 I'm Steve Call. I'm the president of the New America Foundation. And it's my pleasure to welcome you to this event briefly and to introduce our subject, which, from our perspective, involves the launch of a book that somebody will hold up for the audience, since I don't have a copy. Talibanistan. And I just wanted to say a few words about where this book came from and why the subject matter that you'll hear discussed today struck us as worthy of what became really a couple of years of endeavor at New America, led by Peter Bergen, who will be your host and moderator through most of the program today. Peter and Catherine Tiedemann, who unfortunately is not here with us today, co-edited this book from Oxford University Press. It's a collection of scholarly and journalistic articles about the Taliban and its environment in southern Afghanistan and Western Pakistan. And it was born as an attempt at New America by a diverse group of researchers to try to get at some of the diversity of the Taliban itself at a time when the United States was really puzzling over its resurgence as a movement, as a political force in Afghanistan, as a military challenge, and really a challenge that had been neglected in the years after the 2001 defeat of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and which revived and presented itself as a really grave dilemma to the Obama administration as it arrived in 2009. And so our effort was to do what think tanks do, which is just try to provide some ground truth and some complexity and some granularity about this phenomenon, recognizing that the sort of cliched image of a one-eyed mullah and his band of devoted and intractable fanatics was inadequate and really falsifying of the problem. And so the purpose was not to prosecute a particular view of the Taliban, but just to start to document some sections of its diversity and some aspects of its character that were otherwise not part of American debate and discourse. So I'm really, really proud of this book and of Peter, particularly, whose leadership of the National Security Studies Program at New America over the last five years has been one of my joys in my office, just to support him and to watch him. And Catherine as well, who worked very, very hard. The last thing I want to say is that this book and the ideas and the research in it is really part of a much broader body of work about South Asia that we've been engaged in here over the last five years. The AFPAC channel, I hope many of you are subscribers and readers, which we've carried out in collaboration with foreign policy and lots of other conferences and publications around South Asian affairs. So anyway, we're all very pleased to have this occasion to bring us together. And the purpose today is to have a very serious discussion about the ideas and subjects that are in the book and that are obviously still alive as dilemmas for American foreign policy. So let me introduce Peter and welcome him to the podium. Thank you. Thank you, Steve. And thank you for all of you coming today and for C-SPAN for covering this. Steve was instrumental in making this whole project happen. So I'm very grateful to him. Thank you also to Oxford University Press, which published the book and did, I think, a fine job in terms of presenting the material. Thank you also to my co-editor, Katherine Tiedemann. And thanks also to people here at the Foundation, Brian Fishman, Patrick Doherty, Jennifer Rowland, and Andrew Leibovich, who were also involved in making the book possible. As Steve indicated, the reason that we felt this project was necessary, initially it was a series of papers, was not since the Khmer Rouge stormed on the world stage out of the woods of Cambodia in the 1970s, had an insurgent movement become so important, yet at the same time, so less well understood than any other insurgent movement in the modern era. And obviously, we had Aikman Rashid's great book on the Taliban, but it seemed that that was very much the pre-911 Taliban. And we wanted to focus on how did the Taliban develop after 911. And we have some dozen chapters in the book, six people here on the stage who contributed to the book. Anand Gopal, who's a fellow here at the New America Foundation who's writing a book on Afghanistan, has the first chapter in the book. And really, that chapter, which he'll explain in more detail, asks the question, in a sense, was the Taliban insurgency inevitable, particularly as it relates to the Kandahari Taliban immediately after 911? Were there efforts by that movement to essentially negotiate with the Afghan government, which unfortunately were not followed up on? We also have on the stage Hassan Abbas, who's a professor at National Defense University and former professor at Columbia, also a former high-ranking Pakistani police official who really examines what is now the political scene in what was the Northwest Frontier Province, now Kaiba Pakhtunwa. In a sense, the political ecosystem in which the Pakistani Taliban is able to swim, because while groups like the MMA are not the Taliban, they're certainly sufficiently aligned with the Taliban to allow it the political space that it enjoyed in the 2008, 2009 time period when there was quite a lot of denial about the Pakistani Taliban and the threat that it really posed the Pakistani state. Next to Anand is Brian Fishman. Brian is a fellow here at New America Foundation. He also works at Palantir, a company with which many of you are familiar. Brian worked on two chapters, also one with Anand, one really looking at the Akhani network in some detail. Anand is probably the only person in the room. I'm pretty sure probably the only person watching who's actually met Siraj Akhani, the de facto leader of the Akhani network. Brian also worked with him on that chapter and also did a very interesting chapter where he kind of stepped back and looked at, in a sense, the typology of all the different Taliban groups and asked certain questions. Do they attack the Pakistani state or not? Do they attack US NATO forces in Afghanistan or not? Do they take direction from Mullah Omar or not? And a very interesting way of capturing the sort of typology of the different Taliban groups. To Brian's right is Ken Ballin, who's one of the leading pollsters in the Muslim world. He helped us with a poll, the first poll that really looked at the political, sensitive political questions in the federally-administered tribal regions. Obviously polling in Fatah is pretty tricky for all sorts of obvious reasons. We had a very good partner on the ground called Camp based in Peshawar. Ken helped us really think about how to make this poll a truly scientific poll. He will explain some of the findings of that poll. He's written a book, Terrorists in Love, which is an almost anthropological account of jihadis and why they join certain groups. And he'll also talk a little bit about what he learned about Mullah Omar in the process of writing that book. To the right of Ken Ballin is Colonel Tom Lynch, who served on Admiral Mullen's staff and is now at National Defense University, along with Hassan Abbas. He has written, I think, an absolutely fascinating chapter and essentially on the strategic defeat of al-Qaeda and what that means and what the United States should do about it going forward in Afghanistan. Of course, this is not necessarily a popular view among certain circles in Washington, DC. For instance, we want to say somehow the attack in Benghazi is proof of an al-Qaeda resurgence. I think Colonel Lynch will deal with that question in his remarks. And finally, Samir Al-Lawani at the end of the row. Samir is a fellow here. He's a PhD candidate at MIT. And he has a very interesting chapter in the book about Pakistan counterinsurgency operations, which have actually been, I think, quite effective. I mean, we have had our own problems with counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Arguably, the Pakistani military did a better job in SWAT than we've done in most of Afghanistan. So with that, I'll turn it over. We'll just go down the row this way. We'll start with Hassan Abbas. Thank you very much, Peter, first and foremost. I really congratulate you on the book and the great work done by New Magna Foundation on militancy in South Asia. AFPAC Channel is really a great contribution and a great source for research for students everywhere, not only in the US but also in South Asia. I just actually returned from Pakistan about 48 hours ago. And I was just joking with a friend that out of my three days in Pakistan, about two and a half days were spent on discussing Tahir Al-Qadri, a new phenomena, a religious player who has just gone back to Pakistan. And this has become, in the recent months, kind of a new phenomena. Many major political leaders holding big rallies with hundreds of thousands of people coming up with new agendas, coming up with new slogans, and now with elections coming in three months or so, there's a lot of political activity. But I'll focus in about the remaining seven minutes that I'm given on Northwest Frontier province. And I also want to add, given my position in a government organization, that all that I'm saying today in my views are my personal views and not representative of NDU or DoD. The landscape, the political landscape in what was called the Northwest Frontier province and now known as Kheber Pakhtunkhwa province, that's what I focused on. This is the settled area of Pashtuns. We often focus on the unsettled area of Pashtuns, which is a federally-administered tribal area between Pakistan and Afghanistan, with about six or seven million people. But we often get to look at the adjoining or adjacent settled area, which the British had framed it like that, which is about 25 districts, 20 million people, perhaps a bit more than all the Pashtuns together in Afghanistan. So this is very critical. This is the connection between FATA and the rest of the mainstream Pakistan, if I may call that. What happened there in the last 10 years or so had a huge impact on how the Pakistani Taliban came into being, how there was the genesis, how they established their roots, how in a step-by-step fashion they expanded their space. That's why this area, what I'll just now call KPP, short for Kheber Pakhtunkhwa province, that's why it is important. And I only have about three or four points to focus on here. One is that one of the reasons why the genesis of or creation of or mushrooming of Tariq-e-Taliban, Pakistan or TTP became a reality was that there was this government of all major religious political parties in Kheber Pakhtunkhwa province or KPP. This was from 2002, after 2008 or 2007. This religious political alliance, and these are those political parties which believe in a democratic process. These are not the terrorist groups or like the LET or TTP or other groups which believe in militancy. These are the groups which believe in a democratic process. They have their declared political agendas, their manifestos, their websites. And one positive thing, if I may call that was that this group of five