What I'm actually going to do is read a bunch of things from the actual assessment that General--that was leaked by The Washington Post, and a couple of other recent studies and pieces, because I think that we've really--it is a dense document, the assessment is. It's very complicated. Afghanistan will give you a headache if you think about it for 30 seconds. And a lot of press reports have highlighted or asserted things about the assessment that I think don't accurately reflect what General McChrystal is trying to do, even apart from the fact that what's publicly available is a redacted draft.

So forgive me while I read a few sections from it to highlight some of the key aspects of this strategy.

First of all, under objectives, if you ask what does General McChrystal think that his objectives are, he lays them out very clearly.

President Obama's strategy to disrupt, dismantle and eventually defeat al Qaeda and prevent their return to Afghanistan has laid out a clear path of what we must do. That is the objective that General McChrystal is trying to achieve.

And I don't see in this document a mission statement or objective other than that, except for the ISAF mission statement, because General McChrystal is a NATO commander, and NATO has given ISAF a mandate, and the mission is, quote, "ISAF, in support of the government of Afghanistan, conducts operations in Afghanistan to reduce the capability and will of the insurgency, support the growth in capacity and capability of the Afghan National Security Forces and facilitate improvements in governance and socioeconomic development in order to provide a secure environment for sustainable security that is observable to the population."

General McChrystal adds, "accomplishing this mission requires defeating the insurgency, which this paper describes as a condition where the insurgency no longer threatens the viability of the state. The government of Afghanistan must sufficiently control its territory to support regional stability and prevent its use for international terrorism."

Those are the objectives at which this strategy aims, at least according to this assessment documenting what Gener-al McChrystal has said. And I think that accusations or assertions that this is somehow a--really is an attempt to build Valhalla in South Asia and has--that he's gone off the reservation and moved away from the president's mandate are unfounded.

I think it's important to understand the degree to which General McChrystal himself highlights the need to get Afghan forces into this fight and turn this fight over to Afghan forces as quickly as possible. He says, "The objective is the will of the people. The Afghans must ultimately defeat the insurgency. We cannot succeed without significantly im-proved unity of effort, and protecting the people means shielding them from all threats. Ideally, the ANSF must lead this fight, but they will not have enough capability in the near term, given the insurgency's growth rate. In the interim, coalition forces must provide a bridge capability to protect critical segments of the population. The status quo will lead to failure if we wait for the ANSF to grow."

I believe this is an assessment that was based on a large amount of staff work that was done within the intelligence community, within Kabul, with the CSTC-A, which runs--which is the training command that oversees the Afghan forces. And with our commanders on the ground, I believe that it is a correct assessment.

I think that General McChrystal is making it clear and he's made it clear repeatedly that he does not desire or intend to have American forces waging this war indefinitely into the future, and he does support the notion of transitioning responsibility for the conflict to the Afghan security forces as rapidly as it is possible. But his assessment is that it is not now possible to do that in the circumstances as they exist.

Speaking to the question of al Qaeda's involvement, which I think is important because it comes up periodically, the assessment addresses the issue and says al Qaeda and associated movements based in Pakistan channel foreign figh-ters, suicide bombers and technical assistance into Afghanistan, and offer ideological, motivation, training and financial support. Al Qaeda's links with the Haqqani Network, which is an element of the Taliban, have grown, suggesting that expanding Haqqani control could create a favorable environment for al Qaeda and associated movements to reestablish safe havens in Afghanistan.

There are people who have made arguments that a return of Taliban government would not in fact lead to a return to al Qaeda, and I have--but I have to say, looking at the evidence, there is a real danger in cherry-picking intelligence in order to support an assertion like that, because I believe that the mass of the evidence suggests otherwise, even if people can isolate individual instances that would seem to say so.

It's also important to recognize that the assessment was developed on the assumption that the elections would be fraudulent, at least to some considerable degree. And in the assessment it notes, "The recent presidential and provincial council elections were far from perfect, and the credibility of the election results remains an open question." I think it no longer is an open question. This clearly was a fraudulent process that has harmed the legitimacy of the government. But that was an element that I believe was factored into the assessment that General McChrystal has produced; by which I mean it is not a new development which would justify or require necessarily rethinking the entire approach, or starting over.

The points about prioritization of effort that my colleagues have made and many other people have made are very well taken. ISAF's strategy previously, and the strategy of the international aid community, had really been very much spreading forces and resources more or less at random around the country, vaguely trying to tie them to population cen-ters, but without clearly articulating why any particular area was more important than any other particular area.

The strategy that General McChrystal is working on was designed specifically to address that precise problem, that until you have identified which areas really matter and what you need to do about them, you can't come up with any meaningful assessment of resources that's anything other than infinity.

And so, to read a couple of sections from the report:

"ISAF's operations will focus first on gaining the initiative and reversing the momentum of the insurgency. ISAF will prioritize available resources to those critical areas where the population is most threatened.

ISAF cannot be strong everywhere. ISAF must focus its full range of civilian and military resources where they will have the greatest effect on the people. This will generally be in those specific geographic areas that represent key terrain. ISAF will initially focus on critical high-population areas that are contested or controlled by insurgents, not because the enemy is present, but because it is here that the population is threatened by the insurgency.

"Based on current assessments, ISAF prioritizes the efforts in Afghanistan into three categories to guide the allocation of resources."

What follows is a section that has been redacted, quite appropriately, because we don't need to tell the enemy exactly how we're going to be prioritizing our efforts. But this was the beginning of a clear statement of the prioritization of effort within the country to focus on the areas that matter, rather than attempting to deal with every problem everywhere.

