 Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. My name is Nancy Lindborg. I'm the president here at the U.S. Institute of Peace. And hopefully, as most of you know, USIP was founded a little more than 30 years ago by Congress as an independent federal institute that is really dedicated to looking for practical solutions for preventing and resolving violent conflict. This is something vital for our national security interests. And we work closely with our state aid and DOD and non-state actors in pursuit of this vision. And we have worked in Afghanistan continuously since early 2002. And for a number of years now, it's been our largest program and appropriately so, given that it's America's longest war and absolutely vital to U.S. interests to consider how to move forward with that. We, in Afghanistan, partner both at the national level as well as working at the community level and at the grassroots level. And we work regionally looking at what are the various ways to understand and to address the drivers of the violence that persists there. So today's event comes at a very important time. We saw the horrific truck bomb that killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 people in May. And the administration is currently taking a hard look at what its policy should be going forward. We've already heard a lot in the media about the military components of the strategy. But I think everybody in this room knows, and I see a lot of people here who have spent a lot of time working in and around South Asia, that this will require all the tools of America's arsenal and that we need to understand what is the political strategy, what's our regional strategy, what are all the non-kinetic ways and approaches that we need to bring to bear on a very significant challenge. So I'm pleased we have a very distinguished panel of experts, most of whom have spent many years of their life, maybe more than they'd like, working in and around this problem. And so thank you for joining us here today for this conversation. It's an important one and one that we'll continue to have as a part of our mission. And I would like to, before turning it over to my colleague, Andrew Wilder, give him a special shout out as our vice president for Asia, who has really driven this program for a number of years and brings his own vast wealth of experience and knowledge along with his team. So with that, join me in welcoming Andrew in the panel. And thank you very much for being with us here today. Andrew Wilder. Thank you, Nancy. And let me thank all of you again for coming, and in particular our panelists. As Nancy mentioned, I think this is a really good opportunity to be having this discussion. All of you who follow Afghanistan know that the administration has had an ongoing Afghanistan review. Initially, we thought this would be finalized and completed before the mini NATO summit in April. Then there was a decision to broaden the scope of the policy and not just look so specifically at Afghanistan but put that more in the regional context. And so then come up with a regional strategy, in particular how it relates to Afghanistan. And once you start dealing with those dynamics, not surprisingly, the process slowed down a little bit. Secretary Mattis, when he testified in mid-June, Senate Armed Services Committee at that time when he talked about that we are not winning, he did then promise that there would be a strategy developed by mid-July. So we are very close to mid-July, and I think we should soon be hearing more about the strategy. But we thought it would be a really good opportunity beforehand to bring together a collection of former US government officials, all of whom have worked on Afghanistan from either DOD or from the National Security Council or from the State Department to talk about the issues and challenges. And as Nancy mentioned, in particular, there has been more focus, certainly in the public domain, on the military strategy. And that tends to always get to the lion's share of attention. There's a fixation with the troop numbers issue. And so you sometimes would think that the strategy boils down to how many troops are we going to have in Afghanistan. And yet all those working on the situation, I think, do recognize there isn't a military solution alone to the issues in Afghanistan. There has to be a broader strategy that addresses more of a political and diplomatic components to how to address the issues in Afghanistan that we face. And so today, the discussion is really to try to focus on that particular piece, which, again, many people, both in and outside the administration, are working on and are writing on. But I think it often does not get nearly as much attention as the security piece. So in particular, for example, the regional strategy, what to do about the region. And in particular, the issues around Pakistan. Second one is the domestic politics. I mean, again, we can come up with a strategy. But ultimately, there's an Afghan government involved. There's opposition to the government. There's ethnic tensions growing. We're entering the electoral season in Afghanistan with parliamentary and presidential elections scheduled over the next two years. What impact will those electoral politics have on a US strategy? And for example, how to move a reform agenda forward. So I think there's that dimension. And then, of course, the one about how to deal with the Taliban. And I think, again, there's been lots of lip service again paid to the need for some kind of politically negotiated settlement. But how to go about doing it. Is it realistic? What are the steps that need to do? And how can that feature more prominently in US strategy? So again, that's really what we're here today to discuss. Again, we have a very distinguished panel here to do so. We're going to start off with Ambassador Doug Lute, who's currently a senior fellow at Harvard University's Belfer Center. But prior to that, again, was at the US permanent representative to NATO from 2013 to 2017. From 2007 to 2013, he served at the National Security Council for both the Bush and Obama administrations as a senior advisor to the president, first on Iraq and Afghanistan, and then on Pakistan and Afghanistan. Ambassador Lute also has a long and distinguished 35-year career in the military, where he retired in 2010 as a lieutenant general. So welcome. After Doug, we'll move on to Laurel Miller, who is a senior foreign policy expert at the RAND Corporation. But from 2013 until 2016 was the principal deputy special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the State Department. And then until about three weeks ago was the acting special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the State Department. From 2009 to 2013, before entering government then, she was at the RAND Corporation. Before then was probably the most important position in her career when she was a senior expert here at US Institute of Peace. And then prior to that, she also had many years of experience working in government in different positions as well as at RAND, including as a senior advisor to the US special envoy for the Balkans, a senior advisor to the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, and director for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the National Security Council. Then third speaker or panelist today will be Barney Rubin, a senior fellow and associate director at NYU Center for International Cooperation, where he directs the Afghanistan and Pakistan program. From April 2009 until 2013, Barney was the senior advisor to the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the Department of State. As before that, Barney was also at CIC, but he also in 2001 was an advisor to the special representative of the Secretary General in terms of the bond peace accord negotiations. And subsequently, it was an advisor to the Inama Office in Kabul on a range of issues, including the finalization of developing the Afghan Constitution in 2003 and 2004. And again, a highlight of his career, no doubt though, was his time as a Randolph Jennings fellow here at USIP in the 1990s. And last but not least is Colonel Chris Kalanda, president and CEO of Kalanda Strategic Leadership. From 2009 to 2014, Chris served as a senior advisor on Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Department of Defense senior leadership. Chris graduated from the US United States Military Academy and had a long and distinguished career in the military, which included four tours of duty in Afghanistan. Chris just returned to the US from the UK a couple days ago, where he just completed his PhD. King's College, looking at issues around war termination. So very pertinent today's topic. And so again, welcome to Dr. Kalanda. So, and with that, I think I'll turn over to you, Doug. Well, thanks to Andrew Nancy and the USIP team for assembling us today. I gotta tell you, sitting on the panel here, it's a little bit like attending your 50th high school reunion, okay? So much of what you're gonna hear here today, I think, will be familiar to the old Afghan-Pakistan hands who are in the room. But there's this sort of eerie sense of, you know, we just keep getting older. The problems don't actually go away. Let me start by agreeing with Andrew's premise that for too long, and maybe just too easily, we focused on the wrong thing as observers of American policy. We focused on troops. We focused on the military campaign. We've been fixated on this, like it's the shiny object, the hypnotist, shiny object. I remember the 2009 review, the big debate in the situation room weeks on end was the options between 10,000 more troops, 40,000 more troops, or 80,000 more troops, okay? Well, you know, the problem is that's not really fundamentally going to change the situation. So I'd like to offer this morning or this afternoon, sorry, coffee, a three-part framework on what we should be focused on. And it all has to do with the politics that drive the security situation. So in my view, it's the underlying political setting that we've got to address. So I think that if we, if the administration decides as apparently it has to increase modestly on the margin number of troops, that's not gonna do much of anything with regard to either the security stalemate, right? Or more importantly, it will do almost nothing to contend with the three political stalemates that actually drive the security situation. So let me describe three stalemates that I think are the root cause here, not the symptom, the security situation, but the root cause. And then my fellow panelists may wanna expand on this three-part framework. So the first stalemate is the political stalemate, the domestic political stalemate in Kabul. And here you'll appreciate that the national union government was a bit of a quick fix in 2014 just to get a passable outcome from the 