 Good evening, and welcome to the CSIS-TCU Sheeper School Journalism Series. We're pleased that you all could be with us tonight. I'm Andrew Schwartz, Vice President of External Relations here at CSIS. After Bob and the panel kicks it around a bit, we'll be able to take some of your questions. And if you could come up to the mic and ask your questions, that'll be great. But with that, I'd like to turn it over to Bob Schieffer. And I'd also like to say thank you to TCU for being here and being part of this and this wonderful series that we're able to do with Bob. Thank you very much, Andrew. And thanks all of you for coming. So we have today basically a journalist roundtable on Afghanistan and Pakistan. And we hope to talk about that. And we have four people here who know a lot about this and who know about it from being there on the scene and getting ready to go back. Rajiv Chandrasekrian, Associate Editor of The Washington Post, and with us before, he wrote the great book on Iraq Life in the Imperials, in the Emerald City, Life Inside the Green Zone. I still want the best books, I think, about Iraq. And it's done a lot of groundbreaking reporting. You're getting ready to go to Afghanistan now next week. Yep. Next week. Nancy Youssef, who was the Baghdad Bureau Chief for the McClatchy Newspapers for about four years. She's been writing about Iraq for even longer than that. Got back from Afghanistan in January, and she's getting ready to go back in about a week or so. That's right. Ibn Lus was made Washington Bureau Chief of the Financial Chimes in June of 2006. Writes about the U.S. economy, politics, foreign policy. Manages a team of Washington-based reporters from 2001 to 2006. He was the South Asia Bureau Chief for the Financial Times based in New Delhi. He began his career as a Geneva-based correspondent for the Guardian of the United Kingdom. He has highly acclaimed book India in spite of the gods, The Strange Rise of Modern India came out in 2008. And of course, over on the right, my old buddy, David Sanger, who's the Chief Washington Correspondent for the New York Times. His new book is just out. It is a New York Times bestseller. And it is called The Inheritance, The World, Obama Confronts, and The Challenges to American Power. It's sort of, I call it, owner's manual for the new president coming into office and kind of a guide on the problems. I think he knows what they are about that. But I'm sure he enjoyed having your book to give him a little start on it. We want to talk about Afghanistan and Pakistan. And I think the interesting thing about this is where these were being dealt with as sort of two separate subjects in the previous administration. The Obama administration has basically put the two countries together. And I want to talk about, is that a good idea? What does that mean? And why don't we just start with you, David. Bring us up to date on where we are right now in these two countries. And do you see these two policies being put together as sort of one policy now? Well, they said quite explicitly, Bob, that that was going to be the intent of the new administration when they came in. Although I think in all fairness to President Bush and his team, they were beginning to do that in the last policy reviews that took place at the end of last year as they began to recognize that, of course, since the problem was a common one and since the insurgents don't particularly view the border that we all care about as a border for them, that these were two completely interrelated problems and completely interrelated insurgencies. Of course, there's a long history of having a lot of difficulty getting the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan to work together themselves. And there were a number of cases during the Bush administration, there had been some in the Obama administration, where efforts to try to coordinate military operations and even diplomatic operations, but military for sure, so that you could squeeze the insurgents on both sides of the border have by and large not worked because the Pakistanis weren't moving up to that border and because the Afghans were in many cases not capable and U.S. forces, of course, have been stretched thin. I think the interesting thing about the Obama policy since they turned it out about two, two-and-a-half months ago was this, that if you read what its core objective is, it is to defeat al-Qaeda and its associates. It says nothing about democratizing Afghanistan, most of the political objectives that President Bush had laid out had been set aside other than chasing after and defeating al-Qaeda and its associates. The difficulty that they've run into, of course, is that while we are pouring troops into Afghanistan, we'll have about 60,000, I guess, by the end of the summer, by the time this is done, maybe even a bit more if you include some of the support troops. Al-Qaeda, of course, is largely in Pakistan and we can't operate there. And so even if you deal with it as a single entity, as a matter of policy, as a matter of practice, except to the degree that they are pursuing the covert programs that President Bush extended last summer when he authorized both broader predator strikes in a bigger target group or some of the operations that President Obama has done since, by and large, we have our hands tied still in Pakistan. I want to ask Rajeev and Nancy both the same question. You're getting ready to go back to Afghanistan. What are you going to be working on? What are the stories you're going to be looking for as you go back? Just want me to tip my hand right here. I want to just follow up on one thing David was saying. While the administration's stated strategic objective is, as David noted, going after Al-Qaeda, that they have certainly de-emphasized the broader talk of democracy building, other sort of broader reconstruction efforts, much of the U.S. activity on the ground, both on the civilian and military side, is largely unchanged today from the way, from what was going on a year or two, three ago. In fact, in many ways, there's simply an increase. There are