers and trainers. So, no one
should think that, because we're sending over trainers, that
they're not going in harm's way. They will--and we will lose
some in this hard fight against a vicious enemy.
So, another 10,000 advisers over the course of the next--
over the course of 2010, but it's important that we mentor
units, as well. So, they have to have American or international
units to partner with, which will increase the rate of growth
of those Afghan security forces, make them more capable,
faster. And all of these efforts will ultimately lead to an
earlier withdrawal, an earlier exit strategy that has
accomplished our national security objectives.
Senator Casey. Because of the prelude to my question, I'm
down to just about a minute. But, maybe for our other two
witnesses, can you just give a quick summation? When we talk
about that border region--I don't think we've spent a lot of
time in Washington talking about the extremist--the networks
that are there. I'm aware of at least three networks--the
Quetta Shura, which is in the southern end of the border
between both countries; the Haqqani network; and then the so
called H-I-Q, or H-I-G network. How would you describe the
three of them? And are there major differences? And does one
pose more of a threat to our security, or the security of the
region, than another? I know that's a lot, and you've got 9
seconds, but----
Dr. Biddle. Just very briefly, the most threatening to U.S.
national security interests is the Quetta Shura Taliban, which
is based around the old Taliban government and Mullah Omar. The
other two factions are people--are lead by people that I
wouldn't want to have dinner with, but that I think are less
ideologically committed and much more radically self-
interested; and thus, you could conceivably imagine splitting
off from the remainder of this alliance.
Were the preconditions for negotiating success present? And
again, my concern is that, at the moment, I don't see those
preconditions being present.
Senator Casey. Thank you very much.
Mr. Stewart, I know I'm over but I'll----
Mr. Stewart. Unfortunately, it's an area I know very little
about, so I have very little to say. Sorry, Senator. I'm not an
expert on the details. In fact, I would say, as a caution on
this, that the amount of information available on those groups
is considerably more limited than is suggested by some of the
confident statements made about them.
Senator Casey. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Lugar. Thank you, Senator Casey.
Senator Shaheen.
Senator Shaheen. Thank you.
Mr. Stewart, I think I understood you to say that one
alternative we have in Afghanistan is to pursue a narrow
counterterrorism objective and a humanitarian effort. Can you
describe, in about a minute or less, how you define a narrow
counterterrorism objective? What that would look like, in terms
of troops, in terms of support from either the United States or
an international effort?
Mr. Stewart. Yes. I think the central question is, What
kind of benefit would al-Qaeda find in being based in
Afghanistan? How would that increase their ability to harm the
United States? Clearly, our priority isn't to keep them out of
Afghanistan just for the sake of keeping them out of
Afghanistan; it's to protect the United States. So, we need to
look seriously at what we mean when we talk about the Taliban
providing a safe haven. How safe is that haven? What can a very
poor, technologically incompetent group like the Taliban really
do to protect al-Qaeda?
To some extent, what they did in the leadup to 2001 was not
much more than saying, ``Pitch your tent over there and we're
not going to hand you over to the United States.'' How much
ability do they really have to protect al-Qaeda if they built a
Quantico-style camp against Delta Force or against predators
coming in?
In fact, curiously, one of the things that we've learned,
is that a failed state may be less threatening to U.S. national
security than a partially formed state. It's very noticeable
that Osama bin Laden has chosen to be in Pakistan, not in
Afghanistan, a country which has considerably more established
state structures, and that is because, to some extent, he's
protected by Pakistani claims to state sovereignty.
One of the things we may be learning through this period is
that, in fact, states like Pakistan, or, of course, states like
Iran, may be proved to be more damaging, more dangerous to U.S.
national security, than failed states like Afghanistan or
Somalia, where our freedom of operation is so much greater.
Senator Shaheen. But, I guess I still am not clear on what
you're saying it would take, in terms of an American effort, to
provide just that narrow counterterrorism objective. I
understood what you said with respect to the ability of the
Taliban to support
al-Qaeda. But, what is not yet clear to me is what it would
take for the United States to actually ensure that they don't
have the ability to support al-Qaeda.
