 pretty good turnout for a nice weathered Friday, so thank you all for making the time to come here today. Today we're going to discuss Afghanistan and crisis. Where do we go from here? The security situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate. And just two weeks ago, a massive truck bomb in Kabul killed 150 civilians and injured 300 others, making it one of the worst attacks in Afghanistan since 2001. This incident highlights the continued crisis, just as the Trump administration considers what direction it should take with US policy regarding America's longest war and during a time when Ambassador to Afghanistan has yet to be nominated. As Afghanistan's regional neighbors, the US, EU, and NATO convened in Afghanistan this week to engage in conversations around the Kabul process, an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned peace process. Our panel will help answer a few broad questions today. This includes what steps will the Trump administration take and what policy should it adopt, how should the US weigh the costs and benefits of the various options on the table with the idea that increasing troop numbers is not the only viable solution. To discuss these issues, we are joined by Peter Bergen, Vice President of New America, John Dempsey, a fellow with New America's International Security Program, and Yanni Cascinos, a senior fellow with New America's International Security Program as well. I'll give you a quick bios for each, and then we'll start with opening remarks. John Dempsey will start. We'll head over to Yanni and then with Peter Bergen to close out before we open it up to questions. John Dempsey is a former senior advisor to Ambassador Richard Holbrook and his successors in the State Department's Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he oversaw US government rule of law and election policy in the region from 2009 to 2016. Yanni Cascinos focuses on foreign policy issues with an emphasis on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. He is the CEO of the Hoplite Group, a company focused on sustainable and innovative solutions to complex problems in the most challenging environments and harshest conditions. He has been based in Afghanistan for the past seven years and is retired from the US Air Force in 2011 after a 20-year career in special operations. And lastly, I mean, I do feel like I need to introduce him just to be consistent, but I think Peter Bergen doesn't really need an introduction. He is Vice President of New America and is also director of the ISP program here. He's the author of several New York Times bestselling books and recently published the United States of Jihad. I should say that we sit on you with Deputy Director of the Fellows Program here and an Afghan-American who wrote a book called the Kabul Soccer Club based on the time in Afghanistan. So John, we'll start with you. Thanks very much, I'm pleased to be here. And as I was to say, it's great to have such a turnout on a beautiful Friday afternoon in the summer here in Washington. I'll keep my remarks very short and so we have time for discussion and that I will still moderate and then for Q&A. But right now, it's a pretty pivotal point in US-Afghanistan relations as the Trump administration undergoes its review of policy and is about to make a decision on its strategic direction in the country. And I was fortunate a couple of months ago to be invited over to the White House with a group of experts on Afghanistan and the region to meet with the new National Security Advisor, General McMaster, before he went out to Kabul to help frame some of the policy choices that he and his team were gonna be facing going forward. And without going into the details of that discussion, the first thing he did say to us, the group of people assembled, was how surprised he was at how little attention Afghanistan was getting here at home in the United States and even within the government to some degree because people were so consumed with putting out the fires of the day, be it in the DPRK or Syria with ISIS or what's going on with Russia. And yet Afghanistan is America's longest war. Now in its 16th year, General Nicholson, our commander on the ground, is asking again for more troops, potentially for an indefinite duration. So this conflict doesn't seem to be coming to an end anytime soon, and yet it's getting very little attention. And so what General McMaster asked of the group assembled there that day was to try to get this out there into public discourse, to hold events like this and make sure that people are debating what the policy options are and understand what the stakes are for decisions that are going to be made. And it's been encouraging in the last couple of months to see this gaining more attention here in Washington at least so that policy makers understand the stakes and are able to weigh those as they make their decisions. In the last couple of months, Afghanistan's also been in the headlines for a couple of other reasons, first in April of course, with the decision to drop what's called the mother of all bombs in eastern Afghanistan which I think highlights a new phase in the war, at least new from the US perspective since 2001 in that there's a rising presence of ISIS and Daesh in the country that adds a new level of complication in terms of what the US approach is going to be to pursuing its strategy in the country. And of course, the events of the last week I think highlight again just how grave the situation can be with whoever that was if it was the Haqqani network or some other group that was striking literally at the heart of downtown Kabul at rush hour for one of the most grim attacks we've seen in recent years followed by then the shooting of