more troops flowing in, particularly into the south. There are more reconstruction dollars that will be flowing through the pipeline. And what I want to develop a better understanding of is where does this effort, as it plays all down the ground, link up with this broader sort of strategic change that has been articulated from the White House? And how do you get to a point where your focus is simply going after Al-Qaeda and denying them sanctuary? And what appears to be the case is that the administration and principally through the Special Envoy Ambassador Holbrook, as well as General Petraeus and their respective staffs believe that you need a continued degree of engagement in Afghanistan on the reconstruction front, both in terms of at the local level building up local governance and local institutions, the police force, the Afghan army, as well as other types of more traditional reconstruction efforts, particularly with regard to agriculture, for instance, as they seek to try to find new ways to combat some of the poppy cultivation, particularly in the south. But understanding how the new strategic objectives and the very vague white paper that was released by the administration now some weeks ago translates into changes on the ground as something that will be sort of up there on my list. And then also trying to see how this... how the addition of U.S. forces in the south plays out. The U.S. Marines and a Striker Brigade are just starting to flow in to southern Afghanistan. They won't really be operational for another four weeks or so. They're waiting for a lot of their equipment to follow them. But what does that mean? All of a sudden the south, which had been principally the domain of the British and the Canadians with a few Dutch and Australian and some Americans thrown in, now will be a principally American theater. And the Americans are going to push into parts of Helmand province and parts of Kandahar province. And how will that change the dynamics down there? There's going to be a political component to it too, Bob, as U.S. casualties rise. How will that affect support for Obama's broader AFPAC efforts back home? Well, I'm looking at this as a Pentagon correspondent. And so one of the things that I'm focused on and folks looked at when I was there in January is the military's transition from Iraq to Afghanistan. Because up until this point the mindset, the equipment, the training was all focused towards Iraq. And you're seeing a military that's trying to very rapidly adjust to Afghanistan and finding that the lessons learned in Iraq, which in some cases took years to get to, doesn't translate into Afghanistan as well and you're starting to see the readjustment. The armor that they wear in Iraq doesn't apply to Afghanistan. It's too heavy. The MRAPs that we talk about so much, the vehicles that were designed to protect troops against the IED threat in Iraq, again doesn't work against the rough terrain in Afghanistan. And so from my perspective, my job is constantly to cover that transition from one war zone to the next. And as Rajiv mentioned, the paper that the administration put out is quite broad and so when you're on the ground, you end up seeing the responsibility of sort of translating that into a practical policy falling on 22-year-old second lieutenants and the Marines and how they go about doing that. The other thing as a military correspondent that I'm looking at is what they do with the numbers. You know, in Iraq they had 140,000 troops upwards of 150,000 on the surge to send in to really flood Baghdad and put troops out in every little community to deal with the threat. Whereas in Afghanistan, as we've mentioned, it's about 60,000, 100,000 if you start to count the coalition troops. And so how do you use those troops effectively? Will we find them in outposts? Will they be able to reach the tribal leaders? Or will we see them instead being a quick reaction force if you're reaching out to the local tribal leaders and the local security chiefs and saying, look, if you work with the Taliban, we'll be here to back you if they come and attack you. So how they dole those troops out, how they move in the south. And thirdly, the relationship between the coalition and the U.S. forces. Again, we'll have a larger U.S. presence of what was something that could really be called a coalition effort will become a U.S. effort. And the problem becomes how Canadians do something that's different than how the British do it or the Dutch do it than how the Germans do it. And so how do you meld those efforts together, particularly in a region as complex as the south? Edward Loos, let me talk to you about Pakistan because I think the administration has concluded that the central problem is Pakistan. How much influence can we exert over Pakistan? How much influence are we exerting now and what is the main problem there? Well, stabilizing democracy, getting clear institutions that survive and that can have some degree of integrity, a government that functions across the whole of the territorial expanse we call Pakistan. I was reading back over something the other day and I was talking to Rajeev about this as well. When Carter, President Carter, gave a billion dollars to General Zia in 1980 following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Zia said this is peanuts, which is obviously a very pointed insult to the president. We're now looking at, 29 years later, a much ballyhooed fanfare, Kerry Luger Bill, supported strongly by the administration, which will increase civilian and economic aid to 1.5 billion a year, admittedly from much, much lower levels, it's a tripling. But if it was peanuts then and look at the rate of inflation, we'd have to have some sub-peanut category to describe this. This is a $300 billion economy. It's got 175 million people. And whilst it's absolutely right for the Obama administration to focus much, much more strongly on how it can deal with the civilian side of Pakistan and governance strengthening and institution building and all the other kinds of things that come with this bill, I think that the