 My name is Rod Hills, I'm delighted to have this opportunity to moderate a most distinguished panel on what is surely one of the critical foreign policy issues of our day after the drawdown Afghanistan or how will they spend our money when our army is gone. Jerry Hyman, our first speaker, will draw upon his long experience, both here as President of the Governance Program at CSIS on his trip to Afghanistan and earlier as the Director of the Governance Programs of USAID as well as his distinguished scholarly career. Sadly, Ambassador Grossman is not going to be with us today, he's come down with a very bad head cold, it's up at his schedule and we'll miss him, but our most distinguished panel which you can tell from the biographical sketches that you have is more than qualified to deal with the issue. Ambassador Newman and Dr. Cordesman along with Jerry are uniquely qualified to give us a look at something that is forbidding to me at least. Jerry's going to speak for about 15 minutes, each of the panelists will talk for six, seven or eight minutes, we'll have a discussion amongst ourselves and I will save a half an hour for discussions with the audience. Dr. Cordesman, Tony? Oh, I'm sorry Jerry, excuse me. Might I have a comment before the speech would be easier. Thank you Jerry. Thank you. Well, first thanks for coming and thanks to you Rod, the Chairman and Mentor of our program and have been supportive of all of these kinds of things that we've been doing for a whole lot of years, seven in my case, but before that three others and grateful for the support that you've given in the guidance. Also thanks to Ambassador Newman and Dr. Cordesman for being on the panel and thanks also for Ambassador Cordesman who unfortunately as you said Rod isn't able to come. I welcome discussion and criticism so this is by way I hope of a conversation that we'll be having. First a word if I could about strategy, a word which in my opinion should be struck from the civilian side of the river for at least two decades, enough time for Moses to lead the children around for a couple of decades and get some new generations who may know what that means. So I want to use the word in a very specific way. For me, a strategy is not just a list of things you would like to do with the word strategy pasted on top of it so people will supposedly pay more attention. It is a plan by which to allocate scarce resources and to deploy them in pursuit of an objective or objectives in the face of obstacles. That's true for a medical doctor looking at a patient it's true for a lawyer looking litigator looking at a trial it's true for a commander figuring out where troops should be deployed and how they should operate and it's true I think on the civilian side of a whole lot of things that we do or it should be but I think unfortunately isn't. So a strategy is about making choices because of limited resources. If you think you can do everything you don't need a strategy. Secondly it's about timing and quantity and deployment and thirdly it's not a lot it's not as I said a little of everything. In the State of the Union two a year and a half ago President Obama said this drawdown will continue and by the end of next year meaning December this year our war in Afghanistan will be over between 2014 beyond 2014 America's commitment to unified and sovereign Afghanistan will endure but the nature of that commitment will change. A month earlier in a joint press conference with President Karzai said and by the end of next year meaning this year the transition will be complete. Afghans will have full responsibility for their security and this war will come to a responsible end. I think it's not going to come to an end responsible or otherwise but what will be left after the drawdown is an assistance program that currently is extremely large and the promises are there for a continuation. Four billion dollars a year were promised by the coalition donors in Tokyo in 2012 and the U.S. itself promised a billion of that with corresponding commitments by the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan which I'll refer to as Jairoa. There is however going to be declining assistance due to donor fatigue to U.S. budgets and to the failure of Jairoa to meet the commitments that it promised in 2012. I think Iraq is going to turn out after the drawdown to look a lot like Iraq. Afghanistan is going to look a lot like Iraq and Vietnam that is you're going to have a hard time finding the same problem or the same event on page 27 that you used to find on page one. The government of Afghanistan Jairoa has its own goals in recognition even of limited resources. In the Afghanistan national development strategy it provides for 22 national priority plans. 22 national priority plans each of which is a dozen or two dozen pages long. That is what Jairoa calls a strategy. 22 priority programs is not a strategy. By 2015 it says Afghanistan will have taken over operational responsibility for its own security and will be leading development initiatives to build on foundational investments remember that word and good governance remember that word that will pave the way to economic growth, fiscal sustainability and sustainable human development. By 2025 10 years later Afghanistan will have reduced its dependence on international assistance in non-security sectors to levels consistent with other least developed nations. Peace and stability will be consolidated in the country through effective development, improved delivery of government services and the promotion of fundamental freedoms and human rights. By 2030 five years later achievements in development and governance will allow Afghanistan to emerge as a model of a democratically developing Islamic nation. So those are Jairoa's national development strategy goals. On the civilian side to date the strategy if there is one has been driven by coin by the anti-insurgency strategy and it the civilian side was to quote extend the reach and legitimacy of the government of Afghanistan. It's quite possible I suppose with enough money and enough people and enough good luck to extend the reach but you will not, assistance will not extend legitimacy of a government. That needs to be earned by the government itself so as a goal not a particularly achievable one but that's no longer the case coin is no longer going to prevail after December 2014 and so now it will be driven the assistance program by the context of Afghanistan by performance and by some other strategic logic which is what I hope to explore today. What should that strategic logic be? What objectives? What resources? What allocation? The premise here is that there are three scenarios. I don't think they're very sophisticated very simple even simplistic I think better one should be developed but for the purposes of our discussion as a way of analyzing the problem divided into three scenarios optimistic pessimistic and muddling through. What we need to avoid I think in the allocation of limited civilian resources is to try to do everything because everything is necessary or alternatively to simply cut off as a result of budget cuts some of everything and keep the entire program. It seems to me we need to make some again strategic choices about the allocation of these resources and we need to deal with choices imposed by the realities on the ground. My argument is that three elements are determinative of which scenario will prevail and which programs should be prioritized security which is the military's responsibility primarily although not entirely governance and economic growth in that order if there is no security there will not be good governance by almost definition if there is not security and good governance I do not believe you will get good economic growth that's the proposition I put forward here today everything else and I realize this is the contentious element is secondary in my view whatever else there is in the assistance program is secondary to those three or at least those two governance and economic growth. So let's begin with the context five realities first on security the objective is to defeat or contain the insurgency or to make it chronic and not existential the insurgents have endured although they've not been able to capture the state there have been tactical victories but an insurgency succeeds if it survives and is not defeated it does not have to win in order to keep its momentum and to threaten the state and the order there are splits within the Taliban it's true but they still persist notwithstanding all of these security efforts which I'm sure Dr. Corisman will be talking about the Afghan national security forces are problematic uncertain doubtful quality and varying performance according to general Dunford they're under trained under financed under motivated and under performing they're also deeply corrupt especially the police element they're divided internally as a brittle collection of military units some of which are divided by tribal and sectarian forces others by who has