2014 elections and keep this project glued together. But what it has matured into, despite a lot of great efforts to include folks on this panel, but also by Afghan leaders themselves, right? It has turned into sort of a zero-sum winner-take-all, still corruption-based approach, which has been too little, too slow on reform measures, and it basically has produced a political stalemate. That in turn tends to fuel the Taliban insurgency. I think that this political stalemate in Kabul should really be a focus of our attention because there are three key benchmark events that we're gonna face. I mean, we understand they intend to hold parliamentary elections next year. The year after that, 2019, we're into another round of presidential elections, and the year after that, we're into the end of the current tranche of international support. So both international support for the Afghan national security forces expire in 2020. And likewise, the Brussels commitments for civilian support, economic assistance also expire in 2020. So if we have the status quo we have today through 18, 19, and 20, I think we're really gonna be in trouble in terms of trying to promote, trying to break this stalemate and demonstrate to ourselves, if no one else, that we can actually move forward politically. Second political stalemate has to do with the region. And to mention this, I know others are gonna dive into this in more detail. Let me just offer that. I don't think my look at the region, and here you can just take out the map. Look north, southeast, and west, right? You don't have one cooperative neighbor in this project regionally. Now you might ask, well, why is it? Are they just being obstinate? Are they just defying the United States? No, I actually have another explanation. And it is because, in my view, the United States actually has prioritized our national interests, and north, south, east, and west, we have higher national interests, higher priority national interests than we have in Afghanistan. So I'll just cite one example of that, and then if you want, we can probe this in questions. Look at Pakistan. I would argue that our national interests in Pakistan have to do with the remnants of al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups with transnational reach, and I don't mean by transnational across the Durand line, transnational that can reach us. And for years, that was the dominant vital national interest. I think the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons surpasses Afghanistan as a vital national interest, and I'd argue that the tensions between India-Pakistan and the potential that that conflict could spark a nuclear exchange also exceeds our vital national, any national interest in Afghanistan. So my argument here is, this is actually quite logical, that vital national interests north, south, east, and west think about vital national interests with Russia today. Afghanistan is pretty low on that two list. How about national interests, vital national interests with Iran to the west? Afghanistan is not even on the, we're not even talking to Iran about Afghanistan. So I think the cold sort of steely-eyed assessment of national interests help explain why we have a regional stalemate with regard to Afghanistan. And it is functionally, it's the dominance of more important vital national interests in every direction. And then the third stalemate, just to complete the three-part framework, is the stalemate that has to do with getting, with at least the image of getting the Afghan government to talk to the Afghan Taliban about settling this deal, settling this. And there have been sort of half-starts. For a long time, I believe, we didn't prioritize this adequately. You can make a case, I think, and the serious histories of this haven't been written, but that during the point of our maximum leverage on the ground, we didn't make maximum effort to try to use that leverage to move into talks. We haven't always had a unified view here in Washington about the importance of talking to the Taliban and seeking a political settlement. That impeded us for, frankly, years. We wasted some of our best years talking to ourselves within one mile of this building about the value of talking to the Taliban. But we also sometimes have not had a willing, capable Afghan partner. We've always been attracted in the notion this had to be Afghan on Afghan, right? It's for it to have durability. I still think that's the case. But unless we break this stalemate, what you see today, plus or minus three or 4,000 troops, is what we're gonna see at the end of this administration for eight years from now. And I don't think we're gonna dramatically move the needle if we continue to focus on troop numbers and the security situation, which are fundamentally symptoms of the root causes, which I think are best framed by way of this three-part framework. It's not a solution. So let me stop there, and hopefully that gives a little bit of a frame on which we can move our way down the panel. So Laurel, thank you. Thanks. I think that's an excellent framing of the issues. Andrew asked me to focus in particular on the regional dimension and the issue of trying to bolster a regional consensus in support of stability in Afghanistan. Afghanistan has the largely unenviable reality of being surrounded by neighbors, near neighbors who are capable of influencing events in the country, either constructively or destructively in accordance with their own interests. The United States recognized at the outset of our engagement in Afghanistan that it was necessary to try to collaborate with this group of states, and Barney can speak to that personally, the efforts at Bonn and in the aftermath to try to work together with countries like Russia, Pakistan, Iran, and later China, as well as India in order to forge some kind of regional arrangement for engaging with those countries and for collectively supporting stability in Afghanistan. We saw over the subsequent years for a variety of reasons that I won't get into a fraying of that consensus. Some of it had to do with broader set of geopolitical issues, but to a considerable extent it had to do with how these countries saw the political and security situation within Afghanistan. It had to do with their skepticism about the Afghan government's durability and their skepticism about the ability of the Afghan government and the ability of the United States to improve the security situation sufficiently through military means with the result of stabilizing the country. Over the four years that I was at the State Department in the SRAP office in a variety of capacities, we worked assiduously to try to bolster that regional collaboration, regional consensus through our diplomatic efforts, so I would say it was one of the main lines of effort within the SRAP office during that time and I would expect it to continue to be a focus of efforts going forward. But it's a task that is constantly up against a number of obstacles to include the ones that Doug noted about other US interests related to these countries and how those interests affect our opportunities and lack of opportunities to interact with these countries about Afghanistan. What is it that the countries of the region, a rather disparate group of actors with disparate set of interests actually agree on what is the basis for there to be some form of consensus about Afghanistan? Essentially, it is concerned about the risk of a security vacuum in Afghanistan that would create space for groups or perhaps even other states to interfere in ways threatening to their interests. That doesn't mean that they see the particular nature of the risks in the same way or the nature of the threats in the same way. They may emphasize different risks and they may have different interpretations of it but essentially it's a concern about a security vacuum. Now, because as I noted, these countries do not see as realistic a means of addressing this risk being the military effort in which the United States has been engaged with the Afghan government, they, with the exception of India, I would say, have all expressed and acted in ways which suggests that they do in fact believe that there needs to be a peace process in Afghanistan, that there needs to be a negotiated settlement, political settlement of the conflict there. The effort to try to launch a peace process, the interest in there being a negotiated settlement is central to any form of consensus that still exists or that might be further built up over time. The reason for that is not sort of altruistic interest in peace being a nice thing. It's because they see that there is a prospect through a peace process for them to have their interests advanced through whatever the terms of the final process would be. As a result of that, they all want to have some share of a role in both in participating in the peace process and in shaping what the final outcomes are. Moreover, I would say all of these countries, again, probably with the exception of India, see a peace process and a negotiated settlement as a means of getting US bases out of their backyards. All of these countries have acknowledged privately but largely publicly as well the temporary necessity of having American troops in Afghanistan but that doesn't mean that countries like China, Russia, Iran want to see US bases in Afghanistan on a permanent basis. Now those motivations of the countries of the region make a peace process complicated for the United States given American interests in the region. It means that there will be different views from our own on what the terms of a final settlement should be and what the format of a process should be. And it also means that the US interests in how it might ultimately withdraw militarily from Afghanistan under what conditions with what protections might bump up against the interests of others in the region. But the interests of all these countries basically in having a negotiated solution of the conflict is an opportunity for a more durable outcome that does serve American interests. These countries by geographical reality are going to be in the region forever. Whether they like it or not, they're going to be neighbors and near neighbors of Afghanistan. And as a result, if there is an outcome in which they believe they have a stake because their interests are sufficiently satisfied, then there's a greater prospect of them supporting that outcome. If in addition, having a negotiated settlement that is supported by these countries is advantageous to American interests because it would obviate the rationale for these countries to include Pakistan from spoiling American efforts in Afghanistan and acting in ways that are contrary to US interests or make it difficult for us to achieve our objectives in the country. And these countries all have capabilities in varying ways to