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i 

57–054 2010

[H.A.S.C. No. 111–102] 

COUNTERTERRORISM WITHIN THE 

AFGHANISTAN COUNTERINSURGENCY 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND 

CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE 

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS 

FIRST SESSION 

HEARING HELD 

OCTOBER 22, 2009 
(II) 

TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND CAPABILITIES 

SUBCOMMITTEE 

ADAM SMITH, Washington, Chairman 

MIKE MCINTYRE, North Carolina 

ROBERT ANDREWS, New Jersey 

JAMES R. LANGEVIN, Rhode Island 

JIM COOPER, Tennessee 

JIM MARSHALL, Georgia 

BRAD ELLSWORTH, Indiana 

PATRICK J. MURPHY, Pennsylvania 

BOBBY BRIGHT, Alabama 

SCOTT MURPHY, New York 

JEFF MILLER, Florida 

FRANK A. LOBIONDO, New Jersey 

JOHN KLINE, Minnesota 

BILL SHUSTER, Pennsylvania 

K. MICHAEL CONAWAY, Texas 

THOMAS J. ROONEY, Florida 

MAC THORNBERRY, Texas 

TIM MCCLEES, Professional Staff Member 

ALEX KUGAJEVSKY, Professional Staff Member 

ANDREW TABLER, Staff Assistant 
(III) 

C O N T E N T S 

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS 

2009 

Page 

HEARING: 

Thursday, October 22, 2009, Counterterrorism within the Afghanistan Counterinsurgency ........................................................................................................ 1 

APPENDIX: 

Thursday, October 22, 2009 .................................................................................... 27 

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2009 

COUNTERTERRORISM WITHIN THE AFGHANISTAN 

COUNTERINSURGENCY 

STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS 

Miller, Hon. Jeff, a Representative from Florida, Ranking Member, Terrorism, 

Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee ................................. 2 

Smith, Hon. Adam, a Representative from Washington, Chairman, Terrorism, 

Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee ................................. 1 

WITNESSES 

Kagan, Dr. Frederick W., Resident Scholar, The American Enterprise Institute ........................................................................................................................ 3 

Nelson, Rick ‘‘Ozzie,’’ Senior Fellow, International Security Program, Center 

for Strategic and International Studies ............................................................. 9 

Pape, Dr. Robert A., Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago ......... 7 

APPENDIX 

PREPARED STATEMENTS: 

Kagan, Dr. Frederick W. .................................................................................. 34 

Miller, Hon. Jeff ................................................................................................ 32 

Nelson, Rick ‘‘Ozzie’’ ......................................................................................... 47 

Pape, Dr. Robert A. .......................................................................................... 38 

Smith, Hon. Adam ............................................................................................ 31 

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) 

COUNTERTERRORISM WITHIN THE AFGHANISTAN 

COUNTERINSURGENCY 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES, TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND CAPABILITIES

SUBCOMMITTEE, Washington, DC, Thursday, October 22, 2009. 

The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:34 a.m., in room 

HVC 210, Capitol Visitor Center, Hon. Adam Smith (chairman of 

the subcommittee) presiding. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. ADAM SMITH, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM WASHINGTON, CHAIRMAN, TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE 

Mr. SMITH. I call the meeting to order. I apologize for being late. 

I was still operating off the assumption that the meetings were 

over in the Rayburn room, and it is a much longer haul getting 

over here than it is to Rayburn. 

But I apologize for that, and I really appreciate our witnesses 

joining us this morning, as well as the panel, to have this conversation. I have read all three of your works on many subjects. Very, 

very knowledgeable people on a very important subject for all of us 

right now: the path forward in Afghanistan, and also in Pakistan 

and that whole region. 

This committee has a particular interest in the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and its role in counterterrorism. But, of 

course, we are also members of the full Armed Services Committee 

and interested in the broader picture as well. 

Although we certainly look forward to hearing your testimony on 

all those subjects, on the best path forward, the dominant two 

issues for me are, number one, this is a critically important part 

of the region. We have heard some people talk about Afghanistan 

and say, well, if our concern is al Qa’ida, well, they have moved to 

Pakistan. Or, al Qa’ida is in 45 or 50 different countries; what 

makes this one special? 

Well, in my view, this one is extraordinarily special. The relationship between the Taliban and al Qa’ida is unique. This is the 

place where al Qa’ida is strongest and most likely to launch attacks. And it is pretty much the one place on the globe that we cannot afford to turn a blind eye to, if we are truly concerned about 

dealing with al Qa’ida. 

I know a number of you have greater knowledge about that relationship than I. I look forward to hearing about that. But just to 

drive home the point that we cannot comfort ourselves by saying 

that, well, you know, they are in a lot of different places, they are 
2 

more or less in Pakistan, do we really have to worry about it? In 

my view, yes, we do. But I look forward to having that discussion. 

The second difficult part about it is having to worry about, it 

puts us in a very, very difficult place. And the central focus of that 

challenge, I think, is finding a reliable partner in Afghanistan, 

finding a government, a tribal structure, a provincial structure, 

somebody, some group of people who we can work with to offer the 

Afghan people a viable alternative to the Taliban. 

We are in reasonably good shape in that the Afghan people know 

the Taliban and they do not like them. However, they like some 

form of government; they like some rule of law, some structure to 

their society. And if nobody else can offer that, the Taliban will fill 

that void. 

So we are really struggling right now to find that Afghan partner. You are all familiar with the problems of corruption and ineffectiveness within the government; and now we have the challenge 

of an illegitimate election. I am very, very pleased that they made 

the decision to do the runoff, to at least give them a chance to have 

a more legitimate election. 

But the challenges there are great in trying to find a reliable 

partner, so I look forward to the testimony. I will briefly introduce 

the witnesses now before turning it over to the ranking member on 

the committee, Mr. Miller, and then introduce you again when you 

each speak. 

We are joined by Dr. Frederick Kagan, Resident Scholar at The 

American Enterprise Institute; Dr. Robert Pape, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago; and Rick ‘‘Ozzie’’ Nelson, 

Senior Fellow, International Security Program for the Center for 

Strategic and International Studies. I look forward to all of your 

testimony. 

I do have a full written statement which, without objection, I will 

submit for the record. And with that, we will turn it over to any 

comments that Mr. Miller has. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Smith can be found in the Appendix on page 31.] 

STATEMENT OF HON. JEFF MILLER, A REPRESENTATIVE 

FROM FLORIDA, RANKING MEMBER, TERRORISM, UNCONVENTIONAL THREATS AND CAPABILITIES SUBCOMMITTEE 

Mr. MILLER. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. 

Thank you to the witnesses for being here today. 

Also, Mr. Chairman, I would be remiss if I did not, on behalf of 

the subcommittee, say we are glad to have you back functioning on 

both lungs today. 

Mr. SMITH. Right. It is good to have it. Unfortunately, unlike kidneys, apparently you need both lungs. Just in case anybody was 

wondering. 

Mr. MILLER. Having recently returned from a trip to Afghanistan 

over the Columbus Day weekend, I can say that this hearing does 

come at a pivotal moment. We know that two months ago General 

McChrystal provided the President with his assessment of the situation in Afghanistan, and as we have all read in the press, he has 

deemed the situation serious. While General McChrystal acknowledges the very difficult task he faces in bringing security to Af-
3 

ghanistan and its people, he does not view the situation, however, 

as a lost cause. 

I do have a statement that I want to go ahead and enter into the 

record. So I ask unanimous consent to revise and extend. 

Mr. SMITH. Without objection. Thank you very much. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Miller can be found in the Appendix on page 32.] 

Mr. SMITH. With that, I guess we will go left to right, as I look 

at it, ironically. And we will start with Dr. Kagan. And there are 

statements in our books for the members if they wish to look 

through them as we go, as well. 

STATEMENT OF DR. FREDERICK W. KAGAN, RESIDENT 

SCHOLAR, THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 

Dr. KAGAN. Thank you. 

And also thanks for introducing me as the left side of this debate. Since I guess I am vigorously supporting the President’s stated strategy, I suppose I am on the left side of this particular debate. 

Thank you very much for having me in front of this committee. 