what power and who can gather what forces for economic reasons there are minority officers or is for the there are officers from the so-called minority parts of the population actually not so minority and large numbers of Pashtun troops there are a variety of reports ISAF is more optimistic the international security assistance force is much more optimistic but the rest of the reports that we get reports that we get from Congress from the World Bank from a whole variety of other sources are less optimistic and we have insider attacks green on blue initially now green on green troops attacking their own officers the drawdown will be from 65,000 more if you look at the surge to somewhere between zero and 15,000 depending upon what the president decides and that's if there's a bilateral security agreement the coalition countries will also withdraw as the us withdraws afghans are worried there's an enduring strategic partnership agreement that we got in 2012 we maybe can get into that in the discussion but most of the effort goes to the afghan side not so clear about what the strategic part for the us and its allies are second governance afghans do not expect swiss government they don't expect danish government they don't expect norwegian government but they expect something some kind of decent government the 2003 constitutional loyal jerga created a strong unitary highly centralized government with huge budgets the 22 priority projects all of which were provided by the donors none of which is consistent with afghanistan's historic way of governing itself not impossible but difficult so instead of a federalist state or a confederalist state with a lot more localized autonomy or at least a lot more localized authority we created a this highly centralized unitary state very dependent on donor support decentralization i think is inevitable if only for budgetary reasons corruption within the government is extremely high afghanistan ranks on t on the transparency international index which has i realize all kinds of critics nevertheless it ranks last along with north korea and samalia now even if ti is wrong by an order of magnitude afghanistan is not going to be very high up it's from the bottom billions of dollars are being stolen every year or millions by almost by the day those with ties to the art to the palace are in patronage networks there is poor performance on basic services never mind exotic ones the asia foundation survey finds very substantial disaffection with the government on performance the special inspector general for afghanistan reconstruction has report after report quarter after quarter one just a couple of days ago outlining the difficulties of governance 36 percent of the operating budget 17 percent of the development budget has been has been spent among the ministries with development budgets of 50 million dollars or more only three health finance and rural development executed more than 20 percent of the budget they got in the first half of 2013 there's a growing financing gap there's a growing trade gap corruption is growing not shrinking and so on on the economy a lot rest as i think i as i said on security and governance there has been rapid but somewhat artificial growth especially in the cities there are 500 000 new workers a year out of a total population of 30 million so that's about 17 percent per year coming into of the total population coming into labor force growing trade gap sliding economy if you are buying low and selling high for a while you were investing in real estate in cobble you are now investing in real estate in dubai many many of the of the investments are going belly up especially in real estate which is an indicator of where the elite believes the future lies there's a large expatriation of capital still afghanistan is a different country now than it was in 2001 education levels are much higher workers have gone abroad consumer goods are now widespread there's a large growth of population in the cities it is a mistake to think of afghanistan as a as a country of small villages each of which is isolated from one another the underlying foundation nevertheless still endures there is a new generation which is a biggest asset i think afghanistan has and higher expectations among afghans for their future a fifth element the reality is the neighbors which perhaps we can leave for discussion there's a fairly discussion in the paper central asia iran gulf states china russia and of course pakistan whether they will leave afghanistan alone is a question whether they'll help is not a question on the other hand the a nsf has done better the security forces have done better than expected in this last electoral period the elections went better than some people feared seven and a half million voters came out where's due for round two and so it looks like there's a road potentially to a credible not perfect not swiss not norwegian not finished but a credible election if we can keep if the country can stay together so what are the three scenarios and what is the second what are the secondary programs as opposed to the primary ones i'll try to run through this a bit quickly the optimistic scenario is that there would be reasonably secure stable prosperous well-governed preferably democratic country and the preferences are afghan not just foreign by a large number by large margins afghans prefer a democratic future president obama just a couple of months ago said we're confident that we can prepare for any eventuality and that we can continue to maintain both counterterrorism commitments as well as commitments to help develop an afghan afghan security force that can endure that afghanistan does not end up being once again a safe haven for terrorism and that it can be a stable and secure country that serves the prosperity and security of afghan people that's the current among the current objectives i already read to you the gyroa goals for the for the optimistic future 2015 2025 2030 in the case of security one hopes there would be general control of the country no major losses of territory sporadic but limited violence suicide bombings ied's ambushes assassinations and so on but declining and chronic and limited in the area in which they were taking place on the governance side there would be credible elections followed by decent performing government limited to base to basic services probably but act that are actually provided substantially reduced corruption and nephatism a much declined budget deficit and better budget execution improved performance the assembly the national assembly the will say jerga will see jerga rather it will hopefully take a more active role and will be a countervailing power to centralize executive power and the media will continue to grow which has been another bright spot on the economic side returned economic growth from the decline we've seen in the last couple of months stem the the capital expatriation yet there are few afghanistan enjoys few comparative advantages carpets are not going to be the road to economic growth in afghanistan not enough carpet buyers to do that for 30 million people minerals are a possibility but they need to be extracted and they need to be marketed out of the country and that takes better security and better governments which is would happen in the optimistic scenario the silk road has been mooted but my opinion i think that ambassador newman may feel differently is at best an uncertainty and also depends entirely on security and good governance the really brightest spot is the new generation of afghans and the possibility of Taliban reconciliation the assistance program all variety of things are possible under the optimistic scenario but still it seems to me the really core needs to be concentrated on the muddling through scenario is much less opt is much less optimistic by definition so general security will be provided by the the national security forces but you'll be looking at a strategic stalemate neither the insurgency nor the government will strike a decisive defeat momentum will shift back and forth cities will be perhaps controlled by the government and the roads but by day the Taliban at night most utilities will be at risk troop supply routes economic infrastructure and random violence will grow whether you need 10 to 1 5 to 1 or 3 to 1 edge in counter security it's unlikely to be sustained over the long period of time by the national security forces with will possibly fragment under the pressures of the counterinsurgency there will be no unitary state because the country will be divided into little enclaves by definition and many gains will be eroded a downward cycle expectations and increased hedging Taliban the government leaving the country immigration a vicious cycle that will increase anxieties and also hedging behavior virtually no national government returned to more local governance by definition not a decentralization program because it won't be controlled by the government pockets of governance returning as they used to be but with