 It doesn't sound like it. David? Oh, it is on. OK. There we go. Thanks very much. And I'm happy to be here. My name's John Dempsey. I'm a fellow here with New America's International Security Program. And happy all of you have come out today. Well, I think we're honored to be here with Dan Green, who's written a fascinating book that I read over last weekend. It's a quick read on a difficult and complicated subject. He explores basically the series of experiments that the US and coalition and the Afghans tried over the course of many years following 2001 using auxiliary or local militias to supplement the Afghan national security forces where they were unable to or couldn't reach. And I highly recommend all of you taking a look at it. It displays really what is uncommon among the expats and the foreigners that I worked with having spent seven years living in Afghanistan myself from 2002 to 2009. Dan is unusual in that he really has an extraordinary understanding of the tribal dynamics in the shifting tribal dynamics in Afghanistan, but particularly in the Urzgan Zabel Daikundi belt where he was focused for much of his time there. So I think you probably have copies of Dan's impressive biography, but quickly, let me just highlight a couple of key points. He's currently a defense fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy here in Washington after having served multiple tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq. He was a civilian on his first tour in Afghanistan in Urzgan province on a PRT there in 2005. Then went back in 2009 and 10 to serve as a military liaison officer with the ISAF Joint Command based in Kabul, which I guess was under Lieutenant General Rodriguez at the time, a three star. But also because he had had state department experience, he served as a bridge between ISAF and the American Embassy's Office of Interagency Provincial Affairs, which I think, and he had kind of an unenviable task, I would say, of trying to foster close relations between the US military and the US Department of State, just as the civilian surge was kicking in. And he talks about that at the outset of the book a bit. And then finally, he returned for a third time in 2012, this time again to Urzgan as a member of the military, working on what's known as the Village Stability Operations Initiative, commonly sometimes called the Afghan Local Police Program, which is a program that was designed by Army Special Forces and Navy SEAL teams. And that's the primary subject of this book, though he does, as I said, go through the prior attempts to work on community defense initiatives. Finally of note, he was also on the Navy SEAL team in 2007 in Fallujah, in Anbar province in Iraq. As a, not as a SEAL, though. Not as a SEAL, OK. But I think it was an experience from reading the book that proved valuable to a degree when he got back to Tehran Coat. Although Dan does highlight a key difference between what was taking place in Anbar in 2007 and what the Village Stability Operations Initiative was trying to do in Tehran Coat, and the key difference being that it was much more unrelenting direct action in Anbar against the enemy while in Tehran Coat, they took a more holistic approach, trying to mobilize communities to take charge of their own security leads. So what I'm going to do is ask Dan to speak for a few minutes about the book to give us a flavor of why he wrote it, what it's about. And then I'll pose just a few questions to him about his personal experiences in Afghanistan and to hear how he'd reply to some of the prevalent criticisms we hear about the use of local militias. And also, given the timing of today's discussion coming just a couple of weeks after President Trump announced the new US strategy for Afghanistan, I'm going to take advantage of us having Dan here to ask him what he thinks of the strategy and whether he thinks we're going in the right direction, partly for selfish reasons, because I'm going to be participating, again, tomorrow on a panel here on the new strategy. So maybe if you have any bright ideas, I can steal some of them. But I'll keep my question short so that we have ample time for questions from all of you. So with that, let me turn it over to Dan. Great. Thanks so much before we kick off the conversation. Thank you very much for coming. I appreciate it. There were many reasons I wrote the book, but I think the one I'd like to focus on is sort of, I think in the American mind and even within the mind of many policymakers in Washington, when people hear about special operations forces, they think Navy SEALs, the Osama and Laden Raid, they think of night vision, they think of nighttime raids on compounds, which is certainly what they do. And that's been a large part of what they have been doing over the course of the wars in both countries. But they also do a lot of other things, including what is not well known, but is very important to these kinds of conflicts, something called foreign internal defense or FID. It doesn't sound particularly compelling, but what essentially it is, is working by, with and through local governments to help them secure themselves by building up their indigenous forces. The problem with this approach is that, while it's very effective, it doesn't lend itself well to the American imagination. It's very compelling when you're trying to write a book or make a movie about a helicopter or coming in at night hitting a compound. It's very compelling visually. It's very satisfying in that it's over quick and then you move on. But the problem, I think, is that that's a strategy that however effective it is in the near term, it's not particularly effective long term. It has to be part of a larger approach, including building up local forces. And so if you solely rely on what we call direct action or clearing operations even, that's kind of a recipe for perpetual war. But what you need to do is supplement that with this additional approach. And so this book is a story of a program that special operations came up with called Village Stability Operations. It was officially sort of inaugurated in 2010, but it had a lot of sort of antecedents that led to this development. And what it was essentially saying, look, we can clear every village and valley we want, but unless we have a holding force there that's from the community, however effective your near term efforts were, they weren't effective for the long term. You had to get the locals off the fence, essentially, get them involved. It was also a recognition that a lot of our approach as a country to dealing with Iraq and Afghanistan is very top down. And it's recognized we needed a bottom up approach to kind of reach up while this other hand was reaching down. And it was also a recognition that essentially the Taliban used a strategy starting in 2006 very effectively and continuing that was very different than we had initially thought of. They essentially were trying to mobilize the population as much as intimidate them. And they had a bottom up approach that was holistic. So in 2006, when the Taliban really came back in large substantial numbers in Afghanistan, they had a strategy that was tapping into tribal conflicts. They were tapping into the need for a paycheck. They were tapping into cultural things that was very difficult for the Afghan government as well as the US to really take advantage of. The way I like to think of it, there are four questions that General McChrystal asked. He put this in a Foreign Affairs article in 2013, which I've sort of taken to heart. He says, you know, when we first went to Afghanistan, the first question on my mind was, where is the enemy, right? We've just been attacked, let's go after him. But then as the war continued, his second question was, who is the enemy? Who exactly am I fighting? Then he said later on his third question was, why is he fighting? And then fourth question was, how do I defeat him? I think in a lot of ways those four questions mirror this developmental process over the course of the war within special operations of thinking through not just how to fight the Taliban better, but how to build stability in villages so that what you do is enduring. Great, thanks very much. I'd like to kick off with one question. I mean, the book jacket says, I can read from it here, that, soft adopted to the unique demands of the local insurgency, this is a rare inside look at how they confronted the Taliban by fighting a better war, and in so doing, fundamentally changed the course of the struggle in Afghanistan. And given what we've heard from General Nicholson earlier this year as to the trajectory of things in Afghanistan, given what we've seen on the ground in terms of the Taliban gaining more territory, more spectacular attacks around the country, how would you argue that this actually did fundamentally change the course of the war when it seems like things continue to go downward? Well, what I meant by that is that when it comes to the local Taliban, it fundamentally changed the dynamic. Certainly there's no VSO in Pakistan where the Taliban are constantly being replenished. And VSO in and of itself is not the strategy, it's part of our larger strategy of building up the Afghan army, Afghan national police, having a political strategy to complement that. So, I may not have been as precise as I could have been, but that's sort of what I was coming at. Looking at this province I served in Aruzgan and being in districts that seven years prior were completely no-go zones, where our bases were ringed by mines by the Taliban to then go back and see how this program implemented and seeing this district completely opened up. You could walk around it now relatively safely. It was astounding. And then here the Afghans talk about it, how they would complain about we used to hit their compounds at night or do these clearing operations, but now they're often bred some level of resentment and then seeing it years later that they were actually protecting themselves and how happy that made them, how much more effective it was. That's what I mean fundamentally. The insight though of enlisting Afghans in their own defense, I think that's the fundamental insight that's so central to this that we've long been missing. Right. Also in the forward written by Michael Walt, who I think is also