Mr. Stewart. So, if the only thing you were trying to do is
to ensure that al-Qaeda did not discover in Afghanistan
something that gave them a serious comparative advantage, a
serious advantage in their ability to attack the United States,
I believe you could do that with an intelligent use of Special
Forces and intelligence operatives, whose job would simply be
to identify those vary narrow group of people called ``al-
Qaeda'' with an international objective against the United
States, and then to eliminate them. If that's the only thing
we're involved in, we don't need too many troops.
Senator Shaheen. Was that not, however, how--what we were
doing for much of the last 7 years that we've been in
Afghanistan? And it has not----
Mr. Stewart. It's worked----
Senator Shaheen [continuing]. Accomplished----
Mr. Stewart [continuing]. It's worked very well, Senator.
There have been no al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. They haven't
attacked us from Afghanistan. If our only objective is to stop
al-Qaeda from re-forming, we've won. We've achieved that
objective.
Senator Shaheen. Well, how would you respond to--I think it
was Dr. Nagl's comments, that our efforts in Afghanistan have
made Pakistan more stable? Would you agree with that?
Mr. Stewart. I can't see any evidence that our efforts in
Afghanistan have made Pakistan more stable. I would consider
Pakistan less stable today than it was. And I don't think
that's largely because of our efforts in Afghanistan; that
because of eternal Pakistani factors to which Afghanistan is
largely irrelevant.
Senator Shaheen. Well, when we were--I had the opportunity
to visit, shortly after the President announced that new
strategy for Afghanistan, and one of the things that I thought
I heard from those that we talked to was that our efforts were
important, not just in addressing the Taliban, but because of,
as you've all pointed out I think, the relationship between the
Taliban and al-Qaeda. And isn't one of the challenges here the
fact that if they are successful, whether it's the Taliban--the
bad Taliban, however we want to describe them--or al-Qaeda,
that the potential for getting access to nuclear weapons
because of the situation in Pakistan is one of the real
challenges, and that that's part of what we're trying to
address here? And so, I guess, if what we've done is to move
al-Qaeda into Pakistan by the efforts that we've had on the
ground in Afghanistan, how does that access to nuclear weapons
in Pakistan and the potential destabilization there get
affected by our reducing a footprint there to just what you're
describing as a narrow counterterrorism object? And I guess I'd
like for each of you to answer that question.
Dr. Biddle. Well, I suppose I'll start. I think the
question of the security of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal turns
centrally on the question of the survival of the secular
Pakistani state. As long as the state survives, and as long as
the state's writ runs, I think there's a reasonable basis for
confidence that that arsenal is secure.
The problem is precisely if the Pakistani insurgency
succeeds and either the government falls or the state
collapses. And again, to the extent--to the extent that there
is a serious United States national security interest uniquely
engaged in Afghanistan and not elsewhere, it is precisely the
concern that chaos on the other side of the Durand Line could
have effects that would swamp what may be marginally
deleterious effects of the United States presence on Pakistani
public opinion now with the enormous massive problem of a
hostile or--either a hostile state on the other side of the
Durand Line or simply an uncontrolled environment of violence
in which factions hostile to the Pakistani Government are
running rampant.
This raises the issue that underlies several of your
questions, which is, What is the meaning of a haven in this--in
today's environment, with the Internet and with the ability to
plan in remote locations? And I disagree, fundamentally, with
Rory Stewart on the function that havens provide and the
ability of the United States to thwart geographic havens with
Special Forces strikes or with drone attacks from a distance.
