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i 

54–057 2010

[H.A.S.C. No. 111–106] 

AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ: PERSPECTIVES 

ON U.S. STRATEGY, PART 2 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE 

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS 

FIRST SESSION 

HEARING HELD 

NOVEMBER 5, 2009 
(II) 

OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE 

VIC SNYDER, Arkansas, Chairman 

JOHN SPRATT, South Carolina 

LORETTA SANCHEZ, California 

SUSAN A. DAVIS, California 

JIM COOPER, Tennessee 

JOE SESTAK, Pennsylvania 

GLENN NYE, Virginia 

CHELLIE PINGREE, Maine 

ROB WITTMAN, Virginia 

WALTER B. JONES, North Carolina 

MIKE ROGERS, Alabama 

TRENT FRANKS, Arizona 

CATHY MCMORRIS RODGERS, Washington 

DOUG LAMBORN, Colorado 

TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania 

DREW WALTER, Professional Staff Member 

THOMAS HAWLEY, Professional Staff Member 

TREY HOWARD, Staff Assistant 
(III) 

C O N T E N T S 

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS 

2009 

Page 

HEARING: 

Thursday, November 5, 2009, Afghanistan and Iraq: Perspectives on U.S. 

Strategy, Part 2 .................................................................................................... 1 

APPENDIX: 

Thursday, November 5, 2009 .................................................................................. 37 

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2009 

AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ: PERSPECTIVES ON U.S. STRATEGY, PART 2 

STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS 

Snyder, Hon. Vic, a Representative from Arkansas, Chairman, Oversight 

and Investigations Subcommittee ....................................................................... 1 

Wittman, Hon. Rob, a Representative from Virginia, Ranking Member, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee ............................................................. 1 

WITNESSES 

Eaton, Maj. Gen. Paul D., USA (Ret.), Senior Advisor, National Security 

Network ................................................................................................................ 2 

Fair, Dr. C. Christine, Assistant Professor, Center for Peace and Security 

Studies, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University ......................................................................................................................... 4

Khan, Dr. Muqtedar, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science 

and International Relations, University of Delaware ....................................... 5 

Strmecki, Dr. Marin, Senior Vice President and Director of Programs, Smith 

Richardson Foundation ........................................................................................ 8 

APPENDIX 

PREPARED STATEMENTS: 

Eaton, Maj. Gen. Paul D. ................................................................................. 44 

Fair, Dr. C. Christine ....................................................................................... 52 

Khan, Dr. Muqtedar ......................................................................................... 69 

Strmecki, Dr. Marin ......................................................................................... 77 

Wittman, Hon. Rob ........................................................................................... 41 

DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD: 

[There were no Documents submitted.] 

WITNESS RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS ASKED DURING THE HEARING: 

[There were no Questions submitted during the hearing.] 

QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MEMBERS POST HEARING: 

[There were no Questions submitted post hearing.] 

(1) 

AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ: PERSPECTIVES ON U.S. 

STRATEGY, PART 2 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE, Washington, DC, Thursday, November 5, 2009. 

The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:32 a.m., in room 

2226, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Vic Snyder (chairman 

of the subcommittee) presiding. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. VIC SNYDER, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM ARKANSAS, CHAIRMAN, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE 

Dr. SNYDER. The hearing will come to order. We appreciate you 

all being here today. I am interested in hearing what you all have 

to say. We will get to the discussion. So I am going to forego any 

opening statement. 

You may notice we get a little musical chairs going on today. We 

are fortunate to have some members from the full committee that 

are not on the subcommittee that want to join in. 

If everybody shows up at the same time who is a member of the 

committee, we will have them—some members sitting on the table 

with you all over there, but we will—we are fortunate to have this 

level of interest amongst other members. So Mr. Coffman and Mr. 

Hunter are with us today. We appreciate that. 

Mr. Wittman, any opening comments you want to make? 

STATEMENT OF HON. ROB WITTMAN, A REPRESENTATIVE 

FROM VIRGINIA, RANKING MEMBER, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE 

Mr. WITTMAN. Not at this time, Mr. Chairman. I would just ask 

unanimous consent to enter my comments into the record. 

Dr. SNYDER. Sure. Without objection. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Wittman can be found in the Appendix on page 41.] 

Dr. SNYDER. And the opening statements of the witnesses will 

also be made a part of the record. And I need to get the—here. 

Our witnesses today are Major General Paul Eaton, retired U.S. 

Army, Senior Advisor for the National Security Network; Dr. C. 

Christine Fair, Assistant Professor at the Center for Peace and Security Studies, the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown 

University; Professor Muqtedar Khan, Associate Professor and Director of the Islamic Studies Program, University of Delaware; and 

Dr.—is it Marin? 

Dr. STRMECKI. Marin. 
2 

Dr. SNYDER [continuing]. Marin Strmecki, Senior Vice President 

and Director of Programs, the Smith Richardson Foundation. 

We will make all of your written statements a part of the record. 

We will turn the clock on for five minutes. You will see the red 

light go on here at five minutes. Do not look on that as a hard stop. 

If there are things that you want to tell us beyond that, feel free 

to do so. I know members will have plenty of questions. 

So we will begin with you, General Eaton. You are recognized. 

STATEMENT OF MAJ. GEN. PAUL D. EATON, USA (RET.), 

SENIOR ADVISOR, NATIONAL SECURITY NETWORK 

General EATON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Snyder, 

Ranking Member Wittman, members of the subcommittee, ladies 

and gentlemen, thank you for the invitation to join you today to 

discuss a topic that is at once very important to the Nation and is 

very personal to the thousands of families who send their soldiers 

and Marines to prosecute the Nation’s wars. 

To put it into context, over 200,000 American families wake up 

and look outside to see if there is a government vehicle out to give 

them their worst news possible. It happens every day. So I support 

this Administration’s prudent review of our options in Afghanistan. 

Now, I am not going to read the entire statement submitted, but 

I will highlight a few points. 

Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel, now professor of international relations at Boston University and author of The Limits 

of Power, wrote for ‘‘Harper’s’’ magazine this month, ‘‘Among 

Democrats and Republicans alike, with few exceptions, Afghanistan’s importance is simply assumed, much in the way 50 years ago 

otherwise intelligent people simply assumed that the United States 

had a vital interest in ensuring the survival of South Vietnam. 

Today, as then, the assumption does not stand up to even casual 

scrutiny.’’ 

I don’t buy Mr. Bacevich’s comments exactly, but it certainly 

tempers the argument. So before we begin the debate about numbers of soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan and subsequent impact 

on mission there and our mission in Iraq, it would be helpful to answer the questions, ‘‘Why do we continue operations in Afghanistan,’’ or, ‘‘What do we want Afghanistan to look like in so many 

years,’’ or, ‘‘What differentiates Afghanistan from Yemen, or Somalia, or Sudan, or any other failed or failing states capable of harboring al Qaeda?’’ 

So the mission statement will inform the commander’s intent 

from which the real campaign will be known. If you don’t know 

where you are going, any road will take you there. 

So the primary rationale I see for continuance in Afghanistan is 

60 or so nuclear weapons in Pakistan, the link to regional stability 

and the extremist groups operating there. 

There is an argument, unfortunately hearkening back to Vietnam-era domino theory, that as goes Afghanistan and its internal 

fight against extremists, so can go Pakistan. But I will leave the 

answer to why to the experts. 

Now, from a military perspective, the—we are not going to get 

to the 600,000-plus that we need by our own math to execute counterinsurgency operations. So by definition, whatever number sol-
3 

dier option the President elects to pursue, we are going to have a 

kind of COIN—counterinsurgency operation—lite. It will probably 

not be rural. It will be urban. 

And it will be along the lines of what my—one of my smarter 

classmates, Andrew Krepinevich, talks about, the oil spot approach, 

where you establish a zone of security and derive from that a zone 

of prosperity, which will ultimately spread out and include greater 

parts of the country. 

Now, reviewing the components of U.S. projection power, I am 

going to insist that there are three components, not just the military. As I told then-candidate Obama when I had an opportunity 

to meet with him more than a year ago and he asked me what the 

Army wanted, I responded, ‘‘Senator, we want your Secretary of 

Agriculture to be at least as interested in the outcome in Afghanistan and Iraq as is your Secretary of Defense.’’ 

The United States is in serious need of a review and revision of 

its national security architecture. We prosecuted the Cold War with 

the National Security Act of 1947 and did so brilliantly, but the 

world is very different now. 

Every colonel who goes to the Army War College gets the components of national power—economic, military, diplomatic, political. 

And I am not going to go through the list of questions that—that 

I proposed that you ask the Administration for the military component, but I would like to emphasize the so-called civilian surge that 

we are embarking upon. 

It is not illustrated well enough. I don’t understand, from what 

I can find out, what the components of the civilian surge are. I 

don’t know who is in charge of the economic program. And as a citizen, I think it prudent that we find that out. So I expect that we 

be informed relatively soon on what the civilian surge looks like, 

what the economic program is going to be, who is in charge. 

From a diplomatic perspective, there is an internal—a micro-diplomatic program, and an external—a macro-diplomatic program, internal to develop the—from district to province to—to national and 

alignment with political operators inside the country to shoulder 

the counterinsurgency warfare program, and then there is the 

macro, our allies in Europe and the surrounding countries on what 

they will do to assure and to assist us in establishing the security 

that we need to in Afghanistan. 

So this preoccupation with the number of soldiers is secondary, 

I believe, to the greater issue of economic engagement and political 

engagement. 

And I will end with a quote from Richard Clarke in his book 

‘‘Your Government Failed You.’’ ‘‘If we stop denigrating government 

and using its instruments as partisan punching bags, if we work 

in a bipartisan way to rebuild our institutions of national security, 

your government will fail you much less. It could even make you 

proud once more.’’ 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

[The prepared statement of General Eaton can be found in the 

Appendix on page 44.] 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, General Eaton. 

Dr. Fair. 
4 

STATEMENT OF DR. C. CHRISTINE FAIR, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, CENTER FOR PEACE AND SECURITY STUDIES, EDMUND A. WALSH SCHOOL OF FOREIGN SERVICE, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY 

Dr. FAIR. Thank you, Chairman Snyder and Ranking Member 

Wittman as well as your esteemed colleagues for the opportunity 

to speak today. 

I have actually been asked to address how U.S. strategy and objectives in Afghanistan affect the U.S.’s ability to prosecute its interests in Pakistan. The Afghanistan-Pakistan (Af-Pak) strategy 

suggests that to stabilize Afghanistan you must stabilize Pakistan. 

I argue that this formulation critically inverts the primacy of 

U.S. interests. Pakistan is the epicenter of the most intense U.S. 

national security concerns, including regional, conventional and nuclear stability, terrorism and nuclear proliferation. 

I submit that focusing resources upon Pakistan will greatly enable a pacification of Afghanistan. Karzai’s electoral malfeasance 

and continuance as president has prompted reflection about the 

next step forward in Afghanistan. 

On the one hand, some argue for a more robust counterinsurgency strategy to be resourced with additional troops, and other in 

financial resources, while others argue for a separation of the counterinsurgency effort with greater focus upon the counterterrorism 

effort. 

Proponents of increasing military efforts in Afghanistan argue 

that failure in Afghanistan will spell out grave outcomes in Pakistan. This formulation reverses cause and effect. 

Pakistan’s behavior and policies in many ways determine the 

events and outcomes in Afghanistan as well as the rest of South 

Asia, in part because of its continued support of the Afghan 

Taliban. 