General McChrystal also noted in his assessment something else that's very important, which is that we are not going to solve this entire problem all at once, and we have to recognize that it will develop over phases. He says, "We face both a short- and a long-term fight. The long-term fight will require patience and commitment, but I believe the short-term fight will decisive. Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near term, next 12 months, while Afghan security capacity matures, risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possi-ble."

I agree with that assessment. I do believe that we are at this moment losing the war in Afghanistan. I believe that if we do not send sufficient forces to reverse the insurgency's momentum, the war will be lost long before there is any prospect of bringing Afghan forces or local security forces to bear the problem.

General McChrystal also noted, "Our campaign in Afghanistan has been historically under-resourced and remains so today. Success will require a discrete jump to gain the initiative, demonstrate progress in the short term and secure long-term support." And here he's referring also to the psychological effect, I believe, of the commitment of a signifi-cant, potentially decisive amount of U.S. force, rather than what looks like a grudging parceling-out and incremental approach of U.S. forces that will allow the enemy to believe that successful enemy operations can deter the U.S. from sending the next force packet. I believe that was important in Iraq, and it's important here.

And I want to highlight this culture of poverty. All of a sudden we've gotten--we've gone from a situation where everyone who's been to Afghanistan has seen how desperately poor that theater is in terms of resources; how hard it is to move around; how you have--I certainly noticed this--how you have majors and lieutenant colonels working on your travel arrangements, instead of specialists and sergeants, because there aren't enough specialists and sergeants to go around.

The way that that organization is run, it is church-rat poor and it has been for a long time. And I think that if we--we really need to keep that in mind, as we think about the prospect of nickel-and-diming that command over troop re-quests, because this isn't Iraq.

This isn't a highly developed theater with lots of capabilities and lots of things, lots of people lying around not doing anything. Everyone in Afghanistan is working five jobs. It would be nice if we could get them down to working four jobs.

I'd like to just point out quickly that the British prime minister of course has now laid out his strategy. And he's al-ready committed to the counterinsurgency approach and made very clear that Britain's objective is to defeat the insur-gency by isolating and eliminating the leadership.

I think we need to think about the alliance consequences of choosing another strategy. Those of you who have read Dexter Filkins's recent article in The New York Times Magazine will find some very recent insight into McChrystal's thinking also about the role of counterterrorism.

He says, killing insurgents in Iraq worked there only because it was part of a much larger effort to not only defeat the insurgency but also to build an Iraqi state that could stand on its own.

He noted, if we are good here, it will have an effect on Pakistan. But if we fail here, Pakistan will not be able to solve their problems, which I also believe is true.

And there were three quotes that Dexter Filkins reported, from locals, that echoed with me very much, from conversations that I had had with many Iraqis, when we were discussing the surge or when we were implementing the surge early on in 2007.

One of the Afghans said, you guys, you come to help and then you leave. The Afghan people are not 100 percent sure that you're going to stay. They're not sure they won't have their throats cut, if they tell the Americans where a bomb is.

Separately an old man with a long beard stepped forward. We're afraid you're going to leave this place after a few months, the old man said, and the Taliban will take their revenge.

Lastly everyone in Garmsir sees that you are living in tents, and they know that you are going to be leaving soon. You need to build something permanent, a building, because your job here is going to take years. Only then will people be persuaded you are going to stay.

We heard many similar comments in Iraq. If you want to get local people to fight for you, you have to persuade them that you will be there for them, which leads me to my last point, which is a brief look at the Kerry-Lugar bill, which is now so much in debate in Pakistan, from a different perspective.

I think that the language that's in that bill requiring Pakistan to comply and requiring our agencies to report on Pakistani compliance, which is really what the language is, with our desires, is perfectly reasonable and appropriate, and I think we've got ourselves caught in the middle of a Pakistani political firestorm that has little to do with the specific language in the bill.

But I'd like to focus on something else in that bill. The following sentences are in that--in that piece of legislation. "The U.S. intends to work with Pakistan to strengthen Pakistan's counterinsurgency and counterterrorism strategy to help prevent any territory of Pakistan from being used as a base or conduit for terrorist attacks in Pakistan or else-where."

Under the Security and Assistance title, "The purpose of assistance under this title is to work in close cooperation with the government of Pakistan to coordinate action against extremists and terrorist targets. Pakistan has made progress on matters such as preventing al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated terrorist groups, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaishe-Muhammad from operating in the territory of Pakistan, including carrying out cross-border attacks into neighboring country--countries." I'm sorry. We have to certify that it has done that.

"The president shall develop a comprehensive interagency regional security strategy to eliminate terrorist threats and to close safe havens in Pakistan, including by working with the government of Pakistan and other relevant governments and organizations in the region and elsewhere to best implement effective counterinsurgency and counterterrorism efforts in and near the border areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, including the FATA, the NWFP, parts of Baluchistan and parts of Punjab."

And lastly, we--"Agencies are obliged to provide an evaluation of efforts undertaken by the government of Pakistan to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda, the Taliban and other extremist and terrorist groups in the FATA and settled areas, eliminate the safe havens of such forces in Pakistan, prevent attacks into neighboring countries."

I would ask, how can we insist that the Pakistanis conduct operations like that while we say that we are not going to do the same things on the Afghan side of the border, which is under our security responsibility and directly impacts their ability to do those things?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar at AEI.