good morning today the house armed services committee meets to receive testimony from outside experts on afghanistan getting the strategy right today our general starting in two thousand and six i began referring to afghanistan as the forgotten war we allowed ourselves to be distracted by a war of choice from the war i think the president was right to call so i was greatly encouraged by the serious approach president obama took in reviewing the conflict earlier this year on march twenty seventh president obama announced a new strategy for afghanistan and pakistan and in my opinion it wasn't just a new strategy it was our first strategy present underlined his approach by sending twenty one thousand additional troops and a new leadership to the german question is simply the best we've got and we're very fortunate to have him population centric counterinsurgency campaign that would protect the population build the afghan security force and work to improve the afghan government as my colleagues know i'm a strong leadership is the right approach suggests that our primary mission should be to train and equip more men afghan security forces that we should not add u s troops to the sixty eight thousand already there or on the way president again faced a momentous decision charting a path for never understand he's undertaking a serious review of the strategy in afghanistan will make a decision as a commander in chief in the near future i believe he feels the same sense of urgency we all feel and i hope we can all support his desire to make sure that we get afghanistan right congress however will be ultimately involved in the decision to help us work through some of these issues we're here today to hear three experts who will help us highlight the questions about each path forward and think through what is most likely to work and i thank each of them for their parents here and we appreciate it very much not turn a good chairman thank you for calling this hearing today welcome to our witnesses general keane it's great to have you back before the committee mr chairman i commend you for holding this hearing in early september general mcchrystal provided the secretary of defense a sixty day assessment on the security situation in afghanistan with the release of the mcchrystal assessment on the president's and sowing strategy review our country finds itself in a debate over our future commitment to the conflict the debate is largely taking place in the media with the congress and the white house is largely passive player that's why today's hearing is so important a true national debate on the war cannot be packaged in a made for t v two minute soundbites and seven hundred word op ed columns pram with rhetoric the congress is where national policy debates be long and the armed services committee is congress's designated venue for addressing matters of war we must recall that the president himself who called for a public discussion of the war in afghanistan in the absence of the commander in chief leading the debate i think the best way this congress and the american people can evaluate our next steps in afghanistan is to have general mcchrystal testify chairman skelton and i sent letters to secretary gates requesting general mcchrystal testimony we're still waiting for an answer so where are we in the debate after nine months in office president obama's afghanistan policy is in the same place where he found it in january in a state of drift and lacking direction six months after outlining a strategy which calls for executing and resourcing and integrated civilian military counterinsurgency coin the president has once again called for a review of our strategy and now questions the underlying assumptions of that strategy the current strategy review is put into question the nature of the threat we face in afghanistan and whether we have the right strategy to defeat the threat while the question of whether to send additional forces into afghanistan may seem to be a detail of the larger debate i think it's the correct place to begin the discussion the president's response to general mcchrystal is requests for forces will reveal how he views the threat and what strategy he intends to pursue in afghanistan as we've recently learned words on a white house white paper are easily erased the forces you put in the field that demonstrate the true nature of our commitment to our military our country the citizens of afghanistan and our enemies i mean agreement with chairman skelton on what must be done in afghanistan i believe that to prevent al qaeda from returning to afghanistan we need to leave that country in a stable position i think the president's march strategy had it right fully resourced counterinsurgency strategy is the best way to ensure that the taliban will not run the shadow government out of kandahar and play host to qaeda fully resourced coin mission has proven has a proven track record of defeating insurgencies and its general mcchrystal lowest risk option presently we find ourselves in a stalemate in afghanistan and the taliban has the momentum as general mcchrystal stated in his assessment failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near term the next twelve months wrist an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible in other words time is of the essence and he wrote those words over a month ago our forces need a strategy that everyone in the chain of command supports in word and indeed given the urgency of the situation i have a number of concerns about how the debate in washington will affect the war in afghanistan first i'm concerned about the continued drift of our afghanistan strategy it's unfair to our forces in theater to fight a war while the strategy remains in limbo last week the president told members of congress that his decision will be timely my hope and expectation is that the president will make a decision on resources in the coming week and we cannot win if we conduct quarterly strategy changes to be sure nips and tucks are appropriate but wholesale reconstructive surgery is a recipe for disaster my second concern is the looming intelligent proponents of a minimally resource strategy which there are a few if any who are military experts question the nexus between the taliban and al qaeda is to disrupt dismantle and defeat al justifies a more limited war strategy on the basis that we can now tolerate omar's taliban in afghanistan we all know the perils of driving intelligence analysis to preferred policy outcomes my last concern is that the debate is muddying the clear national security interest at stake in this war if the conflict in afghanistan is not worth the cost then what conflict is worthy in my view afghanistan  ground zero when it comes to the rest of the world where al qaeda safe havens narco traffickers and nuclear weapons connect if there is a venue for a military that has been reoriented to fight irregular forces th homeland over eight years ago this will endanger our homeland and put our forces at risk i look forward to a candid discussion on these important issues thank you again for being here this morning thank the gentleman and before this distinguished committee and also i'm happy to join dr steve bedell and and dr tiller here this morning let me say upfront while there are many options for the way ahead in afghanistan there is a single choice which offers the united states and the afghan people the opportunity to succeed against the taliban insurgency and thereby stabilize the country that choice is general mcchrystal and general petraeus is kind of uncertainty a strategy with the appropriate level of military force civilian personnel and financial resources to want to stand that statement we must know what has happened in afghanistan since the invasion of two thousand and one and why this is the only remaining viable choice it is a fact that afghanistan beginning in two thousand and two and increasingly so in two thousand and three became a secondary priority in the war in iraq if indeed it remained as such and so this year two thousand and nine when only now we are beginning to shift our priority effort from iraq to afghanistan as such as a secondary effort despite the addition of nato forces and resources afghanistan has always been operating at the margin and in most of those years below what was required in forces and resources not surprising the taliban advantage this vulnerability and not only reemerge but have been able to gain the initiative to the point the momentum is on their side particularly in the south and east add to that a weak ineffectual central government plagued by corruption election fraud and legitimacy issues afghanistan has now become a major challenge it is appropriate to ask is afghanistan worth the continued sacrifice of u s lives and try what should be our strategic goal is an unjust been and goals and resources appropriate let me briefly answer those questions by stating our strategic goal in afghanistan should be a secure stable afghanistan without an al qaeda sanctuary and yes it is worth t continued sacrifice to achieve that goal not only because a stable afghanistan is in our national interest but its stability is inextricably linked to the stability in pakistan the al qaida center of gravity is not afghanistan it is pakistan a loss of afghanistan is a win for the taleban and the al qaeda in pakistan with potential serious consequences for pakistan while there are few our condo in afghanistan it is clear they supported one another going back to pre nine eleven when the taliban would not give up the al qaeda when united states allied attack was imminent moreover the taliban is very current on i e d technology and us tactics taleban we cannot conveniently separate the two the honest to goodness usable nuclear arsenal and it's a country that's currently waging an insurgency against a variety of terrorists and insurgent groups already within its own borders should pakistan collapse and risk the security of its nuclear arsenal american security would be directly a threat the problem is we have very little ability to deal with that threat directly i would much rather that we were able to deploy the troops are currently thinking about deploying for counterinsurgency in afghanistan to assist the pakistanis and prevailing in their insurgency which is more important to us i would like to be able to persuade the pakistanis to shift their threat assessment from india to internal problems and transform their military from a conventional force to deal with a hostile to counterinsurgency force that could assist in defeating their internal insurgency we have very limited ability to do any of these things directly in large part because we are so unpopular within pakistan in a situation in which our ability to deal directly with the threat that matters to us the most is so limited arguably the appropriate way forward is t invoke the hippocratic oath and at least do no harm don't make a situation that we have very little ability to fix directly any harder to deal with than it is already and it seems to me that one of the more important ways in which u s policy could if we are not careful make things importantly worse in pakistan is if the counterinsurgency project in afghanistan fails the karzai government falls and we get either chaos and a renewed civil war within afghanistan or a taliban restoration with potential revolve with these across the border now that i think suggests that we do indeed have important interested stake in afghanistan but they're in direct and they're also limited in nature we could succeed in afghanistan and if the pakistani government does not put its own house in order they could fail in their counterinsurgency anyway if pakistan does put its house in order and if they devote the resources at their disposal to resolving their own insurgency we could fail in afghanistan and the central threat to u s national security the