good morning a quorum being present the committee on oversight and government reform and the subcommittee on national security and foreign affairs the hearing in title afghanistan and pakistan oversight of a new interagency strategy will come to order i ask unanimous consent that only the chairman and ranking members of the committee and of the subcommittee be allowed to make opening statements without objection so what did i ask unanimous consent that the hearing record be kept open for five business days so that all members of the committee be allowed to submit a written statement of the record without objection so and general gregson were happy to have you here with us as well though you would have been here last week we had the benefit of your presence here today the president's interagency strategy for afghanistan and pakistan is a welcome shift in the approach to that region a vital national security interest as the new strategy recognizes our common goal with afghanistan and pakistan will require a closely coordinated effort between all three states ultimately the united states must rely on the capabilities of pakistan and afghan governments themselves this hearing has come at a critical time afghanistan will hold presidential elections in august amid along the cheery rating security situation the united states is committed to significantly increase troops on the ground coupled with a so called civilian surge of four hundred fifty additional aid professionals over the next eighteen months finally we have a new commander in afghanistan lieutenant general mcchrystal who has arrived on the ground there this past week the years of seemingly inconsistent attention to the threat posed by extremist militants in the north as fronting a province in the federally administered tribal areas and increasingly baluchistan in punjab pakistan seems to have finally harnessed the political will and the manpower to engage in a concerted action to retake swat in the adjoining areas of the malecon region in the past eight weeks it's important to recognize and honor the sacrifice that pakistan and its soldiers have made during this campaign and that has been substantial tragically the nature of the recent fighting has produced by some accounts approximately three million internally displaced persons an expression i am standing bash it doesn't like using more than we do because of its impersonal nature but the three million people who are now without homes without businesses and having a difficult time struggling to survive and to get their lives back together in untold numbers of civilian casualties according to public reports the pakistan military will now turn its focus to the much more difficult terrain of south wa as united states discovered in iraq and afghanistan additionally clearing extremist militants from an area does not in itself create long term security long term security will require a comprehensive strategy to secure rebuild and implement the political legal and economic enfranchise than the pashtun population is that of an isolated isolated for far too long critically the pakistan civilian government must extend its way to all areas of the country for too long pakistan has ceded its authority in some regions and failed to establish a basic domestic compact between the federal government and the people residing in those regions the united states must continue to support the pakistani government as provide more security more governance and more basic services in those provinces i have a concern that as a result of his history of failure to adapt its national security priorities to the evolving sir stances of militant extremism pakistan currently lacks the resources and strategic doctrine to engage in a concerted campaign to win the hearts and minds of its own people in the affected regions the house of representatives has recently taken an important step to address this issue by passing the birman bill also known as the peace act in the senate is marked up its counterpart to the burma bill the kerry lugar bill these bills proposed to triple economic assistance to pakistan in the next five years to one of the have billion dollars we recognize as some controversy has been stirred over the question of conditions in the legislation some are concerned that conditions will offend the political sensitivities of pakistanis involvement with the taliban and other extremists there are notable examples of inexplicable conduct such as failing to target wanted leaders of visible anti government groups and failing to dismantle their known bases we have learned of the release from confinement of such leaders even those believed to be implicated in the mumbai bombings we are painfully aware of the military's proclivity for entering the truces with extremists and ceding territory to their control only to have residents there suffer egregious repr regression i support the conditions that are in the bill and hope that and wish that they were stronger and more pointed they are applied only to the military and not the civilian assistance in the berman bill i hope that my colleagues and people in the other chamber in the administration will support the craft a carefully crafted and negotiated legislation on the one of the principal aims of today's hearing is to address the serious accountability and transparency concerns that have plagued us programs and operations in both afghanistan and pakistan for the past seven years for example last year the subcommittee conducted a major investigation of the aleutian support funds program by which the united states reimburse pakistan for expenses incurred in certain counterterrorism operations this program has represented the bulk of u s aid to pakistan's military in the past seven years amounting to over six point seven billion dollars to date our investigation found that there were no receipts for a significant portion of u s reimburses to pakistan and that the program lack basic accountability provisions further this program has not improved the pakistan military capabilities the counterterrorism counterinsurgency operations another purpose of this hearing is to hear from eyewitnesses about implementing a fundamentally interagency strategy across the departments in the united states government we want to know about the contributions by the various departments the quad nation amongst others and the strategic guidance implementation directives that are coming from senior leadership in addition we want to know whether there are a capacity problems at the civilian national security agencies that need to be addressed further by this congress and finally the most immediate and urgent task of the united states is to provide aid to alleviate the suffering of the pakistanis displaced by current fighting we've had the opportunity to speak with embassador holbrooke about his recent trip to the camps and i want to express my strong support for that trip for his efforts and for the united states aphids but a week ago last thursday the subcommittee held a hearing on the humanitarian crisis and heard witnesses testifying in this room and from islamabad they reported that they expect the crisis to get worse before it gets better and that much more must be done it's our oversight capacity now responsibility and we have to continue to urge the united states aid for humanitarian crises make sure there's delivered to the field promptly effectively and accountab i'd ask unanimous consent that the the article from the carnegie endowment for international peace be entered into the record today this was a witness we chose not to have so as to keep the hearing simple without objection thank you ambassador general i want to thank you for being here today as the new administration begins to implement its vision of a better safer world and particularly as to the deteriorating situations in afghanistan and pakistan i'm comforted to know in basad or that you will be first hand involved in this over the years in which you have been out of the administration i have had an opportunity to meet with you around the dinner table and throughout the the circuit here of good thinkers who had a lot of thoughts and were often often asked if they had been asked but seldom could they answer that they were the tools the previous administration used undoubtedly will be the same tools you use what will be different can only be the tone and the amount of each of those tools and certainly as your administration inherits an afghanistan dependent upon production at a level far greater than in any time in history it is particularly difficult to wean people off of a corrupting influence like the production of tools for heroin additionally the situation in pakistan has only deteriorated during the previous four years this is by definition a huge problem for the new administration so i want to say today that on a bipartisan basis we look forward to working with you as you attempt to reverse what has been in many ways the nine eleven year notwithstanding that it's no surprise to you that i would say that iraq is to a great extent behind us and will allow you the opportunity to work on this troubled region this is the committee on government oversight and reform not the foreign affairs committee and although i'm pleased as is the ranking subcommittee member to be a member of foreign affairs on leave of absence i recognize that our job is not to discuss in detail your vision our job is to provide the oversight as to whether or not the plan has been properly thought out as to cost and effectiveness additionally as the chairman indicated in his opening remarks there have been serious concerns about waste fraud and abuse both directly with our partners in afghanistan and pakistan and in previous hearing of this committee with our nato partners large amounts of cash have been taken to the region and often with little or no oversight i hark back onto a hearing in which we discovered that good allies good nato allies were given tens of millions of dollars simply on one general signature although there are allies i rely on them to try to protect us i recognize that we would not accept that one american general signed for twenty million dollars and no further receipts we certainly cannot expect less of our nato partners and we expect then we expect of our own homegrown generals general that will be one of our questions today undoubtedly is can we bring a level of transparency and accountability both to our effort at nation buildings and to our cost and detailed work in the region without a doubt that is the primary jurisdiction of this committee i always remind my colleagues but particularly myself that we are a committee a broad jurisdiction but we are not are not the foreign affairs committee and our efforts today will be in order to support you but at the same time let you know  was my witnesses from time to time today we're going to continue on through the hearing on that but the absence of some members on occasion here is not any indication of their lack of interest but rather their obligation to register their votes and also sometimes to be at other committees as well  we're going to continue on well now we see testimony from the panelist before us today at first light to say if you are as about each of the witnesses embassador richard holbrooke served as president obama's special representative to afghanistan and pakistan prior to that he served as chairman of the asia holbrooke has held a number of other distinguished positions in both the public and the private sectors he holds a bachelor of arts from brown university welcome to bassam general wallace chip gregson served as assistant secretary of defense for asian and pacific security affairs prior to assuming this post general gregson was owner and president of w c g and associates international a foreign policy and military affairs consulting organization prior to his retirement from the united states marine corps general grayson