different religious political parties represented Sunni groups within the Sunni Muslims, Diobandis, Barelvis, Ehli Hadiths, which are more closer to the Saudi version or Wahhabism and the Shia group as well. So in principle, it looked like a good combination where all the different religious political parties are coming together. But, and this was the first opportunity this group had to rule or run a province. But the results of that were, if I may call that devastating. Because that, their policies created a space. They were not directly supporting militancy or terrorism, not at all. But there's some of their orthodox conservative, narrow-minded policies or looking the other way. When they saw militant groups operating, that created the space for this new networking or connectivity between FATA and if I may call the militants who were in Punjab. If you remember during the Musharraf years, various militant groups were banned. So they all started moving from Punjab, from the south of Punjab, where it was, they were somewhat closer or they were more organized in that area to go to India. And then they were banned. Pakistan military stopped any kind of connections with many of those groups. What they did, they started moving from Punjab through KPP to FATA and then some of them moved on to Afghanistan. This was the responsibility in the KPP province to stop them or go after them. Pakistan had lacked capability to do that, to stop them because the counterterrorism money, all the investment was made not in the civilian law enforcement or civilian intelligence agencies, which could have really stopped that. So that's a large, I would say a failure or a gap that created, that provided this opportunity for all this TTP activity. Three other points. One is about Savat. Savat operation, as Peter had hinted, was indeed a successful operation. I think Pakistan military deserves credit for that. But I was just reading the latest figures of 2012 and it said they were about 17 major attacks from Taliban groups that were repulsed in Savat. They were 105 different firefights because Fazlullah and some of those Savat militants have gone into Afghanistan. And this is a contentious issue. Pakistan government is arguing some of the Taliban are attacking Pakistan or Savat from the other side. So that's a big issue. The stabilization or the consolidation of the peace has not happened. There's a successful de-radicalization process that is going on. About 2,000 of these militants are going through that process. So that's one study, one important factor. Successful, but not fully successful or still in transition. The history or the modern history of Khyber Pakhtunkhaw cannot be completed unless I salute two people specially. One is Bashir Belor, a leading Awami National Party, a very brave and courageous man who survived three suicide attacks. And then he knew fully well that the Taliban were after him. He stood us down, was killed in a suicide attack recently. Malala Yusufzai, another icon who have taken up a stand, as important as it is, and this I've made this point in the chapter as well, as important as it is to profile militant groups and militant leaders, it is as important to salute and to appreciate all the great and courageous people who are standing up to these things. Bushra Gauhar, another A&P woman leader who despite threats is standing up. But also the tragic part is that some of the leading police officers and one of the leading very well-known Pakistani police officers is in the audience and I'm reminded of that. Three famous senior police officers were killed in Peshawar in Khyber Pakhtunkhaw province. So also there's this challenge that civilian law enforcement faces that they have not been able to defend those brave people. And if these courageous people who are standing up to Taliban fall one by one, then it creates a scary scene. So these are the, I think the important currents, I think I've finished with my eight minutes or so. But I want just to focus on, just to leave you with this idea, there's a successful case of Savat but the de-radicalization process, we don't know whether how far it will go, those gains have to be consolidated. Avami National Party, a progressive political party was voted in because ordinary people of this province reacted against MMA, that religious alliance which I was mentioning had created that space. So ordinary people in Pakistan and in Khyber Pakhtunkhaw have been doing the right thing. They have been voting in the good people. They have been voting out the problematic forces in a limited sense with all the caveats. But without good governance, without investment in education, Khyber Pakhtunkhaw province will not be able to come out of the crisis it is in. 768 schools bombed in the area, 58 schools bombed in this province, in this year, last year, 2012. I have not seen any major effort on the part of Pakistani political government or military government to take up these major causes of investing in education or infrastructure unless that is done Khyber Pakhtunkhaw will, that the status quo in Khyber Pakhtunkhaw will not change. Thank you. Thank you. So I'm going to focus on the Afghan Taliban which is a completely different beast than the Pakistani Taliban. My chapter on Kandahar, which is the one I'm going to focus on, really covers 2002 to 2004 as the major period. And the reason I did this is because I believe that the patterns of conflict that we see today really were locked in by 2004. And I went back before this and sort of looked through the chapter and I was trying to think about what can we actually glean from that period that would be relevant for today? But I was surprised to see that in fact, most of the dynamics that are taking place on the ground in 2002 and 2003 in Afghanistan and in Kandahar are completely relevant for what's happening today. And what I see is happening today is two key questions that we need to sort of grapple with. The first is what happens when the U.S. leaves, if the U.S. leaves? And the second is do the Taliban want to negotiate? And for both of those questions, I think the chapter in this book is very useful in this regard. And there's a lot in there. I believe it's the longest chapter probably, yeah. So I'm only going to focus on those elements which speak directly to these two issues. So after 2001, the Taliban were routed and left in shame and defeat and the people of Afghanistan welcomed that for the most part. And al-Qaeda, if you recall, at the time, they fled to Torah Bora and then they went to Pakistan, they declared Jihad. And at the time, watching this from afar, I assumed that the Taliban had essentially the same position, that they were declaring Jihad with the infidels of the foreign occupiers. It was only after Peter asked me to study Kandahar and the Kandahar insurgency and going to Kandahar and really trying to grapple with what's happening there that I actually came to a different conclusion than what I had originally thought. And in short, that is that after 2001, the Taliban had quit, essentially. They had quit wholesale. And what I mean by that is that the Taliban, the people who today constitute the insurgency from the leadership to the rank and file, had quit and tried for the most part to engineer a series of deals with the Afghan government or in some cases with the Americans directly. And it's interesting because I dug up a quote. At the time, and this is 2002, there were Pakistani clerics, radical clerics who are trying to drum up support for the fall on Taliban. They're saying, we need to send money to the Taliban so they can fight the occupiers. But this is a quote from somebody who is a relative of Mullah Omar and a very high-ranking person in the Taliban. And he said at the time, in late 2001, after the government had fallen, he said, we want to tell the people that the Taliban system is no more. They should not give any donations in the name of the Taliban. If a stable Islamic government is established in Afghanistan, we won't launch any action against it. And on one level, this may seem surprising, but on another level, if you look at the broad sweep of Afghan history over the last 30 odd years, it's really not that surprising because what you see when you look at Afghan history in the last three decades is a large number of factions that are fighting against each other that switch allegiances over the years and they're driven by the exigencies of survival, essentially. And so with the Taliban, particularly, they took power in 1994, starting in Kandahar. And what they did is they displaced a lot of power brokers or warlords and they gave these warlords an option in the south, essentially submit to us and surrender your weapons to sit at home and give up politics altogether and we'll let you live, or if not, we'll fight you. And so some of them fled to Pakistan and some of them stayed in Afghanistan and did as they were told. And talking to the Taliban leadership, a lot of them expected the same thing in the 2002, 2003 period. And so what you had in 2002 to 2004, specifically, is you had more or less the entire leadership of the Taliban and I'm talking the minister of interior defense, information justice, foreign affairs, key frontline commanders, key sort of advisors for Mullah Omar who's the supreme leader of the Taliban cut deals with the Afghan government and in some cases attempted to cut deals with the U.S. And this holds for even the most ideological people in the Taliban. So my one example is Mullah Tarabi who was in the Ministry of Justice and he was one of the ideologues for the most draconian social policies for the Taliban. So the whip-wielding religious police, the people who would go around and check people's beard, lens, et cetera. Even he surrendered and cut a deal with the Afghan government in 2002. And along with them were thousands of foot soldiers who did the same. And so there was an opening there for a broad political settlement but unfortunately it didn't come to pass. And this is why I think the years of 2002 to 2004 are relevant for what's happening today because again today the question is whether a broad political settlement is in the cards or not. But what the Taliban leadership found in 2002 and 2003 was that a settlement was not in the offing. Instead every single deal that was engineered was at some point overturned for various different reasons. So I'll give an example. So I mentioned Mullah Tarabi who is the ideologue, one of the ideologues of the draconianism that took place. Tarabi turned himself in in January of 2002 to the governor of Kandahar province, Gulag Al-Sharazain. And they arranged a deal through tribal intermediaries which is how it usually works in Afghanistan. And the terms of the deal were that Tarabi would give up any rights to political life. He would surrender whatever assets he had in terms of vehicles, et cetera. He would then retire to his home village. He would publicly pledge support for the Afghan government, the Karzai government and for the Americans. And he would agree to be sort of monitored by the Afghan