 Good afternoon, I'm Peter Bergen, really delighted to introduce a long time collaborator with the New America Foundation, Colonel Thomas Lynch, who is a PhD from Princeton in International Relations. The PhD dissertation was about arms control and then a very distinguished military career including advising Admiral Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and also a frequent at a Pakistan and now a distinguished professor at the National Defense University. Colonel Lynch, Dr. Lynch has just authored a very impressive paper, which we have copies for you, which is debuting today. The 80% solution, the strategic defeat of bin Laden's al-Qaeda and implications for South Asian security. He's going to speak for about 20 minutes, sort of outlining the key findings of the paper. I'm going to engage him in a little Q&A after that, and then we'll throw it open to questions. So Colonel Lynch, thank you. Great. Well, thank you so much, Peter, and thanks to all of you for being here today. Let me start with the appropriate list of thank you since I'm headed off in that direction. First, as many of you in the room know, and I see a lot of familiar faces here, thank you very much for coming today. I am a research fellow over at National Defense University's Institute for National Strategic Studies, and the inspiration for this paper and the emerging project related to it really owes to my two bosses in the Center for Strategic Research, Nick Rostow and Phil Saunders. So I thank them very much for the inspiration for this last year, shortly after bin Laden's death. Second, I want to thank another element of the National Defense University, our Captured Records Research Center, or CRRC, which is the repository for the papers out of the Saddam Hussein collection in Iraq, but also is the emerging center for a lot of other documents and records that are being released from our intelligence community having to do with Al Qaeda. And they sponsored a conference last September that Peter and I were fortunate enough to speak at, and a lot of the thoughts and the sentiments that you see expressed in the paper that I'll talk about today were first vetted at that conference, and I thank the CRRC and Johns Hopkins University for allowing me to use those thoughts and ideas from that conference in this paper. And then I want to also thank here directly the folks here at New America Foundation, led by Peter and the Security Studies Program for the offer to publish this piece with them, and also for the great work that I've had here with Peter's associates, Andrew Libovich, Jennifer Rowland, and of course the anonymous reviewers here during the process for the paper. So thanks for all that. And then thanks again for each of you for coming today on a Friday afternoon like this. I'm sure that many of you like me are anxious to head back to work on the Friday afternoon, but for the few of you that might be heading out from here this afternoon, I thank you for taking advantage of this opportunity to be here today. Finally, before coming into the substance of a small disclaimer and a requirement since I do work for the United States government, but in a position where I am fortunately encouraged to take divergent opinions from perhaps what the policy of the government is, I acknowledge here that my opinions and the scholarship you see in this paper and what I'll talk about today neither represents the official position of the Department of Defense, my employers at National Defense University or the US government. So thank you for bearing with me for those thank yous and disclaimers. What I want to offer today here though in our, the presentation is really kind of the, as Peter mentioned, the highlights of the paper here that's structured around basically two fundamental areas. First is asking the question of where does al-Qaeda stand after the death of bin Laden and of course there's been a lot of writing about that. Much of it I have found to be good and useful, but others of it I have thought to be a little bit disjointed and not technically focused on the unique nature and the essence of what al-Qaeda is as an entity in an organization. And an entity in an organization that I argue in this paper is distinct from the wider movement of those that wish to see change and dramatic change in the international context as to how Muslims govern themselves and to what extent non-Muslims are involved in that governance. Indeed al-Qaeda has been a conspicuous manifestation of a global ideology transposed and layered over many smaller groups with local and regional agendas. And my argument here is that bin Laden's worth in terms of fusing that together has been well understood but misappreciated, perhaps underappreciated for a long time and I thought it was worth exploring the degree to which his death had disaggregated officially and formally al-Qaeda from a lot of these other regional movements. And second was to discuss then the implications of what this means for South Asia, which of course has been the fulcrum of how al-Qaeda has been dealt with by our government and by other Western governments now for going on a decade and even if you count back to 1998, which I tend to do, closing in on a decade and a half. And so I thought it was important for us to look though carefully at the structure of South Asian security, a structure that's always been there, but one that tends to be masked heavily by American predilections and Western predilections to first look at it as a zone to deal with counterterrorism problems. And second, more recently, as an area to try to help the Afghan government pull itself up by its bootstraps and provide its own local security. And to me, and as you'll see here in the paper, and as I'll talk about, those two perspectives on South Asian security and how it matters in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and even to India is a gross misrepresentation of how those who live in the region see the security structure and the status as it now exists. And my thesis here is that bin Laden's death brings into sharper relief the real characteristics of, in Afghanistan terms, civil war ethnically based and then proxy war based between Pakistan and Afghanistan that matters a lot, and I argue matters now in a dominant framework way in the region and therefore needs to color proper policy and proper approach to policy in the region. And sadly, I'm here to tell you that I don't think that colors our policy right now and therefore we need to do a lot more with that. So those two pieces, let me go back and just cover them real quickly. In terms of the al-Qaeda and its evolution in its state, as I argue in the paper here, and I think it's been clear and effective in a lot of the better writings on al-Qaeda for a number of years, al-Qaeda as organized by Osama bin Laden and Alman Zawahiri, and that organization is a history of its own, some of it well documented, well articulated by authors like Peter himself and Stephen Kahl also from numerical foundation. That history definitely goes back to the end, very end of the Mujahideen war with the Soviets, but the permutations and evolution of al-Qaeda as a global organization, as a global organization wedded towards catastrophic terrorism really ties back only to the formal merger of bin Laden and Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic jihad, which of course took place somewhere in the mid-1990s and really culminated by bin Laden's return along with Zawahiri and his band to the border region of Pakistan, Afghanistan along about 1998. And as a consequence of that, when one looks at al-Qaeda, indeed how I've looked at al-Qaeda and the piece that I've written here, it's really a look at that organization is fused together starting in the 1997-98 period and its five essential elements. And those five essential elements, as I document in the paper, I believe are, first of all, its core organization for catastrophic global terrorism. Indeed, that has been the essence and the hallmark of al-Qaeda as an organization that's differentiated it from the dozens of other jihadi-oriented groups that focused on terror or terrorist activities consecutively and consensually from the end of the Soviet war in countries like Algeria, Azerbaijan, Sudan, Saudi Arabia for a lengthy period of time, Egypt for a lengthy period of time. What's differentiated the group was its core element and orientation, which was to take the methodology of terror and catastrophic terror, big spectacular strikes, to the far enemy, the countries away from the Muslim world in an effort to show them the degree to which pain could be inflicted upon them if they didn't augur to get out of the way of protecting corrupt regimes across the Muslim world that in the theory and the thesis of bin Laden were what was protecting and inhibiting the fall of the corrupt monarchies and autocracies that were across that part of the world. Second and incipient with this was this notion of becoming a vanguard to both organize and coordinate the disparate groups of global jihad. So the core oriented towards the actual physical training, inspiration, organization, and then pushing out of these wider catastrophic attacks. And then the vanguard role, which I think I, like others, trace back more to the inspirations at the end of the Soviet period of war in Afghanistan, which was to kind of organize this loose confederation of groups and get them inspired to go beyond themselves, to go beyond the local and the regional, and to be interested both spiritually and ideologically in the wider fight for a global caliphate and for a global world order. Next, and I think this has always been present, although it's a clear point of debate and substance, is to inspire, that al-Qaeda would be an inspiration and try to inspire the disaffected, we now call the lone wolf, or the individual, to out of frustration take to action, take to violent action, either against corrupt regimes in the Muslim world or against those oppressors or those non-believers in the non-Muslim world. And so that's a third element that's been and been a critical part of the way al-Qaeda has developed and seen itself since at least the middle of the 1990s. And this one is one that's distinct but related to the first two, which is al-Qaeda as a brand name. And indeed that brand name is the one that's affiliated to what its core organization or its vanguard has been associated with, and that is to be the ones that are successful in having the ability to strike out against the crusaders and the infidels, either within the near-enemy world or in the far-enemy world. And