varying degrees of spoiling American efforts in Afghanistan. So in my view, there is no way ultimately to hold together a regional consensus, much less to further build up a regional consensus in support of stability in Afghanistan without having an American policy that is attractive to these countries that draws them in. We're not going to succeed in achieving alignment of these countries' views and policies with American views and policies simply through rhetorical pressure and simply through, I would say, persisting with the kind of policies that we have currently. We're only going to succeed in drawing them in if there's a policy that prioritizes a peaceful negotiated settlement of the conflict in a much more serious way than we've done today. Thanks, Laurel, Barney. Oh, thank you. It's very moving to me to see how many people are still interested in what we have to say or perhaps you, like us, have nothing better to do. Thank you. Thank you. Andrew asked me to say a few words about the internal political situation in Afghanistan, which I will do, but I want to put it in a slightly broader context, which is I think even this term, which I have used liberally over the years and was told by Richard Holbrook not to use because it was much too sensitive, political settlement or solution, may lead us to have objectives that are far beyond our capabilities. And having objectives far beyond your capabilities are quite dangerous. When we think of stabilizing Afghanistan, frankly, that is an objective that is far beyond our capabilities. And I'll come back to that in a bit. So I think our objective should be to get sufficient consensus in the region and among Afghans so that Afghanistan doesn't escalate into an armed conflict that becomes a regional threat and requires so much global attention. It's not very well defined, but it's somewhere in that area. Now, domestic politics. The national unity government was one of a whole series of attempts to settle the big issue in Afghan politics that has emerged since the overthrow of the monarchy and the demise of the communist regime, which is basically the national identity of Afghanistan. What is Afghanistan? Who are Afghans? And historically, the state of Afghanistan developed out of the rulership of the state of Afghanistan, developed out of Pashtun empires. That's what the name of the country means. Afghanistan originally meant Pashtun. Now it means citizen of Afghanistan. And many Pashtuns, including Pashtuns in Pakistan, think of Afghanistan as their country. It doesn't mean they want an apartheid system or expel everyone else, but they think of it as their country. Now, the other people in Afghanistan, including some Pashtuns for that matter, think of it now as a country within its boundaries, whose future should be politically determined by the people living within its boundaries, or the citizens living within its boundaries, and now whoever they may be. Now, let me just mention some of the reasons why these two visions are not compatible and why there are problems and how they lead directly to the type of electoral disputes that we have seen in 2009 and 2004, too. One is, many Afghans do not consider the boundaries of the country to be legitimate. And that has become, it actually has become a much more open issue because it was the landline drawn by the British and so on. And they consider at least the people in the tribal agencies as Afghans. So in a way, sometimes they say, the king's grandson once said to me in a meeting in NATO, we can only accept the Duran line through a lawyer, Jerga, of all the Afghans. So I turned to the senior civilian representative and said, I hope you understand that when he says all the Afghans, he means all the Afghans on both sides of the Duran line. Okay, so it's unlikely that Pakistan would accept such a meeting. Then in the course of the last almost 40 years of war, of course there have been many, many millions of refugees and also economic migrants. For various reasons in particular, the where those wars have been fought and where they are being fought now, those migrants and refugees have been disproportionately Pashtun. So there are a disproportionately number of Pashtuns, former Afghans in some sense, living outside the country. Second, even within the country, now, there are many areas of Afghanistan to which the state does not have access, for instance, for holding elections and so on. Therefore, and most of those areas are also predominantly Pashtun areas. So if you hold a national election within the boundaries of Afghanistan with the Afghans who are currently in Afghanistan and who are reachable by the government, a lot of people, a lot of Pashtuns who think they should be included, will not be included. In addition, nobody knows how many people those are because there has never been a census. And there are wildly different estimates of the numbers of people belonging to different ethnic groups in Afghanistan, which are not based on real data. So therefore, people find it very, any election outcome, international election, some people find incredible. They don't believe it can possibly be true. So that's one issue. So this was an attempt, the coalition government is an attempt to paper that over because no one could agree what majority outcome would be. Now, what's the conclusion from that? I'm not gonna suggest how to solve that problem. I don't know if you've noticed, but we're still fighting the Civil War. People are still fighting over the Confederate flag and the state's race and race. So I don't think a foreign country can help us solve those things. And I don't think that we're gonna be able to help Afghanistan solve those things either. We can try to de-escalate them. Then this will be my last point. Our policy today, there's such a thing as path dependence. Our policy today has evolved from our policy from the beginning. And this has advertised as a commentary on the current strategy. We're unable to comment on it because it hasn't come out yet. But we've all been involved in conversations about it. And we have all remarked how similar those conversations are to the ones that we had at the beginning of the Obama administration. And I'm sure Doug can go back even further and tell us how similar they are to conversations that were held in the Bush administration. You were on the ground fighting at that time so you weren't involved in these conversations. It was late. Yeah. So, but the problem is not the same. The country is not the same. And the region is not the same. Okay. First of all, at that time there was a big consensus actually among most of the countries in the region except Pakistan about what the terrorist threat was. Now there is no such consensus. And there's another threat. And a lot of the words about that other threat, it's one that we don't see because it doesn't threaten us. That threat is us. We are the largest military power in the world. And we are establishing bases in Afghanistan on the Asian mainland. Surround where there's Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, India. We believe we're doing it for innocent, virtuous purposes to fight terrorism. But you know, we've said that Iran is the leading state sponsor of terror. So perhaps overthrowing the government in Iran would count as counter-terrorism. You know, maybe having an intervention inside Pakistan to seize control of their nuclear weapons so terrorists don't get a hold of them would count as counter-terrorism. And so that's how people in the region, very serious people, see our presence there. And they want us out. They don't want us out immediately and unconditionally. But in their view, the purpose of, one of the purposes of a political settlement is not just to bring the Taliban into a more stable political arrangement. But by doing so to create the conditions under which the United States will withdraw its troops. And what they see right now is our military leadership speaking about establishing a long-term counter-terrorism platform in Afghanistan, which means permanent basis as far as they're concerned. And counter-terrorism is a very flexible term, and can be used for a majority of purposes. So we have not been clear, of course we don't want to pull our troops out now, no one wants us to actually. I think even the Taliban, if you ask them now. But we haven't made it clear whether what's our priority, stabilizing the region or keeping our troops there for counter-terrorism purposes. And for that, we have to think what is really effective in counter-terrorism is an ongoing constant civil war, or not civil war, an ongoing constant war in Afghanistan with our counter-terrorism presence. Less of a threat than a more stable Afghanistan without our troops that might be a flawed partner in counter-terrorism, because now Russia, Iran, so on are looking to the Taliban as a potential counter-terrorism partner against ISIS. Finally, economy. China, India are growing. There's huge investment in infrastructure in the region. Afghanistan for its economic development, which is absolutely necessary if it's ever gonna secure itself, because right now it cannot pay for a state, including an army. Needs Iran, especially if it is going to try to have a degree of independence from Pakistan. There's a great danger, this is what Doug was saying, that whatever Afghanistan-centric policies we choose, supposedly for the stabilization of Afghanistan, will be undermined by our higher priority policies toward all the other countries in the region. But we're not taking that into account when we think about our policies toward the other countries in the region. Thanks, Sanctuary, thanks, Barney, and Doug and Laurel. Did you know that according to some estimates, the United States spends $25 billion per year in its commitment to Afghanistan? Did you know that with $25 billion, the United States could pay in the U.S. 50,000 teacher salaries for 10 years? Did you know that with $25 billion, the United States could repair over 50,000 miles of our dilapidated roads? And did you know that with $25 billion, the United States could feed 3.4 million Americans three meals a day for a year? Now imagine if you could, on the one hand, bring the war in Afghanistan to a successful conclusion, a successful conclusion that respected the service and sacrifices of Americans and Afghans alike, and they were able to use all of that funding or at least a substantial portion of that funding to deal with some of those issues that have been chronic problems in America. And interestingly enough, you can actually have both. And it's not easy to get there, but it actually is possible to bring the war in Afghanistan to a successful conclusion. And that's what Andrew has asked me to talk a bit about today. And so I'm gonna build on the comments from Doug Laurel and Barney to discuss where the idea of a peace process fits