government. So they would have somebody coming every week to his village to see what he was doing. And he retired to a life of preaching. Now news of this came to DC, came to Romsal particularly and Romsal was furious about this and it leaked out into the press. You can go back and look at the archives then and see what people in the administration that were saying about this. And the conception that was where we were making deals with terrorists and that's unacceptable. And so a lot of pressure was placed on the Afghan government and particularly on the governor of Kandahar then who had engineered the deal. And so he went or his people went to Tarabi and said, look, we're under a lot of pressure and we cannot guarantee your safety here in Afghanistan. So you should go to Pakistan. And he fled to Pakistan. And this sort of, this instance, this case was played out again and again in Kandahar and around the country. Another example, which is particularly pertinent for today is Haidullah Haidhuwa. He was former interior minister under the Taliban, also very important provincial governor and he was also, he's a Pupilzai which is a tribe of Hamid Karzai. So he had tribal links to the Karzais. After 2001, he had repudiated the Taliban and he was seeking to find a way to join the Afghan government and join the Karzais essentially. And so he contacted Ahmed Wali Karzai, Hamid Karzai's brother and he wanted to engineer a deal again to see if there's a way that he can join the government. So the meeting took place or the meeting was scheduled to take place in Chaman on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Now the Pakistanis caught wind of this and they were none too pleased with the idea of Taliban joining the Karzai government. And so they told the Americans that Haidullah Haidhuwa is in such and such place. And I believe they arrested him, handed him over to the Americans and the Americans sent him to Guantanamo. And he's still in Guantanamo today. And he's a particularly interesting case because a lot of the sort of talks about talks or the sort of nascent negotiations that are taking place are about prisoner releases from Guantanamo. And he's one of the five Taliban prisoners that the Taliban are seeking to release. So here, these are just two examples but this is, you know, you can go across the board and the chapter goes into a lot more detail about a lot of this. And as this was happening on the leadership level, we also had on the rank and file level, night raids, the Afghan government was, it has been implicated in torture and human rights abuses, not just towards former Taliban members but also towards people whom the Afghan government or whom the Americans perceived as being aligned with the Taliban. So this would be clans or tribes or communities in which the Taliban had traditionally drawn recruits from. And through all of these processes, again, and there's some detail in the book, in the chapter on this, you had a sense amongst people who either were once in the Taliban or people who had been in communities from which the Taliban were drawn that there was no space in the political system in the post-2001 political system for them. And so these people like Haidullah Haidullah, and not him, but sorry, Mullah Taurabi and others relocated to Pakistan, to Quetta and the Taliban was reconstituted, essentially. And having talked to a lot of these people who were in their process in 2002 and 2003, what's striking to me is how relevant that seems to be today in trying to understand whether the Taliban are open to negotiations or not. So in my sense, there's, broadly speaking, two camps in the Taliban. One is, one of people who are mostly political. But political, I mean, they're not frontline commanders. They're not on the ground in Afghanistan leading fighters. Rather, there are people like former ministers of education, ministers of culture, religious ideologues, or people who are in Mullah Omar's inner circle who recognize today, and these are the same people who had desperately tried to reconcile in 2002 and 2003. And they recognize that the Taliban are not going to win this war. And I think, to me, it's clear that the Taliban are not gonna win this war. And they recognize that. And therefore, coming out of this very practical need, there's an opening or they have a sort of orientation towards trying to find a negotiated settlement. And there's 10 or 15 people today in Doha who are Taliban leadership. There's a dozen people who are in Abu Dhabi and there's a couple of people in Turkey and as well as people in Pakistan right now. And so that, to me, constitutes one sort of click, very informally, a click of the Taliban leadership. And a second grouping is what I think of as the military side. By military, again, I mean people who are actually, they themselves may not be on the ground in Afghanistan leading fighters, but they are the ones who are directing the insurgency on a day-to-day level. And these are people who either, for the most part, distrust the US's intentions in negotiated settlement or in talking to some of them, they frequently point to the 2002 to 2004 period and say, look what happened when the last time we tried to reconcile. And some of these people, by the way, are people who actually tried to cut deals with the Americans in 2003 and were rebuffed and now are on the military side. And there's a sense amongst these people that we'll just wait out the Americans until 2014. And talking to them as well, there's a sense that they believe they can reconstitute the 90s Taliban. I think that's a fantasy, but they believe that they're very close to that and if they just hold on a little bit longer, they can do that. And so, I should say, by the way, that these categories that I'm putting forward, they're very fast and loose, they're heuristic, you shouldn't reify them into real groups, but there's ways to try to understand the differing positions that are right now with the Taliban. And talking to all of these people within the Taliban and people around the Taliban and also ordinary Afghans, there's a very heavy focus on troop numbers. Karzai has probably landed today in the US and is gonna be talking about whether it's gonna be 6,000 or 9,000 or 3,000 troops in Afghanistan. And that's important and a lot of rural Afghans in the villages where the war is actually being fought would say we want zero troops and not three or six or 9,000. But there's another question that I would like to raise which something that I think in my discussion with the Taliban, they actually don't think about it, nor with most other people who are actually think about these things in Afghanistan, which is that what we're facing today in Afghanistan is a question of state formation. And this is similar to the questions we're facing in 2002 to 2004. And that's why I think some of the findings in the chapter are still useful. And what I mean by that is that I believe that the US has never seriously attempted to build the Afghan state. If you look at the 2002 to 2004 period, what happened is on the one hand they poured money and expertise into the center, into Kabul to Karzai's government. But at the same time, we had a number of independent and unilateral agreements with people in the periphery. This would be, for example, the governor of Kandahar in 2002, Gulag al-Sherzai, or there's a series of private militias that were funded and supported. So while we were putting money in to create the Afghan police, we were also giving money to Gulag al-Sherzai, the governor of Kandahar, for him to maintain his private militia. And this is a militia that doesn't answer to the Afghan government in any way. It answers to Shersai alone and perhaps to the special forces. And you can't create a state under these conditions. I mean, if you think of a state in the very basic definition of a body that has a monopoly over the means of violence, I mean, there's a series of actors that exist around the country from 2002 to today, which preclude the formation of a viable state. To give an example, there are probably 100, maybe 200 military bases, US military bases, scattered around the country in Afghanistan. Now, each of those or most of those require Afghan militia men to guard. And these are not Afghan police and these are not Afghan army. These are irregular militia men that we call private security contractors to guard. To supply each of these bases, we require convoys that need to be protected from insertion attacks. And the people who protect these convoys, for the most part, are again militia men, warlords or strongmen. Each of them are either being paid directly by the US military or they're being paid indirectly by the Department of Defense through various subcontracting regimes. So, and there's been various estimates on how many of these people actually exist. And we're talking, if you include the private security contractors in Kabul, maybe 50, 60, 70,000 young men who have arms who do not fall under the Afghan government's purview whatsoever. And they all owe their existence entirely to foreign patronage. So the question is what happens when the money stops flowing? Along with them, the Afghan state itself. The Afghan state doesn't collect its revenues through taxation. It collects its revenues almost entirely through foreign patronage. So again, the question is what happens when the money stops flowing? Now we have one case that we can look to, which was in the 80s. This is very similar to what the Russians with the Soviets had. The Soviets had militias or the Afghan communist government had militias around the country, patronage flowed from Moscow to Kabul and then outwards into the provinces. And it was only, the Russians left Afghanistan in 1989, but the civil war started in 1992. And it started in 1992 because the money stopped flowing in 1992. And these are sort of the questions I think we face. And you can draw these questions out, I think, from the chapter in this book. My notes are on the phone. Thanks very much. I wanna thank New America and Peter and Steve for hosting this event. It's great to be on a panel with all these folks. And to go after Anand, I do wanna sort of reemphasize the point that Peter made. When you read any of the chapters that Anand has written, you really have to read, look at the references. I mean, more so than with your average chapter. They're really pretty incredible. So what I like to talk about is some of the semantics. My sort of task in this effort was to step back and look at the bigger picture. And one of the things that came out of that process when we were originally pulling together these chapters, and these chapters do hold up over time, as Anand said. I really think that some of the basic dynamics are still there, even as conditions have changed. Some of these people have been, some of the individuals and personalities have been killed. Some of the political dynamics have changed a little bit, but fundamentally, you see the same issues at play. And so semantically, when we were pulling these together, there was this division