 I think we're going to go ahead and get going with our lunchtime discussion. I hope you've all enjoyed your lunch. Unfortunately, our speakers, we've dragged them away from their desserts to present their presentations on an incredibly important topic on the whole issue around the Afghan National Security Forces and their development and the issues associated for that. And that warrants a minimum of a two-day conference in its own right. And we're only limiting that discussion to this lunch. Now obviously, already in our morning discussions and in the future discussions, the whole, some of the tensions between the objectives around on the military side and counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, obviously conflicted with some of the state-building, state-strengthening initiatives that's already come up and will continue to come up. But I think today, right now over lunch, I thought we'd give an opportunity to extremely qualified people to comment on some of their thoughts around the whole issue of building the Afghan National Security Forces. Obviously, it's an area also that consumed a vast amount of resources and a very high percentage of the resources spent in Afghanistan during the last 13, 14 years. We're going to start off with Ambassador Carl Eikenberry. Two other American officials have been as involved in Afghanistan over the period we're discussing in this conference and Ambassador Eikenberry. First in 2002 and 2003 as the U.S. Security Coordinator. Then back in 2005 to 2007 as Commander of U.S.-led Coalition Forces. And then once again back in 2009, 2010 as the U.S. Ambassador to Kabul where he oversaw, or maybe not oversaw but was a witness to 2009-2010 elections and what went along with that. Ambassador Eikenberry is now the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. And with both of our speakers I could go on and take all of our time introducing them but their bios are there so I won't go in more detail. I did want to acknowledge Carl's role and instrumental role behind this conference. I think it was nearly a year ago that he first raised the idea of organizing a conference here at USIP, trying to look back at the lessons of the last 13, 14 years to try to inform future efforts not only in Afghanistan but in other contexts. So this conference is his idea to begin with. So let me go ahead and also introduce Ambassador Minister Jalali who will then speak right after Carl. We are very fortunate to have Dark Minister Jalali as a senior expert here at USIP. Before joining from 2003 to 2005, Minister Jalali was the Minister of Interior in Afghanistan. He has also served as a distinguished professor at the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies and as a researcher at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at National Defense University in D.C. since 2005. He has a long and distinguished career also as a journalist. He was the regional director for Voice of America, also spent time in Peshawar working for Voice of America during the 1990s. I should also note he's about to come out with the two-volume definitive military history of Afghanistan from ancient empires to modern wars which is going to be published soon by Prager. So we'll have to have you all back for another launch of that volume when it comes out. But now I'll turn it over to you, Carl. Thank you very much. Thanks, Andrew. Thank you, Andrew. And delighted to be sharing the stage here with my old friend, Dr. Jalali Minister Jalali. I think that some of what we're going to be talking on the stage here are things that we talked about over tea in 2005 in the Minister of Interior's office. The purpose of this conference, as you know, was to try to take an objective look at state-building efforts over the last 13 years in Afghanistan, both with an eye on informing the international community and the United States continued support of Afghanistan in the years ahead, which I'm confident will remain sizable. And secondly, to inform both international community and United States efforts of dealing with what we can call wars of internal disorder in the future, I think it's safe to conclude that the United States is not about to embark on an industrial strength counterinsurgency operation and commit 150,000 troops to some part of the world for a decade, but nor can the United States of America say that our only choice is either that or to do nothing with countries that are suffering problems of internal disorder. So I think there was a hope that some of what we talk about today, not only applicable to Afghanistan, but maybe a lot of what we talk about could be applicable to other future interventions or efforts to improve state-building and state-building governance. And then with that, I'll transition into some of the discussion that we had this morning. It is interesting, as I was doing a review of what I'll be talking about, the Afghan National Security Forces, as I was going over the literature to see the profound, profound depth of literature on massive failures. And it's as if when we talk about anything that's gone right in Afghanistan since 2001, and Jim Dobbins did take us through a few of the metrics of success, it's as if that was just some kind of lucky outcome. It happened in spite of our efforts to achieve failure, where then the volumes written about failure is clearly due to the stupidity of the