a fellow here at New America, he describes the program's crowning achievement as connecting Afghan villagers to the central government from the bottom up. And so I would ask, given we've seen indications that the central government is increasingly unpopular in Afghanistan today and is still not providing services to the people outside of urban areas, for example, how does this actually work in practice to connect villagers to the central government? Absolutely, you know. So essentially, Green Berets and Seals were always clearing villages and valleys. We call that sort of commuting to combat. And there was essentially an insight said, okay, we need to be in a district or a village in a persistent manner, persistent presence. Okay, while you're there, you need to raise local forces so villagers protect themselves. We have to make sure that we're not creating militias, we're not creating a competing source of authority or security against the Afghan state. So all the Afghan local police that we would recruit with the Afghan national police were vetted by the US, vetted by the Afghan government, received a portion of their salary from the Afghan government, a portion of an Afghan national police salary, so not a full salary. And then they were logistically provided everything they needed, uniforms, bullets, salary, vehicles through the Afghan national police. So logistically, they were controlled by the Afghan state. But the only way you got to a local deciding to volunteer to protect his own community is because you've mapped the community, understand, you never know it fundamentally, but you have a better appreciation for the conflicts between different villages and personalities and tribes. You try to mitigate that through your presence as being kind of an honest broker. You work with the village elders, so you're now meeting regularly, almost like a city council if you will, but an American perspective where you're talking about these problems. And then as they become familiar with the program, they start to volunteer their young men or military age males to be part of the solution. And then as you build out this force and they're trained in their own villages, you know, they're taking security on themselves and you're there to support them, they're supported by the Afghan national police. And so you're essentially empowering local governance. You are bringing security to the people from their perspective. You have salaries coming in, which is partly an economic boom, but also through security, the economy improves. So bizarre shops start to open up, a little more frequently, roads start to open up. So these are sort of things that we created, but as well as raising these local forces, we had something called, and they were deliberately, I think, the names were deliberately sort of opaque, district augmentation teams, provincial augmentation teams, et cetera. These were essentially uniform personnel who were acting as political mentors. We'd have one per district, one per province, and we'd have a regional and then a national team. And what these people were doing was sort of acting as political advisors and mentors to police leaders and political leaders. It's kind of a way to influence the Afghan system, almost like a shadow government. I say that somewhat tongue in cheek. But it was a way to sort of say, look, having worked with State Department, there were limits to what state could do. Often there were force protection concerns and other limits just, they didn't have enough people. So this is a way to sort of use politics as well to link these villages to their government and exercise influence. So why not just recruit these people and put them in the Afghan national police? Why do they need a separate structure? Sure, so every district would have an Afghan national police force, but sometimes people didn't want to make that their full-time job. They had a bizarre shop they ran, they had a farm they had to run. So this is a way of supplementing their income. It was also a way of identifying people who could eventually become Afghan national police members full-time, if that's something they desired. So it was a way to sort of supplement formal security forces. So every local villager who joined the Afghan local police program was one less villager who could potentially join the Taliban for a paycheck. The other aspect of this too is when you're in the village in a persistent manner as the US and you're working with elders and villagers, Afghan police and Afghan special forces are there often. You sort of knit together these provinces that are very disparate through like a logistical sort of hub. So the provincial chiefs of police owned all the logistical stuff. So it kind of knit together these districts in a useful way, I think. Okay, so today, the ALP program was intended, I think, to be a temporary program that was first put in place in 2010 by President Karzai. And it was capped at 10,000. And then they elevated the number of ALP to, I think, 30,000. And today, I think there are close to 30,000 ALP members in close to 200 districts in 31 provinces, if my memory is right. And what I hear about the upside to the Afghan local police being is their trustworthiness. Because these are people who come from the communities, they're chosen by members of the community to provide defense against the Taliban in their areas. They know the areas, they know the structures of the community, tribal structures, the clan structures, and people who have vouched for them. And they also get four weeks of training, I think, which is about half of what the ANP used to get. I don't know if they still get eight weeks. But the results have been mixed, as they have been for... I mean, excellent and are super excellent? Not quite. From what I've read about the Afghan local police program, estimates are about one-third of the ALP groups have been successful. And about one-third have failed. And then the other is kind of a mixed bag. And on the failed ones, there are serious allegations of things like human rights abuses and civilian casualties, that they become predators themselves once they're in these positions of power, given weapons, given salaries, and that they have used their own populations, that sometimes local government officials will take them and use them as bodyguards for themselves as opposed to having them do what they're actually supposed to do. Sometimes they're ill-equipped because the materials and ammunition that are supposed to come from the central government get pilfered by the AMP or others. And oftentimes they're not being paid, which frustrates them, seriously. So what can be done to address those concerns? When the program was developed, it was an outgrowth of a lot of experience with many of these similar issues. It was a very conscious decision to not create militias. It recognized that all the Afghan security forces, there's a potential for abuse, right? So part of that is these aren't absolutes, it's the sort of efforts to mitigate it. There was definitely screening of these people by the Afghan government, as well as local community leaders. They were screening by us. We taught ethics and what have you, just to start with that. ALP members had to be drug tested. These are initial attempts to address this. The first ALP effort started in 2010, 2011, suffered from some of the challenges you talked about. So there was an ALP sort of 2.0. As people recognize, you just can't roll in the militia you had been working with into the program. There was a deliberative methodology and approach of how to engage communities locally. In my experience in the Ruzgan province in particular, it was a heck of a great initiative because I take the district and I talk about it in the book, district called Shahidi Assas, which had a Ford operating base there named Kobra. And in 2006, it was essentially completely ringed by landmines and the Taliban had completely controlled the district. And the thing that was there was virtually just struggling to survive their tour versus looking to pacify that district. And they had about 40 people on that rotation and that base, they had 22 casualties and about seven killed. It was amazing. I mean, this is 2006, I was there when that occurred. Six years later, through this program, we brought in three additional Greenbury elements to the district. We started recruiting locals as part of this program. And what it did is it completely opened up this district. And so I actually went on and talked about it in the book, went on this trip we drove all around the district. There wasn't a single concern. I mean, it would definitely have had IEDs and complex antitacks and ambushes in 2006. And I quote the elders here. The key part of this book too is often memoirs about Afghanistan more about us than the Afghans. And I have a lot of dialogue and meetings with the Afghans. They really say, look, take what you want about what I'm saying about the program. Here's what the Afghans are talking about. And we had these elders saying, we remember when you clear out these districts, you would often arrest the wrong people or kill the wrong people. And then you would leave and we'd have to deal with it. But now we are organizing, we are protecting ourselves and we really appreciate it. So yeah, any program in Afghanistan will have challenges. To me, that's a challenge to improve it, not to abandon it. What do we do when we go into a place like Afghanistan that's so complex in terms of the number of tribes and the rivalries among tribes and within tribes. And we go in and we want to work with the government and the state institutions that we've been helping to build up. But those institutions are populated by individuals. And when people see us giving money and assistance and training and cars to certain people, like in the case of Erzgan, two members of the Popolsai tribe, doesn't that then make it seem like we're duplicitous in saying we wanna build the inclusive nation or we're just dangerously naive to the complexities of Afghanistan and we may have the best intentions, but we're just going to exacerbate tensions. Right, usually when you look at the US experience when we have had to invade a country or have a substantial presence there, at the outset we're the most confident in our abilities but we're