that we often made between so-called Afghan Taliban and Pakistani Taliban. And that's something that I thought at the time was a sort of false construct that gave us, that created a false distinction that obscured some of the cross-pollination between these kinds of groups and didn't really shed a lot of light on the strategic differences between them. You see a new version of that even in the last couple of days where there has been reporting in our newspapers about a drone strike that killed a Taliban commander in South Waziristan named Mullah Nazir. So Mullah Nazir, and if you go just look at the headlines, you'll see is often referred to as good Taliban versus bad Taliban. And the distinction there that gets made is one around whether or not this is a Taliban figure that attacks the Pakistani state. Well, that is a really critical question and it is quite important, but that sort of normative judgment also obscures a lot of complexity that we need to be considering when we think about these folks. I mean, after all, smart people in the US government decided that he wasn't all that good of a Taliban. And wherever you sit on drone strikes, there are smart people that think that he deserved one. So what are the questions that we should be asking about these militant groups? And I'm just gonna run through the six that we identified when these chapters were written. And I think they still hold up. The other thing that I would point out is that a slight tweak of these questions should be used in all settings where we have militants that are associated with al-Qaeda. And the Taliban is not al-Qaeda, but they are associated with al-Qaeda. And I think that when we've got local groups that are associated with a transnational militant organization, there is a version of these questions needed to be asked, whether it's in Syria, in North Africa, in Iraq, in Yemen, in Mali, wherever. So the better solution, six questions. The first one is the key strategic question that the good versus bad Taliban gets at, which is does the militant group attack Pakistan? The reason why this is fundamental is because it shapes their local environment and it fundamentally frames how they are going to be interacting with the organization that has the most power on the ground, which is still the Pakistani military. If we look at Mullah Nazir, for example, this is somebody that did, over time, generally have a more positive relationship with the Pakistani government than other militants in the FATA. Mullah Nazir came to power in 2004, only after a previous drone strike, U.S. drone strike killed his primary rival, Nekh Mohamed. At the time, Mullah Nazir was in a Pakistani prison, which, I don't know exactly how to put it, but that allows for a lot of negotiation with the Pakistani state. He was then released and sort of took a leading role among the Ahmadzai Wazirs in South Waziristan. So, you know, Mohamed Nazir was ended by a drone strike, but in many ways his leadership started with a drone strike as well. Second question is what are the group's tribal and social roots, right? This is obviously a key question because while we tend to look at conflicts in terms of how these organizations and how these networks face the United States, oftentimes that's not the most crucial question to the groups on the ground, right? And sometimes it's very difficult to understand exactly what those histories are, but as these groups build relationships, as they negotiate the politics of the region, those are the questions that they ask. What are my social roots? Who can I trust? Who can I not trust? And so if we're gonna understand these organizations and develop a policy towards these organizations, those are the questions we have to ask. The third, what are the militant groups' relationship with foreign fighters? Well, in the case of Moulin-Azir, it really varies and you have to ask what kind of foreign fighters? Moulin-Azir over time had a pretty good relationship with Al Qaeda and I imagine that the targetiers guiding the drone strike recently would point to that relationship over time, but Moulin-Azir clashed repeatedly with Uzbek militants associated with the IMU and the IJU and as a result he clashed with other Taliban elements in South Waziristan that had allied with those militants. So when we look at somebody like Moulin-Azir's relationship with those other organizations, we really have to sort of get down to fine points about how he's framing his politics. Fourth, how aggressively do these folks target international troops in Afghanistan? This is another obviously key strategic question. Well, in the case of Moulin-Azir, this is a pretty obvious one. He supported attacks against US troops in Afghanistan, closely with the Haqqani network over time to do so, but that's not the case for every militant network in the FATA. There are plenty of criminal organizations. The most famous was probably Mangle-Baz in Khyber area that fought other militant organizations. So this is a key question. It's a key question for US policy going forward. It's a key question for understanding how the Pakistani state is going to look at these organizations. Obviously, this is important to us. It's not as important to the ISI in terms of how they're going to define their relationship with these organizations. Does the militant group engage or support attacks on Western civilian targets? The reason why this one is important is because it obviously defines a relationship certainly with al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda's globalized mission and attacks on civilians. Moulin-Azir was never publicly implicated in a global attack, which distinguishes him from some of the other Pakistani militants that were. They told him the sude, for example, was pointed to for a plot that would have taken place in Barcelona, Spain. Wasn't, it was disrupted by the Spanish police, but that was a really interesting one where you did have a fundamentally local Pakistani militant looking to attack abroad in an al-Qaeda style format, right? Moulin-Azir, to my knowledge at least, was not implicated in that way, but, and this is total speculation, but one of the questions that I would ask about somebody like this, somebody that had a long close relationships with the Haqqani network, Siraj Haqqani intervened on Moulin-Azir's behalf as he was negotiating relations with the Tariki Taliban Pakistan in 2008, is whether or not some of these other militants engaged and supported some of the Haqqani network terrorist-style attacks in the heart of Kabul over the last couple of years. That's the kind of question that would, I think, change the way people thought about these kinds of organizations. And then the last one is, does the group take operational direction from Molaomar? Everybody rhetorically supports Molaomar, but I think one of the things that we need to be very careful of, especially as researchers that don't have the kind of source network and access that Anand has, is to be very careful with what these guys say, and that goes for the Taliban, it also goes for al-Qaida, right? The heart of being a terrorist organization or an insurgent network that needs to create a lot of power out of relatively little on the ground force is that you have to create myths about yourself, right? That's at the heart of terrorism is to create myths, to create political power out of relatively small amounts of force, and so you do that with strategic communications. You do that with attacks that are gonna get a lot of attention, you do that with attacks that are gonna generate a lot of publicity, and you do that by building a sense of coherence and cohesiveness within a range of organizations that are really running in all sorts of different directions, right? And I think that's one of the things that you see with the Taliban is that you've got a lot of different sub-organizations running in all sorts of different directions. And why that's important is because understanding those networks and understanding the internal tensions within these milieus gives us tools for undermining them, right? I've heard it said and sort of been criticized at times for saying, look, we need to dig deeper and we need to understand, we need to, I don't wanna use the word empathize, but we need to really put ourselves in the shoes of some of these organizations to understand how they understand the world. But the reason why we need to do that is not so that we can understand why they're able and how they're able to exploit the drone strikes in order to recruit. It's so that we can understand how they operate so that we can undermine them, right? And we understand what they're afraid of so we can undermine them. The last thing that I'm going to say, and that's this, right? This is a model that is not just applicable in Pakistan. Mullah Nazir, by the way, had close relationships rhetorically with Mullah Omar and Mullah Omar reportedly intervened on his behalf again in 2006 to keep him in a leadership position in South Waziristan. So that does look like a pretty close operational relationship, at least as far as it goes. The last thing I'm gonna say just going forward is on the future of Afghanistan, I could not agree more with what Anand was saying about the money issue in Afghanistan. I wrote a paper published here by New America called Russian Roulette, and I forget the subtitle, that runs through and does a comparison of the last days of the Russian occupation in Afghanistan in the late 80s with where we are today. Frankly, I don't think from a sustainability of the Afghan government standpoint we've done much better. And that's pretty depressing, but I think that's the case. And we may have done worse. Because I think in a lot of ways you could make a strong argument that Najibullah was a more dynamic and creative leader than Hamid Karzai. So the last thing though is where do we go going forward? And I think, especially in the FATA, right? We have a strategy of very effective tactics, meaning the drone strikes. Those aren't going to defeat the Taliban, and they're not going to fundamentally defeat Al-Qaeda in my view. I think they will suppress the Taliban in Al-Qaeda. And I think it's possible that Al-Qaeda in particular will sort of defeat itself the last 10 yards or so. Because they've lost a lot of really important people, and their ideology is fundamentally a conflict with itself. But when it comes to the Taliban, I'm not as optimistic as a non-person, because I am quite pessimistic about the Afghan government. And I don't think that what we will see is the Taliban sort of rushing with armored columns back into Kabul. But I do think that civil war in Afghanistan is a real possibility in the years after an American withdrawal, particularly if the money stops flowing in the way that it did after the Soviets left. And that's how the Taliban got there in the first place. They didn't defeat Najibullah on their own, right? They rose after the Afghan government had been shattered by civil war. And I think the danger comes not in the first three or four years, the