conditions that are being attached to it and the benchmarks that Kerry Luger are going to require of the administration for how this spending is accounted for makes it look really ambitious. I mean, we've got all sorts of things covered by this bill. We've got women's health, we've got education, we've got democracy strengthening, quite apart from the separate benchmarks of reorienting the Pakistan army to the Fatah regions away from the border with India, we've got micro-credit. We've got every good thing under the sun. And my fear is that this is not just too little but it's also too ambitious, but paradoxically. So what do we do about Pakistan? Well, this is a start, but it's a very, very small start. It's very easy as a journalist to sit here and be glib and say you should do this, that, and the other. I really can't think what this, that, and the other would be for Pakistan. It's a very, very difficult situation. I do know that Holbrook was privately remarked that somebody reported that it needs $50 billion. That kind of money would help transform some sectors in Pakistan if the government was capable of absorbing it and had a plan to do something with it. But I'm sorry not to give a clearer answer. It's a very, very difficult situation and there are no easy solutions. Let me just ask David, because you've written about this. I mean, one of the problems obviously are the nuclear weapons and are they secure? If I understood President Obama or somebody in the administration the other day, they said they did feel that as of now we believed that these weapons are secure. But then didn't I also hear Leon Panetta say the other day we don't know where all of them are? That's right. So how can we be sure that they're secure if we don't know where some of them are? You know, these are the kinds of questions that it's always fun to ask government officials because you're always sort of waiting for a creative answer. And in fact, you have had regular assurances from government officials both during the Bush administration and now during the Obama administration. Admiral Mullen has repeated these in recent times. A relative sense of security about the weapons themselves. The U.S. had a program which we've written about extensively that started fairly early in the years after 9-11 that spent about a hundred million dollars to help train the Pakistanis to protect their weapons, train them on how we protect some of our facilities. When I was in Pakistan working on the book they described to me how they have built their own equivalent of our PAL system, the computerized links to how to make sure that you can't detonate a weapon if one goes missing. Most people I talk to seem fairly well confident that the weapons themselves are protected and the warheads are separated from the fissile material and the triggering devices and so forth. The difficulty, the thing that I hear a lot of nervousness about comes in two areas, Bob. One of them is that we're still very concerned about the materials. Pakistan is building, adding on to its nuclear arsenal probably faster than just about any country on Earth right now. And a lot of people believe that some of that military aid that we sent over the years may have well either been funneled off to that or at least freed up Pakistani money for that. And it's the materials which are worked on in the laboratories that were, of course, the leakage point for AQ Khan, one of the founders of the Pakistani program. The other is a considerable insider threat. There's been ready streams of intelligence suggesting that some people, some Pakistanis who are trained abroad are subject to some recruitment. So they would come back and work inside the Pakistani nuclear program. The Pakistanis told me when I was there there were about 2,000 engineers who have what they call critical knowledge about how to build a weapon. I think there's a lot of concern about insiders with fundamentalist tendencies. So those are the two big issues. And as Director Panetta said the other day we don't know where everything is and that's in part because while the Pakistanis don't of course trust the Indians, they're fearful of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, well they really don't trust us and they think that we always have a SEAL team hanging just off the horizon ready to snatch their weapons and that may not be an entirely fanciful concern. So I think it is really the area where you see the cost of this lack of trust. Do you want to add to that, Edward? Because I know you're so familiar with Pakistan. About the security of the nuclear weapons. I recently reviewed David's book and he knows 100 times more about that subject than me. All I'd say is that you'll probably attest that most of the designs, in terms of leaking of knowledge most of the designs for these weapons are on the internet and they're 1945 quality nuclear weapons. And the security of the Kahuta nuclear ecosystem is I think the vulnerability of it has been slightly exaggerated in recent media reports around the world. The Buna'a and SWAT might be 60 miles away from Islamabad but there's a very, very strong Punjabi army in Punjabistan, if you like. And it's I think probably not quite as vulnerable as some of the media reports have been suggesting. Rodgie and Nancy, let me ask you about Afghanistan. How bad is this situation now? I mean, is it any better than it was? Is it getting worse? Does anything we've just had to change in commanders? Can you just talk about those subjects in general as you head over there? What do you think about this situation? Well, I still think the metrics are pretty bad when it comes to overall security. I mean, in much of the south and the east of the country the Taliban have defective control of much of that territory. They sort of own the night. They effectively have cowed villagers into supporting them both through outright intimidation as well as stepping into a void that exists there because there is in most places or at least in many places a lack of effective local governance. And so the Taliban sort of step in as the local