 Good morning, my name is Robert Lamb. I'm the director of the program on crisis conflict and cooperation at CS is thanks All to all of you for coming this morning I want to start by thanking Finn Mechanica for making this entire day possible I'd like to request that you all please silence your cell phones So that we're not interrupted during this would I think will be a lively interesting discussion on Afghanistan and Pakistan We will be live tweeting this event From at CSIS underscore org So if you see Tony court has been playing with his cell phone, that's because he's tweeting the entire event Following the panel we will take questions from the audience Please wait for the microphone to come to you because we are We are live streaming this over the internet and we want to make sure that everybody can hear your question When you do get the microphone Please identify yourself and phrase your question as a question Please Don't don't give any speeches. I just you know keep your questions limited Lunch will be served during the third session beginning at 12 30 this session ends at 12 15 A little bit about our program the the C the program on crisis conflict and Cooperation known as C3 used to be called the post-conflict reconstruction project We're now in our tenth year at CSIS During a time when the field has changed fairly dramatically 10 years ago after 9 11 There was a lot of hope about post-conflict reconstruction In the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq we've had quite a lot of experiences with post-conflict reconstruction and We have found that it's time to rethink where we are in the field where we've come A lot of what we do in our program looks at development and governance in particular in crisis and conflict areas In particular looking at the the risks challenges and opportunities for cooperation that might exist I'm thrilled today to be sharing the stage With three distinguished panelists Anthony Cordesman to my immediate left here is the Arleigh Burke chair in strategy at CSIS He's a Defense Department distinguished service medalist He he participated in the 2009 Afghanistan review and has done quite a bit of advising On the conflicts in Afghanistan Iraq and obviously in many other places as well going back many years his his service to the field of strategy goes back all the way to Vietnam he has He has studied probably every major strategic issue That has arisen everything from energy to nuclear to Middle East And we're looking forward to to his comments today on Afghanistan and Pakistan Dr. Corey Shaki has joined us as well. She's currently at Hoover. It's formerly taught at West Point Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies And the University of Maryland School of Public Policy where she and I both got our our PhDs During the Bush administration. She was at the Department of State in the office of policy planning and also at the National Security Council where she advised on defense issues and Including interagency coordination and working with our our allies In Afghanistan in Iraq And finally All the way to my left. We have ambassador Newman former ambassador to Algeria Bahrain and Afghanistan Spend a good deal of time in in Baghdad advising on Political affairs and any number of other issues He was once the Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Near Near East Affairs in the State Department is a published author and Very well-known expert on all things having to do with the subjects we're talking about today So I thank all of you for being here. It's it's very easy to be pessimistic about the the situation Afghanistan the transition In Afghanistan and the US relationship with Pakistan Clearly in both countries, there is problems with with corruption problems with relations between civilian and military parts of the government There is a good deal of violence in both countries some related to insurgency some More terroristic in nature Strange relationships between government officials and various malign actors organized criminals Former warlords and commanders. It's a very challenging environment to work in in Pakistan last year with the death of Osama bin Laden the relationship with the United States broke down pretty severely and Here we are You know nearly a year later, and we're still struggling to to redefine that relationship It's somewhat harder to be optimistic about the situation in both countries But saying the situation is completely hopeless is not particularly helpful to those who are trying to figure out how to move The situation in both countries forward In Afghanistan, we can observe at least that ten years ago the country was essentially a medieval theocracy And say what you will about the state of the government and the economy both of which are bad There are at least not Taliban are a bad There are a number of former warlords and combatants who are participating in the Afghan political process and not necessarily still as Combatants in a civil war as they have been in the past. That's not to say that they might not be again in the future But there is participation in political processes formations of political parties generally speaking there are There has been progress in the cities probably more than in the in many of the rural areas There are some rights and some stability and some market activity that have not been in Afghanistan in a long time Again, that might not be sustainable that could collapse fairly quickly His history has shown us But we do need to acknowledge the progress that has been made and probably most importantly most Afghans Probably do not want the country to collapse into civil war They would probably prefer that their government would work and that their military be strong enough to defend the country and protect them without being a participant in the civil war these are some of the Some of the Observations that we can make that could potentially be built upon for the future, but again, it's it's all tenuous in Pakistan Most Pakistanis probably do not want the military to take over the civilian government again The civilian government is likely to complete its full term for the first time in some decades The judiciary is increasingly independent and self-confident and civil society is increasingly confident even in the face of a great deal of intimidation from Militants and extremists There have been some governance reforms that separated powers at the local level and established the requirement for local elections These are promising they have not been fully implemented. It's not entirely clear when they will be but at the very least they have put in place some Some incentives and some frameworks for reform in the future Most importantly in Pakistan there are a lot of Pakistanis who also want their government to function well and would prefer that There not be support to militant groups and terrorists operating within their borders Now you can't build strategy on optimism and you can't build strategy on pest on pessimism You need to to build strategy on a realistic understanding of the facts on the ground and what is actually possible In Pakistan it probably is not useful for us to to disengage The more we disengage with Pakistan the less influence will have in there and we already have very little influence on Pakistan's domestic politics and quality of governance for that matter So the challenge is how can we marginalize those within the Pakistani government military intelligence services who are Anti-American who are who take more militant views more hard-line views about the use of violence in and outside of Pakistan How can Pakistan's many moderates and reformers and Democrats be supported? What can