This year, Pakistan commenced so-called anti-Taliban military 

operations. This terminology confuses, because it suggests that 

Pakistan has turned its guns on the Afghan Taliban when, in fact, 

the Afghan Taliban operate freely there. Pakistan is, in fact, limiting its war on terrorism to those elements that undermine the 

Pakistani state, and those elements are not comprehensively the 

enemies of the United States. They are specifically the enemies of 

Pakistan. 

Pakistan, with some justification, blames the U.S. presence in 

the region for the country’s degraded internal security, rather than 

viewing their insecurity specifically as blow-back from their country’s own dangerous policies. 

While militants have targeted the Pakistani state since 2004, in 

part because of its cooperation with the United States in the war 

on terrorism, Pakistan has used militants in India since 1947 and 

in Afghanistan since the early 1970s. Unfortunately, the Pakistani 

Taliban have connections with these longstanding proxies and this 

fundamentally limits Pakistan’s efforts to defeat their own enemies 

decisively. Worse, these proxies have ties to the Afghan Taliban 

and al Qaeda. 

Yet having received $13 billion, if not more, from the United 

States, to participate in the war on terrorism, Pakistan continues 

to support the Afghan Taliban. This means that Pakistan is under-
5 

mining the very war on terrorism that it has received handsome 

reward allegedly to support. 

Success in Afghanistan requires effective partners in Kabul as 

well as Islamabad, yet such partners are unlikely to materialize 

any time soon. I recommend a realistic reformulation of U.S. interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan to identify Pakistan as the most 

critical locus of U.S. national security interests. Washington needs 

to ask how it can protect its regional interests, perhaps without decisively defeating the Taliban in the near term, while compelling 

Pakistan to stop interfering in Afghanistan over the long term. 

This may require greater focus upon counterterrorism rather 

than counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan. This would 

allow the U.S. over time to decrease its kinetic footprint in Afghanistan and lessen its logistical dependence upon Pakistan which seriously degrades Washington’s options to be harsher with Pakistan. 

To stabilize the region, Washington needs to create space to compel Pakistan to cease supporting all militant groups operating on 

and from its territory over a reasonable time frame. And to state 

the obvious, this includes coercing or compelling Pakistan to abandon its continued support of the Afghan Taliban. 

Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Fair can be found in the Appendix on page 52.] 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Dr. Fair. 

Dr. Khan. 

STATEMENT OF DR. MUQTEDAR KHAN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE 

Dr. KHAN. Well, I want to thank members of the committee for 

inviting me to testify. 

I want to begin by discussing the impact of the war in Iraq on 

our ability to prosecute the war in Afghanistan. I believe that the 

U.S. strategy in Afghanistan was fatally undermined by the decision of the previous Administration to wage an unnecessary and 

bigger war in Iraq, even before our goals and objectives were realized in Afghanistan. 

The war in Iraq has exhausted our resources. It has cost $700 

billion in direct costs, led to 4,355 American military fatalities, 

nearly 250 civilian fatalities, 31,000 wounded, caused a global pandemic of anti-Americanism, and undermined the legal and moral 

underpinnings of the global order that the United States had constructed and nourished since 1945. 

For many Iraqis, too, it has been proven to be devastating, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths and refugees. It also diverted 

resources and focus away from Afghanistan. 

Most importantly, the unnecessary war in Iraq has sapped the 

American resolve to wage long wars that involve insurgencies and 

nation-building. The war in Iraq has made it very difficult for our 

President to go to the American people and say that we must. 

We need to stay in Afghanistan for a long time. We need to 

spend billions of dollars and perhaps lose many more American 

lives in order to finish in Afghanistan what we started eight years 

ago. 
6 

I have bad news for this committee. I believe that the U.S. at the 

moment does not have the political will nor the public understanding and commitment to do what is necessary in Afghanistan. 

At the moment the public support for the war in Afghanistan 

stands at 40 percent. With the current spike in casualties, the 

growing political crisis that started with the malpractices in the 

presidential elections, I suspect public support will decline further. 

It will become very difficult for both the White House and the Congress to do what is necessary. 

What is necessary? To win at all in Afghanistan, the United 

States will need to control the Af-Pak border and completely eliminate the ability of the Taliban to cross borders when things get 

tough on either side, undermine their ability to recruit and 

fundraise, win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people to such 

an extent that they are motivated to stand up with the United 

States against the Taliban and take risks to realize the dream of 

a democratic Afghanistan. 

We also hope to create significant positive change on the ground, 

that progress can seduce the Afghans away from war and hate. But 

to realize these objectives with minimum civilian casualties the 

U.S. will need more troops, more civilians and far more commitment to Afghanistan. 

We will have to convey the intent, the resolve, that the United 

States is there to do the right thing and to do it right. Half measures will cause more damage and make it impossible for the U.S. 

to achieve even its minimal goals. 

The stated goal of the Bush Administration for invading Afghanistan was to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, destroy al Qaeda, 

and make sure that Afghanistan was no more a safe haven for terrorists. 

We think these goals have been partially achieved. There is no 

al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda is everywhere else but Afghanistan. It is in Pakistan. It is in Yemen. It is in Somalia. And it is 

in Iraq. But not in Afghanistan. 

Bin Laden is still at large. The Taliban have—sorry, al Qaeda 

has succeeded in reconstituting itself in different forms, in different 

locales and using different modus operandi. 

Bin Laden is still not in our custody. Anti-Americanism and overall discontent with political realities will have to decrease significantly before the demand for organizations such as al Qaeda diminishes in the Muslim world. 

To make matters worse, the Taliban, in a hydra-like fashion, 

have reproduced themselves. Now we have two Talibans: Taliban 

in Afghanistan and Taliban in Pakistan. And both of them are operating brazenly either side of the border. 

They have attacked the Indian embassy. They have attacked the 

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). They have attacked 

U.S. bases in Kamdesh, for example. They have killed civilians and 

soldiers on both sides of the border. They have grown four times 

in size, from roughly 7,000 to 25,000. But the number of attacks 

that they make have grown a hundred times. 

The British intelligence reports that now the British army fights 

the Taliban seven times a day. This is exponential growth. If you 

look at the casualty figures of the U.S. Army and allies in the re-
7 

gion, it clearly suggests that it is rapidly approaching the numbers 

that we saw in the last two or three years in Iraq. 

What are our options in Afghanistan? 

The first option is to accept the recommendations of General 

Stanley McChrystal and send a second surge of 40,000 to 100,000 

troops and civilians to Afghanistan to escalate both war and nation-building activities simultaneously. We should remember that 

this would be the second surge, again, under the Administration of 

President Obama. We have already sent 30,000 additional troops a 

few months ago. 

The second option is to scale down U.S. strategy from counterinsurgency and counterterrorism to counterterrorism only, meaning 

forget Afghanistan and the Taliban and focus on al Qaeda, wherever they are. 

The third option is to partially answer General McChrystal’s request, which means that we give him half or one-third of what he 

is asking for. In my humble opinion, the third option is not worthy 

of consideration at all. 

General McChrystal’s strategy does not have a global perspective 

to it. Anti-Americanism in Afghanistan is not contingent on what 

the U.S. does in Afghanistan alone. It is affected by what the U.S. 

does in Palestine, what the U.S. does in Iraq, what the U.S. does 

in Pakistan and other parts of the Muslim world. 

It is conceivable that the U.S. could invest a lot of blood and 

treasure in Afghanistan while still lose if it fails in other theaters 

in the Muslim world. So we could spend billions of dollars in Afghanistan developing it, materially developing it successfully, but 

if you do not pull off the peace process in the Arab-Israeli conflict, 

then there will be anti-Americanism in Afghanistan still. 

Additionally, the U.S. military presence itself is a provocation in 

itself. Many Afghans will support and fight with the Taliban as 

long as there are foreign troops occupying their land. A major surge 

will inevitably cause many civilian deaths which incite hatred 

against the U.S., garner support for extremists, and generate more 

recruits for them. 

I like the second option with additional caveats. The U.S. must 

fight only those who directly threaten U.S. interests and security. 

Global wars have serious costs and consequences that even a superpower cannot afford. A poor country like ours that agonizes for 

months over whether we can pay for the health care of poor and 

underprivileged Americans cannot afford to fight wars indefinitely 

which require unlimited resources. 

Al Qaeda has brought devastation and violence to the very societies that have hosted it. For the past two years, Pakistan has been 

the biggest victim of terrorism by al Qaeda and Taliban. If some 

Pakistanis, due to misguided and unwise anti-Americanism, choose 

to support them, then they should be left to deal with the consequences. We can pray for them. 

We should not embark on imperial adventures without strong 

commitment by those we seek to rescue. If the Afghans want to 

help to fight the Taliban, they must prove their resolve by first 

standing up to them. If the Pakistanis want to help to fight their 

extremists, then they, too, should show the necessary commitment 
8 

and stop running with the hare and hunting with the hound at the 

same time. 

In the age of unmanned drones, I think long-distance relationships are not a bad idea. If the U.S. can make its war against its 

enemies invisible, it will have a better chance of winning. 

Simultaneously, you must continue to maintain wide-ranging 

dialogue with the Muslim world and seriously seek to resolve key 

issues that undermine U.S.-Muslim relations. 

Any and every diplomatic blow against anti-Americanism is 

worth many military surges that inevitably kill civilians and undermine the main goal: to improve U.S. security through better 

U.S.-Muslim relations. 

Thank you for considering my thoughts. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Khan can be found in the Appendix on page 69.] 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Dr. Khan. 

Dr. Strmecki. 

STATEMENT OF DR. MARIN STRMECKI, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AND DIRECTOR OF PROGRAMS, SMITH RICHARDSON 

FOUNDATION 

Dr. STRMECKI. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I welcome the opportunity to discuss U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and how it relates 

to the situation in Iraq. 

The challenges we face in Afghanistan today are largely a product—— 

Dr. SNYDER. Is your microphone on, Dr. Strmecki? 

Dr. STRMECKI. The light is on. 

Dr. SNYDER. Well, that is a good sign. You must have much less 

volume than Dr. Khan did. But go ahead. 

Dr. STRMECKI. Okay. The challenges we face today in Afghanistan are largely the product of an escalation by the enemy that 

began in late 2005 and then dramatically increased in the subsequent years until today. 

It is difficult to remember now, but there were several months 

back in late 2004 and early 2005 where there were virtually no security incidents for several months in Afghanistan. The contrast 

between the violence that attended the 2004 presidential election, 

which was minimal at best, and the 2009 election, which was an 

all-time peak, is dramatic. 

Now, for a variety of reasons, the Afghan government and the 

United States and NATO did not adequately respond to this escalation. Afghanistan was an economy of force theater vis-a-vis the 

situation in Iraq. NATO partners were unwilling to send additional 

forces. There was a reluctance on the part of supporters of Afghanistan to massively increase Afghan national security forces, though 

some steps were taken both in 2006 and 2008. And President 

Karzai did not do enough to improve governance though, again, he 

did some measures such as appointing a better minister of interior. 

The result of this response and the escalation by the enemy is 

that security conditions deteriorated, particularly in southern Afghanistan. And this is the situation that President Obama inherited. 