different leadership of course and different structures religious leaders will reassert religious will reassert themselves religious fundamentalism is likely to rise under that scenario a reversion to the historical mean Taliban controlled areas specific especially uncertain in the economic side uncertain security governance virtually no national economy or growth continued expect expectation expectation expatriation of capital and hedging pessimistic scenario needn't go into very long the security forces look like they're losing the Taliban gained momentum raised to safety retreat the ethnic religious and communal preservation impossible implosion and collapse of the afghan state power will be contested partition resurgence of fundamentalism potentially return of this kind of split between the northern part of the country and the southern trade would be almost impossible certainly hazardous episodic and very expensive afghanistan would become possibly a narco state and what would be left for assistance to do in both the muddling through and the pessimistic scenario is to basically try to reinvigorate the governance and economic growth part as best it can but there's no point in talking about in my view economic education health all the kinds of programs that are in the in the quiver now would not survive either a muddling through scenario or a pessimistic scenario so what are the revised objectives what are the conclusions what should we be doing maybe we can keep this for the discussion but I think you're going to wind up reverting at best to these three areas security governance and economic growth this can the report that you have contains about 20 pages of conclusions and assistance recommendations very emotional and I realize simplistic scenarios they should be better we should try to develop better more more nuanced ones and in light of those our systems programs perhaps would be different from the ones I've suggested but I don't think radically in effect there will be a much reduced I think several possibilities and I believe it would be best for us to concentrate on the core ones that have at least a shot at creating or supporting a potentially possibly optimistic scenario or at least one that avoids the muddling through and pessimistic scenarios thank you Jerry good afternoon morning I should say I'd like to talk mostly about the baseline in Afghanistan but let me preface what I'm going to say with the fact that some 50 years into this and at least now five or six major u.s. efforts at counterinsurgency I'm always struck by the fact that we face three major enemies whenever we get into a counterinsurgency campaign one is the threat the other is the host country which helped generate all of the conditions that led to the insurgency in the first place and the third is the way we go to war reinventing our plans on an annual basis never really implementing any of them lacking planners lacking measures of effectiveness and often just lacking basic accountability well this is May of 2014 we are going towards transition with no plan for the military side although we have a great many options almost a new option every week in some variation and no plan at all on the civil side other than to provide project aid in whatever form has sort of evolved over time the sub theme to all of this is we're pulling virtually everything out of the field we're going to have to rely on contractors to measure performance something which hasn't worked yet anywhere with any reliability we are deeply committed to reducing not simply aid money but military spending now we're faking it this year in what's known as the OCO account there's 77 billion but an awful lot of it has nothing to do with the OCO account it's just an effort to cheat on sequestration and the budget control act then next year it drops to 30 billion for which there is no plan it's just a number but that makes things look better to the congress in terms of the overall budget deficit which is the sole rationale for any of these figures i really think our basic reality is going to be we will just barely get enough military advisors at best to keep the system running and god knows what will happen with the civilian side on governance and on the aid and here i think one of the most damaging things we do is deny that this is a very fragile developing country which is likely to have a lot of trouble in every aspect of transition and isn't going to develop for the next three to five years and the basic problem is whether you can deal with both the military and the civil transition now a couple of realities the afghan people are as concerned with corruption unemployment as they are within security they have been very consistently when it comes down to the security zone none of the things that took place in iraq are taking place in afghanistan the surge didn't work isaaf had to stop all regular reporting on metrics and combat effectiveness it has focused almost exclusively on tactical encounters over the last year although there's no earthly reason why the taliban should fight on unfavorable terms when they know we're leaving and many of the indicators that really are relevant to a political and guerrilla warfare indicate that things are getting worse and not better these are things like high profile attacks in terms of human development this country is basically one of the worst in the world it is not a country that has moved towards development not in the classic sense not when you look at the actual metrics involved education appears to be better in the hdi because the un accepts the figures that are often given on education in afghanistan for which there is no credible source certainly things have gotten better but there is no basis for these numbers that will survive even the slightest amount of practical examination you have life expectancy rising that is a good thing if you believe it but only about half the sources actually show that this is taking place and the un has elements which directly disregard disagree and what is rather striking is that in real terms the per capita income has not increased and indeed the world bank sees a significant increase not only in poverty but in the distribution of income in ways which sharply encourage tension and problems within the country and will make it worse as military spending and aid go down one way of looking at afghanistan as how does it compare to bangla dash in napal and the answer is very very badly and these are not high standards of stability and comparison challenge of corruption by all of the measures the world bank uses this is one of the worst governments in the world it ranks in the worst five in all of the measures that are used by the world bank is the world bank right who knows quite frankly when you start ranking bad governments it is an art form of considerable uncertainty but what is really a serious problem is that government effectiveness has not improved at a time that the afghan government in theory is supposed to take over aid planning and management of the forces and all of these ratings assume you have a government and the little problem we face now is we don't know when as a result of the election we get a new government we don't know what that government will be in the field and we don't know how well it can operate we do know that in many critical areas including education you simply don't have the people in the field one key metric that came out of work done by the department of defense is a number of ghost schools that actually exist and where which make that education figure many people focus on so suspect but the problem is you're lacking people in the provinces you can count and in many of the provinces you can't count your shortfall in the number of people in the field budget execution is a massive problem Jerry already mentioned that but what is really critical is that we had hoped that there would be an increase in revenues which would somewhat offset the probably cuts in aid and military spending it hasn't taken place in fact it's moved in just the opposite direction revenues have dropped as both a percentage of government expenditure and as a percentage of the GDP you've also seen a growing financing gap in terms of operations there's no way this can change in 2014 2015 or 2016 you simply don't have any way that you can show that this is a probability the challenge of corruption isn't just transparency international it is the world bank it is survey data which incidentally show a very disturbing increase in corruption in the afghan national army over the last few years and it is ratings by isaf now this map of dark spots shows you increased areas of corruption the bottom line and this is available on the csis website shows that you have had a steady increase in the perception of corruption over the last four years using an isaf study this is not a positive basis for change and reform one of the key areas here is just plain demographic pressure jerry gave one figure for the number of people entering the labor force