the United States do? To make sure that they're not marginalized within Pakistan Those are open questions in Afghanistan There are open questions about governance and political settlement. It's an extremely difficult situation As we all know the government is often seen by many analysts particularly here in the United States As being one of the main roadblocks on the path to stability in Afghanistan It's not necessarily the case that we can depend on the Afghan government to be able to hold the country together To not be corrupt to build up a relationship with its own people Afghanistan is the kind of system that We don't necessarily Understand how to analyze but there is at least an academic term for it. It's called a hybrid political system Which means that there is a formal government that structures the overall systems of Decision-making and service provision in that country, but the formal government is merely the skeleton to that system informal actors tribal and ethnic leaders organized criminals insurgents and Various other individuals in Afghanistan are the flesh the muscles sometimes the tumors on that system Collectively they make up a hybrid system in Afghanistan To the degree we think that we're going to try to get the government of Afghanistan to have a monopoly on Governance and violence in Afghanistan I think we're probably fooling ourselves That's a long-term project probably the work of generations over the next two years Afghanistan will probably continue to be well Afghanistan will certainly continue to be A hybrid system and so the question is to what degree can we shape that hybrid system? So that it's stable so that there's not an increase in violence so that there's not economic and political collapse in afghanistan I've asked our speakers to talk about their views of some of the most important risks that we face in both afghanistan and pakistan On what they think are the most important us interests in both countries And what changes they think need to be made in the current approach? So i'm going to step down and let them give your um let them Give you all their views And I think i'll start with uh with tony courtesman You're welcome to sit or stand as you uh as you like Thanks very much. I'd like to talk specifically about the risks in transition And let me preface this with two points first It's by no means clear that if we can't achieve most of our goals Afghanistan somehow comes back under taliban control it may well divide We need to remember that for all the problems that are within The taliban and other insurgent movements they are relatively limited in strength and coverage They are tied to given belief structures and ethnic groups What may well happen is that afghanistan reverts to something very close to what it used to be a capital with a group of various ethnic and sectarian and geographic groupings And if that happens, I think it is also important to note That as countries go particularly in today's financial climate This is not a country of great strategic importance to the united states We are not in it because of its strategic importance We are in it because at a given point in time it was the center of a movement That conducted successful terrorist attacks on the united states Whatever happens for all the talk of a new silk road This is not going to be an area of major economic importance to the west To china to russia to the countries in the region it may be There are many other centers of extremism of al qaeda now Emerging as ones which probably are going to be more serious threats and in fact pakistan Is much more the center of al qaeda today Than afghanistan But let me go back to 2009 and say where are we on the road to transition and what I think will happen and do it very quickly We had I think unrealistic hopes on the part of some that we could deal with the problems Of corruption and effectiveness in the afghan government We will not make success All of the objectives that were formally on the table are not going to happen by 2014 And this is not a reflection on president karzai It is part of a very broad system of competing power brokers Of people struggling for money struggling for influence and struggling for security There will be better ministry. We will have trained more civil servants But by and large afghanistan is not going to meet the goals that were set in the afghan compact And the bodies which deal with corruption are almost uniformly ineffective and when they become ineffective Either end up with scapegoats or end up in being disbanded Whether that matters or not Is a real issue I suspect that as the money grows weaker and smaller Corruption will revert to the more affordable patterns We're not going to deal with the insurgent sanctuaries in pakistan It is brutally clear that whatever our hopes were That pakistan would turn against these insurgencies pakistan will focus on its own internal security issues We can talk we can meet we can get occasional cooperation But the hekhmatya group the hekhonic group and the various forms or groups of the taliban Are not going to be somehow pushed out Unless there is some kind of an anticipated peace settlement The sanctuaries in in pakistan in 2014 and 2015 will be very much what they are today That creates a massive challenge to security Our transition plan for the afghan national security forces is frankly not a plan Roughly a year ago. We were talking about expenditure levels of seven to nine billion dollars a year through 2020 For the afghan national security forces the force of over 300 000 of which Roughly 40 percent would be five different police forces And this is an important distinction because it's often confused with an army We are now talking about 4.4 billion dollars a year after transition Having cut our fy 13 requests roughly in half from what we spent in fy 12 We're talking about going down to 230 000 None of us really know what this means And this focus on manpower numbers ignores the fact that when it comes down to transferring responsibility Both within the ministries according to the department of defense reporting and in the training force We have not yet been able to put together the structure To provide sustainability the skilled elements of a force structure as distinguished from battalion elements Within the place we have a pattern of corruption local influence Which is going to be the pattern of corruption and local influence when we leave We have a peace negotiation If you go onto the website for the taliban You will find that they declare that the peace negotiation Is victory that they have won and basically we are forced to concede and we are talking to them because they've won That's not usually the prelude to a smooth compromise and effective transition out of a military position And I think that one has to remember what happened in cambodia where we ended up with the kinder gentler paul pot Taking over or what has happened closer in napal Pushing too hard for peace too quickly Creates two problems one is you may empower The opposition the insurgents in the process The other is no one knows what to plan for If we don't know whether there'll be a negotiation or it will be successful How do you plan transition at any level? When we talk about us force cuts It's important to note that we never Build up to the us force levels that we're called for in the original mccrystal plan And we have already built down far more than we had originally planned to build down Similarly, we never had the number of civilians that were called for in the strategy Whether that's critical or not is not yet clear But I think that the plans we had at the start of last year For holding on to the south and moving