that brand naming, of course, because bin Laden, no stranger to understanding strategic communications, was pretty impressively important and really oxygenated, of course, after 9-11 when al-Qaeda became the focus above and beyond all the other organizations disparate as they were out affecting jihad in local or regional areas. And then finally, I think this is an important one. Indeed, this is the bridge one that I talk about as I transition to South Asia security, is the notion from the very beginning of al-Qaeda under bin Laden's organization after the death of Abdul Abzam in 1988, excuse me, was the base for certain conquests in Afghanistan. Indeed, I make a significant amount of effort in the paper to discuss what some of us in the West misunderstand, which is the degree to which al-Qaeda really saw Afghanistan as that first and foremost place where they and the jihadi organizations overcame an international ideological movement, the Soviet Union. And of course, they claimed, and they claim in their literature to this day, to have been the most important element in that, far more important than, say, Afghanistan-Mujahideen, far more important than Saudi money, and certainly far more important than Western orientation or organization to make that happen. And so those five elements, I argue, have really been the key components of what has made al-Qaeda what it's been, the focus of international terror and the focus of the jihadi ideology of catastrophic international terrorism moving forward. And so what I argue in the paper, though, is when you look at all those pieces and elements, one really needs to focus on bin Laden's involvement in those five to figure out where al-Qaeda is right now, first globally, and then where it is with respect to security in South Asia. And there's where I come up with the notion of the 80% solution, because I really do believe and argue here that one can see and should see bin Laden's death as being a very crippling blow, indeed a complete blow to three of the five essence pieces of what al-Qaeda international has been in the framework of bin Laden and Zahra Hiri, and that the other two elements have really been attritted by half by his death, and we will continue to see that attrition manifest and play out. So where do I see these percentages coming into play? First, the organization for catastrophic global terrorism, I argue, has dropped to at or near a 0% reading with the death of bin Laden. Indeed, it was bin Laden and Zahra Hiri's capabilities that brought together kind of the technical expertise of the Egyptians and the Libyans that came with Egyptian Islamic shahad and bin Laden's ability to encourage and excite financiers and those with a message that catastrophic strikes and terror were important to drive the West off and to better ensconce the notion of the importance of jihad worldwide, that those were unique capabilities that bin Laden, most of all, and Zahra Hiri at a lesser level, brought to the table in terms of the core organization. And when one looks at what that core organization was and what it's built out to, and I do this in appendix A of the paper, and try to assess who amongst the constellation of what's left in terms of core leaders could really try to rebuild that core, could find a way to transit globally and invest ideological and financial resources against then a really worthwhile training and organization framework that can bring credible international terrorist strikes to fruition in the manner in which we saw in places from the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, straight through planned attacks and opportunities that included the coal, right up and through 9-11, and really continuing, one might argue, up into the issues and the incidents in London in 2005 that what's left out there right now is really kind of Zahra Hiri and not much else. And I even look and argue that in Pakistan, Afghanistan in particular, that the last several years our campaign, our operations there have really brought down and drawn the curtain down on a number of core leaders who might have had the ability to reconstitute what been long and developed, but are now really left to be Zahra Hiri and perhaps two other names that many in this room will know, Yaya al-Libyan, who has been very, very important to the group over time, but has now been in and out of perceived difficulty over the last several years due to the campaigns in Western Vata, or then Suleiman Gaith, who for a long time was believed to be in Iranian protective custody or arrest, whichever your case and choice may be, but has now believed to at least since late 2010 been back in the Vata area. And that's not a lot that's left out there that can really organize. And you'll see in the annex, I actually argue that when you look at the group of folks that might actually matter to reconstituting an al-Qaeda core, that the majority of them, we control. The majority of them are in Guantanamo, right? The ones with experience really being able to transit countries, bring together benefactors, identify targets, plan and conspire to get training effects and activities, and then to continue to edge and egg on the type of planning that would lead to these spectacular strikes, beyond the lone wolf type strikes, beyond the types of strikes that are regrettable but not catastrophic or threatening to key pillars of Western society. And so in that context, Bin Laden's death really is a huge blow to the organization. It's inspiration, it's financial backing, and it's wherewithal to really push these types of attacks. And I think that's shown. And as I talk about in the paper, we've seen a continuous atrophy and the ability of this group under pressure to do much in these areas, and we should continue to expect that. Second, I argue that its vanguard role, indeed, to both organize and then coordinate global jihad amongst these disparate and different groups, while not attributed to zero is at least half as much as it was amongst the five constellations. So no better than about 10% of that being left. And I argue that as a consequence of both the natural attrition of the wider network that Bin Laden's al-Qaeda had built in the late 90s and early 2000s, indeed a network that had spanned effectively from the Philippines all the way around to Morocco. And one can go back and trace, and I do a little bit in Southeast Asia, the degree to which groups like Abu Sayyaf and Jamal al-Ismailiyah, which is, of course, out of Indonesia, Abu Sayyaf out of the Philippines, were the conduits and the places in which al-Qaeda affiliates who had been trained or vetted in Afghanistan would go to actually find the training camps to really practice building the bombs and rehearse the dry runs of the bombs that then would go off in Bali or other places, or run the trap lines that almost led to the strike against US interests in Singapore in the early part of the 2000s. And that that network, over time, in large part due to activities and actions taken by local governments as well as by governments from the United States, Australia, and other countries, that that network in the Far East is emblematic of the wider set of inspirational challenges for al-Qaeda. And that network has collapsed. And it's not that Abu Sayyaf doesn't exist anymore or not affiliated with the moral front. It is. And it will continue to be. It's not that Jamal al-Ismailiyah has totally gone away. It is not. But it's no longer effective as an element or a network in this coordination and organization for global catastrophic terror strikes, whether they be in this country, in Western Europe, or in Australia. And that's a major decline that we should continue and to expect to see. And we also see that Bin Laden's role in this, although many of us had doubts or questions about what it was, has been outed a little bit as a result of what we found from the raid in Abadabad. Indeed, some of what's been released in the open press pretty interestingly, and I would say convincingly, talks about how Bin Laden's latter years were spent in large part in frustration in trying to coordinate groups in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula and other places to stay focused, to not be looking to their local interests, but to stay focused and be involved with this wider organizational construct and this interest in doing these global catastrophic strikes against other countries. And so my argument is that his death takes away a lot of that, not all of it, but a lot of it, and we need to recognize that for what it is. Next, this notion about inspiring disaffected individuals towards lone wolf-type actions globally. Indeed, I think we've been saturated now over the last couple of years, and I join in the saturation with the notion that the last, that shouldn't say the last, that the greatest residual threat of international jihadi terrorism in general and al-Qaeda in specific is this inspiration to lone wolves to act. And I argue here that that's probably true, all right? That that probably is the significant remaining threat here, but that al-Qaeda, as conceived by Bin Laden's Awahiri and has developed, has taken some role but not a lead role in the inspiration of those kinds of strikes. That it's clear that Bin Laden and the organizational networks, especially the social media networks that al-Qaeda has been involved in the last five to 10 years have looked to encourage and tried to inspire this kind of lone wolf terrorism. Al-Qaeda, as it's developed, has neither been the lead entity in this, nor even necessarily been shown to be affiliated with some of the more spectacular and intriguing lone wolf strikes that have taken place. And I also argue that a lot of these lone wolf strikes have not really been spectacular strikes in terms of the ideology of al-Qaeda and the grand spectacular requirement to really cause the crusaders and the infidels extreme pain. That's not been the way in which these have developed. Indeed, the linkages that have occurred between Major Nadal and some of the other individuals in this country, as well as those in Western Europe, pale in comparison to the aspirations of the terror strikes that were being developed in the 90s and early 2000s. And that gets back to this notion about what this inspiration is. And so that's the second of the five elements that I argue still remain, but it reduced in about half strength capacity and will be the lingering dimensions of al-Qaeda going forward, but nowhere near at the level of danger or certitude that we had when Bin Laden was still alive. Then to the issue of the brand name of al-Qaeda. And