look if we had a competent state department and a competent us a id and something approaching transparency and integrity in the united states government you would report the uncertainties in the figures you are using and you would show the range of estimates the afghan central statistics office puts the current population at 27 million of which 2.5 5 million are actually countable our census bureau puts it at about 3.8 some estimates put it at about 35 just think what all of these estimates of per capita income and all the rest really mean if the united states government had the integrity to show the range of uncertainty and look at those life expectancy figures one un source is quoting 44 to 45 years the world bank is 64 the cia is at 50 you are measuring one of the most critical aspects of our whole effort aside from education which is health and your figures are essentially showing you that the range of estimates indicates we focus on the figure that is much the most flattering and the most positive without ever justifying or validating divisive demographics real economic challenges look one of the other dishonest things we have done as a government is to talk about GDP growth in the past few years when the rains were good now for us aid and the state department to take credit for high rainfall and agricultural output uh is applies certain capabilities in the state department which may have existed when ron was ambassador but i somehow think are missing today when it comes down to what you have this gdp and economy is absolutely critically dependent on outside spending and aid in theory next year 50 percent of the outside money should go through the central government right now it has no capacity to do that no one would argue this government is ready to spend the money and if any of you really believe that the speed with which you can spend your budget is a measure of effectiveness in government i'd like to see you about your investment profile after this meeting the fact is it's an absolutely meaningless metric of performance this is essentially that green line simply tells you something about the gdp it goes up when it rains it goes down when it doesn't rain it has nothing to do with aid or development activity by the u.s. government or a un dp or anybody else world bank estimate it will not meet anything like the growth rates needed to employ people entering the labor force or deal with existing unemployment or poverty problems through at least 2016 there's no way mines the silk road anything else can really change that very much and yes these are the world bank estimates of poverty and look it's going up it's not going down in real terms again the other great problem is because we've had such poor controls on the way we have spent money in afghanistan it has deeply corrupted people within the market sector the people who benefited as contractors builders and in government from an uncontrolled amount of aid and wartime spending it's inflated and created major problems for people who are in the market economy in cities increasing their vulnerability something the world bank has been pretty blunt about improvements as part of the tokyo accord zero all of the metrics that people have talked about in terms of afghan reform and the tokyo accord have essentially been related to holding elections not the economy and not the quality of governance in terms of the world bank assessment of what the private sector can do 164 out of 189 this country is going nowhere on the basis of those barriers unless it can get them down in a hurry and open things up to its own market sector and let me just conclude with opium for all the bullshit about arcana narcotics program and excuse the use of a technical term you may not be fully familiar with what you have really seen is a massive recent increase in narcotics output a massive much more massive increase in the area under cultivation a reversion of much of the hillmond area the marine corps liberated to taliban and narco control and frankly in the first world bank real look at this an honest assessment one way you can lie to everybody about your effectiveness is to only measure drugs in terms of farm gate prices because guess what the farmers don't get anything the minute you shifted around to the narcotics estimate in terms of the actual impact on the economy goes from about five percent of the gdp to 15 percent so jerry's options if we're going to make anything work let me just conclude with one statement you don't do it with a liars contest ron it's up to you to find something good about us about something ambassador human i did note these analyses were a little bit dire um well none of them are mine yeah and there's a lot in there which i agree there there is a funny paradox of course that the i think the overwhelming sentiment in a large piece of afghanistan right now is is measured optimism or perhaps unmeasured optimism um which clashes remarkably with our presentation today which doesn't suggest the presentation necessarily is wrong but they have just come through an election in which despite well they come through the first phase of an election they got a second phase to go and we'll see how the shoes drop but you know the afghan security forces performed credibly albeit for a limited period of time with a limited mission not you can exaggerate everything but they managed adequate security and you had twice as many people voted as in the last one and we've got lots of problems to go and i'm simply saying that as a matter of sort of afghan sentiment it clashes with the analysis the analysis may still well be right there's a lot in this with which i agree um i certainly agree that the washington civilian use of the word strategy is noticeably lacking in intellectual content um it's likely to continue um i agree i agree greatly that i with this business of what's going to happen in terms of wars continuing i shutter i just loathe it every time we say we are ending the war we are ending our military participation in a nasty vicious struggle that is going on and we're going to leave it to others and that would be another place where a little honesty would be useful if perhaps not politically uh helpful um but i i want to go to the report and i'm going to be a little contrary and in a couple of respects uh partly because the panel be boring if everybody agreed but uh also because i think there are a couple of fundamental things one needs to add one is i think there is with all respect to a lot of good stuff in here there is one very large hole and it's a hole that i see repeatedly in our analysis and cia products and in many of our strategic discussions and that is it doesn't treat what we do as a major component of what happens if we decide to have a decision about a larger number of troops if we manage to keep up our funding uh these have consequences that are psychological as well as individual military or economic and i think we do a lot of analysis in this town as though those guys are over there and we're over here and we figure out what we think the situation is and then we have a policy about that situation rather than seeing what is really the dynamic of policy is often a kind of continually reacting circle and that is particularly the case in afghanistan where there's a huge psych sort of tightly wound psychology where people constantly i would say constantly overreact they overreact bad they overreact good we signed the strategic partnership agreement signed the strategic partnership agreement which has almost nothing in it it's really pretty vanilla you know and real estate prices jump 15 percent in a week uh something bad happens everybody's down the mouth but these psychological swings have consequences so that doesn't necessarily mean things will be better because i'm not all that optimistic about the policy choices that this administration is continually refusing to make for no particularly good reason but the fact is that any analysis of the future needs to look at the reaction mode of what we do as well as what happens in afghanistan leaving leaving that out i simply submit as a whole um and then i'm going to be really bizarre because washington is obviously a town that loves policy and strategy even if they don't know what it is and i'm going to suggest that maybe this is actually not the time to make big strategic choices when we come back to that in a minute talk just about a few details in the report by the way on tony's comment on helman which is a very particular little detail there's a largest report coming out from david manfield it's not correct to say that helman opium production is up in the areas the marine secured what you have is you do have a massive production but what you have is a new settlement north of the canal and ground that didn't exist before what you've actually got is a considerable success of the areas in which people fought in an ever evolving situation now that doesn't make things good i'm not saying that but when we go around saying oh everything we've