into the east are not tenable with the forces we are going to have left And the rate of reduction in the course of the period between june and september of this year Is going to create major problems In terms of afghan presence and structure As we look at the real power structure We still have a question. Can we have a successful election? At the same year we're in transition. If so, who will the leader be? Will it really matter? We often worry about the quality of the election for the afghan legislature, but nobody can really explain to me what it does aside from consume assets The constitution that we left basically gives the president power over virtually all of the revenues And that leaves provinces and districts with a structure That is inherently weak the last time I looked we were at about 25 percent of the goal For afghan officials in the field that we had planned in 2009 Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is hard to measure Some people would argue that these are enough When you look at the pressure that is coming from outsiders on what happens as we leave We don't yet know but we are seeing a step up In iranian activity and we certainly do not see a pakistan which has abandoned its goal Of making afghanistan strategic depth Whether india has changed its goals is another issue What is truly striking Is the absolute lack of commitment so far on the part of china or russia Both in aid and any other kind of active presence The most that russia has done is support us rather oddly in maintaining power projection In terms of the actual fighting let me just make a comment about what I have seen There are two sources of reporting on afghan security that are unclassified and official One is a report by the department of defense called the 1230 report. It's a semi-annual report Another is a report by the special inspector general for afghan reconstruction Two years ago those reports provided data on areas of insurgent influence Areas where the afghan government was or was not becoming more effective Maps of where aid was being spent a whole series of indicators All of them are no longer in the reports What we see today is a set of measures which bear a striking resemblance To what happened in vietnam We don't talk about insurgent influence We talk about insurgent significant incidents And insurgent initiated attacks Now strangely enough we've pretend to win by those criteria They don't take on our conventional forces and win So the numbers become very favorable relative to the peak fighting Of 2010 and that's exactly what happened in vietnam We almost never lost the tactical clash and of course it almost never mattered Because what did count was influence The growth of the ability to control or intimidate the population Something we no longer report upon It's very disturbing to me as we head into transition that we do this That we do not provide meaningful measures on where the fighting is Or the progress we're making or the areas of insurgent influence Influence After 50 odd years of working with the u.s. government wherever you see a massive drop in transparency It is not a sign of success Now let me just close with The economics of transition If you go back to the bond conference The afghan government submitted a paper Listing a whole group of reforms that's been promising for the last six years In the return for that it asked for between 10 and 20 billion dollars a year in aid through 2020 It did not describe how that aid would be spent And the figures were taken almost verbatim from a world bank study on transition Which is the same study that the u.s. Is using to the extent we have a transition plan There's a little problem The world bank estimate of the afghan economy is approximately half the estimate used by the state department And by the cia And this just illustrates the almost total disconnect In the level of economic data we have We don't know basically where our money goes We know how much we appropriate But we have no accounting system to say exactly where the spending goes Inside afghanistan And we have no formal measures of effectiveness As to what the aid programs are Please don't misunderstand. I think we have accomplished a great deal with roads with water and individual aid projects But if you look at these numbers as we go into the economics of transition We have spent since this war began 10 times the highest estimate of the afghan domestic gdp over the same 10-year period As that money goes down we risk a recession or a depression of major proportions And we do not have in any credible form The most basic data On the afghan population The afghan economy Or exactly what we have been doing with aid money and exactly who it's gone to Thank you. Thank you, tony. Cory So, uh, I disagree with that couple of tony's judgments, and I guess that's where i'll start I'm going to focus my comments on the risks though, and maybe we can pick up mitigating factors in that conversation The first place I think I differ with tony's judgment is that it does seem to me that the military piece of what we are doing in afghanistan Is going better than I think it seems to tony The the problem for me is that the military piece of it never has meshed with other elements of a strategy And those things are essential to us being able to capitalize on the gains that the military is making We have never had that right in afghanistan and now with the clock ticking down to 2014 Some of the essential bargains that we made in afghanistan I think need to be revisited in order for the transition not to simply result In something we're not going to like a whole lot better than we liked the 2001 version of afghanistan the first A big thing I think we are not doing is investing in Rethinking the structure of the electoral system and the distribution of political power in afghanistan. There's a terrific posting on shadow government by my colleague pal miller today that looks at The choices that we made what which of them are inherent in the constitutional structure of afghanistan Which of them are simply political bargains that we made? And one of the things that really strikes me about the governance structures that the united states endorsed both in iraq and in afghanistan Is the centralized nature of control and that's so out of character with a country that has all of that sort of vibrant State and local challenges to federal authority that It leads me to believe that the basic reason we do it is because it's easier for us to manage it that way Right, you put somebody in charge. You help them have authority over the country But that is as pal miller points out a terrible match for the culture and the politics of afghanistan And then essentially what we have done is allowed The afghan political elite to carry over The the constitution from when afghanistan had a king and karzai is currently invested in those powers There's not a regional balance to it. There's not a parliamentary balance to it as tony very nicely pointed out It seems to me in the time we have remaining That focusing on the structure of governance Where changes might be made to the structure of governance to provide for a more pluralistic and more representative afghanistan Is someplace we ought to be investing an awful lot of time and attention because If president karzai honors the constitutional pledge that he will not run again in 2014 Um, there's a real opportunity for bringing forward a generation of political leadership and putting in place Structures and practices that will make afghanistan a lot better than afghanistan currently is And that can begin to reconnect the people of afghanistan with a government that they have lost faith in And