Shuja Nawaz, director of the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center, published an op-ed entitled “Pakistan’s Summer of Chaos” in Foreign Policy. As Pakistan’s leaders prepare for a major campaign in the FATA, Nawaz warns that a failure to take into account the lessons from Swat could be disastrous.
The full text of his essay is available at the New Atlanticist.
As the summer solstice draws near, it seems as if all the evil spirits are coming out to haunt the body politic of Pakistan. The country faces an escalation in hostilities on many fronts. And unlike in the past, when sweet deals and concessions could woo militants and protesters into silence, this time no amount of amulets will drive them away.
On the battlefield, the portents exist for a major new clash between the Army and the country’s homegrown militants. There are reports of forthcoming military action against fighters in South Waziristan, on top of the Army’s ongoing assault against the Taliban in Swat and Malakand. The fighting in Swat has displaced nearly 3 million people in just over a month — a number likely to swell as the Army moves into Waziristan. One might expect protests against the government and even perhaps the military to erupt if these internally displaced persons (IDPs) cannot swiftly and safely return home.
Pakistan indeed finds itself in quite a mess, and cleaning it up requires some review of how exactly the country became so disheveled. Before the assault on Swat began last month, the Army had been confined to its bases, apparently having rousted (but not routed) the Taliban. With the local and federal governments absent from the region in name and in services, the militants crept back and established a bloody regime. Violence escalated, and the Army was reticent to step in absent a long-term plan for controlling the area. So, the government agreed to a peace deal with Taliban-sympathizers. The truce was intended to subdue the militants, but instead, it gave them more time to organize.
Rather than melting away, the Taliban began snatching up territory closer and closer to the Pakistani heartland, and outrage among locals and the larger Pakistani population pushed the administration and the Army to react. Their tactic of choice was a full-fledged assault. The Army now has close to 150,000 troops in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Swat, and Malakand. In Swat alone, there are at least two full divisions from the eastern frontier and an additional four brigades cobbled together from divisions usually stationed near the Indian border. In addition, there is a full brigade of commandos in the Peochar Valley, and nine wings of the Frontier Corps. The total troop commitment in Swat is about 52,000. The military is taking losses daily. The militants, meanwhile, have taken the battle to the center of Pakistan, attacking offices of the Inter-Services Intelligence in Lahore in May and other softer targets, such as the Pearl Continental Hotel in Peshawar last week.
Pakistan needs to regain territory and reestablish the writ of the provincial and federal governments in Swat and Malakand. The bad news is that taking territory, as the military is doing now, is not enough. There is no effective civil or judicial system in place to speedily see to the needs of the population, nor is there an effective local police force to protect civilians from Taliban reprisals. We are still waiting to see any semblance of a government plan for dealing with the IDPs’ return home. The Army is neither trained nor equipped for that task and cannot be expected to hold the areas that it clears. Locals told U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, special envoy to Pakistan, that the civilian leadership was still missing in action when he arrived to assess the situation in IDP camps. Little has really changed.
Now, the Army may be preparing for action in the Bannu and Dera Ismail Khan areas into South Waziristan, with the goal of flushing out or even eliminating Baitullah Mehsud and his fellow leaders of the Pakistani Taliban. In its effort, the Army may well resort to its old tactic of leveraging tribal rivalries. The target of their affections this time might be Mullah Nazir of the Ahmedzai Wazir tribe — traditional enemies of the Mehsuds. If so, it’s a dangerous strategy. If the situation devolves into tribal war, Pakistan risks losing the support of those Mehsuds that may not yet be fully aligned with Baitullah. And the Taliban leadership might simply melt into the countryside as the Army battles in populated areas.
Which brings us back to Pakistan’s 3 million displaced, only 200,000 of whom have been accommodated in official camps. The rest are fending for themselves and are anxious to return to their homes and orchards. Before they can do so, however, those areas must be safe and secure — and there remains only a narrow window for the government to prepare for rehabilitation and reconstruction before winter. With the exception of the United States, very few countries have come forward to assist in this effort. The Muslim world has been notably silent, as have the Europeans. A number of potential donors had already pledged more than $5 billion to help Pakistan’s economy at the Tokyo meeting this spring, but donor fatigue might be setting in now.
Aside from foreshadowing future turmoil, the Swat operation and the flood of IDPs indicate a lack of strategic planning on the part of Pakistan. A coherent strategy was nowhere to be found in both cases, nor was there any meeting of the minds between civilian and military thinkers and between federal and local officials on how to tackle the militants.
Another seemingly obvious but important lesson is that military attacks address only the symptoms of discontent, while doing little to tackle the root causes of militancy. No steps have been taken by the government as yet to integrate FATA into Pakistan’s economy and polity, to regularize the region’s legal system, or to allow Pakistan’s political parties to operate inside FATA’s boundaries. Nor have any plans been made to employ FATA’s bulging youth population, an estimated 300,000 potential Taliban recruits. The government could rapidly create employment by launching heavy infrastructure projects such as east-west roads linking FATA to Pakistan, construction of embankments, small dams, and tube wells.
Washington is doing its best to provide Pakistan the wherewithal to tackle these issues. Now it’s time for Pakistan to step up and formulate its implementation plans, before it loses the trust of its people and the summer boils over into political chaos.
Shuja Nawaz is director of the South Asia Center of the Atlantic Council. This essay was previously published at ForeignPolicy.com.
As President Barack Obama prepares to address the Muslim World from Cairo on Thursday this week, he would do well not to dwell on the past but to look to the future. His speech should be the first salvo in a battle to meet the expectations of a world dominated by youth. He should not revive memories of past conflicts.
He needs to keep certain facts in mind, many of them intuitively clear to him no doubt from his own exposure to parts of the Muslim World and to his early personal friendships with young Muslims.
First, Muslims, who comprise between one-fifth and one-quarter of the world’s population, are a diverse lot. Speaking politically or socially of the “Muslim World” as a bloc would be a mistake, as much as speaking of left-handed persons in the world as a bloc. Second, their population is rising rapidly, close to 2 per cent a year worldwide. In the last century the world’s Muslim population rose from 150 million to over 1.2 billion.
Most important, President Obama will be addressing a population with a huge “youth bulge”: In the Middle East, for example, 60 per cent of the population is below 25 years. Research indicates that some 60 of the 67 countries with a youth bulge are embroiled in internal conflicts today. In 62 countries of the world, two-thirds of the population is below 30. Countries like Nigeria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are included in this group. Over half of the population of Iran is below 30 years.
Muslim youth were excited by Obama’s election and it is this group that he should address when he speaks from Cairo on June 4, for they, not the aging autocrats or obscurantist clerics, will control the future of the Muslim World. And they are increasingly connected with the world at large through the internet, radio, and television.
What is the message they wish to hear?
If President Obama connects with Muslim youth this week he will be investing in the future by drawing them away from the blandishments of the radical Mullahs. If he bends his message to maintaining ties with the antiquated feudal and dynastic leaders of the Muslim World, the opportunity will be lost to build a better world for all of us.
Shuja Nawaz is director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council. This essay originally appeared in the Huffington Post as “Obama Needs to Look to the Future.”
Shuja Nawaz, director of the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center, commented on North Korea’s recent nuclear tests as part of a discussion for PRI‘s The World.
FREDERICK KEMPE: Welcome. Welcome to all. Welcome to the Atlantic Council and to this Commanders Series event with U.S. Army Chief of Staff George W. Casey. I’m Fred Kempe, president and CEO of the Atlantic Council. We’re delighted to have you all here with us today. Frank Kramer, vice chair of the Atlantic Council, who I’ll introduce in a minute, will introduce General Casey, so I won’t do that. However, I will say one thing, and that is many of the people in the audience may not know that you were a senior fellow – you served as a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. And what pleases me the most about that is it’s proof positive that this is not an impediment to a military career.
As many of you know, the Commanders Series is one of the council’s flagship public speakers series, providing a platform for U.S. and European senior military leaders to share the security debate with us here in Washington, very often bringing to us information from the field that just needs to be brought into America’s capital. We’ve had people from the EU commander dealing with the Congo to the U.S. commander dealing with the Arctic.
One of our previous speakers in this series, General Jones, spoke as Supreme Allied Commander Europe when he was here. He kicked it off. He then became chairman of the Atlantic Council. Last night, he outlined at one of our events in fascinating detail how different the national security challenges are today than they were during the Cold War. And, of course, that also means the challenges are vastly different for military commanders. They have to be prepared for a wide range of contingencies, counterinsurgency, stabilization, reconstruction, from the high end of nuclear threats to the low end of improvised explosive devices. The knowledge, capability and skills that it takes to hold high command these days is enormous, and it’s part of the reason why, General, this series has been such a compelling one and a popular one in Washington.
I want to thank Saab AB for its generous support of this series. And I want to acknowledge the presence – the presence of Atlantic Council board director, Ambassador Henrik Liljegren. He’s the former Swedish ambassador to the United States and also Swedish ambassador to Turkey twice; diplomatic – senior political and diplomatic adviser to the president and CEO of Saab. Henrik, it’s wonderful to have you with us tonight.
General Casey, the man who will introduce you tonight – and we have a history at the Atlantic Council of having introductions of the introducer – is Frank Kramer. Frank’s career has overlapped with that of General Casey’s, both during the time serving in Bosnia as well as on the Joint Staff. Both are genuine strategic thinkers tested with real-world experience. Frank served as assistant secretary of defense for International Security Affairs from 1996 to 2001, deputy assistant secretary for European and NATO Affairs prior to that. He also served in senior positions in the Pentagon from 1977 to 1981.
But it would be remiss of me not to say here that what really, truly impresses me about Frank is all the work he does for the Atlantic Council. And he has given us a great deal of help with the breadth of his strategic radar. He’s played a critical work on our work – in our work on issues as diverse as Afghanistan, NATO Strategic Concept, Pakistan and cyber-defense. There is no security issue – or virtually no security issue I know of where Frank has not written about it or studied it or given me some advice on it. So, Frank, the podium’s yours.
FRANK KRAMER: Thanks very much. And let me welcome all of you here again. I wish my children had been here to hear this. That is not how I’m recognized in the house. I’m the guy who takes out the garbage.
