joining us this morning as well as the panel have this conversation i've read all three of your works on many subjects very very knowledgeable people on a very important subject for all of us right now the path forward in afghanistan and also in pakistan and that whole region this committee has a particular interest in the special operations command and its role in counterterrorism but of course we are also members of the full armed services committee and interested in the broader picture as well although we certainly look forward to hearing your testimony on all those subjects on the best path forward the dominant two issues for me are number one this is a critically important part of the region we've heard some people talk about afghanistan and say well if our concern is al qaeda they moved to pakistan or it is in forty five or fifty different countries what what makes this one special well in my view this one is extraordinarily special the relationship between the taliban qaeda is unique this is the place where al qaeda is strongest and most likely to launch attacks it is pretty much the one place in the globe that we cannot can we cannot afford to turn a blind eye to if we are truly concerned about dealing with al qaeda and i know a number of you have greater knowledge about that relationship than i look forward to hearing about that but just to drive home the point that we cannot comfort ourselves by saying that well you know there are in a lot of different places there more or less in pakistan do we really have to worry about it and in my view yes we do but i would for the having that discussion and then the second difficult part about it is having to worry about it puts us in a very very difficult place in the central focus of that challenge i think is finding a reliable partner in afghanistan finding a government a tribal structure a parental structure somebody some group of people who we can work with to offer the afghan people a viable alternative to the taliban we are in reasonably good shape in that the afghan people know the taliban and they do not like them however they like some form of government they like some rule of law some structure to their society and if the body else can offer that the taliban fill that void so we are really struggling right now to find that afghan partner you are all familiar with the problems of corruption ineffectiveness within the government and now we have the challenge of illegitimate election i am very very pleased that made the decision to do the runoff to at least give them a chance to have a more legit legitimate election but the challenges there are great in trying to find a reliable partner so i look forward to the testimony introduce the witnesses now before turning over to our the ranking member on the mr miller and then introduce you again when you each speak we are joined by dr frederick kagan resident scholar at the american enterprise institute dr robert pape professor of political science at the university of chicago and rick ozzie nelson senior fellow international security program for the center for strategic and international studies look forward to all of your testimony i do have a full written statement  with which without objection i will submit for the record that we will turn it over to any comments that mr miller has thank you very much mr chairman thank you to the witnesses for being here today also mr chairman i would be remiss if i did not on behalf of the  columbus day weekend i can say that this hearing does come at a pivotal moment and we know that two months ago general mcchrystal provided the president with his segment of the situation in afghanistan and as we have all read the press he's doing the situation serious and while general mcchrystal acknowledges the very difficult task he faces in bringing security to afghanistan and its people he does not view the situation however as a lost cause i do have a statement that i want to go ahead and enter into the record thanks very much with that yes we'll go left or right as i look at it ironically and we'll start with dr kay and there are statements in our books for the members if they wish to look look through them as we go as  well thank you also thanks for introducing the left side of this of this debate since since i guess i'm vigorously supporting the president's stated strategy i suppose i am on the left side of this particular debate thank you very much for having me in front of this committee it's it's an honor as always and i'm very grateful for the attention that you're paying to this very important topic and i'm very pleased that we're having this level of  national debate now because i do think that whatever we do in afghanistan it's going to be a long process it's going to be a difficult process and it is very important that the american people understand very very clearly why we think we need to do it we're doing what we think we're doing why we think it's going to work and i think this entire discussion and exploration of alternatives helps that i am not going to read my didn't give you a written statement actually give you a bunch of various things to look at i have a sixty some odd slide deck which i'm going to run through actually i'm just going to make a few points and i just look forward to to engaging with you in question in questions which i think is probably the most useful thing to do look when we're talking about counter terrorism in this part of the world or anywhere we really have to ask ourselves the question what are we trying to do are we trying to prevent attacks against the united states is this a defensive mission exclusively and if so are we prepared to be in a defensive posture with occasional reactive sorties against these groups or are we trying to defeat these groups and if we're trying to defeat these groups what does that actually mean we're certainly not going to defeat their idiology in any short term and it is an idiology within islam it's a heretical ideology within islam that has roots in the in the years immediately following the death of the prophet muhammad goes back a long way it will always be there in some form to be used by someone and of course if you look at the history of the cold war did we defeat the communist ideology well we tarnished it very sadly by defeating it's reification in the world and that's something that is important to keep in mind al qaeda has embodied this particular vision of this heretical and its success or failure is tied to a considerable extent to the value that other extremists are likely to put on this particular ideology and so i think that we do need to understand that there is a broader issue here than simply preventing this particular bunch of thugs from attacking us there is also the question of trying to to make it clear that this idiology is a loser and it leads to defeat and it leads to calamity for the people who pursue it and it does not lead to success or anything positive because we want to deter future generations of extremists from using this particular particularly noxious idiology to justify what they're doing and in that context it's very important to understand that al qaeda does not define itself as a terrorist group al qaida defines itself as an insurgent group it is an insurgency within the muslim world its objective is to se power within the muslim world and then transform the muslim world in accord with its ideology and the reason why that's very important to understand is first of all that explains why wherever all qaeda goes wherever an al qaeda franchise goes it plants a flag it establishes the islamic emirate of wherever the heck and it declares itself the only legitimate sovereign government of the four kilometers of land that it probably controls at any given moment there were about five different