Now I would like to make six quick points about his response. 
9 

In its white paper on Afghanistan and Pakistan issued in March 

2009, I believe the Obama Administration demonstrated a correct 

understanding of the problem. There is a single enemy that is located in western Pakistan. It is a syndicate of extremist and terrorist groups that includes al Qaeda, but it is not limited to al 

Qaeda, and that receives support from certain elements in Pakistan. 

That is the enemy that has to be defeated. But the enemy’s 

threat radiates in three directions. It comes at us as a 

transnational terrorist threat. It crosses the border of Afghanistan 

as an insurgency. And then violent armed groups are operating 

against the Pakistani government. 

And the white paper stated quite clearly that you can’t separate 

out your actions against one aspect of the threat rather than the 

other. If you work against one part of the problem, it is going to 

migrate to the other. If you are going to defeat that enemy, you 

have to work at all parts of the problem simultaneously. 

My second point is that the McChrystal report, at least the portions that were made public, is a good first round implementation 

concept for the security-related aspects of President Obama’s strategy. There need to be more specific questions answered, and those 

are probably answered in parts of the report that were not made 

public. 

But the very important fact that there was a shift to a population security counterinsurgency approach for Afghanistan and 

also, for the first time, realistic levels for the Afghan national security forces—240,000 for the Afghan national army, over 100,000 for 

the Afghan national police—were put on the table, so that there is 

a—there is an end point where Afghans can be securing Afghanistan. 

Regarding the question—third, regarding the question of the requested number of troops, I believe the Congress should ask a simple question, ‘‘What is the amount of troops that are necessary to 

decisively reverse the deteriorating security condition and start a 

virtuous cycle of improving security and governance?’’ One can’t in 

one sweep solve the problems of Afghanistan, but changing the 

trends should be what we are measuring the troop request against. 

Fourth, the Obama Administration has correctly placed emphasis 

on the need for the Karzai administration to improve governance. 

President Karzai has badly underperformed in recent years. But I 

don’t think the confrontational approach that some urge vis-a-vis 

Karzai is the right way to approach it. I have seen, when I was involved in policy toward Afghanistan, that a smart engagement with 

Karzai can lead him to take risks for reform and manage those 

risks jointly with his partners. 

Fifth, turning to Iraq, I would say that the continued stabilization of Iraq is a precondition for shifting the additional forces that 

are needed in Afghanistan. And therefore, it is vitally important 

that we continue to build on the political reconciliation process that 

started in 2005 and that culminated during and after the military 

surge. We should not be playing a heavy-handed role in Iraqi politics, but we should remain willing to engage and use our influence 

to catalyze constructive politics if that is needed by the Iraqis or 

when opportunities arise. 
10 

And finally, sixth, as we look to the future of the region as a 

whole and the imperative to constrain the destabilizing activities of 

Iran, the value of our relationships with Iraq and Afghanistan rises 

substantially. And we should start to think about how these partnerships might be used in a broader regional sense. And we should 

look at our relationships with these countries as opportunities, not 

as burdens. 

And let me end there. Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Strmecki can be found in the Appendix on page 77.] 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Dr. Strmecki. 

What we will do is we will put ourselves on the five-minute clock. 

Well, I think the etiquette is to go with the subcommittee members 

first, and then we will go to Mr. Coffman and Mr. Hunter in whatever order—in some order. And we will probably have time for 

more than one round, if not more than two rounds. We will see how 

it goes. 

I want to begin with the question I have asked a couple times 

before both at the full committee level and at the subcommittee 

level, and I phrased it as, you know, what is our moral responsibility in this, and I am not sure that is the best way to phrase it. 

But where I am coming from is we made some very strong statements back in 2001 that we would not forget about Afghanistan, 

that we would not—I don’t know if the words at that time were 

abandon, but we made some very strong statements, while it was 

in our national security to go in and take out the Taliban with the 

help of Afghan allies, that we would not forget Afghanistan. 

Some members have returned from visits and where they have 

met with women legislators who—members have heard independently from them—use the phrase, ‘‘Please don’t abandon us again.’’ 

And I thought of that, Dr. Khan, when I read your statement, 

which is—you say option two, which you favor with caveats, is 

meaning forget Afghanistan and the Taliban. You recommend that 

as a policy decision we should forget Afghanistan. Those are your 

words, which, of course, conflicts with Dr. Strmecki, who says, ‘‘We 

must send a strong statement of resolve.’’ Obviously, those are in 

great conflict. 

So my question is how do we respond to women, women legislators, those who have aligned themselves with us over the last 

seven or eight years in Afghanistan—how do we reconcile doing 

what is in our national security interest with whatever commitments we have made to Afghans who have been helping us? 

And I think, in fairness to General Eaton, we will start at this 

end this time. 

Dr. Strmecki. 

Dr. STRMECKI. I agree very much with your first phrasing in 

terms of a moral responsibility. The Afghan people have made a 

common cause with us in two dramatic cases—one, when we supported their effort to liberate their country when the Soviets occupied it, and the Afghans gave a million and a half lives in that 

struggle, and five million Afghans were refugees. And we abandoned them after that conflict without taking even a strong political attempt to create a post-war order. 
11 

And yet after 9/11, both Afghans in the north and Afghans in the 

south rose up to join us. We would have never been able to overthrow the Taliban with the handful of troops that we sent there. 

It was the catalytic role that those troops had in enabling the Afghans to join us in fighting Taliban and al—the Taliban-al Qaeda 

regime. 

So I believe that that creates a—not only a relationship but a 

moral debt that we should vindicate. 

Moreover, your second point in terms of our national security interests—I think our security interests are still at stake in that region. The enemy that is just across the border in western Pakistan 

is real, and there is nothing more that they would like than to 

move back into Afghanistan and restore that period where they 

had sanctuary there. 

Further, the people of Afghanistan are with us, as you have spoken about. So I think that the key operating concept is let’s make 

a sufficient commitment now so that we can stabilize the situation 

while we build up Afghan capability to defend themselves in the 

long term. 

Our goal should be to move from being the combat force in Afghanistan to an enabling force that supports Afghan capability— 

police, military, intelligence—to secure their countryside and to secure their cities. That has really been the model where we have 

been—that we have used to be successful in—around the world. I 

mean, think of South Korea—completely dependent on us at the 

end of the Korean War. But now, with a military force it really can 

stand on their own, but we remain in an engagement in a supporting way. 

So I would urge you to take that model. 

Dr. SNYDER. I might say we each have five minutes, and I appreciate your answer, Dr. Strmecki. Maybe you want to err on the side 

of brevity so—in fairness to all members so we can get around. 

Dr. Khan. 

Dr. KHAN. I am convinced that the Taliban is not a national security threat to the United States. Taliban, unlike al Qaeda, is a 

regional—— 

Dr. SNYDER. No, I want you to respond to—you want us to forget 

Afghanistan after—— 

Dr. KHAN. Yes. 

Dr. SNYDER [continuing]. For seven or eight years we have had 

our soldiers and our civilians encouraging—— 

Dr. KHAN. My—— 

Dr. SNYDER [continuing]. Afghan people to align themselves with 

us—— 

Dr. KHAN. My—— 

Dr. SNYDER [continuing]. Security, and you want us—— 

Dr. KHAN. My—— 

Dr. SNYDER [continuing]. To forget it. 

Dr. KHAN. My recommendation is based on these two premises— 

one, the Taliban is not a national security threat. Number two is 

also based on the judgment that we will not be able to do what is 

absolutely necessary for us to do there, which is to make a commitment that we will be there until the job is finished, and we will 

do the job right and send enough number of troops to fight the in-
12 

surgency, enough number of civilians to build the infrastructure 

and commit to building a democracy. 

The amount of money and efforts that are required—I am convinced that there isn’t the political will in this country to do that. 

And I fear that in the absence of a political commitment to fulfill 

the moral obligation that we owe not just to the Afghans who are 

our allies but to all the Afghans to help build their nations, not kill 

civilians, and the insurgencies—insurgency strategies. 

We will do more harm if we were to pull out later than now. The 

decision to stay is impossible because you could have the next presidential candidate running on this—on this agenda that we need to 

pull out of Afghanistan in 2011. 

And so if we were to escalate war now and then create more 

havoc in Afghanistan for the next two or three years, and then a 

new candidate gets elected on the agenda to pull out of Afghanistan, and we pull out in 2012, then we will be doing to the Afghans 

again what we did to them in 1989—leave a devastated nation 

helpless again. That is my genuine fear. 

If—— 

Dr. SNYDER. We will move to Dr. Fair. 

As an Afghan patriot who had aligned myself with the United 

States troops, I would be a bit apprehensive about a political analysis based on the 2012 presidential reelection discussing what our 

moral responsibility is, but I appreciate your comments. 

Dr. Fair. 

Dr. FAIR. Of course, I don’t see this in moral terms. I don’t think 

we should make current and future decisions based upon sunk 

costs, but I also think it is a fake binary that not forgetting Afghanistan somehow means an increased troop commitment. Quite 

the contrary. You can imagine scaling up troops to build up Afghan 

national security forces in the preparation of eventually 

downscaling our kinetic footprint. 

And I am skeptical of this comprehensive counterinsurgency 

(COIN) approach, not because it is not the right thing or the optimal outcome, but because I don’t believe that we have the troop capabilities to do it. 

I don’t believe that Afghans are entirely receptive to more troops. 

The polling data pretty much buttresses that opinion. And we can’t 

be more committed to Afghanistan than Afghanistan’s leadership. 

All of our efforts are undermined by the ineptitude and the corruption both in Kabul and the strategy to find sub-national partners are completely undermined by the—Karzai takes the district 

as well as provincial officials. 

So I have a somewhat different formulation, and I also disagree 

with some of the panelists here. The Pakistani Taliban are not the 

same as the Afghan Taliban. They share networks, but they are 

certainly not the same. 

And so this idea of conflating entirely these two theaters I think 

is really misguided, and we should really be served by asking ourselves what, strictly speaking, is our national security interest, 

leaving aside the moral issues, in both of these countries and how 

best do we prosecute those interests. 

Dr. SNYDER. General Eaton. 
13 

General EATON. Mr. Chairman, 60 nuclear weapons are a vital 

national interest. Regional stability to protect those weapons from 

extremists—our moral responsibility is a subset of that mission but 

an important subset. 

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Wittman. 

Mr. WITTMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

I want to thank the panelists for being with us today. I want to 

look at this issue maybe in a little bit broader perspective, because 

I think there is a lot of interrelationships there in the region, and 

I think we all agree, at least what I am hearing from you, that 

strategically a stable South Asia is in this nation’s interest. 

And we see there is animosity between a nuclear-powered Pakistan and a nuclear-powered India. We also see Afghanistan as one 

of the top producers of heroin. We see instability and terrorist activities in Pakistan increasing. We also see a hostile and emerging 

nuclear threat in Iran. We see transition in Iraq—lots of dynamic 

situations in that region. 

I just want your overall thoughts about what do we do in that 

particular scenario to increase stability in South Asia? And obviously there is a lot of interconnectivity there. 

But, General Eaton, we will begin with you. 

General EATON. Thank you, Congressman. I think General 

McChrystal’s comprehensive plan is a—from a military perspective 

is a very good plan. I would like to see the rest of the executive 

branch, all departments, support the general in the prosecution of 

his mission. 

He has got to provide the security with the military. I believe 

that the rest of the executive branch needs to fall in and support 

in providing the prosperity that we need to see derived from the 

security. 

So his approach to take whatever number of extra force structure 

he gets to go after an urban counterinsurgency to create prosperity 

zones with a security zone I think is a very prudent approach to 

military operations in Afghanistan. 