stability of pakistan could be secured anyway we do have important interests here but they are not unlimited and the more important of them are indirect what is it worth spending to secure or important but limited in indirect interests in afghanistan in many ways the natural intuitive response is if we have limited interests in afghanistan let us pursue them with limited means and a variety of limited means have become very popular in the public debate there are perhaps a half dozen or more that have been widely discussed including but not limited to shifting from a combat emphasis in afghanistan to one that would put the primary stress on training and advising afghan indigenous forces or switching from a large counterinsurgency effort in afghanistan to a more counterterrorism oriented strategy based on the use of drones in northwest pakistan and many others in the interest of time i won't go through them all in substantial detail my statement does that and i'd be happy to follow up and q and a what i want to do however is make an overarching characterization of many of these proposals and their analytic dynamics and that is that most of the middle way that have been proposed as ways of securing our interests in afghanistan at lower cost than the kind of integrated multi dimensional and very expensive counterinsurgency strategy that general mcchrystal has proposed the middle way is an important respects represent taking bits of that program single elements single dimensions pulling them out of context and trying to do them alone without the rest leadership targeting for example is an orthodox part of integrated counterinsurgency training and advising an indigenous military is a central part of orthodox counterinsurgency orthodox counterinsurgency theory however claims and i believe soundly that the pieces of a normal counterinsurgency strategy are mutually supportive and provide synergistic benefits when executed together the ground forces that secure the indigenous population make possible governance improvements in economic development governance improvements and economic intelligence that we need to find the targets the pieces all support one another if you take individual bits out of context and try and do them alone what i think you get is yes a less expensive campaign but one whose probability of success is lower than if we did the entire integrated package together and that means that this problem of middle ways is a microcosm of the general problem of u s policy in afghanistan which is we can invest more and reduce the risk to us or we can invest less and increase the risk to the middle way of cost but they produce lower odds of success in exchange and there is no way out of the vice grip of this dilemma for afghanistan there is no magic silver bullet middle way that can provide comparable odds of success at lower call this does not necessarily make them bad ideas but what it does is throw you back into the same problem of having to make a value judgment between what are you willing to pay in order to reduce the risk to the security of the national of the united states by a given amount it would be nice if there were some way of getting the same reduction in risk at substantially lower cost and unfortunately i don't think that's available to safety and security of the american people what public discourse about afghanistan unfortunately has failed to stingel is clearly among that ultimate objective certain missions that may or may not advance set objectives and specific strategies for accomplishing a particular mission or theater commander has quite properly focused on strategies for accomplishing his assigned mission as he currently understands it and which quite put it put it to put it quite simply is to stabilize afghanistan or at least to prevent the government of afghanistan from falling but policymakers in the executive branch and here in the congress must confront the larger question whether stabilizing afghanistan through counterinsurgency would sufficiently enhance the safety and security of americans enough given the cost and failed it would be a mission worth pursuing we are in afghanistan as a direct result and a justified response to the terrorist attacks on the united states in september of two thousand and one the prime overriding purpose of our intervention there is counterterrorism although i hasten to point out military force is only one counterterrorist tool south asia is only one possible place to employment to employ it a more refined version of the overall question for policymakers is is the difference between the terrorist threat americans would face if we wage counterinsurgency in afghanistan and the threat we would face if we do not wage a sufficiently large and in the right direction of course to justify the cost and risk of the counterinsurgency itself by way of framing the issue is in that respect very similar to the way stephen billed as the counterterrorist objective in afghanistan we invariably here is to prevent terrorist groups and especially establishing a safe haven there or reestablishing a safe haven their terrorist groups do make use of territorial havens when they of them but the use by a terrorist group of such a haven does not imply that its operations would significantly impeded if it did not have one most important activities that transnational terrorist groups have performed in safe havens also can be and are reformed often with comparable elsewhere is friends and ideological soul mates in the afghan taliban were to offer a renewed hospitality inside afghanistan a location there would offer a few attractions over its current haven in northwest pakistan and in any event it's not apparent to me how a move of al qaeda or part of it from one side of the duran line to the other would substantially affect the threat the group poses to us in such threat should be no less from was zero stand than it would be from there regardless of whether a renewed haven inside afghanistan were attractive and useful to al qaeda or any other terrorist group there is a further question of whether a counterinsurgency would preclude it a haven would not require a patron would control over all of afghanistan but instead only a small slice of it as described in general  assessments a properly resourced strategy and using the general's words a properly resourced strategy would leave substantial portions of the country those portions not deemed essential to the survival of the afghan government outside the control of that government or of u s forces in short even a properly resourced counterinsurgency that was successful in the sense of accomplishing the mission of bolstering the government in kabul and stabilizing the portions of the country where most afghans live still would leave ample room for a terrorist haven inside afghanistan should a group seek to establish a further the question is whether a group seeking a haven would require either afghanistan or pakistan radical islamic including al qaeda have other unstable place to which to turn somalia and yemen are two that immediately come to the terrorist threat to u s interests even just the sunni jihad is portion of that  does not all emanate from afghanistan or from any other single place one hears frequent mention of link back to afghanistan or pakistan but links do not necessarily mean direction or instigation in many cases they mean much less perceptions of what we do militarily in afghanistan or have other effects that are important to counterterrorism and this gets under the heading of do no harm a little mention these include resentment over western troops occupying muslim lands and anger over the civilian casualties and other collateral damage that are an inevitable byproduct of even the most carefully prepared and skillfully executed counterinsurgency operation a reflection of this inside afghanistan has been the increase over these past few years in the number of insurgents fighting against us and our allies many of whom we place under the label of taliban but have little or no identification with the extreme ideology of the principal taliban leadership the taliban are a loosely organized resistance concerned above all with their version of society politics and power inside despite the leadership's clear ideological affinity to and proven cooperation with al qaeda they are not driven by the transnational objectives associated with bin laden and zawahiri they're interested in an antagonism toward the united states is almost entirely a function of what the u s does inside afghanistan to thwart their the cause most likely to unite the taleban is resistance to foreign occupation of afghanistan they will tend to be stronger to the extent that our military presence there is seen as an occupation now the possible connection of events in pakistan afghanistan to pakistan has of course become a major part of the debate and has been stressed by both of my fellow witnesses i'd like to stress to keep questions on the dimension of the problem one is how much effect anything happening in afghanistan is likely to have on the politics and stability of pakistan we have a tendency to think of such questions in special terms with visions of malevolent influences somehow suffusing across international boundaries like a contagious disease but the future of pakistan will be influenced far more by forces inside pakistan itself those forces include the inclinations of the pakistani population and the will and capabilities of the pakistani military which is by far the strongest in several senses of that term institution in pakistan pakistan is more than five times the population of afghanistan its economy is ten times as large pakistani policy makers and the pakistani military certainly have a very keen interest in afghanistan partly because of concerns about pashtoon nationalism and mostly as a side in their rivalry with india but events inside afghanistan will not be the decisive or anything close to the decisive factor in shaping pakistan's future the other question is exactly what sort of influence even if marginal events in afghanistan are likely to have in pakistan and it is hard for me to see exactly how the vision of spreading instability would work in practice even if a ruling afghan taliban that is an afghan taliban that has reestablished a state or proto state inside afghan decided to turn their attention away from consolidated domestic consolidating domestic power to try to stoke islamize fire in pakistan and i don't believe they would given that the afghan taliban have been beneficiaries rather than enemies of the pakistani regime they would have few additional resources to offer and the pakistani taliban already have bases of operations in the federally administered tribal areas which appear as part of pakistan on maps but with just lamas as never effectively control in the meantime an expanded u s led counterinsurgency in afghanistan would be more likely to complicate rather than to alleviate the task of pakistani security forces in so far as it succeeded in pushing additional militants across the duran line a larger us military presence in the immediate region also would make it politically more difficult for the pakistani government to cooperate openly with us on security matters in the face of widespread negative sentiment inside pakistan regarding the presen inclusion mr chairman to absolute concepts such as victory versus the successes versus failure because this problem like many others offers no clear conception of victory we must instead carefully weigh costs and benefits of each contemplated course of action including the direct expenditure of resources in a counterinsurgency in afghanistan and what it would buy us in the form of lessons  e recognizing that no course of success and that every course entails my own weighing of these considerations leads to the conclusion that an expanded military effort in the cause of counterinsurgency in