their loss of faith in their government is a huge impediment to our capacity to carry out our strategy A second Risk that i think i see and here's this is the second place i think i differ with tony It does look to me Like afghanistan actually does have the potential to revert to the 2001 afghanistan if we don't play the end game right And in particular if we apply the end game that the obama administration applied in iraq I think that is just a recipe for an afghanistan that reinforces the al-qaeda narrative Right. This is their big victory 10 years. We achieved nothing. They're in control of the country Al-qaeda Why wouldn't al-qaeda make that essential node of their worldwide operations? Because it would feed the narrative that We have spent so much time and so much effort trying to pull up by the roots and to substitute With a narrative that is about us having a positive vision for the country um Because ultimately this It's certainly a battle for security, but it's also a battle of narratives and who has an idea That that afghans will buy into Another risk i see is that we are about to convince ourselves of several things about America's ability to change and influence the world and whether it's worth it to do it But I think Feel to me a lot like the end of vietnam Right, but it's too hard that these countries don't actually deserve our help They're fighting against us as well as they're fighting with us That our ideas and values are not something that they share And that it's actually too expensive and too hard to try and create positive change And while i'm actually sympathetic to a lot of that emotion behind that because it is really hard and fighting and winning these kinds of wars is Uh confusing and contradictory and it's hard to tell when you're making progress And very often you only know far in retrospect when the when the victors in the country you are trying to affect tell their story That said It It If we allow ourselves to begin to believe those things That leads us to vice president biden's counterterrorism strategy Right where you just kill bad guys wherever you can find bad guys And you don't try and send girls to school solve childhood nutrition improve the quality of governance and In my judgment one of the main reasons the united states can perpetuate its Has perpetuated its global power It's because most people in the world and most countries in the world actually want us to succeed Countries and people don't actually work very hard against what we are trying to advance in the world very often And that's a huge positive element of american strategy and if we stop being something more than our military might The likelihood of other people wanting us to succeed and helping us succeed drops dramatically And that is actually a consequence of not trying to make the world a better place not caring about whether you know Ten years ago. There were 10,000 afghan girls girls in school now. They're 10 million. No, excuse me. They're 2.6 million afghan girls in school and That creates a different afghanistan in the long run And and we're about to convince ourselves that that stuff doesn't matter. We can't do it And they don't want it and that seems to me Likely to cause us a whole lot of problems in the coming two decades Another risk I see in the end game of afghanistan Is that if we adopt this approach if we decide hearts and minds are unwinnable and by the way, it's too expensive and too hard to do Um That it makes it much more difficult to get positive cooperation for other things we want to do Because after all if afghanistan's the place where You know the first attack on american territory in the last 50 years comes from And we don't bother to see that one through to a positive finish to one that secures our actual interests Um, then why would other countries that we are trying to persuade to do what is in our interests? Have any belief at all that we're going to see it through to where they and we benefit from it And perhaps the country it is most important to persuade in this regard is pakistan For reasons tony alluded to and that I think are self-evident Um another risk I think that is internal to the american logic on this is that Whole of government operations is really hard and we're not very good at it And we're about to convince ourselves that we can't do this All right, then our military is great at their job But nobody else is any good at their job and we need a strategy that Where the military gains aren't weighed down by failures in our diplomacy and our development and other things Again, i'm sympathetic to the critique American diplomats and american development workers aren't nearly as capable as they could be Um, but that's not because they are either stupid or ill meaning It's because we don't invest in their professionalism and the way we invest in the professionalism of the american military And we need to fix this. It's a structural fix. It's not impossible. In fact, businesses all over the country succeeded this The military succeeds at this Um, we can fix this we just haven't and we are looking at the consequences of having it Which is that our military's success outpaces our capacity to capitalize on it in diplomatic and economic terms But the solution to that isn't falling back to strategies that don't have constituent elements of diplomatic and And development and other aspects It's making ourselves as good at those other things as we make ourselves at the military success Um, another risk that i think uh, Tony very rightly pointed out is that the afghan national security forces cannot do what we expect them to do Uh, this seems to me very much an open question And while i see positive signs for me the the most significant one Recently was the the comparison of the studies that the american military did about green on blue attacks in afghanistan And then one that the afghan army did The american military did what the american military does so wonderfully and Enduringly well it critiqued what we could do better Right, what what it concluded is that we need to be more sensitive. We need to be more knowledgeable We need to be more respectful of the afghans, and i'm sure all of that's true Um, but it is a problem that focuses on us as the solution The afghan army also did a study and what they found is that the majority of green on blue attacks occur The perpetrators of them their families are living in pakistan So that tells you something about their commitment to afghanistan it tells you something about the potential for hostage-taking it tells you something about the um The likelihood of radicalization Not only did they identify those factors But they also have moved to require all afghan soldiers to have their families living in afghanistan So they not only identified the problem they identified solutions and brought them into effect And that suggests to me that the afghan national security forces are perhaps better than any of us are giving them credit for Um that for me is an important sign That said To the extent that our military operation still depends so heavily on night raids I think there's a real question whether afghans When they are in the leadership are going to be willing to do this in the way that we've done this I was uh quite taken aback in in um general alan's testimony a couple of weeks ago that he mentioned That we have conducted 2200 night raids in the course of the last year And he also said that 82 of them Captured their intended target and that only 1.5 of those raids Resulted in civilian casualties, and that's a very admirable statistic But that means that at least 330 times a year afghan civilians are being killed in the conduct of night raids right