Dr. FAIR. I appreciate your regional take on this. But I want to 

point out that our inability to compel Pakistan to decisively cease 

supporting all militant groups is actually the crux of this. 

Let’s remember that it was a Pakistan-based and -backed terrorist group, Jaish-e-Mohammed, that attacked the Indian parliament in 2001–2002 which brought the largest mobilization of 

those forces, brought the country—both of them to a near-war crisis 

with the specter of nuclear escalation. 

Everyone that studies South Asia agrees that a militant attack, 

say, akin to that which happened in Mumbai will be the most likely precipitant of an Indo-Pakistan conventional crisis with potential 

escalation. 

I might also add that Pakistan’s own domestic problems again 

stem from its support of militant proxies. The Pakistan Taliban, 

the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), shares overlapping membership with those very same groups that target India and, obviously, 

the Afghan Taliban operating in Afghanistan. 

So it can’t defeat its own internal security threats, which brings 

into the question of Pakistan’s national integrity and, obviously, its 
14 

strategic assets until it is compelled to strategically abandon militancy as foreign and domestic policy tools. 

Dr. KHAN. There are two things that I would like to point out, 

and I want to work on—build on what my colleague here said. 

I think, first of all, we need to really honestly ask the question, 

‘‘Are we the force of stability in the region or not?’’ It is my understanding that the United States presence in South Asia contributes 

to the instability in South Asia. 

Before we went there, there was no suicide bombing in Afghanistan. Before we went there, there were no two Talibans. And the 

level of violence was not this level. And we have been there for 

eight years and things have got continuously and steadily worse. 

So I think we need to ask a question that the major military 

presence of the United States in South Asia—does it contribute to 

stability? 

I consider major U.S. presence, military presence, there as a 

provocation. It is a provocation not only to the militants but it is 

also a provocation to the population, which will align itself with the 

militants. 

This concern that we have for nuclear weapons in Pakistan is 

read entirely differently in Pakistan. It is seen as an attempt by 

the United States to neuter the Islamic world, which is to deprive 

the only Islamic country with nuclear weapons of that capacity. So 

Islamists, radical extremists and even those elements in the Pakistani government which see the U.S. threat to Pakistani nuclear 

capability continue to play with the extremists. 

The Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and others 

who support the Taliban in Afghanistan do it for two reasons—one, 

because they sympathize with the geopolitical view which is antiAmericanism and see America as an enemy of the Muslim world, 

and number two, they also see these as instruments to pursue their 

geopolitical interests in the South Asia vis-a-vis Kashmir, et cetera. 

But I believe that the United States military presence will not 

contribute to stability. Sending more troops into Afghanistan will 

provoke more violence. There will be more civilian deaths, which 

will mean that the extremists will continue to get more support 

monetarily as well as in terms of recruits. 

So we engage for moral purposes or for strategic purposes, the 

way to do that is not through increasing military presence. 

Mr. WITTMAN. Dr. Strmecki. 

Dr. STRMECKI. The violence and chaos in that region for the past 

25 years has stemmed in large part from Afghanistan being a zone 

of proxy warfare among the regional powers—Russia, Iran, India, 

and Pakistan. 

And so if we are able to stabilize Afghanistan, to enable it to 

build institutions so it can defend itself and that it assumes a neutral posture vis-a-vis regional rivalries, then you have kind of put 

a keystone in an arch of regional stability. 

And in fact, if you look back over the history of the last 50 years, 

a stable Afghanistan produces greater stability in the region. 

Moreover, once you have that, you can unlock regional trade. The 

stable Afghanistan would be a land bridge that would unlock—or 

it would create an economic zone of more than a billion people and 

a trillion dollars of aggregate gross domestic product (GDP). Al-
15 

ready you see intrepid truck drivers transiting Afghanistan to start 

stitching together the old Silk Road routes. 

But if Afghanistan is stabilizing and we become engaged with 

the regional countries in planning the infrastructure to allow regional trade, you could create some win-win situations. 

Dr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mr. Wittman. 

Mr. Nye. 

Mr. NYE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

I want to start with one question focusing on Pakistan. I am 

going to ask this of Dr. Fair and Dr. Khan. And I agree a hundred 

percent that what happens in Pakistan as that plays out is critical 

to our ability to have success in tackling the number one U.S. national security objective in the region, which is defeat of al Qaeda 

in the region. 

And what I would like to have your comments on is, Dr. Fair, 

you suggested very clearly today we need to compel Pakistan to 

abandon its support of the Afghan Taliban and start to focus on 

helping us defeat them in Pakistan. 

What I would like to ask is for your ideas of how to accomplish 

that. I suspect that somewhere in the grand scheme our relationship with India, and India’s relationship with Pakistan plays a 

large role in that, but I would like to get both of your thoughts on 

how would we compel or get the Pakistani government to change 

their approach, to be more helpful to us in achieving the goal that 

we are trying to achieve in Pakistan. 

Dr. FAIR. I am going to sound like a crazy woman, but let me 

put a few things on the table nonetheless. 

The Kerry-Lugar legislation I think actually rightly identifies 

that the Pakistan army is as much a part of the problem as it is 

any solution. And I think it is right to condition security assistance—in fact, I favor a stronger conditionality than that which 

eventually appeared in that legislation. The problem is it is subject 

to a waiver. 

And as long as we need Pakistan to facilitate the massive 

logistical support in our—to support our effort in Afghanistan, 

which will only increase as we increase the troops, you can bet that 

waiver is going to be applied. 

So I think that we need to be much more creative in thinking 

about negative inducements—sticks, if you will—much more targeted and really increase the political will here in Washington to 

apply those negative inducements. And obviously, our dependence 

upon them diminishes that will. 

At the same time, I think we need to be much more creative 

about positive inducements. It is very clear that money alone does 

not fix Pakistan’s chronically neuralgic sense of insecurity vis-a-vis 

India. 

I don’t think that what India does or does not do in Afghanistan 

is going to make Pakistan stop supporting the Taliban. I think we 

need to think very hard about what is Pakistan’s genuine source 

of insecurity and put some things on the table that might be outof-the-box. 

Let me put one on the table, and it will probably engender snickering. What is wrong with a conditions-based civilian nuclear deal 
16 

for Pakistan, a highly conditions-based? They will probably never 

make any of those conditions. 

But in the process of trying, we gain more visibility into their nuclear program, which I think everyone would want to make sure 

that its command and control is as reasonable as it can possibly 

get. And some of those conditions could even involve its support for 

non-state actors. 

You could also even imagine working with the Indians and the 

regional partners to put a security guarantee. If Pakistan really engages in these policies because of fundamental insecurity, let’s call 

their bluff. 

So I am not going to sit here and say I have all the answers, but 

what I can say—a genuine compellence campaign needs much more 

clever positive inducements and greater political will to apply more 

clever negative inducements. 

Mr. NYE. Thank you. 

Dr. Khan, you also suggest in your testimony that we need to 

incentivize Pakistan to stop pursuing two countervailing tactics at 

the same time. Do you have ideas of how to do it? 

Dr. KHAN. There is one thing that we need to understand. Our 

interests are not fully in sync with that of Pakistan. There are two 

threats there, the Taliban and al Qaeda. 

Taliban in Pakistan are a threat to Pakistan, not so much as a 

threat to us. But al Qaeda, who are also in Pakistan, are more of 

a threat to us than they are a threat to Pakistan. 

So what happens is that when we target al Qaeda, we can be indifferent to Pakistani Taliban, and when Pakistan targets Pakistani Taliban, it can be indifferent to al Qaeda. So that is something that we need to understand, that there is a—the lack of sync. 

We are not fully synchronized in terms of our threats from extremism. 

I mean, strangely, our best friends right now are the Pakistani 

Taliban. By killing civilians in Pakistan, they are generating public 

opinion against them which is empowering the army to act strongly 

against the extremists in Pakistan. So the only reason why the 

military is now operating in Waziristan is because there is public 

support in Pakistan now. 

The U.S. relations with India, the continuing bettering of U.S. relations with India, is a continuing source of increasing insecurity 

of the Pakistanis, and Pakistanis will not be able to be full allies 

of the United States if they continue to perceive that India is closer 

to the United States. 

So there are several things that we can do. One of the things 

that we need to do is to—to provide long-term guarantees to Pakistan, to say that we will never abandon Pakistanis when it comes 

to India-Pakistan relations, we will not allow a situation in South 

Asia which will undermine Pakistani interests and advantage 

India. 

We have not convinced the Pakistanis on this score, especially on 

our deal with the F–16s. The deals are not compatible with India 

and Pakistan and our nuclear issue. We are favoring one country 

over the other. 

So I think if we can somehow shore up Pakistani insecurity visa-vis India and we also convince Pakistan that we will not allow 
17 

India to gain the other side of Pakistan, which means allow India 

to have significant strategic presence in Afghanistan—right now, 

Pakistanis feel that just as we feel that Pakistan has a—is playing 

on both sides with the Taliban in Afghanistan, Pakistan feels that 

America, too, is doing the same thing by allowing India significant 

strategic presence in Afghanistan, which by—thereby surrounding 

Pakistan. 

So basically, the key is the insecurity of Pakistan, especially the 

military and the political elite. 

Mr. NYE. Okay. Thank you. 

Dr. SNYDER. Mrs. Davis for five minutes. 

Mrs. DAVIS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

And I am sorry I wasn’t able to hear everyone’s presentations, 

but let me try and just follow up with that a little bit. 

Part of my understanding—and please correct me if I am 

wrong—is that some of the insecurity would be further increased 

in Pakistan if we did not try and bring about stability in Afghanistan, that the—that there is a great concern about our leaving, essentially, or not engaging incrementally now in a way that would 

change the situation on the ground. 

And I wonder if you could comment on that, because it—part of 

it—the real difficulty here is trying to, in an Af-Pak way, understand whether or not it really matters, and the extent to which it 

matters, what happens now in Afghanistan rather than in Pakistan, where we know a lot of the efforts, a lot of that relationshipbuilding, has to occur given the situation on the ground. 

And the follow-up to that, really, is to the extent to which we 

are—we are secure in the belief that if, in fact, a lot of help occurred in Afghanistan today whether that would really make a difference in terms of the ability of the Afghan army, the law enforcement and the government to be able to actually be a counter to 

Pakistan in a way that would be meaningful and helpful. 

Anybody want to comment on that? Dr. Fair. 

Dr. FAIR. Anyway, first, let me just step back regionally. India 

is over the long term our strategic ally. India doing what it wants 

and needs to do in the region basically prevents China from consolidating its hegemony. So this is what is motivating the longterm strategic interest with India—is opportunity. 

Our engagement with Pakistan is largely framed because we are 

scared of it, and it actually turns its frightening-ness into an asset, 

because it says ‘‘We are too dangerous to let you fail.’’ 

I don’t believe that sending them F–16s or conventional armaments in any way diminishes their security apprehensions about 

India. It has much more to do with the way in which the region 

was cleaved. So sending more F–16s, buttressing Pakistan’s conventional capabilities against India, isn’t going to fix the problem. 

And their distrust of the United States doesn’t go back to 1989. 

It goes back to 1962 when we basically armed the Indians vis-avis the Chinese. 