here this is the third question, the second of the three that I believe really have gone to zero. And I think we're seeing more and more evidence of that over the last year. Indeed, the success of Bin Laden's group in bringing the strike and the attack against the Westerners and the Crusaders made al-Qaeda kind of a standalone entity as we got after 9-11. But over time, that has attenuated. Indeed, the strikes that had continued in the period right after 9-11 that had injured or damaged many Muslims in the Muslim world started to chip away a little bit at this brand name, but nonetheless left al-Qaeda in the forefront. But as over time, there've been other groups, other activities and other energies that have occurred. There's kind of been a loss of focus on Bin Laden's group as the originator of spectacular terrorism. And also that as the lore has developed, it really was a lore about Bin Laden's ability to escape and to live with impunity outside of the efforts of the United States and Western countries to run him or Zawahiri to ground. And what May 2nd, 2011, and I use May 2nd here for those of you that may track May 1st because that's Pakistani time for this incident, what May 2nd, 2011 did was really explode the balloon of this impunity that Bin Laden had, right? There's still probably a little bit of that left with respect to Zawahiri, but every site, every element of the Bin Laden network that was based upon this lore, this impunity has really suffered a blow since then. And I would argue that Al-Qaeda's brand name importance really died with Bin Laden in that Abadabad raid. Finally, this notion of Al-Qaeda and the importance of it being the base and the inspiration for certain conquests in Afghanistan. That has also been important and it's been important for a long time for Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, but that importance has been masked by what I think is becoming more and more apparent even since the Bin Laden raid, which is the fact that there have long been fissures and divisions between Al-Qaeda's senior leadership and the Taliban. Indeed, while I would argue that it's clear that there's an ideological affiliation between the Taliban in terms of the desire for the way in which societies are organized, there's always been a deeper schism over whose Afghanistan a Sharia law country would be. And that shows up in many different ways in terms of how the interaction went on between Bin Laden and Mullah Omar. And really indeed between Bin Laden and some of the other critical players that we now know as household names, but 20 years ago were involved and we didn't know as household names. For example, Haqqani, where Bin Laden had a significant personal relationship for a long time or Eunice Callas, who was a forerunner of Haqqani and a separate warlord during the Mujahideen days, but who also had a real personal relationship with Bin Laden and one that even led to Callas being the one who flew down from Pakistan to Sudan to help the return of Osama Bin Laden in 1998 when the Sudan had had enough and said you need to get out of the country because we're under too much pressure. And from that constellation, Bin Laden developed other personal relationships to include with Mullah Omar, albeit never a close one, but one that as many of you in this room know had a unique circumstance where Bin Laden himself pledged oath or loyalty to Mullah Omar as the titular leader of the faithful, leader of the ummah in Afghanistan in particular. But that bayah or oath has no corollary in the residual or the remaining Egyptians and Libyans who you currently see on lists of those who are senior leaders in al-Qaeda. And it's my contention here that the absence of that bayah and the absence of that bonding really does split what was arguably the last and most important vestige of the Taliban seeing some oath or allegiance to the wider global terrorist vision of al-Qaeda. Indeed, the Taliban lost a lot when they refused to renounce ties to al-Qaeda, but continued, I would argue, to not renounce those ties and will continue to not renounce them because of the personal relationships that are involved. And the important dimension of Bin Laden's death in this is that now those groups and organizations who were in the Taliban constellation who might have had affinity or affiliation with Bin Laden, and now have got to look much more carefully at their strategic masters, right? And that strategic mastership really is all about the security interests and preferences in Pakistan, not about the choices of an extended network of Egyptians or Libyans or even the remaining Saudis or Kuwaitis. Not that they're totally gone, but when the Taliban look at where they turn to survive and thrive or to be harassed and eliminated, it's not to the network and the affiliation anymore with this wider al-Qaeda constellation. It is, in my estimation, especially since the death of Bin Laden now, that they must turn and understand where they fit in the Pakistan perspective of its security interests in Afghanistan and with respect to India. And so it's from that constellation, and I leave you with the assertion then, that the United States counterterrorism program really can and should be credited for having achieved an 80% solution on reducing the five major areas that our major enemy in the world has been oriented around. And I think we've understood that since May 2011 with the death of Bin Laden, but I think we've underappreciated that in many, many areas, almost as though we've got our eye on what we've done effectively in counterterrorism and we still think we have to do more and more of that in order to get us further and further along. And so the question then becomes diminishing marginal returns. How much more do you go to eliminate that threat? Recognize that you probably can never bring it to zero and recognize that a lot of it now has to do with kind of disaffected regional and local organizations or lone wolves inspired by things that don't necessarily subject themselves well to hard focused military power, hard focused intelligence power, and then what do you do in terms of how you address that or rationalize that into your policy? And that's where I turned to South Asia and really the corollary of the extension then of the implications of Bin Laden's death. Because my argument here is that given that Bin Laden's death breaks the tenor of the tie between the global jihadi franchise and the Taliban, then one of our gravest fears, which has been for a long time that somehow if Afghanistan falls for some reason either under the total or partial control of the conservative Pashtuns that are arrayed within this Taliban constellation that somehow that will be another moment of history where al-Qaeda gets to claim absolute victory in Afghanistan and having defeated another empire and that that in turn will inspire a resurgence if you will of global oriented international terrorists and activities. And my argument here is that that likelihood is dramatically and if not completely attritted with the death of Bin Laden. Indeed, there is no extant logic to what's occurring right now that would allow a credible claim by al-Qaeda or its leadership that it would be responsible for either the very unlikely defeat of America in Afghanistan or the potentially more likely slowly attritting influence of America in Afghanistan. Indeed, the Taliban constellation that now works in Afghanistan really relies very much on its support base in Pakistan and its tolerance in Pakistan and it's those preferences that matter. And so I think the risk or the threat of that claim being one that we should fear as another redux into what happened at the end of the Mujahideen fight is a non worthy sequitur and one that we really need to review carefully in light of the actual nature of the ties that no longer bind between the Taliban and al-Qaeda as constructed by Bin Laden. So what are the implications for South Asia? And here's where I spent a lot of time in the paper indeed it's the area where despite my soliloquy in the last few minutes is where I'm most concerned. And I'm most concerned when I look at this area an area that I've worked in or worked around either military uniform or now as a researcher for the better part of the last nine years in that in light of the erosion of the importance of al-Qaeda in that region what has risen to the fore is the importance of Pakistan's interests and preferences in the region and how Pakistan perceives what has been happening. Over the last several years. And so while I can stand here and argue as I do that America's role from 2000 to nine to 2011 has been important in Afghanistan and in Pakistan really has been important to help get us to the position where we have reduced al-Qaeda to zero in its core element in that part of the region and really eliminated its brand name residents and put into position where it can't claim victory in Afghanistan even if things were to turn against the coalition. What I fear is that we have also overseen during this period of time a dramatic shift in attitude or I should say on a shift an exemplification of attitude and amplification of attitude in Pakistan that our presence in Afghanistan, America's presence in Afghanistan and what we're doing there with the Afghan National Army and with our intelligence assets is really a stalking horse for Indian interests. And so what they believe we've been doing by establishing an ANSF that can stand on its own two feet and putting together a counter-terror network that both helped lead to the capture of bin Laden has also helped run those drone strikes that we now all acknowledge in public have been going on in the western part of Pakistan that that network is perceived as being designed, organized and arrayed such that it benefits President Karzai who is seen in Islamabad and especially in Raul Pindi as a mere agent for Indian interests, all right? And in addition to that because of Pakistan's extreme sensitivity to the manner in which we penetrated their country on the raid with bin Laden and the manner in which other trans-border actions have taken place without their imminent knowledge, there is extreme phobia in Pakistan that our intelligence structure which we believe and argue is counter-terrorist oriented is really oriented against them in two areas. One oriented against them because we establish baselines and we move to do things so we can learn about their nuclear weapons which they are convinced is us moving in a direction either to neuter their nuclear weapons or to give all that information to the Indians so the