afghanistan would be unwarranted the benefits in terms of ultimately adding to the safety and security of the american people would be marginal and quite at best the difference such an effort would make in the terrorist threat facing americans would be slight at worst the effort would be counterproductive and would not reduce the threat at all and even at its best the benefit would be in my judgment outweighed by the probable cost of the counterinsurgency thank you mr chairman i look forward to the committee's questions we learn let me mention that the elephant in the tent is the legitimacy of the afghan government as a result of the flawed election yes i don't believe that the problems associated with this government that's fraudulent is as it is and as corrupt as it has been in of itself should trump what we're trying to achieve in terms of our national interests in afghanistan all that said what can we do about it we still have an election crisis taking place even though the election is over because i as someone insecurity about the results of all of that and his relationship with us i think that gives us an opportunity to do a couple things with him one is insist on what is in front of us is a trend transitional government as opposed to a permanent government with another election being held in have some say over who the members of that government should be we know who the maligned actors are and i'm not suggesting we go on a major anti cut corruption campaign i think the atmospherics with all of that would have some negative feedback i think we do this with precision just as we did in iraq we knew who the bad actors were and dealt with precision based on evidence and specifics we were able to move them all away from the media and other other interest groups so we should have some say about who is in the future of that government and then also of a benchmark and and how we're going to hold them accountable i would also convene members of the international community dealing with establishing the legitimacy in the sovereign state of afghanistan in the future in terms of this is not something we should do unilaterally we have countries in the region and other interested countries to do that make no mistake i think we should lead the effort and that should take place over the ensuing months as we proceed to establish a legitimate sovereign state and we should as part of that process encourage others who want to seek leadership positions and run for office encourage them to stay engaged and of course deal with karzai in terms of any attempts that he would have to discourage them so i think there are some things that we can do and this is really is in the realm of a political strategy for afghanistan that we don't spend much time talking about because where we're focused on on the insurgency and how best to the legitimacy of the karzai government is absolutely critical and is very problematic and this is the normal case in counterinsurgency as a general rule if the united states is involved in a counterinsurgency it's because there's an illegitimate local government that gave rise to an insurgency in the first place and therefore almost any time we do this we are going to have to confront the problem of serious misgovernance on the part of the host government and i think it's interesting and important to no that the mcchrystal report argues that governance and security are code weakly important and failure in either of these undertakings will produce a very high risk of mission failure overall and  again i think this is this is not an uncommon situation in counterinsurgency the election results over the summer heard i tend not to think that there are a transformational moment however at least for afghans there were widespread expectations  the election would be illegitimate and corrupt the magnitude was larger than some had expected but we have not yet seen the kind of legitimacy crisis in afghanistan that we saw for example in tehran over the course of the summer perhaps we will eventually we have not yet as a result i think what we have after the election in afghanistan is a situation where a very serious underlying challenge the legitimacy of governance has gotten worse not better but i don't think it's fundamentally transformed from a workable problem to an unworkable problem what has happened what has happened is a very difficult problem has gotten a bit worse either way to make any difference we are going to have to start using the leverage at our disposal as a result of our presence in afghanistan as a systematic means of changing governments not to produce as the central asian vala the secretary of defense famously put it not pretty switzerland and to cushion but to produce a degree of governance improvement that meets the minimum requirement of ordinary counterinsurgency theory which is only a stable preference on the part of the population for their own government over the insurgents this does not require that we eliminate corruption it requires only that we produce a persistent preference for the cars i or his replacement over a taleban that has never polled above single digits in afghanistan i think this is a doable undertaking but it's not going to be trivial or easy and it will require that we much more systematically use the resources at our disposal to this end and that requires that the military side of the house and i see itself as a mechanism for governance improvement as well as security which general mcchrystal does and that they cooperate very closely with diplomats and political specialists in the embassy in developing a program and a strategy for using the leverage we have to bring about the governance change that we need it's hard but i don't think it's impossible and i don't think it's unique to afghanistan thank you dr p learned mr chairman you're absolutely correct in putting your finger on this as a key issue not only as a problem of an illegitimate or what is seen as an illegitimate government something common in counterinsurgency but establishing that legitimacy is essential to success in the counterinsurgency the one additional thought i would add to what my tuco panelists have said is i think what we ought to encourage in terms of what we do right now is co optation and  incorporation of a range of interests and views in the afghan body politic through the traditional afghan way which is negotiation striking deals and not to pander wait for the next election if we want to model on this and i hasten to add it's not a very encouraging model but this may be as well as we can do you look at it as in bob way where there was a blatantly corrupt election engineer by mugabe and then the subsequent solution was to incorporate his opponent mr shankar into the government as prime minister now they've had a lot of friction since then but i think depending on the cooperation of mr abdullah the principal opponent of the cars i know something along those lines a government of national unity if you will would be the best that can happen during the next few weeks thank you very much thank you for your testimony i'm going to ask a question that is being asked by millions of americans why is not afghanistan the ultimate exercise in futility even if we are able to accomplish their what no one else has ever accomplished alexander the great failed there the british empire failed there twice i believe the soviet empire failed there even if we are successful where no one else has ever been successful would it really matter because the bad guys they're saying would just go into pakistan and then would we assist pakistan with additional investment of blood and capital and if we're successful there then the bad guys would go to somalia or yemen or some other place in that part of the world because many of the central governments there have little control of rural tribal areas and so they're asking if we make the huge investment that would be necessary of blood and treasure to win in afghanistan and pakistan in the words of the old farmer would  and start that there are two important dimensions at least in the question one is can we succeed at all in the second is with the problem simply go somewhere else even if we did succeed from the start with the second move to the  a potential base for terrorism there are many places around the world that would constitute at least secondary alternatives that al qaida would surely move to where afghanistan is unique is its geographic proximity to a threatened unstable country that has a nuclear arsenal and we're all qaeda is already operating and it seems to me that whereas there are many potential bases for al qaeda to operate in pakistan that collapsed and that as a result lost control of its nuclear arsenal as a unique threat to us geographically that's a problem that's very very different from yemen that's very very different from somalia i would certainly not advocate for myself deploying sixty eight thousand or more american soldiers to somalia to try and deny al qaeda haven there i think the problem of pakistan is a very different order and again the problem with that is we have very little ability to secure our interests directly and therefore we're stuck trying to moderate the threat in the ways that are available to us which prominently include afghanistan can we succeed in afghanistan anyway is this a graveyard of empires in which success is impossible i would begin by saying that the historical record is a bit more ambiguous and it's sometimes portrayed as being the three angle afghan wars for example are often cited as examples of how foreigners always fail in afghanistan with the exception of the first in the second to the british actually came out with a significant fraction of their interests at stake in the conflict it wasn't an unambiguous straightforward simple low cost conquest of a foreign country neither was it a situation in which britain was simply vanquished left with nothing and had no ability to secure its interests through its influence on afghanistan its like often is the case in south asia a muddy in between case let me speak to one of the more direct analogies that underlies the argument however the graveyard of empires that's the soviet experience in the country in many ways the soviet experience is a very poor guy to our prospects today to begin with the soviet union was recognized by all afghans within milliseconds of their arrival in the country as a hostile force that was pursuing its own interests and not afghanistan's the united states was much more popular among afghans in two thousand and one than we are now but we remain substantially popular among an important fraction of afghans we are much more welcome than the soviets that the soviets had an extremely poorly trained poorly motivated conscript military that was very poorly equipped for counterinsurgency we have one of the best trained best motivated and increasingly best equipped counterinsurgent forces in the history of  counterinsurgency the soviets were facing an opposition force that by the late one nine hundred eighty s numbered perhaps one hundred fifty thousand mujahideen estimates of taliban strength today are uncertain but they're nowhere near that perhaps in the twenty to forty thousand range moreover to pick another analogy that's popular vietnam relative to the naam the taleban coalition that we face in afghanistan is much much weaker there are deeply divided very heterogeneous collection of actors with very different interests very different motivations and very different stakes in the conflict that have substantial difficulty in coordinating their activities they're also radically unpopular among afghans who unlike the south  know what they would get if the taliban were to take over and have consistently said that they don't want it finally the taliban coalition although it's heterogeneous is almost entirely past afghanistan wall importantly pas especially in the south