And I think Americans need to stop this narrative ‘‘If we abandon Pakistan.’’ The fact is we were aligned with Pakistan in the 

1980s because of national security interests. They were cut off because they chose to proliferate, and that was more important than 

F–16s. 
18 

Incidentally, they probably made the right decision to go for nuclear weapons over a batch of F–16s. But we need to hold Pakistan 

accountable for its actions. We didn’t simply walk away from the 

region. 

Similarly, India is an actual regional power. We cannot say to 

India, ‘‘Stop being involved in Afghanistan.’’ In fact, to step back, 

I would argue that India, even Iran, has a lot more in common 

with us and our interests in Afghanistan than does Pakistan. 

Now, it is true that there are probably two camps in Pakistan. 

There are those that fear the U.S. withdrawing, that there will be 

greater insecurity. But I assure you the strategic elite in Pakistan 

would prefer a stable, chaotic Afghanistan than a stable Afghanistan which will most certainly have greater ties to Iran and, in 

particular, with India. 

General EATON. From a military perspective, you isolate the objective. We have not done that in Afghanistan. The free flow across 

the borders is creating a terrific problem for all military units operating in Afghanistan. 

And I really like what I heard Dr. Fair comment on as far as 

Pakistan and India are concerned. 

Dr. KHAN. For a long time Pakistan has used the chaos in Afghanistan as a strategic asset. Pakistan is not interested in stability in Afghanistan because instability in Afghanistan has been 

a source of tremendous military and financial aid from the U.S. 

during the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and once again. 

But in the fight with the Soviet Union, Pakistan has benefitted 

financially and militarily because of instability in Afghanistan, and 

they continue to do so. 

The Pakistani military and the Pakistani political elite genuinely 

believes that it can manage Afghanistan on its own, and that is 

why they created Taliban. And they believe that ISI, with its control and links with extremists and the various military groups in 

Afghanistan, can manage Afghanistan. And if you talk to them 

now, they will tell you, ‘‘We kept Afghanistan very much under 

control before you came, and it is after the U.S. adventure in Afghanistan that we see that the chaos has been escalating.’’ 

So in spite of the fact that Afghanistan produces tremendous 

amount of refugees who go into Pakistan and are having an impact 

on Pakistan’s social fabric, Pakistan elite believe that Afghanistan 

is their regional sphere where they would like to have influence. 

Even though Pakistan has had good relations with Iran, they have 

not tolerated Iranian interference in Afghanistan. 

But what they fear now is that the United States, when it leaves 

Afghanistan, it will hand over the management of Afghanistan to 

forces other than Pakistan. It could be Iran. It could be Pakistan. 

Or it could even bring in other international players such as China 

and other players. 

So Pakistan will continue to agitate Afghanistan in order to have 

global leverage. Without Afghanistan, they have no leverage. 

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Hunter for five minutes. 

Mr. HUNTER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and—— 

Dr. SNYDER. Incidentally, I should point out—— 

Mr. HUNTER [continuing]. The opportunity to be here. 
19 

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Hunter, I should point out, this is former-Marine day on the subcommittee, with Mr. Coffman, yourself and me. 

You know, we have got them outnumbered, so—— 

Mr. HUNTER. Semper fi. [Laughter.] 

Thanks for letting us be here today to—really appreciate it. I had 

a lot of specific questions, but I want to get into one. We are not 

at the ground floor in this debate anymore. We are kind of talking 

like we are. And my question—one, is we are over there. We are 

committed. We are on the 50th floor. So what now? 

And I don’t think that our commanders over there are ignorant 

of anything you all are saying. I think they all—do you think they 

are ignorant of this? I think that they have heard probably every 

point of view. 

And the State Department involvement—I was stationed in Afghanistan for my third deployment in 2007, and I just went back 

over this last weekend. It was fun. 

The State Department involvement and the civilian and smart 

person involvement now with the military in Afghanistan is unprecedented—never happened before. It has quintupled since July, 

the number of State Department, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) personnel. 

And there is a—there is a two-star civilian for every two-star 

military person now. There is a whole chain of—of command for 

the civilian side, along with the military side. 

Everybody is confident that if they are asking for a troop surge— 

I mean, that is what everybody is asking for. My question is so 

what now, then? I mean, there is—we are talking a lot. We are at 

the 50th floor, not the ground floor anymore. 

We are over there. We are committed. Dr. Khan might have us 

pull out, but not on the basis that we can’t win, on the basis that 

you don’t think we will stay. 

Dr. KHAN. Yes. 

Mr. HUNTER. Right? 

Dr. KHAN. Yes, exactly. 

Mr. HUNTER. Okay. So what now? That is all I got. And that is 

the big—what do you recommend if we do want to—so that we can 

leave at a certain point in the next two to five years and leave it 

relatively stable, not abandon it totally? We probably will leave 

troops there like we will in Iraq. But so what now? 

Dr. STRMECKI. My view is the end state is you want Afghans defending Afghanistan with us enabling them in the way you spoke. 

And so the way to get there is to give General McChrystal a 

surge that allows him to reverse the deteriorating trajectory of security, particularly in the east and south, and to put the Afghan 

national security force buildup on a—on a trajectory that allows 

the build-out of local security to be done by Afghans. 

In his report, he didn’t give us a timeline in the sense of how 

long does the surge have to be, so do you get the handover—— 

Mr. HUNTER. He gave us metrics, though. 

Dr. STRMECKI. That is right, he did—— 

Mr. HUNTER. Right. 

Dr. STRMECKI [continuing]. And I think in the portions that 

weren’t made public there probably is more of a timeline. 
20 

But I think that is the right template. And so I would give him 

the resources to execute that if in asking him about the—his template and about his timelines you find that compelling. 

Mr. HUNTER. Pro-surge. 

Dr. STRMECKI. Yes. 

Mr. HUNTER. Okay. 

And, Dr. Khan—and caveat your answer with we are not going 

to abandon Afghanistan—— 

Dr. KHAN. Okay. I am going to abandon that—— 

Mr. HUNTER [continuing]. And leave them—— 

Dr. KHAN [continuing]. Assumption. I am going to abandon my— 

fear that we will abandon. Based on that, I think we need to look 

at Afghanistan not as a source of security threat but to look at it 

as a failed state that we are trying to fix. 

And once that whole perspective changes—okay, we are here, we 

are going to do what is necessary to be done, then you look at Afghanistan as a failed state that needs to be done. So basically our 

problem here is building state mechanisms so that Afghanistan can 

become a self-governing unit—very simply it can stand up on its 

feet. 

For that, the last—the first criteria is to be able to secure it, 

which means being able to isolate Afghanistan from Pakistan. Our 

ability to seal the border—that the threats from Pakistan do not 

come back into Afghanistan, and then we can go after all the problems. If we can secure Afghanistan, isolate it from all other threats 

coming from the Middle East, foreign fighters and Taliban coming 

in—and then you build. You build state institutions. 

And it is not enough to just build the police and the military. But 

you also simultaneously build confidence in governance. 

And if we are there for five, six years, and the population now 

begins to hope that, ‘‘Okay, A, Americans are not going to abandon 

us and go away, let’s take the risk with the American, we can see 

things improving, we can see things improving in Kabul, we can 

see things improving in some parts of Afghanistan’’—that success 

can be replicated in other—I have spoken to people who are fascinated by the changes that have taken place in Kabul. 

Kabul has improved significantly. If that can be replaced in other 

places—but there is one more point that I do want to make about 

this, and it is—this is to understand that this is not about a security. This is not a war anymore. We are essentially reconstructing 

a failed state. That would be the other way of thinking about this. 

Mr. HUNTER. In interest of—time, I want to get everybody else 

to answer. So you are pro-surge, too, but not necessarily for counterinsurgency but for isolating Afghanistan—— 

Dr. KHAN. And then building state. 

Mr. HUNTER. Okay, so two pro-surges. Okay. 

Dr. Fair. 

Dr. FAIR. I am somewhere in the middle. And I think—I—my—— 

Mr. HUNTER. I am sorry, Dr. Fair, I didn’t hear what your preliminary comment was. 

Dr. FAIR. I am somewhere in the middle between these guys. 

Mr. HUNTER. Somewhere in the middle, thank you. 

Dr. FAIR. I mean, I think we do need to think about a surge, 

mostly because the training billets for training the Afghan police 
21 

and the Afghan national army are massively understaffed. Leaving 

aside the numbers, we can also talk about the quality. 

However, I am not a fan of increasing kinetics. If you were to 

ask—answer the question that Dr. Strmecki posed, do we have 

enough troops to meet the kinetic mission, I don’t think we do. 

Mr. HUNTER. General McChrystal doesn’t want more kinetics. 

Dr. FAIR. No, no, exactly. So I am certainly of the belief that Afghans have to stand up. 

But let me say very clearly this is where the rubber hits the 

road, with this Afghan government. I am sure you are aware of the 

Focused District Development Plan, which is a program that is 

meant to train police to deal with local corruption. So we take the 

police out, we hose them off, give them eight weeks of training. You 

can question whether that is adequate, and certainly the people 

who are training even question their capabilities. 

But then we put them right back into the district where you 

have the same corrupt district governor, the same corrupt provincial governor, and then we are surprised by recidivism. 

So this is a really good example of our inability to produce quality Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) because of the corruption in Kabul. So we can’t fix that with troops. We simply can’t 

make Karzai do a good job. That is not fixed by troops. 

Finally, I do want to raise this issue that never gets discussed. 

The Afghan government cannot pay for any of the institutions that 

we are building. It can’t even pay for a fraction of it. In fact, it 

couldn’t even pay for its election. 

So my concern is that we have—we are essentially building a 

country that is ever more a rentier state than it has ever been. And 

I am a realist. Americans are going to stop paying for this. NATO 

and its contributing countries are going to stop paying for this. And 

we build a state which is absolutely unsustainable. 

And so looking down the 10-year time horizon, that is when it 

becomes vulnerable again to all of its predatory neighbors. And 

let’s be clear, all of its neighbors are predatory. 

So at some point in these discussions, we really need to enter in 

some discussion of sustainability, unless you are going to make 

poppy a biofuel. 

Mr. HUNTER. But your answer is slight surge. You are—— 

Dr. FAIR. Yes, but focus on Afghan capabilities, but we have to 

get the corruption in governance issue. Otherwise we will fail. 

Mr. HUNTER. Civilian surge, which is helping with that quite a 

bit. 

Dr. FAIR. Can a civilian surge make Karzai be anything but a 

corrupt kleptocrat who—— 

Mr. HUNTER. It could help. 

Dr. FAIR. I am skeptical. 

Mr. HUNTER. General. I am really short on time, General. I am 

sorry. 

General EATON. Afghanistan can exist as a pretty nice country. 

It did so in the 1970s. Not a bad place. A whole lot of my generation cruised through there in bell-bottom jeans. So it can be a pretty nice place. 

So it can get back there. And if we resource General 

McChrystal’s plan to the degree to moderate risk—and this is a 
22 

discussion between the Chief of Staff of the Army and the commandant of the Marine Corps on what those two services can provide General McChrystal. 

It is that tension between a plan not established in a constrained 

fashion, which is General McChrystal’s plan, which—and that is 

his job, to plan in an unconstrained fashion. He has put a bill on 

the table, and between Department of the Army and Department 

of the Navy that plan will be resourced. At the same time, the 

surge in a civilian arena—the rest of the executive branch has to 

match his appetite for civilian support. 

Mr. HUNTER. [Off mike.] 

General EATON. Correct. 