Indians can neuter those weapons. And secondly, that our activities and actions against militants that they believe are not part of the global threat either to them or to their allies i.e. the Hekanis, the Khmadiyars, the Omars guys that more and more pressure on those, much less Lashgri Tayib or some of the others that are more even tethered to the state in Pakistan that more and more knowledge by us of those agencies and more and more pressure by us on those organizations is really also a stalking horse for Indian interests and activities and that they must resist that. And as a consequence, what is going on here I would argue and what I argue in the paper is over the last several years is us needing to come to grips with the fact that Pakistan's organization for security really not only values but believes it's essential that it retain a militant arm, okay? What we call a terrorist arm but what they see is vital and essential because they don't have the forces to stay and guard along the entire Afghanistan-Pakistan border against what they perceive as a Afghan military that's likely to do New Delhi's bidding, whether it stays together or whether it falls apart. And I add in this that Pakistan and from everything I have seen minor actions with them in their officer corps really expect the ANSF to fall apart and they expect it to fall apart such that more than 80% of it will go and fight for what they perceive to be the Indian-aligned Northern Alliance forces, right? The Tajiks, the Uzbeks, the Turkmen and the Hazaras and that maybe the scraps will come in their direction and join their militants, all right? And so the last year and a half or so one can really see a situation where from Pakistan's perspective all the U.S. success against Omar and his group in the south of Afghanistan has really been beating down an asset that they need to deal with an Afghan army starting to operate on behalf of New Delhi. And as a consequence, that they can't afford to see the group like Heqani or Heqmadi or these other groups take the same beating. As a matter of fact, passively, they need to see those groups do better and do better in some of the areas where Omar's guys can no longer operate because if they don't operate in those areas, if they don't have influence in those areas, whether it be in eastern Pakistan or in the spectacular strike occasionally in aggression in eastern Afghanistan or the spectacular strike in northern Afghanistan, then they lose influence and they lose ability to have a credible force in a looming proxy war. And from that perspective, I argue here that America's understanding of what the Taliban is needs to alter. It's not an agent for al-Qaeda anymore. Matter of fact, it's in my argument here the only way it could become an agent on behalf of al-Qaeda's international terrorism would be if a proxy war in Afghanistan got going to such a degree that Pakistan's national security interests would be to totally turn a blind eye to aid and sucker from the worst of the militants in the global community and let those go and pass into Afghanistan. Short of that, Pakistan has shown over and over again to include with the capture and the arrest of several of the individuals you'll see in appendix A that they have only a limited tolerance for those that are international terrorists either in their country or passing through to Afghanistan. And we should expect them to stay that way unless or until they believe that what's left in Afghanistan is at such a level of disarray and such a level of disadvantage for them in terms of a proxy war that they have no alternative, okay, but to better leverage the international forces that right now they are at best ambivalent about and at worst willing to see us kill off when we coordinate with them going forward. So what's the implication here? The implication for you as policy is the following. First, since our stated goals in Afghanistan and Pakistan have been since the 2009 policy review, one, to a tritz and defeat al-Qaeda and second, to prevent Pakistan from losing control of its nuclear weapons. That we've achieved the former in spades and continuing then to run drone strikes or to run other operations cross-border against elements that are no longer tethered tightly to al-Qaeda but are really tethered tightly to Pakistan's perspective of its security that we are risking the kind of capital that we need to achieve or succeed in our second area which is to have enough of a presence and have enough of a dialogue with Pakistan to help it make sure it doesn't lose control of those nuclear weapons or have those get into the hands of either someone who would use them for catastrophic interstate war or someone who will allow them to get in the hands of somebody who would want to do something with a international or a regional terrorist plot with nuclear weapons. As a consequence, our policy choices since bin Laden's death have been counterproductive in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, as we've continued to try to tout the NSF and then talk about our withdrawal, we've failed, I argue, to invite Pakistan's security apparatus into the formal talks over how Afghanistan looks. And more importantly, we've failed to think about the implications of not having Pakistan in a discussion about what our residual force looks like. Because if in Pakistan's perspective, our residual force still retains enough counterterrorism, enough intelligence, and enough strike capacity to put at risk them at any given time, I either, we haven't developed rules of the road that say, we're interested in al-Qaida not coming back across this side of the Durand line. And we're so interested in seeing you not allow them over there and we're here but we're not going there. And if we don't work out those rules of the road, Pakistan will be convinced that all we're about is still waiting to unilaterally strike at their crown jewels, the nuclear weapons or the militants that work for the state. And in Pakistan, the continued pursuit of unilateral actions or strikes against middling-level al-Qaida figures who can never resuscitate an global organization. Or even more importantly, I argue, against those militant groups that are sinews of the Pakistani state, read the Haikannis plus a number of others, is really only setting in place a circumstance where we're in a lose-lose for our policy. Because Pakistan will continue to push against both of those. It will continue to push with several degrees a plausible deniability against a circumstance where their militants are disadvantaged so they can't play in what they expect to be a American withdrawal come collapse in Afghanistan that would leave them needing those groups to deal with what they perceive to be a hostile Northern alliance underfunded by India and eventually to be bolstered by the weapons and the munitions that we have put in play with the Afghan National Army. And as a consequence of that, the appeal here is that our policy in the region needs a fundamental relook, and not one that continues to pursue the kind of shoot first talk later to the Pakistanis approach that we've pursued since we took care of bin Laden in May of 2011. And also in Afghanistan looks much more towards finding a way to broker in Pakistani security interests as difficult as those well be to negotiate and to negotiate those seriously in earnest over the next one to two years. Well, we still have a force that we can tailor or taper in a manner that will allow us the kind of presence to monitor what we don't wanna see happen which is an implosion in Pakistan that would threaten the region either in a regional war or in the loss of these nuclear weapons or in a condition where our absence would lead to a proxy war going on in Afghanistan to the extent that it would threaten either even further regional instability and the potential use of a nuclear weapon by a Pakistan deathly fearful that it's about to lose control of Afghanistan to its Indian nemesis. So with that and that argument, I offer again my thanks for allowing me to review it here with you. My thanks for all being here today and to offer that summary as a way to set up our father's questions and answers. Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Colonel Lynch. I was brilliant. Very good. Let me, while agreeing with everything you said, let me just throw up some counter arguments. The first would be, you know, Mullah Omar has now had more than six months to say, you know, that deal that we had with bin Laden, you know, he's dead, you know, and he hasn't said anything. And if he hasn't said anything after six months, he says to me, he might never say that. The perfect opportunity to save the Soth of Allegiance that was abrogated is the death of the person you have the oath that you've made the oath with. So Taliban has had 10 years to say we reject al-Qaeda in all its works. They've now had the death of bin Laden as an opportunity and they haven't taken it. Do you expect them to take it down the road or is it hard to make any predictions about somebody like Mullah Omar? And is it kind of a case of mirror imaging to think that he'll behave like a rational actor that we would presume he, I mean, I don't think he is a rational actor. If he was, he would have done different things even after 9-11. No, I think that's a fair question. And you're posing that someone who when asked to offer an opinion in the positions that I was in in previous years, always came back to that very point. That if Omar wasn't willing to, through an intermediary like the Saudis or others, say he was foreswering, you know, this affinity with al-Qaeda, then what basis could we have for moving forward with him? But I believe that the absence of a declaratory policy now that bin Laden is dead is much less dispositive. And I believe actually that it is unnecessary because I believe that the nature of the interactions that one can trace between bin Laden and the constellation of those in the wider Taliban grouping, and I include in there Haqqani and what's left of the Qalis group and Haqmadi are on others, that there is such little evidence of real interpersonal ties or interaction between them and certainly Zawa Heery, who of course has all the personality, you know, of a viper from everything we've been able to read, or that constellation of Egyptians and Libyans that's left. And since bin Laden, we know, use a lot of personal emissaries that appeared to be Pakistanis or others to kind of liaise personally with Omar indirectly and with his others. I've looked to see if there's any evidence of this kind of interaction