administrative force. I was out just about two months ago to the northwest of Kandahar in a district called Maywand where there is a U.S. Army battalion and was talking to some of the soldiers there and they were telling me how just a few days earlier a man had approached the municipal center where there is a company of U.S. soldiers that are mentoring the Afghan police force in that district. And the man came up and tried to get the attention of the Afghan police because his motorcycle had been stolen and the police couldn't be bothered. They eventually sort of said to him that he'd have to pay a bribe if they wanted the police to get involved. And so finally in a huff the man said, well I'm going to the Taliban because at least they'll take me seriously. It's this sort of real lack of capacity and endemic corruption at a local level that continues to bedevil the approach and efforts at stabilization there. So I think that the challenges remain very grave. One thing that we've got to look at very carefully over the next couple of months is that it's this time of year when as the snow in the mountain passes melt that Taliban fighters cross over from the mountainous frontier provinces in Pakistan into Afghanistan. But with the intensity of fighting that's occurring in the Swat Valley for instance, I'm just sort of curious the extent to which some of those fighters that might have otherwise chosen to go and fight and attack U.S. forces in Afghanistan this summer might otherwise be sort of diverting to parts of Pakistan where there are ongoing operations with the Pakistani military. And so that remains one thing to continue to watch. This was President Sardari's complaint to President Obama the other day that we're focusing so much effort and forces into Afghanistan that it's pushing more into Pakistan. Well remember that was the mistake in 2001 that as we moved forces into East that it pushed it in into the Fata and conversely there's some concern by sending more U.S. troops into the south and now push it into Baluchistan and create instability in yet another part of Afghanistan and so I think that's something to watch. Something I would add to Rajiv's point is we have a couple of things coming up. We have elections coming up in August and remember U.S. forces in the south are going to places in some areas where no forces have been before and going right into the economic base of the Taliban, the Papi production. And that's not just an economic base for the Taliban but for the government and for the warlords themselves. How do you go about attacking that? It's upwards of $4 billion industry depending on some estimates. Half of that going to the government and the warlords and so you're going to have U.S. troops who are used to sort of tackling security-based issues now dealing with economic issues too becoming sort of drug cops and so how do you strike that balance? What kind of pressure do you put on the forces and how much influence can they really have on the area? Rajiv talked beautifully about the influence of the Taliban on the region. In a lot of cases the Taliban is able to pay higher salaries than the Afghans are to their police and army. So how do you get over that problem and at the same time try to reshape the economic base of the Afghan economy? And this money, this is all coming from the Papi production from Narkata? That's right. I mean 90% of the world's Papi production, heroin production comes from Helmand province where U.S. troops are now headed into places where there have been no troops before. So we'll anticipate heavy fighting but how do you go about tackling that? People say wheat production as an alternative. The problem is twofold. Number one, Papi you planted and it's done, it's sort of minimal work whereas wheat production requires more work and secondly and more immediate if the Taliban are able to intimidate farmers into growing or providing Papi to them then it makes it impossible to say to a farmer provide wheat when he'll say you're putting my life in jeopardy. You can't protect me from the Taliban. So it comes back to that fundamental question how with only 60,000 troops in a country much bigger than Iraq do you offer security to people? Do you do the outposts as we did in Iraq and do patrols or do you figure out a way to work within a very complex local security system? I want to actually go to questions from the audience earlier than we normally do mainly because we have so many knowledgeable people and experts sitting out here and we'd love to hear some of your questions but before we do that let me just ask all of you and I did hold the answers to the short version on this. Is the policy that seems to be unfolding now that much different from the Bush administration policy or is it about the same or has it radically changed? You know it seems more similar to me than not. They spend a lot of time with the Pakistanis in recent times trying to convince them to focus on the insurgency rather than India. General Hayden is in the audience here. General Hayden spent a good deal of this last year in office trying to convince the Pakistanis to do that. It strikes me that many of the orders that President Bush issued last summer have if anything been accelerated by President Obama. I think just following up on what David said what we're seeing particularly with regard to Afghanistan is additional money being put against the problem or at least the promise of additional money being put against it but so what's going on here is it's largely sort of following through and funding some of the initiatives to a broad degree that the Bush administration had talked about but just didn't have the resources to actually fund because one reason was because of Iraq the other was in some cases just a lack of follow through but I think what we're starting to see is moving forward in a more meaningful way in that direction. One change however is the relationship that seems to be developing between the Obama White House and President Karzai. I enjoyed a very very close relationship with the Bush White House. There were regular video