American Enterprise Institute
for Public Policy Research
Winning Afghanistan
October 19, 2005
Thomas Donnelly: Okay, I’m officially calling the meeting to order, and the first order of business is to welcome everybody to what is a very timely discussion of the situation in Afghanistan. I particularly note that my colleague, Vance Serchuk, who has pulled this together, has entitled this Winning Afghanistan. In other words, it’s a gerund, formulation suggesting pretty strongly that we’re doing okay, but there’s still a way to go in Afghanistan. And just by way of shameless commerce, you’re relieved somewhat of the obligation to take notes today because several of the panelists and moderators today have pieces upcoming in the November issue of Armed Forces Journal, so you may be able to refer to that and just enjoy the conversation today.
So without further ado, let me introduce the first panel and get things kicked off. Our topic, as you’ll see from your materials on the first panel, is to discuss the counterinsurgency campaign and military strategy in Afghanistan, and I can’t imagine that we would have a better lineup of folks to talk about it. Kicking off things will be Colonel David Lamm, who is Chief of Staff at CFC Afghanistan. If not the architect of the strategy, then certainly the scribe to the architect of the strategy, the right-hand man, and nobody more intimately familiar with the transition of the military strategy from counterterrorism to a broader counterinsurgency strategy.
Giving a reality check today and also talking a bit about Afghan National Army and Afghan national security development, we have Colonel Christopher Langton. I don't need to read people’s bios in great extent because you have them in your package, but he’s a retired British Army colonel who has joined the staff of IISS. After a distinguished career, he is now head of the Defense Analysis Department there, an editor of the annual Military Balance report.
Following Colonel Langton, we have Bob Perito - I hope I’m not overly familiar there – who works formerly at the US Institute of Peace.
Robert Perito: And currently.
Thomas Donnelly: My notes are incorrect. I’m sorry. Currently – formerly and currently – and possibly in the future, as well, at the US Institute of Peace - okay, I’m sure Mrs. Perito is happy about that - and Coordinator of the Iraq and Afghanistan Experience Project there. Batting cleanup will be Joe Collins of the National War College, who will attempt to connect the dots in a coherent fashion and summarize and draw some lessons learned and lessons going forward.
So without further ado, we’ll just go down in order as you are here. Dave, the microphone is yours.
David Lamm: Well, it’s a pleasure to be here, Ambassador Oakley, Minister Jalali. Nice to see you again, sir. I just wanted to make a few comments and, as Tom said, I had scribed a few things out on the counterinsurgency strategy. I think what you need to keep in mind is the reason for being of CFC, the reason that it was founded and placed over there and stood up as the headquarters, was to, in fact, establish a closer political and military relationship with not only the US Embassy effort there, the US effort overall, but the international effort and then the political effort working with the Afghan government.
So beginning in the Fall of 2003, we stood the headquarters up. General Barnell – I arrived later – and basically took a look at how we were going to move from basically what we had seen as a counterterrorist strategy where US forces and other coalition forces would move from point A to point B, conduct an operation of sorts, and then return to the base to a counterinsurgency strategy. Which, in fact, meant looking at, to say a cliché, winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people and establishing security forces, working with the AMA, doing what we could do from the DOD perspective on working with the Afghan national police, establishing the rule of law, a large bit of that.
And then the other thing that we always had to keep in mind as we worked and we were very conscious of is everything that we worked on and did inside Afghanistan, we always worked to keep, as we said at the time and probably still do, keep an Afghan face on things. It was always important to the Afghans to lead in all these efforts, whether it was humanitarian aid over the winter up in Uruzgan and areas that were cut off because of the harsh winter last year or how we would effect the mitigation of warlords, most notably Ishmael Khan, Alton Farat [phonetic], about a year ago in September, always to support as best we could the Afghans who are working the problems and then playing a secondary role and backup.
A couple red lines that you needed to keep in mind as we worked, particularly with the security forces. The first one was on this counterinsurgency strategy was to get the Afghan National Army out, and there is a dilemma there. The army, we thought, was progressing fairly well, and I think it would be fair to say that we had a great deal of work to do with the Afghan National Police. And there were a number of dynamics of why, most of which, from our perspective, had to do with the interagency in Washington and the ability of DOD to support and train and outfit the Afghan National Police, which I’m sure Minister Jalali would have wanted, and we’re working towards that.
But at the time, there were serious limitations on what the US DOD could do and CFC headquarters could do with the police, so we did it in a number of other ways and roundabout ways to give the Afghan National Police support in Herat. And as the election came on through the summer and into early fall and October – and I think those were fairly successful. Simple things like providing riot control gear and equipment to the Afghan National Police. It’s tough to be a police force if you don’t have the basic tools to get those things done.
But the most important dilemma that we faced was, while we found the Afghan National Army to be very effective, the problem in the nation’s democracy is, as things are growing, you can’t throw the federal army at all the problems internally. What you find out in the counterinsurgency is most of what you need to do is, in fact, rule of law and should be properly done by internal police forces and not military forces inside the country. So we worked with that.
We had one red line as we went through the Afghan National Army, which I think our counterparts and I know my counterpart in Iraq picked up on very early. The Afghan National Army was supported by embedded tactical trainers, which were US forces, which enabled the Afghan National Forces to, in fact, call in on radio US enablers anytime they’re in trouble. The red line for us as the headquarters working with the Afghans was we would never move or deploy the Afghan National Army into a situation or place of - anywhere in country working with the Afghans where it was going to lose on the battlefield. That was just an absolute red line for us for a number of psychological reasons.
The Afghan National Army and police, anytime we moved it, we made sure it was supported to such a degree, working with the Afghans, whether you overdeployed forces into an area, but that the red line was in this counterinsurgency fight, you can’t deploy Afghan federal forces, national forces, into an area and have them lose. And unfortunately, in Iraq that had happened on several occasions.
For us, it was an absolute red line, and that meant basically that, over time, as we moved the Afghan National Army around - the Green Berets of the Afghan National Army around from place to place – oftentimes, just their arrival, for instance, in Jalalibad several months ago after the newspaper incident – I think magazine incident – here on the treatment of the Koran. There were some riots in Jalalibad. Local mayors – this is one of those great instances in the growth of the counterinsurgency effort. There was rioting in Jalalibad. The local mayors were summoned together.
President Karzai worked, Minister Jalali, all worked together and with very, very minimal US assistance, practically none, they were able to move in local forces and then police and then the Afghan National Army were moved. And it was just their presence, in fact, the rioting stopped. And if you were an insurgent out there or troublemaker, you new over time, because of the pattern of how we would deploy the forces in the Army, that once they arrived the game was up and you ought to pack it in because they are going to come and, in fact, do what they need to do to restore order. And they will win, undoubtedly, in the long term. So that helped immeasurably.
The centerpiece, once we determined how we wanted to work the security forces with the Afghans, then the centerpiece of the counterinsurgency effort was, in fact, going from four PRTs, I think, in 2003 to 19 PRTs, mostly in the south and in the east. And that effort is an interagency effort. A PRT is a provincial reconstruction team for those of you who aren’t familiar with those. They’re composed of roughly 80 to 100 interagency personnel from a number of countries, depending on where they are in the country of Afghanistan, and with Afghan participation – heavy Afghan participation – as well.