was commanding general of the marine corps forces pacific marine corps forces central command general gregson holds a b s in the united states naval academy as well as m a degrees in the naval war college and south a regina college thank you for joining us here today joe thank you both of you for making yourself available and giving us your expertise is the policy this committee to swear witnesses in before you testify i ask you to please stand and raise your right hand do you solemnly swear to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth thank you the record of please reflect that both of the witnesses answered in the affirmative as you mindful of what your colleague congressman issa just said that your main goal is and i quote dedicated to making sure u s taxpayer dollars are being wisely spent i take that very seriously and i share that goal and more importantly it is a specific instruction that the secretary of state and the president have issued to us i would like to divide my opening comments into two parts first the strategic issues and secondly and very briefly in addition to this link the opening statement i'd like to submit for the record to comment on the points you've just made first of all in the strategic issues i concur fully in what both you and  that this is a strategic priority for the united states for reasons we all know pakistan contains within it in its western areas people who have attacked the united states and are we are opinion allies and india and the people of pakistan repeatedly and have said they wish to do so again they are there's no other word for it our enemy in afghanistan the taliban continue to fight and they support they form a support group for the al qaeda and the others who threaten the united states directly so at this point separating taliban and al qaeda is not something one can do in terms of our  policies in terms of our resources of course there's a huge mismatch in afghan as then we have sixty eight thousand troops there on their way and we have a vast civilian and growing infrastructure and considerable involvement on the ground in pakistan the government of pakistan has made clear from the beginning that there's certain red lines which cannot be crossed most importantly ground troops they do not wish any american military presence on the ground and we fully respect that so we can take that off the table however supporting pakistan in every possible way is of the highest priority to the united states for example we have a integrated white house treasury state department team on its way to pakistan now to talk to them about how we can help their economy more they're facing some deadlines from i m f loans they're facing very tough set of problems and we want to show assistance in every way we with the support of this body additional funds have been voted in the supplemental and in addition to that two hundred million dollars in the supplemental for the internal refugees in pakistan and thank you for noting my aversion to the initials i d p these are human beings they were farmers they were pharmacists they were jewellers they are living now in hot airless tents on the flat lands of pakistan's west from the high lands they need to go home and by the way mr chairman i having read the testimony of the three witnesses you had earlier ken bacon sherry raymond and a person from international crisis group whose name i don't remember i want to concur in virtually everything they said to you so we have the highest possible priority in terms of our national security interests at stake having said that we all recognize this is a very difficult difficult set of problems the administration building on what we inherited has made significant adjustments in our policy which i can refer to in more detail later if i had to give headline i would say a massive increase in our agriculture continued focus on stopping the drug trade but within that mr chairman we are downgrading our efforts to eradicate crops with spraying a policy we think was totally ineffectual but we're going to increase efforts on addiction and going after the after the drug lords so we're not downgrading narcotics we're downgrading crop eradication and upgrading agriculture we have to improve the police and we have to work on governance i would draw your attention  to one last point and that is the elections fifty five days from today where will be an election in afghanistan which will have a direct bearing on the future of american and international policy in afghanistan if it is it must be a fair open and legitimate election if it is not if it for example looks like something resembling what's happening next door to the west it would be it would undermine the legitimacy of our effort and the legitimacy of whichever candidate won so to underscore the most important point we can make on afghanistan we are not supporting any candidate we are not opposing any candidate but we are actively supporting a fair free and open process to this and for example ambassador i can bury our extraordinary new one basket  on the ground in afghanistan who twice was the commander of u s forces and brings to his job both both his past and his present because sions to this and bassett or i can very last in the last few days participated in press conferences with three leading members of the opposition in which he made an opening statement saying how strongly we were committed to a fair process without endorsing the candidate he was attending the press conference of he then made no further comments during the meeting the each candidate presented their platforms he's challenging every candidate to come up with platforms some people said he was intervening in the in showing a preference our position and i'm happy to discuss this for the first time publicly today with you our position was very simple we're not supporting a candidate but because of the high investments that the international community has made in afghanistan we are supporting a process and the and it must result in a legitimate outcome he and general jones our national security advisor are in kabul today and they have been talking to various leaders finally mr chairman on organizational structure as you yourself mentioned the president and the sector state directed me to create a special office in the state department which is a true interagency office what sector defense bob gates after visiting us two days ago called a genuine whole of government effort gen gregson is one of the people who feeds into our effort through a new which we are holding we held one yesterday will hold one again tomorrow when which all the agencies send their own representatives but inside our office we have representatives of the c joint chiefs of staff the the department of agriculture the treasury department the department of homeland security and the f b i and the office of the sector defense person who used to work with  general gregson this remarkable inner agency effort feeds directly into the national security council and it is the documents i gave you which i would prefer not be made public outline the details of the result with that mr chairman i thank you for holding this very important hearing i look forward to answering your questions thank you and i want to just say that i believe everybody has read a written statement which was even more extensive than your opening remarks we appreciate the time that went into that as well general right let me try that again mr chairman members of the committee thank you for the opportunity to testify today i am here today on behalf of undersecretary of defense for policy miss michele flournoy who is currently on travel to beijing in tokyo she expressed her regret that she could not be here but the written testimony that she submitted prior to last week's scheduled hearing remains a statement of record i've come prepared with a short opening statement as well i would like to thank you m members of the committee for this opportunity to speak to you at this moment of opportunity the issue today could not be more apt subject the inner agency efforts of the administration to design and implement a whole of government strategy for afghanistan and pakistan this unprecedented task relies much any insight and guidance of congress our assistance to the people and governments of afghanistan and pakistan is at a crucial juncture in our ability to operate smoothly as a cohesive and agile team will with your question period now and that if i could invest i just want to start off by asking you every year your testimony you made mention of the fact that you would support the expanding of the special inspector general for afghanistan reconstruction we you know what is the mandate and responsibilities would you also support the expansion of those responsibilities to monitor our aid programs in pakistan yes i would mr chairman in fact my next meeting after this hearing will be with major general fields the head of sikh are we are very impressed with what the congress established a year or two ago in creating seger but we noted two things its mandate is limited only to one of the two countries which and yet we all agree they're equally important secondly we recognize respect and support it's total independence from the executive branch they will follow your guidance not  ours but both and but in afghanistan interest has been expressed by afghans themselves to the possibility of sega are helping them and their anti corruption drive and they can speak for themselves but they think they need approval from your body or the body overseeing bodies to to to do this i will leave to you the discussion with general feels as to whether his mandate needs to be expanded on the corruption issue in afghanistan but on pakistan there's no question the legislation is restricted to afghanistan and speaking for myself even within the executive branch there's some disagreement on this but since you asked and i'm under oath tell you what i believe with the answer your question is an unambiguous yes i appreciate that or some of us on this committee been thinking on the same line and we have a meeting set up with  field has said that if he's given the additional mandate he'll need additional resources but i leave that to you that's good that's good in the president's speech when he announced a whole new interagency strategy i'm going to give a quote from me so we will set clear metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable we'll consistently assess our efforts to train afghan security forces and our progress in combat insurgents we will measure the growth of afghanistan's economy and it's a listen not comics production and we'll review whether or not we're using the right tools and tactics to make progress towards accomplishing our goals it's been three months since you made that statement have you developed any metrics and if so how are we going to assess the united states performance movie for the answer to your question is yes let me explain first of all that because of the enormous combination of responsibilities our small office has the metrics issue has been handled by other divisions of state the intelligence community and the national security council and metrics have have been developed they have been there's been extensive consultation with the congress on this and  and we're working them out at all levels some will be classified others will be public of course you will have access to both the public and the and the classified when do you think they'll be released  versions you know i can't give you a date certain mr chairman because the the mandate on that runs the leadership in that restaurant play with the national security council let me just ask do we have  a i do not have a date can i answer you in a in a written message this afternoon and it's the reason i can't give you specific data simply that the task or went elsewhere and there was some initial is a very complicated issue and let