that's almost one that that's almost A death a day or several deaths a day over the course of the year that It's understandable to me why that's difficult for them to sustain It's understandable to me that when it's afghans conducting this raid So we'll have a much more difficult time building political support for that And so to the extent our strategy continues to depend very heavily on that It seems to me problematic Two last quick points first Uh, I think we are at risk of adopting a strategy where we quarantine field states And I would want to be a lot more confident in our ability to play defense Before I would shift our strategy that way. It does seem to me that even the abdul mutalib Bomb threat from december of 2009 Suggested me that we Want to have a layered defense and we want to be a lot better at the defense piece of it Before we start to shift our strategy that way and lastly Perhaps the biggest risk of all of the trajectory that we are on in afghanistan Is that we are reinforcing pakistan's paranoia about us abandoning them about india taking over in afghanistan About our fundamental hostility to their security interests And we really ought to in the course of the next 18 months find a way to deal with that If we want a an end state in afghanistan that we're going to feel achieves our security interests I've learned over time as many of you may have that when a speaker says I have only a few things to say or I'll be brief You should understand this is a statement of faith and not a fact and settle back in your chair Nevertheless, I am going to try to be actually on nine minutes Afghanistan is not going well You've heard a lot about that you see a lot about it depressed It is also an incredibly complicated situation And the result of that for analytical purposes is that it's very convenient for cherry picking Those who consider everything impossible and one should leave can find ample Evidence to support the conclusion those who Say the strategy is going well will pick a different array of facts The battling goes back and forth and positions get harder, but not wiser And it's very difficult to get out of this because it is so complex that those who study it or visit it as they begin to develop positions Can almost invariably find the examples to support the position they take in maintaining an open mind In this kind of situation is extraordinarily difficult, frankly That perhaps makes it useful to think about a few basics, but not Not to the exclusion of all the complexities To my mind there are Two big categories of risk To us strategically In afghanistan One is that a premature departure leads to a civil war I don't think it leads to a taliban reconquest, but I do think it leads to a civil war And in fact a great many afghans are talking about a civil war today and thinking about how they would conduct themselves and positioning themselves They're not planning it. Nobody's going to start a civil war tomorrow while we're there But the amount of discussion about the civil war when I went I was back in 2010 and in march in november of 2011 And the amount of talk had increased By march of 2011 and it had become Sort of common wisdom by the end of that year That civil war would draw in All of the usual suspects iran pakistan russia india And it would go on for a very long time take lebanon as an illustration in point Smaller country Poisonous as they were the external players were less capable overall than those that will play in afghanistan And that civil war has the potential to destabilize a very large part of central asia It is also going to draw pakistan in I think Because their view will be that they cannot allow the indians and their northern alliance Colleagues to encircle them and therefore they must support those who will prevent that from happening Which includes a certain number of people that we're fighting with I find it very difficult to believe that pakistan will be able simultaneously to do better at coping with its own extremism While supporting close cousins of the extremists in the war in afghanistan So I think the risk in pakistan gets worse And then a point that my colleagues mentioned It's a huge propaganda and moral shot in the arm for To use a simplified term jihadists The second superpower defeated god is on our side forward to victory I don't know where that plays out, but if you think that's a risk you can That's not a risk then I think you should think twice about It is possible that we will fail. I would say the margin for a kind of messy success Is quite narrow and it is narrower now than it was a couple of years ago and some of that is our own doing I would like to propose though that the debate about this needs to deal with Two basic questions You can decide that the risks that I describe Are acceptable risks Then the cost of trying to prevent them is not worth paying that is a reasonable position You can also decide That I overstate the risks, but then one should have a body of evidence To support that view Not a kind of bumper sticker the dominoes didn't fall in vietnam, so let's go absent Dealing with those questions what one has is a rather burial debate That is a little more like children saying i'm tired and daddy saying, you know, we've got 50 miles to go That is Understandable it is human. It is not intellectually enriching Uh So there are risks the chance of success. I think is quite low And there are a lot of reasons for that We were asked or I was asked anyway to talk a little bit about what it is we can do about it And that is of course Where you know years of diplomatic practice come from I don't care how gloomy it is You know my job is to figure out what it is. I can do about it Even if that might be hopeless I don't think it's quite hopeless here But in considering this I think we need to consider also where we are in the transition period For all the gloom and doom with a great deal of which by the way analytically I agree I agree with a great deal of what uh, tony had to say about lousy reporting from our Of what's happening We are only now at the point where we are testing the theory We have had considerable military success. Thanks gree in In the south where our troops are But we do not know whether the afghans can take that over We know that the our troops will have to fight some major battles in the east We know there is a plan for that and we know that there is a plan to do that with repositioning But we have not seen the results I could go on but what i'm really trying to say is this is a bit like finding you're in the course And you're about to take the midterm and deciding to drop the course before you take the midterm We will over the course of this next year Take that midterm and have a better basis to judge The transition strategy I think given the level of risk that I see it is important To use that year as best we can and then We judge whether we really Have possibilities here question about what it is We can do now there's there's always a lot we can do but we very you know We swing rather wildly between very large expectations and deep depression when the world doesn't change instantaneously and When one looks at what we can do I would say I have to say by the way this is unlikely but The most important single thing we can do Is to steady down on our intentions Because every player Takes position to some degree on the united states Those who side with us those who oppose us those who are fighting us those who are simply neutral are looking for their own survival And the reality is right now they have no bloody idea what we intend This is true of president carzai who has told me so it is true of his most fervent critics Who've said that they do