strategically. What are some of the real challenges to moving that process forward? And then what a peace process that creates an outcome that respects the service and sacrifice of Americans and Afghans alike might look like broad brush. So in terms of strategic considerations, there are four ways that wars end. You can win a decisive victory. You can have a negotiated outcome. You can have a decisive loss. Or if you're an intervening power, you can transition the war from your leadership to the leadership of the host nation. Unfortunately, the United States has no organized way of thinking about war termination, but each of those strategies, presuming you don't want, your aim is not decisive loss, but one of the three more positive alternatives, the strategies for getting there actually look quite different. And so part of the challenge for policymakers is to determine not which outcome of the three favorable ones is most desirable. We all know which one is the most desirable. That would be the Taliban defeated and life in the region living happily ever after. But what is the most realistic outcome? What's the most feasible? And so there's been some interesting longitudinal studies about insurgencies and counterinsurgencies that RAND and other think tanks and studies have done. And since the Second World War, an insurgency that has had external sanctuary and internal support has been successful every single time. Now it doesn't necessarily mean it's overthrown the government, but it's achieved more in a negotiation for instance than maybe it's given up. A host nation government that has been unable to win the battle of legitimacy in insurgent controlled and contested areas has lost every single time. Now it doesn't necessarily mean it's overthrown if it's a negotiated outcome. They have maybe gotten a bit less than the insurgency. The conflict in Afghanistan has both problems. You've got an insurgency with external sanctuary and considerable support inside of Afghanistan. Right now the Taliban control roughly 20% of the country according to DOD estimates and contests 20% more. That's potentially 6 million Afghans who have voted with their support to the insurgency. By the same token, you've got a host nation government that over the years has become a organized and predatory kleptocracy. And thus has been unable to win the battle of legitimacy in these Taliban controlled and contested areas. The Afghan government has been at the very top of the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index and a variety of other indices for many, many years. And the current president of Afghanistan, I mean just to illustrate the scale of the challenge in dealing with a kleptocracy, the current president of Afghanistan is the gentleman who co-authored the book Fixing Failed States. And even Ashraf Ghani, for some of the reasons that both Barney and Laurel and Doug mentioned has been unable to dismantle this system that has been damaging the legitimacy of the government and prolonging war. So we've got both problems, an insurgency with durable internal and external support and a host nation government that is having real problems winning the battle of legitimacy and insurging controlled and contested areas. So unless you can reverse those trends and there's no evidence that we are able to do so or that those trends are going to be reversed anytime soon, you've pretty much ruled out decisive victory and you've ruled out transition as viable strategic priorities, as viable war termination outcomes. So you're left with a negotiated outcome as your most viable approach to achieving your aims and for in our case, it's to prevent the presence of a large scale terrorist safe haven capable of 9-11 style attacks against the United States. So there are some real challenges to moving a negotiation process forward. So let me describe briefly some international challenges and then briefly some of the internal challenges and I'll only be scratching the surface of the challenge. So on internationally, you've got the Afghanistan, Pakistan, India issue where Pakistan allows the Taliban to operate from their territory and believes that a stable Afghanistan is going to team up with India to dismantle the Pakistani state. And whether we believe that perception or not or whether we ascribe much credibility to that perception, that is the belief of the Pakistan National Security Establishment and they're gonna continue to operate on that assumption. India understands this as well and is using their relationship with Afghanistan to advance their interest vis-a-vis Pakistan. Iran and Saudi Arabia both view Pakistan through the lens of their own rivalry and the same way with Russia with respect to NATO. They view Afghanistan in terms of, Russia views Afghanistan in terms of an opportunity to undermine the credibility of the United States and the credibility of NATO. So you've got all of these challenges internationally that are advancing the conflict and undermining the prospects of a successful outcome. Internally, you've got a Taliban that is fragmented and divided, quite frankly. And the election of Haibatullah as the mirror of the Taliban suggests this fragmentation. Now, this doesn't mean that elements of the Taliban are likely to break off, which has been a longstanding aspiration of the United States. The Taliban's strength of identity to being Taliban is significant and such that it gives them political cohesion, even though they are fragmented or there's disagreements in terms of the direction that they ought to take for the war. And part of the challenge of this fragmentation or these disagreements within the Taliban senior leadership is that the way the Taliban makes decisions is like the UN Security Council makes decisions. They operate by consensus. So expecting the Taliban one day to be fighting and the next day to sue for peace is completely unrealistic. They are gonna have these internal frictions and tensions and debates until eventually one side of that discussion prevails over the other. Likewise with the Afghan government, for all the reasons that Barney and Laurel and Doug have laid out, you've got a government that's divided against itself and has not agreed on a way forward to bring the war to a successful conclusion. So essentially you've got a bit of a prisoner's dilemma where everybody agrees that peace would be a good thing but nobody is willing to take any risk to bring it about. So that's where I think the United States comes in. And as in order to move a peace process forward has got to have a clear strategy and an intention to bring about a favorable outcome through negotiations. So a traditional way of looking at a peace process is a light switch. One day we're fighting and the next day we're not. And this view of a peace process as a light switch has really limited our thinking. We got to instead look at it as a real stat. Where eventually the lights are gonna go from very bright to very dim. And that's kind of how a peace process is going to evolve. In terms of what a peace process might look like, this is a conflict on three dimensions and an international dimension, a national dimension and a local dimension. And so a peace process has got to include these three elements, international, national and local. And then it ought to take place over the course of three steps. So three levels, three steps. The first step is dialogue and confidence building measures that result in the Afghan government and the Taliban. So I'll just describe this on a national level. Dialogue and confidence building measures that result in the Afghan government and Taliban recognizing one another as legitimate negotiating partners. That then leads to step two, which are negotiations for a reduction in military activities until you get a ceasefire and eventually end to organize conflict. And then third, step three would be negotiations towards a political outcome. And the United States with a intentional strategy to bring these about can in fact, or has the potential to bring this war to a successful conclusion at the minimum cost of blood, treasure and time and in a way that respects the service and sacrifice of Americans and Afghans alike. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm gonna have a quick question for each of you and then also feel free in your answers to elaborate if you wanna touch on some of the points some of the others made. And then after that we'll go to the audience for some questions. But Doug, first of all, thanks very much again for outlining the three stalemates. The question there I'd have is on the regional one in particular, I think you were very clearly articulated in terms of we have greater interest in some of the neighboring countries than maybe we do in Afghanistan. But I guess my question is, is that because we've actually been in Afghanistan and lowered the threat in Afghanistan, for example, in terms of transnational terrorist groups there because of our presence. And so actually if we left, would Afghanistan rise in terms of the threat level and potentially become one of our biggest threats in the region? So again, is it the presence that has actually reduced the threat which is why our interests in some of the neighboring countries have risen? Laurel, I guess for me the question is the importance of the region, but how do what kind of strategic communications strategy would we need to actually convince them that this is indeed our strategy that peace is a priority for the US in the region as opposed to say RCT objectives. Because again, a lot of the focus as we've already discussed is on troop numbers and our military presence. And I don't think we've had coherence within the USG in terms of what exactly are our key priorities there. So if we were to try to rebuild a strategic consensus for stability in Afghanistan, I absolutely agree it's going to depend on convincing them actually our plan A is to bring reduced violence levels through some kind of political settlement in Afghanistan. Plan B might still be that actually if we fail in that we have to remain engaged to make sure the state doesn't collapse which could then really threaten the region as well. But how do we convince them that plan A is indeed our top priority? Barney, not specific to your presentation now but I know you just got back from Russia. I would suspect that some of your discussions there had something to do with Afghanistan and I know you've also long been involved in the US-China dialogues on Afghanistan and I was wondering if you could, we haven't really mentioned China and I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more in terms of the China-Russia angle here. And then Chris, you touched on it in terms of I think the domestic challenges but say we have a successful strategic communication that commits the region, we want peace and they're