the least wise about the people in the struggle. And then you can have a crossover point as the war drags on where you're finally wiser about things but the will to do what's required is very diminished. One of the themes of the book at the end is I talk about how our government's really designed to fight nation state wars. State department does interstate diplomacy, development community, intelligence community. We're all designed to do these kinds of things. They're usually top-down. We usually fight long wars with short-term strategies. Constant rotations prevent the accumulation of wisdom. We don't have a holistic approach. We have a very bifurcated, passive-milk divide as well as other divides and then divides from strategic down to tactical. And then when it comes to countries like Afghanistan or Somalia, countries like this that aren't considered strategic for a long time. There's not a well of wisdom about these places. If you want to have a long-term career in Washington, better to focus on China, let's say, or Russia or something like this that's considered more strategic than these kind of edges of empire that aren't particularly hospitable or particularly compelling. So a lot of this is about sort of this process we went through, we recognized that we're not well-designed to do this. How do we design a program to do this the right way? How do we, you know, studying the Taliban strategy? How do we use that strategy against them? You know, and that's kind of what this program was. But keep in mind, this is Afghanistan. You know, nine years into the conflict, this program came about. Why did it take that long? You know, and there's a reason why it came from the Green Beret community. They were there at the outset of the conflict and they were looking at five, six, seven, eight tours and they're like, we're clearing the same village and valley again where I lost my friend the last tour or another friend two tours ago. We've got to be a better approach, a wiser approach. So eventually you got to wisdom. But boy, it wouldn't have been better to have that wisdom in 2002 or 2001. You know, that's, to me it's a lot about bureaucracies, not being well-designed to do these kinds of things, but eventually getting there, but by that point the will to persist is kind of almost gone. Yeah, and I mean, I guess I would add the short rotations of people going out to Afghanistan and most people I think go out for one year tours and don't speak the local languages, security restrictions keep them on their compounds, largely, they don't get to interact with the local communities so much, really hinders our efforts to accomplish the mission there. And I think so it's unique what special operations forces were able to do, actually getting into these villages and spending time with Afghans at the village level, which is unusual. But the time you were there in 2012 was also at a time when insider attacks, so-called green on blue attacks against Americans were increasing by the Afghan forces that we were trying to work with. Taliban sympathizers, infiltrating, somebody who just had a grudge or whatever. So how did the special operations teams that went into these places feel about that? And were they putting themselves at much greater risk than they otherwise would have been or is this just natural for special operations to take these types of risks? Interesting, when you look at the insider attacks that took place, it seems that I don't have a full perspective on it, but it seems like many of those that took place tended to take place with the Afghan army. There were some of the Afghan police. In the ALP, I don't recall the single one happening or there were so few that it wasn't noteworthy. And I'm not saying it's the ALP program got it right, but it's a really question of what units are doing what with whom, right? I mean, the whole point of the green beret community was to work by with and through indigenous forces. It recognizes you need to have some maturity dealing with morally gray situations, just maturity in general, having life experience to work with indigenous forces, having that extra language training, being screened, having an amenable personality, they do that. And I think at the outset of the war, we used green berets in particular more as a counter-terrorism force. And where we did use them to train local forces, which was part of what they were designed to do, was mostly to train indigenous special operations forces, not train the Afghan army. And then when we started to focus on building the Afghan security forces, it's a huge military we have to build. So it's always a question of numbers versus quality. And I think a lot of the forces we use, conventional infantry for instance, you know, reservists, I'm a reservist, I can say this, reservists, other services even, Air Force and Navy reservists training Afghan army. There's only so much you can do with zeal and what good intentions, you know, and I think we often misuse our resources for these kinds of things. So we have a young 19 year old infantryman embedded with an Afghan army unit, there's greater potential for misunderstanding there than a 35 year old green beret who's done a bazillion tours, who's done this before in a number of other countries. I think that's an aspect of this we don't often talk about or focus enough attention on. I've heard reports that the Taliban particularly detest the ALP program, which is probably an indication that it's effective to a degree that it's a threat to their influence in rural parts of the country that they traditionally think that they'd be able to and control over through what you refer to in the book as the micro politics of the Afghans. I mean these guys go into the villages and talk to the villagers, it's not like the district officials who are living some way away and don't interact much or are seen as predatory, but these community defense initiatives actually are seen as more trustworthy, which is good. But why is the United States the only country to fund ALPs? Do you know the answer to that? Because I know, I mean there's a multinational effort to build up the Afghan national security forces through funding through the donors put through the law and order trust fund for Afghanistan. But when we tried to drum up support for the Afghan local police program, other countries didn't want to participate. You know I mean, part of that I think is a function of our being the United States and we have a very well-developed special operations community and we have different types of units that perform very national high-end missions. We have other units that perform this kind of by with and through among other tasks. I think for most countries their special operations units are their tier one units that do only those kind of high-end missions that tend to be very counter-terrorism focused. We have units as well, but I think because we have the Green Break community and the SEAL community as well as the Marine Special Operations community which did some of this in Helmand Province we have greater capacity to kind of do this. And I also think each country has their own respective history they have to deal with or overcome. The reason I call it A Better War is a conscious reference to Lewis Sorley's book A Better War which talks about the later years of the Vietnam conflict and talks about General Craig Abrams' leadership of the war at that time and how they arrived at wisdom and started to apply programs much like the ALP programs such as Bing West's book The Village which is very similar to this program in many ways. Combine action platoons with very similar approach. So thankfully, we have this history we can draw from although it's very traumatic in many ways. I don't know if every country has that and they have limitations on what they wanna do in their country in Afghanistan. So I think there's some institutional some are political limitations. Before I turn it over to all of you for your question, there's one part of the book I'd like you to talk a little bit about it's my favorite part of the book it's very well written and I thought highly unusual and unexpected was the story about Abdul Samad in Khaskur's district. Could you just give a little background on that? Abdul Samad was a Taliban commander who had a few dozen fighters mostly local fighters from his village and valley who had decided to turn against the Taliban and reintegrate with Afghan government. From what we had been able to put together and eventually we got to talk to him he was what we would consider local Taliban. He had been a truck driver in the province of Aruzgan and for some reason decided to join the Taliban and he had a little valley that was kinda isolated and he would use that valley as his base and would raid into different areas and fight our soldiers in this one district called Khassaruzgan. Essentially foreign Taliban as we would call it arrived in his valley they'd been working with them but because there were this group called the Hazarans in his valley they are the Shia, the Afghans of Taliban or the Pashtuns and the Sunni. They wanted to go through this valley to go to the local bazaar. Very basic thing, just wanted to go like the local Walmart to do well, right? But because they were locals Abdul Samad saw them as his people. Even they were different religiously, different ethnically, they were his people and the foreign Taliban didn't see it that way. They saw him as Shia, this unbeliever, et cetera and so there was this big firefight that Abdul Samad had with these what we call foreign Taliban and he killed many of them including Pakistani intelligence officer who was with them. Well once that happened the Pakistanis in particular were like you're a dead man and he knew we were also looking after Abdul Samad as a Taliban commander. So rock and hard place, he thought he could get a better deal with us and so he started reaching out to our unit in the district and eventually he came in and we had a big ceremony at the governor's compound. I was there, I talked about it in the book and he symbolically turned over his weapons. He got a new Quran, a new shawl, a new turban and a paycheck and so we started helping him so we started going out to his house. So we were literally in this foreign Taliban commander's home and we helped