done is a failure tony didn't say that and needed to jerry but it is a a frequent kind of doleful clamor in the punditry by the way you know what the definition of punditry is that somebody who's never frequently wrong but never uncertain uh and so the fact is there's been a good deal of success in the strategy doesn't tell you whether you're winning or losing because it doesn't tell you whether the afghans can hold it but when you compare kandahar in 2008 or nine with the telephone on the gates practically of the city and massive numbers of bombing a day with kandahar today where you held massive election rallies that were secured by the afghans without incident where you have a growth in the afghan local police and some of the most problematic districts that we fought in for seven years with huge losses and now you have people that are standing up and they're fighting the taliban and they're doing reasonably well some of them are also politically corrupt there are all sorts of issues but the fact is that when you go around and look at the districts in kandahar that not everything's good but it is a hell of a lot better than it was three years ago that tells you absolutely nothing about whether you will succeed or fail over the longer run but it is important when one gets sort of flapping the hands one thing that i think is important is i agree the scenarios are you know crude but you know any kind of scenario in a place as complicated as afghanistan is going to be crude the likelihood is something between a couple of them there is no question and it came out in the report it comes out of tony's figures as well the governance and economy economic growth are really important having said that these are two of the hardest areas to implement and we have continually for the last umpteen years actually since about at least since about 2003 when improving governance appeared first in general barno's campaign plan we put these things down with absolutely no notion of what it is we're going to do about them and then we tend to be very short range in our focus the result is we waste an enormous amount of time by a refusal to deal with the fact some things just take a long time to do anything so if you're going to do economic growth there are no good short range strategies you can dump money into cash for work and other things but most of those have been failures the the real things and they may you may not be able to bring them off that's a separate question but that you need to look at economic development are things like power and roads if you don't have power you cannot have competitive light industry and anything produced by any of the neighbors because their power costs are so much lower that brings you in you know by the way note i reoriented a lot of our aid power and roads i am not a disinterested observer in the defense of this program but i would still argue that it is correct whether every piece done under its correctness is also a separate issue but most what you need to do for economic development is long term if there are no short term fixes you can throw up your hands and say we should quit that is one option but our constant search for the short term has meant that we have plowed incredible amounts of money into some areas that are just plain stupid and others where we have fueled corruption because we have piled so much money in the areas that can't possibly be absorbed and what that does is to just foment more corruption so if you're going to be serious about this you have to take a longer term perspective i do think the scenarios and the discussion is a bit too pessimistic in one respect there is a statement in there that is hard to see any scenario by which the asf will maintain the ground let alone defeat the insurgency i agree that it is not likely to defeat the insurgency particularly because of the existence of sanctuaries but to say that there is hardly any scenario by which they will maintain the ground it seems to me excessive they've done better than that in the last year in fact i would say in fighting terms they have done probably better than most american military i know would have expected a year or two ago would be the case today i don't know what that tells you about tomorrow and afghanistan is a place where if you have a strong view you can find the examples that fit it um reminds me of tony and my first encounter with these sorts of wars in vietnam um an extraordinarily complex situation of all kinds of different parts so that if you have a really strong view you can go to afghanistan you can find the pieces that fit you come back and write the article it says i was there and it's this way but if you have a view that's 180 degrees out you can do exactly the same thing um but i think it's a little too pessimistic on the asf but they they could come apart you've also left out another another issue which is you could have a coup um which would not be totally surprising four or five down years down the road maybe less or more if you continue to have governance bad as you have now to have an increasingly professionalized uh army at the middle for upper middle fecal grades which is held in down by a as you pointed out more corrupt officer class and which has to do the fighting that is a scenario in which a coup is not uh impossible maybe even not unlikely but right now they're not doing so paddling uh and they are more interested in fighting i think than the afghans or the iraqis but we have another problem which we have to handle right now frankly i think in afghanistan and here but in different respects and that's going to actually be managing excessive expectations with the afghans it's because things are going a little bit better and they then expect too much with us i think the problem will be that with a new government we will expect it to do way too much way faster than it can possibly do anything the new president whoever he turns out to be is going to have a very narrow base of really loyal supporters and then a larger base of rather temporary supporters that got him into office now all want a job and then a number of folk that he knows he's got to bring into government because every candidate knows i mean i was there two months ago and i saw all the major candidates they all said if i'm elected i have to bring in more people who are outside my support base in order to form if not a unitary government something that has a broader support getting all those people squared away jobs is going to be an interesting interesting issue and given the balancing that will take place it's not a scenario in which you're suddenly going to clean up the act now it doesn't mean it can't get better and in fact i think i think they all know it has to get better whether they can do it i don't know but if we suddenly march in and want to hold the new government as it gets organized responsible for everything that mr carzai has created in the last few years i think that would be a very unfortunate choice of strategy i am going to suggest that we should hold off on big strategy right now i mean this is of course totally contrary to ways town functions but in fact new strategy has got to be settled with the next afghan government not always in the sense of just doing things that they want but it needs to come out of some kind of realistic discussion with the next president rather than being yet another made in washington creation which will inevitably taking no account of what is realistic and what is not realistic this is not new this administration or afghanistan i noticed there was a comment in the book by the late bill colby about vietnam about some policy designed in washington which he said was absolutely never going to be possible accepted by dm because of his Mandarin background of course washington decided on it and did it anyway 50 percent of the problems we've had with president carzai are because we have been totally biffed to either what he was about or how he interpreted what we were about if we continue in that way then i guess my predictions will become as dire as everybody else's but the we need right now in my judgment to do two or three key things we need to settle the decision about what we expect to do on troop numbers and dollars we may not be able to produce all the dollars but there is a profound unsettling consequence of our long delay and that's our fault that's not afghanistan that's not anything that's in these scenarios it is the incompetence of our refusal to make decisions which need wait on nothing the argument that we cannot make a trip decision until we have signed a bilateral security agreement is a political argument it is factually and legally bogus there is absolutely no reason our trips cannot remain beyond the end of december this year because we have a perfectly serviceable status of forces agreement which has no expiration date now it's not a good solution but the idea that we're up against some hard barrier is a fiction and it would help immeasurably if we would decide what it is we're prepared