international community and the Afghans themselves. And this applies as well, to be fair, in critiques of President Karzai. You look at Jim Dobbins' metrics this morning, and President Karzai presided over the development of a lot of those metrics. Was that in spite of President Karzai? Or is there something deeper here that we need to look into Afghan politics? Dexter Filkins was once being interviewed by NPR, and I have a lot of time for Dexter Filkins, New York Times Correspondents, reported well on problems in Afghanistan. And not to sound patronizing, but Dexter, not for Dexter to sound patronizing, he was being pressed after he was talking about all the problems in Afghanistan in spite of all the money that was spent, everything that was going wrong. And so the NPR interviewer challenged Dexter and said, well, look in fairness, I guess there has been a lot accomplished that if you're getting to a remote part of Afghanistan, that's like doing development work on the far side of the moon. We can question why people were sent to the far side of the moon to do development work. But when we look at some of the results that have been achieved, we also have to take stock that there have been successes, and I would include among those successes as quickly I'll come on to problems with the Afghan National Security Forces themselves. So five quick thoughts on Afghan National Security Forces. Number one is a need to better understand the political context for efforts to build security forces in post conflict, or as I think Minister Jalali will soon say in still conflict societies like Afghanistan. Now, what do I mean about the political context? In terms of doing things not so bad, the development of the Afghan National Army 2002 to 2003 actually was a politically informed process. And by that, if you look at the DDR that was going on in 2002, 2003, and 2004, people would say that was generally successful. Remember in 2002, Ismail Khan owned tanks. Faheem Khan and the Ponjuris, they owned helicopters. By 2005, those militias had been stood down. Of course, there was still militias existing around the country, but they didn't have tanks. They didn't have frog missiles. They didn't have helicopters. Why was that DDR process successful? Of course, it could not have been successful unless the process to build the Ministry of Defense was also successful. Why on earth would Ismail Khan turn in his weapons if he believed that the Afghan National Army that was being created was going to be turned against him at some point? And so we had, as I said, a very politically informed process where quite transparent about developing a new Ministry of Defense and General Staff Department, a tiered set of reforms, jobbed a new organizational structure with job descriptions, and three candidates would be nominated for each position. It was very laborious, but it was guaranteed by the United States and the international community. We served as good information brokers. We had credibility at that point. We could go on, and perhaps Minister Jalali will want to talk about the Ministry of the Interior. I would say we were not near as successful on efforts at Ministry of Interior reform. It was late in coming, and then it was not as a well-informed political process. I'll conclude on this first point by saying that this is important when I'm talking about it right now, because I don't think that the United States military is very good at understanding the political context. The military, our military, the United States military, and many NATO countries, NATO partners, they are superb at training infantry battalions. They can do that work, but that's beside the point. That's tactical. The strategic question is the military force, is the police force that's being built. Is it politically sustainable within the country that's being built? Number two is the role of political leaders clearly matter here. When I was in Afghanistan, particularly down day for our Department of Justice team was when they came to me and said they were failing miserably in their mission. We talked at that time about the Attorney General at that time, and I talked to one particularly depressed attorney from the Department of Justice and said, well, attorney, has there ever been a case that you've been on? Because he'd done a lot of international work. Has there ever been a case where it's worked in these really tough conditions? And he said, yeah, it actually worked in Kosovo. And I said, what was the difference? And he said the Attorney General was the difference. The Attorney General in Kosovo at that particular time he was committed to judicial reform. Now, in the case of President Karzai, President Karzai, in my opinion, he never did embrace the role as commander-in-chief. I don't know whether he was uncomfortable with it or I think more that he didn't really believe in the model that was being used. It was, in his view, it was an American model. Was it a force that was really reliable? Was it a force that was dedicated first and foremost to Afghanistan? Or was it a force which was being recruited by foreigners and paid wages that were too high? I'm not sure of what his thinking was about the military forces of Afghanistan. I'm not being critical of him. What I will say is that he did not embrace the mission of commander-in-chief. And believe me, that profoundly, profoundly matters. That