It is an honor, as always, and I am very grateful for the attention 

that you are paying to this very important topic. I am very pleased 

that we are having this level of national debate now, because I do 

think that whatever we do in Afghanistan, it is going to be a long 

process, it is going to be a difficult process; and it is very important 

that the American people understand very, very clearly why we 

think we need to do what we are doing, and what we think we are 

doing, why we think it is going to work. And I think this entire discussion and exploration of alternatives helps that. 

I am not going to read my—I didn’t give you a written statement. 

Actually, I gave you a bunch of various things to look at. I have 

a 60-some-odd slide show which I am going to run through—no. Actually, I am just going to make a few points, and I just look forward to engaging with you in questions which I think is probably 

the most useful thing to do. 

Look, when we are talking about counterterrorism in this part of 

the world or anywhere, we really have to ask ourselves the question, What are we trying to do? Are we trying to prevent attacks 

against the United States? Is this a defensive mission, exclusively? 

And if so, are we prepared to be in a defensive posture with occasional reactive sorties against these groups, or are we trying to defeat these groups? If we are trying to defeat these groups, what 

does that actually mean? 

We are certainly not going to defeat their ideology in any short 

term. And it is an ideology within Islam. It is a heretical ideology 

within Islam that has roots in the years immediately following the 

death of the Prophet Muhammad. It goes back a long way. It will 

always be there in some form to be used by someone. 

And, of course, if you look at the history of the Cold War, did we 

defeat the Communist ideology? Well, we tarnished it very badly by 

defeating its reification in the world. And that is something that 

is important to keep in mind: al Qa’ida has embodied this particular vision of this heretical ideology, and its success or failure 
4 

is tied to a considerable extent to the value that other extremists 

are likely to put on this particular ideology. 

And so I think that we do need to understand that there is a 

broader issue here than simply preventing this particular bunch of 

thugs from attacking us. There is also the question of trying to 

make it clear that this ideology is a loser, and it leads to defeat 

and it leads to calamity for the people who pursue it. And it does 

not lead to success or anything positive because we want to deter 

future generations of extremists from using this particularly noxious ideology to justify what they are doing. 

And in that context, it is very important to understand that al 

Qa’ida does not define itself as a terrorist group. Al Qa’ida defines 

itself as an insurgent group. It is an insurgency within the Muslim 

world. Its objective is to seize power within the Muslim world and 

then transform the Muslim world in accord with its ideology. 

And the reason why that is very important to understand is, first 

of all, it explains why wherever al Qa’ida goes, wherever an al 

Qa’ida franchise goes, it plants a flag, it establishes the Islamic 

Emirate of Wherever-the-Heck and it declares itself the only legitimate sovereign government of the four kilometers of land that it 

probably controls. 

At any given moment there were probably five different capitals 

of the Islamic Emirate of Iraq—some of them tiny little villages out 

in the middle of nowhere, but it was, by God, the capital of the Islamic Emirate of Iraq. 

And they set up—they tend to set up rather elaborate government structures even if they are, in some cases, fictitious. So in 

Iraq I was delighted to discover that al Qa’ida and Iraq had an 

Emir of Administration. I think if only we could get them to do 

their planning on PowerPoint, we would be a long way towards 

success in this effort. 

But that kind of bureaucratization is not the sort of thing that 

you saw from terrorist groups that really see themselves as terrorist groups, such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA) fighting the 

British, such as Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) fighting the Spanish. They define themselves politically sort of as insurgencies, but 

they don’t have the same elaborated political superstructure that 

they intend to impose. 

And the reason why that matters is because terrain actually 

matters to these guys. Where they plant the flag, they intend to 

stay. And if you take it away from them, it is a blow to them. And 

all of their rhetoric during and after the Iraq surge demonstrated 

that they saw that as a defeat. They did not just see it as, Oh, well, 

that didn’t work out; we will go somewhere else. They saw that as 

a defeat. 

They saw what the Lebanese military did to a burgeoning al 

Qa’ida cell within Palestinian camps in Lebanon as a defeat. They 

saw the fact that the Saudi Government drove al Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula largely out of Saudi Arabia into Yemen as a defeat. 

So this is not a group that will, with any joy, pick up and leave 

from this particular area, which makes this particular area important. And it is one of the reasons why recapturing Afghanistan is 

an important objective for these guys. 
5 

Now, Mr. Chairman, you raised the excellent question of how are 

these groups intertwined; and I think that has also been blurred 

in the discussion somewhat. There is no meaningful difference in 

the ideology that the Taliban, the Afghan Taliban pursues, the ideology that the Pakistani Taliban pursues and the ideology that al 

Qa’ida pursues. They all agree that temporal secular states are evidence of apostasy and, in fact, of polytheism. 

They all agree on the basics of how the Muslim community 

should be ruled. The Afghan Taliban, the Quetta Shura Taliban 

sees itself as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. It is the franchise 

that will control that part of territory. The Tehrik-e Taliban in 

Pakistan (TTP) sees itself as the franchise that will control Pakistan. But all of that is under the umbrella of an al Qa’ida effort 

to reestablish the caliphate for the entire Islamic world. 

So there is a differentiation in the sense of the Taliban group 

saying, This is our front, that is your front and this is somebody 

else’s front. But there is not a differentiation in terms of the objective. And I think it is very important to understand that, as well, 

because if you ask the question, is the Afghan Taliban now plotting 

to attack the United States here, the answer is ‘‘no.’’ If you ask the 

question, is there any basis to believe that over the long term if 

you allowed the Taliban to persist in Afghanistan, it would not develop in the direction of pursuing global jihadism, the answer is 

‘‘no.’’ There is no reason particularly to think that, except that it 

hasn’t had the opportunity to do that yet. But it would be fully consonant with its ideology to pursue that objective. 

The Tehrik-e Taliban in Pakistan has already indicated that it 

had the objective of attacking the United States. Baitullah Mehsud 

said he would attack the White House. Now, there is not a lot of 

teeth behind that, but you do have the stated intention. 

So when you are talking about defeating al Qa’ida, I don’t believe 

that you can separate that from the problem of defeating its allies 

and its local proxies. And that is how we get to counterinsurgency. 

And that is why I think that a counterterrorism strategy has to be 

embedded within a counterinsurgency strategy, or at least has to 

be married to a counterinsurgency—it doesn’t necessarily have to 

be subordinate to it—because I don’t think that we can succeed 

with a counterterrorism strategy that actually aims at what I think 

we need to aim at, which is defeating these organizations without 

defeating the insurgent groups. 

And I would like to just make a couple of quick points and then 

I will stop. First of all, there is a straw-man argument that is 

sometimes put out that some of us have been religiously converted 

to the ideology of counterinsurgency, and wherever there is a conflict, we see an insurgency and we want to use a counterinsurgency 

approach. I certainly don’t feel that way. I know that General 

McChrystal doesn’t feel that way. 

It is weird to make that comment about General McChrystal. 

This subcommittee probably knows General McChrystal better 

than any collection of Congressmen that there are. This guy knows 

all about counterterrorism. If he is coming to tell you that you need 

to do counterinsurgency, it is not because he has drunk that particular Kool-Aid. 
6 

I just look at this and say, Look, you have this alliance of groups 

with similar objectives. We have to defeat them all. Though on our 

side of the border, the ones we are facing are primarily insurgents. 

The way that you fight insurgents is with counterinsurgency doctrine. If they weren’t insurgent groups, I wouldn’t be advocating 

that. And I think that is an important straw man. 

And lastly, I will tee this up so that my colleagues can defend 

their propositions. I will show my cards in advance instead of ambushing them. I want, first of all, to correct what I am sure was 

an unintentional misstatement in Bob Pape’s recent op-ed. General 

McChrystal’s own report says—he explains that American and 

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces are a major 

cause of the deteriorating situation because they have been viewed 

as foreign occupiers. 

The assessment does not say that. I don’t believe that General 

McChrystal anywhere says that he believes that American forces 

are seen as occupiers. And, in fact, the assessment has prominently 

a quotation from the Afghan defense minister who says, Afghans 

have never seen you as occupiers, even though this has been the 

major focus of the enemy’s propaganda campaign. 

And I think it is an important point because I don’t agree with 

the assertion that we are generating this problem by our presence 

in Afghanistan, and I don’t believe—I think that there is also a 

problem with the statistical correlation of rise in violence as resulting from increased troop presence. 