me just say one thing having been through several guerrilla wars we have we must differentiate between employed and output we can tell you how much money we're spending how much how much food we're giving on to the world food program our support for international solutions but how do you measure results on the ground week if you were to ask me how we're doing the swat i could tell you what the pakistan army has done but i can't tell you how much damage has been done to the taliep on and then to you know that you don't know if you're succeeding and having started my career in vietnam i saw a confusion between input and output most famously on the body count issue which was a dangerous misleading statistic but there were many others and i'm very pleased to see that general petraeus is is moving away from there was some articles about this and we're moving away from that so i want to be very careful that w talk to you about benchmarks we give you meaningful measurements of progress not simply telling you how we're organized and how we spent the money and that and that's sorting out is what we're doing now that we appreciate it thank you mr isay recogniz five minutes thank you chairman embassador you know i know one hundred or so days isn't very long but the good news as i said my opening comments is you never you never gave up your your passion to look at all of these regions so  the previous administration had a bias toward using military assistance to do what had historically in some cases been state department work how do you intend to if you intend to not just in this region if you don't mind but perhaps looking more at the whole administration how do you intend to balance how much is military delivering nation building versus either directly or hand in hand with state department your your folks overseeing that and you know you mentioned general petraeus we all have a great deal of confidence but who's going to have the lead and how how will it be different the previous a very important question and as you know books have been written on this from my point of view the analysis to begin by analyzing the problem you can't separate the civilian and the military aspects of the war in which terrain is not the issue it's see it's control of the population either their support or their passive acceptance of coercive force which is what i mean in swat the afghan people are overwhelmingly against the taliep on the i r i poll that came out the other day had additional evidence of that but the e regard for the government of afghanistan has been declining and what we need to do now is restructure our policies to improve the capacity of the afghan government and its security forces if we don't do that congressman we'll never find we'll never be able to carry out the exit strategy now i want to stress when i use those loaded words that i didn't say x a timetable because this is a tough war but the long term way for the united states to and its allies to draw down its forces as president obama has said is to build up afghan capacity in both areas now your live or support for the afghan people and that's your goal which of course begs the question of the outcome of the election does matter if it makes a difference as to how that is accomplished my question really was are they going to see the lead in some way changing a little bit more toward this is the us government versus this is the us military delivering this aid well first of all i want to start with a statistic we discovered when we took office only ten percent of american civilian assistance was going through the government so and yet the rhetoric was straying from the government and we were undermining it without even realizing it so when i talked earlier when he went out to vote about the agriculture program we're going to the afghans used to be agriculture export hours and now they're when they know how to farm in that rocky and high altitude soil but they need help in rebuilding the military and here's a perfect example of your issue the united states military gives out free seed as part of its sir programs we're all in favor that we think it's great because it helps farmers get back on their feet but it doesn't build a long term capacity so under the new plans and under the direction of the president the secretary of state in our office we have u s t a a id pentagon all together and fact this morning we briefed some of your colleagues on this very program and we are working at a new integrated approach to agriculture so that and we in general nicholson has some of you know our commander of all the surge troops in c south as been working with our aid and guide people we're going to bring in sixty new agricultural people tom vilsack is involved personally and he will be going out there next month investor if i can tie into as many times expiring the last part is how is that going to bring greater accountability and transparency for us to see that those dollars because as you said a lot of those dollars were not only around the government but they were fairly opaque to this committee well they were opaque to us and we're spending a lot of time trying to find out where they go and by the way we even greater trouble knowing where the countries are doing so sometimes there's international redundancy and sometimes they break gaps when you're out of the room i quoted back to your committee your own phrase that you're dedicated to making sure u s taxpayer dollars are being used wisely that is our highest goal that's why we talked about sega a moment ago in regard to your issue  are we are focused on accountability there are hundreds of a id d o d and other contracts which we have suspended put a hold on and refused to pass forward because we were dissatisfied with the with the rationale behind them the president in the sector state of instructed us and d o d is working with us on this to reduce the number of contracts now sometimes building a road easy but why for example where we sub contracting thirty million dollars for women's programs to n g o s instead of using it directly under the ambassador so when that contract came to me for approval and secretary clinton's asked me to do that i stopped the contract we turned the money over to the embassy and we now have an ambassadorial fund for women's programs that way we think we'll have more accountability we're going to work with siegel as often as freely as possible i could give you many other examples this is a work in progress but i cannot underscore how strongly we believe in your goal and how closely we're working with our colleagues in the pentagon us to you and elsewhere thank you thank you and in writing to the extent that your staff can i'd appreciate seeing some of the other examples it's very helpful to well to recognize five minutes thank you ambassador and thank you general you all have probably one of the hardest if not the hardest jobs in government really appreciate your service  i have you know the fundamental question which is a tough one is what's the right strategy to deal with a very difficult problem and obviously the weight of our strategy is based on a military engagement  afghanistan and support in pakistan and i think the obama administration is rightly focused on trying to help with capacity building as well but i have skepticism about the capacity  our capacity to execute on that strategy there are some critics who suggest that the better approach is essentially containment as opposed to transformation nation building in there to examples that stick out in my mind that demonstrate how tough it is for our tremendous military in are tremendous diplomats one is when we were with mr tierney in afghanistan we talked to some folks from the chamber of commerce whose job  to try to encourage investment in afghanistan and their biggest problem was is exemplified in the in an example of the fact that a trucker coming from the iranian border into kabul got stopped on average twenty seven times and shaken down by quote authorities and if you want to get a driver's license in kabul you had to get twenty one different people to sign off and then secondly one of our wonderful state department people in vassar that we met  had a job outside of the embassy to monitor an implement a program of demining obviously incredibly important to folks there and i asked her how many times she'd been out in the ten months that she'd been on assignment and she'd only been off that base once because of the security concerns so it raises just very serious questions in my mind about the fundamental tenet that a you can have the military take on this new mission that historically has never been what we've asked of our military namely nation building and capacity building into to have the civilian capacity building occur when the shooting is going on means the security needs for those folks are so great that they can't do their job and many critics who prefer containment to this nation building would suggest that when you're going to do this capacity building with n g o s or state department people it has to be done either before or after the shooting but not in the middle of it so i'm sorry for such a long intro on this but it really raises it's it's the core of my apprehension about the strategy and i'd  each of you to comment on that if we were going to do containment as opposed to this military engagement what would we do and what gives us confidence that we can achieve this goal never in history of the country has it been achieved by the military for building nations let's start thank you for the question i think containment just to set a premise in an overturn to it later containment would be exceedingly difficult we've seen the forces of globalization around the world make that virtually impossible to to to execute now with any in any effect the the military role in the conference urgency  in a large respect is protection of the population and there are times when we have to do the protection ourselves but we want to transition it as quickly as possible to a properly organized security sector meaning the in this case the afghan national army the afghan national police the border police and other similar institutions and with that though has to immediately or concurrently come development we have to bring the instruments of good governance to places that haven't had good governance we have to provide more government services to the villagers to the farmers than the taliban provide while we're simultaneously eliminating the taliban  the nation building thing has in the past sometimes devolved to the military while we're building civilian capacity to do that but it's not an either or it is both of these have to be done together in the past the phrase  used to be we fight the nation's wars was wrong on a couple counts the nation fights a nation's wars not the military but but the goal of any conflict or any engagement of the military is profoundly political and way and that in a counterinsurgency situation means protecting a population and ensuring the delivery of good government services one example of how this fits together it used to be much more difficult to train soldiers and police because there was no viable banking sector in afghanistan the individual soldiers had to take their pay and personally walk at home to their family which could be miles away so you were losing your forces for two weeks thanks to a lot of great civilian efforts we now have a much more viable banking sector which in turn increases the effectiveness of the forces we're trying to train here thank you general thank you as well japhet you recognized i'm just a flake status of forces agreement what is that something that needs to be remedied or is that something which is going to deal with it having to go shoot at these things before i think we're better off right now being in afghanistan under the u n mandate and under the which was all in pricing it's the most far reaching u n mandate