peaceful protest or quote unquote peaceful protestors the next day followed again by a triple suicide attack at the funeral for one of those protestors. So the news just kept pouring in and set a rather depressing tone as the US interagency mulls over its options and comes up with its strategic decisions. That said, it's not all bad. I think earlier this week we saw 25 or so give or take a couple of countries and international organizations convened in Kabul despite the attacks last week and the security concerns to kick off what's known as the Kabul process and try to reinvigorate international support to the country and explore what avenues there are to eventually reaching some sort of political settlement that can end the conflict but there's a long way to go. If you step back and look at the trajectory of things over the last few years one can't say that the war in Afghanistan is going well. In 2016 for sure the Taliban did not take any provincial capitals which is a change from the year prior when they held Kunduz city for a few days but by and large the war seems to be on a downward spiral as the Taliban gain more ground now holding approximately 40% give or take 5% of the country or having at least influence over that 7,000 Afghan security force casualties last year alone the highest since that institution was set up the highest number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan since 2001 corruption seems to be on the rise despite what seemed to be sincere efforts of President Ghani to root that out the migration crisis seems to have abated somewhat but brain drain continues and the Afghans who are necessary for the future leadership of the country still seem to be looking elsewhere for their future and hedging their bets the economy is still overwhelmingly dependent on foreign aid which is unsustainable we're not gonna be able to continue this indefinitely and of course the government in Kabul the unity government that was set up in 2014 and I'm happy to discuss the reasons that was set up and the US role in that during the Q&A but has not really been able to govern effectively for a variety of reasons we can get into later and so I think stepping back and looking at what is America's goal in Afghanistan and what should the Trump administration be doing basically the goal is the same as it was in 2001 it's to keep Afghanistan from being a territory that harbors international terror groups that want to plan, launch or plot attacks against the United States our allies and our interests around the world and so General Nicholson's approach to getting three to 5,000 more troops may make sense tactically in helping to achieve that strategic aim but I think one would be justified in asking given that we have 8,400 or so troops on the ground today adding even if you go to the high end of 5,000 or double that and say you give them 10,000 more troops it's still a small fraction of the number of soldiers we had on the ground at the height of the Obama surge when they were with NATO approximately 140,000 US NATO troops fighting this war and they weren't able to get the job done so what is General Nicholson going to do differently with 15 or 20,000 troops that we weren't able to do with eight or nine times that a few years ago I think one possible answer to that is focusing on the duration of the commitment as opposed to the number of troops I think the duration is what's key in this given that when Obama announced the troops surge in 2009 he subsequently or simultaneously announced the drawdown plan when they were gonna start withdrawing when they'd be coming home and effectively allowed Taliban and their Pakistani sponsors to wait us out and say okay they're going to surge but then they're going to leave they don't have the staying power where Afghans were going to be here forever and we'll have our chance if we go in there and we have a long-term commitment to the Afghan government and Afghan security forces backed by a few thousand American troops to train, advise and assist that might give the Afghan security forces some sense of assurance that we have their backs that will be there for the long haul as they professionalize over the coming years and decades and that we'll be able to strike out when necessary as we see terrorist elements or Taliban amassing to do something catastrophic like try to take a provincial capital or something like that. In conclusion to my opening remarks I would focus on 2019 I think as a pivotal point over the next four years and I hope the Trump administration focuses on that as well as they decide the direction they want to take it's tempting to always look at the upcoming fighting season as the key and try not to move beyond that and because the potential for disaster is real and we really have to focus on what the Afghan security forces and their international supporters are going to face over the coming months but we also need to take a longer term view and recognize that in 2019 there were supposed to be presidential elections in Afghanistan that are going to hopefully result in a government that is viewed as legitimate and has resilience and that the Afghan people support and following the 2014 election debacle we cobbled together this unity government but it's viewed widely as illegitimate as weak as on its last legs and as somewhat of a puppet of the West and the Taliban really have no incentive to negotiate or try to enter some sort of deal with that government so long as they don't see it as having staying power. So if we can work over the next couple of years to set the table for 2019 to make sure that that presidential transition results in a government that has a mandate from the Afghan people from around the country and that can really