In fact, the increased troop presence has lagged behind the rise 

of violence generally. For example, in fiscal year 2005, there were 

about 19,000 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. In fiscal year 2007, 

there were about 23,700 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. Pretty constant. By the way, a tiny footprint. If that is an occupation, then 

one soldier is an occupation. 

With 19,000 American troops in a country of 30-some million 

people, one-and-a-half times the size of Iraq, virtually no Afghan 

ever sees an American soldier. So what you are talking about is 

enemy propaganda. And I would submit to you that the minimum 

required number of American troops in order to be occupiers is one. 

But in that period, the number of suicide attacks, as Bob points 

out, went from 9 to 142. Was that a response to the increase by 

4,500 American soldiers? I don’t think so. That is not what that 

was about. 

What was going on was that in the period between 2002 and 

2005, the insurgent—the Taliban, which had been eliminated from 

power in 2001 in Afghanistan was reconstituting. It was redeveloping its capability. It was reestablishing its networks within Afghanistan; it was reestablishing its leadership structure and preparing for an insurgency. 

It began to launch that insurgency in 2005, which is why violence began to rise. We very slowly and cautiously—too slowly and 

cautiously in my view—started to increase our forces in response 

to that. Naturally, that created more military targets for the 

Taliban to go after, which is one of the reasons Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) went up. 

In other words, I dispute the causal relationship between the 

presence of U.S. forces and the increase in violence here. This was 
7 

an insurgency that had as its objective retaking Afghanistan not 

because we were there, but because they had been the government. 

That is what they were trying to do. And they would have done 

that whether we were there or not. 

The question we have to decide is, do we think it is okay if they 

do? Or do we think it is okay—do we think that we can have a 

counterterrorism strategy with the civil war that will ensue if we 

abandon the effort to establish counterinsurgency? 

Now, civil war may ensue anyway. We can fail. This is war. 

There are no guarantees. But I am as confident as I can be that 

if we adopt a remote approach to counterterrorism here, not only 

will we have a failed—totally, completely failed—state in Afghanistan with a lot of regional consequences that are very troubling, 

but I also believe we will have failed on the counterterrorism mission. 

Thank you. 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Kagan can be found in the Appendix on page 34.] 

Mr. SMITH. Dr. Pape. 

STATEMENT OF DR. ROBERT A. PAPE, PROFESSOR OF 

POLITICAL SCIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 

Dr. PAPE. Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, I am honored to be here today and pleased to discuss General Stanley 

McChrystal’s proposal to commit an additional 40,000 troops to Afghanistan. 

General McChrystal’s recommendation reflects a growing consensus that our current force levels cannot win the war against the 

Taliban; and his proposal has been called an ‘‘ambitious new 

course.’’ In truth, however, it is not new and not ambitious enough. 

America will best serve its interest in Afghanistan and the region 

by shifting to a new strategy, offshore balancing, which relies on 

air and naval power from a distance while also working with local 

security forces on the ground. The reason becomes clear when one 

examines the rise of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan in recent 

years. 

General McChrystal’s own report explains that American and 

NATO military forces themselves are a major cause of the deteriorating situation for two reasons. First, Western forces have become 

increasingly viewed as foreign occupiers. You see the quote on the 

screen from the report itself. 

Second, Western forces are viewed as supporting an illegitimate 

central government—again, directly from the report itself. Unfortunately, these political facts dovetail strongly with military developments in the last few years. 

In 2001, the United States toppled the Taliban and kicked al 

Qa’ida out of Afghanistan with just a few thousand American 

troops and mainly with a combination of American air power and 

local ground forces from the Northern Alliance. Then, for the next 

several years, the United States and NATO modestly increased 

their footprint to about 20,000, mainly limiting the mission to 

guarding Kabul. Up until this point, 2004, there was little ter-
8 

rorism in Afghanistan and little sense that things were deteriorating. 

Then the United States and NATO began to systematically extend their military presence across Afghanistan. This is NATO’s 

own map of their plan to extend that presence. The goals were to 

defeat the tiny insurgency that did exist at the time and to eradicate poppy crops. Western military forces were deployed in all 

major regions of Afghanistan, including the Pashtun areas in the 

south and the east in 2006. 

Over these years, Western troop levels escalated incrementally 

from 20,000 in 2004 to 50,000 in 2007 to nearly 90,000 today. General McChrystal’s request for another 40,000 is simply the next 

step in this escalation. 

As Western occupation grew, the use of the two worst forms of 

terrorism in Afghanistan, suicide attacks and IEDs, escalated in 

parallel. Let me focus on suicide terrorism, the biggest killer and 

greatest threat to Americans and the focus of my personal research 

efforts funded by Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and 

the Carnegie Corporation in New York. 

There were no—as you can see from the slide, no recorded suicide attacks in Afghanistan before 2001 and only a small number 

in the immediate aftermath of America’s conquest of the Taliban. 

But in 2006, suicide attacks rose ten times and have continued at 

that high level ever since. These attacks have been concentrated 

against security targets, that is, American and Western ground 

forces, not Afghan civilians, and nearly all the suicide attackers 

have been Afghans. 

The picture is clear. The more Western troops have gone to Afghanistan, the more local residents have viewed themselves under 

foreign occupation and are using suicide and other terrorism to resist it. 

I will be glad, by the way, in Q&A, sir, to respond to Dr. Kagan’s 

specific challenges to this. If you would let me just continue with 

my prepared statement at the moment now, we will have plenty of 

time for that. 

Our central purpose in Afghanistan is to prevent future 9/11s. 

And this, first and foremost, requires stopping the rise of a new 

generation of anti-American terrorists, particularly suicide terrorists, the super-predators who can kill large numbers of people. 

What motivates suicide terrorists is not the existence of a terrorist sanctuary, but the presence of foreign forces on land they 

prize. So it is little surprise that American troops on Pashtun 

homelands are producing anti-American Pashtun attackers. 

Second, it would be helpful to prevent a safe haven for terrorists, 

for them to use either as training or as safe areas for their leaders. 

This is not as important as our main goal, since the main training 

for the 9/11 hijackers occurred in American flight schools, but this 

goal would help disrupt terrorist ability to organize and inspire any 

new recruits with impunity. 

Alas, adding 40,000 new troops is unlikely to achieve either of 

our goals. It would probably add to the sense of occupation, while 

not preventing Taliban areas from spreading. The reason is clear 

when you compare General McChrystal’s request to the require-
9 

ments for counterinsurgency (COIN) in General Petraeus’ COIN 

manual. 

The Petraeus counterinsurgency manual has two requirements, 

and McChrystal’s recommendation falls short on both. The first is 

the need for a legitimate central government around which to rally 

local support from the population. In fact, I am quoting you directly 

from General Petraeus’ manual that this is actually the most important of our objectives. 

And, of course, the widespread fraud by Karzai in the August 

election raises a serious issue about whether our military forces are 

now engaged in supporting an illegitimate government that does 

not have the consent of the people. 

The second requirement is a 1-to-50 ratio of troops to population. 

For Afghanistans, over 13 million Pashtuns in the south and the 

east, this comes to 265,000 troops or 175,000 troops beyond our 

current level, or 135,000 beyond General McChrystal’s request. 

Hence, adding 40,000 troops for COIN would be a half-measure 

that does not guarantee success by its own doctrine while increasing the sense of occupation that motivates suicide terrorists. 

I think we need to consider other alternatives. Overall, I believe 

our best strategy is offshore balancing, relying on air, naval and 

rapidly deployable ground forces, combined with training and 

equipping local groups to oppose the Taliban. This strategy is what 

toppled the Taliban when it controlled 90 percent of the country in 

2001, and it is our best way to prevent the Taliban from seizing 

Kabul, establishing significant terrorist camps in Afghanistan and 

controlling large areas as safe havens for Taliban and al Qa’ida 

leaders. It is also a strategy that will prevent the rise of a new generation of anti-American suicide terrorists, and so achieve our core 

interests in Afghanistan. 

We should transition to this strategy over the next two or three 

years, say, by the end of President Obama’s first term. 

And given the ethnic divisions in the country, the first step is to 

use political and economic means to empower local Pashtuns to 

achieve greater autonomy from all outsiders, creating a third option between the Taliban and Western domination. A similar strategy of empowering Sunni groups in Anbar reduced anti-American 

terrorism in Iraq and is our best way forward in Afghanistan. 