But I am delighted to be here to introduce George Casey. George and I are long-time friends. As Fred said, we served together in the Pentagon. He was a senior person to whom I turned frequently and often for good advice, the right steer, how civilians ought to do things working with the military. And George always knew that. He is a true soldier-statesman.
He, of course, is the chief of staff of the Army now. He was previously the commander of Multinational Forces in Iraq. But he started his career being commissioned out of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. And as he told me earlier today, in his current office at the Pentagon, he can look out the window and see the spires of Georgetown. And that’s something that I think no one can hope for when they start out as a second lieutenant, but be delighted by the fact of when they’re the chief of staff of the Army.
He served in Germany, in Italy, in Egypt, in Southwest Asia, obviously in the U.S. He has a master’s degree in international relations; as Fred mentioned, culminating educational experience being here as a senior fellow of the Atlantic Council. But he’s also served at every level, commanded at every level – platoon, battalion, brigade, assistant division commander, and, of course, in Iraq. So he puts together, I think, the finest qualities of our military. He knows about counterinsurgency. He knows about stability operations. The experience in Bosnia was highly successful, but it wasn’t clear at the beginning that it was going to be successful, as he will perhaps tell you. We went in heavy and we went in nervous. It worked out really quite well, and that was, in part, very much due to George’s leadership.
He now has to deal with all the issues of the chief of staff of the Army. The chiefs of staff have to organize, train and equip the so-called Title X requirements. They have to get the force ready. They have to figure out how to sustain force rotations in an environment, as Fred mentioned and as General Jones said, that’s much more demanding. The force deployments go on and on and on and on. And our military starts, first and foremost, not with technology, not actually with maneuvers or anything else. It starts with people. And how to keep those people, quality people together, how to keep the families together and yet at the same time bring them to the fore, forward deployed for operations of all kind, from defense diplomacy to counterinsurgency to major combat operations is a huge challenge.
George knows all this extremely well. We couldn’t have a better person here to talk today. I’m really glad to welcome you to the podium, my friend and the chief of staff of the Army, George Casey.
(Applause.)
GENERAL GEORGE CASEY: Thanks, Frank. That was – that was great. And I can tell you, not only was it never in my wildest dreams that I would sit in an office and look at the spires of my alma mater in Washington, I never thought I’d be – people coming here to listen to me speak when I was a fellow here. We used to have brown bag lunches downstairs at the Grange building over there by the new Executive Office Building. But it’s wonderful to be back here. And Fred, thanks for – thanks for inviting me back.
What I’d like to do is talk just for probably about 20 minutes here about how we are designing an Army to operate in the environments, frankly, that both Fred and Frank talked about, because as we look to the future, it is a hugely challenging and different environment than the environment I grew up to – preparing to operate in.
And as we look to this environment, we’ve thought quite a bit about it. We believe that the Army that the country needs for the 21st century is a versatile mix of tailorable organizations organized on a rotational cycle that provide ready forces for operations across the spectrum of conflict and that provide forces that can hedge against unexpected contingencies, and done on a way that allows us to sustain the all-volunteer force. Now, that sounds – it is a mouthful.
And let me talk a little bit about how we got there and about the pieces of it. First of all, we had to start with the environment. And as we look out at the strategic environment, things hit you right in the face. First, we’ve been at war for over seven years. We’re almost in our – finishing eight years of war. I believe that war is a long-term, ideological struggle. It’s certainly not one that’s going to be won by military means alone. But it will be a long-term, ideological struggle.
Against that backdrop, we look out at the trends that we see around the globe. And the trends that we see, I believe, are more likely to exacerbate the conditions that we see now than they are to ameliorate them. What am I talking about?
Globalization – up until some months ago, the globalization was generating prosperity around the world, but it was generating it unevenly and creating have and have-not conditions, and the have-not conditions largely being in the southern hemisphere. And the have-not conditions contain people that are much more susceptible to recruiting by the terrorist and extremist organizations.
Technology’s another double-edged sword. The same technology that is being used to bring knowledge to anyone with a computer and a hook-up is being used by terrorists to export terror around the globe.
Demographics – demographics also going in the wrong direction. I’ve seen estimates that say that the populations of some developing countries like Pakistan are expected to double in the next decade. You imagine the attendant problems that that presents already strapped governments. Populations are increasingly moving to cities. I’ve seen estimates that by 2030, 60 percent of the population of the world will live in cities. That says a lot about where we’ll fight; and I’ve seen what it’s like to fight in the sprawling slums of Sadr City.
The other thing about demographics is that – I think it’s – some of the trends are going to lead to increased competition for resources. The middle classes in China and in India are already larger than the population of the United States. That’s a lot of two-car families.
And the two trends that worry me most are weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorist organizations and safe havens, countries or parts of countries where the local governments can’t or won’t deny their countries as safe havens for terrorists to plan operations.
And so as I look against that – those trends against the backdrop of the fact we’re already at war with a global extremist organization, I believe that leads us to the notion that we will operate in an era of what I call persistent conflict, protracted confrontation among state, non-state and individual actors who are increasingly willing to use violence to accomplish their political and ideological objectives. And I think – I think we’ve got a decade or so of that ahead of us. And that really drives us as an Army to say that, okay, that’s got to – we have to take that into consideration. And I believe we will have 10 brigades of Army and Marine Corps forces committed for the next decade in places around the world. Now, for us, that causes us to think differently about how we organize our forces.
The other element we have to take into consideration is not just the broad strategic environment, but we have to ask ourselves, what does war look like in the 21st century? What’s the character of conflict? And I got in a big discussion with my staff about – is it the nature of war that changes or is it the character of conflict that changes? Well, they argue that the nature of war is immutable, it never changes, but the character of conflict has and does change, and it’s changed over time.
And as we look at it, the types of operations and wars that I believe we will – our Army will have to fight in the next 10 to 20 years are much, much different than the types of operations that I grew up learning to fight, on tank – major tank battles on the plains of Europe. And I’ve served in Iraq, so I’ve got a good sense of that conflict, spent some time in Afghanistan.
But the conflict that I think – that intrigues me most, and I think speaks more toward what we can expect in the decades ahead, is the one that happened in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, where you had about 3,000 Hezbollah operatives embedding themselves in the population centers just north of the Israeli border. They used improvised explosive devices to channelize well-equipped attacking Israeli forces into ambushes where they fired at them with state-of- the-art anti-tank guided missiles. Forty percent of the Israeli casualties were from those anti-tank guided missiles. Now, they used unmanned aerial vehicles to target the Israelis. They started the war with over 13,000 rockets and missiles – not just the small ones they shot at our bases, but the large, 220 millimeter ones they shot at Israeli population centers. They shot down an Israeli helicopter with a surface-to-air missile. They shot an Israeli corvette in the Mediterranean Sea with a cruise missile. They used secure cell phones and computers for command and control. And they got their message out on local television.
That’s a fundamentally more complex and difficult challenge than the challenges of fighting large tank armies on the plains of Europe. And I believe what we’re going to see is more of that and less of the other. And so that is – that is what we’re shaping the Army to be able to do.
So as I look at the environment and the character of the conflict, I come down to, what should the Army do? What should the land forces of the United States be able to do?
The first thing we have to do is we have to prevail in counterinsurgency campaigns. We have to win the wars we’re in, as the secretary of defense has said.
Second, we have to prepare ourselves to continue to engage with other countries’ security forces when we’re asked to help them build the capabilities they need to deny their countries to terrorists.
Third, we need to provide support to civil authorities both at home and abroad. And we work primarily through the National Guard here to provide support to civil authorities in the United States, augmenting them with our active forces as necessary. And we are continuing to provide support to other agencies of the government in Iraq and Afghanistan and helping them plan, integrate and execute the political and the economic and the information elements of the strategy. And you have all heard people say time and again that we will not win this conflict by military means alone. And if we are going to be successful, all of the elements of power have to be integrated effectively. And I suggest to you that it is the planning and organizational skills and, frankly, the integrating skills of the military forces that ought to be considered a national asset. We don’t have to be in charge all the time, but we have those skills and we can assist other elements of the government in integrating their efforts.
And then lastly, we have to be able to deter and defeat hybrid threats and hostile state actors. And frankly, I think we have to be able to do them in that order of priority, because those – that is the conflicts that we are going to be mostly fighting.
So after looking through all that, then I come back to what type of Army are we building, a versatile mix of tailorable organizations. The one thing we know about the future is that we never get it quite right, and that we can only aspire not to be too wrong.
So for 60 years, the central organizing principle of the Department of Defense has been major conventional operations, conventional war. I’m suggesting to you now that – I’m looking at it from an Army perspective – I think the central organizing principle has to be versatility, because we have to be able to do different things. Nothing ever happens exactly how you plan. And so you have to be able to tailor your forces to deal with the situation that you’re confronted with, deal with the reality you’re confronted with, not with the force as you’ve designed it.
And so we believe you have to have a mix of heavy forces, medium forces – strikers – and light forces. And the light forces will probably be more and more riding in up-armored Humvees and MRAPs because they must – they need to be protected as they move around.
And the tailorable organizations – the Cold War Army I grew up in, we were a division-based Army. And we had about – we had 18 divisions. And all of the enabling forces were parts of those divisions. So if you needed to send something less than a division, you had to start breaking the division apart. And it wasn’t good to – any good to you to do other things. Over the last five years, we have been moving to create modular organizations centered on brigades. And we’re 85 percent of the way through converting the Army to modular organizations. And that’s in a five-year period, while we’ve been deploying 150,000 soldiers over and back to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The other element of our reorganization to improve versatility is we’ve been moving away from Cold War skills to skills more relevant in the 21st century. By way of example, we’ve converted over 200 tank companies, artillery batteries and air defense batteries and changed those soldiers into Special Forces, civil affairs, psychological operations, military police and engineers, the kinds of skills that you hear that we need every day in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So a versatile mix of tailorable organizations – and we’re well on our way to achieving that – organized on a rotational cycle. We are moving to put the Army on a rotational cycle much like the Navy and the Marine Corps have been on for years. Why? One, again, I believe that we will – we’ll have a sustained commitment of forces over the next decade.