capitals of the islamic republic islamic emirate of iraq some of them tiny little villages out in the middle of nowhere but it was by god the capital of the islamic or the emirate of iraq and they set up they tend to set up rather elaborate governance structures even if they're sort of in many cases fictitious so in iraq i was delighted to discover that al qaida in iraq had an emir administration i think if only we could get them to do their planning on powerpoint we would be a long way toward toward success in this effort but that kind of bureaucratization is not the sort of thing that you saw from terrorist groups that really see themselves as political superstructure that they intend to impose and the reason why that matters is because terrain actually matters to these guys where they plant the flag they intend to stay and if you take it away from them it is a blow to them and all of their rhetoric during and after the iraq surge demonstrated that they saw that as a defeat they did not just see it as an opera dowell that didn't work out will go somewhere else they saw that as a defeat they saw what the lebanese military did to a burgeoning al qaida cell within palestinian camps in lebanon as a defeat they saw the fact that the saudi government drove al qaeda in the arabian peninsula largely out of saudi arabia into yemen as a defeat and so it's not this is not a group that will with any joy pick up and leave from this particular area which makes this particular area important and it's one of the reasons why we capturing afghanistan is an important objective for these guys you raise the excellent question of how are these groups intertwined and i think that's that has also been blurred in the discussion somewhat there is no meaningful difference in the idiology that the t polytheism they all agree on the basics of how the muslim community should be ruled by the afghan taliban the quite a shortfall of on sees itself as the islamic emirate of afghanistan it's the franchise that will control that part of territory that tell you to be told the bonney pakistan sees itself as a franchise that will control pakistan but all of that is under the umbrella of an al qaida effort to reestablish the caliphate for the entire islamic world so there is not there is a differentiation in the sense of the taliban groups saying this is our front that's your front this is somebody else's front but there's not a differentiation in terms of the objective and i think it's very important to understand that as well because if you ask the question is the afghan taliban now plotting to attack the united states here the answer is no if you ask the question is there any basis to believe that over the long term if you allowed told a bomb to persist in afghanistan it would not develop in the direction of pursuing global jihad ism the answer is no there's no reason particularly to think that except that it hasn't had the opportunity to do that yet but it would be fully con to pursue that objective that teddy could tell the bunny pakistan has already indicated that it had the objective of attacking the united states but all the masood said that he would attack the white house now there's not a lot of teeth behind it but you do have a stated intention so when you're talking about defeating al qaida i don't believe that you can separate that from the problem of defeating its allies and its local proxies and that's how we get to counterinsurgency and that's why i think that the a counterterrorism strata she has to be embedded within a counterinsurgency strategy or at least has to be married to a counterinsurgency doesn't have to necessarily be subordinate to it because i don't think that we can succeed with a counterterrorism strategy that actually aims at what i think we need to aim at which is defeating these organizations without defeating the insurgent groups and i'd like to just make a couple of quick points and then i'll then i'll stop first of all there's a straw man argument that is sometimes put out that  some of us have been religiously converted to the ideology of counterinsurgency and wherever there is a conflict we see an insurgency and we want to use a counterinsurgency approach i certainly don't feel that way i know that general mcchrystal doesn't feel that way it's weird to make that comment about general mcchrystal this committee subcommittee probably knows general mcchrystal better than any collection of congressmen that there are this guy knows all about counterterrorism if he's coming to tell you that you need to do  that's not because he's drunk that particular kool aid we i just look at this and say look you have this alliance of groups with similar objectives we have to defeat them all the on our side of the border the ones we're facing are mcchrystal own report he says explains that after american and nato forces are major cause of the deteriorating situation because they have been viewed as foreign occupiers the ruby assessment does not say that i don't i don't believe that general mcchrystal anywhere says that he believes that american forces are seen as occupiers and in fact the assessment has prominently a quotation from the afghan defense minister who says afghans have never seen you as occupiers even though this has been the major focus of the enemy's propaganda campaign and i think it's an important point because i don't agree with the assertion that we are generating this problem by our presence in afghanistan and i don't believe i think that there's also a problem with the statistical correlation of rise in violence as resulting from increased troop presence in fact the increased troop presence has lagged behind the rise of violence generally for example in f y two thousand and five there were about nine hundred thousand u s soldiers in afghanistan in f y two thousand and seven there were about twenty three thousand seven hundred u s soldiers in afghanistan pretty constant by the way a tiny footprint if that's an occupation then one soldier is an occupation with to within one hundred thousand american troops in a country of thirty some million people one and a half times the size of iraq virtually no afghan ever sees an american soldier so what you're talking about is enemy propaganda and i would submit to you that the minimum required number of american troops in order to be occupiers is one but in that period the number of suicide attacks is as bob points out went from nine to one hundred forty two was a response to the increase by four thousand five hundred american soldiers i don't think so that's not what that was about what was going on was that in the period between two thousand and two and two thousand and five the insurgent eliminated from power in two thousand to an afghan and in two thousand and afghanistan was reconstituting it was redeveloping its capability was reestablishing its networks within afghanistan it was reestablishing its leadership structure and preparing for an insurgency it began to launch that insurgency in two thousand and five which is why violence began to rise we very slowly and cautiously to slowly and cautiously in my view started to increase our forces in response to that naturally that created more military targets for the taliban to go after which is one of the reasons why d s went up in other words i dispute the causal relationship between the presence of u s forces and the increase in violence here this was an insurgency that had as its objective retaking afghanistan not because we were there but because they had been the government that's what they were trying to do and they would have done that whether we were there or not the question we have to decide is do we think it's ok if they do or do we think it's it's ok do we think that we can have a  terrorism strategy with a civil war that will