and east is not entirely so that also tends to produce constraints and limits on the ability of the taliban to expand all these things don't provide some sort of guarantee that if we just do x we will succeed in afghanistan  best we're buying a chance of success but i think it's an overstatement to say that success is impossible or that the chances of success are negligible thank the gentleman dr snyder thank you mr chairman thank you gentlemen for being here  after the perpetrators of the events and then i was very struck on the first page of your testimony this is the strongest public statement i've seen here in which somebody acknowledges on the inside how under resourced we did the war in afghanistan i'm just going to read it again to the fact that afghanistan beginning in two thousand to an increasingly so in two thousand and three became a secondary priority to the war in iraq and did indeed remain as such till this year two thousand and nine when only now we we are beginning to shift our priority to stand as such as a secondary effort despite addition of nato forces and resources afghanistan has been operating at the margins and in most of those years below what was required in forces and resources have a new the question i want to ask is this you all have discussed this topic as we all should in terms of what's in the interest of the united states i have also been struck by the discussion that's going o out in contrast with our debate in a one about what kind of a commitment we would keep to the afghan people and the people of afghanistan i've talked to two different house members in the last couple of weeks who have met with af legislators women afghan legislators and the message they got from these meetings were very eloquent please don't abandon us again now that is not a u s national security interest i believe it is an insist that we need to be cognizant of and none of you discuss that in your in your statement so my question is what impact if any on the decision making process going on here in the in the white house should our responsibility perhaps described as a moral responsibility to the afghan people be i was dr people are when you talk about spreading instability almost it almost seems to me as a euphemism because we know what will happen don't we if the taliban go back into an area where people step forward in leadership positions or women has stepped forward so we have to be sure what we're talking about we talk about spreading instability we're talking about people who have aligned themselves with the nato forces being killed so i'd like you just to comment on  deposed the taliban back in two thousand and one for all the reasons we understand and then brought back in karzai from an exile position and established a government and began you know to put the threads of a country back together again on the a new government i do believe that there are some moral it implications there for us as a nation and given what i've values or in terms of obligations to those people and i did say in my statement in afghanistan and pakistan one of the real problems we have is the skepticism about us staying in the in those countries are commitment and resolve because of our past history in afghanistan and in pakistan think the perception issue is a different issue than what i'm asking about i'm asking what is our what kind of moral obligation i do think there is a moral obligation i do think that our national interest should be what drives us but this is the united states and the values that we stand for certainly at play here and as i'm trying to indicate that when we when we took the taliban down and put and put rules and we still have some obligation there many of those people that we helped put in there are still there and we gave the afghan people certainly a considerable amount of hope in terms of what the future would be and we've done some good things there and i don't want to diminish those but yes it's there but our national interest should drive us primarily i think it's quite proper for certainly members of congress to weigh that as a consideration and for our policy makers in the executive branch to do that as well i would only say that as long as you do that we should be clear that that is the reason or the rationale or at least one of the reasons and rationales for doing what we're doing in afghanistan rather than being a would you respond to a large two arguments number one it doesn't matter which side of the duran line al qaida sets up its bases they're already here and so if they move over there it's no big it's not a significant difference and secondly as i understand a second argument is that what really matters is what happens in pakistan and that afghanistan even if it goes back to the taliban is not going to stabilize pakistan f shielding that much better than it does in pakistan and in my judgment certainly with taliban protection as a host again they would want to reestablish some element of that and also we have them we're beginning to have them bottled up a little bit in pakistan our intelligence has improved we're using a lot of the infrastructure that we have in afghanistan  operations some of this gets into the class of iran and so we will keep this in a public forum here but the ality of that is that the relationship that afghanistan to stability in pakistan and al is a real one in my view the al qaeda network and their training program and support program is tangibly the taliban not only the taliban  pakistan but taleban and in afghanistan and why would we suppose anything else i mean this relationship existed before nine eleven it was it was a cooperative relationship based on mutual interests and for them it was working it is still working in pakistan and the cooperation in afghanistan is a different nature so make no mistake it would be much more reestablished in what is now and i don't know how we can hope to continue to make progress in pakistan if we lose in  afghanistan it makes absolutely no sense it defies common sense to me to think that we would if we would take that risk where they declared center of gravity for the al qaeda it was the central front to kill americans in iraq that's gone because they lost that war it is in fact destabilizing pakistan why is that why is that such a central front in the reason is obvious these are the same people who attacked us and the same people that want to break the model spine of the americans and collapse our economic system by having multiple w w m d events in our country they have not given up on any of that and they want that country and they want those weapons and their relationship with afghanistan and the taleban pakistan i think is real and if we lost afghanistan for the life of me i don't see how that wouldn't be a major major impediment to what we're trying to do and assisting the pakistanis to stabilize the country thank you dr bell i want to get back to a discussion you and mr bartlett were having isn't it that afghanistan was relatively stable from the thirty's to the seventy's under a king who was not a strong central power of course but but but still during that forty fifty year period until you got into the assassinations that led to the soviet invasion in seventy nine that basically the place was yes that's correct it didn't have a strong central form of government but it was largely stable it wasn't a failed country people were worried about overflow into neighbors of the kind of instability that we're worried about today moreover that model relatively weak central government imperfect administration substantial poverty but relative stability is not uncommon in the developing world the debate over afghanistan's political future at the moment is in part about whether or not the afghan governing system of them is off about an era under the king is replicable today given the kind of demographic change that we've seen in afghanistan and the effects of the civil war and its aftermath so i think it's not trivially easy to simply reproduce that we have two major challenges as we try to work our way through this very critical part of the world the first one is there are a lot of as i've talked to  representatives of different governments urging them to support us in afghanistan not so much with the military but with the reconstruction resources  are they're afraid we're going to do the same thing we did previously and that's leave leave and they'll be left they'll be stuck holding the bag  the second the second issue is how do we what strategy do we use to convince them that not only we don't intend to do that but it's in everyone's best interests worldwide all the different countries even those that are neutral in this in this effort may be affected if afghanistan fails if the taliban takes takes control and al or some other yet to be determined terrorist organization has a base of operations so if you three what would you three gentlemen would address those two points how do we make the argument to them that we're not going to leave as we did the last time and how do we convince them that it's in everyone's best interest to help us there again not just with with military resources but reconstruction resources as well also the well i believe very strongly in what you just said because the skepticism as i mentioned before that's in afghanistan and also in pakistan is very real and in south asia or in general and as a result of that as i s i organization and others assisted the taliban to a certain certain degree because he felt he'd have to live with them again so these issues are out there and they're very pregnant and i would hope that one of the advantages that the president has as he's conducting this very deliberate review process is the opportunity for him to be very decisive about what his intent is and in afghanistan and very clear about it and i think it is an opportunity for him to to make the commitment to afghanistan in terms of stabilizing this country with the appropriate resources  and i think an unequivocal statement along those lines and people will judge not just what he says certainly but what he does what are what are the resources and what is the strategy that he's putting in play and i think it's critical i think you put your finger on something that's vital to a success in a counterinsurgency is the support of the people now we do have that support they they do want us stay they want us to succeed but they have every right to be skeptical about that the second point dealing with all the help look at we do need help we shouldn't bad this financial burden by ourselves and the other countries in the region that's been certainly help and other interested countries obviously nato was involved then and a lot of frustrations with nato with forty two countries there and very few of them providing combat forces and we just s wave our hands and give up on it but the fact that the matter is if they're not going to provide combat forces then this should be a financial relationship to afghanistan as a result of not providing those combat forces and i think we should be pretty tough about what our expectations are too bad that financial burden not by ourselves but with other countries in the region and also and i think the question of u s resolution will is obviously important in lots president in particular in the government large to stake out a clear declaratory position once we've decided what actions do indeed speak louder than words and credibility builds gradually over time through observed demonstrated actions on our part there's no way to change people's perception of our of our willingness to stay overnight it will only happen by in fact and by in fact turning the tide on the ground and demonstrating that we are willing to pay the costs if that's what we ultimately d conceptualize that and i think it was about a plan and what we had in the pentagon just to be honest about it but then very quickly in december