not understand what we intend after 2014, but they have to survive We have a transition policy that is beginning to come into focus And maybe if we sign the strategic partnership it will but the fact remains that at this point Our intentions post 2014 are not very clear and our messaging is rather mixed What does this mean to the pakistanis You're trying we want the pakistanis to cooperate more with us pakistanis looking at a geostrategic situation Where it believes we will leave prematurely and the process we have undertaken will collapse leading to civil war And that's the strategic field in which they have to make choices Afghans are thinking the same they have 30 years of practice with foreigners leaving What does this do It creates hedging behavior you may have to steal more because you're going to have to run You tighten your ties with your ethnic and tribal colleagues because they're the ones who are going to fight with you if you're not going to run But if you do that you don't really give much of a damn about their corruption and their rapacious behavior You think there may be a civil war you start looking at whether you've got your colleagues as battalion and brigade commanders And where they're positioned and where they're stationed in the country And that takes precedence over professionalism because you're going to have to fight with them and survive So there are a whole series of hedging behaviors You want to negotiate with the Taliban, but you think you might be leaving You know this is a way to raise the price not to produce a rapid negotiation If you think negotiations are a rapid alternative to war you suggest that your appetite for war is less than your Opponents and you are simply raising the price or raising their propensity to simply wait you out I'm not against negotiations, but understand their parallel so If there is a single thing that is overwhelmingly important to our chances of success It is to define what we are going to do and put into it I have very little expectation that's going to happen by the way, but I was asked to say what could we do about this So I'm going to leave it at that. There are any number of bits and pieces I mean, I've been doing afghanistan for a number of years now. I first went there in 1967 And I can tell you there's nobody who actually understands afghanistan in a comprehensive way But the virtue of those who continue to work on it for a long time is that we could raise your confusion to a higher level of detail Thank you very much Thank you very much dr. Cordesman dr. Shaki and ambassador Newman. I wanted to begin the discussion By highlighting Where where ambassador Newman just left off. I went to Kabul a few weeks back It was a week after the quran burning soon after the the shootings at the ministry of interior and Kabul was on lockdown a lot of my meetings were canceled The the upside of that was that freed me up to meet more afghans And to a person every afghan I met said exactly what what ambassador Newman just said that there is uncertainty Afghans want to know what we're going to do the the problem The problem that a number of them highlighted was If we don't know how many You know us forces are even going to be there if we don't know what development projects are going to continue If we don't know how much money is going to be available How can we plan The afghan people are the ones who are going to be responsible for holding off the taliban or or dealing with them somehow the afghans are the ones who are going to be responsible for For running their government For holding up their economy If they don't know what the commitment of the international community and the united states in particular that they can count on That creates a sense of of uncertainty That leads to widespread feelings of vulnerability and a number of people told me Told me this that that the powerless and even a number of powerful people within afghanistan Feel themselves vulnerable that leads to hedging behavior both economically. We know that a lot of money is leaving afghanistan every day It's being expatriated by people who think that it is probably a safer investment elsewhere That there are a number of powerful people You know a lot of the warlords may may not have the the large followings that they used to But there are still a lot of people who are collecting small arms And trying to build up the relationships that they think they might need Just in case there might be a civil war The problem with hedging behavior is that it can very quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy How do we avoid that Some people say that if we if we say a little bit more clearly about what our intentions are between 2014 That we're essentially showing our playbook to the taliban and that'll help them plan better I'd like your opinion as to whether uh, that's the more important consideration or whether it's more important To help the afghans plan their own playbook I'll take a shot at that Because I think we've actually already told the taliban the main element of our playbook Which is when we're leaving And that has made the execution of our strategy extraordinarily more difficult And has caused everybody to start hedging years in advance of when they might otherwise have done so So I don't see a big downside to that but I do see two big opportunities and the first is as the ambassador newman mentioned the The agreement with the afghan government about what we are going to do where we are going to be And what kind of activities we're going to be engaged in over a longer period of time That will help stabilize the situation Not just internal to afghanistan, but also with the pakistanis. The second big thing is twisting arms at nato chicago summit To make sure that afghans have a reasonable prospect of what kind of international assistance is going to be made available to them About the continuing commitment of the countries that are currently fighting in afghanistan to help them see it through That too would really stabilize it and I very much hope that the obama administration will take advantage of those two big opportunities And it seems to me that they are I think we all know the numbers They're in the budget submission They're not going to change this is not a year where the congress is suddenly going to spend more money Than the president has requested We've made a massive cutback already in aid. We did it last year It's going to be cut again. The state department has not firmly issued the figure in the lco account But basically speaking when we go into chicago, we will go into chicago Having already decided we are not going to spend anything like the money that was called for In the original transition planning And going to allies for more pledges. We have some very good data on whether allies meet pledges They are historical and they're very clear But those are civil aid programs The problem is the massive expenditure in afghanistan has come from military spending not aid The total state department spending on the afghan war Was six percent of the department of defense spending over a 10-year period The state department percentage is dropping relative to defense even with the cuts And this is the last year fiscal 13 we can have a major impact on transition As i pointed out earlier, we have already Virtually cut the amount of money we plan to spend next year On the afghan national security forces in half in the budget request The tentative plan that went from seven to nine billion for the afghan national security forces Remember that money pours into the afghan economy It actually probably puts more money into the economy than the us aid budget by a factor of two to three We are