ensue if we abandon the effort to establish counterinsurgency no civil war may ensue any way we can fail there is this is war there are no guarantees but i am as confident as i can be that if we adopt a remote approach to counterterrorism here not only will we have a failed told completely failed state in afghanistan with a lot of regional consequences that are very troubling but i also believe will fail in the counterterrorism mission thank you thank you chairman i'd like to bring up a slide presentation if i could yeah that's probably a good idea but i'm also not quite sure why our presentation isn't coming  up maybe somebody could use a computer or even what happened my apologies that was working just a moment ago mr chairman members of the committee i am honored to be here today employees to discuss general stanley mcchrystal is proposal to commit an additional forty thousand american troops to afghanistan general mcchrystal is recommendation reflects a growing consensus that our current force levels cannot win the war against the taliban and his proposal has been called an ambitious new course in truth however it is not new and not ambitious enough america will best serve its interests in afghanistan in the region by shifting to a new strategy offshore balancing which relies on air and naval power from a distance while also working with local security forces on the ground the reason becomes clear when one examines the rise of terrorist attacks in afghanistan in recent and general mcchrystal zone report explains that american and nato military forces themselves are a major cause of the deteriorating situation for two reasons first western forces have become increasingly viewed as foreign occupiers you see the quote on the screen from the report itself second western forces are viewed as supporting an illegitimate central government again directly from the report itself unfortunately these political facts ducktail strongly with military developments in the last few years in two thousand and one the united states toppled the taliban and kicked out the out of afghanistan with just a few thousand american troops and mainly with the combination of american air power and local ground forces from the northern alliance then for the next several years the united states and nato modestly increase their footprint to about twenty thousand mainly limiting the mission to guarding kabul up until this point two thousand and four there was little terrorism in afghanistan and little sense that things were deteriorating then the united states and nato began to systematically extend their military presence across afghanistan this is nato's own map of their plan to extend that presence the goals were to defeat the tiny insurgency that did exist at the time and to eradicate poppy crops western military forces were deployed in all major regions of afghanistan including the pashtoon areas in the south in the east in two thousand and six over these years western troop levels escalated incrementally from twenty thousand in two thousand and four to fifty thousand in two thousand and seven to nearly ninety thousand today general mcchrystal is requests for another forty thousand is simply the next step in this escalation as western occupation grew the use of the two worst forms of terrorism in afghanistan suicide attacks and i e d escalated in parallel let me focus on suicide terrorism the biggest killer and greatest threat to americans and the focus of my personal research efforts funded by detroit and the carnegie corporation in new york there were no as you can see from the slide no recorded suicide attacks in afghanistan before two thousand and one and only a small number in the immediate aftermath of america's conquest of the taliban but in two thousand and six suicide attacks rose ten times and have continued at that high level ever since these attacks have been concentrated against security targets that is american and western ground forces not afghan civilians and nearly all the suicide attackers have been asking in the picture is clear the more western troops have gone to afghanistan the more local residents have view themselves under foreign occupation and are using suicide and other terrorism to resist it i'll be glad by the way in q and a sir to respond to dr kagan specific challenges to this but if you would let me just continue with my prepared statement at the moment now will have plenty of time for that our central purpose in afghanistan is to prevent future nine eleven and this first and foremost requires stopping the rise of a new generation of anti american terrorists particularly suicide terrorists the super predators who can kill large numbers of people what motivates suicide terrorists is not the existence of a terrorist sanctuary but the presence of foreign forces on land they prize so it is little surprise that american troops on pashtoon homelands are producing anti american attackers second it would be helpful to prevent a safe haven for terrorists for them to use either as training or a safe areas for their leaders this is not as important as our main goal since the main training for the nine eleven hijackers occurred in american flight schools but this goal would help disrupt terrorist ability to organize and inspire any new recruits with impunity alas adding forty thousand new troops is unlikely to achieve either of our goals it would probably add to the sense of occupation while not preventing taliban areas from spreading the reason is clear when you compare general mcchrystal is request to the requirements for coin in general petraeus is calling manual betrayal of counterinsurgency manual has two requirements and the crystals recommendation fall short on both the first is the need for a legitimate central government around which to rally local support from the population in fact i'm quoting you directly from general petraeus is manual that this is actually the most important of our objectives and of course the widespread prior fraud by karzai in the august election raises a serious issue about whether our military forces are now engaged in supporting a legitimate and illegitimate government that does not have the consent of the people the second requirement is a wonder if if the ratio of troops to population for afghanistan's over thirteen million posh tunes in the south in the east this comes to two hundred sixty five thousand troops or one hundred seventy five thousand troops beyond our current level or one hundred thirty five thousand beyond general mcchrystal is requests hence adding forty thousand troops for coin would be a half measure that does not guarantee success by its own doctrine while increasing the sense of occupation that motivates suicide terrorists i think we need to consider other alternatives overall i believe our best strategy is offshore balancing relying on air naval and rapidly deployable ground forces combined with training and equipping local groups to oppose the taliban this strategy is what toppled the taliban when it controlled ninety percent of the country in two thousand and one is our best way to prevent the taliban from seizing kabul as stablish in significant terrorist camps in afghanistan and controlling large areas as safe havens for the taliban and for taliban and al qaida leaders it is also a strategy that will prevent the rise of a new generation of anti american suicide terrorists and so achieve our core interests in afghanistan we should transition to this strategy over the next two or three years by the end of president  first term and given the ethnic divisions in the country the first step is to use political and economic means to empower local pashtoon to achieve greater autonomy from all outsiders creating a third option between the taliban and western domination a similar strategy