Two, when you have forces organized on a rotational cycle, you have some forces at a level of readiness that could be committed when you have unexpected contingencies. And third, we have to do it because we have an all-volunteer force and because they need to be put on a sustainable deployment tempo. And we’ve been deploying for four years or so, one year out, one year back. That’s not sustainable for us over the long haul.
We are – with the changes that we’re making in the Army and with the president’s announced drawdown plan in Iraq, I expect we will achieve our goal of getting to a one year out, two years back by 2011. And that would be a very, very good thing for us. To sustain this over the long haul, though, I believe we get – need to get to a one year out, three years back tempo, which is what the Navy and the Marine Corps have been on for quite a while. I believe that’s sustainable indefinitely.
And so what we’re doing is organizing the Army, really, into four bins. And the first bin is always available. It’s fully manned, trained and equipped. And in that bin you have an operational headquarters, you have four tactical headquarters, 14 or 15 brigades and then about 70,000 what we call “enablers,” military police, engineers, civil affairs, psychological operations, other things that enable the force. That’s a very significant force. About 120(,000), 130,000 total folks could almost meet the demands in Iraq and Afghanistan today – not quite.
Same force in the second bin; same force in third bin; same force in the fourth bin. But as you go to the left, there are different levels of readiness. The second bin, the forces could be pulled forward for unexpected contingencies. The third bin could come, but they’re more of a strategic reserve, as is the fourth bin. It would take them longer – 90 to 180 days to prepare.
So what you see is you have committed forces, you have an operational reserve and then you have a strategic reserve to use in an emergency. And that’s how we’re working to array our forces. And we think that allows us to generate the sustained flow to hedge against contingencies and to do it in a way that sustains the all-volunteer force. That then gives you the versatile mix of tailorable organizations on a rotational cycle to allow you to meet your requirements, hedge against uncertainty and sustain the force. So that’s the direction that we’re headed. We believe that is the right force and the right organization for the challenges that I described to you that we see coming in the 21st century.
Let me just close here with a brief story, because you get a lot of questions about the quality of the force and how the – how the men and women of the Army are doing. I did – I did two commissionings in the last couple of weeks, one at Georgetown, one at George Mason. And then I went to West Point last Friday night, and I spoke to all the graduates and their families the night before commissioning. And I can tell you, when you look in the eyes of these young men and women, you can feel pretty good about the future of the country. They’re committed, they’re focused and they’re ready to go out and make a difference in the world.
And at West Point, I told them the story about one of them who had been in that audience two years ago, in 2007. And his name was Lieutenant Nick Eslinger. Nick was a platoon leader in Samarra, Iraq. And he was leading his patrol – his platoon on a patrol of downtown Samarra in the middle of the night. In some of the Iraqi cities, you have large courtyards that are surrounded by high walls, and it makes the street look like a tunnel, because you have all the high walls butting up on the street.
As the patrol was walking down the street, a grenade comes over the wall, lands in the center of the patrol. Lieutenant Eslinger, seeing it, realizing it would harm his platoon, he dove on it. The grenade didn’t go off. He had the presence of mine to reach down, grab the grenade and throw it over the wall. When he threw it over the wall, it went off.
I said, Nick, what the heck did you think when the grenade didn’t go off? He said, I don’t know, sir. I just reacted.
I said, Nick, what did you think when the grenade did go off? He said, I don’t know, sir. I just reacted.
But that’s the type of men and women that you have not only in the Army, but in the armed forces of the United States, and you can feel pretty good about it.
And so with that, I’ll close and I’ll be happy to take any questions that you have. Thanks.
(Applause.)
MR. KEMPE: Thank you for that wonderful presentation, and thank you for that wonderful close as well.
I’m going to start. Since you talked a great deal about what sort of Army one should have and also, very interestingly, about one year out, two years back, one year out, three years back, maybe talk a little bit more about what happens if they don’t get that. In other words, you’re in your eighth year in Afghanistan, sixth year in Iraq – what are you seeing in terms of stress? What are you seeing in terms of what this does to the Army, both in a personal sense and a structural sense? In other words, what are you fixing by doing this?
GEN. CASEY: Yeah. A great question. You know, people ask me what do I worry about the most. What I worry about the most are two things.
One, I worry about the repeated – the impact of repeated combat deployments on the long-term health of the force. Last year, 2008, we had about 13,000 newly identified cases of post-traumatic stress. Now, that’s a good-news/bad-news story. I mean, it – bad news, it’s a lot. It’s about double what it was two years before. Good news is because of the work we’ve done to reduce the stigma, more and more people are willing to come forward and get the treatment that they need, because all of our studies tell us, the sooner you come forward, the sooner you get treatment, the better off you are. So that’s my first worry.
Second worry is that there will be some unexpected requirement for forces in the next two years that won’t allow us to get this drawdown in Iraq and to stabilize the force. If we’re not able to do that, it will get very difficult.
Now, on the – back to the first part. We have been looking very hard at ways to develop coping skills and resilience in soldiers. And we will be coming out in July with a new program called “Comprehensive Soldier Fitness.” And what we will attempt to do is raise mental fitness to the same level that we now give to physical fitness, because it’s scientifically proven you can build resilience. And I was up at University of Pennsylvania last week where we had our first group of sergeants being trained as master resilience trainers by the University of Pennsylvania staff, Dr. Marty Seligman and his folks. And the whole idea here is to give soldiers the skills they need to increase their resilience and enhance their performance.
A lot of people think that everybody that goes to combat gets post-traumatic stress. It’s not true. Everybody that goes to combat gets stressed. There’s no doubt about it. But the vast majority of people that go to combat have a growth experience, because they’re exposed to something very, very difficult and they prevail. So the issue for us is, how do we give more people the skills so that more people have a growth experience? We felt it’s important to get started on this, because everything else is you’re – you know, you’re treating the problem. And so we needed to be more proactive about it. And so that’s the direction that we’re headed.
MR. KEMPE: That’s interesting. So you’re working more on the psychological training as well as the physical training.
GEN. CASEY: Absolutely.
MR. KEMPE: You made headlines yesterday, stating that you think –
GEN. CASEY: It was not intentional.
MR. KEMPE: Well, if you’d like to do it again, we’re all for it. You said that you think – and you said that elliptically in your comments here, too, that you think U.S. ground forces will be in Iraq and Afghanistan for at least another decade.
GEN. CASEY: I didn’t say that tonight, did I? (Laughter.) I don’t think I did. I actually didn’t say it – I didn’t – actually didn’t say it last night, either.
MR. KEMPE: You didn’t say – well, why don’t you say what you would like to say about that?
GEN. CASEY: Well –
MR. KEMPE: But on top of that, let me go beyond that question to how you think those missions are going to evolve over time, and irrespective of how many years you think that will go on is how do – how do the force levels change as those missions evolve?
GEN. CASEY: First of all, I’ve been around long enough to understand I don’t do policy. As Frank said, organize, train and equip. And in my job of organizing, training, equipping, as much as I talked to you tonight, I have to look out and say, okay, what are the – what are the demands that are going to be put on the Army and how do I best organize to meet those demands? And so I said basically the same thing that I said to you tonight, that I believe we’re going to have demands of about 10 Army and Marine Corps – Army brigades, Marine Corps regiments deployed for a decade or so. I mean, I believe that. And that is why we’re organizing the Army in the way that I described to you today. As I – every time I make that statement, I say, this is not a policy statement; this is an organizational statement for me of the Army. That didn’t quite get reported.
As I said several times in my congressional testimony, we are fully planning on executing the drawdown in Iraq. In fact, as I said tonight, it’s very important for us to execute that drawdown. And so any long-term security relations remain to be developed between the Iraqi government and the United States government. So I had no intent of trying to change the policy.
Now, how’s the – how are the missions going? I was just in Afghanistan probably I think two weeks ago now. What I saw there is we are already seeing the impact of the additional forces, especially in the Regional Command-East. I visited the brigade that was diverted from Iraq to Afghanistan. It was already there. It was already on the ground. They had done a wonderful job of preparing the bases, of having the equipment organized and lined up. They told me they got off the plane; they got on their vehicles and they went right into their area and they were already having an impact.
I went down south to Kandahar. The forces there were beginning to flow in. And there was huge construction and everything going on there in the base. But there’s going to be a big fight down south. And that’s why we’re putting the forces in there. And I think everybody’s been very clear that there is going to be a big fight.
But the – my assessment as I left is the forces are there, are in route there that will allow the commanders to support a successful election in August. And I think that will be a very positive event for Afghanistan. So I think we’ve taken the right steps and it just is going to take a while for them to play out.
With respect to Iraq, as I said, I have no reason to believe that the drawdown won’t get executed as planned. You know, we’re at war; things can change. But it seems to be moving positively in the right direction.
MR. KEMPE: Thank you, General. Let me ask you one more question, and then I’ll go to the audience. And as you ask your question, please identify yourself as well.
Over the next 10 years, in some ways it’s easy to say as much is going to be deployed as you say is going to be deployed. What’s harder is, is it going to be counterinsurgency; is it going to be conventional? You hear a call in NATO for more Article V protection again. You see what’s going on in North Korea. How do you plan for that? And where do you think that’s going in terms of the balance?
GEN. CASEY: Yeah. You know, that’s a great question. And I talked about a doctrine of full-spectrum operations, offense, defense and stability operations, all done simultaneously, no matter where you are in the spectrum. And as we’ve worked our way through this, to me it’s become less useful to think about warfare in the 21st century as either/or, as either conventional or unconventional. And I’ve come to think of it more as the hybrid warfare that I described in my presentation, hybrid warfare being diverse combinations of irregular, conventional, terrorist, criminal elements all working together to come at us asymmetrically. And I believe that’s what we’re going to face.
And I – and when you look out and think – again, I mentioned the tank battles in Europe that I grew up learning to fight. I don’t see warfare in the 21st century being like those big battles. It’ll be different. It’ll be more hybrid, I think, than it will be conventional.
So we’ve really gone away from saying either/or. You have to be able to operate across the spectrum. And with the experience that the young leaders are getting in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have folks that are capable of operating like that. It’s much more complex than conventional warfare.