going to go to four point four billion As the future planning figure and where a year ago we were planning to spend about 80 percent of that money We're now talking 25 percent Now going into chicago and getting more pledges is going to be like the bond conference And if you look at the world bank report, which is the only thing we have There is no us economic transition plan for afghanistan The world bank report talks about the massive impact of what's going to happen with or without chicago And you can see that validated in the report from the us special inspector general for afghan reconstruction And the issues are raised in the department of defense report Some of these facts as ron points out are who picks the facts We have three reports on this war that matter And I would suggest that it's about time we start reading them Because we only have one fiscal year to really handle this transition and we've already made most of the decisions ambassador newman there's There's one source of uncertainty is the question of numbers and committed the international community Another source has to do with governance and politics within afghanistan the capabilities of the government and so on And we're likely thoughts on both of those You know we are talking past each other just a little bit The original question was whether making the playbook clearer Would be an advantage Of course that it would Tony talked about how dismal the playbook is um And with with the usual deference that I have for my colleague dr. Goresman I agree the playbook is is not real good And frankly, I think our choice of numbers is Really a bit too low for the strategy Our ways and means are not as well in balance as I would like to see them But that said The afghan and regional expectation that we're just going that there is nothing Is so large that in fact Even what we are going to do if it is understood and publicized does have value within the political situation Which we were talking about which was your initial Initial starting point what people expect us to do the broad expectation is that we're all gone in 2014 So if you start talking about Dollar numbers and maintaining an afghan army You could have a big argument about whether that army is sufficient And you can also have an argument about how much of our dollars pours into the afghan economy an awful lot of that has gone in Some has a lot has gone into equipment and a lot of what has gone into the economy Has been construction of facilities, which we would not have been continuing anyway, but the size of the army and salaries that goes So I still come out that it is important To have greater clarity about what we are doing whether or not that policy is totally adequate to the transition But the second point I would make is It's kind of an operational one but Signing the strategic partnership agreement or bond Is going to have a one day Chicago is going to have a one or two day Half-life People forget documents very quickly So if we really want to use the greater clarity that may come out of this And I think you may see some more pledges on the afghan army out of chicago Then you're going to have to treat them as politicians treat their stump speech You give it over and over again And you don't expect that you can give it once and one or six months later why you have no constituents so Even if we get a degree a degree of clarity Whether adequate or not There will be an operational question which may look sort of this isn't the policy issue But it is a policy issue because if you do it badly you lose the if you don't do it You lose the effect of your document on governance And sorry to take so long to wind up to your question there We are now in a position where we have enormous suspicion between us and president carzai and many around him And some of that suspicion is because we don't like the way they do things A great deal of that suspicion has also been caused by us by our complete mishandling Of him and by the misperception of our motives And you know, I guess I'm harder on our stupidities than theirs, but The fact is we are now dealing in a situation with a great deal of distrust And we have a situation where we don't have clarity about whether we will stay This means our leverage for domestic and governance change is very low I wish it were better, but it's not So when we think about what we can do, I wouldn't be Too grandiose. I think our ability to restructure the basic form of the afghan government is almost nil There are too many you do that once before you hand over sovereignty once you've handed it over You don't have the ability to make that size change anymore Even if you screwed it up the first time There are issues could one should one bring the elections forward to late 2013 or Early 2014 while we'll have more security in country if you did that that's a very big political deal With the parliament. Can we push more into the provinces? There's an argument for doing it those things are worth looking at But I think one has to recognize that the amount of influence we have is for marginal change In governance over the next year or two I'd like to take three questions from the audience when I call on you. Please wait for the microphone to arrive And identify yourself and please keep your question very brief We don't have very much time left and we'd like to maximize the amount of time for a discussion Start with this gentleman here the microphone is on the way. I'm harlan olemann. I have two brief questions Before cori drew some of my fire. I was I found it instructive that nobody had mentioned nato So my first question is what do you think the impact of afghanistan is going to be on nato? Given that european publics are even more disposed against the war than a majority of americans And second about pakistan, what do we do? I think one of the many nuts of the problem Is that going back to pervez meshar when he was both chief of staff and president extending today to asaf sidari and Pervez kiani the pakistanis have always disagreed with our strategy In afghanistan they have argued from the very beginning consistently It was not going to work So why should they support the strategy that they think it was going to fail? And that's been their view collectively for the last five or six years What do we do to turn that around or is there really nothing we can do? And no matter what we think pakistan is just going to get worse until it gets better. Thank you very much question two Is at the table Thank you. My name is debbie smith. I run an NGO Paths and we're building a school for kids with disabilities in afghanistan and kabul. My question is for kori in regards to your comments on The increase of boots on the ground vis-a-vis state department Assets I it's been my observation watching Things in afghanistan the question very brief. Yes. I'm sorry That we have approached it for more of a top down as far as development instead of bottom up And i'm wondering if you could just speak to that And the final question back by the the back door, please Thank you Um, I first wanted to thank you for your comment about how the military does everything right and all the rest of the government is Does everything horribly? No, just joking. Um, my question is um How can we engage militarily? Or is it even possible to engage militarily? In a cooperative manner when diplomatic channels tend to close up or tensions tend to increase Is that even possible? Should our military leaders actually continue to push engagements despite military diplomatic Tensions, or is it just inevitable for the military engagements to suffer when diplomatic Engagements suffer. Hey, thanks very much. Why don't we begin with with