continuing between Zawa Heery and the Egyptians and the Taliban. And there is little circumstantial evidence to say that is continuing. And there's a lot of history to say that it's unlikely that it ever developed. And so, well, I take the point, and I'm certainly one who's made the point in the past, that why wouldn't he declare? I think it's also important to separate between declarative policy and the most likely dimensions of where this movement is now. And as a consequence of that, I look at the incentive pattern and I say, where does Omar need to turn right now to survive? He needs to turn to the Pakistan military security establishment and intelligence establishment to make sure he knows his place in that environment. And to me, that's the ultimate arbitrage here that says him turning back to a bin Laden or al-Qaeda global constellation movement has got a strategic check in place, which is the essence of survival for his movement, which now even more so, and much dramatically more so, tethers to the Pakistani state. You could make an argument that one of bin Laden's most toxic legacies accepting the 80% problem that we or themselves, they've created for themselves and their attrition, the one of bin Laden's most toxic legacies is to kind of communicate his ideas to groups that don't call themselves al-Qaeda, like Lashkar-e-Taybo, which after all, sought out in American and Jewish targets in Mumbai in 2008, or the Pakistani Taliban that sent suicide bombers to Barcelona over the same year, and then of course sent Faisal Shazad to Times Square in May of 2010. And that one of the legacies that he would, if he was around to be proud of, is the fact that he's able to communicate ideas to groups that did have only a kind of nationalist interest. And they've now sort of, without saying I'm al-Qaeda, have started behaving more like global jihadis. I think it is an important legacy, but I think there's some qualifiers that I would apply, and I do a couple of these in the paper. And with deference in the room to those that are even better at Lashkar-e-Taybo than I am, let me start here by saying, I think Lashkar is an interesting case that perhaps we air in making too much of in terms of their international aspirations. While clearly they have international ties and tethers, a Lashkar strike inside of India is inherently consistent with what they have done and programmed to do for a long before the al-Qaeda brand name or Bin Laden inspiration was there. And the fact that the ideology that is kind of, defensive jihad of Islam can be expanded or extended to Jews, crusaders, and infidels, I think is explanatory of the fact that those were not unreasonable target sets in Mumbai for a Lashkar oriented on what it would normally try to strike. The other examples that you raise, I think are important though as well, because I think this gets back to this devilsome notion of how much military presence in Islamic country is tenable over what period of time. And I really believe that the Faisal Shazad incident where the Tariki Taliban Pakistan appeared to make good on the threat it made just after Baitullah Massoud had mysteriously died at the hands of something launched from the heavens is an example of kind of retaliatory jihad and can be argued as not necessarily encapsulating this notion of well we're out to do this because this is the right thing to do objectively but rather an incident or an episode of retaliation. And I take the point about the elements being dispatched to Spain. I'm still not convinced that that also wasn't some type of an effort of kind of retaliatory strike that if we are not in a position as being seen as being aggressive against those local or regional interests that you would have then the same traction for this global ideology to move forward and move out. And so I think it's a reasonable question. I think it's one that our policymakers need due diligence on but one that I would argue has changed in terms of its analytical imperatives over the last several years and especially since the death of bin Laden that the less we have as a presence and the less we're seen as being aggressive against especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan, those local groups the less incentive for the far enemy strike there will be. The burden of your paper suggests that al-Qaeda which was a national security problem on 9-11 is now sort of a second order threat not dissimilar to say if they got lucky a Timothy McVeigh-like attack where they would kill some Americans but not very many. If al-Qaeda is not a national security problem for the United States, I mean zooming out quite far not just in terms of our South Asia policy but I mean what does that say when we're spending $80 billion a year on our intelligence and $700 billion roughly on our, you know how should we, what are the implications of that for our both our national security policy writ large because we seem to have made huge investments I just read today that we now have 21,000 people on the no fly list on 9-11 there were 16 so there's probably a very legitimate reason for a lot of those people to be on the no fly list but if this is really not a problem anymore the scale that we used to conceive of it what does that mean going forward? No, I'm taking that as a very friendly question. I don't know it is a friendly question because the paper is very persuasive. Exactly and thank you and I do think that this is where our work is cut out for us because it does take a lot of energy and passion to restructure as we did after 9-11 our national security framework both in terms of where we invest forces, intelligence operatives and other activities overseas and then as you indicate what we do with terms of our homeland and how we secure and those bureaucracies stand up grudgingly and go away very stubbornly and if ever and the mindsets that go with them also struggle to resolve and as a consequence of that what I've seen over the last year is both some encouragement but still huge disappointment analytically for how we've come to grips with where al-Qaeda is. It has seemed to me that the bureaucracy has wanted to grab on to what I call the 20% residual and argue for retention of the trappings of where we have built ourselves to over the last decade and that especially concerns me in terms of our overseas footprint because I think there are a lot of things that we've developed over the last year in terms of our intelligence operations, our special forces operations, a very limited conventional set of presences and how we work with foreign governments that is excellent and is the right answer to that 10% of the regional stuff that's left out there that we can deal with in pockets in Yemen in conjunction with Saudis and Omanis and others in Somalia for heaven's sake because we have universal access from the sea and they don't control their own sovereign country and in places like Morocco and other parts of North Africa where I'm not saying the threat is trivial but it's not targeted at the level of catastrophe there. So I think we have many of those seniors in place but we still have a legacy of wanting to leave large residual forces in place without orientation on the local or regional conditions that more underpin where the focus is of the jihadis that are there and that's why South Asia, in addition to being in my research portfolio stands out so starkly is because we've made the run at trying to defeat the Taliban over the last couple of years. We can argue that we never had enough forces originally to do that. I couldn't possibly disagree with that but having said that we may not have even succeeded then and so now we're at a place where we are either gonna have to figure out if we want to declare war against those that kind of underpin the Taliban for their own interests that country to the east of Afghanistan which I see no way, shape and form us doing with our resources, our interests or we're gonna have to better understand and accept that the security dynamics of South Asia this Indo-Pakistani dynamic that layers over the ethnic grievances in Afghanistan that's always been there but that had been kind of like an iceberg going over the top of it, you know, has been there. That's receded and therefore our presence and what we leave behind has got to be more oriented towards diffusing the issues that would cause a potential proxy war to really get going now between two nuclear countries, right? And in the 1990s, you know, the Civil War that was going on there at that time which had Indian interest in the North Pakistan, that wasn't two nuclear countries, right? That was that predated explosions in Pakistan and India and since that time Pakistan is now the fifth largest nuclear weapons holding state. This is not a forecast of nuclear war in Afghanistan, don't get me wrong, but it's a forecast that the risk factors of that happening if our withdrawal is either so precipitous and so reckless that it allows the oxygen to go into civil war to develop or if us staying does not acknowledge that we need to as difficult as it is, negotiate with the Pakistani military intelligence apparatus as to what our residual looks like, what it will not do that's threatening to them, what it will do when our key interests are involved and I'm arguing our key interests are not eliminating the Haqqani group at this point, that if we don't take those approaches that we in the wider picture really miss the change that's augured here. So I nest underneath your wider point and say yeah, we've got a lot to do in that area but I look at the regional point and I say this is a first place where we can have some influence and let me just tag one more point on there because I wanna come full circle and be a little bit optimistic. I take some optimism from our latest counter-terrorism strategy back to your point because I think our latest counter-terrorism strategy does start to talk about resilience in the face of terrorism and I think if one sits and thinks about that a little bit, one can take from that this notion of a political superstructure that is for so long tried to work towards a zero sum terrorist outcome that we are now trying to recondition ourselves almost like going through psychotherapy about the fact of you will never drive out all terrorism that could be inspired by this thing called jihadism that lone wolves may still be there, that allies may still get struck but that you can without having the superstructure or the overseas footprint we have right now do less, do it smarter and still protect yourselves to an acceptable level and so I see some positive