of empowering sunni groups in anbar reduce the anti american terrorism in iraq and is our best way forward in afghanistan mr chairman i would like to refer you to my written testimony which includes background slides for a strategy of local empowerment in the areas thank you thank you very much german smith ranking member miller distinguished members of the subcommittee thank you for the opportunity to discuss this important topic i come to you today is a recently retired navy officer who has spent most of his last the last decade focus on the challenges of combating global terrorism including assignments at the national counterterrorism center the national security council and april i returned from a tour of duty in afghanistan where i was director of a joint task force in support of operation enduring freedom the next few minutes i plan to is shrinking the militants there including al qaida have launched a spate of attacks in pakistan over the last weeks and descriptions of all kinds of crisis of leadership are tempered by revelations of a suspected geodes cell in new york here's what chairman of the joint chiefs of staff noted recently any al qaeda attack on the us is likely to emerge from the fatah on a more immediate level al qaeda operatives in northwest pakistan are believed to have teamed with other militant groups including the t t i still threatens regional stability in the middle east increasing concern are several cars associated groups in north africa southeast asia yemen and somalia the case of somalia like pakistan highlights originally a smaller focused insurgency into a terrorist organization with global reach including contacts in the united states this trend is illustrated by a recently uncovered plot to recruitment in minnesota based somali immigrants to fight with al planning explosive attacks in new york after receiving training at an al qaida cap in pakistan in two thousand and eight while these developments represent an excellent an expansion and a flattening of al qaeda global scope they should not be too taken to minimize the continued importance of the group senior leadership including the sa bin laden and ayman al zawahiri on a functional level these men remain active most likely in pakistan some are governed tribal areas on a larger more some symbolic level they drive al qaida genda by inspiring future jihad is by reminding everyone including us officials of their organizations resilience successfully combating al qaida ultimately require punishing the groups cult of personality by capture or killing senior leaders including bin laden and zawahiri what i've tried to do in this brief overview is a show that al qaeda despite certain a set backs remains global in scale and determined to attack the united states the epicenter of its power lies in pakistan sunlight governed tribal areas is important to appreciate how this fact relates to afghanistan we should recall that the u s invaded afghanistan to defeat al qaida but as foreign policy analyst why u s nato forces remain in afghanistan today and you're likely to see refer you have different responses to feeding the taleban stabilizing and rebuilding afghanistan and maintaining american credibility are just a few of several reasons given in addition to counterterrorism for our continued presence in the country these are all laudable goals but the white house must ensure that combating global terrorism generally and al qaeda specifically remains a strategic anchor in afghanistan framing american interests in this fashion will lead us to ask important questions of the v strategies now being debated i will conclude by posing just one question what f x would additional troops in afghanistan have on the stability of pakistan after september eleventh american troops and our allies essentially pushed extremist out of afghanistan and into pakistan which heightened terrorist activity in northwestern pakistan over the last year in particular we have seen a mix of al qaeda t t p l e j militants strike large pakistan cities and military facilities with increasing frequency meanwhile the fatah haven serves as a primary base for al qaida global terrorist agenda these developments are troubling not just because they endanger a nuclear armed regime but because the us is largely powerless to mission even more difficult indeed in meetings with general petraeus and senator kerry earlier this week pakistani prime minister use of the law he asked the u s and nato forces restrict militant infiltration from pakistan afghanistan into pakistan and the end any regional strategy which shores up afghanistan while destabilizing pakistan would detract from our goals of combating terrorism i'd be happy to labrinth on this and any other issue during our think you've hit upon one of the great challenges of any counterterrorism work out or insurgency effort is you know you have to defeat the terrorists who are not alienating the population in some places that's you know that's easier than others in the philippines we've had some success i think in that area because you know it was not it was not as violent and as out of control and we had a local partner that we can work with the one question i have off the top about your strategy of a sort of standoff approach i mean we're going to be creating just as many terrorists if not more or if we're bombing them from afar then if we happen to be in their village trying to fight them that way in fact that's one of the things that you know general mcchrystal is really focused on is this this standoff aerial campaign approach has vastly more civilian casualties in a million aids the population even to a greater extent so what are we truly accomplishing if we say we're going to you know cut in half the number of troops and just launch missiles at y sir i think your question is excellent and i'm not calling for sort of increasing numbers of drone attacks i'm not calling for what's just kind of replace ground troops with still more application of air power in fact i think that probably what we need to look at is actually even a reduction in our drone attacks let me explain this by showing you the kind of base that bin laden had in afghanistan in two thousand and one before nine eleven i think would be very helpful i'm not sure you may have seen this base before sir but this is what we call the terrorist camp notice how this is a base or this is like maxwell air force base where i taught for three years ok so when we talk about a terrorist training facility before nine eleven that al qaeda had in afghanistan we don't mean three buildings we don't mean one safe house for some suicide terrorist somewhere in that little daughter time here how we work and back to the question the question is that i believe that what we need to do is focus on preventing camps large camps not every safe house and so sir i think that if we are going to attack safe houses then we need to be much more judicious in attacking safe houses and specifically  need to ask the following risk reward question at the moment the way risk reward works when we go after safe houses as you probably know as we run it through jag and what we do is we say is the benefit of getting this terrorist worth the loss of x number of afghan civilians on the side the real risk reward ratio sir is different every time we go after a safe house what that's going to do is probably produce collateral damage which will produce suicide terrorism who will want to kill americans identify is there but the detriment is there as well there's the sort of there's no way no matter how you do it to sort of half fight them and fight them in a way that doesn't create some animosity so whether you do it stand off whether you're being careful about what you're bombing wherever you're at if you're accepting as part of the