teleconferences between Bush and Karzai. There was a sort of a close personal friendship that had developed between the two men starting in about 2002. The Obama administration is instituting a much more of an arms length relationship with him. Those video teleconferences aren't occurring the meeting that the meetings that Karzai had when he was here with President Zardari a couple of weeks ago while very polite did not have the same degree of Bonhami that those interactions did during the Bush administration. I would just add to that I think the ultimate change and it happened really before the policy was announced was that the Obama administration came in and called this the good war the justified war the war that had to be fought so perhaps the biggest change is the emphasis and how much the administration has already sort of staked its foreign policy legacy on the outcome of this war. I haven't got much to add to that but I would say there's one positive factor in the sea of bad news recently has been the Indian election result in the last 10 days the return of the Congress government but with a much stronger mandate and I think you know if you'd looked at the possible political consequences of the Mumbai terror attacks last November you would have predicted a Hindu nationalist as a beneficiary the BJP as a beneficiary from this which would have been very very bad for Pakistan paranoia so I think this is a plus factor and I think in his wildest dreams if Holbrook could think of one thing that would help cut through the various Gordian knots that he's trying to grapple with in the region it would be dramatic progress on Kashmir to really take the sting out of the Pakistan posture towards India and that's while still unlikely quite a bit less unlikely today than it would have been two weeks ago Is the general feeling in Pakistan is that India still poses a greater threat to Pakistan than any of this internal and why is that? Are they right? You know I think Pakistan it's a very complex question that I could bore you to death with over the next hour but I mean the one Pakistan in many ways is defined as being not India it's a homeland for India's Muslims and the raison d'etre of the Pakistan army has been to reclaim Kashmir that's why it's got such a preponderance over the Pakistan budget and why it's the only really serious national functioning institution in the country so for the Pakistan military the Kashmir problem is both a cause of enmity but also a cause for celebration for the people and as wealthy and as lavishly funded as it is so if you wanted a deal on Kashmir I guess you'd need a military government on the other side or at least if you wanted a deal that's stuck you'd need the military to sign off on it you'd need General Kiani to be really intimately involved in such a deal but as I say I don't think the deal is quite so impossible as some people may imagine and the last point I'll make on that I'll talk a few weeks back about the off the shelf deal on Kashmir when Musharraf was still in power that deal's still there like Arab-Israeli problem we know what the end result's going to look like it's a question of how we get there but the Indians as I'm sure you'd agree bristle at the notion that the Kashmir issue be linked to the AFPAC issue and they made it very clear that they don't want Kashmir to be part of Holbrooke's mandate and officially it isn't although people in the State Department clearly recognize that the Kashmir issue does have a very very significant and central impact on Pakistan and then by extension Afghanistan of course the Pakistanis would love the United States to get involved and to play a role there so there remains a fundamental point of disagreement between the two nations and India was part of his I mean it was a mistake his original designation and just as a brief aside David Miliband the British Foreign Secretary went there and just before inauguration for a trip to India mentioned Kashmir as British Foreign Secretaries always do implicitly got completely hounded to death by the Indian media and a couple of days later Holbrooke dropped India from his designation there's a saying not from India that a chicken to scare the monkey and in this case poor old Miliband was the chicken Alright well let's take some questions from the audience and we do have General Hayden here with us today General would you take a question or would you like to make a comment? My name is Kami but I write for the Pakistani Spectator David I asked you a question on Don Rimsho but I didn't get the answer do you know where are American nuclear bombs and why should we expect that we give peanut to Pakistan and then ask them about your atomic nuclear weapons it's very very unfair I mean Pakistan is not our slave state we shouldn't expect these kind of things if you read Ambassador Haqqani's book you will learn that Pakistani army is very incompetent all they know how to conquer Pakistan and how to exploit their own people what do you expect how can they defend their own country with traditional weapons because they don't have money Pakistan is a practically bankrupt country after they pay their armed forces and their federal employees they have nothing left so the only option they have is to make small strategic nuclear weapons to defend their country Who would like to take that? Thanks Next time do I get a hard one Bob? What I think is interesting about what's not in the discussion right now is you haven't heard anybody including the Obama administration or the Bush administration before it suggests that they were going to reverse the fact that Pakistan is a nuclear state you did hear that in 1998 after the Indian and Pakistan tests and we had sanctions on both countries and the ostensible part of that sanction regime was that Pakistan would give up its nuclear weapons of course it's not a nuclear non-proliferation treaty as India is not and Israel is not and North Korea has pulled out of the treaty you don't hear that discussion anymore so there is basically acknowledgement at this point that Pakistan is a nuclear state