Mr. Chairman, I would like to refer you to my written testimony 

which includes background slides for a strategy of local empowerment in Pashtun areas. 

Thank you. 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you very much. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Pape can be found in the Appendix on page 38.] 

Mr. SMITH. Mr. Nelson. 

STATEMENT OF RICK ‘‘OZZIE’’ NELSON, SENIOR FELLOW, 

INTERNATIONAL SECURITY PROGRAM, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES 

Mr. NELSON. Chairman Smith, Ranking Member Miller, distinguished members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to discuss this important topic. 
10 

I come to you today as a recently retired Navy officer who has 

spent most of his last decade focused on the challenges of combating global terrorism, including assignments at the National 

Counterterrorism Center and the National Security Council. In 

April, I returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan where I was 

director of a joint task force in support of Operation Enduring 

Freedom. During the next few minutes, I plan to discuss the 

threats posed by al Qa’ida and other terror groups and how they 

should figure into debates over U.S.-NATO strategy in South Asia. 

It can be difficult to assess the current state of al Qa’ida and 

other globally focused terrorist organizations. We are told that Afghanistan has fewer than 100 al Qa’ida operatives, but that the 

failure of the Afghan Government will lead to the group’s inevitable return to the State. 

The Director of the National Counterterrorism Center reports 

that al Qa’ida’s haven in the federally administered tribal areas, 

the FATA, is shrinking. You have militants there, including al 

Qa’ida, that have launched a spate of attacks in Pakistan over the 

last weeks. And descriptions of al Qa’ida’s crisis of leadership are 

tempered by revelations of a suspected jihadist cell in New York. 

Here is what we do know: Al Qa’ida remains intent on attacking 

the United States and our friends and allies across the globe. The 

organization maintains transnational reach, but is rooted in Pakistan’s semi-governed tribal areas. As Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted recently, any al Qa’ida attack on the U.S. is likely to emerge from the FATA. 

On a more immediate level, al Qa’ida operatives in northwest 

Pakistan are believed to have teamed with other militant groups, 

including the TTP and recent attacks in Pakistan and India. 

Al Qa’ida offshoots remain active beyond South Asia. Al Qa’ida 

in Iraq (AQI) gained notoriety for its brutality during the early 

stages of the Iraq war. While its influence has subsided since the 

Sunni awakenings, AQI, still threatens regional stability in the 

Middle East. 

I have increasing concern there are several al Qa’ida associated 

groups in North Africa, Southeast Asia, Yemen and Somalia. The 

case of Somalia, like Pakistan, highlights the dangers posed by collaboration among different extremist groups. In recent testimony 

before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, FBI Director 

Robert Mueller suggested that the Somalian insurgent group alShabaab has grown close to al Qa’ida. This development has helped 

propel al-Shabaab, originally a Somali-focused insurgency, into a 

terrorist organization with global reach, including contacts in the 

United States. This trend is illustrated by a recently uncovered 

plot to recruit Minnesota-based Somali immigrants to fight with alShabaab. 

Along these same lines, officials in September arrested three Afghan citizens and U.S. legal residents on charges of lying in a matter involving terrorism. The key figure in these arrests, Najibullah 

Zazi is believed to have been planning explosive attacks in New 

York after receiving training at an al Qa’ida camp in Pakistan in 

2008. 

While these developments represent an expansion and a flattening of al Qa’ida’s global scope, they should not be taken to mini-
11 

mize the continued importance of the group’s senior leadership, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. On a functional 

level, these men remain active, most likely in Pakistan’s semi-governed tribal areas. On a larger, more symbolic level, they drive al 

Qa’ida’s agenda by inspiring future jihadists and by reminding everyone, including U.S. officials, of their organization’s resilience. 

Successfully combating al Qa’ida ultimately will require puncturing the group’s cult of personality by capturing and killing senior leaders, including bin Laden and Zawahiri. 

What I have tried to do in this brief overview is to show that al 

Qa’ida, despite certain setbacks, remains global in scale and determined to attack the United States. The epicenter of its power lies 

in Pakistan’s semi-governed tribal areas. 

It is important to appreciate how this fact relates to Afghanistan. 

We should recall that the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to defeat al 

Qa’ida, but ask foreign policy analysts why U.S. and NATO forces 

remain in Afghanistan today and you are likely to see a flurry of 

different responses. Defeating the Taliban, stabilizing and rebuilding Afghanistan and maintaining American credibility are just a 

few of several reasons given in addition to counterterrorism for our 

continued presence in the country. 

These are all laudable goals, but the White House must ensure 

that combating global terrorism generally and al Qa’ida specifically 

remains a strategic anchor in Afghanistan. Framing American interests in this fashion will lead us to ask important questions of 

the various strategies now being debated. 

I will conclude by posing just one question: What effect would additional troops in Afghanistan have on the stability of Pakistan? 

After September 11th, American troops and our allies essentially 

pushed extremists out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan, which 

heightened terrorist activity in northwestern Pakistan. Over the 

last year in particular, we have seen a mix of al Qa’ida, TTP, 

Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) militants strike large Pakistani cities and 

military facilities with increasing frequency. Meanwhile, the FATA 

haven serves as a primary base for al Qa’ida’s global terrorist agenda. These developments are troubling not just because they endanger a nuclear armed regime, but because the U.S. is largely powerless to combat the threat without Pakistani support. 

Fortunately, Pakistan’s military has just become a 30,000-troop 

assault on al Qa’ida- and Taliban-controlled territories in South 

Waziristan, the type of campaign that U.S. policymakers have long 

sought. As Pakistan confronts extremists in its northwest, we must 

be careful to ensure that any U.S. troop increases do not push insurgents in Afghanistan across the border. This would effectively 

heighten extremist activity in the FATA and make Islamabad’s 

mission even more difficult. Indeed, in meeting with General 

Petraeus and Senator Kerry earlier this week, Pakistani Prime 

Minister Yousuf Gilani asked the U.S. and NATO forces to restrict 

militant infiltration from Afghanistan into Pakistan. 

In the end, any regional strategy which shores up Afghanistan 

while destabilizing Pakistan will detract from our goals of combating terrorism. 
12 

I would be happy to elaborate on this and any other issues during our questions. Thank you again for inviting me to speak today. 

I look forward to your questions. 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Nelson can be found in the Appendix on page 47.] 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you all. 

I will start with—we will put everybody on the five-minute clock. 

I will try to get two questions in. I will just start with one basic 

one for Dr. Pape. 

I think you have hit upon one of the great challenges of what any 

counterterrorism or counterinsurgency effort is. You have to defeat 

the terrorists without alienating the population. In some places, 

that is easier than others. In the Philippines we have had some 

success, I think in that area because it was not as violent and as 

out of control. And we had a local partner that we could work with. 

But the one question I have off the top about your strategy of a 

sort of standoff approach, I mean, we are going to be creating just 

as many terrorists, if not more, if we are bombing them from afar 

than if we happen to be in their village trying to fight them that 

way. In fact, that is one of the things that General McChrystal has 

really focused on, this standoff aerial campaign approach has vastly more civilian casualties and alienates the population even to a 

greater extent. So what are we truly accomplishing if we say we 

are going to cut in half the number of troops and just launch missiles at you? 

Dr. PAPE. Sir, I think your question is excellent. And I am not 

calling for sort of increasing numbers of drone attacks. I am not 

calling for let’s just kind of replace ground troops with still more 

application of air power. In fact, I think that probably what we 

need to look at is actually even a reduction in our drone attacks. 

Let me explain this by showing you the kind of base that bin 

Laden had in Afghanistan in 2001 before 9/11. I think it would be 

very helpful. I am not sure, you may have seen this base before, 

sir; but this is what we call a ‘‘terrorist camp.’’ Notice how—this 

is a base, sir; this is like Maxwell Air Force base where I taught 

for three years. 

So when we talk about a terrorist training facility before 9/11 

that al Qa’ida had in Afghanistan, we don’t mean three buildings. 

We don’t mean one safe house for some suicide terrorists somewhere in—— 

Mr. SMITH. Got that. I am a little short in time here. How are 

we working back to the question? 

Dr. PAPE. The question is, sir, that I believe what we need to do 

is focus on preventing camps, large camps, not every safe house. 