strategy that there are bad guys there that we need to try and take out in some way we're still kind of in that tension that you have but i want to when i ask dr kagan i mean the big question here and this is the challenge you know we don't have a local partner we certainly cannot put enough troops in there to do a counterinsurgency for you know the full population the thirty million population these are both true i mean part of the strategy is talked about now is going to try to secure pieces of the population within classic counterinsurgency doctrine we also have a major problem in terms of unity of effort we have so many people involved there not just militarily but in geos various development groups i mean th going past each other and wasting money an incredibly inefficient way i mean with those three great challenges how do we go forward and implement even a more limited more strategic counterinsurgency strategy well if this if this were easy you probably would be holding hearings about it and probably would be having this discussion it is hard i want to i want to make note of the fact that what the quote from f m three does twenty four actually is that the primary objective of counterinsurgency is to foster the development an effective and live legitimate government that is an output it's not an input you don't you it's not the case that you can't do counterinsurgency if the government is not legitimate if the government will give you i just do the record i want to be clear that i don't buy into this notion that unless you can like you know build minneapolis in afghanistan somehow you don't have an effective counterinsurgency strategy unless you can have an overwhelming force you can't possibly succeed i mean we saw that that wasn't true in iraq i think you can have a more limited realistic goal and still have an effective counterinsurgency strategy so this this idea that counterinsurgency is some big grand presto we instantaneously build you know the most modern sophisticated civilization ever is ridiculous so with you on that but from that there's a good deal of distance between that and where we're at in afghanistan and i'm trying to carve out what that relisted strategy is that roger that and you put your finger on one of the most glaring look  in the administration's approach to this problem general mcchrystal has put together in my biased opinion since i participated in it a very good assessment of the situation and a very good recommendation for a military plan that also goes pretty far toward recommending some of the key political changes that need to be made it says a heck of a lot more than forty thousand more troops and went right on to forty thousand more troops it's a sixty sixty some odd page report that gets into a lot of important detail the question is where's the political strategy where what i think you know something like that would look like i think we'll do that i don't want to i don't want to set the bad precedent here so we'll go to mr miller thank you and dr kay and i agree i think there there is a weak link  could you comment a little bit on on the statement that he made said basically only by sending more personnel military and civilian can president obama improve the afghan government's performance reverse the taliban's gains and prevent al  are at the moment that is if you take our military forces and put them down in a certain area neighborhood and they are able to pacify that area i have great respect for our troops the problem that we have  is that the coin doctrine would require two hundred and sixty five thousand american forces for this purpose and we just simply don't have the troops to do that and that's only for the south in the east and that would be if we abandoned all the rest of afghanistan so the problem we have sir is that if we're going to sort of go big then we have to be still more ambitious because this idea of the gradual drip by drip by drip that we've been going through for the last few years i'm afraid is actually producing more suicide terrorists than it's killing if i can if i can comment first of all i have to take exception with the coin math that's being laid out here it's not a requirement of one american soldier for every fifty of the popular and it's a quote it's a good sort of corpsman for one counterinsurgent for every fifty of the population and in counterinsurgents we include american soldiers we include the nato forces that are operating which are a significant number of troops and we also include any effective indigenous forces that are operating and in this case there are about one hundred thousand troops in the afghan national army and they are pretty darn effective the afghan national police i'm willing not to count because they're very corrupt and inefficient and so forth although elements of them operate that gets you up to about two hundred thousand right now if you add forty thousand american troops and get you up to two hundred forty thousand we're planning to bring on bringing afghan national army just army up two hundred thirty four thousand by next year that covers the gap so that the notion that this is not doable from the standpoint of the coin math i respectfully disagree with that but the key point in your question which i really think needs to be emphasized is that american troops and nato troops affect governance at the local level and they can affect governance at the national level too and we saw this very clearly in iraq american forces engage in counterinsurgency do not simply spend their time kicking down doors and pulling bad people out and shooting people they also spend their time being eyes and ears on the ground developing tremendous assets especially for local intelligence and in turn feeding that up the chain of command and in iraq the model that i would give you for the role that the military c developing governance is how we curb sectarian death squad activity supported by senior leaders within the iraqi government relying on intelligence that was developed by our soldiers on the ground and relying on those soldiers those officers on the ground brigade commanders the time commanders sometimes company commanders to address malign actors within their areas and then coordinate with senior leadership to address at the highest level i believe that that approach can be modified to address the fact that it's not sectarian death squads in afghanistan it's abuse of power and corruption and so forth to put then a fine put pressure on key malign actors to facilitate a governance program but the military is an essential component of that because without the military forces you don't have the access to the population that you need to understand what's going on in affected could you respond to the math yes or i think the best way is actually to do it in iraq in anbar because we had a similar situation you remember in iraq we had this huge problem this insurgent out of control problem right specially in anbar we also had this whole debate about where we building an iraqi army and so forth and was going to work and all that kind of stuff but let's just look right at anbar sir if you look at the chart about what actually changed in anbar between september zero six and september oh wait i'm sure you've seen charts that the attacks went down against americans that definitely happened and are definitely quieted down the question is why first american troops and the coalition did not actually increase their aggregate number of troops we did put more troops in iraq but as others were leaving we have centrally in the aggregate came down sac and if you look at the number of troops a specifically in anbar they only go up a teeny tiny amounts the real change and we would have needed one hundred thousand by coin doctoring the real change occurred in the