irreversibly and that is why there is so much discussion right now about nuclear safety because I think we're well past that moment when any American president thinks that they're going to get them to give it up Did you have a question? Yes I'm Patrick Cronin from the National Defense University, great panel, excellent discussion, could ask many questions, let me just make one very brief comment picking up on Edward Luce's point which I think is critical because there are things that Washington can change about South Asia and South West Asia and there are things we cannot change one thing we can change is the way of development using local people buying locally, empowering local people and we're not going to do that and I hope you report that from the field as we fail to adapt quickly enough to this reality now the question though is things we can't change especially the political leaders we're dealing with both in Afghanistan with the upcoming August election and in Pakistan with Zidari to what extent is US strategy if it can be called that on the success and the willingness, political willingness of those leaders to go along, for instance if Karzai gets re-elected in August and he starts to sell his cabinet positions to unsavory people does that sell our strategy down in the next two years and also in Pakistan if Zidari really loses more political legitimacy and traction are we really back to supporting just a military government? I'll take the aft side of that I think what we're seeing are steps toward really de-linking the broader US objectives in Afghanistan from Karzai and from an expectation that Karzai will follow through for a variety of reasons one, because of just general concerns about the ineffectiveness of his administration his sometimes sort of mercurial tendencies his tendency to sort of bring in unsavory actors into his orbit most recently seen by his decision to bring in the former warlord Marshal Fahim in as one of his vice-presidential running mates so the governance focus at least as it's being articulated now and it's going to we'll have to wait and see how this actually plays out is to a degree some of what we've been trying to do in Iraq which is a far more sort of local decentralized strategy working more with local governors, local councils pushing down into sort of a district level trying to build up those sorts of institutions partially as a counterweight to Karzai and partially because the recognition that Afghanistan is a diverse country the central government historically has not always been able to project its authority in the far corners of the country and that we have to make the the parts of government that most people sort of relate to which is the real local government or they interact with more effective as opposed to sort of devoting the bulk of our energies and resources to the administration in Kabul I would just add to that when you talk to the residents in Kabul they really resent the United States for sort of foisting and upholding this the mayor of Kabul, Hamid Karzai and I think there's a recognition of that we were talking earlier about what are the biggest differences and I think one of them is under the Bush administration was very sort of top down in terms of governance and as Rajiv mentioned the now sort of a combination is top down plus bottom up and recognition of that the danger becomes, you know we go to Iraq as the model we say we reached out to tribal leaders Iraq's a lot more linear than Afghanistan you know if you're in Anbar you deal with the Dulemiz and in Samar you deal with five or six tribal leaders whereas Afghanistan is a complex matrix of tribal relationships and I think the danger becomes we end up picking one person and all of a sudden find ourselves intermixed in a tribal war that we didn't intend to be a part of and I think that will be the biggest danger coming forward but there's certainly a recognition of that that problem and I think you're starting to see this dual approach that wasn't there before and with regard to Pakistan while in the past the relationship was largely focused on Musharraf this administration seems to while, you know, keeping you know, cordial relations to a degree with Zardari ensuring that there are you know extensive you know, links with you know, the military with the ISI and essentially trying to to deal with all of the locuses of power in Pakistan as opposed to simply a a sort of head of state the head of state relationship Yes, sir Thank you very much, Mr. Shu, for an excellent panel here. My name is Mataab Karim and I'm an academic professor of demography and I'm currently doing a book on demography of Muslim countries at Pew Research Center I have some reaction to a billion-dollar remark made by Mr. Liu it was not a billion it was a 200 million actually because I was a student those days and I remember it very well. Anyways I think you're, and then what you said I really agree with all the points it's very important where are we investing in Pakistan and Afghanistan being a demographer I have to tell you some numbers unfortunately 175 million people 33% of them are youth between the ages of 15 to 29 in Pakistan about half of them are men about 30 million 30% of them are unemployed ok that makes 9 million the 30 million youth is more than the population of Afghanistan and Iraq you have to look into these issues now where are we investing where are we doing do I agree with the gentleman here military being an academic I do agree with him what do we do with these people you know they are multiplying the number is increasing we have to invest where we can take care of them 9 million unemployed people I'm talking about invest in agriculture productivity industries you see one of the major investment US is doing is bringing those young people to us to do graduate studies about 200 in a year they come from elite classes they don't go over and work back in Pakistan many of them like many of us are sitting here from foreign countries we stay here I came a long time back to study but I stayed back so what we are looking for is investing