But, you know, as we worked our way through this, if you’d had asked me in – when I was a division commander in Germany, in ’99 to 2001, you said, General Casey, where should you best focus your training so that your division is most versatile to move across the spectrum of conflict? I would have told you if I could do conventional war, I could do anything. And after 32 months in Iraq, I don’t believe that anymore. And there’s not a lot of people left in the army that believe that.
Now, there’s this debate that’s supposedly raging within the Army that all us old dogs, that we’re genetically ingrained with the Fulda Gap, and we will never be whole unless we can go back and do that again. And then the young folks are all irregular warriors. It’s almost the opposite. You know, we – most of us have been there. We understand it. Young folks have been there. But interestingly, from the young folks, what you get is they got the irregular, but they’re uncomfortable because they’re professionals, and they know that they haven’t maneuvered their tank company; they haven’t fired their artillery battery. And they’re nervous, because they haven’t done the things they know they need to do. But those skills are very, very recoverable, quickly. And so we’re moving away from trying to talk in either/or.
MR. KEMPE: Thank you, General. Please.
Q: General, Air Vice Marshal Mike Howard, U.K. defense attaché. One of the things – organize, train, equip the interagency – I think you’ve had some initiatives which are really important, some lessons on that. And you mentioned West Point, a terrific product. But where’s that product for the other departments, and some of the things where you’ve offered other departments places on courses that are run by the U.S. Army? I know the other services do it, but specifically that.
And then I think you’ve also provided soldiers to backfill those gapped positions elsewhere. There may be lessons from there. What can you tell us all about that? It’s so important.
GEN. CASEY: Well, first of all, I would never accept the responsibility of organizing, training, equipping the interagency. (Laughter.) But to your point, Lieutenant General Bill Caldwell out of Fort Leavenworth has, in fact, started some exchanges in the interagency to bring folks from the State Department and the CIA out to our major-level courses that we run out there at Command and General Staff College at Leavenworth. And because of the need to backfill those folks so they can come – they can take the time off and come to the course, we’re actually sending Army officers back to those – to the State Department to fill in the gap. And so we’re getting a much earlier start on the interagency. And I think that’s hugely important.
I go out once a month and I talk to all our lieutenant colonel and colonel-level commanders, people getting ready to go into command. And I was out there one day and I was talking to the group, and I noticed that there were these four muscular-looking guys with short haircuts in the back row. And they’re all sitting there with their arms crossed. So I went up afterwards, and I said, what happened? Your plane lose your bags? And they said, no, we’re the CIA. So here they were, sitting in our command course. And so I think that’s – it’s a great thing.
You know, from my time working with Bob Gelbard, I learned – I learned the power of the interagency. And from my time in Iraq with John Negroponte and Zal Khalilzad, you know, we tried to make that work. But we’re not going to make it work until we start it at much lower level than we have been in the past.
Q: Thank you, General.
MR. KEMPE: Please.
Q: Harlan Ullman here at the Atlantic Council. General, thanks for your comments and your impeccable logic.
I wanted really to expand on the last question. To the degree that you could argue that U.S. national capacity has a Maginot Line complex to it, in that, as you know, the Maginot Line was never penetrated, but the Ardennes and the northern flank was, and the problem is that the military is the best at the game in the world, but we are lacking a lot of capacity elsewhere. And even though the secretary of defense has made that argument and the president has made that argument, it seems to me that that is really a gap which we’re not moving to fill. There is no real, as you know, civilian surge, it appears, in Afghanistan. In Pakistan, it’s going to be the civil side, where we seem not to be able to fill the void.
So if I could ask you to step outside your pay grade, not above it, what sort of advice would you have to fill in this capacity that goes beyond the military and even the intelligence but gets into the civil sector capacities that are really critical to win the larger war? And I agree with you, it’s going to be a long-term struggle, but the military is not going to be the one that ultimately wins it. It can lose it, but it can’t win it, as you rightly point out.
MR. KEMPE: And is that really outside pay grade any longer, in the days of stabilization, reconstruction, et cetera?
GEN. CASEY: Well, it’s certainly outside of my purview, but you want to – I’m asked this question a lot. I mean, as I said, I lived it in Bosnia, lived it in Kosovo, lived it in Iraq. And we need to get started. And, you know, I hear a lot of talk around town about a Goldwater-Nichols for the interagency. I don’t know if that’s the right thing or not. But what I do know is Goldwater-Nichols passed in 1986, and it took us a decade to embrace it. And so we need to get started now.
In the interim, you know, I think we have to figure out how to get the civil side of the government to leverage the capabilities that the military can deliver.
You know, what I saw and continue to see is, you know, having the one person that knows how to run that border station, that knows – really knows how to run a border station or really knows how to run a city council or really knows how to run a power station makes all the difference in the world. You know, we got a lot of energy; we got a lot of people; we’re fairly organized. We can do all that. But if you don’t have the expertise, what you get is a lot of energy and arm- waving and not necessarily the result you want.
So in the interim, I think we’ve got to meld those two things, the expertise that comes from the civil side with the organizational planning skills of the military. I think that’s what we have to do to bridge this. But I think we need to get on with it.
MR. KEMPE: Thank you, General. Bob Gelbard, I think you’ve been called upon by the general. The – could you wait for the mike? Thank you.
Q: You began your fascinating speech by outlining an intricate, very well-crafted description of how you see the Army for the 21st century, and then you went back and parsed it. You didn’t describe, however, one key part at the end, which was the all- volunteer force. What gives you confidence that you’re going to be able, in an extremely dangerous world, in this post-Cold War environment, to find all the people you need with the economy recovering eventually to fulfill all the requirements that you will need with this very versatile force?
GEN. CASEY: Yeah. Great question. Bob is an old mentor, and I was hanging on his every word, because I knew there was a trick in there someplace. (Chuckles.) That is – that is a great question.
I mean, the first thing we have to do is get ourselves on this rotational model so we sustain the folks that are with us. And as I went around in the first four months that I was the chief two years ago, with my wife, it was clear to me that the families were the most stretched and stressed part of the force. In a force that’s almost 60 percent married, it makes a huge difference if – whether or not the families feel like they’re being cared for and properly taken care of. But, you know, what they – what the spouses tell you is every deployment’s harder than the one before. And it just – it doesn’t get any easier, and especially when you’re going for 12 months or 15 months and you’re coming back for 12 or 13.
And I just was back from about five weeks’ worth of visits to bases in the United States, and I tried to get them 90 days after they’d been back, because what you see is they come back; they have about 30 days off; they get back with their families; they’re feeling pretty good. But at about 90 days, they’re faced with the stark reality, they’re going back in nine months. And that’s where you really see the stresses and strains.
So we have to get ourselves on this rotational model at a better deployment tempo. That’s the first thing.
The second thing is that – I called Shy Meyer, who was one of my predecessors. He was the one who went to Congress in 1980 and said, the Army’s hollow. I said, Shy, what happened? What was it? He said, George, it’s all about the people. And what – he says, there’s a thin red line out there that you’ll – as hard as you’ll try to know if you’ve crossed it, you’ll stumble across it, and you’ll look back from the other side. And what happens is it’s the mid-level officers and non-commissioned officers start leaving in droves. And those are the people that it takes you a decade to grow. And I lived through that decade in the ‘70s, and it wasn’t pretty. And so, again, we have to get ourselves on a more sustainable cycle so that we keep those folks with us.
The last thing, and I think the gist of your question is, can we continue to recruit? I think we can. Last year, 2008, 290,000 men and women enlisted or reenlisted in the Army, the Army guard and reserve. That – I mean, to me that’s a staggering number. And they did – every one of them did it knowing that we were at war and that they would go to war. Now, I think that’s out there. You know, we’ve – we have – we’ve made our retention objectives for the year already. And the quality of the recruits that we’re bringing in now is back up where it was four years ago, in terms of high-school graduates. And we’ve stopped some of the waivers that we were giving. We don’t give any drug and alcohol waivers anymore and we don’t give any major crime waivers anymore. So the quality of the force will continue.
It’s not really knowable how long we can continue to do that. I think that the – we can continue to do this if we sustain the quality of the force and we give the families the benefits that they’ve been accustomed to. But, you know, how long, I couldn’t tell you. But I think it is sustainable.
MR. KEMPE: Very interesting, General.
Paul?
Q: (Off mike.)
MR. KEMPE: Could you wait one second? Sorry.
Q: Paul Gebhardt from the Cohen Group group, sir. You identified very early in your presentation that you saw a distinction between operations, as you’ve said, for eight years in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Israeli operations in 2006 in Lebanon. What makes you focus on that in particular versus the eight years that we’ve had so far? And in terms of your role of organize, train and equip, how do you see the significant difference between how the Army has had to evolve for Iraq and Afghanistan and what you’re seeing out of Lebanon?
GEN. CASEY: The reason I look at Lebanon is there are a lot of – a lot more elements at play. I mean, you have Hezbollah, non-state actor, operating inside a state, Lebanon, supported by two other states, Iran and Syria, and fighting a fourth state, Israel. And they employed all of those different elements. You have the instruments – instruments of state power are no longer necessarily the exclusive purview of states. I mean, what other terrorist group has 13,000 missiles and rockets and cruise missiles? I mean, that is the – was the staggering thing to me.
You know, we didn’t face anything like that in Iraq. You know, you had some support for the Shia insurgent groups coming out of Iran and you had the Syrians, you know, not securing their borders, letting folks coming across there. But as I looked at it, I said to myself, Iraq was hard, no doubt about it. But I’m not sure it was as complex as what they had – what they were trying to do there in southern Lebanon.
And so we – you know, we gravitate toward the more difficult situation. So I thought there was a lot more at play in Lebanon than necessarily was at play in Iraq and Afghanistan, as hard as they are.
MR. KEMPE: Thank you. Jim?
Q: Jim Hoagland, The Washington Post. General, thank you for your comments.
I just wanted to follow up on Paul’s question a little bit and ask you to talk a little bit more about the implications of what you witnessed in Lebanon for the kind of training and equipping that you now feel we need in the U.S. Army, and also to extend the question a little bit into whether or not you see similarities, great similarities between what happened in Lebanon in 2006 and what happened in Gaza in January. Many of the elements seemed to be present. Were they different? If they were different, which one of them is the anomaly and which one of them – either Hezbollah or Hamas – is the trend?