It is an outreach program that we thought paid probably the biggest dividends of anything that we were doing inside of Afghanistan. And the thoughts of how they would come about theoretically and expand those things really sort of evolved over Lewis Sorley’s book, A Better War, and a number of other pieces that we looked at in theory.
But four PRTs are already established, and the notion was that, over the winter of 2004, I believe it was, we would place 19 of these PRTs, form them out of the 25th Infantry Division, which was CJTF, the Task Force 76, and then basically have them arrayed out in Afghanistan for the spring thaws when we would suspect the annual migration of our Taliban friends would cross the borders. And they would have 19 PRTs to greet them, all of which were dispensing, I think, the first year, 2003-2004, it was about $42 million in commander’s emergency relief program funds, [indiscernible] funds.
This past year, that was $142 million, so and that’s where you got, I think, the most bang for the buck was the local commander on the ground, local PRTs working with the local officials in Afghanistan doing local projects. So that when the insurgents would come back in in the spring and attempt to set up camp for the summer, what they found was a rather apathetic group towards them, in some cases absolutely hostile.
In fact, I will tell you that most of the intelligence that we received from about 2004 to the present time on the presence of where insurgents may be, former Taliban troublemakers may be, in fact, came from the Afghan people themselves. Where IEDs, where IED bomb making areas were, most of this very good intelligence was, in fact, coming from the Afghans themselves who had been formerly sitting on the fence. This gave us a great indicator that the counterinsurgency strategy was, in fact, working over time. So all politics is local. It’s the best place to spend the money, and to quote T.V. Lawrence, I think what we figured out in the strategy is it was a dollar well spent on the people of Afghanistan that’s worth more than 10 bullets anywhere.
Thomas Donnelly: David, thank you very much. That’s a great introduction. Colonel Langton, if that was the concept and the intent, how are we doing and how are the Afghans doing?
Christopher Langton: Mr. Chairman, thank you, and I’d like to thank the organizers for inviting me to this rather large ambush, which is full of people I recognize from my military past in the British Army and others, including Ambassador Elias [sounds like]. Very nice to see you again, sir. We last met, I think, in 1993 training 25 IEDs to go to Haiti at Fort Polk full of mosquitoes. I don’t wish to pretend that I have any particular knowledge. I’m an outside observer. The opinions I express are my own. I was very fortunate in May to be hosted by Dave Lamm on my left. He gave me a very candid briefing at a time he could probably ill afford the time to do so.
I’m going to speak to notes because, in a sense, I’m an academic, and I like to follow this theme. On the 17th of November 2001, when Mullah Omar recognized that the Taliban would not be able to stand up to the US military might, which was coming from the north, he said that his regime would fall, and he said that quite candidly, and that Afghans would carry on the fight from the mountains, as they always had.
Now, I’ve been asked to assess in the first part of my short presentation from my point of view some elements of the counterinsurgency campaign today. Firstly, it is true to say that insurgent and terrorist attacks this year have shown that the Taliban and its allies retain the capacity to move with relative freedom, which isn’t surprising given the terrain, and to put together tactically sound operations. And I think this shows that the infrastructure, the training base and the logistic chain remains capable. It does not indicate any particular failure, however, in the counterinsurgency campaign because of the long-term nature of such operations, but it does highlight the challenges posed by regular forces using asymmetric, unconventional tactics against a technologically superior conventional force on what is now termed as complex terrain and also where there exists a number of safe havens.
My belief is that in Afghanistan, as elsewhere, this needs to be looked at in the context of the complexity of Afghan culture and ethnicity, and I think the British learned this very sound lesson in the 19th Century. As has been indicated by Colonel Lamm, the territory is the population, and particularly in this context the Pushtin population. And lessons from the Soviet occupation, which are expounded on in Army General Mahmood, Garyev’s excellent book, My Last War, show that mujahaddin then were able to operate in groups of 400-500, changing shape, merging, remerging, demerging, and, as he put it later, like oil spots on water, which I think is a very apt description. The Taliban in some sense is the same for obvious reasons. Also of relevance, I think, is the fact that every [indiscernible] is a bear net. There is no logistic tale, meaningful logistic tale, eating up valuable manpower, and they are fairly much self sufficient.
But crucially, this is really only possible while they are able to subsist off the local population on both sides of the Durand Line, if I may say so. And it was really ignorance of the Pushtin factor which Garyev highlighted finally in his book - it was his main conclusion, and it made him very unpopular in Moscow – as the main reason for the failure of the Soviet campaign. Now, you know, this is another discussion.
So today, Taliban are observed crossing the Durand Line and are being engaged successfully in the southern provinces, being unable to defeat US-led forces when they meet them. But I would also suggest that in counterinsurgency there is a need to be cautious of measuring success in terms of body accounts, as this seldom amounts to an indication of victory. Indeed, we could also add that, in the culture of Taliban, death in itself is some kind of a victory. They have succeeded in moving, I think, further north perhaps than they were last year, and this has added pressure on the processes which back up the military counterinsurgency campaign.
As David Lamm has said, in other words, loyalty in Afghanistan is a very fickle bedfellow, and sometimes people have described it as being based on the principle of who can give me the most or who can hurt me the most. The idea amongst some of the indigenous population is that the insurgency will outlive the counterinsurgency operation, allow some people to give pride of place to Taliban when it comes to loyalty, believing that they will last longer.
So as has been said earlier, in this type of operation it is the collective mind of the population which is the territory to be captured and held, not some hilltop nor town. And programs to bring social and economic reform are ultimately more important in insuring victory than the military campaign itself, which is an enabler, rather than, if you like, the be all and end all of the victory.
And police forces are probably more important, as Dave Lamm has already said, than the Afghan National Army ultimately as establishment of the rule of law, which is vital and really tells us that now the training of the Afghan National Police, which is, I believe, to some 62,000 by the end of this year, is a main priority. And later on, we’ll talk about why I think the ANP has had more difficulty reforming than the Afghan National Army. As an aside, the rule of law in Afghanistan, really unlike, if you want to make comparisons, and I don’t think it’s particularly relevant, but some people do, unlike in Iraq, is a very difficult issue as there has been no real reconciliation of different legal systems in Afghanistan to date. And this is being worked on, of course. We’re talking about secular law, Sharia law, and I think, to some extent – and I look to the Minister – we might think also of the adherence of the people of the south of Afghanistan, to Pushtin [indiscernible], the Pushtin Code and how that fits in to the factor when we look at the rule of law.
But first, the counterinsurgency campaign, the military campaign, has to deprive the Taliban of oxygen, and this is the place where it gets its subsistence from. Therefore, my observation and, in some sense, this is a criticism - it’s one which has been voiced in Washington as much as anywhere else - is that more international forces have to be generated to enable this to happen. It is a fact that the ratio of multinational counterinsurgency forces in Afghanistan is much, much smaller than you could find in other counterinsurgency campaigns.
We could say that what I understand to be the imminent concentration of US forces in the southeast or the east where the problem may be more serious as far as insurgents – concentrations of insurgents – is concerned, will allow in that arrow for a better ratio of insurgent to counterinsurgent. But again, we go back and suggest that we need to beware of Garyev’s oil spots and what happens when you break them up.