going to become more consensus in terms of that piece. Perhaps we, through our strategy, get the Taliban to agree that we want to sit down and have negotiations. In some ways I'm wondering if the biggest challenge might not be actually the other Afghan political actors and political elites, many of whom benefit from the status quo. And we've seen the difficulty of a power sharing agreement that we tried to broker just between, in terms of Ghani and Abdullah and the constituencies they represent, presumably bringing the Taliban into the equation, more power would need to be shared and again, the winners and losers and that, and so building domestic consensus, aside from the Taliban, how do you see that being done? So my homework assignment is has our presence actually decreased the threat and in relative terms made more important the US interests on the periphery in the neighborhood. I'd argue that, yeah, I think that's right, but this is longstanding. I mean, this happened within weeks of the intervention. I mean, there hasn't been al-Qaeda in any significant numbers in Afghanistan largely since Torbora, right now. Okay, for those who really study this, there's this guy, Farouk al-Qahtani, he lived in the mountains somewhere. When we were at our peak, 100,000 Americans, we couldn't find this guy, okay? And then I think he fell off the mountain or something, something happened to him, I don't know, in a dark night and now he's gone too, okay? All right, well, great. But did he really present a transnational threat for those seven years when he lived in Afghanistan and we couldn't find him and he was a card-carrying member of al-Qahtani? I'd say no, okay? And if that's the bar, I mean, every last al-Qahtani member, well, there's probably 30 or 40 other countries around the world. In fact, I'd argue today, Yemen and maybe Somalia present more meaningful safe havens for transnational terrorists and probably a number of other states like Syria, potentially Iraq, Libya, and so forth. So, I mean, I think that's kind of the low bar. I don't, I no longer buy, look, I was inspired by 9-11-2, right? But I no longer buy the notion that we should invest 25 billion, by the way, at the peak, it was 120 billion a year, okay? To diminish the potential of transnational terrorist safe haven. That's an unpayable bill because it applies to so many different places. So, yeah, we've substantially reduced the threat, but that happened within weeks of the intervention. Just to add one little point to what Doug just said, my own personal view of one of the, shall we say, gaps in the policy review is that it should have started with a very clear-eyed threat analysis that was completely abstracted from the level of resources that we currently have in Afghanistan. And you should, and the question as to what is the nature of the threat and what are the resources needed and actions needed to address that threat should have been approached from a, at least intellectually, from a blank slate, not overvaluing the sunk costs or overvaluing what we can do with the assets that we have there. And that's not something we've done. Or if I may add, conflating the Taliban with transnational terrorists. One of the things that took the fall of 2009 review, so many weeks, believe me, it was a long time, was the inside the situation when we came to the realization that these are not one and the same. That the Taliban are not transnational terrorists and the Taliban and the al-Qaeda are not the same thing. And in fact, even all the way back then in 2009, there were pretty clear signals that the Taliban was distancing itself from al-Qaeda because al-Qaeda brought unwanted attention. So this kind of clear-eyed, let's be honest with ourselves in terms of the threat is really important. I think too many Americans today probably conflate the Taliban and al-Qaeda. So I'll answer your question. No, I agree. Strategic communications towards the region. One of the things that's challenging about that is that some of the steps that the U.S. government needs to take and other governments interested in trying to advance a peace process have to be done quietly. You can't and shouldn't talk about everything that you're doing and that is therefore an inhibitor to persuading others as to how seriously you're taking it. That said, I don't think that's the real reason that they're not convinced. It's just a factor you have to consider. I think the way that you demonstrate the seriousness of purposes, first of all, the level of communications. I mean, yes, is it well-known that the State Department is working on trying to launch a peace process and it's an element of policy? Sure, is it, was it known in the last administration that that was an element generally speaking of the whole of government policy? Yes, that's different than having the president speak very affirmatively and clearly about advancing a peace process being a core element of U.S. policy. It's different than having senior military leaders and Secretary of Defense talking about it as well. I'm not saying it never passes their lips and of course it's not there. It's not the senior military leaders and Secretary of Defense's job to do the diplomatic work but there are ways through these very high-level communications and public statements to make it clear what's the focus of your policy and what isn't. Another step is just the diplomatic vigor that you apply to the task. That doesn't mean that people like Rick and I and others and Barney in the past weren't doing our best to work vigorously but to really have a strong U.S. government effort that's putting all the necessary resources to it is something that has not always been there. And that leads to the third element which is constancy. There has been a flow of our efforts on peace process and I would agree with the point that someone made either here or earlier about not putting the maximum effort into this at the time that we had the maximum resources and maximum leverage. There has always been a tendency to think well first we have to turn the corner on the battlefield then we'll get to reconciliation then we'll get to a peace process when we have the upper hand. Well if we didn't get the upper hand with 140,000 NATO troops in the country we're not going to get the upper hand any better now. Moreover this is an effort that's going to take a long period of time regardless of how assiduously you're working towards it. So to try to judge when is the right moment to turn up or down the dial on peace process efforts suggests that we have ability to sense the right moments to a degree that I don't think will ever have that kind of fine tuned ability. And then finally one practical step is I do believe that the U.S. should support the appointment of an international mediator to help build and maintain momentum in a peace process and if this administration were willing to do that that would be a signal of seriousness. That's a complicated endeavor and you have to choose the right moment but in particular it would signal the willingness of the United States to to some extent subject itself to being mediated. And that's a tough thing to do and obviously the U.S. government would have strong views about who said mediator should be however it would be I think a signal that would be valued by the region. And then finally I think it would be important while respecting the extent to which of course an Afghan peace settlement must be Afghan owned because Afghans are going to have to implement it. If the United States showed itself willing to encourage our Afghan partners in the right direction in a consistent way that would be a signal of seriousness to others in the region in particular to the Pakistanis and the Chinese. Actually I would like to say a few words about the threat assessment too because it actually is relevant to how the regional countries are perceiving Afghanistan. And let me just elaborate a little more. 9-11 was not planned in Afghanistan. 9-11 was planned in Kuala Lumpur and Hamburg and the flight training was done in Florida. The problem with Afghanistan was that we could not arrest, capture or impose punishment on the leader of the organization that did that because he was protected in Afghanistan. That was the problem. So the problem is not having 50 Al-Qaeda people in Noristan maybe that's a solution, not a problem if they're stuck up in Noristan. So we may be miscategorizing the problem and the other countries in the region think now, they see that what we are doing is totally disproportionate to the actual threat that we are facing, that we claim to be facing. And then they assign other weapons. So then they think we must be doing it for some other reason. And that reason is to take away Pakistan's nuclear weapons to support I actually heard this in Moscow and I didn't hear it from the editor of a weird website. I heard it from a person within a very establishment institution that the United States is trying to support ISIS in North Afghanistan in order to put, we started doing that after the Russians sent troops to Syria in order to put pressure on Central Asia and then on Russia. Iran of course is always suspicious that we're putting troops in Afghanistan in order to use them against them. And they asked if you're concerned about Taliban and Al-Qaeda, why are you putting your troops on our border? That's not where they're coming from. Of course, we removed them from their border now actually, but I don't know where we might put them in the future. So the fact, so I think if we could, and we have not had, and it's in the absence of this, of real communication, which I mean real, real honest communication is kind of a ridiculous thing to expect among national security establishments, but let's say a slightly better degree of communication and understanding than we have had thus far. And it's in that vacuum of such communication that conspiracy theories flourish. Now, Russia and China, Russia is at the moment, I would say more of a problem, but doesn't have to be necessarily, but China is one of the most hopeful and helpful things that is changing in the region and that we can hopefully leverage into something positive for a settlement. The problem with Russia doesn't arise from our opposing interest in Afghanistan, except in that we have an interest in having troops in Afghanistan, or we think so, and the Russians have an interest in not having troops in Afghanistan. But as far as the future of Afghanistan, not much conflict there. But the bilateral relationship is such, and I'm even being in Washington, I even hesitate to discuss it, it's so complicated, but that it's almost impossible to have a conversation, there's a great deal of mistrust, and so on. So they, in addition to, they have, they don't believe that the national unity government will survive or that this government will survive. So