serve to unify the country backed by the presence of international forces with an open-ended commitment I think that then you're starting to set the table for what could be potentially meaningful peace talks going forward with the Taliban. I'll stop there but during the Q and A I'm happy to talk about the reconciliation prospects as well as some of the regional implications and the other option that I think that Trump administration may be weighing which is why not just disengage entirely? We've been there for 16 years, hundreds of billions of dollars, thousands of Americans killed, many more Afghans killed and we seem to be losing. Why not uphold the Trump pledge of America first, spend that money at home and rebuild infrastructure here rather than spending all of this time in a losing effort. So I'll leave it there, but thanks. It's nice sometimes going second, it sucks right now, but after you. So let me just say first of all, I like to start these conversations by saying my name is Yanni and I have a problem, it's Afghanistan, it's an obsession, I sort of stick with it for better or for worse and it's part of my 12 step process through recovery to actually admit it right up front. So that's my first statement. The second thing is I've never been associated with anything to do with Afghanistan certainly in the last 12 years that we haven't been at a panel that somebody will say, well, this is a pivotal point in Afghan history or the US relations. It's always a pivotal sort of moment that we all are gonna have to deal with. So I think, and I know John will agree and certainly Peter, that what's really needed here is a comprehensive strategy forward. It's not some sort of destination that we need to say that whether that destination is 2019 or whether the destination is reconciliation and political settlement, whether the destination is winning, as weird as that may sound. Put a hashtag on it and it sounds good, but it's not really a good plan. So my training in the military for the most part was I was a planner. So I always like to kind of plan backwards from the objective, if you will. So whatever that thing that we wanna put the hashtag on, we kinda have to figure out a comprehensive plan forward, which is sometimes the thing that eludes us or the realization that that strategy is gonna be hard. It's gonna be long, it's gonna be something that we're gonna have to spend an intellectual effort and quite frankly go through some hard days trying to get there because even in 2009, 10, when President Obama announced the strategy with the near immediate, this is when it's gonna end, there was actually a comprehensive plan in place. I mean, there was actually a plan that people had put out there. The trouble is that people started running into the challenges that are associated with those plans. And quite frankly, we start falling into the traps of saying, well, that was a good plan, but it's so hard to do. So we start falling into terms such as, afghan good enough, well, Afghanistan, it's been corrupt always. Really, I mean, I don't think so. I like to see the evidence where that is, but it's easy for people that really don't know anything about Afghanistan. This is their well intentioned, but this is their tour there. They're looking at it as a 12 month or 18 month assignment. And so they just fall into these traps of saying, look for an excuse almost to just disengage rather than continue with a longer term approach. The perfect example is this reconciliation conversation. Of course, a political settlement is how these things end, of course. But nobody wants to talk about how to get there. They just wanna talk about such subjects as the Taliban, well, they're so misunderstood. You know what, 150 people at least killed. When you have a week that you have about 700 people killed or wounded within a two, 300 meter radius. I'm sorry, I'm about as forgiving as anybody else out there, but that is not misunderstood. These are not brothers. They're not cousins. They're not even distant relatives. These are terrorists. Now, we can mince the words as much as we want, but they are terrorists. We need to talk about them. Okay, we don't, some tendencies to say, well, Pakistan, they're okay, fair enough. You wanna talk about Pakistan, that's fair. However, I actually look at what's the, I've been taught to think that what can I affect immediately, I mean, I can blame space race for a lot of things that are happening on this planet, but I really can't affect them that much. The Kabul government, we can affect a lot. Before you go to Pakistan, India, the region, the world, the planet, the interstellar galaxy, let's concentrate on what we can actually affect the most. So I would say that, again, a comprehensive strategy is something to focus on. It has to start with our engagement with the Afghan government and how we make them a stronger partner, a more resilient element to fight against the Taliban or the enemy forces, because, like John said, 3,000 people, I mean, I'm sorry, that's almost not just an underwhelming number, it's also intellectually numbing to think that somehow this by itself is gonna make a difference. So the last thing I'll say, and I'm really looking forward to the questions, is if you remember that scene from my cousin Vinny, where you walk up and Vinny shows up and this is his first engagement with the judge, and he says these two young men, the two youths are innocent, and the good Southern boy judge stands up and says, oh, let me get this straight, so you wanna skip the arraignment, you wanna skip trial, you wanna skip the judge, and you just wanna go to dismissal. Okay, fair enough, it's not gonna happen. So again, the comprehensive strategy is how we get to whatever the goal is, and