in the history of the u n because it stems directly from the events of nine eleven and it added included not only the security council but the whole general assembly so sooner or later of course but negotiating a self is really tricky and when we when the afghan government and feels it's necessary of course we'll do it but right now i would leave that way under the u n umbrella that you mentioned that  support for the afghan government seems to be declining to what do you attribute that mostly the perception of corruption or is it just inability to deliver services or security what what is at the root of that let me stress congressman that i was quoting a poll i don't i don't have a view on that i just noted it secondly according to the same poll corruption and if and the difficulty in delivering services left many people feeling their country was not as well off so it was in two thousand and four when everything looked much rosier on the other hand nobody wants to go back to what is called the black ears and so while reporting to you accurately i don't want to leave you with the sense of of but despair and mr chairman if i could add one word about mr welch's question on the wall of security that doesn't allow americans to get out in the field this is a huge problem and we have i have met people in kabul who never left the embassy compound for a year except to get on the airplane and take their vacations what are they doing there and of and particularly somebody in the de mining areas congressman welch refer to the ambassador eikenberry and his team are loosening the boundaries of that they're removing the curfews they're forcing people to go out because we have a huge civilian build up under way and if the people just come into compounds we're wasting time money and so on kind of going off on that some of us have been in country and i visit some of the prevention reconstruction teams or p r t's and having spoken to a number of them there seems to be and it seems that you're correcting some of the lack of coordination on this side i'm just wondering if that filters down to the p r ts because i can tell you over the last several years there's not been coordination there one seems not to know what the other is doing you know the sharing of brest best practices you have nutrition programs here you have something completely different going on in another place what are we doing on the ground i understand what's being done here to coordinate but is that filtering all the way down congressman flake our efforts are only as good as they are at the province and district level and i began my career as a province representative in the mekong delta so i was living with the military and working with them so i believe and that we are turning the political advisers the so called poland's into active operational people we're abolishing the pullout system by the way we all said to polish the defense attache office in the embassy removing eighteen military positions from the embassy which frees them up for useful service and we are going to put a civilian senior civilian in each province at it and at the regional commands to work with the military commanders now we've got this straightened out already on the u s side general petraeus and i have a framework agreement and bass or i can very and general mcchrystal and their teams are drilling down to the operational level as we speak and but we have not yet got everyone out in the field and the other problem we have is that it only applies so far to areas where the u s forces and u t s we will be going to italy tomorrow to meet with my international counterparts there about twenty five countries now that of appointed counterparts to to me from britain to tokyo from the united arab emirates to the sweetened and we're all meeting and we're trying to we're trying to get other countries to follow the model i'm not trying to subordinate civilians to the military going back to your congressman and his question but this is a war and the lead has to be taken by the military the civilian part of it however is integral to success because it's about strengthening the governments capacity to take care of its own problems and if i were to list the problems you started with corruption i would say the top three issues in no particular order are governance corruption and the secure quality of the security services and narcotics is a big issue but it's not the issue it's not the reason we're having goldie's and finally and above all other issues the sanctuary in pakistan if that isn't fixed success will be virtually an achievable thank you thank you was to quickly recognise five minutes good afternoon gentlemen shifting the focus for myself on pakistan and our relationship with the leadership in pakistan we read of the drone attacks and cross border attacks that have taken place in the past i guess i want to couple that thought in your evaluation of how that's affecting the the good that we're trying to do with the interviews i saw with pakistani leader  and other discussions i guess i was questioning whether they seem to have a firm grasp of the reality of their situation their strengths their weaknesses and what they might have to do to solve these issues  they do have a firm grasp of the severity of the situation but they may have gotten there a little more slowly than you and other americans might have liked but having just been out there on my third trip in four months and i'll be going back again in a couple of weeks i am and i am quite convinced that the three most powerful elements in pakistan political life all share a common enemy a common problem and are bringing coming together those three elements of course our presence adare and his p p p party know w sharif and his brother the chief minister of the punjab and their party and the pakistani army and all three are united and public opinion pakistan has begun to coalesce around common opposition but this goes back to our early colloquy with congressman and chairman tierney about and you have your and the witnesses you had when we wanted to hear all of them as i read their testimony all of to size the point i want to underscore to when the refugees go back they have to have security and if they don't and if we have a replay of the taliban coming down out of the hills it will be a catastrophic setback one of your witnesses the foreign minister of information sherry raymond made that point in very dramatic terms and i i i won't share all her rhetoric but i certainly share view so m answer your question is there is a common understanding but is there enough resources i don't think so i love you very very pleased that your body passed the howard berman led legislation that of one point five billion dollars of authorization and a year for the next five fiscal years and supported the r o z legislation put forward by congressman van hollen that was terrific legislation that got huge headlines mr chairman in pakistan and if the senate follows suit that will be the kind of support we must in my view give pakistan let me interject with that the  and perhaps you can educate me on where their thoughts are now pakistan's desire to build their new killer arsenal which would seem to be misplaced in time congressm with great respect let me follow standard policy and and offer you and your colleagues a classified executive branch discussed executive session discussion on that it was serve no national security interest whatsoever to discuss that issue in public except to say that we understand your point of view and we are not ignoring it and i understand i guess that causing the the first point i had made if you could focus a little more on the reaction the negative reaction perhaps to drone attacks or cross border ventures and how that is playing out now in pakistan if if if it would make our life easier if we discuss that also in closed session but let me say that that that we are very mindful of the of the complexities of this issue and let me just stress again that the people who have publicly said and repeatedly said they wish to stage another nine eleven reside to some large degree in that portion of pakistan which is out of reach of american ground troops and if i can just acknowledge congressman van hollen as he comes in i was mentioning your legislation before you came in thank you i have a first first i want to thank you for using camp atterbury it's an amazing training camp for our guard and regular military people heading over to afghanistan because it has all sorts of buildings like a  question and i have some concerns about the current strategy before the the russian plane wrecked i was one of the only groups that ever got down into the helmand province and i understand how it differs from colombia but there are a lot of similarities to colombia it is not true that the heroin is mostly in individual compounds there was heroin is far as the eye could see and that the former king both in exile and after he came in was repeatedly critical of our strategy of not eradicating because they were the bread basket of the world before heroin and that going in and trying to do all the agricultural crops when you have the opportunity to get huge dollar returns off of heroin compared to traditional agricultural crops there has to be a disincentive to plant heroin in addition to incentive to plant other crops and that i'm wondering what the current status is of trying to employ both the stick and the carrot it will not suffice to say plant corn when you can get incredible amounts more dollars than you can for corn a second part of this is there's seems to be a presumption here but let me let me ask you a serious question second question is what is al qaeda funding itself with if they are getting some kind of money from the heroin crops either in the form or providing protection kickbacks like fark does colombia or in many cases from what i understand direct control of the poppy third is that are we trying to send a message to other countries around the world that we think poverty is the reason for terrorism and if so how do we not repeat what happened in gang programs early in united states when the bloods and the crips first started up we started job programs for the bloods and the crips what we found was the number of kids who joined the gangs went up four times what it was because the only way to get after school programs and so on was to join the bloods and crips and how do we not send a message if it's all just kind of positive feeling stuff here we're going to help you do agriculture how do we not walk into this trap that other countries will start harboring other countries will see that the only way to get this amount of aid is to do this and i just don't see how we already have tribal conflicts that heal iraq pales to the tribal conflicts in afghanistan that part of the reason we haven't been able to get most of the money to the government afghanistan is because we didn't feel many of those leaders were trusted they  were making all kinds of deals on their own and you kind of balance and then pakistan which was forced together out of india laying tribes over tribes is a tribal mass and if you don't control the narcotics how do you propose to get this all sorted out narcotics are certainly a major if not the only source of funding for the taliban al qaeda and we are determined to to eliminate or at least greatly decrease the amount of illegal activities on net and afghanistan and other places eradication by itself hurts the farmers the people who are making money off of the drug trade are not the subsistence farmers they are the middlemen and the and the other people so the other piece that has to be put in here for going to eliminate the growing of the poppies that leads to the heroin and opium is sufficient security so that we can introduce alternative crops so that the individual farmers can make more money from the alternative crops than they're making from the poppies and that