danger from the Taliban or some reflection of it comes not in the first three or four years after an American withdrawal, but in the next five. And if you can get through that first five years without civil war, maybe you make it. But I worry very much that that's not gonna happen. So, thank you. Thank you, Peter Bergen and Steve Cole of New America for this, both the book and this presentation. As Peter mentioned to you, I will talk about two things. One, the poll that my organization, Terra Free Tomorrow conducted jointly with the New American Foundation in the FATA. And this will complement what Hassan addressed about the nearby Khyber-Pakhtuna province. While much focus on the FATA deservedly has been on the militants there, as well as the United States drone strikes in the area, not as much attention has been paid to the actual people who live there and their point of view. In our public opinion survey, while not startling in some of its conclusions, I think gives an insight into where future policy might head. Here are some of the key findings and they're set forth in the book in detail. Nearly nine out of every 10 residents in the FATA region oppose US military operations. And this is not a view that's lightly held. In fact, it's passionately and intensely held. And here's one measure of why. While only one in 10 people in FATA, one in 10 FATA residents of the tribal areas think that suicide attacks are ever justified against Pakistani military forces, almost six in 10 believe these attacks are justified against the United States military. Much of the antipathy towards the United States is stems from one cause and one cause really only. And that's against the CIA directed drone strikes on militants living in the area. More than three quarters of FATA residents oppose these strikes. However, this opposition to American military policy does not mean that the people of FATA embrace the Taliban or al-Qaeda. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Fewer than 10% of the people in the area supported the presence of al-Qaeda. And less than 20% supported the Pakistani Taliban. And here's a telling finding we asked this question, which was Peter Bergen's idea, so I have to give him credit for it. On previous polls, we had conducted, not with New American in Pakistan. He always suggested this question and it's a brilliant one. We asked the people to pick who they would vote for in an election. And we listed al-Qaeda and Taliban as possible choices. Fewer than 1% of the people in FATA said they would vote for either one of these groups. So the support for these groups is quite very limited to a very small minority of people. Instead of supporting the militants interestingly enough, nearly seven out of 10 residents of FATA want the Pakistani military, the Pakistani military alone and without US help to come in and pursue the militants and take care of them in their area. It's a pretty stunning finding. So the popular support that these militants draw from is limited largely to responsive American actions in the area. So as Brian alluded to, it's a tactic. It's certainly not a strategy that drone strikes. Now, this was a fascinating finding. The antagonism towards US policy was not coming from any kind of general anti-American feeling. In fact, almost three quarters of the people in the tribal area said their opinion of the United States would improve most by a great deal if the United States provided humanitarian aid and, believe it or not, visas to work and study and come to the United States. So this is not some generally anti, we hate America, they're bad, they're this, it's very much related to the presence of drones and the military policy United States in the area. So while hating the drones above them, the people of FATA would welcome the chance to have the ground of America beneath their feet. As I said, the poll details are set forth in the book. I'll just take another minute or two to outline what I found out, which is kind of complimentary of what Anon talked about, about the Taliban. And this is in my book, Terrorist in Love, and based on my interviews with many Taliban, both leaders and foot soldiers, and the role of Mullah Omar. According to the Taliban leaders and fighters I interviewed, the seminal one event in securing and establishing Mullah Omar's authority as the undisputed leader or guide, they call it of the Taliban, occurred in April of 1996 in Kandahar, Southern Afghanistan. There, Mullah Omar wore, took from a religious shrine the holy relic of the cloak of the prophet Muhammad. Simply by standing in the holy cloak's presence, the mute have walked out speaking, the blind seeing, but only when a true leader from God stands before it will the holy cloak come out. This is what a Taliban leader told me. In fact, in the past 100 years, the cloak only came out, if you will. I know we have another association with that term, but anyway, the closest I could translate it, came out when the legendary King Ammanullah wore it to save Afghanistan in 1929, and then again in efforts to stop a cholera epidemic in 1935. The prophet's cloak can be opened only when touched by a true leader of the faithful, another Taliban told me. Mullah Omar had the right touch. So, so Allah Almighty opened the clock chest for him to wear the very cloak worn by the prophet Muhammad and be proclaimed the leader of the faithful. Now, as Anand talked about after the initial American victory in Afghanistan at the end of 2001, Mullah Omar and his top leaders were treated to quetta in Pakistan. Now, I received what Anand said is absolutely true. They didn't fight, and a lot of them were trying to do deals, et cetera, and this is very enlightening. I received a very different explanation for this, and you can take it for what it's worth. But as recounted to me, Mullah Omar was devastated by the Taliban's defeat. He was paralyzed with an action, and he was taking up shop at a madrasa in quetta. Couldn't decide what to do. In other words, he couldn't decide whether to launch Holy War or not. The reason, he was waiting patiently for a true dream from God to tell him what to do. Now, that's what caused him to go to Kandahar to begin with the wear of the cloak of the prophet Muhammad was because he had a dream that foretold us. So, only after a Taliban deputy, the leaders of the Taliban are sitting in this room, and a Taliban deputy, as recounted to me, told of his dream, and his dream was that he saw the beard of Mullah Omar turn a blinding white so that it was made of the very threads of the prophet's holy cloak. This was greeted with cries of alawak bar praise God, and as told to me, this is why the Taliban took up Holy War against the United States. This reverence for Mullah Omar, I found among all the Taliban that I spoke to, I'm not sure about the political implications of it, but they saw Mullah Omar as a spiritual, almost a divine presence who would guide him. So, I think whatever happens, the reverence for Mullah Omar among the rank and file is very strong, regardless of what faction there is. There's this religious aura around him. That concludes my remarks within eight minutes. Great, thank you. As mentioned, I'm Tom Lynch, and I wanna thank New America for having me here today. As already been mentioned by my co-authors, it is truly an honor to be included in this work, particularly because of the terrific pieces in the distinguished chapters by the authors that you've heard from today and several that are not here today, one of which I intend to allude to in my comments as I go forward. And in that context, I think the book is special at this time, as it's been alluded to already, because I think it still is very relevant and very important in terms of our understanding of this region, this Afghanistan-Pakistan region, now and going forward. So thanks again to Peter Bergen, Catherine Tiedemann for the inspiration for this work and for the opportunity today. As I mentioned, I'm a research fellow at the National Defense University, so I must make this specific opening comment, the remarks I'm about to make, and indeed what's written in the chapter, chapter 14 of the book, neither represent the position of my host institution, the National Defense University, my ultimate employer, the Department of Defense, but in fact represent my own research and conclusions, and I'm thankful for the opportunity provided by National Defense University for that academic freedom and for the freedom to publish here in this book. In the text of the chapter inside entitled The 80% Solution, The Death of bin Laden's Al-Qaeda and the Implications for South Asian Security, I make and work hard to justify several points regarding Al-Qaeda as constructed by Osama bin Laden, and then the status of South Asian security, the implications for American policy subsequent to his death. My general thrust is in the following three areas. First, we still underestimate and underappreciate the significance of the death of Osama bin Laden to the essence of what Al-Qaeda was, global Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda of a threat of an international and catastrophic terror nature. As a consequence, we misappreciate that bin Laden as a personality was no less relevant to turning the ideology of Salafi jihadism, which had been a regional and a locally focused approach in the Muslim world to understanding politics into a cogent globally threatening movement. And he was no less important in this than Lenin was to making a Marxist Bolshevism globally relevant through the communist and the co-option of the communist ideology. So much like Lenin was for global communism, bin Laden was a unique visionary, combining charisma and ability to communicate and to creatively fuse disparate and diffuse factions of the Salafi jihadi predisposition into something galvanized and formidable and therefore a menacing threat to the West and to out of regional areas. The unique and acute problem posed by bin Laden's Al-Qaeda was its credible effort to graft itself on top of the wider Salafi jihadi movement. And it's one substantial progress at co-option was brought together largely and in most significant ways in the region we're talking about here, Talibanistan. So I think that's important as a marker as to why this is so important. In the chapter I establish and assess the five elements of bin Laden's Al-Qaeda that made it historically unique and conspicuously severe threat. And then go on from there to argue about why that threat is receded and what implication that has for us to better appreciate the dynamics, the regional dynamics that underlie the present and the future in South Asia and particularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan. First I argue that the five elements of bin Laden's Al-Qaeda that made it unique was one that it aspired to be a core organization dedicated to planning, recruiting and training for an organizing, and this is the important word here, catastrophic global terrorist events against Americans and other Westerners that they referred to as Zionist crusader targets, especially