in that but I see us kind of only putting a toe in that water right now Peter with a long way to go. Well that's why your paper is so important kind of Lynch because I think for a politician to say even if that person knows it to be true that al-Qaeda is essentially done politically it's impossibly it's very very difficult to make that statement because if you're wrong what if Christmas day AQAP had blown up 300 Americans over Detroit? I mean politically these statements can never be made so that's why I think your contribution here is so important because I think it gives people more space to say hey we need to move on we need to rethink but just one final thing on the Pakistani military intelligence what do you think that sort of de minimis kind of what would be satisfactory to them in terms of our post 2014 presence in Afghanistan? You know this is very difficult because I mean as someone who and as many of you in the room know have had a lot of interaction with our Pakistani friends in the military and intelligence over the last several years that quite often what they say and what they mean diverge what they say is that they want a friendly government in Kabul that's non-hostile or threatening to them where the rights of aggrieved Pashtuns are properly considered and taken into effect and where their critical security apparatus read their nuclear arena and their militant groupings are not put at risk by nefarious outside agents read India. Now within that though when you then say well what does that mean then it gets very difficult to see how our posture and remaining posture makes sense because when you factor all that in and you figure that what they say nests with what they mean in terms of the fact that they see our counter-terrorist presence and the intelligence structure that built up around that and I pay some homage to that in the paper by the way I think we also underestimate just how enormously creative and functional our intelligence apparatus grew into in Afghanistan and where we could in Pakistan from 09 to 11 and having served there from 04 largely right the way through Admiral Mullen's tenure in 10 I mean it was a spectacular explosion of capability which gave us the ability to do what we've been doing in Western Fata and then with Bin Laden but is also inherently and extremely threatening to the Pakistanis because they believe we're reading all their mail now and they believe then we know where the nuclear jewels are and that we're willing and able to go after them so I mean that's difficult. What they mean by Pashtuns is they mean Karzai and puppets that spend any time in India or aren't affiliated with groups that we can manage, notice I don't say control here because I don't think there's a control, it's not control, it's management and management sometimes by very brutal means in pitting one group against the other, right? That's how the Pakistanis, but they don't control that but they also want to make sure that their groups of Pashtuns are not disadvantaged and right now Karzai and those that are affiliated with anybody who doesn't work with the Northern Alliance are considered to be tainted by them and therefore that's a problem and also when they say that they wanna feel not threatened, they mean they want to have some guarantee that the ANSF isn't gonna suddenly take all this weapons and all this training and then become a foreign force of Indian persuasion on their border and when you mix all that together and you look at American presence, you go wow, you really hear them saying they want us to go to zero but if they want us to go to zero then they want the ANSF just to be left to its own devices and they really don't want that. What they really don't want though is they don't want what's left behind by an American or NATO presence to be ungoverned in terms of what it can do cross-border and my point is we may need to grant that. I mean if we don't wanna go to zero and I think it would be reckless and irresponsible to go to zero because the ANSF would not hold together in that arena and we would see rapid descent into civil war with several hundreds of thousands of better trained Afghans now being things that the Pakistanis fear and them feeling they have to if not oxygenate at least give more degrees of freedom to their militants to counter in the south and the east of Afghanistan, if we don't want that we need to find a way to stay but we can only stay if we sit down and negotiate as nauseous as that may make some of us with the Pakistani military internal establishment to one figure out what a new federal framework in Afghanistan would do to allow southern Pashtuns more sway in that area and also what our military residual presence in terms of trainers and managers would be that wouldn't allow us to just unilaterally approach either CT operations or stuff up against their border and I think that's the subject of parallel negotiations that have yet to my read to really have gotten going and that need to get going so that we can find a way to leave a residual US and NATO force behind that's responsible to keep ANSF together, responsible to keep Afghanistan free from an outrageously ugly civil war but that doesn't inherently threaten the Pakistanis to the point where they just continue then to fight us as part of the proxy problem and I think we're heading towards that latter outcome right now if we don't change our diplomatic tact in terms of how we're reducing what we're reducing towards. Great, we'll throw it open to questions. Can you wait for the mic? Where is the mic? Yes, thank you. Eric, just the gentleman in front of you, Steve Tankle. Hi, thank you very much. Tom, thank you for an excellent paper and a very thorough presentation. I agree with just about everything you said. I was wondering if dig more deeply into two points. One, I mean, to the degree that you can be a little bit more specific about what your sense of what your sense of what our residual force should look like, certainly be interested in that and then two, to Peter's point about that toxic legacy and your discussion about what sounded like saying, look, a lot of these groups ideologically aren't opposed to attacking Americans, but this is about strategic calculation for them. I would certainly agree with that. One could point to LT and Mumbai as being about strategic calculation and internal tensions. Given what you've said about al-Qaeda, I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about whether that genie, not necessarily has been put back in the bottle, but it sounds like the wind has been taken out of the sails in terms of global jihad. What about AQ's impact on revolutionary jihad in Pakistan? Because one could argue that it is pushing that as hard, if not harder, than it has been global jihad in recent years. Thank you, Stephen, both excellent questions. You'll note in the paper, I talked a lot less about residual force size and a lot more about diplomatic energy and the need to work on how to stay and so I would extend that analysis in the following way. Dovetails on what I answered to Peter a few minutes ago. Well, I think the ultimate numbers are probably not far off about what everybody seems to be talking about right now in terms of residual force. I mean, somewhere down in the 25 to 35,000 range. And I think the missions that are being talked about in terms of training and mentoring of the ANSF, residual counterterrorism presence and the intelligence aspects of that counterterrorism value are probably about right in terms of trying to best help provide the adhesive to keep what we've built in Afghanistan from fragmenting into ethnic lines and proxy war lines. My point is the diplomatic approach to how you get there. And to me, the how you get there is not just to declare unilaterally you're staying behind with this stuff and tell the Pakistanis to pound sand, which is the way I believe they're receiving what we're doing right now, right? And that's spoken in code about we don't understand what your in-state is, we don't understand what you wanna do. And then in getting down to the tough business of trying to talk to them about rules of the road, where we may have to accept some very unsavory things, like, okay, there will be a demilitarized zone right up against the border of Afghanistan and ANSF won't penetrate there and we won't do operations there unless it's like one or two of these international terrorist characters and we go back to maybe where we were in 0809 in terms of not doing unilateral terrorist actions without giving them an advanced notice and recognizing, one, that some of those things they'll sell out on, because they're their guys. But other times, and we see that in some of the things that they'd be willing to do against, you know, Eunice El-Moratoni in the last year in terms of his capture or other international terrorists, which, and I also talk about in the paper, some of the work they've done to try to go after groups that have been a threat to Germany. When I say go after, it appears that when we show them intelligence, their ISI counterterrorism wing is willing to help us round up guys or maybe look the other way when things go boom from the sky, right? We want to continue to encourage that because the Pakistanis show strategically, as you've said, I would argue, that they don't want to be fingered as complicit in global international terror, right? They want to work to the extent they can to not be fingered in that. But they definitely don't want to be disadvantaged in Afghanistan against India and they're gonna work very hard against us if we work against those interests. So negotiating to find that dimension in the rules road and then politically negotiating while allowing the Pakistanis a seat at the table to talk about the federal framework in Afghanistan so that it's not perceived that the Islamic Republic is inimical to the interests of the southern Pashtuns that they believe are cut out right now. And that doesn't mean I don't think that the Pakistanis want a return to the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. And there's plenty of evidence to include a pretty good paper released last year by USIP with Moid Yusif and also with the Pakistan's new ambassador from the, yeah, Sherry from the Jinn Institute talking about what Pakistan wants and that I summarized that kind of in my answer to Peter but I think it also indicates that they don't want necessarily the Taliban back there. I mean, there were a lot of negatives with the Taliban but they just want this kind of neutral zone, this India free zone that exists in Kabul and then