of two thousand and one was the first time sitting together as a senior four star that i was told that they were thinking that we were going to go to war in iraq that was december two thousand and one we dropped afghanistan and the taleban in november  remember of two thousand and one and then general franks was given instructions to make plans and his organization intellectually started to get its arms around a much larger problem of going to war in iraq and some of us argue that the time that while i didn't i could see iraq in the future as to why something like that may in fact need to be done if we if we were not able to get our hands on on th  the fact of the matter is the leadership at the time believed that and you probably are aware of this that the last thing that we wanted to do was nation building and i think that was an overreaction to the previous administration and what we wanted to do was stand up the host country don't create an artificial dependency on us and give them the minimal resources so they would bring  their ministry and the services that they need to provide online much faster as opposed to the more robust model that was used in bosnia which many of the people in administration felt created this sort of artificial dependency protract that that was the strategy i think it was the wrong strategy to be quite frank about it i think time certainly has proved to be dr bill let me ask you very quickly said that the analytical benefits of war in afghanistan is a close call have to get that kind of information as to what's going on in afghanistan i would presume we have multiple sources of information he has the theater military commander would have one channel of anything you want to talk to him if you were developing a training and it was true of our generals no fault of their fault of people like myself for running the military and then provide that kind of foundation we have been at this now for a long time and we experience and he also has a great mentor and the two of them are the best probably that's ever been put together so i value their judgment quite a bit in terms of what needs to be done because sorry i had to be out of the room for a few minutes i might have missed some of your discussion about the taliban but to think about the discussion that's going on now and whether it's based on some assumptions that you believe are correct or in some cases may not necessarily be correct about the taliban and the relationship to iraq and what we did there are we suggested moving away from nation building and more toward deal making with the taliban whether that is a strategy that you think has more negative than positive opportunity i'll try to respond to that i think the main mistaken assumption that is being made is because what we know as the taleban is as ideologically extreme as al qaeda it is ideologically similar to it because it has had a proven alliance with al qaeda that it therefore follows that the taliban itself is some sort of security threat to the united states beyond what we are doing ourselves in afghanistan that's a mistaken assumption the taliban is one of the insular inward looking groups anywhere they are concerned overwhelmingly with what is going on in afghanistan they are not a transnational terrorist group they do not have larger global designs like al and bin laden do another assumption that has been taken as a so called no brainer but i think as much short of a no brainer is this business about well if the taliban did establish a some kind of proto state in afghanistan that that would mean automatically al qaeda would come back and have a safe haven where we've already addressed the question of how much that was what it would matter whether they did or not but if it's not an automatic certain thing the fact is that the biggest single setback that the afghan taliban has ever suffered a catastrophic setback was their loss of power over most of afghanistan thanks to our intervention in operation enduring freedom as a direct result of al qaeda terrorist activit that doesn't mean we're going to have a break between the taliban and al qaeda it does mean it would be a source of strain does mean that that afghan sanctuary we keep hearing about is not necessarily going to be any more attractive than what al qaeda has in pakistan right now  the taliban are clearly not a direct threat to the united states the taliban are not going to launch missiles at us the question is not whether they're a direct threat to the united states the question is would their either retaking control in kabal or their actions leading to a collapse of the current government kabal indirectly create a problem for us by enabling other actors either al qaeda in afghanistan or al qaida or many others in pakistan and again for my money the latter is a bigger problem moreover i don't think the right way of thinking about the taliban and al qaeda even in afghanistan is whether it's automatically an invitation to the as we live in a probabilistic world in which the whole problem here is one of judging relative likelihoods i don't think you can guarantee that al qaeda would be invited back also can't guarantee that it would and the problems of the relative likelihood and how much of a likelihood you're willing to tolerate the other issue i want to talk about though is this question of deal making and deal making with the arteriosclerosis probably the end game for this if we end up with something that looks like a success from our perspective is some sort of a deal in which elements of the taleban are civilian and brought into the government does legitimate political parties in exchange for other concessions that we can live with the problem is we can't get that right now because the other side or the other sides of the heterogeneous collection of actors on the other side of the afghanistan are by all indications unwilling to time now that the negotiations never go anywhere because the taliban keep insisting that a precondition for talking is that all foreign forces leave the country that's an obvious poison pill accurate it is been ahead of the curve it's been politically incorrect but you've been proven correct and so i want to thank you for your past testimony being here today additionally i agree with president b year in iraq training the afghan police and army units general bob livingston and i visit every three months and i know so many of the people in that unit and they felt so good about working with their afghan brothers people who do want to live general what do you think the capabilities and proper roles of the afghan national police and the afghan national army are they being effectively trained or the large enough what do we need to do put troop strength in and equi yes well thanks for all the support that you provide to our troops out there particularly with those those frequent visits i know they're appreciated you know that's a great question i mean the afghan national security forces you know clearly  the final solution to the problem we have we had the same problem in iraq in two thousand and six the level of violence had had reached epic proportions in iraq in two thousand and six it was way beyond the capacity level of the iraqi security forces to cope with it so we had to bring that violence down to a point where they could cope with it and then we were able to put together a strategy where we gradually and deliberately leave the country that's what's on fold in front of our eyes that is the way you have a successful end to that strategy and that's what the intent is here now can we do that well the problem is this growth of the afghan national security forces has been on a diet for the last seven or eight i mean they are at a pitiful number in terms of where they should be a little less than one hundred thousand police and now reaching four hundred thirty four thousand by two thousand and ten in terms of the growth of the army we have got to expand that dramatically now that the commanders certainly on the stand that the prime minister wardak clearly understands that he's at the four hundred thousand number and i believe the generals were at that is where so we're talking about doubling that so that's crucial the quantity it really makes a difference hold on to this thought we went into iraq in two thousand and seven we put about thirty five thousand people part of that surge from february to july the iraqis put on the street one hundred twenty five thousand troops from january to december of that year that were not there the previous year now that also contributed to the success and they don't get much credit for it because we have a tendency to talk about ourselves a lot but the fact that the matter is we have to do a similar thing in afghanistan we have to get those numbers up to where they make a difference we'll do side by side operations with them their growth and development will be very dramatic once we start doing this and i don't we've got to stop wringing our hands about the fact that there are a literate and it's very hard to find leaders listen in the final analysis this force we put together has got to be a little bit better than the other afghan we're not building an image of the of a western military force and we're certainly not building something like the iraqi military you have a history of a large standing army we're building a security force inside afghanistan for the afghans term cost of the counterinsurgency strategy because we're not looking just military costs obviously we're looking a lot of other things too if we're really going to adopt a counterinsurgency strategy that we're talking about capacity building  we're talking about before we can begin to talk about those costs on the cost i think a reasonable rule of might be roughly the scale of cost that we've been expanding in iraq iraq as a country of comparable population to afghanistan ordinarily counterinsurgency effort is scaled to the size of the population to be defended so i think to a first approximation a ballpark on the likely cost of continued operations on an annual basis in afghanistan will be that they could very well rise to what we have been spending in iraq they have been running radically low while substantially lower than that in afghanistan i think that's not a good guide to the future in terms of how many years we'll have to incur that scale of cost there's a paradoxical quality to the answer to that question if we are prepared to stay long enough to prevail there is a reasonable chance that we can negotiate the kind of deal that davis was talking about earlier because we can change the long term prognosis of the opponent what they think they could get in the absence of a deal in a way that opens bargaining space and makes a possible deal sooner a deal could end the war if it's reached much much sooner than the kind of five to fifteen year commitment that people often talk about for counterinsurgency if we are not willing to stay for the longer term we aren't going to get the deal in the short term that could shorten the war i think the expectation therefore has to be that if we're going to do this we have to be willing to pay scale costs for three to five years at a minimum if we are willing to do that perhaps we'll be fortunate and be able to negotiate a deal that would end that expenditure sooner than that but i think it would be very unwise to plan on that basis the bill is much more of a counterinsurgency expert than i and i have no reason to differ from his estimation of iraq's scale cost for at least three to five years the only thing i would add as a supplement to what steve said is i don't see any one deal that would cut short the war you know we're not going to reach a negotiated agreement with wilma where they're quite sure we can and should and must or the karzai government should and must reach individual deals with pieces of what come under the label of taliban but that's part about