build it up so he could resist these foreign Taliban trying to take it up, built trenches, sandbag things, gave him ammunition, some money and it was phenomenal, it was great. It was very good for us from an informational operational perspective but we're always trying to replicate that but I think in the circumstances were kind of unique. Yeah, you have a unit of you flying out to his house to talk with him. I guess the question I would have about the whole and what I think makes it kind of unusual is that I thought that the program that you were working on was to protect the communities against the Taliban not to try to reintegrate the Taliban into the community. That's right, that is the purpose of the program. So the money he got was part of a reintegration fund which was separate from that local police program but sometimes you have pragmatic adjustments. It was definitely not, an ALP was not intended to do that. By the way, we didn't have a lot of Taliban trying to reintegrate so it wasn't often an issue anyway but we had this bridge of money from the Irrigation Program, Peace Program to do it and then I think maybe down the road he could eventually become part of the local police. But that reintegration program was separate from the national Afghan peace. No, no, it's part of it, that was part of it. It was part of it. It was separate from the Afghan local police program. Two separate pots of money, two different initiatives. Oh, okay, I was confused there. Because I know that the Afghan peace and reintegration program, APRP, was designed to try to bring in the foot soldiers. Yes, that's where they got funding. We have some bridge money we provided, short-term money while that program was getting underway. It had so many limits on it due to corruption concerns. It wasn't often dynamic enough to take advantage of local situations like Abdul Samad's. So our local unit provided some bridge loans, if you will, or just short-term cash to help mitigate his problems in the near term while he got enrolled in that program. And so now is he an ALP commander today? I don't know, but he and his men were evacuated from his district two years ago. The Taliban have arrived back in large numbers as conventional-sized type units and they're starting to try to overrun districts again. Not uncommon. Okay, well, I'll turn it over to the audience. Maybe we can take two or three questions at a time and then let Dan go forward if anyone has anything to kick off. Yeah, if you could introduce yourself as well, that'd be great. I'm Dan, I currently work with SIGAR, but in a previous life, I was a short previous life, I was an infantry officer. So we touched a little bit on how, you know, approximately a third of the ALP programs were successful, a third, you know, we eventually failed, and then a third were basically a mixed bag. What do you think are the relevant factors that made the successful programs successful and what was it that failed about the failed programs? I'm not sure, I just agree with that those numbers, to be honest with you. I think it was much more successful than the alternatives. So one of the things I was trying to do in the book was say my commander said help me think through success, what would a success look like and then why are some ALP sites successful while others struggle, right? So I visited, we had 17 sites, I went to 15 of them. One of the things I did there, I said, look, you know, the view was, oh, this commander doesn't get it or the Afghans weren't ready. Very squishy factors. So what I did is I sent away for a statistical program when I was over there and I gathered data on all the 116 or so sites we had in country. I thought let's do like a regression analysis on that and see if maybe we can figure out what factors there are. So I looked at characteristics of the unit. I looked at characteristics of the district, characteristics of the province and the government. I looked at, you know, how many miles or kilometers does a district share with Pakistan? Thinking that would be a negative indicator. How long is the unit where the US had presence in that district as a positive indicator? So I ran the numbers and, you know, like anything in Afghanistan, data is hard to gather. Most of my data was at the district level whereas most of these ALP are kind of in a part of a district. But I found some interesting factors, you know, more work needs to be done someday. But, you know, numbers of miles you share with Pakistan, not positive. Ruggedness of the district helps a lot. So if you're a completely flat district, it's very easy for the Taliban to get access to the population. If you're extremely mountainous, it's very hard for us. But there was a middle zone I found that was actually quite helpful. You know, if you got a few Afghan local police volunteers, you could use the mountains and the valleys as almost like additional men. You could control a few entry points. So that actually significantly helped. You know, so there's like little factors like that that I kind of looked at. I talked about that in the book, just how do you measure success. So that was a lot of it. We're going back to like expertise. Like some of the folks on my, on this deployment I was in, but one captain had done four tours of the same Ford operating base in the Afghans. You're like, welcome back. I mean, it's like his second home, you know, now it is. So that was another, I think, contributing factor. Some districts that say like in Helmand where we recently cleared it with Marine forces and other forces, security was relatively new versus in the US presence was new. I think they often struggled with ALP. Whereas in the Rusgun, we'd had a presence there since 2001, 2002. So they knew us. We were part of the fabric almost in the other community. Are there a question? Yep, right there. Thank you. My name is Wahidi from, student from American University. Thank you for this opportunity. Since we're talking about stability as well, you and John very rightly mentioned the importance of cultural training as an important and central element into any stability operations given today. But, you know, now about 16 years into the effort today, we still see some of the very basic mistakes that happened at the beginning still continue to happen. We saw what happened the other day with the leaflets and I know some of you know it. It's something that one could only think and happen at the very beginning when you don't know the society, when you don't have even any training, any understanding of any culture. But being into this war and having learned a lot of lessons from mistakes, what do you think is missing? Why do they continue to make mistakes that are so highly costly for both public opinion as well as the whole effort in the country? Thank you. Do you want to take another question from the back? Thank you. Good to hear you. I'm Gila Nuri from Voice of America, Afghanistan Service. Listening to you and I looked through your book, I see that you have been in touch on seeing and a lot of warlords in that area was gone. What kind of programs were successful to bring tribal leaders to cooperate against Taliban? Most of the tribal leaders don't see Taliban as their immediate enemy and what kind of program were successful really to the Taliban cooperate and also you spoke about that Bill Samar that he left the town. So is there a guarantee that he's not gonna join Taliban again and fight against US forces? I think one of the challenges like, anything, and whenever you have humans involved, there's gonna be mistakes in anything. But having said that, I think what you talk about speaks to this problem how we often don't use the correct kind of units to do this kind of work. This requires specialized knowledge, requires certain personality types to deal well with other cultures, to deal with moral ambiguity, to have a great sensitivity to the interests and needs of other people. And the US military is designed to fight big wars and just kill the enemy, thankfully he wears a uniform and then we leave. Obviously this war is not exactly like that. So I think there was an effort, you know about this, the Afghan Hands program was an effort to sort of say look, this constant rotations, these constant rotations are really making it difficult for us to understand the war. There's a great quote from Vietnam by the book Neil Sheehan's book, A Bright Shining Lie. I think it's in the book or at least it's from John Paul Vann saying we weren't in Vietnam 10 years, we were there one year 10 times, right? And I think that applies to this, for sure. There are plenty of people in Afghanistan right now who are on their first tour, who are maybe born right after 9-11 that are now serving there. I serve in this province twice just by luck. You know, we sort of stumble into wisdom, we don't begin with it, we don't consciously design it and try to like get ahead of this learning curve. So I think you should have a modest, light lean and long term force in Afghanistan using the right kinds of people who are committed to the cause as well as the people and I think you not have these mistakes, you're still gonna have mistakes but kind of these more basic cultural things you're talking about I think would be less frequent. And I think also when you, I think these constant rotations are just really making it very difficult for us. It takes the right kind of personality. We have, for example, working at the State Department in Afghanistan as an unaccompanied tour. Allow someone to bring their family either in Afghanistan or nearby. This would really help us in terms of recruiting people to go to these countries. Imagine if you could do five years there, like look at the titles of our memoirs. They always have a one year, like Paul Bremer's book, My Year in Iraq, my first book, A Year in Afghanistan. Look at the British memoirs. It was 18 years in the Khyber Pass by Robert Warburton, you know, or General, can't remember the name, the second commander of the Afghan War, 41 years in India. India's different, I get it, but like these titles speak to the kind of mentality. So I think to me that's, I think that's certainly the stuff you need to talk about. Now I don't know if Abdul Samad will return to the Taliban, there are no guarantees in Afghanistan, but Afghans I find are very