the ports parts of the East and my concern is unless we're willing to stand up and fight them for it, we're not gonna do any better than that but we need to be able to talk in terms of how we find accommodation and that's a couple of year negotiations that's gonna take place. Your second question about the ideology. Yeah, right, right. Well, I mean, honesty and advertising, Steven and I have engaged on this quite a bit here to include in some research we've done and I think he and I are in complete agreement that there is and has been that effect inside of Afghanistan, in Pakistan. As a toxic brew has continued there, it's pushed together groups that now think more about going after the Pakistani state as opposed to being co-opted by the Pakistani state for its security interests and so that is a concern. The question I then come to from a policy perspective is does that mean from where we wanna be that we wanna be more and completely out of Afghanistan and with no relations with Pakistan to be able to walk into Rawlpindi and offer them something that maybe eventually they can't refuse, which is like help to really be serious against these terrorist groups or do we wanna be measured and moderate and kind of find a way to stay in Afghanistan, keep the conduits and the lines of communications open between us and their military as odious as that may be sometimes, still show the civilian sector of Pakistan to the extent we can that we wanna help their capacity, not to the degree we've maybe done in the past but the lifeline is still there. Do we want that kind of a future and maybe expending six to $10 billion a year in Afghanistan to retain that? To me, it's the ladder that matters as the hedge against the creeping jihadism inside Pakistan that I think you rightfully point to as being there and that I point to as really being the biggest threat to us right now in South Asia about our two major security objectives. It's no longer al-Qaeda, they've been attritted and eroded to the point they're not a global threat. A imploding Pakistan with nuclear weapons out of control and nobody there to help influence that except for the Indians and don't get me wrong. The Indians have influence, it just I don't think it will be positive influence initially all right, when things start to erode that there be some way that there's a mechanism there through Afghanistan that we still have that that set of doors open. So I offer you that Stephen is kind of a way to think about this. Jonathan Landy here on the front. Tom, one of the things your paper implies is two things, one that the administration's narrative for maintaining the policy, the strategy that it has is al-Qaeda-centric still. And that is basically we can't let them come back and yet you hear them also bragging about how badly al-Qaeda has been hurt. If the administration maintains that narrative does that not give status and standing to al-Qaeda that your paper says it no longer really deserves? And if that's the case, doesn't this mean then that the beg that the administration come up with a new narrative, develop a new narrative to sustain American policy in that part of the world and to avoid the civil war that a lot of us are deathly afraid is coming? How do you reconstruct that narrative to both meet the strategy there and also the political necessities here of a reelection campaign? Great question, Jonathan. And it was almost going to be easy to answer. And so you threw that election campaign stuff in there at the end, always the inside and the outside perspectives. Well, I think you're exactly right. What I mean what I'm implying here is that even though back in 2007, 2008, I might have been able to make the case that the counterterrorism narrative was the one that had to underpin what we were doing there. And by the way, we couldn't do that without at the same time offering to help the Afghans more than we had been from 2001 to 2008. Now that bin Laden's gone and we've had this significant attrition of al-Qaeda, that's exactly right, that that's a lesser issue now. And that when we continue to trumpet the deaths of middling al-Qaeda figures and foreigners as somehow continuing to damage the core of al-Qaeda, that we do misrepresent the degree to which they still matter and are relevant to our major threats in the global context and also, and more importantly, in terms of the South Asia context. And so in the South Asia context, which is where you went next, to me it is about reframing our policy for South Asia. And in that dimension, maybe if you get the mental image of a policy that we've had over the years that's had three rings, an outer ring of counterterrorism, which has been a very thick, thick ring, an inner ring about trying to help Afghanistan become better over time and defend itself, which probably started as a small pebble in 01 through 03, but then grew out. And in the middle of that is kind of the South Asia security dynamic, this Indo-Pakistani tension and competition, where the competition has kind of gone torpid in Kashmir, right? I mean, there hadn't been too much going on there the last several months. And some of us in this room think that that's by choice, that the Pakistanis have made a calculus that the Indians can mess that up enough on their own every summer, and the Pakistanis don't need to be there to help them out. So I mean, my argument is, what's happened over the last year and a half? So then what happened is that middle ring got squeezed to a very small portion of the perspective of our frame of reference. But over the last couple of years, we've tested the hypothesis of whether we can help Afghanistan enough to be organized as an Islamic Republic in its current constitution. And I would argue to you that we can't air if we leave that part of the circle too wide. That diameter has got to contract. And I think we know it's got to contract because we can't get them there where they need to be. And then the outer side, we've really had success in counterterrorism and reduced this ring. So that leaves this large inner ring now, which I would argue to you is dominant. And I don't see us reviewing our South Asia security footprint, much less our Afghanistan policy, in light of that change in relative diameters. And that's what I'm arguing for here. The question is, how do you do that in an election year when it appears that there's more traction in saying, we're pulling out quickly, which the region is receiving right now. Is they're abandoning us? They're abandoning us. Let's make sure our forces are ready to fight when we have to fight. Versus not scaring the Bajis at everybody at home and talking about, well, South Asia, we've got all these other issues, right? The number five largest nuclear state and the number seven or eight largest nuclear state and their forces in Afghanistan. How do we do that without scaring everybody and thinking, man, we're still going to be there with commitments that are bazillions of dollars going in the future? I mean, that's the policy art right now. My concern is we at least have that discussion more explicit and not fear that discussion, because if we avoid it until after the election, it's going to come back and bite us anyway. It's going to be there because all the essence of the Civil War with proxy war later over the top of it, all those frameworks are in high gear in the region right now, as you yourself know, having traveled there and we're missing that part of the music right now over here because we're not sensitive to it. Colonel Lynch, two years ago would have been quite unpredictable that Pakistan would have granted India most favored nation status and relations between Pakistan and India seem to be better right now than between Pakistan and the United States in a sense in terms of the kind of warm and fuzzy feelings. So how does that change what you've just described? I mean, there does seem to be something significant going on here that wasn't the case even a year ago. There does with comment. The with comment is there's some who argue that what Pakistan is with India right now is still very tactical. It's still very tactical because they feel vulnerable to the West, they feel like they've displaced a lot of their military to the West and they can't get them back to the East and that their fear of the real playground for proxy war is now shifted from Kashmir to Afghanistan and they gotta be better vested there so let's be nicer to the Indians. I take that concern, but I think I align more with you. I think, when one looks at the trajectory of Pakistan right now, I mean, all dimensions of it are frightening. Its economic circumstance is not getting better, its social dynamics are not getting better as Stephen Tankle has indicated, creeping jihadism within the country and the lack of tolerance of different views, deep pessimism amongst even those that are educated in the country that they can find their way out of the current malaise and a feeling that the political leadership has failed them but not comfortable that the military leadership knows what the hell it's doing either and in the midst of all that, there still is this objective, unrelenting narrative of India's ascent, right? And India that continues to grow, I mean, even during the economic malaise, they've grown at eight and a half percent over the last two years, astounding. They still matter in terms of regional trade and so I think it is encouraging that we finally got the most favored native nation status but I think it is gonna be a long agonizing process where Pakistanis leadership elite, the military intelligence side, which tends to dominate the civilian side but even the civilian side which has got some concerns about being swallowed by India whole are gonna have to come to terms with how to fit into a South Asia that is gonna be India centric if not India dominant. I don't underestimate the psychological difficulty that Pakistan faces in that nor the difficulty of the military intelligence apparatus will have because if it does allow itself to be absorbed more and more into economic interaction with India, something that arguably it must do, then where does its raison d'etre to continue to marshal the militarized state come from and how does it then continue to do and work the levers and the tools that has worked for the last 35 to 40 years. So I take encouragement from this, I don't think it's tactical but I still think it's indicative of a great internal psychological struggle in Pakistan's leadership and elite as to how you do this without putting everything that you are in question. Take some in the back, Eric, if