there is enough infrastructure roads in it and other things to get the legitimate crops to market and and build the capacity that way your analogy about the bloods and crips is very interesting this is all about a legitimate government providing proper and better and more efficient services to the population than other groups who will come in and fill the place of the legitimate government in many ways with the narcotics trade we have the wrong people providing the services and coercing the people involved in invested he wanted talks and financing i want to clarify what general gregson just sa it's very critical the a lot has been written about the relationship between drugs and the enemy and there's a lot of confusion about that and the intelligence community is not in full agreement my own view and i met with cia analysts yesterday we're meeting with a woman who just wrote a book about it tomorrow open source is as follows the drug traffic is the source of the local tali been funding in afghanistan to the to a considerable degree but not exclusively there's also massive extortion so the people in  through the drugs but as general gregson said spraying the crops just penalizes the farmer and they grow crops somewhere else and our hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars we spend on proper education has not had any damage to the knowledge on the contrary it's helped them recruit in my experience in the u s government foreign aid and i began my career with a id in the one nine hundred sixty s this is the least effective program ever but you feel that way in colombia do you believe that's true in colombia where we finally have no idea what would be the difference between colombia and i have i have no views on colombia congressman i've never served there or worked on the problem but i want to go to the al qaeda and the taliban in pakistan because there according to our best sources the primary source of money is money flowing in from supporters of jihad based in the international community of people who support them much of it seems to come from the gulf but not the governments involved i have now made three trips to the gulf the treasury department the intelligence community the f b i state are all working on creating a we've created a task force to address this issue a lot of this has to be in closed session but i have no hesitation say in public that we are intensely concerned about this much greater flow of of  money as far as the drug trade goes the major beneficiaries are corrupt officials and and peace people in on the take in the police system so although there is some going to help to the taliban al qaeda doesn't get its money from is busy on the floor with other matters and that is the chairman we want to thank you for convening this meeting your leadership on this issue and if you're prepared would like to give you an opportunity to make a statement and whatever questions you might have of the witnesses thank you very much let me that some kind of way let me yeah begin by saying we now plan to significantly rapid ramp up in terms of the military and civilian aid programs for afghanistan and pakistan we plan to do that yet aid in both countries have proven extraordinarily difficult to oversee and we feel that it is right for waste fraud and abuse what steps have you taken or will take to ensure greater transparency and accountability for the u s aid programs mr chairman it's good to see you and if i can be shameless for a  minute i want to introduce the mother of two of your mother and future mother in law has two of your own constituents my step son and his future fiance causing my size here today that's i know that shameless but i couldn't resist in terms of greater accountability in terms of greater accountability the we've already talked about c r and i will be meeting again with general arnold fields this afternoon chairman tierney asked if we wish to extend c go to pakistan you put me under oath so i said yes i would and extend its mandate in afghanistan secondly we are cutting back on contracts and above all we have this integrated civilian military effort which general gregson and i testified together in body we are well mindful of our mandate not to waste taxpayer money a lot has been wasted already and we're going to do everything we can and i would offer this committee which is as i mentioned earlier i've never testified before before before we would offer you total time with the united states marine corps were things were not going very well and it wasn't until later on when there was enough security on the ground during the surge that provide enough security that allowed the political process to move forward and allow the kind of capacity building to occur to create a government with more stability that is allowing us at this time to do a phased withdrawal from the country when i look at the metrics between iraq and afghanistan it looks to me that this administration is making the same mistakes did george w bush made in iraq that we are incrementally putting in resources that we know are not adequate and because of that we will and necessarily cost the lives of young americans in this war will be afghanistan has a larger landmass in iraq more difficult terrain afghanistan has a larger population that iraq dispersed in rural areas unlike iraq afghanistan has no real history of governance  that iraq has iraq today has six hundred ten members to its iraqi security forces six hundred ten thousand afghanistan it's projecting i think under two hundred fifty thousand i know there are reexamining that after iraq and in the in the surge had a hundred sixty thousand u s military personnel on the ground we are going to source up to i think it's something like sixty eight thousand t include advisors and trainers this is ministration needs to be honest with the american people up front as to what this cost of reversing the situation in afghanistan is going to  please answer thank you afghanistan and iraq are indeed different no doubt about it we take your point about resources that may or may not be adequate we are going through another assessment general mcchrystal has been ordered by the secretary of defense to conduct a sixty to conduct an assessment within the first sixty days of all manner of things in afghanistan to include what will be needed to reverse the adverse trends and to provide adequate security and to get on with the development that we need to get to get on with there in the meantime the inner agency process led by ambassador holbrooke we're making an assessment across the region particularly afghanistan and pakistan and we expect to consult closely with the congress on these metrics as we go forward we need not only a whole of government meaning a whole of the administration solution we need a whole of government whole of nation solution from our part to reach to make sure afghanistan comes out the way we want to t security forces and it's it's my understanding that that that that review is focused on afghanistan security forces and it's not focused on u s military personnel and i just want to urge you to take the message back to admit the administration that needs to be focused on both and the american people need to know what the true cost of this war is going to be and we're not going to go back to the george w bush days before the surge where we're just getting into the war and then figuring out based on our losses that all we need more resources and then we're going to fit in and we stop and pause and intel we get it right i think that's just unfair to the young men and  that are serving on the ground and and again i think that we need to do not what is convenient but what is necessary to reverse the tide in this war if that is the intention of this administration yes it is the end intention of the administration we spoke earlier embassador holbrooke spoke earlier about making very sure that we are properly measuring outputs not just the more easier or the easier measure of purely inputs we're going to remain focused on outcomes which is the proper way to measure what we're doing and i think fits with with the intent of your comments that we make sure that number one we're honest with the american people number two we can explain what we intend to gain from the expenditure of resources both lives and treasure here thank you general and to the marines and soldiers on the ground those inputs are important for their day to day survival and we certainly found that out iraqi heart  really think you two gentlemen for being so patient while we play the games on the floor these of procedural motions and they delay our serious work what we're discussing is serious so if members run out it's just because they have to go down in vote i've got to defend my crips and bloods you know we start in south central and we sent them worldwide but what they do but so many of these youngsters have never been offered their own turf are to the pacific ocean and the in result of the drug trade is really that that is coming over the border so i wanted to our southern border i just wanted to set that record straight embassador holbrooke i'm so glad that you are back in the mix now we need to and my question goes to what we have observed in iraq and that is  there was that him to build the largest embassy in the world and add a trillion dollars and i thought well the largest embassy in the world should be in india and china and so we stop the funding on that i understand only nine people in the embassy spoke arabic so my concern is the communications the understanding of the culture the language and so on because i think that understanding who we are dealing with in pakistan and afghanistan would help us it is not all a military war it's a psychological war so i'd like you to comment and i was sent to vietnam and i studied yet on these for a year please don't ask me to prove it today but i highly as i am not the of course we have to speak the languages and i can't speak to the iraq story but i can speak very directly to our current efforts and the easiest way to do that is to introduce my staff assistant who's traveling with me to the hill kim  lot of people like him in the foreign service now who once the present once president obama articulated the priority of afghanistan once hillary clinton made the personal appeals we found something quite interesting eight hundred people signed up to be considered for this search i just gave the chairman a an unclassified timeline on the surge the pentagon bob gates initiative secretary gates has initiative has given us an additional list of about three hundred people i brought with me today joe in arts is in charge of that how many people are in the list that the secretary of defense three hundred five additional names from the pentagon joanne who heads a special afghan support office is working very very hard on that and with your permission mr chairman we would be delighted to submit an additional statement for the record on these issues because it doesn't matter how many people we send if they don't know the territory we're not going to succeed without objection so yeah mr chairman we have been just to inform very interested in the city in the state department i'm so glad that you're picking that culture up and moving with it because i think the more people who reflect those out there that you are relating to i think the better understanding we have and maybe we can put our guns down and you know negotiate through diplomacy we're giving some new tools to our secretary of state and we can talk about that and at the time but i don't think we win and the questions have been you know who are we fighting and what are we trying to win and i think we're going to have to do it through in that though she's institute diplomacy and that at the end of a gun general which you like to respond i would concur completely with that statement the military has a role here but the most important role is that