unfortunately, all we're talking about destinations, nobody wants to talk about the journey. So with that in mind, I'll pass the floor over to Peter. Well, I'm picking up on a number of points that John and Yanni made. I mean, I think it's important to understand that whatever we do in Afghanistan, we're not, this is about writing a situation which is in very, very deep trouble. I've been visiting Afghanistan since the Civil War of 1993, I was there under the Taliban, I've been back many, many times. And five years ago, everybody in this room could have all gone out for a nice lunch in Kabul without fear of being kidnapped or bombed or murdered. That's impossible today, and I mean, Yanni lives there, and it does a lot of security work there. And so I think that in itself is important because if you can't have a group of people from outside live securely in Kabul, you can't really have any business. And it's very hard to run an NGO. And so that's just one aspect of how bad the situation is. And John alluded to this 40% figure, I mean, and people have different formulations, but I think that about a third of the population, which is a better metric than perhaps the actual geography, are either in areas either controlled or contested by the Taliban. Now the population of Afghanistan is 30 million. So you're talking about 10 million people. ISIS at the height of its power in Iraq and Syria controlled 8 million people. So if these figures are correct, and we hear them all the time, the Taliban now control or contest a larger number of people than ISIS did at the height of its power. And so whatever we do, we have to respond to a situation which is in deep crisis. And in fact, this is really a tremendous opportunity for the Trump administration because they have an opportunity to turn this around. And the most important thing is not the number of troops, as John and Yanni have said, the difference of between 12,000 troops, 15,000 troops, yes, there's a military difference, but the most important thing is what we say about what we're doing. And the most important thing that we can say is we're here for the long term, and we're here until Afghanistan is a state that is sort of at peace with itself and its neighbors where the Taliban are essentially a marginal force who are evented politics or whatever we're gonna say about the end state. And we already have a strategic partnership with Afghanistan till 2024. So we already have the architecture in place for us to do this. And the question of disengagement is an interesting one. We have already run this videotape once before and it was disastrous for American interests. In 1989, we closed our embassy in Afghanistan. The Clinton administration then essentially zeroed aid out to Afghanistan into which a civil war, we were blind when the civil war happened. We were blind when the Taliban came to power and we were blind when al-Qaeda essentially positioned itself in a manner that allowed them to attack us on 9-11. So why run this videotape again? I mean, it doesn't make any sense. And we've run another version of this videotape in Iraq where we essentially turned off the lights and laughed and into the vacuum came ISIS. And there's a big difference between Afghanistan today and Iraq in 2005 because it's kind of a narrative, a leftist narrative or liberal narrative that somehow American presence is disliked and kind of causes antibodies. Sometimes that's true. In Iraq in 2005, a vast majority of Iraqis wanted us to go. If you look at polling data from the Asia Foundation today, most Afghans, a very large majority, want international forces to stay, to stay to help the Afghan National Army, to stay to help the Afghan National Police. And John is completely right. We had 150,000 US and allied troops in Afghanistan in 2009. I don't know the answer to the question I'm gonna pose which is, okay, what is different today that makes having 15,000 American troops and let's say 10,000 other NATO, what's different? I mean, is one difference that the Afghan National Army is actually a more effective force? You mentioned that 7,000 of them are being killed. This is not the Iraqi army that deserted in their droves in 2014. These people are standing in a fight. They may not be the world's greatest army, but it would make more sense for this approach if indeed the Afghan National Army is showing some ability to work well. And so those are really the main points that I wanted to make. And I will just amplify the point that both John and Yanni made. I mean, I was at CNN on December 1st, 2009. We had the speech that President Obama was gonna deliver at West Point. And the crawl at CNN at 3 p.m. on the screen before he gave the speech was about the withdrawal, not about the search. And we were about to search 40,000 more American soldiers into Afghanistan. The story became about the withdrawal. So this was the most counterproductive messaging strategy in history. It made no sense. And no American president, whether she is a Democrat or a Republican, is going to withdraw from Afghanistan because it would be so politically costly to do that and then have something go wrong, which is an attack in any way. Think about Benghazi as a political matter. And then think about an attack that was somehow cooked up on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border after you've ordered withdrawal. It's just not gonna happen. So we shouldn't be talking about withdrawals. It doesn't make sense from a military point of view. It doesn't make sense from a political point of view. It doesn't make sense at all. So the final point is what we say about what we're doing is the most important thing we can do in addition to what we actually do. And we should signal a long-term