you go to the back. I might sort of group two or three questions together because we have about 10 minutes left. Ryan Evans, ICSR, I just find it interesting to hear that Pakistan's expressing such concern for Southern Afghans when having worked in Helmand and spoken to colleagues that worked in Kandahar and Oresgan about this a lot. There's probably no one that Southern Afghans seemed to hate more than Pakistan. So I was wondering if you could comment on that. No, that's an excellent point and I actually raise it in the paper in the context of a couple of excellent pieces in 2009, 2010 that both exposed the nature of the interaction between Pakistan's intelligence services and the Taliban but also the feelings of animus that the Taliban have for Pakistanis. I mean, you're exactly right. The animus exists there and the one paper that I cite a lot in there that I think is excellent even though some have argued that it might be too extreme is the one by Matthew Waldman called The Sun in the Sky which was released in 2009 where he had done interviews of Southern Taliban commanders and also Eastern Taliban commanders and the metaphor of The Sun in the Sky is that all the Taliban middle-level commanders know that the hidden hand is that of Pakistani intelligence. It's as clear as The Sun in the Sky but just like you don't talk about The Sun in the Sky being the thing that gives you life every day they don't talk about that and just like The Sun if you are out and exposed to it too long can burn the hell out of you and hurt you, that's the same relationship that the Taliban have with their Pakistani handlers and masters. Now this open source reporting as many of you have followed this last week is I think even gotten further oxygenation by the release out of England that summarized some 4,000 interviews that were done at around the same time that Matt Waldman was doing his informal ones. These are being done through formal NATO channels and they confirm the same thing. They confirm deep antithopy even in the Taliban who are erstwhile allies of the Pakistanis. But as those of us who've worked this region especially those of you who've lived there for a long time know I mean that is a very complicated psycho-analytical relationship, all right? I mean there is love-ness and hated-ness going on all the time there and the Pakistanis as well. I mean, many of the guys I work with in Pakistani military or work with over time, you know? You know, referred to the Pashtuns of Fatah and Eastern Afghanistan as being those hill people or those hillbillies or you know those unsophisticated types. So there is this kind of animus back and forth which is not to say that there's some way, I don't believe, to have us outside Westerners, us non-believers somehow find the clever way to manipulate or pit those against each other. My experience has been we do that ham-handedly and atrociously, right? And the Pakistanis though seem to be able to find a way to pit just the right group off against another one and not perfectly either to move things forward. So yes, I mean, I take your point 100%, I highlight it I think in the paper to show that there is this set of separations that exist here and Afghans won't be totally pliable to Pakistan but Pakistan's intelligence service works very darn hard to make sure they're not pliable to Indian interests, Israeli massad interests, okay? Or the interests of American's intelligence agencies are black water, okay? And so that's the other part of the story where they kind of do find common ground. In the back. Hugh Grindstaff, T-H-I-S for diplomats. I came here going to ask you about AQAP and Yemen being a fertile recruiting area and then sending people back to Afghanistan and Pakistan but your emphasis on Pakistan and their relationship with Pakistan made me switch my question to we've spent billions of dollars assisting Pakistan. National Defense University has a international fellows program where the Afghan officers come here and train. It seems to me and my, to follow up, have you talked to the Afghan pack hands element at JCS about your paper? Yes, good question. Yes, I do have interface interaction at National Defense University with the international officers there both from Afghanistan and from Pakistan. As a matter of fact, they're quite often very forthcoming and refreshing but they're also fairly candid about how they feel about America's exploitation of Pakistan since 9-11 to have us fight quote, have them fight quote our war against forces and things in the western part of Pakistan that they believe if they just left alone would turn their attentions elsewhere, okay? So there's that dimension and a lot of what I've talked to you about here in terms of their belief sets, I mean I've been able to derive from that as well as from time spent with Pakistani officers and other military types in my military uniformed incarnations working in SENTCOM and then working on the joint staff. In terms of this and talking about it with folks in the joint staff or really in the interagency policy community, I mean since I first developed this, I have taken the opportunity to talk widely and in fora that are within the interagency and the government about these concerns, specifically about our misassessment of the degree to which al-Qaeda is wounded right now and the degree to which the proxy war issue in Afghanistan matters most. And so with thanks to the joint staff, OSD, other members of the interagency, I have had the opportunity since about November to be circulating these conclusions and these concerns. And some have been receptive of this as yes, we understand this and others have been receptive of it and saying, yeah, we understand that, but we still have these other concerns. So part of what I do where I work is I try to make sure that my ideas and information are conveyed to those that are in the policy nexus fully acknowledging that I don't have the vantage point on all the points of view or all the constituents that they must answer to, but rather offering this as hopefully a learned input. Rob Dubois. Thanks, Peter. Good morning. I'm Rob Dubois. My title is a policy advisor for the DEPSEC-DEPSE senior integration group. So I've worked with the policy guys quite a bit myself. I love this 20% you mentioned that they're not gonna be responsive to standard military or intelligence approaches or methodology, the remaining core. Peter has been supporting me with this book, a powerful piece coming up that I'm releasing soon. And I talk about grievance being behind a lot of conflict. So what you're doing is you're echoing the smart power philosophy, the whole of government holistic approach, which includes military and intelligence, doesn't it? And what else beyond that if we're gonna address this 20%? Well, I think that's a good point. If I could just emphasize, for me, the 20% residual is al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda is conceived by bin Laden's Awa Hirees, vanguard ability to try to coordinate out of regional elements, kind of more global jihad. And that they're doing that about half as well as they did at their height. But they'll continue to try to do that for more than a little while. And that they still will look to try to inspire disaffected Muslims into individual lone wolf type strikes. And to me, that requires a soft power approach but a soft power with comment. I mean, there still are gonna be required kinetic operations against these types of guys, these cells where they appear, wherever they might be, you know, in Algeria, in Somalia, in Yemen. My argument here, my point is that those types of residuals are not either amenable to large military footprints and quite the converse, they can even be oxygenated by large infidel military footprints. And so we have to stay only where absolutely necessary, make ourselves seem small but then be both lethal and well-informed. And we do that with the locals and we do that partnering with like-minded states and we do it with small combatant teams with agile logistical support and not a gross preponderance of military force. And so that's kind of what I'm arguing for, not abandonment but repositioning or realignment. And here, Afghanistan to me still is the exception that proves the rule. We're gonna need to leave a force there largely because we built this thing called ANSF and if we walk away from it, we know what's gonna happen to it. It's not gonna stay together and it's gonna be cleaved apart along the very lines of proxy and ethnic civil war that we don't wanna see happen. But what else goes with that? I think that's a good question. What else goes with that I think is adept diplomacy. So that what we leave behind is seen by those that might take offense at it, countries like Pakistan or be worrisome to countries like Oman, say if we're talking about the peninsula, other places, that we leave stuff behind that's capable and commensurate but also nested within mediation frameworks. So for example, when I look at Afghanistan, I say one of the things I think we owe in Afghanistan is a serious effort to find a way to encourage quiet Indian and Pakistani discussions about when they're aggrieved, right? When the Pakistanis are aggrieved and think that every Indian businessman is some type of a military agent that they don't first go to the proxy to have a bomb go off at that location but they instead go to a mediation framework that some third party mediates and they complain, right? Just like they do about water on the Indus River or just like they do about Kashmir that there's a built in mediation location and that can be either third party generated or we can look at it through international fora but we figure that out and we figure out how we then allow Indians and Pakistanis as well as Afghans to sit down and to first vent steam without first shooting as a way to add to what you're calling soft power but I would still argue is, you know, a mailed fist inside of a velvet glove that is serious about not letting international terrorist research but is equally serious about not continuing to be a canker sore with a large footprint in the middle of regional grievances when we can proportionally get ourselves to a level with a effective military footprint and effective intelligence footprint that's also got a diplomatic component to it that allows for these different types of mediation with countries or others who may have issues either with our presence or with the way in which we're conducting our business. Well, thank you very much, Colonel Lynch. That was a really great presentation. We're willing. Thank you.