And so, sir, I think that if we are going to attack safe houses, 

then we need to be much more judicious in attacking safe houses. 

And specifically, sir, we need to ask the following risk/reward question. 

At the moment, the way risk/reward works when we go after safe 

houses, as you probably know, is we run it through Judge Advocate 

General (JAG) and what we do is we say, is the benefit of getting 

this terrorist worth the loss of X number of Afghan civilians on the 

side? 
13 

The real risk/reward ratio, sir, is different. Every time we go 

after a safe house, what that is going to do is probably produce collateral damage which will produce suicide terrorists who will want 

to kill Americans. 

Mr. SMITH. General McChrystal quotes that all the time. I will 

come back to that. I have another question. 

But the trap is, either we are fighting them or we are not, to a 

certain extent. If the strategy is, we are going to pull back and stop 

fighting them, I think that the benefit that you identify is there, 

but the detriment is there as well. There is this—there is no way 

no matter how you do it, to sort of half-fight them and fight them 

in a way that doesn’t create some animosity. 

So whether you are doing it standoff, whether you are being careful about what you are bombing, wherever you are at, if you are 

accepting as part of the strategy that there are bad guys there that 

we need to try to take out in some way, we are still kind of in that 

tension that you have. 

But I want to ask Dr. Kagan. I mean, the big question here— 

and this is the challenge. We don’t have a local partner. We certainly can’t put enough troops in there to do a counterinsurgency 

for the full population, the 30 million population. These are both 

true. I mean, part of the strategy that is talked about now is going 

to try to secure pieces of the population within classic counterinsurgency doctrine. 

We also have a major problem in terms of unity of effort. We 

have so many people involved there, not just militarily, but NonGovernmental Organizations (NGOs), various development groups. 

I mean, they are all sort of going past each other and wasting 

money in an incredibly inefficient way. 

With those three great challenges, how do we go forward and implement even a more limited, more strategic counterinsurgency 

strategy? 

Dr. KAGAN. If this were easy, you probably wouldn’t be holding 

hearings about it, and we wouldn’t be having this discussion. It is 

hard. 

I want to make note of the fact that what—the quote from FM3– 

24 actually is that the primary objective of counterinsurgency is to 

foster the development of an effective and legitimate government. 

That is an output; it is not an input. You don’t—it is not the case 

that you can’t do counterinsurgency if the government is not legitimate. If the government—— 

Mr. SMITH. Don’t get me wrong. Just for the record, I want to 

be clear that I don’t buy into this notion that unless you can, like, 

build Minneapolis in Afghanistan, somehow you don’t have an effective counterinsurgency strategy, that unless you can have an 

overwhelming force, you can’t possibly succeed. I mean, we saw 

that wasn’t true in Iraq. 

I think you can have a more limited, realistic goal and still have 

an effective counterinsurgency strategy. 

So this idea that counterinsurgency is some big, grand—presto, 

instantaneously build the most modern, sophisticated civilization 

ever is ridiculous. So I am with you on that. 
14 

But from that, there is a good deal of distance between that and 

where we are at in Afghanistan, and I am trying to carve out what 

that realistic strategy is. 

Dr. KAGAN. And you have put your finger on one of the most 

glaring lacunae in the administration’s approach to this problem. 

General McChrystal has put together—in my biased opinion, since 

I have participated in it—a very good assessment of the situation 

and a very good recommendation for a military plan that also goes 

pretty far toward recommending some of the key political changes 

that need to be made. 

Mr. SMITH. It says a heck of a lot more than 40,000 more troops. 

Everyone is fixed on the 40,000 more troops. It is a 60-some-odd 

page report that gets into a lot of important detail. 

Dr. KAGAN. The question is, where is the political strategy? 

Where is Ambassador Holbrooke’s assessment and recommendation? Where is Ambassador Eikenberry’s assessment and recommendation? Where is Secretary Clinton on this? 

This is, I hope—as the Obama administration goes through this 

review, I believe—if you come to a second round of questions and 

want to spend more time on this, I can lay out what I think something like that would look like. 

Mr. SMITH. I think we will do that. 

I don’t want to set a bad precedent here, so we will go to Mr. 

Miller. 

Mr. MILLER. Thank you. 

And, Dr. Kagan, I agree. I think there is a weak link, and that 

weak link may very well be with State Department in regards to 

what their activities are going to be. 

But I would assume that all three of you read or are aware of 

Max Boot’s article yesterday in the New York Times. Could you 

comment a little bit on the statement that he made that said, basically, only by sending more personnel, military and civilian, can 

President Obama improve the Afghan Government’s performance, 

reverse the Taliban’s gains and prevent al Qa’ida’s allies from regaining the ground they lost after 9/11? Could you? 

Dr. PAPE. Yes, sir. I am glad to. 

I think—I respect Max. I think that he is right that where our 

troops are at the moment—that is, if you take our military forces 

and put them down in a certain area, a neighborhood—they are 

able to pacify that area. I have great respect for our troops. 

The problem that we have is that the COIN doctrine would require 265,000 American forces for this purpose, and we just simply 

don’t have the troops to do that. And that is only for the south and 

the east, and that would be if we abandoned all of the rest of Afghanistan. 

So the problem we have, sir, is, if we are going to sort of go big, 

then we have to be still more ambitious because this idea of the 

gradual drip by drip by drip that we have been going through for 

the last few years, I am afraid is actually producing more suicide 

terrorists than it is killing. 

Dr. KAGAN. If I can comment, first of all, I have to take exception 

with the COIN math that is being laid out here. It is not a requirement of one American soldier for every 50 of the population. It is 

a requirement for one counterinsurgent for every 50 of the popu-
15 

lation. And in counterinsurgents we include American soldiers, we 

include the NATO forces that are operating, which are a significant 

number of troops, and we also include any effective, indigenous 

forces that are operating. And in this case, there are about 100,000 

troops in the Afghan National Army, and they are pretty darned 

effective. 

The Afghan National Police I am willing not to count because 

they are very corrupt and inefficient and so forth, although elements of them operate. 

That gets you up to about 200,000 right now. If you add 40,000 

American troops, it gets you up to 240,000. We are planning to 

bring Afghan National Army, just army, up to 134,000 by next 

year. That covers the gap. So the notion that this is not doable 

from the standpoint of the COIN math, I respectfully disagree with 

that. 

But the key point in your question, which I really think needs 

to be emphasized, is that American troops and NATO troops affect 

governance at the local level and they can affect governance at the 

national level, too. And we saw this very clearly in Iraq. 

American forces engaged in counterinsurgency do not simply 

spend their time kicking down doors and pulling bad people out 

and shooting people. They also spend their time being eyes and 

ears on the ground, developing tremendous assets, especially for 

local intelligence, and in turn feeding that up the chain of command. And in Iraq, the model that I would give you for the role 

that the military can play in developing governance is how we 

curbed sectarian death squad activity, supported by senior leaders 

within the Iraqi Government, relying on intelligence that was developed by our soldiers on the ground; and relying on those soldiers, those officers on the ground—brigade commanders, battalion 

commanders, sometimes company commanders—to address malign 

actors within their areas and then coordinate with senior leadership to address at the highest level. 

I believe that that approach can be modified to address the fact 

that it is not sectarian death squads in Afghanistan, it is abuse of 

power and corruption and so forth to identify and put pressure on 

key malign actors to facilitate a governance program. But the military is an essential component of that because without the military 

forces you don’t have the access to the population that you need to 

understand what is going on and affect it. 

Mr. MILLER. Dr. Pape, could you respond to the math? 

Dr. PAPE. Yes, sir. I think the best way is to actually do it in Iraq 

and Anbar, because we had a similar situation. You remember in 

Iraq, we had this huge problem, this insurgent out-of-control problem, especially in Anbar. We also had this whole debate were we 

building an Iraqi Army and so forth and was it going to work and 

all that kind of stuff. 

But let’s look right at Anbar, sir. If you look at the chart about 

what actually changed in Anbar, between September 2006 and September 2008—I am sure you have seen charts that the attacks 

went down against Americans. That definitely happened; Anbar 

definitely quieted down. The question is why. 

First, American troops and the coalition did not actually increase 

their aggregate number of troops. We did put more troops in Iraq, 
16 

but as others were leaving. So we essentially, in the aggregate, 

came down. 