the only way you can get a soul breathed into an army is through the society that that army is to serve and the commander-in-chief going out and rallying the troops, showing his confidence in the force, trying to talk to commanders and get them on mission. That all matters. I'll tell you here again, our military, we spent 300 times as much effort discussing what type of transport aircraft the new Afghan National Army needed, and how many did we need to buy, and we spent very, very little time talking about this fundamental issue of President Karzai as commander-in-chief. President Karzai, to talk about this soul of the army, just to stand this on its head now with President Karzai, I remember once in a discussion with the Minister of Defense that the Afghan Minister of Defense talking about why the Afghan army could not get into Nuristan, and the Afghan Minister of Defense correctly said, how can we get into Nuristan? We don't have helicopters. We can't resupply our troops. We can't do medical evacuation to which President Karzai looked at the Minister of Defense and said, how many helicopters does Taliban have? And that's the point about a soul of the army. Now here, I think he was being a good commander-in-chief. Third point, dependency and risk-taking. That one of the challenges of many that I think we and the Afghans had together is we went into Afghanistan after 9-1-1. We didn't know how long our military presence was going to last. We certainly in 2002 didn't anticipate in 2011 that we'd have 130,000 NATO ISAF soldiers on the ground. So at the point that the American military knew that timelines now could be seen on the horizon, that there was the so-called drawdown or an exit strategy or an exit from combat operations, which is being modified as we speak, I think here in town, nevertheless, there was no real clear incentive or clear vision about how did the transition to Afghan lead have to occur on what kind of timeline. All of that said, though, I would argue that our military and our civilian leadership and the Afghans, we failed collectively to sit down at a reasonable point, 2004, 2005, say, what's our methodology for the Afghans to take lead for combat operations? But here's a problem with that, that if you're in the United States military or in the Italian military or in the British military or in the Afghan military, you want to win 100 to nothing. You don't want to win 51 to 49. So as we have NATO ISAF forces all over Afghanistan and we're partnering with the Afghan security forces, we want those Afghan security forces, of course, to win 100 to nothing. If I'm an Afghan platoon leader leading 40 Afghan private soldiers, I want to win 100 to nothing, too. But strategically, how do you then balance that against the need to get the Afghans into combat lead? So I use the expression once with President Karzai as we can now see transition looming large, that perhaps what we're looking for right now is for the Afghan Army and Afghan police to be able to go out and get a bloody nose, but we don't want them to get a broken nose. And he said that's about it. That's how I would phrase it. Number four is on sustainability. We talk about sustainability, operational sustainability of forces, fiscal logistics sustainability. People ask the question, well, how is it that here in this year of 2015, we together, we the Afghans, NATO ISAF, we've got ourselves in a position where the Afghan forces that exist right now are going to take anywhere with the police included, are going to take anywhere from over $4 billion to maybe $6 billion a year just to sustain at current levels. There was an agreement that over the next year or two we could draw down, the Afghans could draw down their military and police and numbers and that would get the sustainment figure of about $4 billion. I don't think that a drawdown of Afghan police and army is wise right now, nor is it on the horizon, but how did we get there that we're in this position of billions and billions of dollars of foreign assistance being needed to sustain the Afghan army and police? Actually, going back to assumptions, it's important for this, I think our two days is keep on asking what were the assumptions of decision makers at particular points in time. The fact is not that year after year the U.S. Embassy and U.S. military in Afghanistan had a crew of a ship of fools. These were smart people that at each point in time were making decisions based upon assumptions as they saw them. I think it gets back to what Ron Newman was talking about as well. How do you see the world? You make your decisions accordingly. In the case of Afghanistan, believe it or not, in 2002 Minister of Finance Ashraf Ghani and Major General Carl Aikenberry huddled at Ashraf's residence for several nights and we concluded in the fall of 2002 that an end the strength of the Afghan National Army of 70,000 would be proper. 