they have succeeded in opening up talks with the Taliban, the Taliban reached out to them. By the way, for many years, when I was in the government working on trying to set up the framework for a political settlement, the Russians were very strong opponents of it, but they have now, on the grounds that the Taliban are not different from Al-Qaeda, they have concluded the opposite now, that the Taliban have changed and are not the Global Jihadist Organization. In my view, they weren't a Global Jihadist Organization either, but the main thing is there's a new threat, the new threat is ISIS. And ISIS is very clearly a competitor of the Taliban, you see, Al-Qaeda was not and is not a competitor of the Taliban, because Al-Qaeda supports the Taliban. That's what the ties between Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are. Al-Qaeda supports the Taliban in their fight and in return, they get some space in which to operate. But the Taliban doesn't support Al-Qaeda's international operations, but ISIS wants to incorporate Afghanistan into its now hopefully non-existent caliphate. So when they have their own Amir, or they did until he was perhaps killed two days ago. So the Taliban have been fighting ISIS just as US and Afghan government have. So it's, as for China, you know, the really major project of Xi Jinping is the Belt and Road Initiative, which is designed to continue, which is, it's not really, it is a foreign policy initiative, but it's motivated by the internal security and economic development of China. China has to open to the West, open its center in order to continue its rate of growth, incorporate, it's China's own periphery. And to do that, you know, there's been estimated that there's a $10 trillion infrastructure deficit in continental Asia. And the Chinese are starting to address that. They're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars, which is still, you know, not what is, you know, commit to $10 trillion, it's not that much, but it's a major investment across Central Asia, down through Pakistan, around the Indian Ocean. And for that, they believe they need peace and security in the region. Unfortunately for us, they have a much longer timeline for planning on when this peace and security needs to arrive than we do. But it means that they are actively interested in talking to us about how they can help in settling the conflict in Afghanistan, how they can help with Pakistan. They don't want to put pressure on Pakistan because they have very close relations with Pakistan, but they are willing to try to work with Pakistan so that it's comfortable changing and so on. Again, not on the timeframe that, you know, we like and not in the way that we like, but nonetheless, it's a very important, decisive change in the region. However, it comes along with something else. Recently, I just, I published an article, which I had this table about showing the GDP of the countries in the region, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and of the United States. In 2001, when we intervened in 2015, the last year for which data is available. In 2001, the economy of the United States was over four times as large as all those other economies combined. In 2015, the United States economy is 20% larger than all those economies combined. So it means there is a massive change in relative power and we have to adjust to it, which is a part of the reason that, and it's not because of Obama and if it continues, it's not gonna be because of Trump. It's a long-term global trend. And we cannot continue, people talk about Afghanistan being another Germany, Japan, Taiwan, well, not only is Afghanistan not Germany, Japan, or Taiwan, but also it's no longer 1952. Everybody wants to sell stock when it's at its highest. The problem is you never know when your stock is at its peak, except in hindsight. And this has been one of the challenges in thinking about a peace process. And Laurel brought this up where we've had this impression that we can sort of dial things up to a certain point at which the Afghan Taliban will capitulate or what have you. And I use the RIO stat analogy, not as the United States sort of smartly playing with the dial, we don't have the ability to do that from Washington DC, we don't have the bandwidth, we don't have the smarts. But as a way to describe a movement from war to peace as a gradual process rather than a deal. A deal is like a light switch, a process is like a RIO stat. And how do you build consensus for this? Well, if you talk about a peace deal and your first conversation about peace is what does a power sharing arrangement look like, then it's a poison pill. I mean, the scar tissue in this conflict is profound. Afghans have been fighting this conflict for nearly 40 years. And there have been devastating actions by a lot of actors against a lot of other actors. I mean, we think 9-11 resonates with us, and it certainly does, but what Afghans have gone through is very different. And so to think that we can somehow magically force everybody into a deal, I think is delusional to the point of criminal negligence. So in terms of how do you get all sides of this conflict that have so much scar tissue on board is part of the logic of this three-step process. And you've got to start small. So in the dialogue and confidence building phase, it could be, well, let's figure out what we can agree with. Can all sides agree that Afghanistan ought to be a sovereign country? All right, maybe that's a starting point. Can we agree to coordinate polio vaccines? You know, Afghanistan is one of the three countries in the world that still has polio. And I would be willing to bet that both sides, the Afghan government and Taliban, could figure out a way to coordinate polio vaccines. I bet they could figure out a whole variety of these very small steps that begin to build confidence in one another as legitimate negotiating partners. And then you can get into reduction in military hostilities. And then finally, at the end, when you've gone through those first two steps, which are gonna take a really long time, can you begin talking about, okay, how do we live together? How do we deal with the 40-some-odd years by that point of war? So I think you've got to start very small. In building consensus both in Afghanistan, but internationally as well and built from there. Thank you. I'm gonna open it up for questions. We're running a little short on time, so I ask everyone keep their questions short. And with your permission, we're gonna actually go for about 10 minutes over to give a little more time for discussion. So I think with that, open it up. There's a question in the very back. I don't know if you're making that closer. I can't, I don't know if you're making that closer. Any other mic? It's being webcast, if you can also please just identify yourselves and people around you. Actually, I'm taught both of you at NPR, and everyone's been talking for years about the no military solutions here, though. Okay. Well, if I'm to tell you, why would I negotiate now? I'm on the line. What do you need to tell the line? I'm moving it to the north and the east. Why would I negotiate? Number two is, you say there's no real threat to the United States, your national security threat. The U.S. and the U.S. have to say two plus years, that's 45,000 billion dollars a year. Now we're talking about the U.S. Would it be better for the U.S. just to leave and focus everyone's mind on negotiations? Not only will it be a bit of a handstand for the neighbors as well. Take a couple more questions and come back to the panel. Gentleman in the back. Oh, thank you. Hopefully it works. Yes, hello. So my name is Ahmad Mojibi. I'm from Afghanistan. I worked there with the U.S. forces translator for almost 11 years. I met Ms. Lara Miller at the Center for Strategic and Status at November 2015. You talked about 9,800 more soldiers in Afghanistan. So in regard to his question and what we're seeing now, Afghanistan is in rise of insurgency and violence. I would say every day it's getting worse and worse the recent attack. 150 people got killed. So a very clear question would be if we leave Afghanistan, if you were saying we leave Afghanistan, then what's going to happen? We started a war. Thousands of people are dying there. We did not have a counterinsurgency policy to fight these terrorist groups. So ISIS is now growing a northern port of Afghanistan and we have the Taliban all over the country. So if one port say that, hey, we have to pull over, it's a waste of time. Soldiers are dying. Money is waste. And the other team says, no, we have to just stay there and fight more and fight more. So then we have a crap government with the crap leaders. How are you going to bring peace? It's been since Ashraf Ghani became a president with Dr. Abdullah. Can you come to the question? Because we're running short on time. So the question is very specific. So all we talked about and we heard about and having different strategies. So asking from all the scholars, what would be one solution? Should we stay or should we move out? Should we support the local governments or should we have a better counterinsurgency policy? Thank you. Don Ritter, the Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce been involved for quite a few years in Afghanistan. I heard the term consistency. And given the fact that, as has been mentioned, the Taliban are gaining upper hand gradually. And given the fact that we've announced withdrawal dates while we were announcing surges, why in the world would the Taliban want to negotiate anything but near surrender? Given the fact that they think we're leaving. And so I would ask the panel, don't we need a policy that says, we're not going anywhere anytime soon. And otherwise, negotiation appears to be tantamount to surrender. So let me take initial stab at the theme here is why would they talk, right? Well, I can imagine in such circumstances if we were in a negotiation with the Taliban where they would accept that they will not achieve all of their objectives on the battlefield. I don't, I imagine that they don't believe they're gonna take over the major population centers. It's one thing to control, you know, Musakala in Northern Helmand. It's another thing to take Kandahar city or Harat and so forth. So I think there's, the conversation would have to be, what do you think you can accomplish on the battlefield? It's not gonna look like 1991, 92. If you can't achieve it all, do you imagine that you can achieve part of your objectives in a negotiated settlement? And that will hinge on how much we're willing to be flexible in terms of our absolute conditions. But some sort of power sharing arrangement is kind of the conventional approach here. So how much are they, what do they imagine they can achieve? What are they willing to accept? And then finally, I think a