What havens do is not to provide real estate for the
construction of tent farms where you can conduct training
seminars. What havens do is to protect insurgent organizations
or terrorists from human intelligence penetration on the
ground, which is the primary threat to their survival. The
efficacy of our drone attacks turns, importantly, on our
ability to find intelligence on where these organizations, and
where these individuals, are located. That intelligence comes
to an important degree--not wholly, but to an important
degree--from human intelligence through penetration on the
ground, which would be made extraordinarily difficult by the
presence of a hostile government that actively prevented people
from getting access to the members of the organization. That's
why control of the government underneath the drones is so
important to the efficacy of drone-based counterterrorism, and
another reason why, again, I think the problem here is that the
component elements of what people talk about when they talk
about counterinsurgency are very difficult to pull out of
context and make them work on their own without the rest.
Senator Shaheen. Do you--you're nodding, Dr. Nagl, so I
assume you agree with that.
Dr. Nagl. I agree with everything Steve said. I'd like to
disagree with Rory a little bit, though.
What's happened over the past 8 years is that the Taliban
has slowly gained strength, first--we chased it out of
Afghanistan into Pakistan. It gained strength in Pakistan and
started creeping across the border. And it has gained strength
steadily in Afghanistan, and arguably continues to do so today,
because of insufficient Afghan and international security
forces on the Afghan side of the Durand Line. It gained
strength in Pakistan, and achieved an extraordinary success, in
March of this year, by taking the Swat River Valley, some 60
miles from Islamabad. At that point, because of--in no small
part because of very diligent and impressive diplomatic efforts
by a number of members of the administration, the Pakistani
Government, which had ceded the Swat River Valley to the
Pakistani Taliban, decided to retake it. It did so in a very
unsophisticated counterinsurgency campaign, but in a successful
one.
And it is important to note that the Pakistani Government
has since continued to improve its cooperation with the United
States, in both counterterrorism and counterinsurgency
operations. Any withdrawal or retreat on our part from the
conduct of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism would put
that progress at risk, in my opinion.
Senator Shaheen. Thank you.
Senator Lugar. Thank you very much, Senator Shaheen.
Senator Kaufman.
Senator Kaufman. Thank you, Senator Lugar.
I've tried to avoid, since I've been in the Senate, making
statements before I make these. But I think the last two
statements, by Dr. Biddle and Dr. Nagl, go a long way to
explaining what I think is going on in Afghanistan.
And the other thing I'd like to point out, which has not
been raised, because I think it's a basic misunderstanding of
the American people--and that is, we left Afghanistan in 2003.
We spent almost as much money in Iraq in 2008 as we spent in
Afghanistan from 2003-2008. This is not like we've had a failed
policy. We had the Taliban beat before we left, which is one of
our big problems, in terms of convincing the people in
Afghanistan to be with us, because we left in 1990 and left in
2009.
We've talked a lot--I think there's a lot of confusion here
about what you can do, in terms of ``build,'' if you don't do
``clear'' and ``hold.'' There's been a number--I think, half a
dozen comments, I think, here. So, Dr. Nagl, could you kind of
just explain the difficulties--you did a little bit of it, in
terms your Anbar--but, just the difficulties with doing the
``build'' part, the economic development, the governance, and
all those other things, when you do not ``clear'' and ``hold''?
Dr. Nagl. Yes, sir.
The peril of fighting an insurgency--in a conventional war,
the hard part is killing your enemy. He's relatively easy to
identify. You shoot the tanks that don't look like yours. In an
unconventional war, an irregular war, a counterinsurgency
campaign, the hard part is finding the enemy. And Steve has
talked to the importance of having a good base, a government
that is willing to allow you to conduct the kind of human
intelligence that is essential to finding out who the
insurgents are. If you have not provided that security network,
the insurgents have freedom of action. You own only the ground
you're standing on at any given point in time. And the
insurgents, in particular, tend to operate through night
letters. Very good article, in the Post on Monday about
Kandahar, in which the Taliban has a great degree of control
over what happens inside Kandahar, and they drop night letters
through the front doors of people who are working with the
United States, with the international community, with the
Government of Afghanistan. And they tell them that, ``If you
continue to work for the government, if you continue to work
for the security forces, your family will be killed, you will
be killed.'' And they follow up on enough of those to make that
a credible threat. Those sorts of night letters, which happen
in the absence of a stable security network provided by
counterinsurgent forces, make real progress impossible.