in Western homelands. And this was for a specific purpose. That purpose was to drive Westerners out of Muslim lands. Second Al-Qaeda's core element and principle was to serve as a vanguard for organizing and coordinating already existing, regionally focused and locally focused groups towards acts of violence against what they referred to again as the American Zionist crusade of nexus in Muslim lands, where the presence was believed to defile Islam and bring it to a level that was unacceptable. Again, for the purpose of driving Westerners out of Muslim lands. Third, and although a lesser aim, the goal of Al-Qaeda as a core was to serve as an inspiration and a focal point for disaffected lone wolf Muslims worldwide to act out on their frustrations through violence against the symbols of perceived oppression against Islam in the Islamic world or in the Western world, again, for the purpose of driving Westerners out of Muslim lands. The fourth and fifth, also very important, but at a lesser level, I argue here, and indeed many scholars have argued about Al-Qaeda's core, is was to serve as a brand name, Al-Qaeda representing kind of the highest level of Salafi jihad ideology in bringing successful violence against so-called crusader governments in which the most senior Al-Qaeda leaders of the jihad remained free, and this was important, free from serious punishment, penalty, or harm. And here, this was indeed the kind of mystical notion of Al-Qaeda prior to the raid against bin Laden in Abadabad that was the notion of impunity, that bin Laden and to a lesser extent, Zawahiri were immune from justice and they could hide out beyond the arm of contemporary international law. And fifth, that Al-Qaeda would serve, and this is also important from the notion of Tel-Albanistan, serve as a base certain for the conquest of Afghanistan and included in that is their notion of Western Pakistan in the name of global jihad. And this was important because of the mystical origins about where Al-Qaeda had come from and how it had built up in the end of the anti-Soviet jihad period in Afghanistan itself. Now, I argue in the piece here that these five essential elements of bin Laden's Al-Qaeda, three of them were completely devastated by the raid in Abadabad and the passing of time has eroded by about 50% the other two. First, the notion of Al-Qaeda as a brand name that was free from retribution or had impunity against being attacked and captured, that was exploded literally in the manner in which and the finality of which bin Laden met his end. To most of us who followed jihadi websites, we saw in the traffic shortly after bin Laden's death, certainly for a period of two to three months that this notion of how could this have happened was followed by the claim and the desire to have revenge, a revenge that in many ways has never yet been served up. But the notion of Al-Qaeda as disputed leader living with impunity and living above and beyond the law, that came crashing down by way of this raid and other groups, other Salafi regional groups, I would argue to you have exploited that for their own benefit and for their own standing within this wider movement. Second, the essential idea of Al-Qaeda as the premier Salafi jihadist organization able to plan, recruit and then conduct successful terrorist operations overseas that had been already eroding over the previous five to six years really came down on the heads of the organization with the death of midlan. Indeed, we can show in our intelligence that Pakistan was and the locus of Al-Qaeda central was the point of many plots since 2006. But the Western governments largely due to their own efforts and we can talk about that in question and answer in terms of understanding, identifying, being able to monitor the movements of Al-Qaeda really were very successful in taking would-be plots and disaggregating them into unsuccessful plots. Indeed, since the attack in the Northern subway system in London, England in 2005, there has not been a commensurate significant and substantive attack in the Western countries and yet there have been dozens of intercepts and dissembling of terrorist acts and I talk about some of those here in the chapter and talk about how that has led to a demolition of the credibility of Al-Qaeda as a global catastrophic movement. Finally, there's this critical notion of Al-Qaeda as a base certain for conquest in Afghanistan. That's a longstanding and critical notion to the base and to the core. This too was dashed and I think it's important here for the work and the piece about the South Asia to understand this as I argue in the chapter that the relationship between Bin Laden and Mullah Omar as well as the Akhadi network and several other Taliban groups was really personal in terms of the relationships between the leaders. I lay out in some detail the fact that Zawahiri in the Egyptians never swore a similar bayat or a similar oath and to this day Zawahiri is not although he is elliptically referred to still respecting Mullah Omar. He has never sworn the same kind of bayat and therefore the ideological linkage to Al-Qaeda matters far less to Mullah Omar and folks like Akhadi and Akhmadi are these days. Then the vital strategic link they have to Pakistan and its military intelligence establishment. Indeed what I argue has occurred undisputably with the death of Bin Laden is that Pakistan's national objectives don't align with Al-Qaeda or internationally. Indeed they don't align even with the Pakistani Taliban's aspirations to eliminate the Pakistan government itself. And as a consequence Islamabad has incentives to constrain and to limit the effect of the Afghan Taliban going forward in manners that do not represent the wider Salafi jihadi movement. And so my argument in this piece is that the loss of the three critical elements and the erosion by 50% of the other two due to the US campaign and due to the continuous pressure changed what I define and put into place an 80% solution to the problem of Al-Qaeda Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda of global catastrophic terrorism. Now where does that leave us in South Asia? And here the latter two thirds of the piece I discuss in some detail how it leaves us with an under appreciation of the need to rethink our strategy going forward in South Asia. Almost a year ago I finished this piece and I argued in three areas for the wider region for Afghanistan and for Pakistan a proper understanding of this schism between the Taliban's aspirations and Al-Qaeda's make it important for us to adjust the way in which we view moving forward with the quote in game in Afghanistan which I argue should be an interim game. And here's the points I make and I will update them briefly and where I think things have adjusted or adapted specifically within the last year. First two points about the wider region. I think the war in Afghanistan needs to be reconsidered as it's always been viewed in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Indian circles and that as is as a Pakistani supported rebellion in Afghanistan against the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazra dominated government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan with significant links in New Delhi and Tehran and only a fig leaf of Pashtun representation in the form of President Hamid Karzai who is completely mistrusted in Pakistan as too cozy with India. Now that point I don't think is yet resonated in the West and is certainly not resonated yet several streets down in this government. I think there's a grudging and slowly evolving understanding but not yet one that puts us enough in a policy frame of mind to address the subsequent points I'm gonna make. The second regional implication is again to state that with Bin Laden dead, the critical mass of Al-Qaeda's core in Western Pakistan eliminated and severely compromised. The essential dynamics in the Afghanistan are those with regional rather than with international import. Fundamentally, the war in Afghanistan is an Indo-Pakistani proxy war between nations that have fought each other in shooting wars and indulged in several other martial conflicts since 1947 and these are layered on top of the ethnic cleavages within Afghanistan and the poise for action between them as Brian has alluded to in my estimation is great and growing ever stronger as each day passes going forward. And again, I think too little U.S. and Western understanding of this and insufficient attention to the obligations for a residual U.S. diplomatic and military presence to try to cleave together that which we have now armed and put at a better footing is important before it breaks apart and moves in separate directions. Implications in Afghanistan and I'll skip two of the three I had here to save time for questions. The critical notion is that led by the United States, the coalition in Afghanistan has now shepherd reconciliation talks among the Afghan government, the Taliban and representatives from Pakistan's military intelligence services to show how a more federal system in Afghanistan can meet both Pakistani and Taliban aims while preserving the basic framework of an Afghan republic as opposed to a return to an emirate. And here, I think there is some room for cautious optimism, although there is a great blowback and a backlash about the recent High Peace Commission in Afghanistan's Roadmap to 2015 plan, which to me in this framework that I've developed and that I really believe in is encouraging because it shows there's a recognition that the Taliban, Pakistani leaders and Afghan leaders, each of who hold different aspirations and ideations must come together and produce a more confederal and a structure that allows for more southern Pashtun representation, not all of it which is Taliban but some of it which is that allows that inclusion in order for us to have a reasonably peaceful future. And finally, with respect to Pakistan where I think the implications are most grievous because Pakistan as a country is really the fulcrum of the issues that present themselves now moving forward in Afghanistan. First, I think American policy must do better at resolving unilaterally attacking al-Qaeda's remaining core leaders or mid-level Afghanistan Taliban figures to their last breath in Pakistan and specifically here with drone strikes. I think we still too much are using drone strikes in the western region of Pakistan. Indeed, I've called for us to halt them temporarily and restructure them, although my next point is that I think we are in fact starting to see a limited recalibration of how drone strikes are being used, not in a manner that I think is overt and explicit enough to dampen the unhappiness with them in Pakistan which I still think is extant and very important but rather in a manner where for the first time since back in 2008, 2009 I see activities in the last five or six months with drone strikes starting to converge around both Pakistani interests in inhibiting Tariki Taliban Pakistan and also American interests in dampening the international