of the guardian it's not how many enemy we attack it's how well and how much of the population we can protect and that's that's the operating philosophy the operating guidance and a strong guidance from both the previous general and commander gen mckiernan and certainly re indorsed and re strengthened by general mcchrystal who's now in charge i might add two additional points on your on the thrust of your comments in addition to the people that ambassador holbrooke spoke about we've collected  over a thousand resumes department of defense civilians and retired military who are volunteering to help to fill any civilian capacity positions that we don't know how many we will need yet but there is a strong well of patriotism within the country and and and certainly within the government to volunteer to serve in afghanistan and pakistan the second point i might make particularly on the language capability and where  congress may be able to provide some help to us we are a nation of immigrants we have a tremendous latent language capability out there and it you often find people that are serving in government or other places you have no idea they speak a language of value to us if there has to be a way to tap into that that reservoir out there where we can get people who do bring native language speaking capability in these many areas that are of  certainly very high importance to us now there's one very good example of that mr chairman which we have now implemented in the refugee camps in pakistan a member of our team  family from the plunge in pakistan has been mobilizing women doctors of pakistani american background the first six are in the refugee camps now it's obvious why you need women doctors in that culture another twenty five or thirty have signed up they would have gone except for the bombing of the pearl hotel this may seem like a small thing sitting in this room today but you get some women doctors  tuesday's hearing both sherry rehman who's a member of parliament over there in dr ahmed were indicating that very thing about getting female doctors over in that region particular with all the disruption that's gone on and i think i share with you about twelve thousand names or about the share of  pakistani heritage doctors in the united states so we have a large reservoir of people the ministration seems intent on trying to utilize those people the best they can to do we have that list yet because that would be very valuable that we shared people your staff and i was to work that out i was a chef has been very patient thank recognized by the news now thank you and thanks ambassador and thank you general for being here and thanks for your dedication to our country and your commitment to public service and the untold number of hours and heartache that you go through and we appreciate that but i would like to talk about the nation building aspect of what's happening but before i get to that ambassador i need to ask you just a brief set of questions about your involvement with the countrywide loans that were given out the so called friends of angelo program now my understanding is that you are a private citizen when you participated in that and personally i don't see a challenge when you're involved as a private citizen engaged in those types of things but would you agree with me that there's a difference  i was a private citizen one sixth of all the mortgage loans in the country were from that company we we looked around it wasn't actually a loan for me it was for my son and i got on that go question i really want to ask is if you were involved in public service that would be an issue right this really shouldn't be an issue because you're a private citizen have is if you can tie that into somehow it makes the relatives of the hearing we're having find otherwise just to rule that line of questioning out of order i have for you well let me let me ask just finish off the chair and can i ask for you nance consent to at least i'm at the documents that i have in my possession for the record we're going to was all the reservation on that objection until we see the documents will make a ruling after that thank you  the nation building aspect of what's happening it means that my concern is that they the gravity and the propensity to to be able to actually execute and achieve those those goals in nation building so called nation building when you have an education system where you have such an amazingly high illiteracy rate how do we how do we tackle that not only in the short term in the long term as well and that seems like such a daunting task when you have parts of the country that's my understanding is as high as ninety maybe even ninety five percent illiteracy rate how do we how do we address that we have a very strong education backing the government since the taliban were thrown out of the have about six or seven million people in schools including three million two or three million girls literacy rates are very low but they're not as low as you said i think your figures are wrong on that and  d which is a very high priority but literacy in and of itself is not the underlying cause of the problem we face it's an endemic problem and one that has to be addressed across the whole world general did you did you want to yeah i'd like to comment that nation building travels under many definitions but the standard time proven principles of a counterinsurgency campaign call for a whole of government effort providing security for the people and providing the means of development providing means for their life to get a little bit better day by day and to be able to see that that rising standard of living and to bring good governance from the host nation to bear along with the host nation security forces illiteracy literacy education is part of it but a literacy rate measured by the way we do in the west i would submit does not necessarily indicate a lack of intelligence the oral tradition in afghanistan is very strong and to make progress in afghanistan we have to operate within the cultural norms and expectations within afghanistan while still bringing the good governance the security and all those things there and providing better services to the population than our enemies thank you general thank  the national security challenges we face in pakistan and afghanistan just a quick word on the pakistan master holbrooke thank you for all your efforts including your efforts to pass the reconstruction opportunity zone legislation  as you and the president said military force alone is not going to resolve the challenges here we've got to have a comprehensive strategy and certainly economic support especially in the in the weight of free trade opportunities is important so if you have any update on where they are in the senate pre shared i know you've been in conversations with senator cantwell but before you answer that let me just say with respect to pakistan i think enormous progress been made a short period of time the pakistani government the new government and i think now the people of pakistan now see the challenge of the pakistani taliban as not just the u s is or the u s is problem but clearly a problem for the people of pakistan and that that's brought about a sea change and we need to make sure that we continue to work with the government should they take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves make sure that out of this refugee crisis it's clear that the pakistani government with our help and support is able to provide the resources so that doesn't turn into something that undermines our support in that area i want to briefly turn to  the afghan we have to win over the hearts and minds of the people and i think our previous approach was counterproductive in that regard so i'm pleased to see the changes there my question relates to  the program question because as you said master holbrooke i think there been serious shortcomings in the way ideas approached afghanistan and i'm very heartened by the changes that you've made one program that by a lot of the testimony of a lot of people seems to be successful at the local level as the national solidarity program i'd be interested on your in your thoughts on that there is a perception among some that  ideas the idea is not a fan of the national security program and has not been interested in fully supporting that effort i don't know if that perception is accurate or not i'm interested in your take on that but there is some concern that some of the proposals that are being made will undermine the efforts of the national security the national solidarity program and i'm interested in your views on that use of close air support missions or any air support missions to be counterproductive all the commanders and all the air crews are very carefully attuned to the necessity to prevent civilian casualties so we are saddened whenever any innocent civilian is killed we are continually adjusting our procedures many times in response to discover techniques that the enemy is using to place civilians between us and themselves in other words using them as a shield or intentionally trying to cause casualties a very serious matter it has our full attention two of the republican leadership i talked to senator kerry and many other senators but where it stands where it stood three hours ago where it stands right now could be different so i think i'd better just to for but maybe let me make it clear the president has spoken publicly about the value of this when your body passed the legislation it was a huge story in pakistan and a favorable story and we cannot thank you enough and we hope it will become law on the refugee issue let me just point out again that the refugees are in the arazi area and that is the critical issue on the bombing let me add to what general gregson just said a personal comment echoing what general mcchrystal and bass or i can very and i have all said publicly in the past a war could be lost over this issue if the war turns from a war against the taliban into a war against the pashtoon people we will lose the taliban propaganda is all designed to make that point we were successful in the eighty's and turning the soviet invasion into along those lines we can't let that happen to us that's why we're putting so much attention on what is called strategic communications a phrase i'm not comfortable with because it doesn't quite convey we're talking about we're talking about counter propaganda and colly been have been winning the propaganda struggle finally on the national side a program i consider the best program in the country twenty two thousand villages have been covered by it seven thousand have not a id may or may not have been supported in the past but i can assure you mr chairman they are one hundred percent supportive now or they're not going to be working on an integrated issues the seven thousand uncovered villages i've talked to bob zelic the president the world bank about increasing their support some of your colleagues have expressed support for it and we want to do everything we can to get this program going because it's one of the few programs that gets all the way down to the bottom levels thank you thank you thank you if i might just  put vast additional resources into this issue and very importantly have brought a new two star admiral admiral smith who was in charge of this issue in iraq out there as part of the headquarters team for general mcchrystal we have a team in my office working on the civil mil integration we are still lacking a civilian counterpart to admiral smith on the ground in kabul that's a very hard position of to fill so the resource front i think we've got enough and we talked earlier about counter narcotics some of that forty five million dollars we're taking away from cropper advocation will be used for public information and when you counter the narcotics issue you are also countering the taliban propaganda so i don't feel there's a huge resorts issue