major variable here that would cause them to talk is if they felt at risk in Pakistan, if the Kwedeshura, if the Peshawar Shura, if the Khakani network felt insecure in their current safe havens in the Pakistan border regions, that could dramatically change their calculus. So there are some, those are sort of the variables that I would play with if I were working on this. I agree with those and I'll add to it to put part of what Doug said in a different way. While we have, I think, demonstrated the reality or experienced the reality of not being able to achieve a military victory, we have also demonstrated that we have the ability and the will to prevent the Afghan government's defeat. And I think it's likely that whatever the specifics of the outcome are of the ongoing policy review that it will be, there will be some continuation of a demonstration of our ability and intent to prevent the Afghan government's defeat. And so if the Taliban believe that they're not going to achieve victory anytime soon, that motivates them at least to test the proposition that they could achieve sufficiently their objectives through a negotiated settlement. I mean, the point of a process, and I agree with Chris's comments about, peace process, emphasis on the process, is that through that process, all sides continue to probe and test the proposition that they can achieve a sufficient compromise that sufficiently satisfies their interests and objectives. You don't go into it knowing whether you're going to be able to do that or not. You have to test it. And during the course of a peace process, positions change. They evolve in accordance with the interaction of the parties and how their interests match up or not. Another reason why the Taliban would be motivated to talk and I think is under the right conditions and circumstances actually motivated to talk is because of their interest in legitimacy. They, their theology of their political theology here is that they are the legitimate government of Afghanistan. The United States illegitimately removed them and installed a puppet regime. And so you see through their policies because they have policies and policy statements and through the way that they, through their political representatives interact with the wider world that they have a drive to demonstrate their legitimacy and to seek legitimacy. And at least the more politically minded, and I mean it's all relative, but at least the more politically minded of the Taliban I think appreciate the fact that they're not going, that a military victory even if they were able to achieve it is not going to be a route towards political legitimacy, international legitimacy, but a negotiated solution could be. Moreover, they have made clear in some public statements and semi-public forums that they're not looking to have the United States and the international community absent from Afghanistan. They don't want the American military there. They would welcome American financial support, civilian support, development assistance. There's a recognition again among at least the more politically minded representatives of the group that Afghanistan is a needy state and will continue to be a needy state and that if they were to have a share of power, they'd like to have a share of an ongoing concern. And finally, I think you can't, I mean I don't believe in trying to read into the minds of other people in general much less the Taliban, which is not exactly the most transparent organization, but I don't think it's right to exclude the possibility that there are Taliban who like presumably many Afghans would prefer not war to war. And so if there's an opportunity to achieve some fashion of not war that is not surrender because they're not gonna negotiate surrender, but is a compromise that sufficiently satisfies their interests, then it would be, as I said, wrong in my view to assume that they are some entirely exotic species that somehow is going to, somehow prefers war to not war indefinitely. First, often they get asked questions like why should the Taliban negotiate? Well, you know, it's based on a falsehood of misconception that Taliban have negotiated. In fact, there are people that you are looking at right now who have negotiated with the Taliban. Now, we didn't reach a final agreement, but and now when I started in April 2009 in the last administration to try to set out the framework for a possible negotiation, I had exactly the same question. You know what I did? I asked the Taliban. I was talking to someone and I said, look, you're winning. People say to me, you're winning. Why do you want to negotiate? Well, it turns out they have a completely different conception of what the war is from ours. They don't, they say, they do not say that they, what they say their objectives are not the objectives we attribute to them. We say they're winning because they've taken over some districts in Helmand. Maybe we think that because we've repeated the phrase, the strategic district of Musaqallah so many times that we really believe Musaqallah is strategic. But it's not. They tried, they organized for a year with everything they could to take Kanduz, a medium sized city. They took it for a few days and then they lost it. How are they gonna take Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad, Mazar Sharif and Herat? They can't and they know that they can't, okay? So they have a path to being more successful. They have a path to gaining. They may have a path even to making us lose but they have no path to victory. And there's nobody in the region that wants to Taliban to control Afghanistan, including the Pakistan military, okay? They want to use them for certain purposes. They don't want them to control Afghanistan. So what they say is we wouldn't negotiate before because we were too weak, right? Because, going back to what Laurel said, they're human beings just like we are. We want to negotiate from a position of strength. That's what Chris was talking about. They want to negotiate from a position of strength. They don't want to negotiate when they're weak. If we tell them we're staying there forever and we're never leaving, they'll say the hell you will and they will fight us forever. Okay, by the way, no matter what we tell anybody in Afghanistan, nobody in Afghanistan is going to believe that we will be there longer than Afghans. And regarding giving deadlines, if we tell Afghans we're gonna stay forever, they don't believe us. And when we told them we're leaving, they didn't believe us either. So this whole business about giving deadlines, not giving deadlines, yeah, yeah. And we did indeed, by the way. 2015, Obama was still president when we didn't leave. So basically, they want to negotiate because they want a better outcome than what they have now. Now what are their demands? Well, we'll have to see what we actually get into demands. But I'll tell you what, it's extremely clear what is their main demand. Their main demand is withdrawal of all foreign troops from Afghanistan. It's not the, and what they say in Islamic system, they don't say reviving the Islamic everywhere, but the withdrawal of all foreign troops. And that demand is one that they share with Iran, Russia, China, and Pakistan. And therefore, now we cannot go in and say, we cannot go into negotiations and say we're just gonna withdraw now because we're not saying we have no national interest in Afghanistan. We're saying that we do not have to stay there and solve all the political problems of Afghanistan in order to prevent the formation of a safe haven that will attack the homeland. There's a danger of that in Afghanistan, as Doug said. There's a danger of that in a couple dozen other countries now, but if we're the government in Afghanistan to collapse because we stopped paying for it and so on, that would create huge problems beyond maybe tariff of safe havens, but other problems too. It's not in our national interest. It's not in the interest of anybody in the region for us to do that. So therefore, we have to try to negotiate, not just with the Taliban, but with creating an understanding with other countries in the region about what are the conditions about under which it would be in our mutual interest for our troops to withdraw and the region to be more stabilized. Now, right now, they believe, and I'm not sure that they are wrong, that that is not our objective. They believe our objective is to stay there. President Karzai believed that. Most people in the region believe that, that our objective is to be in Afghanistan for other purposes. And we have to at least start building confidence that in fact we really are there for the reasons we say if we are going to make progress towards some kind of stabilization. At the risk of feeding the dead horse. Tom, you're exactly right. Up to this point, the Taliban have had no reason to negotiate and end to the conflict. They've had reasons to negotiate our withdrawal. They've had reasons to negotiate with us and others to build their political legitimacy, but as long as they believe that their leverage is going to be greater next year than it is this year, they're going to continue to fight. So imagine the conflict in Afghanistan as a teetering stalemate. So imagine a teeter totter, right? And this is a teeter totter that's only got so much play in it. And right now the teeter totter is about 60% in favor of the Afghan government and 40% in favor of the Afghan Taliban. And this teeter totter is only going to move so much. So at some point the Taliban is going to hit a high watermark and won't be able to make any further gains. So ideally, you know, that's at at least where we are now or maybe slightly in more in favor of the Afghan government. So maybe it's they control 65% the Afghan government controls 65% or 70%. But at some point the Taliban hits a high watermark and calculates that I've gotten about as much as I'm going to get. And I now have greater incentive to negotiate an end to the conflict. But bear in mind that the Taliban operates like the UN Security Council. So it's going to take them a long time to come to this conclusion. The Afghan government's the same way. It's going to take them a long time to come to this conclusion. And so the reason part of the reason why process is so important and I'll echo Lauren's point is that all sides of this conflict have to believe that there is a viable alternative to fighting. And so you've actually got to begin building this process and going through this basic dialogue and confidence building measures now. So when the parties get to this point where they say, I'm unlikely to gain further and I'm unlikely to lose much further, they've got something that they can then move forward on in terms of a peace process. These are complicated issues requiring complicated answers. So we are really running out of time but we're going