sons of iraq that is they went from five thousand and september of zero six to one hundred thousand in september zero eight so sir yes the coin math probably does work and yes locals can backfill but we have to actually have real locals from the local area doing the heavy lifting that's what we did in anbar and that actually worked quite successfully and what my local empowerment strategy is calling for is to try to do the same thing to a large degree in the pashtun areas of east and southern afghanistan and let me also just add i was not against the idea of sending twenty thousand troops to baghdad in december two thousand and six  i supported the idea here of what became called the surge in baghdad because there you had sunni's killing shia shia killing sunni that's not what we have here in afghanistan we do not taji killing pashtuns we don't have pashtuns killing we don't have this big rivalry that way what we basically have is an idiot logical battle occurring among the  and for that is very similar to anbar and far as our best analogy not baghdad and this is what happened in what calmed down would be assuming that we instead of going with the kind of insurgency strategy to focus more on the counterterrorism strategy is the debate suggested what is the best and worst case scenario of that strategy and areas in the south and in the east i think my strategy is effectively calling for the containment of those areas and then the gradual shrinking of those areas over time through this local empowerment strategy but it may not work  i think that this the worst case though is that it stays the same and what i think is the best case is that as we shift to the offshore balancing strategy over the next two or three years you'll see the radical reduction in suicide attacks anti american suicide attacks that we're now seeing in iraq as we are building up the local militias in anbar province what that's done is it's allowing us to actually withdraw forces and we're not just withdrawing forces from the country notice how we're pulled them back from cities over the last year and a half we've had a radical difference in the military occupation of iraq and that's actually cause suicide attacks in iraq to go down almost eighty five percent obviously the best way to commit suicide attacks against u s troops is to pull the troops out there isn't any argument with that because then they're not there to be attacked the argument in the issue is what does that do to the taliban's ability to control greater amounts of territory  and not in essence be stopped that's the tension i would just add one other point which is that our presence there isn't only threatening it's not suicide attacks just against our troops we've just arrested an afghan national from colorado  with links to this area clearly motivated by or possibly allegedly motivated anyway by our presence there who was doing reconnaissance for attacks in the new york subway system so i would not think that what's happening is that the threat to americans of suicide of anti american suicide terrorism is limited to what's happening in afghanistan i'm afraid what we've seen time and again in defined as an occupation if you're going to call for making decisions based on the enemy's propaganda line then i think you're going to have a very difficult time coming up with any rational strategy i completely disagree with dr pape's analysis of what the worst case footprint significantly and move to a counterterrorism approach khandahar city would fall rapidly into told a bomb control they now control and effectively govern almost all of the areas around kandahar city helmand river valley would also fall back on to complete have the military capability to prevent this from happening we're still we have already begun to see the mobilization of the tajiks and uzbeks in response to the perception that the united states might be pulling out in abandoning them to this conflict and i believe that there is a very high probability that you would see a full scale civil war reemerge as either of those groups launched preemptive attacks to prevent a tall a bond takeover of the sort that occurred in the mid one nine hundred ninety s or the taliban launched such a to over time which is clearly it intent i don't see any force in afghanistan right now that would be capable of resisting the taliban's pressure or deterring the would be reemergence of the northern alliance in the redevelopment of a civil war and in that scenario it's impossible for me to imagine that the united states would be maintaining footprints within afghanistan from which to be conducting counterterrorism operations i think that's a positive as notion from a logistical standpoint from an image standpoint  and i think it's militarily infeasible so that's the worst case i also think that it's the most likely case we can describe a best case i suppose in which the northern alliance perhaps with our assistance crushes  the taliban crushes the south and then we somehow manage to support them over the years and maintaining a dictatorial rule over the pashtuns which will inflame pasta nationalism throughout the region but i can hardly call that a good scenario i do not believe that there is any good scenario that can emerge from the adoption of such a strategy to thank you dr paid back to your math again on the fifty one ratio in the coin strategy it's a fifty one fifty to one ratio but you make the argument talk about an bar doesn't say anywhere that i'm aware of that it's fifty to one u s or ice after troops make up that ratio it talks about police military u s troops i say have troops and you make the case in anbar province that it was the sunni awakening that's what raised the ratio of and that's to success and i think that's the same thing general mcchrystal is trying to accomplish in afghanistan but you keep coming back to it that it's faulty so i don't understand  is and when you put the numbers together you can achieve that if we've had people there to train up the afghan army the afghan police i don't think the real issue here is actually discrepancy over math per se i think that everybody recognises that we need local allies to help us in afghanistan that's what you're really hearing and so we should just go focus right on that issue this issue of trying to kind of hold things together you know bit by bit by bit with another half measure another half deployment of american forces is actually pushing off the day when we'll be able to truly engage the local population and that's really our our dilemma and the reasons we're not able to engage the local population today is not that we haven't tried we have sort of offered money and we've offered bribes but we've done it in a way where we're expecting the local population the pashtuns to basically become employees of the central government that is to fall under the broad rubric of the central governments or that's not what we did in anbar these are awakening is not being run by the shia and in fact if you remember sir in iraq the shia government was opposing the precisely because they were partners not employees so are really are you but how does that get with you totally about mistakes in mcchrystal talks a lot about those mistakes as well and how you need to change that but how does that get easier to flip those people if we start pulling out on moss i mean how do the i mean you're looking to flip a local taliban person he's like ok taliban's here and they're headed out i just it just doesn't make any sense yes sir  what is strengthening the taliban today is not their numbers because as you know probably better than i do the assessments by the experts are that there is somewhere between ten thousand and forty thousand taliban fighters in the country and of those the experts are kind of agreeing that