what there is is an intellectual problem about the nature of the enemy their propaganda is all negative that we're terrorists we defile their soil they're the true the government's corrupt you know the  internally displaced persons in pakistan initially it appears that the pakistani army was reluctant understandably to engage in conflict with their own population on the ground with the difficulty of doing so particularly when the taliban is involved in exercising the kind of of of of of  have been asked and have moved or run from where much of the fighting is taking place so they're living catch as catch can enter only displaced in their own country have we provided any assistance of any kind what are those and are there large number still left in the conflict zones in them in pakistan side in catch one phrase at the end of your question what if there is what sorry i didn't catch one phrase what if there is i didn't catch what you said after that i'm sorry that you my question goes to what is being done with the internally e affectively became the chief refugee officer of the united states and he we mobilized secretary clinton announced one hundred ten million dollars of aid immediately that's already been dispersed and we then wrote a letter to  the leadership asking for two hundred million dollars to be added to the supplemental at the last minute for this issue that was done we found other money and our total right now is three hundred eighty million dollars now that's the is i was sent out by the president to visit the camps as the chairman mentioned the rest of the world has not responded in kind normally we give about a quarter to a third of international assistance and humanitarian crises in this case were well over fifty percent about fifty five percent that's not right so the president sent me to the gulf to talk to the gulf states and i went to four of them he himself went to saudi arabia are asking whether or not what about the the entire nomic relief organizations that we understand have been playing an important role that is not the case i don't want to get into castigating other groups but i but we honestly believe that other countries including the ones you are referring to have not done enough and we are talking to them continually about this some like the united arab emirates just gave thirty million dollars oman gave twelve million but we think more can be done after all these are countries which are neighbors of pakistan with a lot with huge connections in addition we have mention prior to your arrival here we have mobilized the pakistani american community we're sending women pakistani american doctors out there for obvious tree since in the camps there's been a vet we have the swat if you take your cell phone and you text s w a t swat and then you send it to the number two zero two two two he will automatically contribute five dollars to the u n h c r i urge you all to do it i have i've maxed out twenty five dollars is the maximum and we're doing everything we can to support this effort we're taking the leadership role secretary clinton and the president are incredibly concerned and we also have a economic advisory team headed by the white house's international economic expert david lipton on their way out there to talk about the additional pressure this is putting on an economy which is in deep trouble and which had to take out an emergency i m f loan of six point seven billion dollars last year with a quarterly report due next week and they're supposed to raise energy prices by ten percent next week under the i m f i m f agreement the whole rest of the country sixty percent of the people in pakistan earn less than two dollars a day the u n minimum level we are deeply concerned at the overall strategic political and humanitarian implications of this there is there's no country in the world getting more attention right now from president obama and the secretary of state and the rest of us than pakistan on exactly these issues thank you think it was if i might i'm sorry  some people it became obvious to me our biggest military problem in afghanistan was totally ignored by the press and a lot of people in politics and that is why we were concentrating on contracts in iraq by for profits we totally ignored what appears to me as  huge abuses of nonprofits that were getting funds to do the economic development that that's where the problem was the lack of economic development giving people that alternative not say frankly on both of you with the successes we saw her with the reduction of poppies and then to see the lack of response or that we had in a province that had a major major and i open you to comment about the major reduction we had in that province and the fact that we are looking at are the the us ag experts going in for one year and not knowing local expert culture not knowing the local experience not being able to really understand the application of their knowledge do use see some real changes we need to do in the way we handle that and i would open your comments about the problem of what what i believe was major problems with the application of the contracts with the non profits on the contract issue we could not agree more a priority arrival in the hearing we discussed how many contracts were holding up renegotiating and reexamining and i gave some examples in regard to the counter narcotics issue we consider that immense importance but we do not think crop eradication has had any negative effect on the real enemy in fact it's only driven farmers into the hands of the taliban and so we're downgrading crop around acacia and redistributing the resources that you've appropriated for that to an addiction rule of law going after the big guys and and those involve people in the government the drugs are a important but not the primary source of funding for the enemy they get a lot more money out of the gulf according to our intelligence sources and al qaeda doesn't get money at all from drugs that goes to local taliep on in places like khandahar and they can also get it from extortion but we recognize the importance of the drug issue so but what i'd like to do if you're interested mr chairman is that another day come up and brief you in detail and bring with us the entire panel please people military and civilian working on counter narcotics because i think it's such an important sub issue and we ought to do it as a coherent interagency whole but i appreciate your comments about contracts we really are spending a lot of time sifting through a lot of debris which we found when we arrived but the application of that the lack of application contracts where people were actually and i'm i'm ranking member on pure men were actually showing photos of their their gross they were planning and they were photos of other locations and then they we were keeping on that and the children  and then were watching american troops destroy daddy's crop but didn't see us plan it and i have to say again it seems to me that the transition is how to slowly wean off and maybe through series of phasing in an economic off turn it is and phasing out the the lands that can be used and we don't need to talk or details about how to do it but not an all or nothing thing but a phasing in so that there's an economic alternative as the ability to grow the crops are slowly wind out the proper application of technology so that a fair approach yes doable not only the doable in the in the way that you described but it has to be done that way  to repeat what we've said eradication applied soley was spraying the crops or whatever else we're doing does nothing but hurt the subsistence farmer who's not getting a great profit from this stuff anyway and drive them as the ambassador said into the arms of the taliban we can go to alternative crops it's proven in other places in the world that we're tremendously troubled with the growth of poppies and the opium trade particularly that the thailand part of the golden triangle is now growing designer coffee that sells for three dollars a cup here in washington and the farmers get the profits but the key is providing the security and also providing the improvements to the infrastructure so the farmers can get their crops to market without paying twenty seven tolls between kabul and iran or wherever it is that they're going we can all of it's an all up approach it's also codified strongly in all the best practices of counterinsurgency  and with the new leadership on a process here in washington with ambassador holbrooke we're hopeful that we can bring everybody into this to fix the problem this channel i was just handed a report as it's nothing we can do about it but just so you know that the embassy in kabul is just reported a large explosion on the airfield at the site of the jalalabad provincial reconstruction team that's the province that the congressman was just talking about some you know well from your own trips we initial reports are unclear as to whether any americans have been injured and thank you for that we'll watch as we want to watch that it only reminds us i think and the most graphic possible way what dangers our civilian and military personnel face on a daily basis and the fact that so many of them in both uniform and civilian clothes are voluntary and to go out is comfortable with they do it understanding the risk that they take but it's no less notable and noble for them to do it so let's hope that nobody nobody was injured and that to my witnesses you've been good enough to say that you stay to one we've got a few minutes left we have three people that haven't asked questions yet and i'm going to ask if they would ask you questions try to keep within a couple of minutes whatever so we can hold up our end of the promise on these witnesses i understand of the voting is kept everybody going back and forth so i apologize but we i thank the gentleman i too have a news report ambassador from the new york times says an airstrike believed to have been carried out by united states drone killed at least sixty people at a funeral for a taliban fighter and was there a  stun residents of the area and local news reports said details of the attack remain unclear the death toll was exceptionally high they're saying that if the reports are accurate the strike could be the deadliest since united states began using aircraft to fire remotely guided missiles now invested or holbrook attacks on afghanistan and pakistan seem to have caused united states to lose ground as we attempt to stabilize the region inevitably these attacks when there are mass produced report that innocent civilian deaths including the deaths of women and children result from drone attacks and that they've been these attacks have been met with hostility by the citizens of afghanistan and pakistan now i would just like to know do you think that these would you address the role that these drones used in pakistan and afghanistan by the in the new inner agency strategy with the department of defense and also when considering the use of drones what consideration has been given to the potential increase in extremism among the population due to their use vast very tough set of questions and you and i have different opinions on this but before i respond directly like general gregson to make a substantive specific response to what you just said and then i'll come back i'll direct i was made aware of that report shortly before we came into the hearing room we take any reports of innocent casualties very seriously we grieve for any innocent people that are killed or hurt in any of these actions you are correct that we have to very carefully balance the objective we're trying to achieve with the strikes with the creation of more disaffected people and creation of more enemies i don't know the details  on a single strike but i can guarantee that it will be fully investigated and will insist on a full accounting of ambassador holbrooke congressman as you and i have