GEN. CASEY: Interesting. I’ll come at the second one first, and then you’ll have to remind what the first one was. But the – if you asked this of the Israelis, I think they would tell you they went to school on what happened in Lebanon, and they looked hard at it. And the feedback I’ve heard is that they felt that they got into counterinsurgency-like operations at the expense of their combined arms training, the ability to take air and artillery and ground forces and integrate them all. And they felt not well-prepared for that.
I think what you saw in Gaza was the Israeli military going to school on themselves and they were much better prepared to employ all of the elements of military power more effectively. And I think that’s why the Gaza operation was, in fact, more effective.
And I talked about having a versatile mix of forces, that you need some heavy forces, some light forces, and some middleweight striker forces. And you need to do that because you never know what you’re going to get. And I will tell you, in Najaf and in Fallujah, I saw the value of tanks and Bradleys in those cities. I mean, we got through Fallujah in 10 days. It would have taken a month if we were doing it infantry house to house. And I think the Israelis saw the same thing.
Now, what’s the implications for the Army in Lebanon? And this kind of goes back to what Paul said. One of the reasons I like it is because, as I said, it was more complex. And it really gets into how do you train leaders to operate in that level of complexity. And frankly, that’s what we do. It’s not about machines. You know, it’s not about networks and technology. It’s about people and, most importantly, about leaders.
And so what we say is we want leaders who are very competent at their core proficiency, but then broad enough to do a range of things. I mean, if I expect my leaders to operate from peacetime engagement to counterinsurgency to conventional war, I can’t expect them to be good at every little task in each of those areas.
But I can expect them to be very good at their core competency and then broad enough to do a range of things.
And that gets at, okay, how do you develop – how do you grow officers that are broad? And our culture now and the culture I grew up in is, hey, you want to get promoted, you stay in a unit, you stay in that operational force and you’ll bubble up. Well, we’re trying to say, wait a minute, that gets you so far. That gets you to maybe lieutenant colonel level. We want you to get out of that operational force periodically. We want you to go to graduate school at a civilian university. We want you to operate with another agency of the government. We want you to train with industry. We want you to do something that’s out of your comfort zone and then get back in the operational force. But we’re trying to grow folks that are broad enough to not be cowed by the complexity of a range of different missions. So that’s the primary take-away for me out of that operation.
MR. KEMPE: Thank you, General. Please?
Q: Thank you, General. My name is Paulo von Schirach, Schirach Report. I guess that your Lebanon paradigm or new paradigm or example is catchy. Still on the same subject, you have described quite well, you know, the example of Lebanon and the other elements that you brought to our attention, that is, the phenomenon of urbanization, the collapse of globalization, the change in demographics, et cetera, that if all this converges into an example like Lebanon, it’s essentially an unwinnable fight. If a force is motivated and supplied like Hezbollah in Lebanon, it’s essentially a conflict that is unwinnable according to our own standards, unless we do what the Sinhalese have done, you know, defeating the Tamil Tigers just a few weeks ago, to the world outrage, in bombing hospitals and causing massive population dislocation, et cetera, which I don’t think we are in the business of doing.
So my question to you is if a situation like Lebanon should be replicated in different scenarios, it seems to me on the – in the field unwinnable. And therefore, are there other means that the armed forces are thinking about in terms of depriving the enemy of the motivation to continue to fight as opposed to trying to defeat it in the field, in consideration of the asymmetric advantages that such a force like Hezbollah has enjoyed and managed to deprive the Israelis, who – that are, you know, sufficiently sophisticated, of victory? How would we engage in a situation like that, and can we win in the field or do we have to find other ways to demotivate the enemy?
GEN. CASEY: I mean, in those type of operations, the prize really is the people. It’s not necessarily the enemy force. And I think that’s a fundamental difference that we’re – you know, we have to come to grips with. Was it – Rupert Smith wrote a book where he talked about war among the people. I think that’s a key element of hybrid warfare. When we operate, we’re going to be – you’re operating in Lebanon, you’re operating among the people. In those types of wars, you have to split the people from the – from the terrorists or from the insurgents. And to do that, there has to be enough military force that you take away the options of the other guys with guns. And then there has to be a representative government that the people feel takes their interests into effect.
And so political, economic, information and military, and not necessarily military predominance, so – and finding the right way to blend each of those to generate the – to accomplish our long-term strategic objectives, that’s the art of this whole thing. That’s what’s going on in Iraq; that’s what’s going on in Afghanistan; and to some extent that’s what’s going on in Lebanon. But that’s the art of warfare in the 21st century.
MR. KEMPE: We’re running a little short of time, but I’m going to take two questions here from Atlantic Council colleagues who had their hands up. One, the director of our South Asia program, which we stood up in January for pretty obvious reasons – this has got to be a great focus of the Atlantic Council – and then from the director of our International Security Program.
Q: Thank you, Fred. General, I’m Shuja Nawaz, the director of the South Asia Center. I was intrigued by your description of the change in the doctrine from conventional to hybrid. And I was interested in finding out what the dynamic was. Where did the impetus come from? Was it top down? Was it in the middle, in the battalion commanders, the regimental commanders? Where did this start percolating and who provided the impetus for the change?
MR. KEMPE: And how do we make it percolate in the Pakistani military? I’ll add that additional question. Let me take from Damon, too, before we come back to you, General.
GEN. CASEY: Okay.
Q: Thank you, sir. Damon Wilson, here at the Atlantic Council. Thanks for your remarks this evening. I had a question. We hosted General Craddock here a couple of weeks ago, who raised the issue of the status of the forces of – in Europe and his concern about the continued withdrawal – in particular, two more brigade combat teams from Europe – in terms of constraining the ability, perhaps, in a NATO context, to sustain training and mentoring and partnership with NATO allies and NATO partners. I wondered if you could give us your sense of where we are on the global posture and global defense posture realignment, how you see that going forward, and if you might, a bit more broadly, how you see our NATO allies and our partners drawing some of the lessons that our Army has drawn from recent operational experiences and whether or not you see them moving in a comparable direction or whether you have concerns there with their transformation.
MR. KEMPE: And I’ll pile on there saying, quite specifically, are you –
GEN. CASEY: It’s getting late in the day, you know? (Laughter.) I can barely –
MR. KEMPE: I know. I know. No, this is – this is –
GEN. CASEY: I can barely remember one question. (Chuckles.)
MR. KEMPE: But this actually complements that, which is within answering Damon, can you be a little bit specific of whether you’re reconsidering the Army’s footprint in Europe?
GEN. CASEY: Okay.
To your question, little bit of each. What I found in my own time in Iraq is innovation has got to come from the field first. And, for example, in mid-2005, I started getting the feel that we weren’t really executing counterinsurgency doctrine right, so I sent a team out and went all over the – all over and they came back and said, you know, it is kind of haphazard. So we set up our own academy, the Counterinsurgency Academy in Iraq. And we – everybody that – all the leaders that came into Iraq went through that. And we brought the folks from the States over and they looked at us and then they went back and they wrote the doctrine and then they did the things they needed to do.
This shift from conventional to hybrid was a little bit the same. I mean, that’s what we’re doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. What we had to do was change the – our institutions and our bureaucracy to move away from conventional war. And so I’d say that part had to be top- down.
And frankly, it started just how I said. I took a – I took a chart that had the spectrum of conflict on it, and I drew a circle. And I said what I just said. If you asked me in ‘99 or 2001 where I should focus, I’d focus on major combat operations, because if I can do that I can do anything. And I said I don’t believe that anymore. And then I said I don’t believe that anymore, and then I drew another circle more toward the center. And I said we need to shift our aim and we need to start focusing there. Well, that created a lot of consternation. And people went around scratching their heads, and they were drawing circles in different places. But it got the dialogue going.
And then I realized that we had to adapt our institutions if we were going to make that change. And I think I mentioned the organizing principle for the Department of Defense has been major conventional operations for 60 years. So it’s insidious how that is so ingrained into the processes; you can’t ferret it out. For example, readiness reporting: I send units off to Iraq and Afghanistan that are trained, that are equipped, that are combat- ready. Yet I report their readiness as not ready for their conventional missions. You know, my view, I ought to be reporting the readiness of my units to go to war, not making up another ad hoc way of saying that – whether they’re ready or not. But that’s what – that’s – all through the department, you have those things. And so it’s a big institutional change, not just for the Army but for the whole department to make that move. So that part had to come from the top down.
It was a – it’s a hard push inside the Beltway. It’s a much easier sell outside the Beltway. To the footprint in Europe, the decisions on the two brigades will be made, I think, as part of the Quadrennial Defense Review. I understand John’s concerns. More for him is better. Candidly, I – the question I’ve asked John is what’s the – are we getting the value out of those extra – those two brigades over there? Could they get – could I get more value of them back in the States? And that’s something we’re just going to have to work our way through.
I watched the NATO forces coming through Iraq. All of the NATO countries that deployed their forces to Iraq benefited from it. I used to meet with the Estonian CHOD. They had a platoon – Estonian platoon with one of our brigades in the Baghdad area. That platoon is helping the whole Estonian – you know, the people that rotate through there helping the whole Estonian army move forward. Same with the Poles; I mean, they’ve put a lot of – so I think that’s having a positive impact on the NATO forces. The mission in Afghanistan is the same. I’m just not as familiar with it.
So as I said, we’ll figure that out in the QDR and see where it goes.
MR. KEMPE: Quadrennial Defense Review.
GEN. CASEY: Yeah.
MR. KEMPE: Thank you, General. I’m going to just say something briefly in closing and I’m going to embarrass one of our senior fellows. We’ve got a great successor to you here at the Atlantic Council, Colonel Bill Butcher. And it’s been great having you with us. And I must tell you, in terms of focus and execution, our military fellows, there’s nothing that beats them. So thank you, Colonel.
And I want – this is going –
GEN. CASEY: I hope you get more out of him than they got out of me. (Chuckles.)
MR. KEMPE: This is – this is – (chuckles) – we work them hard, and they deliver.