NATO has to grow in capability, in my view. There is no doubt about that, if it is to take over the roles and visions next year. And we know of certain nations contributing forces to NATO placing caveats on the use of those forces, and I think we all understand constitutional and legal restraints of various nations. However, this is a big test for NATO, and I would suggest that national caveats at this point are totally inappropriate. They weaken the operation and make it more difficult for the US command, and they make it more difficult ultimately for other countries in that coalition who would have to bear the brunt of casualties ultimately.
I mentioned some mathematics, but I don’t think mathematical solutions are that relevant to the campaign as a whole. It’s simply, suffice to say, military forces in sufficient quantity to stabilize the environment, which then allows other strands of the counterinsurgency campaign to take root, social, economic, et cetera, and to remove underlying causes of insurgency that the military aspect of that is vital. We can discuss other things like coffee and crime later, I think.
To conclude this part, I would say, yes, the military campaign has an effect in curbing both infiltration movements and affecting the mindset of the Taliban. And no, in my view, there are not enough troops to prevent reinfiltration to provide the sort of security that enables the all-important social and economic reforms which should follow military takeover of an area and which are now essential if the population in the post-election environment is not to tire of elections because they don’t see any particular progress. It’s important to bring confidence that the process is working.
To enable this, echoing Dave Lamm, it is important that Afghans form their own policy. Too much foreign influence will be counterproductive in a country which harbors deep-seated suspicion of foreigners from the past. And I think maybe one of the reasons why President Hamid Karzai said not many weeks ago that he would prefer it if house searches were to stop because they are probably counterproductive in a culture which views as a house search as an invasion of your personal life, not just your privacy. This does not mean the international forces withdraw. They are essential to bring the ANA to a state where it can begin to operate with increasing independence and allow the Afghan National Police to establish the rule of law, which is what I keep going back to.
Why is the ANA more successful in, if you like, bringing itself up to speed than the Afghan National Police? This isn’t going to take me very long because I think the answers to this question that has been posed are fairly obvious. The ANA benefited from being formed in a new image, which is attractive to many both former fighters and young people. It grew under the tutelage of international militaries and went into combat with its US allies. It was at the beginning better paid than the ANP, and this is one major failing, I believe, in what has happened when we talk about police, as it is always advisable in any environment to pay the police a decent wage.
And I think we know that. But there are a few other reasons why perhaps the ANA fared better than the ANP. The first is its remoteness from society, that is the army’s remoteness compared to the police. And therefore, it’s also its remoteness from some of the corruptive pressures that can be placed on policemen working amongst the local population where former commanders, fighters, people who are maybe trafficking exist and threaten, in some respects, local policemen. This is not the case with the army.
Then the army, like all armies, has an ethos and a corporate morale, and those people who’ve trained the Afghan National Army have sought to foster that from the very, very beginning. And I believe from my own rather small observations on this and talking to people, this is very strong. The ANP, being until recently the less well looked after, has not achieved this, and there is no integrated force within the ANP such as there is with the ANA. I could also add that many local police chiefs are former commanders with a vested interest in their local areas. Thank you very much.
Thomas Donnelly: Colonel, thank you very much. That was quite an incisive presentation. Mr. Perito, both Colonels Lamm and Langton have stressed the importance of local operations and the role of provincial reconstruction teams in both the concept and the execution of the strategy. I would particularly ask you to give us some insight on how PRTs are doing.
Robert Perito: Thanks very much, Tom, and thanks for the invitation to be here this morning. Clearly, the provincial reconstruction teams are a unique aspect of the counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan. What I’m going to say this morning comes out of a project that we’ve been running for the last year which we call the Afghan Experience Project, and under this project we’ve interviewed about 60 people who either work in or worked on or worked around provincial reconstruction teams in Afghanistan. And what I’m about to say represents the results of in-depth interviews with these people, plus visits that I was able to make to Afghanistan a few months ago.
Provincial reconstruction teams are small joint civil and military organizations whose mission is to promote good governance, security and reconstruction throughout Afghanistan. In July, there were 22 PRTs, 13 under US flags and 9 under ISAF-NATO flags. Now there are a few more, somewhat less on the US side, somewhat more on the ISAF side. The pattern has been for the United States to establish these entities and then pass them off to either coalition allies or to ISAF.
When I was there, I had a kind of standard conversation with people about PRTs, and I would start off and I would say what do you think about PRTs. And they would say, I really like the concept, it’s a great concept, but it’s the implementation. That’s where we have problems. And then I would say, well, what’s wrong with the implementation, and they would say, well, there’s the British model and the American model and then the German model and what the Lithuanians are doing. And the conversation would sort of tail off from there. In fact, the multinational PRT program has been characterized by an emphasis on flexibility, on the proliferation of national models and on an ad hoc approach to security and to development.
Now, this approach has allowed for an adaptation of local conditions, but it’s also created a lot of inconsistencies. There is a PRT executive steering committee, but it does not have the authority to actually direct operations. And there’s a lower level working group, but its function is basically informational in providing information to all of the various entities in Afghanistan that are engaged in some way or form with this.
And then there’s the issue we’ve heard about already this morning, and that’s the issue of national caveats. Individual countries place restraints on their forces which restrict their ability to conduct certain kinds of operations, and you have some which are rather extreme, like some forces can’t go more than a few kilometers from their camp or they can’t operate at night, whatever. And these national caveats make it very difficult to have a coherent strategy and a force that can work together.
In the main operations of PRTs, they’re very personality driven, and they reflect the local conditions. In permissive environments, PRTs behave much differently than they do in conflicted areas. There is no general set of guidelines for civil and military relations within the PRTs, so that each PRT operates differently. In some cases, you have a real bifurcation between the civil and the military side, and in others, particularly in the US, PRTs is an effort to try to make these two sides of the equation work together. For the United States, however, there is no real interagency agreement on relationships, roles and missions, and so everything is done on a kind of ad hoc basis.
As a result of these disparities, when we did our study of PRTs, we decided we would focus on American PRTs. And we were engaged in trying to determine what lessons could be learned from this, and all of these lessons seemed to result mostly from the realities of American priorities, American policies, American bureaucratics and resource limitations. And so, in this morning’s presentation, I’m going to focus primarily on American PRTs, but also, when it’s appropriate, I’ll talk about others.
There is, in fact, an organizational model for US PRTs, CFC J-9 model, and under this model the American PRT has 79 military personnel and three civilian personnel, plus an Afghan Minister of the Interior police officer. PRTs are commanded by an American lieutenant colonel. The civilian complement is generally one office each from State aid and the US Department of Agriculture.
PRTs have two civil affairs teams, Army civil affairs teams, composed of a total of eight soldiers. Civil Affairs Team A or the CAT A team is responsible for outreach. These are the guys that go outside the wire and do projects, usually and almost exclusively using Afghan contractors. The CAT B team is the one that operates the CMOC – the Civilian Military Operations Center – and their responsibility is liaison with the UN and NGOs.
In the model, there is a military police unit staffed by three generally reservists who are probably police officers in their civilian life, and the purpose of the police unit is liaison with the local cops. There are generally various kinds of intelligence teams. There’s a demining group, a psychological operations team and then generally a police colonel from MOI whose job is liaison with the local authorities.
Unfortunately, however, most PRTs do not have all of these parts, and a lack of skilled personnel has been a significant restraint on PRT effectiveness. To take a closer look at PRT staffing, the military commander is in charge. This is a military organization, although there’s a civilian component to it. Looking at the State Department part of this, there are 19 billets, or at least in July there were 19 billets for State Department officers.