Second, if you look at the number of troops specifically in Anbar, 

they only go up a teeny, tiny amount. The real change—and we 

would have needed 100,000 by COIN doctrine. The real change occurred in the Sons of Iraq; that is, they went from 5,000 in September 2006 to 100,000 in September 2008. 

So, sir, yes, the COIN math probably does work and, yes, locals 

can backfill. But we actually have to have real locals from the local 

area doing the heavy lifting. That is what we did in Anbar, and 

that actually worked quite successfully. And what my local empowerment strategy is calling for is to try to do the same thing to 

a large degree in the Pashtun areas of east and southern Afghanistan. 

And let me also just add, sir, I was not against the idea of sending 20,000 troops to Baghdad in December 2006. I supported the 

idea here of what became called The Surge in Baghdad because 

there you had Sunnis killing Shi’a, Shi’a killing Sunnis. 

That is not what we have here in Afghanistan. We do not have 

Tajiks killing Pashtuns. We do not have Pashtuns killing—we don’t 

have this big rivalry that way. 

What we basically have is an ideological battle occurring among 

the Pashtun south; and for that, it is very similar to Anbar. Anbar 

is our best analogy, not Baghdad. And this is what happened and 

what calmed down Anbar. 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you. 

Mr. Langevin. 

Mr. LANGEVIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank our 

panel for your very thoughtful testimony here today. And it is obviously very helpful as we are all struggling in trying to get our arms 

around the way forward in Afghanistan. 

I guess at this point my question would be, assuming that we, 

instead of going with the counterinsurgency strategy, we focus 

more on the counterterrorism strategy, as Mr. Pape has suggested, 

what is the best- and worst-case scenario of that strategy? 

I would like to hear from Mr. Pape and then, if I could, Mr. 

Kagan. 

Dr. PAPE. Thank you, sir. I think that is an excellent question. 

I think that the worst-case scenario is essentially a freeze of today’s status quo. I think that it is the case today that, as best I 

can tell, the Taliban control—and what I mean, by ‘‘control’’ is, 

they are in village areas 24/7, with sharia courts, something like 

10 percent of Afghanistan and about 20 percent of the southern 

areas in the south and in the east. 

I think that my strategy is effectively calling for the containment 

of those areas and then the gradual shrinking of those areas over 

time through this local empowerment strategy. But it may not 

work. I think that this—the worst case, though, is that it stays the 

same. 

And what I think is the best case is that as we shift to the offshore balancing strategy over the next two or three years, you will 

see the radical reduction in suicide attacks, anti-American suicide 

attacks, that we are now seeing in Iraq as we are building up the 
17 

local militias in Anbar Province. What that has done is, it is allowing us to actually withdraw forces. 

And we are not just withdrawing forces from the country. Notice 

how we pulled them back from cities. Over the last year and a half, 

we have had a radical difference in the military occupation of Iraq 

and that has actually caused suicide attacks in Iraq to go down almost 85 percent. 

Mr. SMITH. I am sorry. I just have to interrupt. 

Obviously, the best way to prevent suicide attacks against U.S. 

troops is to pull the troops out. There isn’t any argument with that 

because then they are not there to be attacked. 

The argument and the issue is, what does that do to the 

Taliban’s ability to control greater amounts of territory and not, in 

essence, be stopped? That is the tension. 

Dr. PAPE. Sir, I would add one other point which is that our presence there is not only threatening—it is not just suicide attacks 

against our troops. We just arrested an Afghan national from Colorado with links to this area, clearly motivated by—or possibly, allegedly motivated anyway by our presence there—who was doing 

reconnaissance for attacks in the New York subway system. 

So, sir, I would not think that what is happening is that the 

threat to Americans of suicide—anti-American suicide terrorism is 

limited to what is happening in Afghanistan. I am afraid that what 

we have seen time and again—in Madrid, what we have seen in 

the London bombings—what we have seen is that this motivates 

suicide terrorists to attack us here, or our allies. 

Mr. LANGEVIN. Thank you. 

Mr. Kagan, best-case and worst-case scenario if we go with 

counterterrorism versus counterinsurgency. 

Dr. KAGAN. Osama bin Laden’s given reason for attacking the 

United States was because of the presence of American forces in 

Saudi Arabia at the invitation of the Saudi Government which he 

defined as an occupation. If you are going to call for making decisions based on the enemy’s propaganda line, then I think you are 

going to have a very difficult time coming up with any rational 

strategy. 

I completely disagree with Dr. Pape’s analysis of what the worstcase scenario is. The Taliban is very strong now in the south, and 

it has been gaining strength. This is General McChrystal’s assessment, and it is the assessment of almost anyone who has looked 

at the situation over there. 

Were we to reduce our footprint significantly and move to a 

counterterrorism approach, Kandahar City would fall rapidly into 

Taliban control. They now control and effectively govern almost all 

of the areas around Kandahar City. Helmand River valley would 

also fall back under complete Taliban control where now we are 

contesting areas within it. The surrounding provinces of Oruzgan, 

Zabol, Ghazni into Farah, Nimruz would also fall under complete 

Taliban control. The Government of Afghanistan does not have the 

military capability to prevent this from happening. 

We are still—we have already begun to see the mobilization of 

the Tajiks and Uzbeks in response to the perception that the 

United States might be pulling out and abandoning them to this 

conflict, and I believe that there is a very high probability that you 
18 

would see a full-scale civil war reemerge as either those groups 

launched preemptive attacks to prevent a Taliban takeover of the 

sort that occurred in the mid-1990s or that the Taliban launch such 

a takeover attempt, which is clearly its intent. 

I don’t see any force in Afghanistan right now that would be capable of resisting the Taliban’s pressure or deterring the reemergence of the Northern Alliance and the redevelopment of a civil 

war. 

In that scenario, it is impossible for me to imagine that the 

United States will be maintaining footprints within Afghanistan 

from which to be conducting counterterrorism operations. I think 

that is a preposterous notion from a logistical standpoint, from an 

image standpoint, and I think it is militarily infeasible. So that is 

the worst case. I also think that it is the most likely case. 

We can describe a best case, I suppose, in which the Northern 

Alliance, perhaps with our assistance, crushes the Taliban, crushes 

the south and then we somehow manage to support them over the 

years in maintaining dictatorial rule over the Pashtuns which will 

inflame Pashtun nationalism throughout the region. But I can 

hardly call that a good scenario. I do not believe there is any good 

scenario that can emerge from the adoption of such a strategy. 

Mr. SMITH. Mr. Shuster. 

Mr. SHUSTER. Thank you. 

Dr. Pape, back to your math again on the 50-to-1 ratio. In the 

COIN strategy it is a 50-to-1 strategy, but you make the argument 

when you talk about Anbar, it doesn’t say, that I am aware of, that 

it is 50-to-1 U.S. or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) 

troops that make up that ratio. It talks about police, military, U.S. 

troops, ISAF troops. 

And you make the case in Anbar province that it was the Sunni 

awakening, that is what raised the ratio up and that is the success. 

And I think that is the same thing that General McChrystal is trying to accomplish in Afghanistan. 

But you keep coming back to it, that it is faulty. I don’t understand what your math is. And when you put the numbers together, 

you can achieve that if we have the right people there to train up 

the Afghan army and the Afghan police. 

Dr. PAPE. Yes, sir. I don’t think the real issue here is actually 

discrepancy over math per se. I think that everybody recognizes 

that we need local allies to help us in Afghanistan. That is what 

you are really hearing. So we should just go focus right on that 

issue. 

This issue of trying to kind of hold things together—you know, 

bit by bit by bit with another half-measure, another half-deployment of American forces—is actually pushing off the day when we 

will be able to truly engage the local population; and that is really 

our dilemma. 

And the reason we are not able to engage the local population 

today is not that we haven’t tried. We have sort of offered money 

and we have offered bribes, but we have done it in a way where 

we are expecting the local population, the Pashtuns, to basically 

become employees of the central government; that is, to fall under 

the broad rubric of the central government, sir. 
19 

That is not what we did in Anbar. The Anbar awakening is not 

being run by the Shi’a. In fact, if you remember, sir, in Iraq, the 

Shi’a government was opposing this precisely because they were 

partners, not employees. 

So our real—— 

Mr. SMITH. Sorry to do this again. 