in afghanistan and the problems that that creates for reputation what have you on the part of the united states in pakistan because you're out you are assuming that really the major interests that we're example the question is in the longer term if what we do in afghanistan has the effect of creating government collapse and chaos there my sense is that's likely to have more negative consequences for stability in pakistan than the short term problem we could settle with factions quite assure taliban of mullah omar that might very well enable us to largely disengage from the conflict that would not end violence in afghanistan thank you mr chairman thanks to all three of you an even larger safe haven for al qaeda i don't know that we can in fact separate those two hands are just ahead not anybody arguing for the status quo in afghanistan d clear evidence that that's no longer the case if they come out of the fata if we were to abandon everything it leave you think that i mean it ok to taliban taliban which stay in the fatah not continue to threaten central government in pakistan one thing we should remember is that the taleban was the afghan taliban was midwifed by the government of pakistan as general mcchrystal noted in his assessment that was made public last month pakistan services intelligence director reportedly still does do business with the afghan taliban it is part of their way of hedging their bets i think much of our discussion about this topic undersells the government of pakistan in terms of their inclination and proven willingness and ability to cut their own deals and in this case not just cut deals but do business with the afghan taliban which they have to put it quite bluntly considered as one of their tools in their confrontation with india  strongly favors a major increase in civilian resources in afghanistan i think everyone does the issue is how do we go about providing that or do we are the resources being provided financially to the state department or is the state department's hiring process up to the job of bringing in the kinds of skill sets that are needed to do this but i think there's no question but that the military command in theater desperately wants a substantial increase and civilian expertise and  country i totally agree with that and you know we had excellent template for that and in iraq in the recent counterinsurgency there what the team that ryan crocker brought together and how they worked on increasing the minister capacity worked on corruption and a number of other issues and certainly the political progress in the country leading to national and provincial elections and not the least of which was those eighteen benchmarks that the congress united states insisted on them having so there's a lot of work to be done there if we don't do it the military guy that will befall them they'll try to do it themselves and some of that they can do but a lot of it they can't and that and so we really do need some help i've been encouraged by the secretary of state  her comments about how she wants to clearly and increase the commitment of the capacity of the state department to help in a counterinsurgency in a meaningful way to do the work to deal with governance and reconstruction and clearly governance is a been achieved so that's a challenge of itself going forward how would we expect the afghan government to be able to support a force of that size given has no obvious source of revenue we look at iraq for example you have the potential for oil revenue how would they manage that and support that going forward assuming they could even grow it to that point where you're absolutely right i mean i don't have the treasury to do it and that's one of the reasons why i did not grow to the level that i probably should have grown to that would have to come largely from our our finances as well as other countries that are willing to provide it but if we use that as  a cost and a limitation the cost of a u s soldier in afghanistan twenty five to one so as we build afghan soldiers keep in mind yes we're going to pay for that it's going to be considerably cheaper than it is for u s soldiers and as we build that capacity of eventually we'll be able to take those u s soldiers out and they'll be a net savings for us financially but it may require years of support and i'm curious dr bill if you have some thoughts as to how the afghan economy can be developed to the point where it doesn't require american dollars even to even to support the afghan national for i don't think it's reasonable to expect that the afghan economy is going to grow to the point where they will where they will be able to support a government's infrastructure civilian and judicial and military sufficient to meet their needs that was not the case in the one nine hundred thirty s or one nine hundred forty s when we had relative stability in afghanistan and afghanistan has always been a ward to some degree with the international community either their neighbors or great powers like britain or the united states the question is the magnitude of the support they will require from the international community and the political mechanism set up for the international community to manage this problem i think it's important when we think about building up the afghan national security forces to build into it a plan for building it back down again once the security threat goes down through a d d r process that makes it possible not to eliminate or liquidate the afghan military but to downsize it without destabilizing the country when we get to the point where some settlement or series of settlements has reduced the threat to the point where smaller force is possible that kind of build down process has a long lead time items involved like for example providing job training as part of the training regime for troops when they're brought in to the afghan security forces in the first place we need to start planning for that now i don't think however that because it's unreasonable to expect that afghanistan will itself be able to afford a government and a security structure a large enough to keep the country stable therefore the undertaking is hopeless and it shouldn't be undertaken in the first place i do think we need to anticipate the downstream problems and the downstream need to downscale and to ensure some sort of international mechanism for keeping the afghan state funded but i think if we do that properly that it's not necessarily a hopeless undertake it is a cost of all that included in your calculations as to what account  would cost this country or is that a sort of an add on cost down the way no i think that that's part for example much of what we were doing in iraq during the time of our larger combat involvement there was involved in building up the iraqi national security forces in ways that the iraqi government wasn't fully funding itself that that's a direct analogy to the situation in afghanistan in the out years that of international support for afghanistan that will be required even after the insurgency ends is a business and need not necessarily be funded entirely by the united states i think we need a broader diplomatic mechanism for ensuring the proper provision of revenue to the afghan government in the outyears thank you thank the gentleman mr woodman like mr chairman gentlemen thank you all so much for joining us today i really appreciate your candid and well thought out statements and gives us lots of information to ponder as we all look at the decisions that are before  all of us concerning the efforts there in afghanistan i do want to focus some of my questioning on afghanistan police and security forces i think those are important parts of the whole effort there and dr biddle i want to capture some of your thoughts and ideas on page ten of your statement you outlined some of the challenges in the benefits of focusing on training rather than fighting and you say training in combat are not meaningful alternatives in afghanistan the former requires the latter and you also go on to say that proper combat in vising and mentoring speech things like cannot provide an effective mass military instantly in the meantime someone must protect not just keep population centers but also the very mobilization infrastructure and recruitment centers or the mobilization infrastructure of recruitment centers supply depots bases and transportation connections needed to create the new afghan formations and my question goes to the point in this development of the security and police forces should it be the department of defense that does his training or should it be the state department it's my understanding that in general mcchrystal recommendations that he says in his initial assessment that the afghan police training and mentoring graham be transferred from the department of state's narcotics and law enforcement bureau to combined security transition command afghanistan and i understand the military is ready to assume this mission from your perspective do you think the military should take over this activity from the state department and if this recommendation is approved general  mcchrystal do you have any recommendations for a seamless transition with no disruption to training or mentoring operations and with that do you see the need for an immediate area there to maybe make that transition smoother and to make sure that it is without number one delay but also without keeping up the effort to stand up this police and security police  functions are traditionally thought to be central to counterinsurgency because they're the people that are on the ground in grassroots contact with the people already and have the most knowledge about the immediate environment but the kind of policing that people talk about in the context of counterinsurgency isn't writing traffic tickets or even arresting drug kingpins per se it's closer to paramilitary activity and in fact countries like italy for example who've been involved in this activity in the past often produce paramilitary organizations constabulary forces that are substantially more heavily armed and equipped than an orthodox police force and that have training that includes self defense in a higher threat environment that is typical of counterinsurgency as opposed to the kind of peacetime domestic policing that we normally think about when we think about police one of the reasons why i think it's not the right way of thinking about police training in afghanistan to hand this over to metropolitan police officials from the west imported afghanistan for this job is because this is such a radically different environment than any of those officials will have lived in prior to that time i think this is necessarily either a military police undertaking or a paramilitary training undertaking and i think the proper way to organize and control it is through i step on the military command in theater as far as the administrative mechanics of handing off i'll leave that to those who are closer to the day to day administration of this problem than i am the one point i would add to this however is there have been in the past serious challenges with coordinating different national contributions to training activities especially for the police it's very important that there be a uniform approach to doing this and that there be a degree of unity of effort in the way we train both the afghan police and the afghan military unity of effort is always complicated a multinational counterinsurgency effort i specially problematic here the management challenge is i think going to be at its greatest with respect to this business of coordinating different national efforts to assist in the training activity  words corruption in our having followed our efforts in latin america where the presumed goal was to keep the far from creating a narco state in colombia it strikes me as strange that i haven't heard any of you gentlemen talk