70,000, how could Ashraf and Aikenberry screwed that up so badly? Well, what we saw is Taliban was a spent force. And what else did we talk about at length beyond how do we balance this against the demobilization of the Afghan militias, which was a politically informed task? As I said, what did we talk a lot about? We talked about sustainability in terms of finance. We talked about sustainability in terms of politics of Afghanistan. We talked about sustainability in terms of institutional sustainability of the force. But against all of this, of sustainability, is the question of commitments of aid and assistance to security forces, we can go beyond that, in terms of what does that mean for the prestige of the institution? What does that mean for a signal of commitment? In this case, the United States. What does it mean in case of deterrent? Just a brief vignette from when I was serving with NATO and I went to Albania, I'd been to Afghanistan now for two tours of duty. So we're in the streets of Tehran and we're driving through the streets and my first trip to Albania and I'm turning to an Albanian vice chief of defense who's in the car with me and I said your soldiers have M-16 rifles. M-16 is a U.S. rifle. So why did they have M-16 rifles? Because we had been very insistent over years that the Afghans keep the Kalishnikov AK-47 rifle. I said, well, it doesn't make any sense. You know, the Kalishnikov's cheaper. It's easier to maintain. Why did you get M-16 rifles? And he said because when our soldiers got the M-16 rifle, it was a clear commitment to us that NATO was serious. So we talk about fighter aircraft. We talk about people can be critical and say, Afghan army and police, they don't need those kind of bells and whistles. They just need the very basics. But I have to also say, keep in mind what it means in prestige, commitment, and even deterrence. If you're Pakistan and you're looking at the United States military providing some front line equipment to Afghanistan, if they can be maintained and if they can be employed, does that have a value that the comptroller who's looking at cost effectiveness and tactics will not come up with an answer that, yes, we should still sell this? Third and, fifth and final point has to do with the United States military and how we approach these efforts to build security forces, army and police. I'm not going to talk about police because we have Minister Jalalay here who I know will say a few words about police. We can talk about that during question and answer. But the United States military is we go into conflict zones. We tend to bifurcate the operational command. That's the command in the case of Afghanistan that's out there fighting Taliban. We bifurcate that effort with the effort to build security forces. My argument would be that very early on in our stay in Afghanistan that it should have been clear that the main effort of our military was to help the Afghans stand up a good army and a good police force. We did not deliver in terms of putting the capacity, our capacity on the ground to do that. Within a year we had no more active duty units that were training the Afghan army. Within a year we switched to National Guard. National Guard is fine. They are not as good as the active force. Let's be clear on that. And so why did we not use active force? Because they had to go to Iraq but we never really recovered from that. Secondly, until the peak of the surge we were manning our embedded advisory teams out in the field and for the most part our headquarters in Kabul that was devoted to the training of the Afghan army and the equipping of it. We were manning that at about 50, 60, 70 percent levels. So for us politically or for our military leaders to say over the last 12 to 13 years we have taken serious the effort to build the Afghan National Army, ask them to respond to those statistics that I just gave you. Thanks. Thank you very much, Al. I think you made it easier for me because some of the points I wanted to share with you were very eloquently mentioned by General Eikenberry. That's because we worked together for a long time. When I was Minister of Interior for about three years he worked in two different roles. First he was in charge of OMC Alpha, Office of Military Security Cooperation. And later on he came as the commander of CFC Alpha, Coalition Forces, and we interacted in. Now one point that I would like to start with is that was Afghanistan facing a post-conflict situation after the removal of Taliban? The international community did not come to Afghanistan to fix Afghanistan, which was politically fragmented, economically corrupt, socially atomized in a vortex of surrogate conflict supported by the neighbors. It came for different reasons. But in three years the United States led coalition achieved the objective for what it actually decided to invade Afghanistan. The Al-Qaeda network was disrupted. Taliban were hosting that the Al-Qaeda network was removed from power and the leadership of Al-Qaeda was on the run. So why this United States should state Afghanistan? That was the concern was whether they will come back. Afghanistan will again become a source of threat to the United States' allies. In order to prevent that reconstruction of Afghanistan was an afterthought, not planned before. And I think in all cases in the past you see that if post-conflict management cannot be planned as an integrated part of the military phase, it will be very difficult to do it after the conflict phase. First of all, the institutional capacity is not there. You cannot mobilize the right forces there, the right resources there, and it takes time. And when you wait for long, that vacuum can be filled again by the spoilers. Taliban were removed from power, but not defeated. Their leadership went across the border. If you read General Musharraf's recent interview garden from