How does that get—and I am with you totally about the mistakes. And McChrystal talks a lot about those mistakes as well and 

how you need to change that. But how does that get easier to flip 

those people if we start pulling out en masse? 

How do—I mean, you are looking to flip a local Taliban person. 

He is, like, okay, the Taliban is here and they are headed out. It 

just doesn’t make any sense. 

Dr. PAPE. Yes, sir. What is strengthening the Taliban today is 

not their numbers. Because, as you know probably better than I do, 

the assessments by the experts are that there is somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 Taliban fighters in the country; and, of 

those, the experts are kind of agreeing that 10,000 are the hard 

core. Well, that is the number. So the Taliban clearly are not winning by numbers of hard-core fighters. What they are winning by 

is support from the local population, which they are getting from 

three sources: 

Number one, opposition to America’s military presence and our 

forces just simply being there and then also carrying out operations 

that lead to collateral damage which has not just happened for a 

year, but it has been going on nearly eight years, sir. Second is 

money. Third is arms, in some cases. 

So what I am calling for, sir, is to reverse-engineer those three 

reasons for that local support. 

Mr. SHUSTER. What you left out was the fear factor. We were 

there once, and we left them, and the Taliban came back in and 

started to kill people. That is another reason why they are not 

trusting us to be there, and now I think that is what General 

McChrystal is reversing. 

And following what the chairman has said, how do you get them 

to trust us when you pull in and you pull out and you let the bad 

guys in? 

I am pretty clear on your position. I don’t agree with it. 

But I would like to ask—I read a recent article in Strategic 

Forum that talked about the most significant problem in Iraq; and 

turning to Mr. Nelson first, if I could, the unity of effort on our 

part. We have dozens of international organizations, other countries in there. How do we pull that together and make that unity 

of effort not only with the dozens of countries but with our own 

military units over there? And where do you see that improving? 

Or how does it improve? Mr. Nelson. 

Mr. NELSON. That is a terrific question. I think that is one of the 

reasons why the civilian component of our policy over there is so 

important. 

General McChrystal’s strategy is the military strategy. We talk 

about the military surge, but we need a civilian surge as well. 

Those are the individuals who will help bring these different entities together. 
20 

Information-sharing among the NATO partners remains a serious issue. Obviously, we have information-sharing caveats with 

some of our closest allies and partners. But some of the folks that 

we rely on the ground every single day, we don’t share those same 

caveats. 

The good news is General McChrystal has taken that on and has 

said, I want to take the risk of sharing information because I think 

the benefits outweigh those actual risks. That is something that I 

think, from a Washington, D.C., perspective, that we can continue 

to do, is push the folks back here to curtail some of those information-sharing restrictions. 

Mr. SHUSTER. I think one of the important things that I have 

seen him do is he appointed General Miller to take on 500 or 400 

officers who are going to be committed to a three-year period. And 

I have asked the State Department on a number of occasions are 

they doing the same kind of effort, and they continue to say ‘‘yes,’’ 

but I see no evidence of that. 

Somebody here mentioned that General McChrystal’s assessment 

didn’t include Ambassador Eikenberry or Ambassador Holbrooke. 

So it seems to me like there is still a huge problem between State 

and DOD coming together, having a model. Petraeus and Crocker, 

they worked together seamlessly. So what are your thoughts on the 

State Department and what they are doing or not doing, Dr. 

Kagan? 

Dr. KAGAN. Well, as I said, I think we are yet to see the development of a coherent political strategy, and I think that is a major 

failing on the State side. 

I think we have seen a mad scramble to try to recover from a 

crisis that we got ourselves into through nonfeasance while it was 

clear we were headed toward a fraudulent election. I think what 

we have gotten to now is a position where we have expended a tremendous amount of political capital that has not achieved our political objectives. 

So this is not an issue of interagency process or unity of effort. 

This is an issue of priority within the State Department and the 

way that it is structured and the way that its individuals are functioning, simply failing to come up with what should be their purview. 

If I could beg your indulgence briefly to comment on something 

that has been driving me crazy in this discussion, which is the 

characterization of the Sons of Iraq and Anbar, which I think is 

being completely mischaracterized, frankly. 

First of all, there were not five million people in Anbar. So the 

requirement for COIN is not 100,000. 

Second of all there, there were either 10,000 or 20,000 Iraqi 

troops and police that were also in Anbar that were operating, 

which is one of the reasons why we got up to the COIN math at 

work. 

Third of all, one of the key parts of the agreement that we made 

all of the initial Sons of Iraq sign was an agreement to recognize 

the legitimacy of the Iraqi government and serve it; and we always 

had the stated intention, which has now been realized, of having 

the Iraqi government pay for the Sons of Iraq. So it is indeed the 
21 

Shia who are now in control of that organization, and they have 

continued to pay it, and it has continued to work. 

So it is not the case that this movement erupted spontaneously 

without us getting to any kind of proper COIN ratio. Nor is it the 

case that this was just our agreement with them and had nothing 

to do with the Iraqi government. 

Mr. SMITH. We have votes coming up. I will give Mr. Bright the 

last set of questions. This is supposed to take, once we leave, about 

a half hour. Hopefully, we could be back by 12:15, 12:20 or so. Do 

the witnesses have another 25 minutes to take questions? 

Dr. KAGAN. Sir, I have an interview at 1:30. 

Mr. SMITH. Okay, we will try to wrap up fairly quickly after we 

return. 

Mr. MILLER. Mr. Chairman, I was told that they were going to 

hold votes for 30 minutes. The GOP has a briefing going on right 

now on Afghanistan, so they are going to hold the board. So we 

may have a little more time. 

Mr. SMITH. We will go to Mr. Bright. 

Mr. BRIGHT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this very valuable hearing. It is very obvious from the testimony today that 

there is not a clear-cut plan or strategy for our efforts in Afghanistan. I will be very brief. 

My question will go directly to Mr. Nelson. Mr. Nelson, can you 

tell me and elaborate somewhat as far as your opinion is concerned 

on what is the interconnection between the Afghanistan and the 

Pakistan Taliban? What is their relationship? How interrelated are 

they? How entwined are they? Do they share personnel? Do they 

share funds? If you would, I find your answer to that very interesting. 

Mr. NELSON. Thank you, sir. It is a great question. 

Personally, I think it is hard to tell at this juncture. We are not 

just dealing with the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistan Taliban. We 

have divisions in the Afghan Taliban. The Quetta shura. We have 

the Haqqani network and Hekmatyar as well; and, of course, on 

the Pakistan side, you have the TTP. 

Obviously, it is possible that they are sharing funds and are 

sharing resources; and some have argued, like Peter Bergen and 

Tony Cordesman, that they are intimately connected. But there are 

some very important differences, and the other speakers have highlighted this. 

The Taliban’s goal in Afghanistan is to be in Afghanistan. It is 

not a global agenda. The al Qa’ida’s agenda and its relationship to 

the Afghanistan Taliban is much more of a global agenda. That is 

the major difference there. 

So defeating the Afghan Taliban is important for Afghanistan, 

but it is not important strategically in the United States in preventing attacks against the United States, ultimately. 

Mr. BRIGHT. Dr. Pape, let me commend you. I am aware of your 

tenure at Maxwell since I am from that area and was mayor of 

Montgomery for awhile. Thank you for your service down there. It 

is great to see you back up here. 

Mr. Chairman, I want to commend each person for their testimony. It has been very educational and very enlightening for me 

as a new member. Thank you very much. 
22 

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time. 

Mr. SMITH. Thank you. 

Mr. Rooney. 

Mr. ROONEY. I thank the panel for your excellent testimony. I 

know we have to run out of here shortly, so I will try to be brief. 

I am still kind of stumped on this issue of occupation, Dr. Pape, 

that you spoke of. 

Having read the McChrystal report—and I tried to understand 

what the General was asking the Commander in Chief—one thing 

that sort of stuck out to me right from the get-go was that the situation is deteriorating. So the request initially for a troop increase 

would be followed by sort of this winning hearts and minds type 

philosophy of integrating with the Afghani population so that the 

intimidation and the threats to the local populations could be minimized. 

I know you didn’t get into your specific plan because of time, and 

I tried to just skim through it very briefly, but I am kind of at a 

loss as to how you would go about integrating into the Afghani population. 