The State Department had been able to provide only 12 officers. These officers served as political advisors to the lieutenant colonel commanding the PRT. They served as advisors to the provincial governor. They were members of the project review committee that decided on reconstruction projects that the PRT would undertake, and they were the primary eyes and ears of the United States Embassy. These officers provided over 50 percent of the embassy’s reporting back to Washington.
The problem was that the State Department has classified these jobs as FSO-1 and FSO-2, and, if you’re all State Department here like me, you know that these are fairly senior positions. But the State Department hadn’t been able to recruit people at that rank, and so the people that they were able to send were a mix of either very junior officers or retirees that had been called back. State made no attempt to support these people, so they were totally dependent on the military arm and the PRT for their logistics, for transportation, et cetera. There were no particular training programs. None of them got language training before they went to post.
A did a much better job of staffing its side. There were AID officers at all levels. These were the only field officers in USAID. Long ago, it seems AID got out of the business of putting people out, so these were the only AID people in the countryside. Their roles were to advise on development assistance projects, to monitor what was going on, to work with the NGOs, the military CAT teams and the UN on development assistance projects. And in a few cases, they actually had authority to supervise projects, but in most cases they were simply monitoring projects that were supervised out of Kabul or out of Washington.
The problem here was that none of these people were career. They were all contractors. Only about five percent of the AID budget in Afghanistan flows through PRTs. It’s a very small amount. And in cases where these people did not have actual contract authority, all they could do is look at the project and then report back to somebody far away to tell them that there was a problem.
USDA has to be congratulated, I think, for making the effort to send out people to help. Other US civilian agencies apparently didn’t try. But I think the USDA effort is really enigmatic of a general problem that we have in the US government, and that is that civilian agencies have very limited ability to search people, particularly in emergency situations such as stability operations. What USDA did to find people was that they advertised throughout the entire USDA system. They put up signs on the bulletin boards in every USDA agency saying how would you like to volunteer to spend six months working in a PRT in Afghanistan? They got a group of volunteers.
When I was there, there were 10 USDA officers in the field serving in PRTs. One was a forestry expert. One was a dietician. One was a large animal veterinarian. One was a – et cetera, et cetera. And they were sort of spotted about, again, with no program funds, no general guidance, just go out there and see what you can do.
The mission of PRTs as described in a terms of reference document, which was adopted by the Executive Steering Committee, is to do the following three things: to extend the authority of the central government, to improve security, and to promote reconstruction. If you ask American PRT commanders what their mission is, they emphasize expanding the grid of the central government. That is their primary mission. They translate this into supporting the local governor - the local provincial governor – and the local police chief. The problem with this is and the rationale for this is, of course, that provincial governors are appointed by the central government, by President Karzai.
The problem with this is that, in many cases, provincial governors, local police chiefs, are either former warlords or they’re local power brokers, and their interests diverge in many cases from that of the central government. In other cases, some of these people are thought by their constituents to be corrupt, and so the PRT has to walk a very fine line between trying to get the provincial government to do things which are supportive of central government initiatives, but not getting identified too closely if these people turn out to be unsavory. In some cases, the PRT has actually been responsible for helping to remove local officials from office.
In a national sense, the PRTs were very useful in supporting the selection of delegates for the constitutional [indiscernible]. They played a useful role in supporting and providing security for national elections for the president and the parliament, and they’ve been effective in sort of reaching out to local influentials, tribal leaders, Mullahs, other people who help to shape the polity in their areas. In Jalalibad after the riots, the PRT commander invited 200 Mullahs to lunch and spruced up a local mosque, which was run by a rather radical cleric, to demonstrate that the United States was not against Islam.
In the security area, this is probably the most misunderstood of all the PRT mandates. In fact, PRTs are mandated only to provide for their own protection. They’re not responsible for pacifying the countryside, for protecting internationals or for countering the drug trade or fighting insurgents. The military unit in the PRT is generally a US National Guard infantry platoon, and its responsibility is force protection, taking care of the unit itself and the commander and the civilian components and taking these people out when they go outside the wire to make calls. Now, this limited security mandate has in some cases come as a shock to international NGOs in the UN who thought that an extremist could turn to the PRT for protection. And there’s an infamous story about NGOs who were involved in a civil disturbance, going up to the gate of the PRT, knocking on the door and being refused entry.
PRTs do provide a kind of psychological security presence. They do frequent patrolling. They’re out and about. They work with the local authorities, and just the presence of armed American military forces in an area has a way of calming things down. They’ve also made a significant contribution in terms of working with local authorities, particularly with the police, and one of the functions has been to provide the police with backup, but also with equipment and some training and moral support.
Now, one of the questions I had when I went out there was how could these small, lightly armed units exist, in some cases in very heavily contested areas? And the answer for that is, in most cases where this is true, PRTs are co-located with American combat units. In Jalalibad, for example, the PRT is located with a US Marine infantry battalion, with a US Army special forces group, with a helicopter squadron, with a couple of gun ships, with an ANA unit with an embedded training team, and so there’s a lot of folks around.
Now, in PRTs with commanders who are well liked and who are on top of their game, the PRT commanders take on the job of coordinating all of the maneuver units so that the various US units in a given area don’t run over each other. As one officer said, I don’t want the State Department guy to go out and call on a tribal leader in the morning and then have the special forces team come out and arrest that guy in the afternoon. Or I don’t want to conduct an operation and block the road on a day when the seeds are coming in for the planting.
Excuse me, is there a problem?
Male Voice: No, no. [indiscernible]
Robert Perito: Okay. However, recently there’s been a kind of change in direction, I understand, and particularly in the east along the Pakistan border. Control has shifted from the PRT commander to the local maneuver unit commander, and, in fact, PRTs are increasingly seen by the combat commanders as another tool in the bag. And so, one day I can send out the special forces team, and tomorrow I’m going to send out the PRT.
In the added reconstruction, PRT activities can be divided in sort of two general groups. One is civil affairs, short term, quick impact projects designed to win hearts and minds and improve local attitudes toward a military presence, and then USAID longer term assistance projects aimed at creating sustainable security. The civil affairs quick impact projects have been the most controversial, and I won’t go into the rather bitter disagreements that’s grown up between the military and NGOs about whether or not the military, by its presence there and by its engagement in these reconstruction activities, violates humanitarian space and, by blurring distinctions between civilian and military, places NGOs at risk. But that has certainly been a feature of the NGO experience in Afghanistan.
In the beginning, civil affairs teams tend to stress spend and build. The result was a lot of uncoordinated construction, not part of an Afghan national plan, not coordinated with Afghan government ability to support. And so, you had schools built, but there were no teachers, or hospitals put up or clinics put up, but no doctors. And so, the impression often created was the Americans are really good, they built us this school, but the Afghan government, well, it’s not so good because they didn’t send us the teacher. With the arrival of the USAID personnel and a lot of the experience, this has changed, and civil affairs projects are much more focused now on infrastructure, on security related building and on doing things in areas which are too dangerous for other actors – NGOs – to go into.
PRTs have also taken on a sort of longer term development look, and they become very expert in mixing and mingling all the various kinds of development assistance funding that’s available. When I was there, they said, well, you know, we use SERP [phonetic] for this, and we use QUIP [phonetic] for this, and we use DAKA [phonetic] for this. I get lost in all the initials and the acronyms. One of the things I think that this whole project could use is a sort of rationale or a rationalization of the funding sources so that everybody has access to the same kind of money and can use it where the expertise is present.