forces of terrorism where I think the U.S. and Pakistani interests converge even though they don't converge on the elimination of people like Haqqani and Mullah Omar. And specifically I point to the same event that Brian talked about and indeed then the subsequent ones which has to do with the death of commander Muawavi Nazir in south Waziristan on January 2nd. A longstanding tribal ally of the Pak Mil and ISI relations between Nazir and the Pakistani state have soured despite their importance over the last year. Indeed Nazir undertook a November 2011 alliance with Tariki Taliban Pakistan and the Masoods and that is actually detailed in one of the chapters in this book, the chapter number five about Pakistan's Taliban by Masur Khan Masood and therefore puts Pakistan in a position of actually and coincidentally being willing to allow for U.S. assistance in eliminating Nazir's from his role, his critical role. Indeed subsequent to that several members of the Masood tribe in the Tariki Taliban Pakistan including supposedly the suicide attack coordinator, a cousin of Haqqi Mil and Masood, a guy named Wali Muhammad Tafun have been killed over the weekend. And my argument here is those types of killings would not be happening without more than Pakistan acquiescence at this point, okay? There's more than enough they could do to inhibit that. So I think that's important and so some cautious optimism for us retaining the relationship there and moving in a direction to find mutual common cause while acknowledging that there's not common cause. Finally, I think we need to most importantly, diplomatically help Pakistan work quietly with India to find the necessary accommodation in Afghanistan to inhibit the possibility of a reckless proxy war between two nuclear armed states that could seriously threaten calamity both in the region and of a global import. And I fear unfortunately that there is too little movement in this area right now and there's not enough focus on that as a critical dynamic in the region. As a consequence, progress and understanding by the U.S. and the West in some of these areas and the critical dynamics that exist after the 80% solution to the global catastrophic problem of terrorism from Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda and the growing problem of looming proxy war and come civil war in Afghanistan is evolving since my time of writing but not fast enough and not near enough with the alacrity. And I really worry and am concerned that we do very diligent work in the next weeks and months to craft a residual diplomatic and military components in Afghanistan that is sufficient enough to show concern, strong enough to show bonding in an otherwise fractious military and strong enough to provide us a presence in South Asia which faces a very difficult security future that is quite independent of actors from the global jihad. Thank you. I'll try to be brief so we can get to questions quickly. Basically, the paper that I wrote or the chapter in this was trying to address the question of why the Pakistani military strategy during since 2002 has either been limited selective or anemic at certain times. And I go through that a bit in the paper to essentially explain and answer the question that Secretary of State Clinton posed in 2009 which is why exactly is the Pakistani government willfully abdicating to the Taliban. There have been a lot of explanations that have been offered. I think one that gets used a lot is sort of the strategic utility of militants. Another is just sort of outright duplicity and that there's some Pakistani interest in maintaining a certain level of insurgency to extract resources from the outside world from US NATO allies. I think there's also a plausible sort of simple rationalist explanation for this and that's just the costliness of such a venture of having such a comprehensive strategy to tackle all variants of militancy in both the tribal areas and the rest of the country. It comes down to what I think is money manpower material and I sort of outlined the costs that Pakistan has borne over the last 10 years in the chapter. And I think it's because of these costs that they've absorbed particularly since 2007 that shapes the anticipation of future costs and fears of what a future might hold should they go whole hog into FATA, North Uzairistan and future operations. It's just worth paying attention to what Pakistan says or what Pakistani military leaders or state leaders say about what the costs that they've borne because I think we are generally not attuned to this. I thought it was striking when there were some news reports that suggested the GHQ release report saying they had lost about two brigades of manpower just outright manpower from their military and the operational equivalent of two divisions which is dramatic and this might be inflated but this was based on estimations of the retraining costs and the retraining time, the replacement of material costs, the reorganization costs that were required to sort of patch up these two divisions but that was pretty significant. It's not for a military that has a hostile eastern border and potentially a western one as well. This is not an insignificant cost and it's something that doesn't get talked about a lot in the United States in terms of assessing what Pakistan can't afford to do and what costs it can bear. Another cost that gets unnoticed I think is the level of violence that sort of hit the urban and core centers of Pakistan post 2007, particularly post the Lal Masjid siege operations. The numbers are staggering. I was just looking through some of the data recently and if you look at the six month window pre and post that Lal Masjid operation, the amount of violence they hit and racked the urban areas and not just of Faza and Khyber Pakhtumar but also Punjab and Islamabad, the number of attacks increases maybe like two to three times but the amount of casualties goes up maybe 20 to 25 times in just within a short period of time and Pakistani military, Pakistani government states that they believe that these attacks are likely to come again in the future should they take on certain other operations like in North Waziristan against the Haqqani network. This was a profound sort of concern that was voiced to me repeatedly right after Admiral Mullen's statements in 2011 about the Pakistani government not doing much about the Haqqani network and that it's sort of being sort of an arm of the ISI. The explanation that I routinely got and again this can be taken with a grain of salt but nevertheless should be sort of thought about is if the Pakistani military really did actively go into that and they described it as the hornet's nest, there would be an alliance of militant jihadi networks that would sort of align against the Pakistani state and bring that same level of violence that had the Pakistani experience from 2007 to 2009 which basically crushed the Pakistani public and the military and that would return again and that was something that they greatly feared. So there's a degree of calibration as to how much you can do given the cost that you'd have to absorb or cost you'd have to bear that I think sort of motivates or motivates sort of the limited strategy the Pakistani state has utilized. Another question that sort of comes up a lot is the issue of selectivity that they distinguish between good Taliban versus bad Taliban. I'd like to hold that aside for a second and say that selectivity is not just about sort of the target or the insurgent group but it's also about the territory that's being contested. I believe Hassan referred to the distinction between settled versus unsettled areas. This is something that resonates in terms of how Pakistan's calibrate strategy. Unsettled areas are sort of expected to be frontiers or expected to be lawless. There's a degree which militancy or armed militias or the lack of state control, the lack of Weberian control to put a non-term is acceptable. And this is something that we have a very hard time grasping in the United States or in the Western world because our concept of the Weberian state is meant to be total and throughout the entire territory of a country and this doesn't exist in I'd say most parts of the world. It doesn't exist in Pakistan. It doesn't exist in Afghanistan. It doesn't even exist in India which is arguably a democratic ally and much more capable and stronger state. And so I think dispensing with that idea will help to understand where the Pakistan state goes big, for example in SWAT, where they're much more comprehensive in terms of their strategy, in terms of their manpower, they're concerned about civilian casualties, et cetera, versus in South Waziristan or other operations in Fata which have been far more limited in scope and strategy. I think, and a third thing I just think we need to bear in mind is the way in which public opinion constrains Pakistani state even though we sometimes think of it as even under the Musharraf era as not in a democratic state but an authoritarian one, there is still audience costs that every leader has to pay whether it's an authoritarian autocratic government or a democratic one. And in terms of utilizing force against your own people, it's something that we don't have to think about because we authorize force to go be deployed elsewhere and the only cost that the American public bears in terms of counter-intergency operations are fiscal costs and obviously the loss of our troops and our loved ones but in Pakistan it's also about, it's not just a strategic cost, it's also the political cost of authorizing force against your own people, especially if they're important constituent groups. The base of this uncertainty in the militancy in the Fata and Khyber Pakhtuna is the Pashtun ethnic community which is not an insignificant community in Pakistan. It's actually a very key stakeholder in the state, in the military and so the idea of trying to utilize force against it is much harder to stomach both for politicians as well as military leaders as well. I'll leave it at that so we can go to questions. Very stimulating presentation. We have not a huge amount of time for questions. It can you, if you have a question, it's really a question, not a statement, state your name, wait for the microphone and if it's directed to a certain person, say so. So in the back here, this lady here. Hi, thanks so much for being here. My name is Christine Vargas. I'm a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins Psycho-Treated Studies program. My question I think is most pertinent to Brian. It has to do with stratcoms. What can we do effectively these days to interrupt Taliban stratcoms and insert messages of our own? Not a whole lot, I think. I think it's really important when we talk about strategic communications to recognize that oftentimes you get this dynamic where we think about operations and then we think about strategic communications and that's clearly wrong, right? Actions speak louder than words and it doesn't matter what we say if what people are responding to are drone