about the need or even a desire to eliminate narcotics in afghanistan and a what i sense is almost sweeping under the rug of the corruption unless those two things are addressed i only see two outcomes in the case of corruption i don't see how the people can continue to have any sort of loyalty to cars i'm told by  rory rory stewart and others that cars i was referred to as the american bull that once you get outside the city really has no influence i'm told that his brother is one of the biggest dope dealers in afghanistan it's common knowledge in that country so here's a guy who apparently is not controlling his own brother or narcotics are rampant as a nation funded a very expensive but successful effort in colombia why is it that we are willing to coddle what apparently is a norco regime in afghanistan was all seriousness secondly is if they don't address the corruption which i think in turn leads to people having no connection to the central government then when we choose to leave whether it's one year ten years fifteen years from now what is to keep the people who have a resentment against that corrupt government getting rid of that regime  and i'll open that up to that i don't think the general mcchrystal is remotely recommending that we coddle narcotics or the government concerns that's where i got from his report indeed and  speaking for myself and i suspect the rest of the panel i absolutely share his concern with the importance of all broaden it slightly to governance improvement but the central of the narcotics problem to the government's problem the corruption per se is common in the developing world corruption on the scale we see it in afghanistan today is not and that's driven an important matter important measure by the narcotics problem the question isn't so much do we know or it of course we don't the issue is what do we do about it the approach we've tended to take in the past has had a heavy emphasis on eradication that for a variety of reasons doesn't work very well and i think policy in country is moving towards an emphasis on in the longer term developing the infrastructure needed for alternative crops to be canonically viable and in the short term going after specific quite exactly the intermediaries in the process the middleman and the kingpins that are in fact making the great majority of the money from narcotics in afghanistan the farmer at the grassroots level isn't the primary winner from the narcotics problem in afghanistan it's the intermediaries when we talk about using the leverage at our disposal to change governance in afghanistan i think one central dimension of that is using  heard that articulated by anyone within the pentagon or within the administration as being a goal of our nation right now well again i won't speak for the government and certainly for myself when i say governance improvement that is an absolutely critical component of it no question about it you know in my statement i did talk about karzai as corruption and how we need to deal with that certainly the them and we can go after these networks and i'm talking about killing and capturing and going after that money and breaking that system down so it's not being funded it's not helping to fund the insurgency which is currently doing which also was the issue in colombia in south america so i believe part of this counterinsurgency strategy is clearly to put in place an element to deal with that very issue that you're talking about and i'm convinced they're going to be very aggressive about it the political culture of the country do we need to revisit something that's more realistic and well let's let me focus on that question first if you get that question first i think certainly the original constitution was substantially over centralized and i think unquestionably there's a trend in theater at the moment towards a decentralization of government authority from the national level and kabal down to at least the provincial level and in important ways to the district level as well that will almost certainly be part of the governance process moving forward is to empower more local officials in closer contact with the population and seen as more legitimate by the population in ways that it has not been the case in the past i think when it comes to things like rule of law in particular part of that process of decentralizing government authority in afghanistan will probably include some kind of hybrid between a traditional judicial system emphasising village sure and other collaborative methods of conflict resolution and disputed you to that have existed in afghanistan for centuries with a formal government legal system in which you have neither a completely tribal system of justice nor a completely government system of justice but one in which an important subset of disputes before communities are result locally and another subset major felonies for example are handled by the government official formal government system that's i think almost certainly the direction that governance efforts in afghanistan are going to go how far they go how many of the current authorities that are vested in kabal or decentralized the provinces in the districts is where the issue is that i don't think has been resolved yet the direction however i think is clear that has to be replaced in my view with something that has some legitimacy the problem we have with the current constitution is allows the president to make all those appointments  because it has led to ineffectual government at the lower levels patronage system to a fault and none of that would surprise surprise anyone but those kind of improvements have got to be made in our emphasis and we have a tendency to talk about karzai because of the national vote and you know his legit illegitimacy as a result of that and and and the corruption and i did in my statement as well but steve is talking about here is really crucial to the success of of afghanistan in terms of its stability because most issues in afghanistan are really down at the local level with where the people are and we have to provide th rough their own mechanism a much more responsive form of government that will attend to their needs and it has some connection obviously to a central government for it to be able to work being decentralized effective government in terms would be characterized by a lot of deal making not just casting votes in the legislature or a prevention council but the traditional way going back to those years of that well they're very different organizations to be sure that the taliban in in in afghanistan and also in pakistan as a local focus it's the amount of money that has available light i don't know i no longer see those classified reports to be able to tell you where they are all i can tell you is we have we made a significant impact on them in terms of their financial treasures with the help of a lot of other countries in the world doing and i think i'll just in terms of military force the both the taliban in afghanistan and the taleban and in pakistan both of those forces are larger than the al qaida that is sitting in up in the tribal areas and also they have that the al qaeda would welcome the return to power of the taliban while their while their interests are different they only have a common foundation in terms of what their belief systems are i would hope that we're going to make a decisive decision to commit to the stability of afghanistan as part of the united states national interest and further help to stabilize the region we're not the only country that has interest in  think in terms of looking out towards the end game solution that we would like for afghanistan i think we would want to embed afghanistan in some sort of regional diplomatic framework a contact group collaborative to two hundred thirty four thousand about twenty thousand and needs to grow to four hundred thousand and that will take to two thousand and thirteen or two thousand and twelve and i've also read some statements in recent days challenging whether that is even an achievable number do you believe that four hundred thousand is a realistic number that could be achieved or is it more of an idealistic number oh i think it's a realistic number i mean and it has to do with our level of commitment to this and  also breaking the paradigm from the past where we put a lot of obstacles that are out there but we made them formidable and those were higher literacy rates in terms of the challenge of training and the difficulty of finding  leaders and as i said before i mean stay focused on what the goal is here we have a near term problem that we need to solve and security is the issue and these forces have to be better than the other afghans and they're fighting and as we grow the size of them they will operate largely side by side with us for a period of time and out of that will grow about a force all that said we should put in place an infrastructure to sustain the quality and improve the quality of that force all the time with education and other things that we know how to do but we can't do all of that at once and then wait for a force to come out the other end years later that's impossible not when we have in front of us is a few years to solve the problem all right second question i want to ask you also on page four your testimony at the bottom the last sentence says that as these forces conduct operations which you were just alluding to with us nato forces as a matter of routine similar to what we did in iraq their proficiency increases exponentially which i think is an ideal and a great statement my concern is and what if the nato forces do not cooperate as a matter of routine i mean that we know is part of the concern right now is getting them to cooperate does that then undermine the entire premise here well that be frank i mean i was using nato forces there as a generous term i mean the truth of the matter is those that are conducting combat operations a few as opposed to the foetid two nations that are contributing something in the uniform i mean let make no mistake about it we are americanizing this war don't usually use i want to use that term for obvious reasons but that is a fact and most of those operations will be conducted side by side with u s forces and a few other nato countries and you're familiar with you know who they are and i think that's coming a great challenge for us when the statement that you just made where americanizing this war is that is that how long will the american public give the support depending on how long and how quickly these goals can be accomplished and so appreciate you laying out these goals and i think that that's where the challenge for all of us  provincial level and assist with economic development that you just alluded to in your statement also orally when you say an economic development are you talking about the infrastructure like water and sewer are you expanding that also means schools roads health care all of the above or how much of the above i know that's the challenge we face domestically is an extremely rule and poverty stricken districts like many of us represent in that are right near fort bragg we don't have the substantive type of healthcare we have problems with schools we have concerns with infrastructure and water and sewer here at home and so that's part of the challenge we also have is deciding well how much are we go much do we really need to do in afghanistan to sustain what our great superior military is doing and i guess i'm wondering how broad do you mean assist with economic development when you use that for ice i really meant that to m as it impacts that people more at the local level i mean most of our nonmilitary efforts in afghanistan today to been involved largely in the reconstruction effort where you mentioned in terms of large  projects i think while some of that is important a much more important issue is governance and the much more important