Finally, I’d like to talk about the future of the PRT program. The US is transitioning the PRT program to ISAF. This has already occurred in the north and in the west and is going on now in the south. The Canadians have just taken over Kandahar, the British, and I understand the Dutch are moving in to take on the other PRTs in the south. I want to hold up a copy of this map. There’ll be a stack of these out on the counter if you want to pick one up, but basically the north and west being controlled by ISAF, south going over to ISAF, and the US being left with this group here on the border in the most conflicted and most dangerous area.
The question arising out of this is this issue of national caveats. The assumption being made here is that in the west, in the north and increasingly in the south, these ISAF-led units will be able to conduct themselves in a way consistent with traditional peacekeeping. They won’t have to fight anyone.
Now, whether this works or not is open to question. It presumes that things are going to get better and better. In fact, there are a lot of people out there in the west and the south and the north who are not Taliban even who have complaints, criticisms and could cause problems. In the east, the United States will keep the responsibility for the PRTs, and those will be closely integrated with combat units. Shifting these responsibilities from the US to ISAF raises the question of what is the future of the civilian components.
In many cases, when ISAF has taken over, the civilian units have just stayed – the State guys there, the aid persons there. Sometime it’s been a matter of good fortune. I understand when the Germans took over in Kanduz, the State Department guy who was there spoke fluent German, so he just stayed on. No arrangements were made. He just sort of ingratiated himself and kept right on working. But the question is, is the US going to be willing to operate under foreign flags?
One of the most positive things, I think, to come out of the PRC experience is something that hasn’t happened. One of the things that hasn’t happened is that the PRTs have resisted what you might call the Christmas tree effect. They have not generally allowed themselves to be tasked with a larger and larger number of operations, nor have they allowed themselves to replace the Afghan government. And the overall objective still remains that the PRTs will phase out, and the Afghan government will take over these responsibilities, both on the civilian and the military side. Thank you.
Thomas Donnelly: Thank you again. Joe, you’ve got both a hard task and an easy task. The easy task is that the previous speakers have given us both very precise and insightful presentations. The hard part is that they’ve set a very high standard of excellence. So with that mixed introduction, I ask you to try to pull some of these threads together for us.
Joseph Collins: I’ll do my best.
Thomas Donnelly: And to turn the microphone on. There you go.
Joseph Collins: Okay, that’s always the first step. I think we’re all in violent agreement essentially about most things. I was particularly delighted to hear Bob’s report on the investigation of the PRTs, which was – I remember the PRT program when it was two view graphs in Task Force 180 headquarters.
Colonel, you’d be happy to know that the real author of the PRT program was a British colonel by the name of Nick Carter, and I’m sure there’s something in the history of the UK that is the forerunner of the PRT. But I can remember when we pushed them through the interagency process here. I’m happy to see that we have 12 of 19 State Department. That was above average for some of the time that we were there. And some of the same organic problems remain, but I think lots of interesting things have happened.
If all of you out there are going to sit through both of these panels, you’re going to hear a lot of words about what we’re doing in Afghanistan. The words on this panel were sort of organized around counterinsurgency, but you might also hear counterterrorism, reconstruction and stabilization, stability operations, the famous nation building. Remember that one? And the more accurate state building or institution building. And all of these things are really sort of facets of the same stone. They are, in a way, the words required if you are, in fact, going to win in Afghanistan.
And to win in Afghanistan, you’re going to have to win the battle against the insurgents, the battle to build a decent political system, the battle to build the functioning legal economy, and the battle to create a functioning state infrastructure with particular emphasis immediately in the military and the law and order sector. Not just police, but the entire law and order sector.
How are we doing? I think most of us up here sort of lean in the direction the fact that we are winning. Many tremendous things have gone down. In any speech by the President or the Secretary of Defense or State about Afghanistan, you can hear an amazing array of numbers thrown at you. You know, 60,000. It’s sort of like the old McDonald’s, how many billion served. 60,000 militia disarmed, 30,000 soldiers, 50,000 policemen, now 21,000 coalition combat soldiers, over 10,000 NATO peacekeepers, and on and on and on. And lots, in fact, is being done. There’s a tremendous amount to be done. It’s important to remind ourselves, as we pat ourselves on the collective back, that we’re in a period of time where the Taliban has been reinvigorated.
There is still, throughout the countryside, the atmosphere of rule of law is still relatively weak in many areas. The military and the police that we’ve trained are desperately in need of infrastructure, staff bureaucracy, training and all sort of the sinews of those forces. Drug production, not mentioned up here today, is an enormous problem, and the progress in fighting this demon has been miniscule. And actually, that’s a positive statement because six months ago I would have said none at all. And in fact, we’ve stopped backsliding. That’s our battle cry for this month.
Health and economic problems throughout the countryside remain tremendous. Infant and mother mortality in Afghanistan are probably among the highest in the world among countries where such records can be kept. There are probably a few worse places in Central or West Africa, but we don’t have the data on that. So if we’re winning, we have begun to win, I suppose, is a way of saying this.
Now, in my instructions from the Chair, I was also asked to talk about some lessons, and we are talking now about lessons drawn or lessons observed in a game that’s in the fifth inning. And that’s always a dangerous position to be in, and I’m going to do this from a very parochial, US standpoint. Lesson number one is the importance of preparing the US armed forces for combat on the low end of the spectrum. In fact, our skill at conventional war has forced most of the people who encounter us on the battlefield to realize that insurgency and terrorism are probably the only two routes that they can take, unless they’re in a nuclear or weapons of mass destruction business. We have to remember this not only when we talk about operations, but also when we talk about forestructure priorities and transformation.
And education, extremely important. We have first rate combat training, and our strategic corporals and lieutenants need better training and education in this type of warfare.
The second lesson follows from the first, and it is really the stuff of the education problem, and that is the importance of language and cultural training. Frankly, we are broke on this front, and I’ve seen all sorts of horror stories where armies from Europe and other places are coming with translators with a density of 10 times as many translators in some units as American forces.
Why are we doing that? Why do we have to do that? We don’t have to do that. This is just rank and competence, in terms of not on the part of our soldiers in the field, but on the part of our planners and whatever. The language problem in particular in the armed forces has always been cast as a training problem. That is completely wrong and wrong-headed. It is first and foremost a recruiting problem, and, if we think of it that way, we can solve it very rapidly.
Lesson number three, counterinsurgency is a political military sport. It’s an interagency game, and in that game the US armed forces need a lot more help from State and AID. Bob talked about that wonderfully. We have no surge capacity. We need an expeditionary State Department and AID, and we need it quickly. The Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense are convinced of that. The Secretary of Defense has even offered to put up Defense money to fund some of it, but this is very, very poorly supported in the Congress. And all the right ideas and all the right things are being said at State and Defense, and the Congress is not buying it.
Lesson number four is the importance of empowering indigenous forces. One of the most important things we did in Afghanistan was to throw away the peacekeeping playbook. The peacekeeping playbook as described by Iran tells us that we needed 500,000 western peacekeepers for Afghanistan. I couldn’t think of anything that would have been worse and more dysfunctional. I think we’re pioneering a new model for Afghanistan. I think the PRTs are an extremely important part of that.