day one, they tried to use it as an instrument to influence Afghanistan for having influence in Afghanistan in the post-Taliban period. For whatever reason, for whatever assumption they had. But they were there. So Taliban's will. In fact, the intervention, international intervention, supported one side of the civil war against the other. The other was not defeated, nor reconciled as part of a peaceful settlement. So they just crossed the border. They came back. The problem was that the false hope that Taliban's are spent force, they are gone, and now reconstruct Afghanistan. That assumption actually caused a high price in years to come. On the other hand, the militias that were taken and allies over through the Taliban, they were empowered in Afghanistan. And they actually, the bone agreement legitimized them. Bone agreement said that by the establishment of interim administration of Afghanistan, all militias, all Mujahideen, all all groups will come under control of the regime as the army. So it was reintegration. Later on, you had to deintegrate it. So sometimes you call out RDD, reintegration, disarmament, dismantlement, disarmament. It was re, it was actually RDDR. It was reintegrated first. They came, and they were, they amounted to, I'll mention that in 2002, they were talking about 70,000 army for Afghanistan. But they amounted on the paper 700,000, 11 army corps, 40 divisions, and 80 separate brigades and regiments. And now, with that kind of a situation, you wanted to build the security system in Afghanistan. Between the 2002 and 2005, there were competing demands, no clear definition of the mission of security forces. What was the mission of security forces? They were competing demands. On the one hand, about 10,000 to 12,000 coalition troops who were in Afghanistan fighting terrorism or insurgency, whatever you call them. And then ISAF was peacekeeping, was only in Kabul. There was strong resistance against expanding to other provinces. Later on, of course, the PRT took its place for the expansion. And then the people in provinces, they suffered from militias, from warlords mostly. In three years, I was in minister of interior. Most of my time was fighting security threats emanated from these militias, not Taliban. Therefore, the building of security forces should be looked at the context of how the Taliban were removed. Later on, as Karal mentioned, with a change of situation, new decisions were made, incrementally. I think in the past 13 years, building Afghanistan institutions were the costliest and longest, probably, project in history. 60% of $107 billion spent only by the United States was spent on security forces. It's expensive. Could we do it at a lower price, maybe, in the beginning? But it was increment. In 2004, 2003, the budget of the Ministry of Interior, at that time, Ministry of Interior also controlled all provincial governments, district governments, and municipalities. At that time, the annual budget of the Ministry of Interior was $127 million a year. Now you go about a few years later, 2010, the budget of training police and army was $1 billion a month. 90% of it paid by the United States. I wish we had a fraction of it in 2002, 2003. The police was the most neglected force. Although, in post-Taliban period, the major threat was criminality, drug production, drug trafficking, not by Taliban. In those years, I was able to free 11 foreign nationals who were kidnapped by terrorists through cooperation from people, with no giving any kind of concession to the kidnappers, because people were cooperating. At that time, criminality was the major threat against the population. But police actually was not supported in order to do that. When support came mostly from the United States, it was because of the upsurge of insurgency and police became militarized and turned into paramilitary forces. And this is the kind of problem that started with in Afghanistan. In 2006, all of a sudden, with the upsurge of insurgency, showed that the neglect in the past five years actually was resulted in this situation. So in other words, I would say that development of national security forces in Afghanistan should be seen in that context, the context of how Afghanistan was needed, why, and what purpose. And what was the assumptions at the beginning? By 2006, even the assumption was that the threat of Taliban are gone, there's no insurgency. That was Pentagon even insisted that the number of Afghan National Army, which was set at 70,000, be reduced to 50,000 for two reasons. One was the Taliban risk was now not very serious. Second, Afghanistan cannot sustain even 50,000 troops in Afghanistan. These were the criteria assumption. But in London Conference, the Afghanistan compact focused more on social and economic development and less on security level, because it was assumed that security is fine. And that NATO came to Afghanistan with the same kind of mentality, peace keeping, where the peace was not there. And then in the summer of 2006, all the hell broke out. And the upsurge of security in the South and East, from that 2006, 2008, it became a full war. And with 2008, Afghanistan was on the verge of failure. It was after 2008 or 2009, actually, with the upsurge counter-insurgency strategy. And the first time that was a clearly defined strategy with sufficient resources were put in place. I'm not going to talk more about