pragmatic survivors. It was another aspect of your question, just to make sure I addressed it. Sure, so on the political side, you know we have these provincial reconstruction teams and district stability teams, which were State Department, USAID, and sometimes UN to kind of work with tribes to understand the drivers of instability at the local level. The ALP program was an effort to sort of, through understanding the human terrain and recruiting locals to protect themselves, in a way you kind of mitigated a lot of these tribal conflicts as well. So that was an effort, I mean the UN has pretty robust efforts there and USAID and State Department, their efforts are, they have the lead for this, but they don't have a lot of resourcing. So when I was there with State Department, my whole goal was to understand the tribal problems. And there was no file I could pick up at the embassy on that, you had to figure it out by yourself. So I think it's difficult to try to do that when you're having a Taliban overrun districts. The thing I was struck by with the ALP program is once it was really implemented, the kinds of violence changed. So in 2006 when the Taliban came back, you'd have a couple hundred Taliban trying to overrun a district center. It was very difficult in 2012 to find 40 Taliban or 30 Taliban, and the kinds of attacks the Taliban were mounting can be individual level attacks. They couldn't recruit enough locals or intimidate them to participate in larger attacks. So you had more individual suicide best attacks, assassinations, a heavy use of propaganda to try to use public opinion to sway things. However bad those are, I'll deal with those all day compared to 200 Taliban attacking my base. And Ruzga specifically, right? Yeah. Other questions? Yes, another? Mr. Green, another thing is about warlords and new generation of warlords. You see as many people joined Taliban for paycheck. And some people, and also you also wrote about season of assassination, green and blue, and a lot of young people come and join Afghan forces, but they work for Taliban. What do you think about these new generation of warlords and just they're also fighting against Americans? What do you think, what is the policy or something to counter such things or spread among young people to stop it? I'm not as familiar with the new generation of warlords. I kind of worked with an older generation of warlords. I think, again, Afghans are pragmatic and they read the same papers and watch the same TV shows that we watch about the war and they have a feeling that we were, President Obama said we were gonna end the war, at least end US participation in it. And it's okay, well the Americans are leaving, okay? And people are pragmatic. And warlords are local entrepreneurs. You know where the Afghan state is weak, warlords are strong. And warlords provide a paycheck, security, and maybe your tribe. The best way to address that is to provide enduring security with formal security forces, with this tiered approach, local police, national police, Afghan national army. I think that's the best way. You have to have a political strategy too. You've got to have tribal balance in the way you do it, otherwise they never leave favor one over another and that causes problems in the Taliban, exploit those scenes, you know. Any other questions? Yes. My name is Eqbal Danish. I work for PECS Afghanistan. So my question, as you mentioned earlier, that most of the soldiers, they have done several tours to Afghanistan, but they just go there only for a year or nine months to a year. As you know that the new strategy, Eric Prince, the head of Blackwater proposed for President Trump that if we could privatize the security strategy in Afghanistan, will it that work to work closely with the ALP if we send private sectors to Afghanistan? Will that be a successful program? Wasn't to quote privatize the war, but to maybe expand training of the Afghan army to private contractors. It's my understanding of it. If training the Afghan army by using contractors as well as regular U.S. soldiers, I think that's something that we could look into. I think that makes some sense because one of the problems of the war is always saying, well, yes, we should use the green berets to train the Afghan army, but there aren't enough of them. That was always this argument you would hear, which is kind of true. So if this is a way to train the Afghan army in an enduring way, but my critique of that is we should be able to do this as a country anyway. We should have that capacity. We spend so much money on our forces to fight foreign wars. We don't spend anything like this the same amount of money to raise indigenous forces and do this the right way. It's always an afterthought. Like I said before, National Guard, reservists, other services, conventional to raise local forces or raise or train indigenous forces, and those are good, well-meaning people, but you've got to use the forces that are designed to do that, to let them do it. So I mean, if it's a stopgap measure, narrowly to train the Afghan army, yes, I would be open to something like that, but other than that, I don't know if there's much use in that approach. Hello, James Masoncik from CIGAR, also a Marine officer in former life. Pretty interested in the SERP program that was implemented in Afghanistan, and I haven't had a chance to read all of your book. Looking forward to seeing some of the metrics that you were measuring. Could you speak a little bit on how your team's implemented SERP or what you saw some of the effects to be from that program? Thanks. You know, the SERP program is the Commander's Emergency Response Program, right? And so it's a low-level dollar amount. It's good to go into the hundreds of thousands even, I think, to build program, build schools, build wells. It was an attempt for military commanders that have some financial ability to address local problems and reinforce success or whatever. You know, by 2012, I think we'd already gone through a lot of the lessons learned about the problems and challenges of that program. A lot of our approach by that point was very much by with and through the Afghan government and getting their systems financial and otherwise to work well. Why in large, we kind of think stop using SERP at the provincial level and we'd use it out in isolated districts with very low dollar amounts. You know, I think, but when I was there with the provincial reconstruction team, SERP was our bread and butter, for sure. And then USAID would supplement that with larger dollar amounts. You know, all the problems of the SERP program, the challenges of it, you know, we really tried to be very fair in our balancing our money, but you know, the goal was to work with the Afghan government. Well, if you work with the Afghan government, you're on the right, you're doing the right thing, quote, unquote, but if it's controlled by one tribe, you're undermining that, you know, the good work you have to do. So, you know, that getting to that, yeah, there were problems that are along the way, but I wasn't as involved in the SERP program by that point, but yeah, I know it has its challenges. We've all other made those mistakes or hopefully learned from them, so, yeah. Yeah, on that question, and more broadly on US assistance, what I've seen and researchers have shown is that we disproportionately put a lot of assistance into volatile areas in Helmand province and Kandahar and elsewhere, which people living in some of the safer areas of the country, like Bamiyan and the Central Highlands and where there was less violence, we're not getting the peace dividend. They weren't getting the development projects because we were trying to win hearts and minds in areas to get people to stop fighting. But the impact of that was often counterproductive because as you've highlighted, one person's irrigation ditch will help that particular village and then they will view the United States as choosing sides in a conflict between clans and long-standing feeds that have gone on that we just don't understand properly. So our assistance while well-intentioned I think often wound up being counterproductive. Any other questions from the audience? Okay, we're running a little bit ahead of schedule but I want to turn to the question that I'd started with earlier about the recent change in American strategy and your views on that generally and the likelihood for success. But also I'd like to ask you what does success in Afghanistan mean? President Trump said that we're going to win. We're finally going to, we're going to have a dramatic shift from the Obama administration's policy and we're going to win. And what I heard were the two kind of important shifts although not exactly shifts from what had been done before was this, we are not going to withdraw the American presence based on some arbitrary timeline. We are going to stay in Afghanistan until the conditions on the ground allow us to leave. I think President Obama actually later in his second term had come to the same conclusion and was going to leave the decision to the next president as to how our departure would look. Whereas early on for sure he did put arbitrary deadlines of how we were going to withdraw. And the other shift that I heard in the speech was we are no longer going to do nation building. And he didn't elaborate on what that meant and I think it was probably a line meant for his political base and the band and wing of Trump supporters who think we should be doing nation building here at home and building America's infrastructure. Why are we spending so much money in these far-flung countries? We should just be there killing terrorists and that's it. And I think just last October, the international community in Brussels pledged $15 billion to Afghanistan in civilian assistance, which to me seems to be focused largely on nation building type projects. Call it what you will. Anyway, so I'd be curious to hear what you thought of a speech where you think it's going, whether we have things going in the right direction and if not, what should we be changing? Sure. You know, I think you said a lot of things to the rank that I agree with. I think it's important when you're committing, you're serving over there in uniform or in other capacity that they know at least you're trying