Lesson number five, similar to the fourth, indigenous leadership extremely important. And here I’d like for you to sight sitting in the front row our Minister of the Interior, Ali Jalali, who is back now, a colleague on the faculty at the National Defense University. He has been a colonel in the Afghan Army, an executive at the Voice of America, and he did a remarkable job with the Afghan police. The Minister of the Interior in Afghanistan is also responsible for the state governments. They answer to him first before the president. And in terms of cleaning up the act of any number of state and local officials, Mr. Jalali deserves another medal for that. And we’re glad to have you back, sir.
But when we think about our problem in Iraq and our problem in Afghanistan, as someone said to me the other day, we’re still looking for Karzai in Iraq. And truth be told, this is a complex statement. You are talking about different conflicts with different groups, but, when it comes to rebuilding countries, state building, it has to be an indigenous enterprise. It has to be led from the front. There can be no more American seizures. It just doesn’t work. And again, one of the things that we’ve done in Afghanistan is consistently put a lot of weight on Afghan leaders, and now they’re in the lead. And we’re following them, and I think that’s extremely important.
One final lesson is the importance of taking the long view, and we, as Americans, have a problem. We’ve got a real problem. The conventional wisdom is that successful counterinsurgencies take nine years, and we know from the lips of George C. Marshall himself in the middle of World War II that democracies cannot fight a seven-year war. That leaves us a couple of years short.
And in truth, the United States, one of the remarkably consistent things that we have done or not done, depending on your perspective, is to hang in there and to be persistent and to take problems like Haiti and take them from a crisis through assistance into reconstruction, and, too, what my friends at the US Institute of Peace call a viable peace. We’re not getting there. We’re not getting there. We’ve got to hang in there both in Afghanistan and Iraq, and, in the end, the key to this, of course, is explaining what you’re doing, showing progress and keeping the support of the American people.
Dave mentioned the wonderful book that I think only military read by Bob Sorley on what happened in the last few years of Vietnam, and Bob Sorley points out that we were doing much better in Vietnam than anyone in the United States still licking their wounds from the mid-1960s ever realized. And in the end, the folks in that country fell victim to losing the support of the American people much more than they did their own shortcomings, and we have to keep that in the forefront. And this will be both our key policy and our key public relations problem in the next few years.
It’s one thing to go around the world and try and explain ourselves to countries all around, and I salute Karen Hughes for taking a shot at that very, very tough mission. But the most important people we need to explain ourselves to is the American people, and we need to do a lot more, both for Afghanistan and Iraq in that regard. Thank you.
Thomas Donnelly: Thank you, Joe. Thank you all. I’m going to briefly exercise the prerogative of the moderator to ask a quick question. One theme that has run through everybody’s presentation that I’d like people to elaborate on is this moment of transition from US predominance of PRTs and other kinds of security operations to ISAF taking a larger role. And to just kind of paraphrase Joe a bit, it may be that Afghanistan is about to sever from displaced exit strategy syndrome in the sense that Americans are hankering for drawdowns and withdraws and exit strategies and stuff like that.
But it strikes me that, again, just reading between the lines of the presentations, that this is quite a crucial moment, and perhaps people would elaborate on it and do a little forecasting. Again, it just sounds like a crucial moment in the overall success of the longer campaign. So if everybody who wants to will take a swipe at that. Dave?
David Lamm: Yeah, just [indiscernible; microphone breaks up] PRTs, as we move forward with PRTs and ISAF transition, it is the intent or was as I left this summer we would leave a PRT in each of the regions. So they’d leave one in Maza [phonetic], and the one at Furaz stood up, and that keeps a presence there. It also is a way, quite frankly, to funnel the SURP [phonetic] money through, and that gets us now to the NATO piece and ISAF. There is no commanders emergency response program funding on the NATO side, so, if you’re looking for $143 million to spend on the local governments under a NATO rubric, you will not find it.
The other problem is, of course, fourth generation, and this is a pretty wide open topic. But our NATO allies wrestled and flopped very painfully to come up with the fourth structure that they would need just for this initial set. How they will continue to do this will be a dilemma, and they will not bring with them – so if you’re looking from a US exit strategy perspective of cost savings overall, which lots of folks are interested in in Washington DC, I can tell you just by adding the numbers you will not realize a cost savings. Just to run Kandahar alone is $339 million a year. The United States is going to pay that bill. You may get Canadian and British forces to move into the south to operate, but the high cost enablers, the logistics tail, is going to continue to remain a US-paid operation.
So when you consider the fact that you’re going to pay the bills and those nations – I know the Canadians and the British have worked with us very closely, and I don’t see a national caveat [indiscernible] the Canadians and the UK. In fact, we have had, quite frankly, planners with us in the headquarters with us for about a year now on the transition, and we think that that will go very well.
The issue is what you get after the US and Canadians in the south, what country antes up. And then, when you rack and stack national interests of what the US might want to do with our Afghan colleagues and then what the next government who is going to take over – because you remember, these are, at best, nine month to one year cycles. So you get UK and Canadians now. The next iteration could be Italian. It could be German. And I will tell you, working through those rubrics becomes very problematic on the ground.
Consider just for instance what you may want to do from a counterterrorist perspective and what your authorities are going to be in somebody else’s place on the ground, and we learned our lesson just, I know personally, in Bosnia with a small area known as Polai where one guy we really wanted to get at all the time hung out. And when we drew up the boundaries, it just so happened to be in another country’s area and made going to get him very difficult.
So all that has to be kept in mind, but from cost savings overall, the US taxpayer, we could pull most of the US combat forces out of the country. And the NATO contribution, if we’re going to continue the effort in Afghanistan, the US contribution in financial terms is going to be just as large. So I didn’t mean to disappoint you, but we pay the lion’s share of the bills. And if you’re doing that, do you want to then have somebody else be doing the lion’s share of the policy? You’ve got to ask yourself that question.
Thomas Donnelly: If I could toss one other element into the mix, I’d be interested for predictions on what the Afghan response to this might be, as well. Joe?
Joseph Collins: We’re very, at least in the Department of Defense, very interested in finding people to pick up part of the burden, and it’s sort of interesting. It’s interesting to me what a stealth operation this has been, the expansion of NATO assets and NATO command and control in Afghanistan. And how, when we talk about alliances and coalitions, we rarely trumpet the fact that the allies are doing quite a bit, including a number of allies that we’re twitting and fighting with all the time, Germany and France.
But NATO had sworn ultimately to take over the entire mission in Afghanistan. This is considered to be the number one priority by the NATO Secretary General. They’re working it. They took PRTs in the northwest and then in the west, and that was sort of three out of five zones, if you will, in Afghanistan. They’re now moving into the fourth of five zones, which is the zone around Kandahar, which is a zone of very active combat, and this is not just a question of taking over PRTs any longer.
This is a question of providing combat troops, and they’ll be British and Canadian combat troops at least in brigade strength in the southern part of Afghanistan. And I know the Canadians have been there before. They were there in late 2001, early 2002, and they are viewing this as a combat mission, which, of course, is exactly what it is. They’ve already taken over the PRT there.
There is a number of problems with NATO doing this. Theoretically, NATO should be able to do this entire mission. However, NATO’s inherent weaknesses and the interesting little peccadilloes of its command and control arrangements are such that it’s going to be extremely problematical. Bob pointed out the prevalence of national caveats, and that is sort of an incredible phenomenon.