to do because the current approach is a little bit of you afghan sign this sucker and then we'll tell you what we're going to do this is a little bit like saying write the check and then i'll tell you how the car you're buying is going to be equipped i don't know anybody that would buy a car on that basis but we expect the afghans to buy a national security agreement um which i think is silly as you might have noticed we need so we need to get that piece out even if we don't have agreement so everybody knows what we are talking about which would have a certain stabilizing effect we need to think about a few key points we are trying to pump too much money through the ministries too fast and we need to stop saying if you don't do this or that some will change we need to make the change now it's not this is not going to affect the governance that much but it's a matter of recognize we're out ahead of what they can manage and scale it back and scale it back in the places that they're doing worst with the promise that you can reverse it if they do better which is much more effective frankly than a yet another statement of potential threat which we generally don't carry out um think about a few key points that are going to be important to us in the transition of which i would say they're very few but two of them are probably the characters of the ministers of defense and interior that will be appointed on those we have some need at least to consult we shouldn't be trying to veto but or we shouldn't be trying to pick but we do need to consult because if those people are really hopeless we're in trouble but beyond that we need to stand back we need to let the new government get established and then we need to discuss within our very increasingly limited means what we can do to help them what they're prepared to do for themselves where we can where we can work together and what are reasonable expectations and out of that come to a more articulated strategy i think it is a mistake to try to do that on the basis of scenarios that neglect one big issue our own our own decisions and on that i will pause uh let's turn well i've matched afghan incompetence with american so we now have synergy let's uh turn to the audience for a little bit and we'll save the last five minutes for kind of a wrap up up here uh questions please maybe some of the audience has something good to say please thank you frank biller i just got back from afghanistan from being there since 2004 in and out uh thank you so much for your panel it's wonderful thinking and and seen a lot of ways and a lot of actions and i'm here to tell you coming from the isaf level and the embassy level and the statistics that you're laying out a lot of those came from evals that had to be written for senior leaders and other leaders in order to make them do their right jobs and look good in their the way they're doing their jobs but i will tell you that i think that what i'm very optimistic i so you know right up front but i'm optimistic from the perspective of the picture of right that i see which is long term and i think that your muddling theory is probably correct but needs to be leadership leadership and organized muddling because that's where it's going to go for the next few years and using the afghans as the afghan base for how we do any of the support that we want to do uh we do an awful lot from a western perspective and i agree with um ambassador newman uh wanting to try to do things way too fast we need to know what that definition of right looks like along with the picture of right and how many years down the road that might be and certainly not tomorrow or even next year or two to three or five years from now but uh again just a comment uh thank you so very much your thinking is wonderful i've seen several of you have moved around the city here and in afghanistan and i appreciate all your help thank you anybody else like to make a comment ask a question you young lady yes thank you and i apologize that i arrived late but i was um talking to my colleagues in afghanistan i i work for a contractor pa and we implement my program implements um a justice sector reform program in afghanistan and what i wanted to add is that from my little perspective where i sit i think that we are cautiously optimistic um i don't think the u.s. government has made a great advertisement of what it actually is accomplishing in afghanistan and i will be be quite honest i think that what we have done is afghanize the project we started out with 90 percent american and international legal experts we support the criminal justice sector in afghanistan and today um 2014 almost 90 percent of the people who work in this program are afghans afghan lawyers afghan judges afghan subject matter experts in budgeting procurement and other areas so i see a little wedge we have about 500 people working for us and we have done regional work and i think i tend to side more with ambassador newman we are cautiously optimistic but our afghan workers and the employees are uh see a future they risk their lives to come to our camp that says something thank you just try to keep everything to about 30 seconds back in the back please um stanley cobert i'm concerned about the access to afghanistan i'm looking at an article in defense news nato turns to airlift following increased convoy attacks in pakistan and the northern distribution network now also seems in trouble because of our problems with russia so what kind of access can we count on to afghanistan one more question yes please back everyone goes into all american university where in the u.s government is this discussion going on where should it be um maybe that's my question why don't we try to respond to those quickly donnie very quickly i think that to the extent we have a planning effort it does take place in the pentagon it does take place in isaf one of your great problems is not that we don't have options or plans or that the a nsf won't work if they're implemented but i would have to say that we've waited and waited and waited on a decision as to whether we'll have enough advisors and enough money to keep the nsf running and that probably takes somewhere between 10 and 13 000 advisors and it's going to take somewhere between four and five billion dollars a year for several years and it isn't quite clear anybody's program that but there's no question you have the plans for it on the civil side you haven't got any you basically will just go forward with project aid and you will keep doing whatever you're doing regardless of the needs the difficulties we face on that side is what we don't plan for is what happens when all that money that has been flowing into the country begins to really run down which is mid 2015 to end 2015 because of lead times we don't know what happens to the market sector how much the cutoff of money really produces serious internal problems it's an experiment like prohibition you find out the hard way you've been warned by the world bank you may need a major bailout and ron points out you better keep spending because they're not going to get any wiser or any better overnight but we haven't really made that case to the congress or anyone else we're figured out what kind of money is needed and we've done no realistic assessment of what the flow of international aid will be remember we're not the only country involved if we're not estimating our own aid we don't know again one has to be careful if you assume that this is a very poor undeveloped country and it's suddenly going to lose a lot of outside support but not all of the critical support it's going to be pretty much what it is only slightly worse for at least a few years and that's not the end of the world unless the Taliban wins the caution I would give you on some of this more questions was about roads the fact is it's not just access in a security sense you don't have any meaningful trade between Afghanistan and its neighbors relative to Afghan imports one critical issue is if all that money that's been poured into the country suddenly disappears given their current budget and their current costs you don't need to worry about access you need to worry about outside money the other difficulty is increasingly are you actually maintaining the roads inside afghanistan and can you secure them and I think general dunford's concept of layered defense potentially will keep the critical LOC's running within the country but for example Ron mentioned kandahar and it is positive but the road between kandahar and Kabul is becoming a serious problem through lack of maintenance you have problems like the saline tunnel these aren't long-term problems they're immediate but my guess would be that the countries around afghanistan are probably going to keep some kind of access going within the limits of the existing domestic afghan economy we're not planning to move that much stuff in anymore so airlift the kind of capacity we're probably going to retain will be enough for the u.s. component how will other work out well