Aside from just money or paying them, how do you give them the 

sense that I am going to keep the Taliban and their threats at bay, 

and I am going to trust the Americans and the coalition forces to 

provide the kind of intelligence or help to the Americans in what 

we are trying to accomplish there, without having the sense that 

there is security in my village. I feel emboldened that I don’t have 

to worry about these threats from the Taliban. How do you do that 

without having those guys on the ground in those villages? 

Dr. PAPE. First, I think it is helpful to be clear when I said transition over two or three years I don’t mean that we cut and run 

and pull all our forces out in year one. What I mean is year one 

we do a serious local empowerment strategy. That is why I offered 

those slides. 

Mr. ROONEY. How do you do that? 

Dr. PAPE. Glad to cover that, sir. 

Just so you follow the logic of what I am trying to do, this slide 

shows you what is happening right now is the more we occupied, 

we have to go through the villagers to try to get to the Taliban. 

The problem is that the villagers are loyal to the tribe. They are 

never going to be loyal to our western values, at least not in short 

term, and they are also not loyal to Islamic fundamentalism. 

What we are doing is, by trying to get to the Taliban by going 

through the villagers, we are pushing them together. What my 

local empowerment strategy is trying to do is pull back from the 

occupation and then grow the size of the villager bubble so that 

they can contain the Taliban, not without our help at all. And the 

way to do that, I have actually gone through and what the slides 

do is they offer you a real strategy for doing that. 

The key to the strategy is recognizing that, first of all, the problem we have today is part of our own creation with the constitution. We wrote or certainly helped construct the constitution which 

created for the first time in Afghanistan’s history, sir, a top-down 

central government with very tight power of control in the presidency. It is President Karzai who picks the provincial governors. It 

would be like President Obama picking the governor of Illinois. 
23 

Mr. SMITH. Bad example. 

Dr. PAPE. Well, I am trying to help you see that this is not even 

democracy by our own light, sir. And in this country, for hundreds 

of years, governance has gone bottom up from the tribal level. 

What we need to understand, the Taliban, we are giving them opportunities, sir. What we are doing is making it easy for them to 

exploit the local grievances against our occupation because of this 

top-down political flow, and so we need to reverse the arrow. 

We have had existing programs. I am glad to go through them 

in great detail, or some detail, and talk about why they are a problem. But, as I already hinted at, we are trying to make Pashtuns 

employees, not partners. And what I would do specifically is empower local Pashtun areas but differentially, not just across the 

board, but by trying to empower the groups who are really our potential partners, not those we can’t work with. 

What I am doing on this slide is showing you there are large 

areas of the south and the east where the authority rests with tribal leaders and councils, many of which are now cooperating with 

the Taliban, but they are not doing it out of religious affiliation. 

There are areas controlled by the Taliban where there are not tribal leaders, or at least not independently. That is about 20 percent 

of the south and the east. And then there are drug lords, about 10 

percent. They are not motivated by either tribe or religion; they are 

motivated by money. 

What my strategy would do is empower, one; marginalize, two; 

and reconcile, three. The remaining slides, we would go through 

each policy in detail for those three. 

Mr. SMITH. If I can follow up—and hopefully we can wrap this 

up before the votes—everything you say—well, not everything but 

most of what you say makes a great deal of sense: what we have 

done wrong, the centralized government, basically treating the Afghans like employees. All of that is absolutely true. General 

McChrystal talks at great length about all of this in his report, 

about how we have made the mistake—by, through and with. Classic counterinsurgency strategy has been totally ignored here. We 

have been dictating and directing, not doing by, through, and with. 

But the part that doesn’t make any sense is how we can make 

this transition that you are describing, to do it differently with 

fewer people, for two reasons. Number one—forget the security 

issue. That is my second one. I will get to it in a minute. Just the 

basics of supporting them in setting up the rule of law and construction and schools and wells and everything, less is not more in 

that situation. They need more help, not less. So you keep saying 

we are going to change the strategy and do it with less people. 

Second, the other basic level here is you have got to have security. What the Taliban are doing village to village is a classic protection racket. You know, we are the only ones who can protect 

you. If you don’t trust us to protect you, we will show you. 

If you cannot provide security, they have got no place to go. I will 

grant you we need to provide it better. I guess the way to sort of 

formulate that question is what Dr. Kagan described, if we don’t 

increase troops and if we reduce troops, how the Taliban will continue to spread. 
24 

As frustrated as I am by the situation in Afghanistan and what 

we have done wrong and what the Afghan government has done 

wrong, the lack of a reliable partner, I don’t see how, if we don’t 

increase troops, we begin to pull back in six months, whatever your 

timeline is, how the Taliban don’t build on their successes and just 

take on more and more villages. 

You seem to be saying, we are going to change the strategy and 

empower them. With what? With whom? How are the Taliban, if 

they are doing as well as they are doing right now, how are they 

suddenly, magically not going to be doing too well when there is 

less resistance to what they are doing? 

Dr. PAPE. Sir, I am not saying that we should pull out any troops 

in the first year, number one. 

Mr. SMITH. I thought you said the worst-case scenario would be 

to keep things as they are. 

Dr. PAPE. No, no, no, sir. I said the worst-case scenario would be 

that things would stay as they are. 

Mr. SMITH. I don’t know how that is different than what I said. 

Dr. PAPE. I think his question was after two or three years. If 

you implement the whole strategy, after two or three years, what 

is the worst-case scenario? What I am trying to explain—and 

maybe I was unclear, and I apologize to the committee if I am unclear on this point, but I am trying to make it clear, which is that 

I am not calling for withdrawing troops in the first year or on some 

deployment schedule. What I am saying is what we should do in 

the next 12 months is not increase troops. We should dedicate ourselves—which will help protect the cities, the major areas. There 

will still be problems in the rural areas. I am not calling for the 

abandonment of major cities. 

Mr. SMITH. One quick question of Dr. Kagan. What is wrong with 

that strategy? That is one of the things that is kind of emerging, 

not the pullout strategy, not even sort of a standoff strategy, just— 

look, we don’t know exactly what we are doing there right now. So 

to commit more forces in that situation, the stress on our troops 

and the stress on our force, to ask them to go and fight in a situation that is as muddled as I think we have all kind of agreed, it 

is irresponsible. 

We simply have to do a containment strategy, hold the line, give 

McChrystal a chance, and hopefully get Eikenberry and Holbrooke 

more involved, figuring things out and moving us in a more positive direction, contain the Taliban from spreading further instead 

of throwing more troops into a confusing situation. 

Dr. KAGAN. What is wrong with that is we can’t do that with the 

forces we now have, and that is General McChrystal’s assessment, 

and it is the assessment of his staff. I think it is very easily supportable by facts on the ground. So we will continue to lose ground 

with the current numbers because they are not adequate even with 

all of the in-theater readjustment that General McChrystal is undertaking to do this. 

And I think it is very important to note here that we really 

shouldn’t be pulling troop numbers out of our fourth point of contact. This is not something where we just say, well, maybe we will 

only send 10,000 or whatever. 
25 

Troop numbers have to come based on a very specific and careful 

full-up staff, troop-to-task analysis by our professional military 

about what is required to achieve a particular set of objectives in 

a particular set of circumstances. General McChrystal has done 

that. We don’t have to necessarily accept it, but we can’t beat it 

simply by saying, ‘‘Well, I don’t like 40. How about 20?’’ 

Somebody else would have to go through a very detailed, troopto-task analysis for a different set of objectives within an agreedupon framework of what the circumstances are and tell you what 

the number would be for a different set of objectives. But if you try 

to do this as a rheostat with I don’t like 40, I want 20, now tell 

me what I can do with that, you put our troops in a very high probability of being given a mission that can’t succeed. 

Mr. SMITH. I think that is an excellent point to end on. I appreciate your coming and testifying. It is very, very helpful for me and 

the members of the committee. We will keep this dialogue up as 

the decision is going forward. 

I will close with, re-emphasizing what Dr. Kagan said, whatever 

we do, it has to be a clear strategy and a clear plan so that the 

troops and the people that we ask to go and implement it know 

what they are doing. And that is the minimum that we can expect, 

no matter what we decide. 

Thank you very much. We are adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 11:52 a.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.] 

A P P E N D I X 

OCTOBER 22, 2009 

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