Council on Foreign RelationsWashington, DC
Thank you David for your kind introduction and for all your terrific reporting over the years. David's most recent book, The Inheritance, makes the point that while President Obama took office with great promise, his predecessor left him with some very thorny problems and few good options. And nowhere is that inheritance more fraught than in Afghanistan. On day one, this Administration assumed responsibility for a war heading from strategic drift to a dangerous decline. Now it falls to all of us to get this right.
I recently traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan, the culmination of several months of asking tough questions and reexamining the assumptions that will drive decisions of enormous consequence. I believe President Obama has been right to deliberate and take the time necessary to find the best policy. Americans are right to be asking whether the objectives are achievable and worth the sacrifice, questions tragically underscored by the deaths of 14 American troops and civilians in two helicopter crashes today. Many of us know too well the price of sending troops into a war where the strategy hasn't been fully thought through. The responsibility never to put them in that position lies not just with the President or the generals, but with all of us.
What began as a fact-finding trip ended with several days of talks with President Karzai to resolve a dispute over the Afghan presidential elections. You may have read that it takes Three Cups of Tea to make a deal in Afghanistan-well, let me tell you, it took us a lot more than that. I came home with a fresh reminder of the extraordinary challenges we face, but also with the belief that there is a way forward.
David Sanger mentioned that in 1971 I asked the Foreign Relations Committee "how do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" Thirty-eight years later chairing the Committee, I keep that question very much in mind. This journey begins in a different place. In September 2001, mass murder was plotted against us from Afghan soil, and we needed to remove the threat. With certainty, we all know why we invaded Afghanistan. It was not a mistake to go in. We must choose a smart way forward now so that no one is compelled to ask whether we've made a mistake in staying.
The easiest way to make a mistake is to tolerate a debate that sells our country short. In recent weeks, politics has reduced an extraordinarily complex country and mission to a simple, headline-ready "yes or no" on troop numbers. That debate is completely at odds with reality. What we need, above all, what our troops deserve-- and what we haven't had-- is a comprehensive strategy, military and civilian combined.
After eight years of neglecting Afghanistan as Vice President, Dick Cheney has come out of retirement to criticize President Obama for taking the time to examine assumptions before sending troops into war. This from the man who in 2002 told America that "the Taliban regime is out of business, permanently." I think this is the one time I wish Dick Cheney had been right.
But tragically, he wasn't and he isn't, and that's why we have to make tough choices about Afghanistan today.
Make no mistake: because of the gross mishandling of this war by past civilian leadership, there are no great options for its handling today. One American officer captured well our lack of a strategy when he said: "We haven't been fighting in Afghanistan for eight years. We've been fighting in Afghanistan for one year, eight times in a row." That is our inheritance.
President Obama began his strategic reevaluation in March, after he did what he promised to do and sent an additional 21,000 troops to Afghanistan-the most recent of whom just arrived in country. Now he is wrestling with what comes next, with the knowledge that all options involve real costs and significant risks.
I believe if we redefine our strategy and objectives to focus on what is achievable as well as critical, and empower the Afghans to take control of their own future, we will give us the best chance to succeed. Yes, legitimate questions remain about just what it takes to achieve our goals in Afghanistan. Yes, Afghanistan is but one of a number of pressing national threats, challenges, and priorities. The $243 billion price tag is staggering. And yes, many of our stakes there are indirect. But make no mistake: the costs of failure are very real.
In 2001, Al Qaeda maneuvered with impunity in Afghanistan. Today we have killed or captured many top leaders, and few remain there. As a result many Americans are asking, why commit our soldiers and tens of billions of dollars to prevent Al Qaeda from returning to Afghanistan, when they could organize the next attack from Somalia, Yemen, Frankfurt or even from an internet chat room? People want to know, why stay in Afghanistan? And especially, why consider an increase in troops?
First, we start from the premise that Al Qaeda remains at the center of our mission. They still want to attack us, they are still trying to attack us, and we have interrupted plots globally over the last few years. But it's an awful lot harder to plan new attacks when they are boxed in, harassed, and living in fear. We are, as we ought to be, committed to hunt Al Qaeda wherever they go. Bin Laden and his deputies in Northwest Pakistan haven't gone far, and to keep them on the run, we must prevent the Taliban - with long-standing ties to Al Qaeda-from once again providing terrorists with an unfettered Afghan safe haven, just across a border that many there view as mere abstraction.
And we must remember that our Afghan mission takes place in the context of a global counterinsurgency. If we, the United States and our allies, are perceived as incapable of doing the job, it would help extremists recruit and raise doubt -not just in the region, but globally-about our resolve and effectiveness.
Second, what happens in Afghanistan has an impact on Pakistan. Pakistan is not only the headquarters of Al Qaeda today but could become the epicenter of extremism in the world. We have enormous strategic interest in the outcome of the struggle in Pakistan. It is a fragile democracy that is fighting a determined insurgency. It has a full nuclear arsenal and a longstanding, sometimes violent rivalry with its neighbor, India. While stabilizing Afghanistan won't solve all of our problems in Pakistan, instability in Afghanistan can only increase the risk of conflagration where the world can least afford it: next door in Pakistan.