kori? Okay, i'll take him in reverse order. Um, first i I think the example of three minutes each i'm sorry Chinese military to military relations with the united states are a great illustration of the fact that when the political relationship is difficult Actually, the quiet low-key cooperation we have in military channels is actually quite advantageous and even more important I myself am quite critical of the extent to which we are reliant on senior military people to perform Fundamentally diplomatic functions. My favorite example is Sending the chief of staff of the army to iraq to talk to the iraqi political leaders about that stalemate That sends a terrible signal about American diplomacy that we are over reliant on combat boots rather than Wingtips or or at least good black shoes For what needs to be done diplomatically which takes me to your point. I think you're exactly right It seems to me that we are Are not thinking clearly or strategically about how to do development assistance well And it's shocking given that we live in a country with the most tumultuous productive economy in the world That we focus on top-down things in part because um, they're easy also because gloriously we have the experience of NGOs and religious organizations and you know the big beautiful mess of american civil society Has in the last 15 years moved into development assistance in an enormous way and it's been great for the world But we haven't rethought the question of what do we need to do as a government in development assistance Should we actually ambassador newman has talked quite thoughtfully About this subject and you might want to talk to him afterwards But there's a lot that we ought to be rethinking about What does the government need to do at a time when remittances and civil society and private philanthropy Is doing so much in this phase and harlan to your point in 20 seconds. Okay So, uh, I won't talk to the nato piece but the pakistani piece the pakistanis do not have a positive strategy themselves For either their own success or success of what they want to achieve in afghanistan Working with them in a constructive way to nudge them towards Things that the afghans might actually want that the pakistanis also want and finding a basis for cooperation with india Is an extraordinarily difficult intellectual and diplomatic task, but it's the fundamental one Thank you very much, uh, tony Well very quickly harlan i think in the case of nato and this is a thing we all need to remember nato countries populations which have already discounted afghanistan As a good part of america has we forgotten about what happened in vietnam But while there are real risks what minimized the risk was that people already saw it as a war that didn't matter when we left And that greatly reduced the impact it had internationally the real problem I think in nato now Is whether nato europe is going to actually Ever implement any of the current strategy in terms of its more limited power projection capabilities And what coherent structure will exist there the afghan war is not the test of nato europe is The case of pakistan, I think we need to be realistic Without getting into it. I think that the agency's study of pakistan Probably is realistic pakistan today is what pakistan will be in 2014 It is not quite a failed state, but it is a failed government And its attitudes on the afghan war are not ones we can change through negotiation It will be a major problem and the sanctuaries will remain In terms of the whole problem of top down engagement and the rest The fact is I think when we talk about military diplomacy and civil diplomacy What I see in the us and pakistani teams are actually very good mixes of civil and military diplomacy But whatever you do in negotiation you can't do more Than the people you negotiate with will allow you to do And the problem isn't that they had the wrong strategies or the wrong methods of negotiation We will do a little better with pakistan because of military to military and civil dialogue, but not much And finally on the whole aid issue Understand that our prt structure already During 2013 will implode down to five entities undefined But no more than five The allied prt's will probably go at least as quickly That means that sometime by the end of 2013 The number of operational aid workers in the field for governments Will be somewhere like a third of what they are now And the whole surge will have disappeared How much money they'll have is anybody's guess That's going to put more and more of a burden on the NGOs if the NGOs can stay But the thing that's being forgotten here is that the contract security forces that many people depended on Will be gone and the replacement for the contract security forces Are one of the undebated failures of the development of afghan security forces The system isn't working and it isn't going to work in the foreseeable future I'm going to take your challenge for three minutes On the I think we need both top down and bottom up Recognize two things bottom up as vital as it is is very very difficult to scale up quickly It that the success of most small projects is that they are done carefully at a small level by their very definition You can't massively expand them And we are an impatient folk usually asking for very fast results That pushes us to both top down And it pushes us to often demand speed and metrics that are highly unrealistic Then to blame the project implementation when that fails I don't think I know enough about nator to say something useful on that I could speculate but it's not worth having on On pakistan one cannot possibly answer that question in the two minutes and five seconds I have left but I would say that we First of all if we had greater clarity about what we were going to do We would have somewhat more chance of influencing the strategic perceptions of pakistan without that clarity We give up the greatest single lever we would have To change their understanding of the world they have to live in and deal with Secondly, we alternate between We want a strategic relationship and we're mad Mad is in angry not as in our potentials That alternation is confusing and it serves little purpose And one needs to understand that both elements of pressure and of reward are going to have to operate rather continuously I don't think we do that On this last question Which is a very complex one about military engagement as civilians When it's if you're talking about negotiations Then I think the answer is these are parallel tracks. You do both simultaneously uh, prime minister rubin I'm very fond of quoting on this one asked how he could negotiate with terrorists said that I must fight terrorism as though There were no negotiations and I must negotiate as though there were no it was no terrorism And that I think is fundamental when you get down to an operational level. There are times when you need Frankly to control Your military targeting for political purposes. There are other times when you don't If you're going to run there are times when you need to do it even within the military If you're going to run special ops You need to deal with the local situation and not stumble across your own maneuver units and what they're trying to do That can also be true of pakistan So that we're very very antithetical to the idea of political control of military targeting But there are times when it's appropriate. We may never get past president johnson misusing it Um, but there it is. So you can do both But you need to be looking very carefully what you're trying to do and I'm 10 seconds over. Thank you My ambassador newvin dr. Shaki, dr. Corisman and all of you. Thank you for coming today