to take three very quick questions and then we'll conclude starting with Chris and work our way down with one minute answers to all of them in the very back. There's three of you in the back, we'll take the one. That's bogus, okay. The woman in the middle. Actually. You want to do it? I think you said it last. Yeah, there we are. Go ahead, no, no, go ahead. I'll have it. Just ladies first and we'll keep it short please. All right, first of all, thank you so much everyone. Second, my name is Habiba and I heard all of your discussion and it's very intriguing and thank you so much for actually talking about some of the Afghan issues on the Afghan side but earlier, Robin, you actually, sorry, Brandon, you actually spoke about the GDP of the United States. Actually in the same chart, if you look at the GDP of Pakistan, it also folded two, three times more and most of that money that Pakistan achieved was from war on terror. Earlier, a few years ago, 70% of Khebar Pakhtunkhwa, the money that flow there was from war on terror and we all came to consensus and everybody agreed that Pakistan for the durable militancy, military that is in Afghanistan, it's all because of Pakistan. So why not stop actually helping Pakistan, ending the military aid that United States has been giving for Pakistan and that's my first question. I'm sorry, only one question. The gentleman right behind you has been very patient. All right, thank you everyone. This is Mirza Fazal from Afghanistan. I got a quick question and question goes directly to Mr. Robin. I think, first of all, I think the US is very good at writing the policies but very weak to implement that. And for example, the peace process in Afghanistan never had any great achievements in the last years and as we all know that and the question is like about like the Pakhtunkhwa or questions over other side of the border in Afghanistan, they have never said that they are coming to Afghanistan and they never feel that they are in Afghans. They have said that and nobody have sent any referendum or something and to clarify that like who they want to stay with because those are, that line is I think the biggest line, the biggest problem, which is like all the terrorists and other activities are coming from that side to the Afghanistan and trying to do anything. Another thing is like, a US is like keep like funding Pakistan. And instead of like funding Pakistan, just borrow that money and do not give it to Pakistan and then there will be a lot of good peace in the world. Last but not least, the woman here. Yes, thank you. I've been serving in Afghanistan since 2003 and remember Dr. Rubin for our time in Yunama. Thank you so much for all of your great comments. The question, the two mantras that keep coming up are increasing the level of confidence from the Afghan side because we've changed policies and changed strategies from we're here to oust the Taliban, we're now we're here for the women, now we're here for the war on terror, now we're here for the war on drugs and now we're here because of corruption. I've seen that, I returned just six months ago. So I've seen all of these Afghans don't believe us as we well know about staying or leaving or why we're there, as you aptly pointed out. Question is, so why are we, why do we believe now that we can engage and bridge build the confidence? And if we are not the credible players, why are we speaking alone and not talking to our NATO Atlantic players about re-engaging? That has been a topic largely absent from the comments made today. Thank you. Let's start with Chris, if you want to both try to answer some of the questions and any other concluding remarks and I'll generously, you can have a couple of minutes to do so. Thanks Andrew. In terms of getting a peace process, a dignified peace process that respects the service and sacrifices of Afghans and Americans alike, I do believe that, and I agree with Laurel that an international peace facilitator is the right thing to do. And that can be a country, that can be an organization, but it needs to be a facilitator, a third party facilitator that's got credibility with a variety of different actors and is able to begin to construct this process. In terms of this idea of negotiating from a position of strength, look, the United States has been a bit like the poker player who keeps throwing away winning hands in hopes of getting better cards. So we began with like a straight flush and we threw that away and hopefully we would get a royal flush and the madness needs to stop. So if you're negotiating from a position which you control 60% of the country and your opposition controls 40% or 30% or 20%, you're negotiating from a position of strength. And so as we think through this peace process and we think through how to bring this war to a successful conclusion, we're just, you've got to start with the realities and part of the reality is you're not going to have it all. And, you know, but what we can do is support a dignified peace process that achieves our aims and respects the service and sacrifices of Americans and Afghans alike. First of all, the United States has not given Pakistan anywhere near the amount of money that people think and that's not what accounted for growth of Pakistan's economy during that time. Second, the United States has not given aid to Pakistan in order to try to bribe it into not supporting the Taliban. The United States provides this aid to Pakistan as part of a deal that President Bush made with President Musharraf in order to get access to the territory, military bases and airspace of Pakistan in order to put our military into Afghanistan because Afghanistan is landlocked and Pakistan is a sovereign country. The United States cannot just go move its military anywhere in the world in any country that it wants without an agreement and in return for nothing. If it does, that's called an invasion. So that was part of the deal. If we, and there's always the danger, as in fact happened in 2011 and 2012, that if we break part of that deal, they'll break their part of the deal. And then we won't have land transit through Pakistan and transit through Pakistan airspace in order to get to Afghanistan. Do we use Iran? Do we go through Russia? Do we try to go through Turkmenistan, the KSPNC, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkey? So there's a very real reason for all those things other than being in favor of Pakistan. Afghanistan is landlocked and that has all kinds of nefarious consequences that cannot be changed by anybody's policy. As I said in an article I published yesterday, no matter how powerful President Trump makes the United States, he will not win the war on geography. A couple of points on Pakistan. Neither of which are defense by any means of Pakistan's role in contributing to the perpetuation of the conflict in Afghanistan, but I think are just a reflection of some basic realities. We could cut off, the United States could cut off 100% of its financial assistance to Pakistan and it would not change Pakistan's perception of its own national security interests in its own region. It simply won't happen. It is not, the degree of our influence that is brought through those financial resources is not sufficient to achieve that outcome. The second point on the Durand line, it's fair to point to the Durand line as one of the root sources of issues in the region, but that's a problem we're simply not going to solve. I'm going to go back to the good point that Barney made at the outset, that if you have objectives that exceed your capabilities, you're going to be in trouble, or you're not going to achieve your objectives. So the- And you end up bugging out. Yeah, out of frustration. So the task is to find solutions to the problems that relate to the Durand line that avoid resolving the fundamental problem rather than tackling the fundamental problem head on. I mean, it wouldn't be nice to be able to do that. I just don't see it as realistic. And so to the extent possible, and it's easier said than done, there have to be solutions found and implemented that make that, for the time being, irresolvable problem less consequential. So I'll close with addressing this comment about policy making and policy doing, policy implementing. I think you're right that the short history of American foreign policy is we spend a lot of attention and bandwidth on policy making, then we just assume somehow it's going to happen, because we graced the bureaucracy with the policy. That's not what happens, okay? And most of the downfalls and the shortcomings in American policy have to do with the implementation phase. So I'm with you on that. What would it take, by way of implementation, to do what we've talked about now for more than an hour, okay? It would take a major shift in American foreign policy. I mean, think of the international players we've just addressed. I mean, this would have to become a top two or three priority for this administration. Where is the bandwidth that this administration being consumed right now? It's not on Afghanistan. So we're all waiting for the policy, as though, you know, waiting for Godot. This is gonna be great when it arrives, right? The real truth will be told when it arrives and we see what resources are put to this. We've talked all about the political plan to win the peace, what's happening to the State Department and one block from here, okay? So where are these diplomats and where is the high powered team and when are we gonna assemble it and what kind of White House attention, what kind of West Wing attention is this problem gonna get? Let me give you one quick vignette. When George Bush decided that Iraq was going down and we were gonna lose in Iraq and he committed every resource in the US government to turning the tide. This is the famous surge 2007 and so forth, right? He started by setting this example. Every Monday morning at nine o'clock in the morning, the war cabinet assembled. We reviewed the policy on Iraq and at 10 o'clock, others left and he had a one hour VTC with the Prime Minister of Iraq. That's how he started every single week and it's that kind of West Wing attention to the implementation phase that makes a difference. If we get a policy and then we turn it back over to this, okay, to implement, we're gonna get exactly what we should expect, which is none of the sort of heavy lifting that we've described today. So I'm 100% with you. We need to focus on implementation. Much for coming today as an institution dedicated to the proposition that peace is possible but also essential to national as well as global security. It's very encouraging to see a room full of people, as Barney said, still interested in the cause of peace in Afghanistan. So thank you all and please join me in thanking our panelists today. See you at the 60th reunion. I just wrote to my dear friend.