And, unfortunately, the Taliban is gaining strength in
Kandahar. I believe that Kandahar is the next--is the locus of
the Taliban-based insurgency inside Afghanistan. I believe it
has to be cleared out. I believe that if it is not cleared out,
any efforts we make to conduct economic development, to build
Afghan security forces, will be crippled by the Taliban's
ability to infiltrate and to destroy, at night, what we've
built during the day.
Senator Kaufman. Mr. Stewart, I agree with a great deal of
what you said, and your insights, but I was a little confused
about Bosnia. It seems to me, in Bosnia, we did the ``clear''
and ``hold,'' and then we did the ``build.'' And without the
``clear'' and ``hold,'' which we need troops to do--combat
troops, local--so, is Bosnia really a good model for how we
should be preceding in Afghanistan, under any circumstance, or
any of the circumstances that you, kind of, spelled out?
Mr. Stewart. I think Bosnia is a symbol of hope. It's a
symbol of how the complicated, messy engagement of the
international community, and particularly the United States,
can, in the long term, do good in a fragile conflict zone. But,
it's not a good analogy, as you suggested, Senator, from the
point of view of the huge differences between those countries.
Afghanistan is almost the limit case. So fragile, so poor, so
traumatized, so lacking in basic structure or education, that
the kinds of advances, which, in Bosnia, at its best, really
involved simply liberating Bosnian capacity, reinforcing--in
some cases, simply reconstructing things that had been there
before. In Afghanistan, honestly there wasn't much there
before. And I suppose--I'm absolutely with a lot of these
concepts, if they could be done. And the only thing that I'm
saying is that, on the basis of my experience in Afghanistan,
that progress is much more difficult in that country than one
could imagine, that even were you able to ``clear'' and
``hold,'' the ``building'' part, as somebody who runs a
development project, always takes four times as long, and you
always achieve a quarter as much as you hope, simply because of
the lack of capacity on the ground. So, it's really a note of
pragmatic caution.
Thank you.
Senator Kaufman. Great, thanks. That was my--Dr. Biddle, as
you know, in town, here, there's a lot of talk of the kind of
Somalia raid or having--I mean, the same thing went on in Iraq.
We can leave Iraq, but we're going to leave 35,000 troops
behind. And when we find a terrorist, we can--can you, kind of,
talk a little bit about what the problems are of using a
Somalia-type-raid approach as a policy in Afghanistan?
Dr. Biddle. Yes. I think one source of insight is to look
at Somalia itself. We have been, in principle, able to conduct
raids from offshore in Somalia since the 1990s, and yet the
country has continued to descend, and security, especially
since foreign forces left Somalia fairly recently, has gotten
worse, not better.
We will occasionally be able to find a target, and we will
occasionally be able to kill an important leader. That's a
different thing from being able to do enough to prevent a place
from getting worse rather than better, and to prevent people
that we find threatening to us from operating there.
And I think there are a variety of challenges facing this
kind of counterterrorism from offshore approach. One of them,
which I think is the most important, is the one I alluded to
earlier, that counterterrorism from a distance centrally
requires intelligence information on where the targets are. If
you cede control of the government and you cede control of the
country, you lose the ability to find the targets. If you can't
find the targets, none of the rest matters.
Second, if we're going to do this kind of attack with
things like drones, for instance--drones are not wonder-
weapons; they are large, slow airplanes, without pilots, that
tend to spend a long time over a specific point of territory.
It doesn't take very much of an air force to clear the skies of
American drones of the kind that we prefer to use for these
kinds of campaigns.
We depend on the host government in Pakistan for a variety
of key enablers for the success, whatever it may be--and that's
unclear--of this campaign. One of them is intelligence; another
is a benign airspace of the kind that these drones are designed
to require for successful operation.