The Germans, for example, have a big PRT operation in Kanduz, and one of the things that the German Parliament did for them was to give them a very, very circumscribed mission statement. The big problem in that part of the country is narcotics. However, the Germany PRT in Kanduz doesn’t have anything to do with narcotics because it’s not on their mission task list as provided to them by their Parliament. It’s sort of an incredible situation.
If that’s what NATO is going to do, then partnership is the best we can hope for. They’re going to have to get a lot better. They’re going to have to throw away the caveats. They’re going to have to become much more centralized. They’re going to have to form joint logistics units. You can’t have every nation providing 100 soldiers and then a 75-man support group for the 100 soldiers, and when you look at ISAF in Kabul today, what you find is the troops that are really patrolling Kabul are only a small fraction of this tremendous ISAF force there, most of which has become sort of a self-licking ice cream cone. They’re there to support themselves because they’re there.
So this is something that really needs to be watched. We, in the United States, obviously desire for this to come about, but it can’t come about unless changes and common sense procedures and standard military doctrine is sort of put into place.
Thomas Donnelly: Joe, I’m glad you used self-licking ice cream cone. If we don’t use that, then we broke our license to hold conferences on military affairs. Bob, I think you had something you wanted to say.
Robert Perito: Yeah, I, first of all, endorse what’s been said about the military aspects of this, but I want to talk about the civilian aspects of it, which I think are very important for the United States. One of the roles that PRTs play is that they provide a platform. They’re a place where, if a civilian agency wants to send people out, a place where people can go, where they can stay safely, where they can get a hot meal, where they get transport, where there are people there that know the local territory and can direct them and guide them.
As the PRT program transitions to NATO, the question is how do US civilian agencies continue to operate in these environments. Clearly, in some cases, for example in Herat, it would probably be possible for the US to disengage from the PRT and to open an office or a small consulate or some other kind of straightforward civilian diplomatic kind of establishment.
In other areas, it’s probably not so clear, and the question is are we going to continue to operate in environments where we really don’t have clear understandings of the people that we’re working with. Do we want to phase this out? There’s been some talk of civilianizing PRTs and creating a completely civilian PRT, but if you did that, then it wouldn’t be a PRT anymore. It would be something else because a PRT, by definition, is a joint civilian-military entity and draws on the strength of both of those institutions. So this is a – and what happens to the US civilian component of this is something that I don’t think has been really looked at or thought through.
Thomas Donnelly: Christopher, [indiscernible; microphone cuts out]?
Christopher Langton: Yes, two very quick ones. One is a military one relating to US forces and NATO expansion, for want of a better word. Dave Lamm mentioned they simply couldn’t do without the US in a number of areas, but one particular area is in the area of air, so air power, air transport and particularly in the use of helicopters. If you look at the European member countries of NATO, what they can actually generate in helicopter lift is very, very small, and helicopters, as we all know, in Afghanistan are a critical part of military operations for obvious reasons. So from that point of view alone, the US – and again, sorry to disappoint the audience – is likely to have to remain for some considerable time.
My second point on NATO, just to reemphasize, this is a watershed for NATO. It’s the first time it’s done an operation outside its traditional area. There are fissures between member states, as there are in any international or multinational organization. The issue of the caveats is a very serious debilitating issue, which has to be catered for, and we don’t know how it’s going to go.
And I would suggest – I think the question was how will this go at the beginning. The next few months, as we go into British, Canadian and New Zealand taking over in the south, are critical. If that goes well, and addressing the question of what would Afghan people think, then, if they see that going well, I think I’m right in saying, Minister, then there are prospects for the next task. But we don’t know who comes next, and whoever does come next will come with a completely different shit load of equipment, doctrine and everything else.
However, on a more positive note, NATO does bring one major strength to this operation and has done ever since October 2001, and that is it brings a set of common operating, commonly understood operating standards, which has enabled multinational air operations to operate out of Menah, outside Bishkek, involving up to six different types of aircraft from some nine different countries simultaneously. And that is something that NATO can do and does extremely well.
Thomas Donnelly: Thanks very much. We’ll now go to audience questions. I want to remind everybody of the three AEI rules. First of all, ask a question. Second of all, identify yourselves and wait for the microphone. And third – what was the third one? Yeah, ask a question. Ask a question, don’t make a statement. That’s it. Let’s start over here, and we’ll kind of work left to right.
Audience Member: Hi, I’m Dan Scallons [phonetic] from News Hour with Jim Lehrer. I have a question for Colonel Lamm. At the military headquarters, what kind of debate is there and has there been about what to do about Pakistan being a safe haven for insurgents?
David Lamm: We’re on the record.
Male Voice: Pay no attention to the –
David Lamm: Yeah, no cameras in the back. We not only debate what we can do with Pakistan between us and the government of Afghanistan, but have, in fact, worked out a series of relationships on the tactical and operational level and on the strategic level. There is a trilateral commission which meets monthly with high level delegates from Pakistan, Afghanistan and the United States to talk about a range of issues.
I think it’s significant to point out that the first person who voted in the Afghan presidential election was, in fact, a person voting from a refugee camp inside of Pakistan. And while I think everybody would like the Pakistanis to do more, President Musharraf walks a very delicate balance there. And, in fact, operations last summer and even through the winter this year lead us to believe that the Pakistanis have been quite supportive of the operations and are very cognizant of what goes on on their side of the border and our side of the border, as well. On the Afghan side of the border.
I think it’s also important to note that there’s a great deal of military operational and tactical collaboration along that border, and, while some of the details oftentimes get out, the Pakistanis have been very cooperative in that arena. So we debate what needs to be done continually with the government of Afghanistan. What we would like to see around the border, Pakistani operations last summer and in the winter along the Afghan border, that side were coordinated.
I should say – yeah – coordinated in a loose sense. It’s not that we were telling the Pakistanis what to do, but we were aware of what they were doing, and that allowed us and the Afghans to synchronize some of the things that we were doing on our side of the border, as well. So from where we were a year or 18 months ago, we’re in a much better condition now and situation along the border. Do crossings still occur? Yes. Are there other folks on the Pakistani side who may allow that to occur? Yes, there are folks. Does that have the complicity with the government and Islamabad? Probably not - se just have to continue to do that. And then working with the Afghan system. To tell a small joke to lighten things up – [indiscernible] Minister Jalali.
There’s a joke that we tell in our headquarters that, if the President wakes up and the lights don’t come on somewhere in the palace, that somebody in Islamabad has thrown the switch. But that’s not indeed the case, and he knows that. And in fact, I think it’s important to keep in mind that the first formal visitor to meet with President Karzai after the election was President Musharraf, and both of them together spent [indiscernible] Liberation Day in Islamabad watching the festivities there. So I think the relationship is getting much better.
Thomas Donnelly: I would just say that there’s a small nastygram about the Pakistani Army in the Zawahiri letter, which is a significant –
Audience Member: Confirmation.
Thomas Donnelly: And a significant laurel for the Musharraf government. Barney, since you’re in the next panel, I’m going to try to get to some others. And I’ll try this gentleman here in the middle. My apologies, but you get your turn at the microphone.