discussed privately  really i'm really ready to talk about this on any level of detail but we have american troops lives on the line here and it is and we have a huge really important strategic relationship with pakistan at a critical juncture party arrival we spent a great deal of time talking about the refugees the economic crisis and with two with great respect i would rather continue the general gregson can you provide now or for the record the number of civilian contractors by category working inside of afghanistan versus our regular military force and if you had to guess today are they equal in number and what about their responsibility let me take that for the record if i could i'm very interested in that and i will provide more detail for the question is well let me state that what worries me about this whole central asian engagement is the revolving door in and out of government multi million dollar contracts many interests and most wars sometimes justified by contractors drawing us and our people deeper and deeper into a region of the world that we have very little competence to quell it appears to me we are being drawn into the war inside pakistan for swaps and fatah and my question to both of you is should that war be ours pakistan's challenge from the extremists is severe we can't win in afghanistan without pakistan succeeding so to the extent that we can we are helping pakistan with this problem we are pakistan's a sovereign nation they have a competent armed forces we are not putting ground troops in there we are providing help and to help them build a counterinsurgency capability to include doctrine equipment and training could i ask ambassador holbrooke is mr milton beard din working with our efforts in any way associated with you or other parts of our government right now milt bearden yes mil i left germany as a bass or in one thousand nine hundred four and he has not been involved he may be working with other people in the government but i don't know but there's no professional connection between  i've asked myself the question has the i s i ever told the united states the truth about anything and when one looks at the internals of pakistan and some of these ideas that we have from the administration about  opportunity zones and about where we're going to do all this development and so forth would you think that that government would put would would support its own interests in certain provinces and exclude other provinces and as i look at some of the maps that have been submitted for the record we're going to do all this development so to speak if i look at the trade deficit in textiles today we endure with pakistan we're down from eight hundred thousand workers at the beginning of this decade in our country and in textiles to less than half that now are textiles from pakistan has increased exponentially you would think that there'd be a lot more of a middle class inside of pakistan for all the jobs that we've given up in this country so what makes us think  we're going to do more of that it's going to have any impact it seems to me that there's a funnel and the funnel is the central government of pakistan and there are certain provinces where they hold power in certain provinces where they don't and we are being drawn into a situation that we have very little ability to control because we have a government there that has its own interests so i just i just say that for the record because i really don't see how we are going to change that and what happened back in the sixty's do you sometimes have a deja vu as you look at what you're facing in afghanistan and pakistan right now you know back within the vietnamese cared more about their individual villages and regions than they did about any sense of security for the nation we weren't effective there and now we're in an area with even less contact ability experience so what makes you think that we're going to make a real difference here working with the government like pakistan where they have their interests talked many times and i greatly respect and i'd like to address at least one of the three big issues she weighs just as many as you like well thanks a lot it has to come let me ask questions that let me let me start with the last one first of all you you promoted me i wasn't in charge of anything in vietnam i was twenty two years old and they sent me down to the lower mekong delta but i did spend time working on programs which are analogous to what we have in afghanistan and there are structural similarities between the two countries the number one problem is the sanctuary pakistan in the case of afghanistan cambodia laos and north vietnam the case of vietnam there are also problems of governance and corruption and all this there are many structural sinhalese but there is a core difference the vietcong and the north vietnamese never at any point posed a direct threat to the american mainland the people were fighting now in afghanistan and the sanctuaries in pakistan as general gregson said if we get we have to fix the pakistan sanctuary problem in order to succeed however you define success in afghanistan so i want to i want to say that i personally learnt from my vietnam experience things i'm trying to apply in my present job but i also question the vietnam involvement and left and took a leave of absence from the government over it during the nixon administration in this case i believe in what we're doing i'm fully committed and i think every american should say not should we be there but how can we succeed we inherited a lot of programs which weren't successful we're fixing them point by point this committee's oversight in this is indispensable not gulp secondly in regard to textiles i'm not an expert on this issue which is one the most complicated the united states but pakistan is sixth or seventh in turn as of exports the u s textiles it is at about don't hold me the exact number but it is about one sixth less than a sixth of the china size and there's mexico and other countries in between the r o z legislation which congressman van hollen has proposed and senator cantwell as is advocating in the house and the senate would affect only about four or five million people in all of pakistan and  so and if pakistan is a national security priority for the u s and i believe it is the administration i work for believes that is i would ask respectfully recognizing the immense special complexities of this issue it be considered in this in this particular country in connection to our national security interests as some of my colleagues in the military have said americans could because people out of out of work in the the western tribal areas join the taliban and jobs could reduce that there is a causality on this legislation to our national interests american lives it doesn't exist anywhere else in the world and that's why president obama has gone out of his way to to support what i would call in shorthand for the van hollen can't well slightly different versions of the legislation put a couple of remarks in the record one by the former russian general in the soviet afghan conflict who said afghanistan taught us any valuable lesson it has been and always will be impossible to solve political problems there with force i would also  though it was one of the most meaningful things as a tell me that has ever happened in their lives because you took the time to listen to them you took the time to try to understand their concerns about their home country either home country and it just meant a lot and i really appreciated and and they appreciated how important is that i mean it seemed as if you took that very seriously i mean that those just support of the pakistani americans and most of us have pakistani americans in our districts how support on point is that to what you all are trying to do well mr chairman i want to publicly thank congressman cummings and congresswoman sheila jackson lee for leading this effort and on the republican side although he was not up that meeting congressm burton who co chairs the pakistan caucus this is a personal initiative of sector state clinton and the congressional effort to bring in a group of leading pakistani americans to reinforce our efforts was just fantastic i ready mentioned before you were here the issue of the pakistan american women doctors with what you're familiar with and i just want to thank you for this the diaz spirit communities as general gregson has already said  resources of the united states not sufficiently utilized there's also an afghan community and we want to work with them in fact i i think some of them are in your district yes you have something on that general i'm sorry did you have something on that you look like you want to say something earlier we said we were talking about people with special skills and language capabilities and cultural understanding and i only made the point that we're a nation of immigrants we have many many people across the country with very very special skills that we need to tap into dari speakers pash two speakers a number of the languages that don't make the top ten in college studies but are critical to our effort now just one question and that just to be at their spending h r fourteen sixty three which presents congressional findings regarding dr abdul confound of the pakistan's nuclear weapons program according to those found it found their findings kind confessed to participating in an international network that provided nuclear technology to other nations the government of pakistan released khan from house arrest  llama by after only five years and as we feel use to allow the united states government the opportunity to interview kind of how how do our news strategies look at nuclear weapons objectives address these developments and how do you reconcile our karen optimism about interagency cooperation given pakistan's position to date with regard to  the nuclear issue itself congressman i previously respectfully said i want to stick to a longstanding policy of discussing that only in executive session it is the most sensitive issue but we  share we pay a great deal of attention to it on the question of a q khan before i entered the government i was i spoke repeatedly on the subject i think it is inexplicably that when he when this whole of business broke out about six years ago that the u s was not immediately involved interrogations and we have repeatedly stated that at this time we share your concerns at this time it is my understanding and i strive to use those words advisedly because it's second hand that this issue is no longer relevant in the sense that he's old and apparently unreliable and that given the strategic crisis challenge we face we are focusing on many other issues as well but i have discussed that with the leadership of pakistan i have made my views known i think you would find you and i share the same views i wish i could give you more satisfaction on that but i think  think i can at this point i am very disturbed i think this man did more damage to us than any other person to the world than almost any other person the side of osama bin laden himself thank you very much  e that was about financial statements or whatever financial that is not to be allowed in my unit was consent on that any public record that's already submitted obviously will be a public record and that'll be allowed but we're going to allow the witnesses to respect whatever public obligations they have to record and and that's what we'll have for that now i want to thank witnesses for being here and for generously going beyond the time period on that we had a lot of interest right appreciate that i also want to recognize mrs holbrooke who is here for the hearing this morning thank you for joining us i hope he's taking you to lunch you know find some time in the schedule on that we haven't cut into that again thank you thank you for parents with the other day when we had all those votes if it today's