ten thousand are the hardcore well that's the number so the taliban clearly aren't winning by numbers of hardcore fighters what they're winning by is support from the local population which they are getting from the resources number wind up opposition to america's military presence and our forces just simply being there and is to reverse engineer those three reasons for that local so what you left out in there is that the fear factor they're coming in and we were there once we left them the taliban can back in and started to kill people and so that's a reason why they're not trusting us to be there and now i think that's what general mcchrystal is reversing is following that the chairman has said how do you get them to trust us when you pull in and you pull out and you let the bad guys in and that is a pretty clear on your position  i don't agree with it but i would like to ask i read a recent article in strategic form that talked about the most significant problem in iraq and i'll turn to mr nelson for a response first of it to the unity of effort on our part we've got dozens of international organizations other countries in there how do we pull that together how do we make that unity of effort to not only with the dozens of countries but with our own military units over there and where do you see that  improving or how does it improve mr nelson i think that's a terrific question and i think that's one of the reasons why the civilian component of our policy over there is so important you know general mcchrystal strategy is the military  strategy and we talk about the military surge but we need a civilian surge as well those are the individuals that are going to help bring these different entities together information sharing among the nato partners remains of a serious issue obviously we have information the risk of sharing information because i think the benefits while weigh those actual risk so that's something that i think from a washington d c perspective that we can continue to do is push the folks back here to curtail some of those information sharing restrictions and i think one of the important things that i've seen him do is a point of general miller to take on five hundred or four hundred officers that are going to be committed to a three year period and i've asked the state department a number of are they doing the same kind of effort and they continue to say yes but i see no evidence of that and the fact that somebody here mentioned general mcchrystal assessment didn't include a bass or i can bury or bass or holbrooke so it seems to me there's still a huge problem as i said i think that we've we've yet to see the development of a coherent political strategy and i think that's a major failing on the state side i think we've seen in a mad scramble to try to recover from a crisis that we got ourselves into  through nonfeasance while the it was clear that we were headed toward a fraudulent election and i think what we've gotten to now is a position where we expended a tremendous amount of political capital not that does has not achieved our political objectives so i think that this is not an issue of interagency process this is not an issue of unity of effort this is an issue of priority within the department and the way that it's structured in the way that individuals are functioning simply failing to come up with what should be their purview if i if i could bigger indulgence briefly to comment on something that's been driving me crazy in this discussion which is the the characterization of the sons of iraq and on bar which i think is being completely mischaracterized frankly first of all there were not five million people in on bar this so the requirement for coin is not one hundred thousand second of all there were ten either ten or twenty thousand iraqi troops and police that were also in on board and were operating which is one of the reasons why we got up to the coin match that were third of all one of the parts key parts of the agreement that we made all of the initial sons of iraq sign was an agreement to recognize the legitimacy of the iraqi government and serve it and we always had the stated intention which has now been realized of having the iraqi government pay for the sons of iraq so it is indeed the shia who are now in control of that organization and they have continued to pay it and it has continued to work so it is not the case that this movement erupted spontaneously  without us getting to any kind of proper corn ratio nor is it the case that this was just our agreement with them and had nothing to do with iraqi government thank you very much thank you we have votes coming up here i may give mr bright the last set of questions if i may ask this is supposed to take probably you know once we leave about a half hour so hopefully we could be back by twelve fifteen twelve twenty or so did the witnesses have another twenty twenty five minutes at that point to take questions bright mr chairman thank you very much great to be here thank you for hosting this very valuable hearing and it's very obvious from the testimony today that there's not a clear clear clear cut plan or strategy for our efforts in i think thank the panel by the way for excellent testimony i know we have to run out of here shortly so i'll try to be brief i'm still kind of stumped on this issue of occupation dr pape that you spoke of having read the mcchrystal report and tried to understand what the general was asking the commander in chief one thing that sort of stuck out to me right from the get go was that the situation is deteriorating so the request initially for a troop increase would be followed by sort of this winning hearts and minds type philosophy of integrating with the afghanis population so that the intimidation and the  threats by the taliban to those local populations could could be minimized i know you didn't get into your your specific plan because of time and i tried to just skim through a very briefly but i'm a i kind of at a loss as to how you would go about integrating into the afghanis population aside from just money or paying them how do you give them the sense that i'm going to keep the taliban and their threats at bay i'm going to trust the americans and the and the coalition forces to provide the kind of intelligence or help to the americans and what we're trying to accomplish there without having this sense that you know there's security in my village i feel emboldened that i don't have to worry about these threats from the taliban how do you do that without having those guys on the ground in those villages first i think it's helpful to be clear when i said transition over two or three years i don't mean that we cut and run and pull all our forces out in year one when i mean is year one we do a serious local empowerment strategy that's why offer those slides year to that but how do you do that glad to do that sir let me just if i can come back when i'm just so you follow the logic of what i'm trying to do this shows you that what's happening right now is the more we've occupied we have to go through the villagers to try to get to the taliban and the problem is that the villagers are loyal to the tribe they're never going to be loyal to our western values at least not in short term and they're not all they're also not loyal to islamic fundamentalism but what we're doing is by trying to get to the taliban by going through the villagers we're pushing them together when my local empowerment strategy is trying to do is to pull back from the occupation and then grow the size of the village or bubble so that they can contain the taliban not  without our help at all but in the way to do that is what what i've done actually gone through and what the slides do is they offer you a real strategy for doing that the key to the