GEN. CASEY: I look at this as payback, here. (Chuckles.)
MR. KEMPE: Now, the person I’m going to quote right now is not Colonel Butcher. But we do – we have had another senior fellow who spent a few months here. And he came to us after having a couple of tours in Iraq. And after seeing what we did for a few months, he said to me, in a moment of candor, they really pay you for this?
And I think that reflects the fact that he made a considerable sacrifice for his country, as do the men and women who serve under you. We respect the sacrifice you’ve made in your life, the service you’ve given the country in your life, and that of the men and the women who serve under you. Thank you so much for tonight and thank you so much for your service to the country.
GEN. CASEY: Thanks, Fred. Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
Transcript by Federal News Service, Washington, D.C.
Pakistan needs help. President Asif Ali Zardari and army chief General Ashfaq Kayani, who were publicly urged last month by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to “recognize the real threats to their country,” have sent a considerable military force to staunch the spreading extremist threat in the Swat region near Afghanistan.
But now they are struggling to cope with a reported exodus of over one million Pakistanis – perhaps the largest in the troubled nation’s history after the flood of refugees at the time of independence – who want to escape the fighting. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees recently warned: “This is a huge and rapidly unfolding emergency which is going to require considerable resources beyond those that currently exist in the region.”
Pakistan has begun to put together an official relief effort, but it is hampered by a lack of financing and equipment. If Pakistan’s leadership fails to provide timely relief to the internally displaced population, it almost certainly will suffer a serious backlash of public resentment. Ironically, this might accomplish the very destabilization of central authority that the Islamist militants and their Al Qaeda associates hope for – and that the United States and its NATO Allies want to prevent.
But what can NATO do? History suggests that it can do a lot and rapidly. Moreover, a broad-based NATO support may be politically more palatable than any single-country relief effort in Pakistan.
In October 2005, when Pakistan requested NATO assistance to deal with a devastating earthquake, the Alliance needed only three days to activate its NATO Response Force (NRF) and begin a major airlift of relief supplies. NATO engineering and medical units and heavy lift helicopters soon followed. By February 2006, NATO’s “air bridge” of 168 flights had delivered nearly 3,500 tons of aid, its engineers had repaired essential roads and shelters and its doctors had treated over 8,000 patients, often in remote villages.
The 17-week operation, which involved about 1,200 Allied military personnel, opened the door to political dialogue as well: over the next year, high-level NATO and Pakistani officials exchanged their first-ever visits, Pakistani military officers and civilians attended a NATO school in Germany and NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), Pakistan and Afghanistan opened a joint intelligence operations center in Kabul. Last year, General Kayani visited NATO headquarters and spoke about the regional dimensions of Pakistan’s security concerns.
NATO’s stake in Pakistan has steadily increased since its earthquake relief operation. Taliban and al Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan’s western territories have fueled the growing insurgency in southern and eastern Afghanistan, producing a virtual stalemate there with ISAF and Afghan army forces, and NATO supply routes through Pakistan are under attack. Allied leaders first acknowledged the need for a regional approach during their April 2008 Bucharest Summit, but faced with mounting violence, they were more explicit at last month’s Strasbourg-Kehl Summit, warning: “[E]xtremists in Pakistan especially in western areas and insurgency in Afghanistan undermine security and stability in both countries and … the problems are deeply intertwined.”
A NATO combat role inside Pakistan is simply inconceivable, but many of the capabilities employed by the Alliance in the earthquake’s aftermath would be relevant today. The NRF has a readily available air component, now under UK command, that could recreate the 2005-6 air bridge to deliver the tents, field hospitals and medical and other supplies donated by Allies, Partners, international aid agencies and non-government organizations. A prominent British role in the NATO mission would be quite acceptable to the Pakistani leadership and public, given long ties between Pakistan and the United Kingdom. Theater air assets, both fixed wing and helicopters, could help with distribution within Pakistan. The NRF land component, now under French command, could deploy engineer units and medical personnel to work directly with the displaced persons.
As was the case after the earthquake, NATO would work in support of Pakistan’s military and civilian authorities and in coordination with the UN, European Commission and other international donors. Thus, the Alliance would operationalize the “comprehensive approach” (NATO-speak for the effective combination of civilian and military capabilities in a “whole of government” effort) agreed in its Declaration on Alliance Security at Strasbourg-Kehl.
To be sure, even a limited operation of two to three months would be costly. Some of the Allies involved in the post-earthquake effort complained bitterly at the time about the lack of NATO common funding for their NRF role. NATO needs to take urgent action to alleviate that problem – for now, common funding covers only the fuel of NRF air assets – but costs cannot be a show-stopper. Providing security for the NATO personnel would be another important consideration, but with careful planning and reasonable cooperation from the Pakistani military, this need not be an insuperable obstacle. (NATO personnel were generally well-received by the population in 2005-6.)
On the other hand, beyond the inherent moral value of humanitarian relief, the strategic impact of demonstrating NATO’s willingness to once again extend a hand to a Muslim population that is voting with its feet against extremist domination should not be underestimated. Think about winning “hearts and minds.”
NATO’s top decision-making body, the North Atlantic Council, would have to agree by consensus on any Alliance involvement. As a first step, the Council presumably would need an expeditious assessment by its military and civilian staffs of the risks, costs and benefits of such involvement. But the Council will not ask for such an assessment absent an official request for assistance by Pakistan.
Will someone in Islamabad pick up the phone?
Leo Michel is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies. These are his personal views. Shuja Nawaz is Director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council.
Last week’s tripartite summit in Washington, D.C. during which President Barack Obama hosted President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan was a lot like a Chinese meal.
After a substantial repast of meetings and media events, one is left with a gnawing hunger for real progress in the battle against insurgents in both countries.
Zardari came to convince Washington that he needed much more aid than the current $1.5 billion annually for five years promised by bills pending before the U.S. Congress and substantial military aid. He left with the promise of five additional helicopters and little in the way of additional financial aid. Indeed, the U.S. had already pledged $1 billion at the Tokyo meeting of the Friends of Pakistan as a down payment towards the promised Kerry-Lugar $1.5 billion aid package.
Karzai appeared to have gone home with a sense that the earlier coolness of the U.S. administration had been replaced with a grudging acceptance of the inevitability of his re-election as President in the August election against a divided field. To borrow a phrase from former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld “you fight alongside the ally that you can get.”
The U.S. clearly wished for greater action by Pakistan against the militants inside Pakistan and along the Afghan border. It also wanted better collaboration between the Afghans and Pakistanis. It may not have got much progress on the first but made some progress on the latter objective. Yet, given the waning popularity of both leaders at home, Obama may be left wondering how strong his allies are going to be in the battle against terrorism and militancy, and how long the U.S. public and European allies will want to stay the course in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
A fledgling civil government has been unable to assert its control over the country’s polity and its military. Lacking a clear vision of what kind of country it wants Pakistan to be, the government has made alliances with all types of parties, many of them opportunistic members of the preceding Musharraf regime. Despite his own promises and a written commitment of his late wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, Zardari has yet to shed the extraordinary presidential powers of his predecessor, thus diminishing the powers of the prime minister and parliament. And, despite a raging insurgency that has swept from the Afghan borderlands into the Pakistani hinterland, the government has not yet shown itself operating on a war footing.
The Swat deal with the Pakistani Taliban collapsed, as widely expected. In the absence of effective civil administration and a community-based police force that could have kept the militants at bay, yet again the military has been sent in to roust the Taliban. But it faces a daunting task, as an energized insurgency, with well equipped fighters, promises to battle the army street-by-street for the towns of Swat.
Meanwhile, Pakistan faces the prospect of a million plus refugees. The government seemed unprepared for such a massive exodus and it seems to be falling back on the old system of proposing an international aid conference to garner relief assistance. Yet again civil society seems to be bearing the brunt of the relief efforts.
If there had been an institutional mechanism for national security analysis and decision making with a clear central command authority(a Pakistani Richard Holbrooke who could team up with the Army Chief) to break down the stove pipes in the Pakistani government, the exodus would have been anticipated and arrangements put in place to look after the displaced people. Most of them now are seeking shelter outside the paltry camps set up to handle them. The National Security Council has been abolished. The Defence Committee of the cabinet does not appear to have met to discuss the crisis. And in the absence of a National Security Adviser, sacked by the prime minister in a moment of pique following the Mumbai attack, there is no formal mechanism for studying such issues nor a central point in government to ensure that all parts of the administration work together to anticipate problems and resolve issues.
A highly personalized decision making process remains in place, informed in some cases more by anecdote than by analysis. Most exchanges on military issues take place directly between the President and the Army Chief. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is often by-passed. Coordination of the fight against the militants between Interior Ministry and the military is desultory at best. That relationship has not yet recovered by the abortive ham-handed attempt of the current Interior Minister to wrest control of the Inter Services Intelligence in the summer of 2008 away from the military.
The only silver lining from the collapse of the Swat deal has been the rising anger of civil society against the excesses of the Taliban and revulsion for their obscurantist views on religion and social behavior. But chances are that this anger may soon turn against the government itself, if it fails to control the situation.
The army, still unequipped and untrained for counterinsurgency, may yet be able to clear the Swat valley of the militants. But, as a senior military officer confided to me, the army will be unable to hold the territory indefinitely. Providing governance and justice is the civilians’ job. And there is no evidence of civilian institutions or a police force to do the needful. So the Taliban may return to fill the vacuum, as they did before. Moreover, the fear is that even in the Bajaur agency of the Federally Administered Tribal Area, where a huge military operation created almost 300,000 refugees and devastated the territory, the Taliban may stage a comeback.
The military says it opposed the latest Swat deal, as it was to earlier deals. The provincial government of the Awami National Party states that the military sought the deal as a respite because its soldiers were unwilling to fight. The federal government threw the hot potato of the deal into the lap of parliament that hurriedly approved the deal. As yet, there does not seem to be any strong evidence of discontent in the ranks of the army. But the growing frustration of the soldiers is understandable in a battle that seems unending.