commitment. We've been in South Korea since 1953. South Korea went from the poorest country in the world to one of the richest. There's a lot of difference between South Korea and Afghanistan, but an American national security umbrella that is welcomed by our Pakistani friends who, after all, don't want a giant civil war on their border either, and the Afghan people, that is where we want to be. Great, thank you. I'll just start off by asking you a few questions. John, let me start with you. You have a very unique vantage point in that you were part of the Obama administration for seven years, and we're working with Richard Holberg in those first days when Obama took office. Can you give us just a comparative analysis between how President Obama approached the Afghan situation compared to how President Trump is working on it and looking both at the first 100 days and then also now the six months in, if it's possible to go that far back for you. Sure, I mean, there are obviously distinct differences, but also a lot of similarities in terms of coming in with a blank slate, at least the administration has its own blank slate, and they're going to start reviewing from scratch and coming up with their own strategy. I think President Obama had spoken much more on the campaign trail about Afghanistan than President Trump did, but we heard virtually nothing from either candidate last year about Afghanistan. It didn't feature in the US debate, and whereas in 2008, as President Obama hammered McCain and Hillary during the primaries on Iraq, he also wanted not to seem weak on national security, so his attack was always, you took your eye off the ball. Osama bin Laden is still out there. You left too early. The war in Afghanistan is getting out of control because you went into Iraq, which was the wrong war when you should have been focusing on the right war, and if I'm president, I will focus on the right war. He sort of painted himself into a corner such that when he won, he then had to figure out, well, how am I going to then address the right war? And as part of that, there was a big interagency review. He appointed Michelle Flournoy and Bruce Redell in the first three months or so to conduct a review of policy, which was then followed subsequently by a number of reviews conducted by General McChrystal, General Petraeus, then a full interagency review involving the State Department, the Pentagon, the intelligence community, and others that ultimately resulted in his decision first to approve a troop increase that President Bush had already authorized early in 2009, and then at West Point, as Peter said, to announce both the increase of 40,000 or so, and simultaneously announced one, they'd be coming home. Whereas what we see now with the Trump administration is much more difficult to predict. It's much more of a blank slate in terms of understanding where he's coming at, and he did make a couple of remarks in interviews over the course of the year and a half campaigning where he suggested, I think, that it's a terrible war, we shouldn't be there, but we can't pull out type thing, and which gives you very little indication as to where he's going to come down on this. I do think in the Obama administration, the dissenting view came largely from Vice President Biden and some others who thought surging was a mistake and that we should be focusing strictly on CT, counterterrorism as opposed to what McChrystal ultimately advocated, which was this counterinsurgency effort and putting in 100,000 plus troops and building governance around the country. Biden thought that's not in our national interest, we should just have a base at Bodrum and strike terrorists where we know they're hiding and leave it at that. Right now within the Trump administration, I think there's the Biden plus point of view, which is not only should we not be doing nation building in Afghanistan, but we shouldn't even be having bases there and troops on the ground, aside maybe from a special force presence and that we should be saving the money and spending it elsewhere where America's national interests are more immediate meaning here at home and then treating Afghanistan sort of like Somalia or Yemen where we send in missile strikes or drop special forces in for targeted raids that leave it at that. Just a quick follow up, I mean, as a career diplomat to not have an ambassador in place six months in, what does that mean for colleagues of yours back at the State Department? I mean, there's a Sharjah who's in Afghanistan who had already spent a tour there before who knows the country, who's handling things, but I don't think Afghanistan's unique in this administration. I mean, he's not filled a number of key national security positions. Afghanistan is one of them and we hope that they will appoint somebody soon who gets confirmed, who's able to speak and have a direct line to the White House and whom the Afghans and others in the region understand is empowered to make decisions and speak on behalf of this administration. That's gonna go a long way, I think, towards making sure, for example, the 2019 political transition goes smoothly if that person is in place, empowered and able to get the Afghans to sort their political differences out. Peter, question for you. I mean, you said there's about 10 million Afghans who are now under the control of the Taliban with a control of contested. But about 10 million people. And so when we look at the average Afghan, I guess it'd be helpful to understand what that means for the average Afghan, both inside and outside of those areas. And I just wanna follow it up with just a quick follow-up point of, when I was in Afghanistan back in 2006 when things were relatively calm, when I was interviewing people for