to win. Because hey, I want you to put your life at risk for a possible negotiated, ugly withdrawal that may or may not mean your sacrifice is worth anything. There's something to be said for saying that, you know, you're there to win. I think the idea of conditions-based withdrawal or conditions-based success is absolutely right. But again, it's about resourcing. You know, it's really about resourcing. I don't think we're gonna see such a substantial increase in resources that we're gonna be back as U.S. military personnel in direct combat. That is happening for some units, but I think this is all about by-within-through and getting the Afghans to a point where the violence is such that they can handle it themselves. It's not existential to the Afghan state that you don't see district centers being overrun or, you know, the Kabul or Kandahar being threatened with being overrun. I think that's very encouraging. I think another aspect of that speech, we'll see how it manifests itself is talking about tough talk with Pakistan and its safe havens that it, either through its weakness as a state or its conscious policy, allowed to continue. I think that will be interesting. I think President's speech was one thing. We'll see, you know, as it starts to be implemented as the interagency process figures out what these things are. It'll be interesting to see what would happen. But I think what we're trying to do as a country is sort of not abandoning the Afghan people but not be there in such a way that it's so cost prohibitive either through losing our countrymen or through financial expenditure that it's not sustainable. I think, again, light lean, but long term is a way of having our presence there for an enduring manner that addresses the problems and then allows us to provide those niche capabilities that the Afghans haven't yet developed, such as air power, medical support, intelligence support, specifically logistical support. I think those are things we do as a country very, very well. And so I think that's a way of going about this, I think, in the long term. But again, I think it's light lean, long term, is the way. I think if casualties are low and expenditures aren't that high, I think the American people are more supportive of that approach. Now there's a question in the back and one in the front as well. I'm David Hoffman, writing a review of your book for the Foreign Service Journal. It's already at 16 years in, it's already America's longest war ever. And one can imagine it going on almost forever in the future. Could this just continue as an American war that never ends? Well I think everyone often talks about the longest war, but it's also one of our least deadly conflicts we've been involved in. When you look at enemy casualties of US personnel compared to many previous wars, there aren't that substantial. I think that's partly why we've been able to stay as long as we have. It's not been as deadly as past conflict. But yeah, I think you have to ask yourself, are we, what's the alternative, right? I mean that's like anything, what is the alternative? And to me it's, do we allow the Taliban to reassert themselves? Do we allow safe havens to exist for al-Qaeda, ISIS? Are we comfortable with Iran, seizing control by and large in Western Afghanistan? If we're okay with that, that's fine. And let's have that, that should be the policy discussion. But I think the Afghan people definitely don't want that themselves. And I think if we do this lightly, but long-term approach, that's a sustainable strategy. And again, it's by, with, and through. Getting the Afghans to do it themselves, working with them as partners, friends. And I think that's where they are at too. I talk about in the book, the transition of the province to Afghan control. You know, like anything. We're kind of like the friends who don't want to leave, who are staying at a friend's house, you know? And that's kind of where the Afghans are as well. They don't want us there in a large presence, but they do need our support as friends and allies. So I think that's the way to do it. I mean, I'm looking forward. I think precipitous withdrawal, that's not based on conditions on the ground, you know, we kind of saw a little bit of that in Iraq. You know, that's the only, there's anything positive about ISIS is that it taught us that precipitous withdrawal can often have negative consequences. And I think that's true for Afghans in the world. And I think the president kind of, President Obama arrived at that point as well, kind of saying, oh, we can't end the war too quickly. If we pull out, things won't be good. So I think that's an enduring lesson. I don't want to go back there, because I'm still in the reserves. I could conceivably go back there again. I have every incentive to not screw this up, you know? That's kind of how I look at it. Good afternoon, sir. My name's Jason. I'm a recent college graduate. So then through that strategy that you outlined, how do you think at a strategic level the United States ought to balance priorities between the immediate threats that pose the most significant interest to American interests, groups like Al-Qaeda, of course, on group, versus some of the longer-term interests in the stability of Afghanistan, like the foreign Taliban and overrunning villages? So how does the United States balance those two priorities in the strategy that you outlined? Well, I'm not in the administration, so I can only read with, only know what things see in the press as well. Right, but what should you think that balance be? Well, to me, you do all of them simultaneously, in my mind. You go constantly, relentlessly, go after Al-Qaeda and ISIS in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and you set the conditions for the Afghans to deal with the Taliban in their own way that's not an existential threat to their country. You know, build up the Afghans at such a point that they can deal with the Taliban issue on their own, with us just in the back supporting. I think that's the way to do anything long-term. But we have to address the Pakistani safe havens. The only reason this war's gone on, really, by and large, something only reason in many, the central reason is Pakistani safe havens. We've never done anything in quite, we've never done anything in these Taliban areas that we, there's essentially a Taliban statelet in Pakistan that we've done nothing against. I think that's certainly useful to look into. We did kill the head of the Taliban in Baluchistan in 2016. True, true. But you're right, I used to work with National Security Advisor McMaster when he was running a task force in Kabul to try to reduce corruption in the Afghan government. And he used to regularly say that there were two drivers, main drivers of the conflict in Afghanistan. One was Taliban sanctuary across the border. But the other was the predatory and abusive government that alienated its own population and turned people against it. And so the concern I had from the president's speech when he was saying no more nation building, we're going to obliterate terrorists and destroy the enemy was that it was going to stop looking at the government's questions and only focus on kinetic aspects of this and the training of the Afghan security forces to be able to continue the kinetic aspects so we could go, which I think will be problematic because if we depart and there's no Afghan government that's due to reasonably popular by its own people, the struggle is going to continue. And I think that that opens the opportunity for international terrorist organizations to potentially find sanctuary in Afghanistan itself. Question right there. Hi, my name's Afghan Norberkash, I work here at New America. Do you think the Afghan local police believe in the national government like the concept of Afghanistan as a country or do you think they're only there for their own personal provinces, counties, et cetera? One of the phrases we had in ALP programs was from the village. It's sort of saying we recognize that most villagers don't necessarily conceive of the Afghan, an Afghan national identity per se. So it was sort of saying, what is the self-interest of a villager and then harness that in a way that links him or her to the beginning of a relationship with the Afghan state? That was kind of the effort. It was recognizing that sovereignty doesn't exist internally to Afghanistan equally all across the country. So this is kind of a gray area. And this is an attempt to try to link these villagers to the state and try to, once you have security, try to get more of the provincial government out to these isolated areas, even district governments. So it was an attempt to kind of build sovereignty as well. So there's like a holistic program, it wasn't just a security program. Now along the lines of the constitution, when we helped with the drafting of the Afghan constitution, we were again most confident in our abilities, but least wise about the country. And I think the constitution that we helped bring about created such a highly unitary Afghan system of governance when the people live in villages and valleys and want a decentralized system. And I think if you look at the provincial government, the governor's appointed, provincial councils are elected, but they have no power. District directors of health and education, they're all appointed by central governments. District chiefs are all appointed. And the provincial governor does not control the provincial police. They have to work it out through their personality. And to me there's like a democracy deficit at the local level. And all the pieces and parts are there on paper, but they don't have that necessary connective tissue to have sort of rights and responsibilities and checks and balances. And so if you're a tribe that's excluded, like the Badakzai tribe in Aruzgai, when the government is the Pupilzai, you always have the Taliban in your tribal area as a hedge against future problems. And that was the problem we had in the book and we did a lot to try to mitigate that. But that took a lot of time to even understand that. So that's an aspect of this that people don't often talk about. There's a modest decentralization of the Afghan government in 2007. It was very modest. And I think we've got to look at that as well. Yeah, that's