again it's an experiment we've got a lot of questions so jerry let me just say a couple things one on I don't know the answer on the latest convoy attacks but I know having looked at some of the past ones that the news reports have tended to exaggerate the impact of the flow of the pakistani network and I basically agree with tony that this is not dire in terms of our needs on u.s. government decision-making on the civilian side that is making the key political decisions this is locked up in the white house there are my understanding is that there is a fair amount of agreement between state defense and jcs on what they would prefer and those decisions are understood but not liked and the white house has not found a decision it does like it does not also spell some form of disaster and therefore it is standing there it will eventually make a decision but that's where you know and it's a big decision and it matters and it's going to be made by the president when he's ready to make it or can't avoid it any longer whichever comes first on the aid issues just one issue is how we're going to supervise much of anything which we can't figure out without knowing what we're going to do with troops and mobility so that's a way of stasis second is to well I think it's also important to recognize with respect to the special inspector general many of whose criticisms are correct some of whom think are overdrawn we have never tried to have this degree of accountability in a war god only knows what you know ciger for europe would look like if we've done this in world war two but the fact is we're you know we're trying to have peacetime fiduciary management in a wartime situation and there's a there's a contradiction or there's a tension between the goals and we are in congress and in the public discussion completely unwilling to adjust or to deal with that tension finally within aid itself there is a much larger problem which is not of aids making and that is aid is too small to do much of anything itself it's a little bigger now but it's still not more than max 20 of what aid was when i first visited afghanistan in 1967 it cannot carry out projects itself it can only contract and there are big there are big problems with the contractor model which are not problems of malfeasance but they are problems of the way you adjust the problems you hire a contractor to do what you paid the contractor to do and very rarely would the contractor be thanked by telling you that you've actually hired them to do the wrong job because they've discovered some other problem it is slow to react it has a huge amount of overhead but unless aid is significantly not only reorganized but strengthened in personnel you cannot break out of the contractor mode so we deal with symptoms but we don't want to cause jerry one minute please we have a lot of questions i understand that there are a lot of points that got raised here please keep it going we only have 15 minutes okay a couple couple points one is it seems to me the question of options and scenario planning is precisely the point of why i wrote the document i think you need to have scenario planning you need to not be able to say here's what's going to happen but what happens here what happens there what happens in the next thing how do we react to the following scenarios it seems to me that's particularly that's an important feature of planning that we don't have secondly when we say don't make strategic choices now it's quite possible you don't make the strategic choice now but you have these scenarios on hand to that will guide those strategic choices the one element of why the strategic some strategic choice is necessary now is declining budget unless you think that the budget is going to stay on track you're going to have to make some strategic choices and i think that's the premise i think that the budget is going to go down and if if that's not the case then you may well be in a different uh scenario planning because of our own effect on the ground as you pointed out one element that i didn't get a chance to mention government plans if in an optimistic scenario to have a reconciliation with the taliban if you have a reconciliation with the taliban you're going to get taliban at best taliban ministers in a government that they have now agreed to enter at best so the minister of justice the minister of education the minister of health is going to be a mullah omar person now mullah omar claims he's he's he's uh learned some lessons but hasn't spelled out what they are and i'm worried that they might not be the right lessons from the point of view of an optimistic outcome in in in the country can conditionality it seems to me that if you're going to go with a variety of uncertainties then you better have some idea about what conditions you're willing to accept and what your decisions you're not and that has to be serious it can't be the usual conditionality of the donor community which says you know if you climb up that tree johnny i'm gonna you know you're not going to get dessert johnny claims up the tree and the dessert comes out anyway well that's not a good then you shouldn't have made that condition in the first place if you're going to make it stick to it and it seems to me you're going to have to lay down some of those conditions in order for the the for these scenarios to play out monitoring your valuation is critical last point for the moment anyway until the next round maybe is that to me one serious question that afghanistan has raised and iraq after three insurgencies in my lifetime and in some of the lifetimes of some of you around here others too young vietnam iraq and afghanistan it's not obvious to me that we can fight an afghan an insurgency and do assistance at the same time and that gets to your last point that is the most serious in my opinion bottom line question can we do this and if not then we should avoid getting into these kind of situations and expect something different we've had three examples corruption all of the kinds of things all the dysfunctions have been there we're in all three of these cases and we ought to ask ourselves well if they're in three why do you think the fourth will be any different all right so please just wait for the microphone right behind you i'm tom nibblank i'm with the state department i was in cobble from seven until 11 i've been at the pentagon since then one of our ambassadors asked a few years ago what the success looked like and i appreciated the panel members comment on bangladesh and i did him a slide of social indicators and i said if in about 15 years afghanistan looks like bangladesh today that's successful um somewhere about nine 2009 2010 we got way away from that kind of thinking and we impose a time constraint that that was utterly unrealistic my views shade very much i think towards ambassador and humans but i appreciate the comments and the cautions of the other panel members i appreciated the plug on the afghan media i think that's been an extraordinarily positive element and we saw that most recently in the elections going forward a lot less money a lot fewer people we need to think more in terms of reasonable time frames as well as holding their feet to the fire and those plans i had to sort of smile on that one we wrote most of those plans along with our european partners in extraordinary detail and at great cost please right here hi good morning my name is lianne rios and i'm with the united nations development program um i've recently returned from afghanistan three weeks ago where i spent two and a half years or two years excuse me um my question is or my statement really is that uh i appreciate everything that has been mentioned because i think it all has uh merit um but working with the un dp in afghanistan were embedded within the ministries and i've seen the impact that oda has um that we worked the particular ministry that i worked with works on rule development so we do sustainable energy road production all of that i'm just curious why the u.s government doesn't engage more with multilaterals that are already on the ground i know that we obviously have issues as well uh but the fact of the matter is is that we have access to areas that the u.s government simply does not um and un dp in particular is taking over some of the development programs that the prts have implemented within some of the areas in which they're located so so if if the panel can just maybe address um why multilaterals are not used more often in terms of development 30 seconds please i just want to respond to the lady i just came back from cobalt too uh regarding working with multilaterals usa id has committed four hundred seventy five million dollar on on budget projects through adb so adb is handling a good chunk of money that usa id uh is uh allocating for mostly for energy i talked to adb when i was there i talked to us i d so these are the correct numbers thank you thank you richard leesmith from the british embassy could i ask about um us and nato core interests