strikes and that's what they're gonna respond to and I'm not convinced that actually the drone strikes are as important as sometimes people think they are but I think the most important thing that we can do is to eliminate any sense that there's a gap between our actions and our words even if our actions are unpopular, right? We just need to explain what we're doing, state clearly why we're doing it. Peter Bergen actually wrote an op-ed in the New York Times a long time ago saying that we should acknowledge drone strikes, right? And at the time I thought he was crazy but I came to actually agree with him and this is the point, right? Is that we have a story to tell, it's not gonna be popular a lot of the time but we need to explain that very clearly. When I said that militant groups try to create myths, what that means is that we counter those myths when we tell the truth, right? Fundamentally when we tell the truth and we tell it clearly, we are countering the myths that terrorist organizations and insurgents try to create to enhance their own power and so when you just objectively state the truth that is a strategic communications policy and that's what we ought to be doing about these guys. At the end of the day, certainly al-Qaeda and major elements of the Taliban have very little to offer from a sort of governance standpoint. They're not that popular as Ken indicated and so what we want people to be doing is assessing those organizations on their own merits, right? And we don't wanna get in the way of that process, right? So we wanna sort of set ourselves aside and keep the onus on the terrorists, the onus on the militants to establish their own credibility because they have a hard time doing that. In front of you, Jennifer. Thank you very much. My name is Malik Sirajak, but I'm a Pakistani journalist. My question is to Dr. Asan Abbas last week, Pakistani military unveiled a new strategic counterinsurgency plan. Can you speak a bit more about it, what it means for the transition in Afghanistan whether it's a policy of appeasement or of escalating operations against the Taliban? Thank you. Great question. I think this new strategy or doctrine that is being talked about in Pakistani media and General Keane, the chief of Pakistan Army has given a statement, three different statements. He has talked about a doctrine but we have no exact document. What is believed is and what is interpreted is that Pakistan is in Pakistani military and intelligence is actively supporting US negotiations with Taliban at one level. General Keane went to Afghanistan, met Karzai, invited some of the leaders there. There are 15 Taliban leaders who were encustered in Pakistan though the official figure is 10 or 11 but I have heard a figure of 15 somehow. 15 Taliban leaders who have been handed over returned to Afghanistan. There's some rumors about even a meeting that was arranged with Mullah Baradar as well but he refused to go back and in fact was quite aggressive. The point I'm making, this whole effort seems to me to be genuine or I'll not say unless something contrary to this is proved, Pakistani strategic thinking has come to this conclusion that Taliban and the Pakistani version of it and all those independent militant groups indeed are a threat. I would argue it is a bit late in the game. I really and earnestly wish this would have happened in 2007 or eight and there was partly denial, partly delay. Now things are not as easy. It is much more complicated. I would like to believe that this is an honest effort. We have seen many other related developments as well. The meetings, increased meetings between the United States government and Pakistan government at the senior levels. General Kani has been saying this in core commanders meeting and others. So I would argue if this was a facade or this was not a well coordinated, well thought out policy, then we would not have seen as many statements but from the previous developments we have seen the peace deals. If again there's any peace deal which will empower any of the militant that will be problematic. I think it is a flawed belief. If we think that a negotiated settlement with Afghan Taliban will make it easier for Pakistan to deal with TTP and militants in Pakistan, that's flawed. The reason is empowered Taliban or even I would argue Mullah Omar, a Mullah Omar as governor of Kandahar or Taliban in a power coalition in Afghanistan that will inspire and motivate Pakistani side of militants. So I don't think that by dealing with negotiations in Afghanistan it will automatically make it easier for Pakistani military intelligence to deal with the Pakistani side of Taliban. That threat will remain there and military action and drone policy to be frank has not delivered the dividends. Military option has absolutely failed to deal with Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan or even I would argue sorry to deal with Taliban on the Afghanistan side. I hope that this military strategic change is also in parallel to that. There is some new vision and some new thinking also which will tackle the ideological space that has been taken over by the militants. That military cannot do anything about it. Only continuation of democracy, only progressive religious discourse and more education can do that. So even if Pakistani military has changed its doctrine it can only have a limited impact. I would argue I would like to see a much broader effort to deal with these issues. Thank you. Okay we're gonna take three questions here. We're gonna bunch them together because we're actually pretty much almost out of time. And so make the question short and make the answer short. Thank you. Hossein Shabazi from Webster University. I really thank you for the very informative and analytical presentations. I have actually two questions and one is to Mr. Gopal. When you, one of your main argument is that today's is pretty good situation or good environment for pursuing negotiation because of a similar situation took place as you described in 2004. Now I wanna know in light of all the things we know or we heard about what the government is perceived by the Taliban and the U.S. is pulling about the Americans. Why would you say that Americans, the Talibanis are in the situations that would find this today's good time as they saw it in early 2000 when they were very much on run. Could you please elaborate more? And the other question is to Mr. Lynch or Lawani is that in passing I heard something about India and Iran. I'd like to some more on that to see whether Iran and India together or individually have any role in the play as you all discussed. Thank you very much. Okay, and the lady next to you. Hi, Katie from the Department of State. Mr. Boss, you linked the, or kind of referenced the growth of TTP to the lack of support received by the Pakistani civilian law enforcement bodies. I just wanted to see if you could kindly clarify whether the support you were looking for there was financial or domestic political will and why don't you think that support was provided to you? And the gentleman behind. Hi, Nox Tames with the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. This is a question for Professor Abbas and Mr. Gopal. Just the role of religion and the narratives that the Afghan Taliban offer and the Pakistani Taliban offer are often couched in religious terms. Does that play with the populations of Talibanistan? Is this something that brings people closer to them or is it just political verbiage in a different dressing? Okay, and we have the answers have to be like 30 seconds. Please, sorry, because we've got to wrap it up. My name will be brief on, in case of police reforms, the reason there was not investment in police reforms in Pakistan is because of sheer incompetence. It is, of course, that leads to lack of political will. I'll also criticize the U.S. government as much as I'll do Pakistan government. The reason being, and this I'm talking about, the 2001 to 2008 period, not last three, four years when U.S. has started doing actually well and by looking at this police also as an important institution. But why from 2001 to 2008, all these departments and organizations in the U.S. never thought about counter-terrorism as a civilian law enforcement issue? Good point. Go down. There's elements of the Taliban who believe that this is the right time to negotiate because they don't think that the 90s Taliban will be reconstituted. There are others who disagree with that. That's essentially why they think this is the time to negotiate because they think they won't win. And a quick follow-up to that, did the surge work at least on that level in getting the Taliban to think that there's no chance of military success? Yeah, the surge, I think, successfully halted the momentum of the Taliban. It didn't reverse the momentum and it didn't put the United States or any other actor in Afghanistan in a position to win whatever that may mean. But I think it did halt momentum and that informs this position, I think. And the role of the religion in the Taliban, you know, the sort of the ideological battles that are the play out in the countryside are very much couched in terms of religion. So the Taliban are rooted in the countryside as bullies and as people who sort of have a monopoly on religious discourse. And this is why the Afghan government and other actors try to sort of compete with the Taliban on that ground. Yeah, just quickly, you asked a question about India. I'd refer you to the chapter in the book, but India has a critical role to play in my estimation and that's because the narrative of what Afghanistan is as played in a South Asian lyric is that Afghanistan is in play between India and Pakistan, all right? And that the individual tribes in the country of Afghanistan align in one way or the other rightly or wrongly with either Indian interests or Pakistani interests. And Pakistan's military intelligence apparatus is not wishing to see India advantaged either to perpetuate mischief from Afghanistan against its ethnic minorities within the country or to gain decisive advantage geostrategically in Afghanistan really mistrusts fundamentally what it sees presently in Kabul as a New Delhi-leaning government and that America and Western efforts have been either intentionally or more likely inadvertently because of sheer naivete instrumental in giving India a leg up in the country and one that cannot be tolerated for the long term. I would argue that Iran matters in the country but nowhere near as much to the continuation of violence as does the Pakistan-India dynamic. Iran will play and Iran, if you've been to Western Afghanistan is pretty heavily invested and embedded there as it is with some of the Hazara community in Afghanistan but I would argue to you that that's nowhere near as significant in terms of dictating the level and the degree of violence as is the interplay between India and Pakistan interests in the tribal relations. Any final observations? Anybody? Thank you very much everybody for coming. Thank you to our panelists. Stop, please.