Dr. KHAN. I just want to add—caveat a reminder to you—remember when Karen Hughes was hired to talk about public diplomacy 

as an important part of—we are going to win the hearts and minds 

of the Muslim world? 

That year, U.S. defense budget was over $700 billion, and the 

public diplomacy budget was $500 million, and most of it was 

pulled away for Katrina relief, and she literally had no money to 

do her job. 

And that is my consistent fear, that we might spend hundreds 

of billions of dollars on the war effort, but we will not commit that 

kind of same parallel effort in institution-building and state-building. 

And given our past record of last eight years in Afghanistan, I 

really don’t feel confident. That is why if you take my word for 

surge, I want you to have this on record that a surge only on the 

condition that we are committed to doing the right thing and doing 

it right. 

Dr. SNYDER. Mr. Coffman for five minutes, and then we will go 

vote. 

Mr. COFFMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

General Eaton, when we—we just lost eight soldiers from my 

state out of Fort Carson recently in north—in a forward operating 

base in northeastern Afghanistan, a very remote area, very little 

population in that area. 

Ironically, they were ordered to be pulled back prior to the 

Taliban assault on their position. Where would you draw the line 

between—given the resources that we have, between what is a 

counterterrorism strategy versus what is a counterinsurgency 

strategy? 

General EATON. Thank you, Congressman. And I regret every 

casualty that we are sustaining over there, and—because it is pretty personal from my family perspective. 

As I understand General McChrystal’s plan, he is going to establish a counterinsurgency approach to operations and he is going to 

focus on urban areas. If you cannot provide 600,000 soldiers to do 

a country-wide, by our doctrine, counterinsurgency operation, then 

you are driven to something less than that, a COIN-lite is the 

phrase being tossed around out there, where you perform our counterinsurgency doctrine but in smaller places—specifically, urban 

areas—Kabul, Jalalabad, Kandahar. 

So you have got that approach, and I would like to just make one 

short comment about a letter that was written by the translator for 
23 

the New York Times reporter who was rescued and the translator 

killed in the operation the Brits conducted a few months ago. 

He writes from Germany, and he says, ‘‘I look forward to returning to my country, Afghanistan, and to leave the manicured parks 

of Germany and the concrete and the asphalt. I look forward to returning to my village, which is miles from the closest road, where 

it is natural, where I can once again have the dust of Afghanistan 

on my boots.’’ 

Now, that is a different guy from what General McChrystal is focused on in the urban areas, and I think that the urban areas are 

a doable approach to counterinsurgency warfare and—or operations—counterinsurgency operations. 

Mr. COFFMAN. Thank you. 

In looking at Iraq, drawing a parallel to Iraq, there was a turning point that certainly involved the surge but a number of other 

factors that created an environment that brought the Sunni Arab 

insurgency on board with coalition forces. 

In looking at Afghanistan, is there enough outreach to the 

Pashtun population to be in the Afghan army? And I talked to a 

Marine Corps general a couple weeks ago in Helmand Province 

who said that—and granted, there was nobody down there prior to 

his brigade going down there, but that there was yet to be an effort 

to create—to recruit the Pashtuns in that particular province. 

Is that an issue, anybody? 

Dr. STRMECKI. When I have looked at the data, the Afghan national army is relatively ethnic—ethnically balanced at the recruit 

levels or sort of the enlisted level. There is a little bit of a tilt toward the Tajik community in the officer corps. 

But the challenge, really, for the Afghan national army has been 

scale. We undersized it because there was an assumption when it 

was designed that there would be a relatively benign security environment, and we were slow to react in increasing the end strength 

of the Afghan national army as the security situation deteriorated. 

I think the kind of outreach that is needed to sort of replicate 

the Sunni Awakening is really in every locality to understand what 

is driving the—any support for the insurgency. Is it bad governance? Is it intertribal rivalry that pushes one tribe toward the 

Taliban? Is it the need to make money? 

And if you do that kind of analysis—and General McChrystal’s 

report suggests that this is the kind of thing that he will do—then 

you can form political strategies to peel people away, peel away 

what might be called the soft outer layers of the Taliban. 

There will be a hard core that you can’t change and you will have 

to target, but I am convinced in many of these areas there are, as 

Kilcullen wrote, accidental guerillas or incidental guerillas that can 

be pulled out of the fight. 

Mr. COFFMAN. Yes? 

Dr. FAIR. One caveat—it is true when you look at the composition it does generally look ethnically distributed. The problem with 

the Pashtuns is they are mostly coming from the north. There really is inadequate reach of Pashtuns in the south. And obviously, 

that is where so much of the problem resides. 

In addition, it is so easy to focus upon the army, but we have 

really come across the police as a major issue somewhat late in the 
24 

game. For example, I was up in Kunduz as an election monitor. 

You will have districts there that only have 30 police officers, 

and—and who knows what those police officers are actually doing. 

So while the army is certainly important, I really would like to 

drive home that it is actually going to be the police that are going 

to be the element of this strategy that actually does the whole—— 

Mr. COFFMAN. Well, let me interject with another question on 

that, because what I noticed when I was in Iraq with the United 

States Marine Corps is that there were real—that the army—we 

had a lot more confidence in the army than the police because the 

army tended to be from another province that came in there. 

At night, you know, they would go back to their forward operating base that was separate from the civilian population. 

The police tended to be from the community. The insurgents 

knew where they lived. They could be targeted. Their families 

could be targeted. They had a tendency not to do their job, and— 

unless there was adequate security. 

But in that interim period, it was very tough, and so I think 

that—have we overemphasized the police at the expense of the 

army—— 

Dr. FAIR. I—— 

Mr. COFFMAN [continuing]. At this part? 

Dr. FAIR. See, I would actually say the opposite. 

Dr. SNYDER. Okay, Mr. Coffman, we better let this be your last 

answer here, since we have got votes. 

Dr. FAIR. No, actually the opposite, that we started building the 

Afghan army, which has actually been relatively successful, and we 

came to the police too late. The Germans had responsibility for the 

police and they were a complete disaster. 

So I think we can’t forget the police, but one interesting side effect was observed as a part of the Focused District Development 

Plan. When we pull the police out of the district, the Afghan national civil order police go in, and they are a national police. 

And interestingly enough, the locals in the district didn’t want 

the Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP) to leave because 

they were, in fact, not corrupt. Because of the reason that you 

noted, they were not embedded in this political web of corruption. 

So when I look at Focused District Development (FDD), one of 

the really interesting lessons learned is that ANCOP has been really successful. 

Dr. SNYDER. We have to go vote. We have a series of three votes, 

two if we walk slow. [Laughter.] 

And we will be back. Thank you. 

[Recess.] 

Dr. SNYDER. We will go ahead and resume. I am sorry that took 

longer than I thought it was going to. You have been patient. One 

of the new members was sworn in. 

I wanted to ask about the issue of the Taliban in Afghanistan 

themselves. 

Dr. Khan, in your written statement, you say, ‘‘To make matters 

worse, they are proving to be very resolute, cunning, resourceful 

and brazen.’’ And you know, obviously, they have had some successes. The level of violence has gone up over the last months. 
25 

But we can also overstate, can we not, their resources, skills— 

you know, while they can obviously hurt a lot of people and do violence, I mean, they have some disadvantages, too, compared to 

other insurgencies. 

So I mean, I will address that to you, General Eaton, and then 

let the rest of the panel—where does the—well, how do you respond to that statement about resolute, cunning, resourceful, brazen and what we think of the fighting force of the Taliban in Afghanistan, what their pluses and minuses are? 

General EATON. Mr. Chairman, thank you. From my perspective 

and talking to soldiers who have been in the theater, all of that is 

true. Some of the abilities to mass forces and conduct significant 

operations, 150 to 200 strong, albeit lightly armed, the ability of 

Taliban to mass—to produce that kind of number without our intelligence systems picking up on it, is worrisome. 

And it shows a far more sophisticated Taliban offensive capability that—than we have seen in the past. 

Dr. SNYDER. Anybody else? 

Dr. Fair. 

Dr. FAIR. The problem is they have a different bar for success 

than we do. They don’t have to beat us. They only have to keep us 

from decisively winning. 

And I think we would be remiss if we didn’t understand that the 

Taliban, at the very local level, actually do confer certain benefits 

to their community, albeit at a very high price. 

So for example, they do adjudicate disputes. And we are not talking about complicated disputes, but in a rural, agrarian society, 

family disputes and land disputes are very important. And they resolve them very expeditiously. And of course, the Afghan government has no ability to do that at the national, much less sub-national, level. 

They also provide some ballast or some counterweight to corrupt 

officials, so when you want to get something done, and you have 

got an official—a corrupt official—a corrupt official getting in your 

way, you go to the Taliban commander. No one really disputes 

what the Taliban commanders have to say. 

And they also have a jobs and development program called 

‘‘poppy’’. So in some ways, if we could replicate what the Taliban 

do at the local level, we might be in a position to win. 

The problem is we don’t have—and I don’t just mean we the 

internationals, I also mean the Afghan government doesn’t have 

the presence at the district level where the Taliban seem to be so 

effective. 

Dr. SNYDER. Yes, Doctor. 

Dr. KHAN. A couple of things that I want to point out to you. For 

example, the amount of money that we give Afghans or the Afghan 

government pays those who join the Afghan military—is way more 

than what the Taliban pays those who fight for them. Yet the degree of motivation that is demonstrated by the Taliban in the fight 

is significantly higher. 

There are some analysts who believe that there is a soft core and 

there is a hard core to the Taliban, and then that not everybody 

is just as motivated as the hard core of the Taliban, and the less 
26 

motivated ones can be peeled away by giving financial incentives 

and others. 

But what is amazing is the amount of motivation that they 

show—an extremely powerful fighting enemy like either the NATO 

forces or U.S. forces. I sense that they take their legitimacy for 

granted, which is something very interesting. When they operate in 

areas which they control there is no question of whether they are 

legitimate or not, because they conduct the business of—to tribal 

rights. They do business as Afghans are used to doing business. 

But when they resolve disputes or when they govern there is no 

question of legitimacy, but when this government sponsored by the 

United States, Hamid Karzai’s government, comes to govern, then 

it has first got to establish legitimacy in the various areas. 

And it finally—I am repeating this, but I think it is important 

for us to understand that for many Afghans U.S. military presence 

is a provocation and they see that as an occupation. Taliban driving around in trucks with guns is normal. That is not a provocation. That is not a reason for them to become a fighting force. 

But the Americans driving around in tanks with guns is a provocation, and that is difficult for us to overcome. We could have 

100,000, 500,000 American civilians there doing various civilian 

projects. That is not a problem. 

Dr. SNYDER. My question is about the capability of the Taliban. 

Dr. Strmecki. 

Dr. STRMECKI. I think it is possible to overstate the capabilities 

of the Taliban, though they may be able to mass on a limited basis 

on some—for some operations or conduct some sophisticated commando operations as a few attacks in Kabul have shown. 

Their dominant tactic is the improvised explosive device along 

the road, and that is a sign of weakness rather than strength, because it is essentially—if you are caught doing it, you are finished. 

And so I would say the—what Chris said about the mismatch of 

their strategy versus our counter strategy up to now, before we 

move into a more population-centered strategy, is really magnified. 

They have gotten everything they can out of their strategy, because they are in the villages. They can intimidate the population. 

We are—we haven’t been. As we move to a COIN approach based 

on population security, then I think we will see their advantage diminish. 