somewhere take care of the people and these young men somebody said if you don't help them they go to Taliban and they can go and become hard guns for $100,000 they can buy 100 of them so that's what is my submission thank you very much I think you are making a key point there with regard to unemployment particularly youth unemployment Pakistan is a significant issue in Afghanistan and a significant source of recruitment for the Taliban and you pointed to agriculture and that's an important thing to mention here because agriculture is really vaulted to the top of the list for Holbrook and the US government's approach in terms of reconstruction and economic assistance in AFPAC and for a variety of reasons job creation as well as in the Afghan side counter narcotics and if you look at the history of the US aid program in Afghanistan with regard to agriculture it's just heart breaking so much potential there and the program and I've spent a fair bit of time over the past couple of weeks looking at some of these issues you know it's we have not emphasized helping farmers to increase their yields, their productivity it's been very much focused on trying to grab headlines here and there with sort of export promotion and you know we're flying a plane of pomegranates out to Dubai but the real hard work of trying to work with farmers across the country in Afghanistan trying to use counterparts in parts of Pakistan to help expand agricultural opportunity there and by extension economic opportunity just that sort of work hasn't been done and so what we're what this administration stated they plan to do is sort of like a multi-hundred million dollar effort over the next few years at trying to really boost agricultural production and there's an awful lot of need for it when you look at sort of the poppy side of things you know the Taliban have been incredibly savvy Afghans aren't planting poppy just because a Taliban warlord comes and puts a gun to their head and they're not planting it simply because poppy fetches more money than other crops at the market they're doing it because it's an entire agricultural system a lot of these guys are dirt poor subsistence farmers and they can get credit upfront if they plant poppy there's Taliban kind of agricultural extension agents that show up and help them increase the yields of their poppy their futures contracts so that they know what they're going to get for their poppy at harvest time there's farm gate delivering these guys come and pick up that stuff what do we do? we do occasional sort of fertilizer and seed giveaways but we're not engaged in agricultural credit we haven't meaningfully engaged our land grant universities here to help provide agricultural extension services the defense department has admirably done some of this through the national guard program but not in a much larger way so they're huge areas in which our broader reconstruction effort has just completely fallen down on the job can I just add a couple things as long as we're in the business of numbers correction I have to make a correction on my number and I'll break it down for you the estimate 150 million goes to the Taliban 70 million to the farmers and the rest to the warlords and the government and then the economy that's 500 million it's just an incredibly weak economy and I would just add anecdotally when I was in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan one of the first places the marines moved into you would see bags and bags of wheat lined up along the street that asked the marines what are we doing with this and they just didn't know it sort of arrived and they didn't really have a plan on how to get this out how to distribute it all right, yes sir Hi, Stefan Strude from N24 a German news channel I would like to come back to the military part for a moment Secretary Gates in a recent 60 minutes interview complained bitterly about the lack of support from the European allies the German government tells us every once in a while that once they explain to the Americans how much they are doing already in Afghanistan they do understand that the Germans yes they are active and what remains unmentioned is probably the fact that the Germans are leaning back having started two world wars it's not too too popular to be too active in a ongoing war what is the view on the ground are the Germans being viewed as basically you know watching the food lines and leaving the fights to everybody else well candidly I think for the Germans because they are an RC Nord the northern part of Afghanistan which doesn't border Pakistan seeing some of the least amount of violence that they have sort of the easiest assignment and you're right there are 41 coalition countries that are participating from the American perspective there's a frustration and it's not so much just the numbers but how they operate it's sort of an approach I mean you'll hear ISAF which is the acronym that they use that the Americans will say that it really stands for ISOL Americans fighting instead of international security so that's the one you'll hear I mean I don't think it's so much the numbers which although for Secretary Gates it is but I think for the guys on the ground it's what they see they see broadly speaking not the Germans but broadly speaking coalition forces that don't go out as much to take as much risk now I think from the European side they see the Americans as reckless as shooting too quickly as tearing down doors too quickly and I think that's sort of on the ground as much as for the Secretary's numbers but I think for the guys on the ground it's that friction I think we have time for just one more question here Hello Greg Tomlin from George Washington University thank all of you for taking the time to actually visit the country before you report two weeks ago Secretary Gates asked for General McKernan's resignation do you in your opinion think that this was largely symbolic or do you foresee a significant change in theater strategy just short answers and everybody can take the chance we're waiting to see the public line that Secretary Gates took was