a good point. I was working on the constitution drafting back in 2003 and we raised these points with the Afghans to talk about the importance of decentralization and what then their views on it. And almost unanimously, the Afghan drafters of the constitution and the people that were going to participate in the Loya Jirga to approve the constitution and other Afghan leaders that we spoke with wanted this highly centralized state at the time because they were afraid that their institutions were so weak and the country was so fragile following the fall of the Taliban that decentralization would sort of allow the regional countries, Pakistan, Iran, Central Asian countries to sort of build their own fiefdoms in respect of parts of the country and we'd see the splintering of Afghanistan. So they wanted to have this highly centralized structure similar to what they had had under the King when they had relative peace and stability for a number of decades in the 20th century and sort of return to that model where on paper it's highly centralized but de facto at the local level people are taking care of their concerns. But I think you're right that that was 14 years ago. Things have changed and we've seen how things have worked and maybe it's time to revisit this whole notion that the president should be appointing every district governor and every district police chief and let locals decide how they're gonna choose people. Any other questions here? Yeah. Hi, my name is Jack Kropansky, independent on affiliated. I had a question about poppies. How significant are they these days in the economy? Are they any more significant or less significant? And how does that affect what the local police are doing? Is that their job or not their job? Like a current understanding of where the poppy situation is but when we were there, when I was there before, our view was try to have positive programs that would incentivize farmers to replace poppies. The reality is a lot of our bases would be surrounded by poppy fields. And so you'd ask yourself, am I going to go after these fields and then possibly completely have a valley against my base or not? So I think we had a kind of a little bit of a live in it live aspect to it. But we did go very aggressively after heroin smugglers and the legal drug aspect of it but not the farmers. And then we also did a lot with the criminal patronage networks that General McMaster's task force to try to mitigate. My sense is, it's continuing, it's there, it's gonna be there for a long time. I don't think we ever had a real comprehensive approach to doing is often poppy would grow in places that we hadn't secured yet. It was very hard to go after those programs. And the Taliban would use the threat of our possibly going after it as a recruiting tool. So it's a morally gray world we're living in there. So yeah, I think it's, I mean, we're trying to focus on just security. So it's me, poppy is part of that, but we're just trying to get the right mix of resources there to do this for the long term. So yeah, there's a lot more needs to be done. No good news. Right, so the ALP program, their mandate is much more limited. Much more limited. They're not policing the community and arresting people for putting, like they don't have that authority. Right, they tended to be, they're defensively oriented. The Afghan local police program was consciously designed that way so that they weren't going offensive against other tribes and their logistics were controlled by the Afghan state, which we were part of and monitoring. But no, they weren't doing like traffic tickets, things like this, or identity theft, those sorts of things. Yeah, they were mostly just manning checkpoints throughout their villages, controlling main roads, protecting villages, protecting bazaars. And then it was concentric networks or our circles, right? So they were the outer circle. Afghan national police were in the middle there with them as well, Afghan national army. And then we were sort of the honest broker between all three. Other questions? Okay, I guess I'll ask one last question. And if anyone else has anything that they think of, feel free to jump in, we've got a little bit of time. But a program that started soon after 2001, I forget exactly when, run by the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development was called the National Solidarity Program, which was an attempt to allow at the village level people to make decisions for the types of projects that they wanted to have built. Infrastructure projects would be at a health clinic and irrigation ditch at school, well, a new road, or whatever, to try to bring decision making and governance down to the local level. And it was implemented through international and Afghan NGOs, I believe, who would go into tens of thousands, I think it wound up being 20, 25,000, maybe more villages in the country, which I think is about two thirds of the number of villages in the country. And they would gather, depending on the village, local leaders that could be elders, could be religious leaders, both men and women would participate, there might be already existing jurgas or shuras in the village who would come together. And they would have these block grants and they would say, look, donors are funding through this ministry, this program, where you get $50,000 or $100,000, whatever it is, to build a project of your own choosing, but you guys have to tell us what it is. And then we have to come up with a plan and see if it's feasible and all of that, which was an attempt to allow local villagers to feel that their lives were improving and that they had a say in setting their priorities. Did you come across that program at all when you were in the villages and yours gone? Oh, yeah. So we were very much aligned with that. And then when I was there in 2012, I was attached to Special Operations Community, but there was a PRT still in the province. So our goal was trying to get the situation stable enough that it would allow the Afghan institutions to go out there to do this kind of thing. So that was, to me, it was all about building institutions and institutional resiliency and then connecting the different parts of the Afghan state in such a way that it served the interests of the Afghan people. That was kind of an aspect of the approach. It wasn't just security, it was good governance, development. And then the surf money that we had at the ALP level was very, very modest. It actually, by making us somewhat starved at the local level, forced us to rely more on local institutions and local resiliency and be more innovative with what we had. You know, when I was in Afghanistan 05, we didn't have a lot of resources in the country that made us more modest in our goal and made us more realistic on what we could achieve. And I think that's the right kind of way to go about things. I think we spend way too much money in these countries and I think that's an aspect of our bureaucracy that they want to do this. There's a top-down approach. There's a whole way that we do this as a country which is correct on some levels that often is not the right way to approach it. It's top-down, constant rotations. We spend a lot of money. It's force-protection-conscious. We embrace technology solutions. We're very risk-averse. And all these things are more for our convenience than the interests of the locals. And eventually, to this point, we had that bottom-up approach. But just one other aspect of this is I think the VSO ALP program, the concepts that are part of it can be applied to other theaters. I mean, if you look at how al-Qaida and Arabian Peninsula and how they operate in Yemen, a lot of aspects of what they do is similar to the Taliban people's strategy. There's a lot of places where we can apply aspects of this. It doesn't have to be U.S. necessarily. We look at how the enemy organizes himself and how he tries to exert power. It's often this population-based approach. Yeah, there's coercion, no doubt, but there's also a hearts of mind element. And that, to me, is like really key. And not that it's always the go-to reference point, but like the British Empire had a lot of these irregular-type forces. You had the Southern Desert Camel Corps in Transjordan, then by General John Glob. You had the Hadrami Bedouin Legion in Hadramak in Yemen. You had the Kyber Rifle. You had the Frontier Scouts in Waziristan. There are these kind of irregular forces that are tied to the state that fill these niche capability needs. And we should be able to do that. When you walk the halls of SOCOM, almost every picture is about helicoptering in at night, going to the range, some really high-end vehicle you're driving, which is great, and you have to talk about that, but you don't see the Afghan Shura. You don't see a lot of training of indigenous forces because it's not particularly compelling or sexy work. For every movie, like American Sniper, or Alone Survivor, which are amazing movies, there's not going to be a movie called American Engager about the highest number of confirmed key leader engagements in Afghanistan. There's no American Shura. And this goes back to the last part of the book, if we misremember these wars relentlessly. Like, if you look at the titles of these memoirs you've got, there's one called Carnivore, by the guy I got a silver star in Iraq. There's a book called The Reaper about a sniper. I mean, there's a book called Carnivore, not Carnivore, but Rage Company. These are all memoirs about shaping and clearing operations when it comes to counter-insurgency. There's no book about building and transition. And they're usually written by junior officers on their first tour, combat arms, seals, green berets, marines, Marsock. And then they have that one tour. Usually Afghans or Iraqis, if they're mentioned, they're usually shooting at you. And if they're not shooting at you, they're usually interpreters or hard luck medical cases, right? So you don't have any sense of the history of the place. You have no context. And you only have that one tour. What's the place like six years later? This is partly why I also wrote this book. They had that long-term view where the Afghans were part of the narrative and I fill in the history so you understand what we're trying to do and why different tribes see decisions