my book, the one thing I kept hearing and it was very much said under hushed tones was that our life was better before under the Taliban. And so there was a segment of Afghans who very much voiced that concern. And today I wonder how they would feel when that's vision is being actualized. And I'm sure the Afghans don't want that, but there is a segment of Afghans who are not happy with the international security forces as well when they've had civilian drone attacks. Their homes have been raided. Where, what does this mean? You know, it's a very nuanced, complicated question, but what does this all mean now for the average Afghan in terms of their life moving forward? It's a high thing, it's kind of a hard question to answer. I mean, I think if you look, polling data in Afghanistan has I think been fairly consistent since 2005 by the Asia Foundation and people can correct me if I'm wrong, but these are country-wide very significant polls and I think the Taliban usually rates at about 10%. So it's not like they have this huge constituency of people who think they're great now, but there are some people who clearly think, and John was in the rule of law sector, you know, Taliban does provide judicial services and it does provide some kind of security, you know. So to the extent they have an appeal, I think those are the two things. The Afghan judicial system is very corrupt and then that's why the Taliban came to power. They offered security and that, you know, so, but I think it's a clearly security at a tremendous price and one of the interesting things about Afghanistan today is there's a lot of people who, you know, had kids on 9-11. They're in their mid-20s or late-20s now. It's a whole new generation. I mean, they're not gonna go back to a situation where their girls can't be educated or women can't have jobs or they can't watch TV or I mean, it just, I think it's gonna be, and so one way we should think about this is we wanna give the time for the next generation of these 20-year-olds to grow up and because over time, I think the historical forces are moving against the Taliban. They're not, what are they offering? I mean, John mentioned reconciliation and sort of Yani and I wanna pick up on that because I'm enormously skeptical about reconciliation with the Taliban, not that it isn't a desirable idea just because we've run a controlled experiment with negotiations with the Taliban or Pakistani friends have negotiated multiple peace deals with the Taliban, all of which they've reneged on and the Taliban doesn't recognize the Durand line and the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. So, and the Taliban's multi-polar organization and what are they actually, what are they prepared to offer the Afghan people about what they have never really, as far as I know, presented a real, what are we prepared to live with other than we just don't want foreign occupation? So I'm skeptical about the reconciliation process with the Taliban because we've been talking about it for a long time. What is it yielded? It is yielded one thing, which is Bo Bergdor, which I think I personally thought that was the right thing to do, but it hasn't yielded, it's gone on for years and years and years and years and years and it's never really, the Taliban have never really said, look, this is the kind of vision we have of the society that we can live with and I don't think they, maybe they're incapable of making those kinds of statements, but I do think there is a new generation, the Taliban are increasingly offering very little to that new generation. Yana, you just got back from Kabul a few days ago. You were, I assume were there when the bombing happened. No, I came back a couple of weeks ago, but yeah, my folks, one of my security chief had a big block, basically land in the chase car that he was in, he was that close to the blast that some of the debris fell on top of him, so it's personal, although I wasn't there, I was there for the attack on the hospital and then also the bulk attack was something that we all felt, even though I wasn't anywhere near Mazar, but yeah, that's the timing. So a two-part question, what was the Afghan government's response to the bombing and then moving forward a few days later to the Kabul process? I mean, there's been a number of peace processes that have taken place over the course of 15, 16 years. Is this any different? Can we hope that there'll be a better outcome for the lasting peace in the country and in the region? Yeah, I think we have to address some very sort of big elephants in the room to talk about some of these subjects. For one, this isn't a stalemate, we're losing. We can argue about it, but we are losing. Again, they're not sort of distant cousins, they're terrorists. The team that we have forward, the Sharjah de Ferris who was there before, in my opinion, he's not doing very well and to be even more blunt about it, I think he's making some really bad moves that are actually hurting any chance of success there. General Nicholson, very nice guy, incredible friend, incredibly talented, been there a bunch of times, but some of the things that are coming out of his office and his congressional testimony, I just am beyond shaking my head because these are not the words that should be coming out of people that have spent an enormous amount of time there. So when you put the context of the everyday Afghan that I deal with quite frankly all the time is a lens that they don't understand our positions because quite frankly they defy reality that they're dealing with right there. I'll give you very specific examples. His business on me, and I'll get to the bomb, I won't forget. His business on me, you had two factions, basically an element that had joined