that McKernan had done a perfectly solid job but he wanted a new set of eyes and many has chosen ran special forces for many years and one would assume would come to it with a strategy that is more based that way but we haven't seen it yet and of course strategies that are based on special force operations are often the hardest ones to see the results of special forces operations in Afghanistan have been blamed for high number of civilian casualties which have had a significant effect on public support for international forces in Afghanistan I'm not suggesting that General McChrystal will seek to implement a theater-wide special forces approach but what the overall stated strategy here is a counter-insurgency strategy and so there's going to be I think a challenge as he sort of takes his special forces background and seeks to sort of migrate that into sort of a theater-wide counter-insurgency strategy also note that I did find it a little unusual that General McKernan was essentially being drummed out of the military when other generals whose performance has been questioned by their superiors most notably General Casey and General Sanchez in Iraq were both brought back here and in the case of General Casey the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army and the case of General Sanchez I think was sort of kept around as a general officer for at least a year before he retired I mean he is the first general to be fired since McArthur so it is breathtaking I think the only thing going forward is the local press will talk that given General McChrystal's background they think that this will be a more kinetic commander that they'll see more fighting on the ground based on his background so he comes in with that sort of bias from the locals he needs his own strategy and he needs his own general I've been following the spirit of the question I don't cover the Pentagon so I've got nothing to add to what the other three have said which we're going to just close here give us a 30 second what do you think is going to happen I think I think we're in for a tough year I mean things may well turn around but you know when you put that many more American forces into Afghanistan you are of course going to see more fighting and we're going to take more casualties Secretary Gates has said if we can't turn it around in a year he thinks the American public might lose some of its its willingness to take those casualties I think the thing to watch is Pakistan it is the home game for al-Qaeda it is the home game in many ways for elements of the Taliban and I think that they may well conclude that with 60,000 Americans in Afghanistan they're much wiser to focus their energies there two things that I'm going to try to watch this year on the Pakistani side will the Pakistani military be able to engage in counter-insurgency operations what they need to do in the SWAT Valley they're still in the sort of the clear phase can they hold can they build can they actually implement a meaningful counter-insurgency strategy that's what they have to do and will the United States be able to provide the necessary support they need to mount those sorts of coin operations on the Afghan side one thing that I think we should all be looking out for is the degree to which an experiment in Wardak province called AP3 or the Afghan Public Protection Force which is an effort to work with local tribal leaders to raise local security forces you know the military doesn't like them being called militias but to do a degree that's what they are their local militia units will that be effective will that be a model that can be replicated in other parts of the country and will that enable the Afghan government and by extension the coalition to more quickly get additional sort of boots on the ground to provide local security because training the Afghan National Army is a long and complicated process and if we're looking for results over the next 12 to 24 months which is what officials at the White House have said is their time frame that they feel like they need to start demonstrating results the American people clearly before the 2010 midterms that we've got to look at whether that effort is starting to bearing fruit I'll bring the sort of narrow Pentagon correspondent perspective to it I'm looking for the effect the Iraq-Afghanistan balance my biggest fear going forward is not that we've seen sort of violence escalate in Iraq my biggest fear isn't that things get out of control or go bad in Iraq quickly but that they go bad slowly and that as we're slowly bringing down troops and escalating them in Afghanistan we potentially find ourselves mired in two conflicts and that balance so for me as a Pentagon correspondent I'm watching that how we balance those two particularly as the violence has gone up in Iraq Edward I'd simply say in that part of the world that things are never as good or as bad as they seem right now they seem bad but in Pakistan there's been a lot of fear mongering that it's going to have an Iran-style revolution or there's going to be a breaking in the chain of command coup that'll bring bearded colonels to power or indeed disintegration of the state I think it's worth remembering that in the recent elections the support for the MMA the grouping of six Pakistani Islamist parties fell from 12% in the previous elections to 5% of the total vote and it's also worth remembering that the really serious political mass movements in Pakistan of the last two years have been led by middle class lawyers secular movements and that the proliferation of free media in the country in the last few years which started under Mushara was permitted under Mushara has really continued so don't underestimate the strength of civil society out there you can look at or not strength but they don't overlook the fact that there is a civil society out there and I think we tend to overlook that and I think things aren't necessarily as bad as they seem they're bad but they're not catastrophically bad alright well thank you all on behalf of the TCU full of journalism and CSIS and thanks for the time