from different perspectives. That's why my book will never be made into a movie, which is fine. I'm a piece of that because I think it's an important book, like The Village by Bing West, or War Comes to Long An, about the Long An province of Vietnam. These are absolutely central books about that stuff. Books that are constantly about relentless clearing operations are great and I have a bookshelf of them, but in the end, they're unsatisfying because of like, yet the next rotation's right in the same book, they're in the same village as them. The Afghans have a long history with village militias and not necessarily a good one and I think that was one of the big reasons President Karzai was very reluctant to go along with the ALP program at first when he thought back to the Soviet back to Najibullah regime and the role of the PDPA back then and the militias and the dark history of the role that they played in those years. But he did go along and signed the decree creating ALP and that's far with mixed results like everything in Afghanistan, but it looks like it's gonna continue and hopefully continue to improve. But any other final questions or yes, right in the back, go ahead. Hello, my name is Fardaus. I'm from Herod, Afghanistan. I thank you very much. I'm sorry, I was late if you already touched on these points. I actually want to know your idea about the demographic change in Afghanistan. Recently, you see that the majority of population is the younger generation and currently more than half of the population live under poverty line. Unfortunately, 68% of the population that depends ratio is critical in Afghanistan while 40% of the population are unemployed. So there are a lot of social and economic factors that cause too many other challenges including joining youth to the Taliban or insurgency groups. At the same time, there are some groups who are supported by Pakistan or some other countries like Iran because of the natural resources or other factors. So how safe do you see Afghanistan for the Taliban who can rejoin the peace process because recently there was also a debate in New York times that probably Afghanistan is not safe for those Taliban who are trapped in this black hole to come back to Afghanistan, they will be targeted again. So how do you see these interrelated factors and employment rate, the poverty, the socioeconomic factors and political factors and pressures by outsiders? Thank you. I think we're in great agreement. These are all interrelated in the Afghan local police program. We talk about it as a security program but it was also an employment program and through better security, the economy would do better in these villages. You're absolutely right. I think if I was an Afghan and I heard President Obama saying we're pulling out US troops by 2014, I'm gonna hedge my bets. I mean, how can you roll the dice and put your faith in a future that may not happen and the reality of you're choosing the wrong side could be pretty catastrophic. That's, I think, part of this approach by the president. I like to think President Trump that is to say, hey, we're there to win, conditions-based. I mean, some of that's, we'll see how the resourcing looks to do that, to achieve that. How did that really manifest itself? But part of that's also reassuring our Afghan allies. I think, I mean, every Afghan I talk to, I mean, I always had a strategy to leave the province. They were, my interpreter who I talked about in the book, the woman he married, she had two brothers who live in Great Britain. He was like, that's great. I could potentially go to Great Britain. And that's, how do you create the conditions so that people make the decisions to invest in their own country and stay there? And to me, we're at such a point, there's a lot of wisdom. And General McMaster has a lot of wisdom, Secretary Mattis, General Dunford. They have a lot of wisdom about this process. So a lot of hope in them. But you're right, these are all interrelated. They're not separate. It's not just a State Department problem and the USAID problem. It's the economic problem as well as all these things. So it's interrelated. But I think there's an awareness of that, but we'll see how we approach it. I just don't know. We're in great agreement. I just don't know how to address it. Well, I think there's a political, I don't think it's that easy. And I think the reality of how that's going to be implemented where we'll have state building. But I think nation building in people's minds in the US is like throwing money a problem. I think to me, it's about quality, not quantity. And it's about, you're gonna, to grow indigenous forces, you have to have your building the state. And I also think the Afghans at our point too, that I look back to Aruzgan, significant substantial differences when I was first there in 2005 versus 2012. I mean, I think there's such greater capacity on the Afghan side, even in rural places like Aruzgan, to do these things by themselves. So I think the Afghans are at a point too, they can do a lot of this on their own. But like anything, we're at a, they wanna know they have support. They can do it themselves. I think to me, it's about knowing that we're there to help where we can, if they want that help. It's a much more modest approach. So I mean, eventually we were gonna get to a point where the Afghans had to take responsibility, more direct responsibility. And I think there's a lot more Afghan capacity to do that now. Any final thoughts, questions? Yes. But even if there were no president, what sort of problems does it apply? You get the right way for us down the line. I don't wanna be so historically deterministic there because it hasn't happened, we can't do it. I think we can do it, I think it's possible. But again, I think it took us a really long time to get to that point, to understand what's required for building stability in Afghanistan. And I think there's a lot of bureaucratic pathologies in how we fight these things, which made these problems harder than they needed to be and undermined support at home. I mean, we were so poor in 05 when I was there initially. We didn't know we were poor, but that was okay. We fought the war. We lived more like the Taliban and the Afghans, which made it better, I think. We started having, I talked about this sort of tension in the later campaigns because we're finally wiser about the war, but now we've got reflective belts. We have to wear, we're getting speeding tickets at Kandahar airfield, they're paid. My first tour, I lost weight. Hit the second tour, I gained weight. Hit third tour, yeah. Dude, that's like, you're doing the wrong thing, maybe when you're gaining weight. You gotta live like the people, I think. But yeah, I think there are ways of doing it, but we have to overcome ourselves and how we're organized bureaucratically, I think, to do it. There's constant rotations that's still killing us. To me, it's getting a right mix of people supporting them the correct way, giving them this on-ramp to a long-term tour. This is true for Yemen, as well as Somalia and other countries. I think that would do us so much good for this effort, but it's very hard, everyone wants the, I mean, you did seven years there, right, you said? It's great. Yeah, that was not what the government. But that's fine, but we should create the conditions to allow someone like you or others to do that. And they think of the benefits to the effort from that experience you had in that, yeah. So yes, we're in great agreement, I just don't know exactly how to do it, but I think that's the way to do it for the government in the future. Okay, any last? Yes? Well, in terms of living conditions initially, and then I think outside of that modest decentralization of seven, I don't know if there has been at least formally any other additional decentralization, but there's the Afghan informal system, which tends to govern around things it doesn't like. So I think we had a generational change in the province. The old warlords by and large had died or were killed or retired. And so you had a new generation who were often the sons of famous Mujahideen. So they hadn't fought, but they had living off the good reputations of their family, and they've come up under our system. Like I was always sensitive to Afghans using my own acronyms in my own meetings. You know, like I felt I had to be very careful because they knew our system. And I found that increasingly, you know, they had more guys who had suits and ties, you know, and not so much wearing traditional, like, say, Pashtun or Afghan garb. And they talked more on programatics and budgets, and which is great. That's where we want everything to be. So, and then in terms of the province, we had an Afghan who was in charge of administering civil service exams in Aruzgan. I was like, what? That's great. You know, we had a university open up in the province. Only taught a few classes, but it existed. And that's happening in Aruzgan, which is an afterthought for people. I'm certainly hopeful in other parts of the country. But I think we have to re-look at that unitary state thing. I think it does make sense from what you share. I don't even get the outset to have done it. But now that Afghan capacity has grown, I don't think you do a wholesale. You do a modest change. You should be incremental, I think. I think like with President Gandhi, he's taken over. It's, he's taken a much more direct role in the appointment process. And vetting of district governors and police chiefs. I think for sincerely good reasons is that he's the reform-minded, progressive president who wants to make sure he's not put in corrupt officials into the district to try to improve governance. But at the same time, the fact that the president in a country at war is spending his time to interview 350 district police chiefs and 350 seems like he's not prioritizing perhaps properly or delegating enough. But I think that there probably will be some push towards more decentralization as the political system evolves. But I think we're about out of time, actually. So thanks, everyone. I know that there are copies of the book or a few copies outside. So I recommend picking one up if you can. It's a great read, a quick read, and quite informative. And so please join me in thanking Dan for coming today.