this. I'm going to conclude with two points. First, post-conflict management is important. But first, you should know that you have a post-conflict. Some extremists will say that if you cannot manage post-conflict, you should not go to conflict. And that is possible only if post-conflict management becomes part of the original planning for combat. Otherwise, it will be difficult to do it. Second, now, after 13 years, Afghanistan has the National Security Forces of Afghanistan have achieved a lot. They've come a long way, transforming from an odd assortment of militias into modern institutions with professional capacity and politically loyalty to a unified government. That's a great achievement. One should not forget that. But the challenge is sustainability. In the history of Afghanistan, you had three times of the Afghanization of the conflict. One was in 1840 and 41. When the British forces in Afghanistan decided to leave, how about built a kind of a professional army for the Shah Shajja, the king who was backed by them? They created jazal cheese, the professional infantry units, and others, ignoring the power of tribal militia, tribal leaders. And when the British left, that Afghanization of the army did not help. Then the Soviet Union did that, starting in 1986. That created a major, a very formidable army. Army component, police, what they call it, salandoi, that's a paramilitary force. And then the hot or the state security units. That actually proved to be a very formal mail and they defeated Mujahideen in Jalalabad war. But lack of sustainability dissolved that. Now, again, you have a very solid Afghan army, Afghan national police, and state security forces. Until 2017, there's a pledge that they will be funded. What happens after that? Unless there is a kind of political settlement with Taliban, which will allow the reduction of that force or some other kind of reason. When that support reduces or dries up, then you have to think what is going to happen to this army. Sustainability is always a problem after post-conflict situations, in particular in Afghanistan. I will stop here, thank you very much. Both for two very substantive presentations. I have a couple questions which I'll start off with and then we'll open it up for the audience. I guess the first one, I guess maybe a bit more to you, Carl, is your first two points I was interested were, not sort of directly on the ANA, ANSF, highlighting the importance of the politics. I think we were much better at various times at having military strategies or even development strategies, but it was never clear to me exactly what the political strategy was. But also, I guess my question is, we invested so much more in creating the security institutions of Afghanistan than we have in the civilian institutions. And when we had a president of Afghanistan who did not want to take on the role of commander-in-chief and was actually quite disinterested in his own army, which is quite unusual in that part of the world, but also in part because maybe he didn't, as you mentioned, view it as his own army. But now as the NATO or ISAF US umbrella is being removed and the ANSF become institutions in their own right, and amongst the strongest in the country, do you see a risk of them actually taking on a more political role during the coming years? And again, you don't need to look too far in the region to see the impact of very strong security institutions and very weak political institutions. I guess that's my first question. And the second one, I think maybe a bit more to you, Minister Jalali, is on the international community was not so interested in the police and came late to the game of investing in the police, but eventually did and invested quite a bit in more recent years. But we always seem to have more of a preference for in some ways working with the militias or we didn't wanna invest in creating a police force so much as creating quick fixes, the Afghan auxiliary police or national auxiliary police or later on ALP. And I was wondering if you could comment a little bit about the implications now of some of the legacy of sort of creating these militia forces rather than investing in the police. So maybe you first, Carl. Yeah, just briefly under on the question of how much more money we put into military operations or just specifically into the Afghan national security forces than civilian development. One of the obvious reasons is it's just a lot more expensive, let's compare the Department of Defense budget to the Ministry, to the Department of Education budget here in the United States. It's even in Afghanistan, it's expensive. We can debate how different efforts were maybe overly weighted or not weighted enough. I guess it costs not too much of the dollar terms, but the strength of the institution. Well, on the institution itself, I think there's probably two risks that they seem opposite possible outcomes. And I think they're there. The first would be on the fragmentation of the Afghan national army. It was interesting as we reached what was starting to become a very evident political crisis in Kabul last fall, there was concern that the Afghan national army, if they'd have to choose between candidates, might choose a particular candidate. Still today, the high command of the Afghan national army is more, it has more numbers from the Old Northern Alliance and factions related