in afghanistan post 2014 what what you think those are and how they compare to the region um which is something i think we haven't talked about um i mean there's i think there's an interesting paragraph in your conclusions on the report to us policy towards pakistan but i'd be interested in how you see the balance of u.s interest in the region post 2014 and what that means for your policy recommendations for afghanistan and the wider region thank you two more questions two more points in the back anchorman opte uh voice of america afghanistan service my question is uh board to amesader newman as well as uh mr hyman uh if you could put this report in perspective of the recent elections and a future afghan government that uh will be sworn in how do you see all your findings and your expectations from the new government is is the situation still uh salvageable do you see a hope from the new afghan government that will be sworn in uh and i would like amesader newman to comment on the same issue as well please let's squeeze in one more no more gentleman don't even let me just say one key thing about aid afghanistan and where we're headed we aren't in a mode where the united states government can simply throw money at good intended projects or programs you really have to know what's going to happen to the afghan economy as this massive flow of military spending which was far more important than aid spending by a factor of seven or eight goes down you have to see what gets hurt and if necessary you have to bail out the parts that get hurt to the extent they involve young men with guns or critical aspects of government or the order and structure of the society the fact is that most project in program aid is just buying sort of popularity it doesn't matter whether it's surfer anything else it doesn't have any lasting economic impact it fades with monotonous regularity and it does so regardless of whether you have a coin environment and that's particularly true if you have an agency like us aid which has promised what was it seven years ago no that's not fair four years ago yet again to develop effectiveness measures and hasn't core interests let me say this gets down to a really critical problem i can't answer right now tell me where the ukraine is going to be at the end of the year tell me about us overall budgeting how much are we going to be able to spend on central asia afghanistan and pakistan relative to the middle east or asia we are not critically short on resources but we have a lot of conflicting priorities is afghanistan a central factor in the war on terror no it's a very marginal very low priority relative to even pakistan and pakistan is pretty low compared to virtually all the other key centers of terrorism today are you going to go on with this the question has got to be re-evaluated every year this is as is everything else in international relations a sunk cost in triage has to be fairly ruthless but bangladesh in 15 years i think maybe it even might do better but look what is the key punchline of this panel i'm not even sure ron would disagree if afghanistan bad enough under something approaching a reasonably democratic government and without Taliban control that's fine it isn't going to be a developing country it isn't going to be a radical improvement in governance and an awful lot of the efforts that we started if not most during the course of this war are going to fade into oblivion and afghanistan is going to be afghanistan again it may change over time but it isn't just a matter of not selecting new strategies what you see today if you're lucky is what you're going to get sometime between 2016 to 2018 sorry a couple points one is on the question of accomplishments in media i agree media's accomplishment and i don't want to say that there haven't been lots of accomplishments by lots of of NGOs and and companies the question is whether that's all going to get swept away in the security governance and economic growth mixture if women all of those kinds of gains no doubt about it but are they sustainable if the security environment decreases degrades if the governance continues to the way it is or gets worse and yet an economy doesn't doesn't pick up because i the assumption of my paper is that the budget is going down the us assistance budget and that of all of the coalition countries is going to go down now if that's not the case if it's going to double maybe we can talk about that but i didn't include that that whole because i didn't think it was even on the table i mean i can't imagine anyone doubling the the assistance budgets as to the core interest there's a i thought you were going to pick that one up that statement in in the paper and disagree with it and i i think i said in the paper i don't think afghanistan is anywhere near the core interests of the united states in my opinion i'll maybe be a little bit uh uh since i've been so humble and unbrash i'll be a little more brash now in my opinion the the the the afghanistan was emotional more than a geostrategic response we got hit and we wanted to react and i certainly don't i was not different from that but the result was that we wound up hugely hugely engaged in a country that does not have long-term strategic significance even on terrorism it's now moved to lots of other places and if you're talking about the pivot or the rebalancing from europe to asia the rebalancing from afghanistan is going to be like a whiplash there's just not going to there's no constituency for continued assistance and in a large scale in afghanistan in my personal view and it doesn't it's it's national security uh relationship to united states doesn't warrant it so i personally think that's yet another reason that that in my opinion is not going to happen um why don't i leave it there by by my watch we've got two minutes till we have to let these folks go which probably precludes profound answers but um a couple of points i agree the budgets are probably going down i do not agree that this is an automatic function there is room for leadership now if you want to take as a premise of scenario that we will continue to have no leadership that the president will continue to have some residual force engaged in a war but will make no effort to lead it that is a premise you can make it might be the correct one but it's not an automatic function uh there is the opposition to afghanistan or the discomfort is broad but it is weak it is not deep and some of it we're seeing reversing with some of the recent uh republic boners recent comments suggest that there is room there for badover so i i think it is too dire just to treat it as you are although i agree you you may actually be right about where it comes out but not in this automatic sense secondly on this basic question of scenarios it does not i agree we're going to have tough choices i agree with tony we need to look at where they're going to hurt i think it's important to note that when you try to make that analysis it's extremely speculative there are all kinds of things you're not going to know you're going to get pieces of it wrong which goes to another issue in our bureaucratic culture that we don't want to accept failure and we need to understand that in these kind of situations having a learning organization and reacting to it is often a matter of seeing what doesn't work and adjusting rather than treating that as failure because that's a dynamic which tends to put people in the mode of defending bad programs rather than admitting failure so that you go on with a bad program longer but you're very limited so i i think we're out of time i don't agree on it really on the core issues but it's a long it's a long discussion for which we do not have time i would say that i think the cost of a very large perceived failure is much more severe to our core interests than possibly anything we can get out of any short term success but i i think the debate needs to broaden somewhat to cost of failure as well as need for success but we're out of time and i will rest at that point and that is that the future of these decisions is now going to be not in the u.s. hands or in the hands of the of the coalition governments it's now going to rest in the hands of the afghan government and the afghan people what kind of government do they want what kind of society do they want what are they willing to pay for it what are they willing to do these are not going to be washington decisions in my opinion these are going to be decisions much much much more made in afghanistan than they have been in the past and the sort of trend to impose a whole variety of programs and structures and governments and this and that and the next is going to come i believe to a not a halt but a a dramatic decline and so the question in my opinion of what's going to happen as long as the dash or not is going to be in the hands of much more of the government of afghanistan and the people of afghanistan it has in the past thank you all for coming i hope you enjoyed the panel it was a mistake to