Dr. SNYDER. I wanted to ask on a different question, though— 

several of you have mentioned NATO either in your written statement or in the conversation today. 

I was talking to a European diplomat in the last few days who 

said that, in fact, he may share some of you all’s concerns that— 

about what is going on but expressed a view that whatever happens, this does not need to be perceived or it be in reality a—seen 

as a defeat for NATO. 

We will start with you, Dr. Strmecki—comment on that, how 

much of a factor and in what way should that be a factor in our 

thinking and in the President’s thinking? 

Dr. STRMECKI. If we were to fail in Afghanistan, I think it would 

be impossible to insulate NATO and its reputation from such a defeat. 
27 

The limitations of other NATO partners in Afghanistan has been 

a problem with a constant fight over caveats. And so my view has 

always been that the United States needs to do with the Afghan 

government what is necessary to succeed. 

Any NATO partner that comes along with any capability that 

they can offer, let’s find a niche role in which that country can succeed with its own capabilities. And we have done this well in Regional Command (RC) East. 

And it fashions a kind of a soft landing for NATO, which has not 

shown itself able to operate with the kind of quality and robustness 

that is necessary to take on this security environment. 

So I would look to fashion our own strategy first and then find 

a way to make NATO succeed as part of it. 

Dr. KHAN. [Inaudible] on behalf—the United States. The fact 

that we are talking about a surge in American troops right now— 

that NATO has already failed in Afghanistan. 

[Inaudible.] They are looking for soft—the United States. They 

are also—General Stanley McChrystal’s report, but—any commitment of additional troops—it is a half-hearted effort—we will not— 

suggest that NATO is going to fail eventually. 

[Inaudible.] The key question—region. If NATO succeeds in Afghanistan—successful or not. But Afghanistan then—then, of 

course, the failure will be shared by NATO. 

Dr. SNYDER. Dr. Fair. 

Dr. FAIR. Oh, I very much agree with the comments of Dr. 

Strmecki, and I would add a further problem. I have visited many 

of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan, and 

what is absolutely frustrating about them is that they actually tend 

to do more what their domestic constituents want rather than what 

the locals need. 

And there is a massive problem with coordination across the 

PRTs because they are driven by these national actors. So for example, if there is a large infrastructure project that spans multiple 

provinces, there is really no way of getting all of the PRTs in those 

provinces to work together. So apart from the caveats, the lack of 

coordination and synchronization of the international actors are 

very disturbing. 

I am also concerned about some of the specific actors. For example, the security environment in Kunduz has degraded tremendously since 2007, and the Germans still think that they are in a 

peacekeeping mission, but for those of you who have been following 

Kunduz, it is—it is really hard to argue that some of the districts 

in Kunduz actually have peace to keep. 

Dr. SNYDER. General Eaton. 

General EATON. NATO was established to conduct combined 

arms, high-intensity warfare. It was not designed—and everybody 

understood the rules. What we have asked NATO to do now—all 

the contributing nations—is to line up on the United States’ rules 

of engagement. And the respective political environments in every 

country frustrate that. So NATO as monolith in the operations that 

we are trying to conduct in Afghanistan is simply not computing. 

Dr. SNYDER. Mrs. Davis. 

Mrs. DAVIS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 
28 

Thank you again all for being here and for waiting for us to come 

back. One of the comments that we hear often is that they, meaning the Iraqis or Afghanistan, have to want them—this more than 

we do. 

What do you think are the indications for that if we go forward? 

What would you suggest is something that is a firm indicator that 

that bridge is being built? 

Dr. FAIR. Corruption. Karzai has his own family members that 

are deeply involved, allegedly we have to say, in the counternarcotics trade—or in the narcotics business. 

So it seems very strange that we are putting so much money in 

counternarcotics effort and we know that to some extent, although 

one can debate to which extent that is, the narcotics are funding 

the Taliban which, in turn, are targeting our troops. 

So I think there is some very specific things that we can expect 

from Karzai—at a very least—at the very least, cleaning up some 

of the individuals that he knows personally, governors that he has 

appointed that have been involved in the narcotics racket. 

That would be one example of a very concrete step. So for example, when he pardoned five narcotics traffickers because of tenuous 

connections to his reelection campaign, that should actually be a 

pretty strong signal that he doesn’t want it as badly as we do. 

That being said, at the district level, folks don’t want the Taliban 

around. The problem is, as Dr. Strmecki noted, the Taliban have 

coercive power, and even if they do confer some benefit, and the 

high risk of confronting the Taliban and the lack of security for 

them provided by the state, why wouldn’t they simply, you know, 

acquiesce to what the Taliban is up to? 

So what I would like to see is much more leadership coming out 

of Kabul to deal with issues like corruption, the deep involvement 

of Afghan officials at the national and sub-national level in narcotics trafficking. These are important steps that they can take to 

show us that, in fact, they do care about providing a competent 

government and one that can provide safety for its citizens. 

Mrs. DAVIS. Thank you. 

Dr. Strmecki, if I could just—just in counter to that, I thought 

when you were talking about what we can do to work with President Karzai, it is—I think I picked up that you didn’t necessarily 

see the kinds of actions that Dr. Fair mentioned as good leverage, 

that that is only, you know, kind of pummeling him but not necessarily trying to engage on a different level. Is that correct? 

Dr. STRMECKI. Karzai is a difficult actor to play, because he has 

some good qualities and some very bad qualities. 

And in the time I spent in Afghanistan working with Ambassador Khalilzad, I saw that the ambassador was able to form a relationship where he could move Karzai to do things that Karzai 

saw as highly risky or potentially against his interest, but he did 

so in a way by creating confidence in Karzai that the United States 

was standing behind him and was working with him to manage 

those risks. 

Now, that was several years ago, and Karzai was essentially 

untethered and didn’t have that kind of relationship with subsequent ambassadors and underperformed as a result. 
29 

Karzai may have changed and that previous model may not be 

able to be resurrected, but I saw sufficient promise in that model 

that I would still test it today. 

Mrs. DAVIS. Dr. Khan. 

Dr. KHAN. [Inaudible] that both Afghanistan and Pakistan—but 

the question—talking about—Pakistan or Afghanistan is to fight 

for American national security—Pakistan and Afghanistan is to 

fight for a democratic Pakistan and Afghanistan which may—security. 

What is interesting is that because of our presence there, it 

has—there is so much anti-Americanism that even ordinary civilians and citizens who are not affected—for example, Pakistanis 

who live in Karachi, Pakistanis who live in the United States, in 

Europe—who are not directly affected by the Taliban and al 

Qaeda—have this strong desire to see the United States fail. 

And anti-Americanism—see the United States fail. They understate the threat to their own society from the extremists. And any 

place the extremists are operating you will find that there is general perception among people that there are certain benefits that 

these extremists can provide because the so-called secular governments are all very corrupt. 

Hamid Karzai is very corrupt. He is like the mayor of Kabul. He 

has no leverage outside Kabul. He has no authority and legitimacy 

unless he is backed by the United States. And now Abdullah 

Abdullah has completely destroyed his legitimacy. 

For the next four years we are going to have somebody there as 

president who tried to rig the elections, and I don’t think he is ever 

going to be able to redeem that loss of legitimacy. 

So across the Muslim world you will see this pattern of secular, 

pro-Western leaders who are corrupt engaging with Islamist who 

may be violent and very anti-West in their rhetoric, but when they 

are in charge they are less corrupt, and they are quick to dispense 

justice and manage things. 

If you are living in a village in—or if you are living in a small 

village in southern Afghanistan, you might find that the Taliban 

provide security as well as quick justice and solutions to your problems and the West does not. And the West is working with leaders 

who they do not like, who are either anti-Islamic or corrupt. And 

that is a challenge. 

So for us to be able to win the partnership of the population in 

Pakistan and Afghanistan is very difficult. It is further undermined 

by the death of civilians during the various counterterrorism operations that we conduct. 

Mrs. DAVIS. I would like to actually follow up—I don’t know, Mr. 

Chairman—General Eaton, did you have—did you want to comment at all? 

General EATON. Only that the military will provide a feedback 

loop on grading the leadership at every level, and that that will inform the President’s decision on how long he is going to tolerate 

this. 

So the best feedback loop that you are going to get is out of General McChrystal’s headquarters. 

Mrs. DAVIS. Thank you. 
30 

I wanted to just follow up for a second, because part of, I think, 

the metrics that we think about and going back to the comment 

that the chairman made earlier about our opportunity to meet with 

actually women in Afghanistan who are very interested in nationbuilding—I mean, they are very interested in helping to build a 

civil society, and educate their children, and have health care and 

all the things that everybody else in the world wants. 

And it seems to me that—I mean, this is a tremendous tension 

between trying to work with some of those groups that you mentioned, which may, in fact, provide some of that security but yet 

have absolutely no interest in having half the population participate. How do we deal with that? 

Dr. KHAN. Well, there is lot of things that are complicated there. 

For example—this—called Taliban in Pakistan. But for example, 

the group that was fighting in Swat has been fighting for what 

they call—since 1970s—that we now call them Taliban. This problem was separate from the Taliban. 

So it is important for us, if we are going to get in there to try 

to make social change and cultural change and engage with this, 

to really understand the terrain that we are operating in. And I 

think we still fully do not understand these groups because we 

tend to—to clump them together. 

I don’t think that the Taliban in Afghanistan are the same as the 

Taliban in Pakistan. And even what they call—— 

Mrs. DAVIS. Those fighting against the government—— 

Dr. KHAN. Yes. 

Mrs. DAVIS [continuing]. Essentially, right? 

Dr. KHAN. But still, the groups which we call Taliban in Pakistan are very different groups with very different goals. Some want 

to establish Islamic state in Swat and some want to drive America 

out of Pakistan. Some want to punish the Pakistani government for 

aligning with the U.S. Some want to fight against India, so there 

are—different goals that we need. 

But to give one example, there are hundreds of thousands of 

Pakistanis, American citizens of Pakistani origin. There are also, I 

am sure, thousands of Afghanis who live—in the U.S. We have 

never mobilized these people to go back and do social work, this 

non-military work. 

They would have lot more credibility. Every time there is an 

earthquake in Pakistan, we have Pakistanis in our mosque donating thousands of dollars. And I ask them well, why don’t you donate thousands of dollars—go there, make a difference. 

And if you can have educated Pakistani women who have lived 

in America, who are—in America, going back there and doing credible social work—I can tell you that if—a western-looking person 

running an non-governmental organization (NGO) in Pakistan, especially in an area where there are cultural—very tribal—someone 

who actually belongs to their tribe. And I think that is one thing 

that we have ignored. 

Dr. FAIR. As a woman, I don’t want to downplay this, but the 

lack of rights that women have in Afghanistan is a subset of a lack 

of rights that everyone enjoys. 

And I also have a big problem with this reduction of the problems that women face to that of the Taliban. The fact is women 
31 

were liberated only in Kabul. What the Taliban did—they didn’t invent this. They simply mobilized this from the societal base from 

which they themselves emerged. 

So simply having Karzai sitting there in Kabul doesn’t make everything okay for women. So I mean, I kind of prefer sort of stepping back and looking at this as a problem of human rights writ 

large for the country, as opposed to making this a women’s issue. 

I might also add, with the exception of those women that you are 

engaging, for the most part this discussion about women’s rights in 

Afghanistan is a non-starter. It actually alienates some of our other 

partners that are otherwise interested in a much larger discourse 

on human rights in Afghanistan. 