strategy is recognizing that first of all the problem we have today is in part of our part of our own creation with the constitution we wrote or certainly to help construct the constitution which created for the first time in afghanistan's history sir a top down central government with very tight power of control in the presidency its president karzai who picks the provincial governors that would be like president obama taking the governor of illinois when what we really need to do is recognize well i'm trying to help understand i'm trying to help you see that this is not even democracy by our own life and so it's and in this country for hundreds of years governance has gone bottom up from the tribal level and so we need to understand that the taliban we're giving them opportunities what we're doing is making it easy for them to exploit the local grievances against our occupation because of this top down political flow and so we need to  reverse the arrow we've have had existing programs i'm glad to go through them in great detail some detail and talk about why i think they are a problem but as i already hinted at there are a problem because we're trying to make pashtuns employees not partners and what i would do specifically is empower local pashtoon areas but differentially not just across the board bought by trying to empower the groups who are really our potential partners not those we can work with and what i'm doing on this slide is showing you that there are large areas of the south in the east where the authority rests with tribal leaders and councils many of them are now cooperating with the taliban but our own are not doing it out of religious affiliation there are areas controlled by the taliban where there are not tribal leaders or at least not independently that's about twenty percent of the south and then there are drug lords about ten percent they're not motivated either by tribe or religion they're motivated by money and so  employees i mean all of that stuff of course seven years i mean absolutely true and general mcchrystal talked at great length about all of this in his report about how we have made a mistake in that you know by through and with you know classic counterinsurgency strategy has been totally ignored here we've been dictating and directing not doing by through and with but the part that doesn't make any sense is how we can make this transition that you're describing to do it differently without with fewer people for two reasons i mean number one i mean forget the security issue that's my second one i'll get to in a minute just the basics of supporting them in setting up a lot in construction and schools and wells and everything less is not more in that situation they need more help not less so you keep saying that we're going to change the strategy and do it with less people second the other basic level here is you've got to have security and what the taliban are doing village to village is you know a classic protection racket you know we're the only ones that can protect you and if you don't trust us to protect you we will show you that we're the only ones that can protect you and if you cannot provide security they've got no place to go no i'll grant you that we need to provide it better and i guess the way to sort of formulate that question is what dr hagen described you know if we don't increase troops and if we reduce troops how the taliban will continue to spread i just as frustrated as i am by the situation in afghanistan in what we've done wrong with the afghan government is done wrong the lack of a reliable partner i cannot see how if we don't increase troops or if more sense we begin to pull back whether six months from now or whenever whatever your timeline is how the taliban don't build on their successes and just take on more and more villages seem to be saying you know we're going to change the strategy i'm going to empower them with what with who how did the well a band if they're doing as well as they're doing right now how are they suddenly magically not going to be doing too well when there's less resistance to what they're doing sir i'm not saying that we should pull out any troops in the first year number one  that the worst case scenario is to keep things as they are no no no sir i said the worst case scenario would become would be that things would stay as they are ok and that was different than what i said but i well know what i meant i think his question was after two or three years if you implement the whole strategy after two or three years what's the worst case scenario what i'm trying to explain to maybe i was unclear and i apologize to the committee if i'm unclear on this point but i'm trying to make it clear which is that i'm not calling for withdrawing troops in the first year and i'm not calling for withdrawing them on some deployment schedule what i'm saying is that what we should do in the next twelve months is not increase troops we should dedicate ourselves to the low key to somewhere where it's at and which will help protect the cities the major that strategy that's most things is sort of emerging not the pullout strategy not even really sort of a stand off strategy committing for more we don't know exactly what we're doing there right now so to commit more forces in that situation not to mention the stress on our troops the stress on our force to ask them and go and fight in a situation that is as muddled as i think we've all kind of agreed it is here is irresponsible that we simply have to do a containment strategy hold the line give mcchrystal a chance hopefully get i can marr involved they ring things out start moving us in a more positive direction contain the taliban from spreading further instead of going more troops into a confusing situation what's wrong with that is that we can't do that with the forces that we now have and that's general mcchrystal assessment and it's the assessment of his and i think it's very easily supportable by facts on the ground so we will continue to lose ground we will continue to lose ground with the current with the current numbers because they are not adequate even with all of the infielder readjustment that gen mcchrystal is has is undertaking to do this and i think it's very important to note here that the you know we really shouldn't be pulling troops numbers out of our fourth point of contact this is not something where we just say well you know maybe w only send ten thousand or whatever troop numbers have to come based on a very specific and careful fold up staff troop to task analysis by our professional military about what is required to achieve a particular set of objectives in a particular set of circumstances general mcchrystal has done that we don't have to accept it necessarily but we can't beat it simply by saying well i don't like forty i think twenty someone else would have to go through a very detailed troop task analysis for a different set of objectives within an agreed upon framework of what the circumstances are and tell you what the number would be for a different set of objectives but if you try to do this as a rheostat with i don't like forty i want twenty now tell me what i can do with that and you put our troops in a very high probability of being given a mission that can succeed i think that is an excellent point to end on i appreciate your coming in testifying very very helpful for me and for the members of the committee and we're going to keep this dialogue up because as this decision is going forward i guess the thing i will close with this you know we emphasizing what dr gates said whatever we do it has to be a clear strategy and a clear plan so did the troops in the people that we asked to go and implement it know what they're doing and that's the minimum that we can expect no matter what we