A third enabler that we require for this kind of campaign
is basing that enables these drones to maintain the kind of
dwell time over target that they require in order to be
effective. At the moment, it has been reported that the
Pakistanis provide the basing. Pakistan and Afghanistan are
remote, landlocked countries for which basing is difficult to
find.
In general, I think what this suggests--for the case of
standoff counterterrorism, in particular, but, by extension, to
the larger collection of middle-way options that I understand
are popular--is that they depend on a variety of things that
you tend to lose if you take them out of the larger context and
try and do them alone.
Senator Kaufman. Thank you very much.
I had--can I have one more question, since I'm the last
one? I wanted to ask Dr. Stewart--and this is not, like, a
devil's-advocate hypothetical; I mean, I really think this
would happen.
If, in fact, we leave Afghanistan, and if, in fact, the
Taliban takes over Afghanistan, and if, in fact, the Pakistan
Taliban does what they did before, is move out of Swat Valley
and move toward Islamabad, with the support--nothing to worry
them in their back--with the support of the Taliban from
Afghanistan, isn't that--I mean, what do you think the
probability of something like that happen? And that would be
incredibly--as we know, would be incredibly destabilizing to
Pakistan.
Mr. Stewart. I think this is a very important worst-case
scenario to end with, because, of course, that is the major
problem. I mean, as Dr. Biddle said from the beginning, our
real issue here is not actually counterterrorism, our real
issue here is what kind of situation we have in Pakistan and
what kind of situation we want in Pakistan.
On the probabilities of it, I would say, personally, very,
very low. I don't believe the Taliban in Afghanistan are in any
position to take over the country, have planes, control the
airspace, deny the United States from having bases in that
country. So, I think we need to be realistic, that even a
reduction in troops would be extremely unlikely to lead to a
Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.
But, if I follow it right through to your worst-case
scenario, if you imagine that very worst-case situation, if you
imagine even the possibility that they invite back in al-Qaeda,
but, most importantly of all, if you imagine that somehow the
Pakistani state, which--far stronger than the Afghan state--I
mean, as they revealed in the Swat Valley, and as John was
saying, I mean, who are really capable, when they want to, of
showing real muscle. I mean, there's much more capacity in the
Pakistan Government than the Afghan Government. It's largely a
question of will. It's whether they want to do this. It's not
that they lack the capacity to do these things. But, were
Pakistan to fall, were there to be some sort equivalent of an
Iranian revolution in Pakistan, that would have massive and
very deleterious effects on the United States foreign policy
position worldwide.
So, I certainly think everybody in this room agrees that
our No. 1 priority is to stop Pakistan going in that direction.
The question is, How much relevance does our talk about
counterterrorism and our talk about Afghanistan have to the
question of the future of Pakistan? And my view is, perhaps not
as much as we pretend.
Thank you.
Senator Kaufman. I want to thank all the panelists. This
has been an excellent discussion.
And I want to thank the ranking member and the chairman, in
his absence, for having this hearing. I think it's been very,
very helpful.
Thank you.
Senator Lugar. Well, I join you, Senator Kaufman, in
thanking the chairman for scheduling this hearing.
In a sense, all the members are reading, as you are, that
General McCrystal has given documents to the administration,
which they are reviewing. It's not clear how long they will
analyze these documents before we know something about them.
Beyond that, there at least is a hint that General McChrystal,
after a certain indefinite period of time, may also forward
some thoughts about troop strength and at that point, the
administration may have a comment. But, this is why this
hearing is especially important for us, in terms of
constructive education and an exploration, really, of the
background for whatever decisions may be made, because
inevitably we will have some responsibility for that.
And so, we thank each one of you for your assistance to our
understanding, and we're genuinely appreciative, as Senator
Kaufman and the chairman have stated.
With that, the hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 5 p.m., the hearing was adjourned.]
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