the Afghan government. It was a political party in Afghanistan. They had laid down their weapons, they embraced the political process and for a long time they were led by the then minister of economy, Arhandiwal and one of their senior representatives, Mahmohan is the first deputy to the chief executive, Abdullah. So these are people who are actually joined the government and have embraced it. Brake Hekmatyar is the other half of the equation if you wanna think of it in halves. Well the other side of the coin, no pun intended. And they are from Peshawar refugees but really literally conducting insurgency operations inside Afghanistan and killing both Americans, Afghans because in their mind they're pursuing the jihad. So somehow bringing this guy from Peshawar is viewed as a positive event and not an entire segment of his business on me who has joined the government. So the real specific example is my Afghan friends, some of them in his Bizlani of the government variety are coming to me and saying, why is the Afghan or the US ambassador to Afghanistan pushing for Hekmatyar to be the leader of the his Bizlani party? Why? And of course I don't know if that's true. Let's just be real. I don't have any data suggesting that that's what the position of the ambassador is but in open press there has been this overwhelming push towards embracing Hekmatyar as if he's gonna be the one that's at the example that the Taliban are gonna follow because Hekmatyar joined, therefore we are gonna join. I think I mentioned in the previous discussion here there's a reconciled Afghan Taliban that said, we don't like Hekmatyar. Taliban don't like Hekmatyar. In fact we rather, I had asked them years ago would you partner with his Bizlani in some way and they said we rather petition NATO for membership rather than embrace Hekmatyar. I mean that kind of sort of animosity towards him. So when we think of things like that that somehow one thing may lead to the other these are nonsensical issues that quite frankly Afghan hands if you wanna think of them that way folks that have been focused on Afghanistan multiple tours in Afghanistan, these are like just don't make sense. Fast forward to the attack in Kabul. What happened with the Afghan government? The Afghan government basically went into an automatic mode. We are going to say this is bad, we're gonna do this, we're gonna try to go to the hospital for some pictures which is how the protests started. The protests actually started because family members were like no, don't come to the hospital because effectively don't make this into another picture opportunity and then the next day certain elements some very angry at the fact that this has happened and by the way anybody who's been associated with Afghanistan the nightmare scenario is one of those trucks of that variety packed with explosives, half the weight I think of the Moab, so this is the mother of all trucks, the Moat is gonna explode in a very sensitive area and it's gonna actually take out. So this is not something we haven't considered as a nightmare scenario. We had a couple of years ago in the Shah Shahid area of Kabul another truck that went off and it leveled an entire neighborhood of which by the way the Afghan government then said, oh yeah, 15 people died, give me a break. You know what I mean, 15 people and the so-called free media which Afghanistan has by far the most free media of anything sort of went along with the 15 because that's the official numbers but in reality when you survey the damage it's just beyond anything, you know? So when you have this anger at the protest, what happens next, you have basically a shooting incident in which seven protesters, by the way they weren't exactly so peaceful, they're throwing rocks. They're throwing rocks at police officers that are just literally trying to maintain some sort of semblance of security and I think that basically the Afghan government was ill-prepared for this protest. Previous protests when the Hazaras came out and the Enlightenment movement had multiple protests in Kabul they had put barriers, they had put containers, they had segregated certain areas, they had separated from people being able to freely enter those secure sort of sites. They didn't do it this time. So they were caught in a bad situation and it just got worse. So then the next day obviously you had a funeral procession that also went bad and you had about 20 out some people die and about 90 injured, which it tells you that the Taliban or whoever it is can actually strike not only with some serious access but they also can do it quickly. They can turn around and retask people that may be doing X, Y, Z and they're put on the funeral with shoe bombs. So this is a very advanced insurgency. This is a very serious problem, what we're dealing with and we need to, again, our help should not be fighting the Taliban, our help should be focused on getting the Afghan government to be better in fighting the Taliban because that's actually who's on point with this. My last statement because it sort of strikes also the feelings of the ordinary Afghan is we're not forcing the Afghan government to actually stop making the same mistakes. We're not holding them to account for some of these mistakes that are happening. So while we're talking about an indefinite commitment, I think it's super important that our indefinite commitment comes with some definite conditions as to why we should stay and how we will continue to stay. And that's not a hit on President Ghani and his government because he's trying very hard. I mean, nobody will suggest otherwise, but I think the point is that we're not helping them by not placing these definitions of how these limits because we're allowing those, you know,