Zardari’s prolonged absence from Pakistan during this time of crisis has raised eyebrows. He needed to be back in Islamabad, working with his prime minister and the Army Chief to come up with solutions to the rising crisis rather than continuing his two-week overseas tour. He left Pakistan for Libya on April 30, then went on London and the United States, stopping in London again and Paris on his way back. While it is important to meet key world leaders, the signaling effect of his actions is important in Pakistan and for allies that have promised to help.
Much more important is the need for actions that will restore confidence in his government’s ability to meet this huge challenge.
If Pakistan is indeed at war, as it seems to be, then Zardari could begin the reform process by disbanding his 67 plus cabinet of featherbedders and replace it with a small and effective War Cabinet of the best and brightest from all parties and segments of Pakistani society. He could ask the government and the military to produce their plans for post-kinetic actions in Swat. And he needs to have in place a robust and comprehensive communications strategy to counter the Taliban’s propaganda and to share with civil society information on what is being done and why. He has an economic plan that worked at the Tokyo meeting. He must make it work now.
The Tokyo pledges and Washington parleys should have convinced Zardari that Pakistan’s friends in the United States and elsewhere are willing to help. But they need proof that Pakistan is willing to help itself first. Zardari needs to grasp this opportunity to turn things around rapidly before civil society, or the military, decides to take matters into its own hands yet again.
Shuja Nawaz is director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council. He is the author of Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars Within and FATA: A Most Dangerous Place.
Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council, testified before the House Armed Service Committee about the future of the U.S.-Pakistan military partnership.
His prepared comments are reproduced below.
Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member, Members of the Committee, I am honored to be asked to speak about this important issue before your committee today. We at the Atlantic Council recently produced a report on Pakistan that offers detailed suggestions on aid for that country.
The United States and Pakistan have had a roller-coaster relationship, marked with highs of deep friendship followed by estrangement. The two countries now are partners again in an attempt to roll back the tide of obscurantism and militancy that grips Afghanistan and Pakistan today. Yet, a deep distrust marks this relationship arising out of the pattern of engagement. This distrust is rooted in both perceptions and reality.
The United States befriended Pakistan most often when it had autocratic rulers and provided the most aid to Pakistan during periods of autocratic rule when Pakistan was seen as an ally of US strategic interests in the region. The intervening periods of civilian rule often were marked by distance and coolness. And a strong perception was created over time in Pakistani minds that the United States did not understand or care for Pakistan’s domestic needs or security concerns.
Mr. Chairman, Pakistan lives in a tough neighborhood. It is in the shadow of India, a major nuclear power to the east, and powerful neighbors such as China, Iran, and an unstable Afghanistan. Internally it is wracked by a rising militancy that is attempting to force its convoluted view of Islam on a largely moderate population. Pakistan has suffered repeated military rule and corrupt civilian governments that often were in the hands of a feudalistic elite or family-run political parties. Over shadowing all this is a powerful and well organized Pakistan army that repeatedly used its coercive power to take charge of the country.
Today, the United States and Pakistan are at a new crossroads: there is an opportunity to forge a new relationship between the people of the two countries and to overturn the historical patterns. Civil society in Pakistan is on the rise and deserves support. The Chief of army staff of the Pakistan army is publicly committed to withdrawing the army from politics, and the new Administration in Washington is committed to a strategy to help build Pakistan via a long-term assistance program that will strengthen its defence while improving the economy. If Washington succeeds in these efforts, it will help break the yo-yo pattern of the US-Pakistan relationship.
But there are challenges to overcome:
Certain key elements of US aid will be needed in this regard:
Mr. Chairman, I do not believe in blank checks. Mutually agreed conditions of aid, rather that unilaterally imposed conditions are the best way of engendering trust. We have to make sure that we set targets that help Pakistan achieve its potential, while ensuring its security and integrity. Creating a safe neighborhood in South Asia will help toward that end.
Thank you Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member, and Members of the Committee. I am prepared to answer your questions.
FREDERICK KEMPE: Welcome to everyone. For those of you who don’t know, I’m Fred Kempe, president and CEO of the Atlantic Council. And I say that partly because we record, so it shows up, then, on the transcript, and people will then Google and – let me, first of all, tell you what an honor it is for me to introduce this report, and introduce my friend Ashraf Ghani. Ashraf and I met – when was it, in –
MR. GHANI: In 2003.
MR. KEMPE: In 2003.
MR. GHANI: Yeah. When you came with General Jones, I think.
MR. KEMPE: Yes. You were in your job as finance minister. And I had flown in with General Jones, when I was working for The Wall Street Journal as editor in Europe. And we met at your home. And I remember you forecasting that things were turning in a problematic direction, if we didn’t understand what was happening in the narco-economy: what was happening in terms of corruption; what was happening in different ways.
And, at that point, people were relatively optimistic. And so it was quite prophetic – sadly prophetic, I’m afraid. But I do remember you talking about how property prices were moving in your neighborhood in an astronomic way, because of the drug money coming in and buying up things, which was one of the early indicators of what was going on.
When I came to the Atlantic Council two years and a couple of months ago, we built an International Advisory Board, of sitting chairmen and CEO’s of globally significant companies, and Cabinet members – former Cabinet members of some renown from key countries.
At that point it wasn’t so much I was determined to have Afghanistan represented on the International Advisory Board, because not all countries in South Asia are. But I was determined to have Ashraf Ghani because he’s a person who understands the world; understands his region; understands his country. It’s very rare to meet someone who understands the local politics of the various regions of Afghanistan, as profoundly as he understands the workings of the United Nations – both of which are somewhat arcane to me.
This is the – I want to also thank two members of the Strategic Advisors Group. Ashraf Ghani is on the International Advisory Board, which is a group of these businessmen and politicians I told you about, but he also is a member of the Strategic Advisors Group. This is actually a working group of the Atlantic Council. It was co-chaired by General Jones. He was one of the co-chairs until he took his new job and left as chairman of the Atlantic Council.
The co-chairs are now Senator Hagel, who is the new chairman of the Atlantic Council, and Tom Enders, the CEO of Airbus. It has European and U.S. members. And it was in that guise that I first talked to Ashraf, and we talked about how the long-term goals weren’t really known. For all the resources we were putting into Afghanistan, the long-term goals weren’t obvious. And, secondarily, the short-term actions there were not attached to any long-term goals, because there were no real long-term goals.
At that point, we came up with the idea that there had to be a 10-year framework for Afghanistan. Little did we know that we were developing and implementing strategy – because it was always thought to be an implementing strategy. But, suddenly, we had an Obama plan, behind which to put this implementing strategy. And if you’ll see in the report, they fit pretty well.
So I want to turn over to Ashraf, but I also want to say that Ashraf’s work – our work on Afghanistan, our work on Pakistan – inspired me, over my Christmas vacation, to lose a lot of time recruiting Shuja Nawaz to lead a new South Asia Center of the Atlantic Council. This is a joint project of the Strategic Advisors Group of the International Security Program. And the South Asia Center – it’s the second major report to be released in four months at the Asia Center. The first one was on Pakistan – honorary co-chairs of Senator Hagel and Senator Kerry.
And they are a part of our attempt to stay in front of this story. Senator Kerry called our initial report on Afghanistan seminal. He said the report on Pakistan should be read just as closely. We feel that this is a good follow-up on those two reports and should be read just as closely.
It is our attempt – we also had the ambassadors of Pakistan and Afghanistan here – two weeks ago, Shuja? That drew a lot of attention. They were quite blunt. In diplomatic speak, we could say they were “frank.” These two reports we’ve put out this year reflect our attempt to put South Asian affairs in a broader regional context, that includes not just Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, but also understands that this is all interlinked with the Gulf; with Russia; with neighboring China; and with neighboring Central Asia. And so we’ll continue to work those issues.
I’m sorry that I’ve done so long of a warm-up, but I wanted to put all this in context. This is a report that’s been long in the making. There’s no one better-equipped to write it and to speak about it. And, Ashraf, thank you so much for producing this important work.
ASHRAF GHANI: Thank you very much, Fred, for the very generous introduction – but, even more important, for your friendship and support. And thanks to Shuja for enormous work. And your colleagues and the members of the board – both Frank Kramer and Julian French – for commenting.
The goal that the new administration has put to the American public is very clear: it is to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return. But this is a goal that has been put to the American public. What is the means for realization of this goal?
A more capable and accountable government. Hence comes the issue of implementation. There are two messages in the strategy: One is about disruption; the other is about creating a capable state. I would argue that the creation of the goal of a capable state requires a midterm framework. This is not a goal that can be realized through short-term action.
But how do we create a medium-term framework? By connecting short- and medium-term actions together to backward mapping. Meaning that we need to have a picture of where we want to be in 10 years from now, so that actions that can start today lead to that. Unless there is a road map, there cannot be benchmarking. Measurement cannot come from short-term actions, because the unintended consequence of those will be greater than their intended consequence.
So the first challenge becomes: What is the current context? I am offering a framework that is defined by threats, weaknesses and assets. The business literature is strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. We’re changing, because of this driver.
What are the threats? Three of them are well-known. Al Qaeda, because it’s a global threat. It has a regional manifestation, but the “tango of terror” is regional. If you’ve looked at the recent pattern, there is an event in Afghanistan, followed by Pakistan, followed by India. That threat is regional in nature, and it is really a tango. And we need to understand that all of us are threatened by this threat in common, yet the response of our three countries is individual. And it often is involved blame games among us.
And, until now, the United States has not focused on the regional nature of the threat. It has focused on country-specific nature of the threats. Elevating the game to the regional dimension is really important.
The second threat is insurgency. I will not elaborate on the full dimensions that are in the paper, but highlight one thing to you. This is probably one of the best-financed insurgencies in the history of insurgency. Roughly 400 to a billion and a half dollars a year are at their disposal. Their sources of finance are getting more diversified, more consolidated. And because of that, they do not need long lines of supply, et cetera – they can buy a lot of things, in a cash environment.
Three is narcotics. It’s a very large part of a small economy. And the threat of narcotics is again global. Just look at the way it changes from a gram of heroin being worth a dollar twenty in Afghanistan to being worth $32 in Europe. The path is spatial, the networking global, and it’s integrated.