Given the balance of our strategic interests, it should give serious pause to military and civilian strategists alike that the current balance of our expenditure between Afghanistan, where there is virtually no Al Qaeda, and Pakistan, where there is, tallies thirty-to-one. That's why, regardless of what happens in Afghanistan-and especially if we want to reduce the need for boots on the ground-it is vitally important that we intensify our support and improve our cooperation with Pakistan.
These are the stakes: preventing Afghanistan from becoming a sanctuary for Al Qaeda and destabilizing Pakistan and the region. The challenge then, is to establish realistic goals. That starts with a clear definition of success. I define success as the ability to empower and transfer responsibility to Afghans as rapidly as possible and achieve a sufficient level of stability to ensure that we can leave behind an Afghanistan that is not controlled by Al Qaeda or the Taliban.
Absent any truly good choices, we must ask a simple question: What is doable?
Achieving our goals does not require us to build a flawless democracy, defeat the Taliban in every corner of the country, or create a modern economy-what we're talking about is "good-enough" governance, basic sustainable economic development, and Afghan security forces capable enough that we can drawdown our forces.
The truth is, we do need to maintain a sustained long-term commitment to the Afghan people. Doing so gives them the assurance they need to reject the Taliban, whom most already despise. But the nature of our commitment must evolve away from a U.S.-military dominated effort and toward support for Afghan institutions and answers. And it only makes sense to continue moving forward if our commitment is reciprocated by the Afghans themselves in the form of improved governance and increased Afghan capacity-civilian and military.
That's why the cornerstone of our strategy must be to empower and transfer responsibility to the Afghans. That's the whole ballgame. Which means that we need to ask ourselves at every turn: "will this help the Afghan people take responsibility for their country?"-and where the answer is no, we probably shouldn't be doing it.
So how do we get there? Our strategy has to be informed by two basic truths.
First of all, we can't draw down large of numbers of troops today in order to shift to a narrow counterterrorism mission. Second, we simply don't have enough troops or resources to launch a broad, nationwide counterinsurgency campaign, nor do we need to.
We all see the appeal of a limited counterterrorism mission- and no doubt it is part of the endgame. But I don't think we're there yet. A narrow mission that cedes half the country to the Taliban could lead to civil war and put Pakistan at risk. Moreover, the hardest part of counterterrorism operations isn't killing the terrorists, it's finding them. Developing intelligence assets and capabilities should be one of our top priorities because it lets us transition to a more limited presence that still safeguards our interests. But for now, we need boots on the ground to get that kind of information.
On the other hand, we cannot and should not undertake manpower-intensive counterinsurgency operations on a national scale in Afghanistan. Most experts say it would take 400,000 to 600,000 effective international and Afghan troops for a fully-resourced COIN effort. Fortunately, achieving our defined mission does not require such a commitment. We don't have to control every hamlet and village, particularly when large non-Pashtun sections of the country are already hostile to the Taliban. Our allies, together with the populations of these non-Pashtun areas, can help to reduce America's principal effort to the southern and eastern theatres-and limit it to major population centers.
We have already begun implementing a counterinsurgency strategy-but I believe that right now it needs to be as narrowly focused as possible. We must be very wary of overextension. And I am particularly concerned about the potential for us to be viewed as foreign occupiers. Riding around in an armored personnel carrier, as I did last week, and seeing the faces through the window of Afghans watching these monster vehicles go by, you get an eerie sense of the disconnect that Afghans must experience. It was an image I recognized from forty years ago. Look-we are not the Soviets. We're not there to colonize, to conquer, to remake Afghanistan in our image, or to impose an ideology on its people. But it is too easy for our well-intentioned presence to be misread, and for civilian casualties to stoke resentment and resistance. The Administration is right to be deeply concerned by the reality that, as our footprint has increased, so has the number of insurgents.
I am convinced from my conversations with General Stanley McChrystal that he understands the necessity of conducting a smart counterinsurgency in a limited geographic area. But I believe his current plan reaches too far, too fast. We do not yet have the critical guarantees of governance and development capacity. I also have serious concerns about the ability to produce effective Afghan forces to partner with, so we can ensure that when our troops make heroic sacrifices, the benefits to the Afghans are clear and sustainable.
With that in mind, decisions about additional troops should be informed by an assessment of the following three conditions.
First, are there enough reliable Afghan forces to partner with American troops-and eventually to take over responsibility for security? The quickest way out of Afghanistan for our troops is to speed up the training and mentoring of the Afghan National Army and police so that they can defend their own country. The current goal is to increase the number of trained Afghan national army troops from 92,000 to 134,000 by December 2011 and General McChrystal reportedly is trying to complete that within the next year. Key to that will be giving them as much on-the-job training as possible, as soon as possible.
Partnering with Afghans is also a crucial way to relieve the palpable strain of having foreign troops on Afghan soil.
The second question to ask is, are there local leaders we can partner with? We must be able to identify and cooperate with tribal, district and provincial leaders who command the authority to help deliver services and restore Afghans' faith in their own government.
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