to them than not. Recruiting the Afghan national army since 2002, 2003 has been all ethnic, it hasn't necessarily been all national, but it's been all ethnic. And I think that the officer corps of the Afghan national army up to the ranks maybe of Major, Lieutenant Colonel, those who are in their 30s now in their early 40s, I have confidence that they are developing much more of a national perspective. The Afghan national army academy, their West Point, very successful enterprise. And yet we still I would say have got a period of maybe 10 more years before the high command of the Afghan national army, which given you can't create a high command of an army and overnight. So the hand that Afghanistan was dealt in 2002, 2003, had a lot of people from the Northern Alliance that had to go into the high command. But still, even that group, they performed well during the election. There was rumors, but I talked to, at that time, Minister of Defense, Bismillah Khan, and at that time, Minister of Interior, Dawood Zai, and they both said that the Afghan national army and the high command of the police did quite well. Still it's a risk. The second would be, I think what you were getting at, Andrew, could the Afghan national army become a national security state? They've got a lot of resources. Is there a sense of entitlement that goes with that? Could they become a Pakistan? I think that's a possibility if things should start to collapse politically, but I'm not sure that they have the political coherence among themselves that they would necessarily be able to step into that role well, even if many of them wished to and said things are collapsing, so we have to fill the void here. I worry more, though, about the potential of corruption within the army and the police longer term, especially if the economy is going down, because the United States and the international community will continue to give money to the army and police, and if a civilian society is not doing well, that would not go well. I think, last point, about the advisory mission for the United States and NATO, I think the advisory mission that we're performing right now, much more important than helping the Afghans get better tactically out in the field, although that's important. Even more important about than trying to call in the air power is the strategic kind of mentoring that we're doing, because I still think that we're looked at as probably the best umpires and referees in Afghanistan for the political power brokers and the political leadership when they're wondering what's going on inside of that army and police, for the Americans and for NATO ISAF to have a presence in the right positions is useful in that regard. Thanks. As I said earlier, in that stage, initially there were a number of competing demands in contradictions. Police suffered from that too. On the one hand, there was commitment to build democratic institutions, democracy, and on the other hand, to fight insurgency. So the focus on police was instead of building it as an institution to protect the population was built to fight insurgency. While they were poorly trained, poorly funded, poorly equipped, poorly led. They were deployed in small groups in remote areas, only to be a kind of a, you know, something that, once a churcher once said that like a meffat cows, asking the wolves to come and devour them. And on the other hand, the mistake that was made in the beginning of the DDR, some people will claim that reintegration DDR was a very successful process. It was successful because I was, for months, I had to go to the north and stop fighting between two army corps was supposed to be the army of the state. They were fighting each other while the civilian was suffering. So that, when we stopped that war between two army corps, we contoured or collected the heavy weapons, as you mentioned, and yes, heavy weapons were removed. But the police suffered from that because over time, overnight, all militia corps commanders became police chiefs of provinces in order to make it, the DDR successful process. And they brought all these cronies, corrupt militias, to the police department of Kandahar, of Herat, Mazar, and that we could never, were never able to get out of the negative impact of that decision that was made in 2004. And some of them are still there. Then in 2002, security sector reform program was adopted in Geneva. The army was built from scratch. That was fine. But police reformed the police. There was no police to reform. They were all militias, faction militias, they had to amend all police department of provinces. And later on, when I lobbied a lot here in Washington, I lobbied Secretary Roosevelt twice to help us because Germany does not have the capacity, it was the lead nation to build the police. He finally agreed. And then there was a problem between the State Department and Defense Department, because INL and the State Department is responsible for police. But later on, when the situation actually make it necessary for to serve police, all support came to went to police and build it as paramilitary force. That's the story of police. That's why I said that the most neglected element of security forces was, when you have that kind of a police, with $16 salary in the beginning, you cannot expect a very, very clean police. And you cannot pay them very well. They will get paid by finding other ways.