Audience Member: I’ll be brief. Stanley Cohen [phonetic] with the CATO Institute. I’d like to throw this idea out, the future of NATO. Colonel Langton said that we had too few soldiers for successful counterinsurgency, that NATO has to grow capability. What are the odds of that realistically? What are the odds that the national restrictions will come off? You’ve all discussed that. If that does not happen, you’ve said this is a watershed for NATO, which suggests that the implications are not only for the future of Afghanistan, but for NATO itself. This could be a crunch time. And I’d like you to explore that.
Christopher Langton: Thank you very much. I don’t think anybody thinks any other than this is a major test for NATO because of the reasons I said. It’s doing something it’s never done before in a way that it’s never done before. It might be involved simultaneously in combat operations and restructuring operations. Will nations contribute more realistically? I think if the first phase is seen to be successful, then those nations who are not contributing or reluctant to contribute and could contribute more might well do so. And so much depends really on the next few months, in fact, the next year, to see how the British and the south get on.
Thomas Donnelly: And I’m sure that with a heavy heart the CATO Institute will climb on board with continued exercise on American power. I think we have time for just one more.
Joseph Collins: May I have just a word on that?
Thomas Donnelly: Joe, sorry about that.
Joseph Collins: This may be an area of dispute, so I didn’t want to let it go.
Thomas Donnelly: Well, we need at least one small one.
Joseph Collins: I think that we’re sort of getting to the point where raw numbers are not really a problem. You’ve got now almost 12,000 people in the NATO ISAF contingent, 21,000 in the US, 30,000 in the Afghan National Army backed up by 50,000 police, and this doesn’t count various and sundry militias that are out there. That’s a significant force. It’s over 113,000 just in those numbers that are realized right there. You know, when you start thinking in terms of raw numbers what sort of ratios you need, maybe the problem is not so much the numbers, but it’s where they are, their degrees of training and professionalism. But I think in quantitative terms, we’re probably getting to where we need to be.
Thomas Donnelly: Okay. Yeah, I’m sorry for having so little time for questions, but I think we’ll take one more from David, if you - I’m told – I was disciplined. Oh, we have two microphones.
Audience Member: David Isby [phonetic]. A question in general. One of the issues in the past has been lack of unity of effort in that you had the PRT world, the other, if you will, black world, special operations forces and ISAF. And with decreasing forces, how do you, A, avoid several - just a deconfliction, as well as showing continued commitment for the benefits of our friends in Rawalpindi and inside Afghanistan?
Thomas Donnelly: I think that’s primarily for –
David Lamm: It sounds like it’s for me. We would deconflict just the military operations and even the [indiscernible] civil operations with Patrick Fine almost on a daily basis. I would meet with my friend, Larry Sampler [phonetic], weekly, and then when things were hot almost daily as we would run up to elections. I think that whatever headquarters comes in and takes over from CFC-alpha needs to realize that the major function of General Barnell’s headquarters while I was there was to sort of synchronize and integrate all of these efforts on the ground.
So there was not a, as you say, a black operation going down somewhere that quite frankly wasn’t approved by General Barnell and had knowledge of. That then progressed to the point where, I think last summer it was, we met with all the members of the Afghan government and worked out an arrangement where those operations, to include the black operations to some degree – there was some foreknowledge inside there, trusted their folks inside the Afghan government. So those things go on, and that would be the most difficult peace, working with the international community, the UN, synchronizing that piece.
The last ISAF rotation, which was headed by the Turks, we had wonderful coordination with coordinating the operations, counter-narcotics operations in the areas that were going on with the Afghans and ISAF when we would run an operation up there. In fact, in many cases, there were times when ISAF would ask for Afghan pandas [sounds like] help support in the north. They came with US ETTs and, hence, could call them US air enablers. All of that was coordinated very, very rapidly.
And I think one thing I would like to point out which is not probably common knowledge in Washington, I think, as I sit back and reflect and hang out in the town of big bureaucracies, that one of the things that made this work was how small the headquarters were on the ground and how quickly the bureaucracy could move and assist the Afghan government. It was actually rather remarkable, and, as I traveled back to Iraq and commensurated with my Chief of Staff friends there, I think you’d find that the bureaucracies are a bit larger. And in counterinsurgency you have to move fast, and I think the smaller and more nimble you are, the better off you’re going to be.
Thomas Donnelly: Thank you, David. Thank you all. Those were four really superb presentations and made the moderator’s job very easy. One administrative note, we’re going to conduct a fairly rapid passage of lines here and roll right into the second panel. But we should take a moment to thank our presenters for their efforts. [audience applause] Okay, so we’ll take about a five minute break while we switch over.
[break in session to set up second panel]
Vance Serchuk: This is the 10-minute warning for this panel. Calling on all speakers to come up to the dais.
[continue break for second panel to set up]
Vance Serchuk: Good morning. We’re going to try to get our second panel underway. If I could ask everyone to take a seat. My name is Vance Serchuk. I’m a Research Fellow here at the American Enterprise Institute where I work on Afghanistan, among other issues. It’s really my pleasure to be able to introduce and moderate what I think is going to be a great panel with a very high standard having been set by our preceding one.
I think that we’re employing a little bit of a hammer and anvil approach to our conference, insofar as we’ve just had a panel ostensibly about the military side, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism. But one of the things that I think we heard from all of our speakers was the extent to which, as much as the US military obviously plays a lead and critical role on the ground in Afghanistan, it’s ultimately questions regarding the law and order, the growth of institutions, and economic development that are every bit as much going to define success or failure in this mission for the United States, the international community and for the Afghans themselves. As we look back over the past couple of years in Afghanistan, it’s reasonably clear that we do some things fairly well.
The Afghan National Army, we’ve heard, is a great success story. As we saw a month and one day ago, the international community is also pretty good at actually the act of holding elections. What’s less clear is how good we necessarily are with what comes after them, and with sorts of questions related to building institutions, cultivating elites who can staff those institutions, spurring economic growth, changing the way power is effectively accumulated and wielded in a place like Afghanistan. And that’s why I think it’s appropriate that after the first panel that we had this morning we now follow on with this panel where we can talk about the political and economic trajectory of Afghanistan since the ouster of the Taliban.
And perhaps, as the person, as Tom pointed out, who is responsible for the title Winning Afghanistan, for those of you who registered early you saw that initially it was just called Strategy in Afghanistan, and we decided we had to sex it up because not enough people were registering. So there was, in fact, no judgment beforehand. It was strictly for the sake of image, and all of you are here, so clearly it worked.
So now we can turn to just a distinguished group of people and hear from them about the other, I think, critical piece of this puzzle. Speaking first will be Barnett Rubin, Director of Studies and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Cooperation at NYU. From November through December 2001 he served as Special Advisor to the UN Representatives of the Secretary General for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, during the negotiations that produced the Bonn Agreement, and he’s considered one of the world’s foremost experts on Afghanistan and the surrounding region. We’re very honored that he is able to join us before flying off to Berlin and then on to Afghanistan this evening.
Next, Larry Sampler, adjunct staff member of the Institute of Defense Analyses, who served as the Chief of Staff for the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, UNAMA. Before that assignment, he was a consultant to the Afghan government in support of the Afghan Constitutional Loya Jirga, and he had also performed a similar role for USAID in support of the Afghan Emergency Loya Jirga in 2002. He’s held positions at USAID, OSCE in Bosnia, and he’s also served in the Special Operations community of the United States.
Rick Barton, Senior Advisor at CSIS and Co-Dir