issue is some of the things that we we need to do at the local level to assist people with the quality of their life experience and a have found out in iraq that doesn't have it's not necessarily a major major event in terms of what that's doing in terms of financial expenditures or major engineering construction projects school house other things to make life better for them the things that that are very helpful and also gives the the local leader who we are supporting some credibility with his own people and starts to effort would be unwarranted at best the difference of such an effort would make in the terrorist threat facing americans would be slight at worst the effort would be countered octavo not reduce the threat at all even at its best the benefit would be outweighed by the probable cost especially in american lives and limbs and monetary resources u s equities pretty dismal  alternative let me ask would you say we should keep the status quo keep the number of troops we have there now and or would you just pull out altogether what would be your answer as the president's spokesman has made clear post over the weekend in which he lays out the continued important and useful things that we can do at our current force levels much as been said in the hearing this morning about  training the afghan forces our forces and he would and i would support this position shift the emphasis away from our direct combat operations to training there was much more to be done and again this is something else that's been touched on i this hearing in the area of economic development and infrastructure and i would certainly place heavy emphasis on the international diplomatic front there's been countless issues touched on here this morning that affect many other countries at least as much as ourselves for example the narcotics issue that a couple of numbers of asked about russia and iran both have major addiction problems that involve overwhelming heroin from afghanistan that's just one of many ways not to mention the other security related ways in which we can and most of those things you mentioned they are addressing maybe not the way you would like or maybe not as much correct like but they are addressing the right so basically  ou all mentioned i think in your testimony that you probably our main the main reason we should be there for national security and we look to different areas of national security we've been there eight years that's a long time and that and that does does take a lot of staying power and i don't know exactly where the american people are on this i think they're probably kind of drifting because they haven't heard much from the white house and our national interest look at it even with the forces we have there now and with the current one hundred thirty four thousand afghan national security forces and one hundred thousand  nato forces the taliban has the momentum and the initiative if we just continue that there is nothing to stop that momentum that will continue in other words they will gain more influence over the over the people and they will gain more territory they have that influence that's the momentum they're on and the level of violence will continue to increase that's the reality of that if we took those resources away that we have  and other places have a dramatic adverse effect and it would also have a dramatic effect on our adversaries in terms of encouraging them an emboldened on the do other things look at we did draw a line here we  ew those lines and we said this was important to us and and we stated the reasons for that it was obvious at nine eleven and so many of us those reasons are still there in terms of national interest and we tried to explain why and why that is even i have in terms of its impact on pakistan so we've drawn a line to go back in a race that line right now will have a detrimental impact on southern asia to be sure and the radical islamic movement and its march taking place in that area what a limb to encourage an adversary's and in another part of the world as well i mean certainly one of the things that's happened to us and what the radical islamism been throwin in other people's faces for years has been on somalia no response to the cole no response to khobar towers i mean this is in their literature  not ours in terms of this is a country that lacks moral character this is a country that will not shed its blood etc now we've changed all that since nine eleven i mean we've taken that issue away and  we have defeated that movement in iraq and we're drawing a line here in southern asia as well so i think there's a lot to be said for what we have done and what we are  doing if i may comment on two of the key question general keane is raise and i do have to disagree one it is by no means inevitable that the taliban would take over the taliban swept to power in one thousand nine hundred four on a wave of  sympathy and support from the afghan people or fed up with the civil war among the warlords that have persisted after the soviet supported nodular government was overthrown they were welcomed the taleban today is far far less popular in fact they are extremely unpopular with the overwhelming majority of the afghan people who knew what they lived through during the period of taliban rule what will happen when we withdraw is not something we can predict with any certainty the most i would say is we had deals will be struck in the traditional afghan sort of way i think it is far from certain that the deals will be shaped in a way that the taliban will have the upper hand and the other very important question that you raise mr mccann is about the broader facts on how u s credibility is saying about who is seen as wening and losing all around the globe these were of course issues that were raised after  vietnam there's been academic research on this i would commend the work of professor daryl press of dartmouth who has shown looking back through history that other countries and other actors do not calculate our degree of commitment or credibility to uphold our continuing important interest by whether or not we pulled back from or pulled out of peripheral interests that's just not the way other actors including our adversaries judge our commitment our will we would not judge the commitment or the will of our adversaries that way either if we saw when our adversaries pulling back from where he had a losing hand that doesn't make us that doesn't lead us to deceive ourselves  the same adversary would be any less determined to uphold his interest elsewhere so i really don't think that is damage that would justify our continue staying where we as the general put it dr and it seems to me that we we go to war when we're in a weakened position and how people perceive us is if we're willing to stand for the things that we stand for we're stronger if we back away we're weaker and that seems to me that every time we've done that we face the consequences thank you mr chairman certainly thank the gentleman let's go back to basics before we clo why is it important that our efforts in afghanistan be important our national security here is protecting the american people from threats of harm particularly from international terrorists that's what got us into afghanistan the first place and i think that's the overwhelming first for and that's the distinction i would draw for afghanistan we have a wide range of interests there is a much narrower set of things that are worth spilling blood over and those involve the potential threat downstream violence against america and americans and afghanistan in my view largely because of its proximity to pakistan and poses the downstream threat of violence against america and americans and that's what makes it a national security interest for us general i clearly there is a relationship between the stability of afghanistan and the future stability of pakistan with nuclear weapons with a raging insurgency already in place with the al qaeda in pakistan aided and abetted by pakistani taliban on and also to a lesser degree afghanistan and taliban we've drawn a line for national security reasons not to let afghanistan destabilize because of what is is i think that's a great great question and i don't believe that by making a increased military commitment to afghanistan by definition this is an open ended commitment that goes on for a decade or so i mean a stable afghanistan is what we're seeking where its own national security forces are able to protect its people and has a legitimate stable government as well i think those things are achievable and they are achievable more in the short term than in the long term in my view so the growth of sure and maybe a little bit by the end of two thousand and ten and we start to begin to have that the afghan national security forces take over from us so the end state for us certainly is not necessarily a major political reconciliation or end state in terms of our u s military involvement will be turning over the security operation to the afghan national security forces now within their means to cope with it just as it's happening in iraq commensurate with that i do believe we'll make some true progress once we turn momentum many of these taliban leaders who are in a for different reasons will want to be on the winning side and will see their political opportunities with the success taken there and some reconciliation will start to take place so that's the way i would describe it to the  american people a stable afghanistan is where it's national security forces is capable of protecting its own people and when to get it to that point so we can pull out forces out of there  else yes mr chairman that's an excellent question and i don't think it can the status quo satisfactorily answered for the american people the internal political makeup of afghanistan is not what's important or should be important in their view it's alternately our own security here in the united states and american interests abroad and there is not going to be any one mark of success any one mark of victory where either the current or a future president can say all right we've achieved our objective even if general mcchrystal achieves all of his objectives as he's laid them out in his strategy al qaeda is still going to be out there in pakistan in the unsecure areas of afghanistan and all the other places they are in the world emitting their propaganda and all it takes is a single terrorist attack to emphasize what will be their continued point you did not deceive us despite all your effort in afghanistan success in war normally means you secured the interests that led you to go to war and if those interests are essentially to hold that it now becomes afghanistan not be a base for tech not become a base for attacking pakistan success means an afghan government of whatever kind of whatever composition of whatever that has enough control over its territory and population to prevent either of those two things from happening and there's a wide range of possible specific makeup of an afghan government that could achieve that many of which will look very imperfect from our perspective iraq is in some ways an interesting analogy and what the degree to which iraq has been a success is controversy but nonetheless the central s interests in iraq of the war not spreading to its neighbors and genocidal violence not taking place within iraq's borders those two interests as of today are met in iraq through a political makeup that is not what i think anyone anticipated in two thousand and six or when the surge began so i think with respect to afghanistan the point to bear in mind is not that success is achieved only if we create a democracy that looks like other countr in afghanistan success i think is achievable if we've met our aim and those are at the end of the day relatively undemanding aims to permit of a wide variety of different specific political solutions and c