So I think there is a peril in reducing this to another fake binary—if the Taliban are there, it sucks to be a woman. It sucks to 

be woman in Afghanistan, period. 

Dr. KHAN. Period. I fully endorse Professor Fair’s statement. 

Dr. SNYDER. Sorry? All right. Did you want to respond—— 

Mrs. DAVIS. I think my only response is I think—and it is really 

not so much women’s rights or even human rights. I think it is 

having people at the table to be part of the solution. And I think 

that is what has not occurred. 

And part of the question is how do we—how do we facilitate that, 

how do we move that along, so that you don’t have, you know, a 

woman in Afghanistan, for example, at the—in a ministry who has 

no power, really, with—within the ministry to exact any changes. 

And I think that is what we are—what people are searching for 

there. 

Dr. FAIR. Do any of the ministers in any of the ministries have 

the ability to affect change? There is such a—dependency and I 

would argue the ones that do have the power are doing the wrong 

things in those ministries. 

Dr. KHAN. I think you should read the letter written by Pakistani woman parliamentarian to Hillary Clinton. I don’t know 

whether you saw that. It is an open letter. 

And it will tell you that even those empowered women there will 

respond probably very similarly, because they don’t like this condescending attitude that—especially the empowered women that— 

okay, first you separate women’s rights from everybody else’s right, 

and it sucks to be [inaudible] Saudi Arabia, too, if you have—you 

know, if you want—right. 

So what happens is that we ignore these women who stand up 

for local rights, like the women who stood up against Karen 

Hughes in Turkey. We don’t talk about them anymore. Or Muslim 

women who insist on wearing hijab in—either in France or in Turkey. 

So what happens is that we look hypocritical on this issue when 

we ignore men’s rights and push women’s rights, and then we push 

women’s right only—who are willing to play ball on Western terms 

and not those who want to stand up for local interests. 

Dr. SNYDER. I think that Members of Congress are responding to 

what they heard from women Afghan legislators. I don’t think this 

should be perceived as American women in positions of power 

pushing something. I mean, they are reporting back what they 

heard from Afghan women. 
32 

I appreciate your patience. I am going to ask one final question, 

if I might. My previous question was about the importance of having an unvarnished view of who the enemy is. I think we also need 

to have an unvarnished view of what attributes and strengths we 

have. And you all talked about resources, some of those issues. 

But I was struck, Dr. Khan—in one of your statements, ‘‘In the 

age of unmanned drones, long-distance relationships are not a bad 

idea.’’ I think that we need to be very careful, don’t we, about 

thinking that somehow because we have the ability of flying drones 

that that can somehow substitute for human intelligence on the 

ground or feet on the ground? 

I was trying to—I was trying to think about something that 

would be comparable here, and I guess I go back to the early 1990s 

when so many cities in the United States had problems with gangs 

in the streets, and none of us would have felt good to think, ‘‘Oh, 

good news, they pulled all the police cars out, but we got police helicopters overhead at night. Don’t you feel safe now?’’ 

I mean, I think we should be very careful about not—you know, 

maybe your premise is right, what you advocate that we do, but we 

shouldn’t kid ourselves, should we, in thinking that we have some 

drones that we can fly and control—that that is a substitute for 

General McChrystal’s tactical assessment? 

Dr. KHAN. My bigger point there is to make America and its 

presence invisible, because I think that America’s visible presence, 

aggressive military visible presence, is a major provocation. It upsets a lot of people. It generates a lot of support for the extremists. 

People are more willing to—you know, women are more willing 

to take off their [inaudible] and donate to al Qaeda in Pakistan because they have seen civilians die and their country is being occupied by a foreign army. 

We can talk about this in many ways, but a majority of Afghans 

and Pakistanis think of us as occupiers. 

Dr. SNYDER. But I mean, I will take your premise as—I mean, 

I suspect that military commanders would love to be able to fight 

an invisible war. I don’t think that is practical or possible. 

You may be able to do an action that would, you know, take out 

one outpost or one house with a missile attack or a drone and have 

an event occur that people really didn’t know where it came from. 

But when you are talking about actually—you are—you know, 

an—— 

Dr. KHAN. Well, I am talking only about—— 

Dr. SNYDER [continuing]. If the U.S. can make its war—I 

mean—— 

Dr. KHAN [continuing]. Against al Qaeda. 

Dr. SNYDER [continuing]. I don’t see—I don’t foresee how you 

could conduct a war somehow invisibly, and we would say, ‘‘No, 

that wasn’t us. Those last 27 attacks in the last three hours, that 

wasn’t us.’’ 

Dr. KHAN. Well, the war I am talking about is only against al 

Qaeda. And if you notice, my whole argument was that we—we 

support the Afghans if they want to stand up to the Taliban, because I don’t see Taliban in the long run as—the Taliban were in 

charge of Afghanistan and—and Afghans did not stand up to them 

when the Taliban were controlling it. 
33 

If bin Laden was not—in Afghanistan and 9/11 had not happened, maybe the Afghans would have been living with the Taliban 

even today. 

That is the point I am trying to stress, is that the Taliban—are 

very regional—very regional. And they are fighting the U.S. because the U.S. is in their region. 

Dr. SNYDER. I am responding to this issue. I mean, we have 

heard that argument made that—— 

Dr. KHAN. Yes. 

Dr. SNYDER [continuing]. That because we have the ability now 

technically to fly drones that—— 

Dr. KHAN. I think that that is the only way we can fight al 

Qaeda, by locating them and pointing them and destroying their 

capabilities. 

Dr. SNYDER. Dr. Strmecki. 

Dr. STRMECKI. I respectfully disagree on a number of points. I do 

not think that the Afghan people in the majority view us as occupiers. They see us as their indispensable partner to creating a normal country. 

I would hate for the United States to come to a point where the 

symbol of our presence in that region is a Hellfire missile fired 

from a Predator drone. 

And the correct approach to defeating these extremists is with 

the Afghans and with the Pakistanis to find a positive vision that 

we hope to achieve in collaboration with them. And a subset of that 

is the marginalization of the extremism and the defeat of violent 

extremists. 

So you talk to Afghans and—and at the village level and others— 

and their great aspiration is, ‘‘We want to live in a normal country.’’ So I would embrace that, and I would say, ‘‘The purpose for 

us being here is to help you build a normal country.’’ 

And one of the subsidiaries of that is to create the security forces 

that enable a normal life to exist. A parallel could exist in terms 

of what Pakistanis want. 

But I think defining that positive vision—and I think that relates 

also to what—what Congressperson Davis was saying—is, I think, 

the key. 

Dr. KHAN. But what do Afghans mean when they say ‘‘a normal 

country’’ is a question we need to understand. What is a normal 

country, where women and—women live according to Islamic principles or they live according to Western principles? 

Dr. SNYDER. Dr. Fair. 

Dr. FAIR. I have a list of a whole lot of capabilities that we don’t 

do well, and that I would argue that success, however defined in 

Afghanistan—we actually need to do better. 

You say it is broken. We have all heard the figure, be it 80, 90, 

or 70 percent, of dollars that are allocated for Afghanistan come 

back here, so it truly is USAID. The layered contract approach— 

and it is not just USAID—almost all the national aid programs suffer from the same thing. 

A colleague of mine on the Senate Intelligence Committee opines 

that we don’t have any linguists, which is amazing, and there are 

a number of reasons for that. Namely, we have the National Security Education Program that actually educates linguists, but they 
34 

actually can’t get cleared by the government agencies that need linguists. 

With respect to the civilian surge, we don’t have a Team A. I 

don’t know where the Team A civilians are actually going to be 

coming from. 

The international community, including the United States, has 

tolerated all sorts of malfeasance and corruption from Karzai and 

other ministries without consequences. 

The PRT model is deeply broken, for the reasons that I have already mentioned. The NATO partners, as we all know, also have 

a number of problems. 

And I am also concerned that over the last eight years we have 

actually focused too much on building Afghan national security 

forces. We had this pillared program of vertically integrated activities, and building the ANSF really got the bulk of the political and 

financial resources. 

So we are in a position of, for example, training police, but there 

is no functioning rule-of-law mechanism. So without a functioning 

district court, without a prison where you can remand individuals, 

we have built a security service. We actually haven’t built a police 

service. 

I respectfully disagree on the drone issue. The drone issue is not 

because it is the best option—— 

Dr. SNYDER. Disagree with who? 

Dr. FAIR. With virtually everyone that has talked about the 

drone issue. This is not the best option, but it is the least worse 

option, so the Pakistanis lack the capability and the will to deal 

with the characters that are operating in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). 

There are actually multiple advantages of drones. Conceding that 

it is the—not the optimal option, it does disrupt the al Qaeda cells. 

It has driven people out of FATA and into the rest of Pakistan, 

where conceivably they could be arrested. 

Of course, the problem in FATA is there are no police. The paramilitary organization, the Frontier Corps, is deeply—how shall I 

put this? 

Dr. SNYDER. I don’t think anyone here is arguing that we should 

not be having that—— 

Dr. FAIR. Yes, so—— 

Dr. SNYDER [continuing]. Kind of effort in—to go after al Qaeda. 

But it was the general statement talking about long-distance relationships as a principle is what I am getting at. 

Dr. FAIR. Oh, yes, absolutely. 

Dr. SNYDER. You could make a mistake by saying that drones are 

a substitute for—it would be a lot cheaper. 

Dr. FAIR. No—— 

Dr. SNYDER. It was just—if a drone solves all your problems— 

but that won’t work. 

Dr. FAIR. There are, as I said, all these other capabilities we are 

simply lacking. 

Dr. SNYDER. I think that was a good point. 

Dr. FAIR. And so how do we win without fixing this laundry list 

of deficiencies? 
35 

Dr. SNYDER. Yes, I think those are very important points. Probably Secretary Gates has been the leading spokesman here the last 

three years or so about that. 

General Eaton, you get the last word. 

General EATON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. First, a total reliance 

on violence is Mr. Rumsfeld’s approach to warfare, and we have 

seen what that left us. So the use of drone attacks in concert with 

ground forces, the cop-on-the-beat approach, is prudent. 

The presence of ground forces provides the human intelligence 

that we need to be able to prosecute the counterinsurgency operations that we need. 

The feedback that I am getting from soldiers who have served in 

theater is we are not toxic to the environment, that we provide a 

service—security—which is the first role of government, and that 

those who find life in a secure fashion in Afghanistan are appreciative of our soldiers. 

And finally, with respect to the civilian surge and some of Dr. 

Fair’s comments on the PRT, there is a failure in this city on our 

ability to do what the Pentagon does by its nature. 

When you go to the Pentagon mission, they take all the assets 

available to the Pentagon, create a coordinated and integrated plan 

with a unity of command, and they are able to execute very efficiently. 

We are not able to do that with the rest of our departments, so 

there is no agency that is designed to take command of all the 

President’s assets, all the executive branch assets, in an expeditionary approach so that you task the different departments to provide assets that they respond to an integrated plan that is thoroughly coordinated and deployable. 

That is something new since 11/9/89 that the Nation needs to be 

able to render influence, not just military influence, but to render 

American influence with everything that we can bring to bear. 

Dr. SNYDER. I share your concerns. All right. And I think you 

stated that well. 

Thank you all. I apologize for the prolonged voting period, but we 

appreciate your time here today, appreciate your service. 

We are adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 12:58 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.] 

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NOVEMBER 5, 2009 

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