The fourth part is the one that I want to really emphasize as a threat, because that’s not what usually one associates as a threat: it’s bad governance and corruption. My argument is that bad governance and corruption have created the vacuum to allow for the three other threats to be consolidated. Unless we, and until we, address this central issue of the threat that emanates from bad governance, we are not going to make a break.
Stakeholders in instability now are more consolidated, more organized, than stakeholders in stability. The great tragedy of the last eight years was that the nature of governance was not understood – not – (inaudible). When Afghans reformed, the international community was not ready; and when the Afghans retreated from reforms, the international community closed its eyes and ears, and was in denial.
There’s a very good study by the World Bank and UNDP that, for instance, documents on the criminalization of the drug economy, as how criminal interests took over state institutions, very specifically, and turned them from protection of people into protection of criminals. So now we deal with the task of bad governance as the critical issue.
Weaknesses. There are two fundamental weaknesses. And we’ve usually – my colleague, Clare Lockhart and I, in our book, “Fixing Failed States,” have called these the “double failure.” There’s a failure on the part of the international system, and there’s the failure of the Afghani lead. The failure of the Afghani lead is that it’s still vested in the war economy. Our usual mistake in transitions from conflict to seeming peace – because it’s not environment of post-conflict – is that people don’t realize what a fundamental obstacle invested in war economy is.
And we need to understand this. The failure of international financial institutions, in particular, to understand this, and to invest in creation of legitimate economic institutions, is a fundamental issue – because the challenge here is to articulate an agenda that would guarantee both the interests of the elite and that of the population. That requires game-changers. Those kind of game-changers have not been put in place.
The failure of the international system is that it’s 20th-century institutions that simply cannot meet the needs of the 21st century. They’re made for a different era. You have U.N. agencies coming, with all kinds of alphabet that nobody understands, but their main function, supposedly, is to provide technical assistance. Now I can buy all the technical assistance I need from Nepal, at one-hundredth the cost and 10 times the efficiency. Why would I need the U.N. agencies? Or on the ground. So the design of these institutions needs reworking.
The other major failure that confronts U.S. decision-makers is USAID. USAID is a shell of its former self of the 1960s and ’70s, denuded of capacity for delivering development. It’s a contract-management agency that is largely beholden to the Beltway bandits, and does not have the personnel and the resources to supervise its contractors. So it’s the problem of the principal and the agent. The agent has become much more powerful than the principal. Net result: out of one dollar of U.S. assistance, 10 cents to 30 cents gets to the ground. The rest ends up along the Beltway. That is not what the American public wants, or not what the Afghan public wants.
That’s the negative side of the story, and I said this is 5 percent of my work. Ninety-five percent of my work is actually a positive. My message, contrary to my message of 2003 to Fred, when I was beginning to become pessimistic and warn against the signs that people were ignoring – I’m quite optimistic today that we can get Afghanistan right. It is very difficult, but it’s by no means impossible.
Why this message? First, what are the assets? First, geology. The natural capital of the country is fantastic. The recently completed U.S. Geological Survey is very good news. Afghanistan is not Iraq, so let’s not mistake, but it has enough natural resources to provide the basis of a sustainable economy that would be an alternative to a drug economy.
Second, it has water. We have 80 billion cubic meter of water a year, and we pump 60 billion of it to our neighbors, without getting advertising in return. But water, during the next 10 years, is going to become as valuable as oil, if not more so. So it provides the basis.
Its location, that has been the source of enormous problems in the last three decades, actually makes it the natural connection between South Asia and Central Asia. It is the only place that can give Pakistan strategic depth in the true meaning of the sense, meaning economic and relational. So the dynamic can change, from lose-lose to win-win – as well as between South Asia and the Middle East.
The other is that, contrary to headline news, there’s a series of major institutional successes in the last six years. I’ll mention two. One is called National Solidarity, a program of block grants rural development that has given 20 to $60,000 to each village in Afghanistan and has truly covered the country. From Ambassador Holbrook to Senators Levin and Durbin, to Bob Zoellick at the World Bank – everybody has reviewed these and are stunned by the results. Democracy at the grass roots is possible and is working. People have bought in. Self-management social capital is enormous success.
Second is the telecom. We went from having 100 mobile phones in 2002 to having 7 1/2 million phones today. The largest single taxpayer outside custom revenue comes from the telecom sector. It took six weeks of work, because it was about transparent licensing. Four companies, each worth more than $600 million, are operating in Afghanistan today. So it’s not about risk – it’s about how risk-management tools are brought in.
OPIC, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, has made commitments of more than $1 billion to Afghanistan, and the amount that has been recalled is infinitesimal. What it brings is the issue of design. When institutional design is approached the right way, it’s not the context but the design that makes the difference.
This brings me also to the international assets. First, in the wake of the global financial crisis, it is incredibly gratifying to see the international community commit both forces and resources to Afghanistan. President Obama has walked the walk; he has not simply talked the talk. To commit more forces in this time is an act of both courage and statesmanship. But, also, the commitment of resources that that entails is quite a significant statement.
However, with that comes the question of conditions. It’s a second chance. Afghans have to do our part – otherwise, it will be a delimited engagement. International commitment is not going to be there forever – but it is here, and we need to utilize it.
The issue now that forces and resources are committed is regarding the strategic utility and utilization. Forces in themselves are not the answer – it is the strategy that is going to use them that is the issue. If these forces are deployed within a counterinsurgency doctrine, the results could be enormously beneficial. If they are used in other ways, the results could be counterproductive. So there is the question of choices that arises.
But we also need further imagination. And I think imagination has been largely lacking because of a simple issue. The United States, Europe, Japan have not really known what to offer for development of Afghanistan, and the Afghans have not known what to ask for.
What do I mean by that? First of these are guarantees. OPIC has not been matched by Europe. Europe should become, really, an engine of now not just providing aid, but providing financial architecture. From Hermès in Germany to Lloyd’s in London to others, really need to be brought together to provide what OPIC has demonstrated – the utility. And the framework should extend both to Pakistan and Afghanistan, not just to be limited.
Second is green financing. If 40 of the world’s worst polluters come together to finance the hydropower in Afghanistan, Afghanistan within four to six years could become a major exporter of electricity in the region. Northern Afghanistan alone has the potential of producing 10,000 megawatts. Overall, the country could be a major drive of new energy. And if energy is put on the table, the dynamic will change in the region. If Europe was about coal and steel Afghanistan and Pakistan could be about energy and transit, and then built on that kind of foundation.
And third is trade. And in terms of trade, our first port of call is NATO. NATO is not buying from us. NATO is bringing tons of water from abroad, not to mention grapes and other things. It’s enormously ironic to see Frenchmen eat French grapes in Afghanistan, while we export grapes. Buying Afghan first could change the dynamic of agriculture radically.
That’s the assets in the question: How do we prioritize state building? My recommendation and argument is that we need to tailor the strategy into four orders of institutions, hence the 10-year framework. So let me very quickly go over these.
First order core function – law and order. The emphasis overwhelmingly is on security. In my judgment, this is the wrong emphasis. We need to reframe security within law and order. If we go for security without framing it in terms of law and order, we’ll end up with repressive security institutions.
Second is public finance. We are leaking 70 percent of our revenue today in Afghanistan due to corruption and mismanagement. Afghan revenue can be doubled or tripled very quickly, if the political will existed, in a series of mechanisms.
Third is administrative control. Afghanistan has five levels of government: the village; district; municipality; province; and the central. We are a unitary system – we are not a federal structure. Our American friends often confuse our provinces with their own elected governors, and this has produced a lot of unintended results.
These five levels need to be brought together. It’s not a question of centralization or decentralization – it’s the question of alignment. And, again, National Solidarity provides one example. I designed other programs, for other levels, but they were not followed.
And the fourth is human capital. Not one university in Afghanistan is functional. We, together – the Afghans and our international counterparts – have delivered the youth to the arms of the Taliban and irrelevance. We need to invest in youth. Two billion dollars is gone in technical assistance. And Afghanistan’s ranking, in Transparency International, has dropped from 117 in 2005 to 176 – namely, the fifth most-corrupt country – in the same time. There’s surely something wrong with this recipe. If we invest in the Afghan higher education and technical education, one could change the dynamic.
The second-order institutions is, simply put, about jobs. The most common definition of a Talib is an unemployed youth. Seventy-one percent of Afghans are under the age of 30, and 40 to 60 percent of these are unemployed or suffer from hidden unemployment. My goal would be to create 1 million jobs in two years. And five sectors – agriculture, mining, construction, transport and information-communication technology – can provide this.
In agriculture, the goal should be to raise the income of rural Afghans from $1 a day to $4 a day. Why $4 a day? That’s the tipping point in which production of opium does not make economic sense. You can have any amount of investment in repressive institutions to contain narcotics. You won’t get there, unless it’s simultaneously accompanied by an agricultural development. And the irony is, the United States knows how to do this better than anybody.
A county in Nebraska or Oklahoma has all the knowledge that is required to transform agriculture in Afghanistan. And not only did you do it in your own country, after the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, you did it fantastically in East Asia. We just need to draw those models, rather than the Beltway models.
Here my emphasis is on building the market. We have not paid sufficient attention to building the market, because there was a feeling, during the height of the 1980s and ’90s, that the market was a natural institution. It is not. It’s a social construct, and it’s an institution-building process. And this requires innovative approaches. And, again, I would emphasize the use of NATO as the first port of call.
Our third-order institutions are about infrastructure. In creating the global linkages, I have mentioned the hydro potential, then roads and railways, are critical as the next linkage. China is going to be the greatest purchaser of the mineral resources of Afghanistan, and two things are required if Afghanistan is going to benefit. One is rule of law. We need the right contracting arrangements. The extractive industries’ initiative and transparency is the key requirement. Second is the railway. All of Afghanistan’s potential exports are bulky – and without investing in the railway, it will not happen.
It is really ironic at times to see, with hindsight, what one was requesting and was being rejected. In the Berlin conference of 2004, I requested $27 billion for eight years. And we had a huge fight, for over four months, because our international colleagues wanted to give us 1 billion, and I was asking 8.2 as the first installment. I got 8.2. But the thing that they took out was $500 million for railways. And today, every single military planner is coming back and is willing to put three times that amount to secure NATO supply routes. Sometimes locals do know best. (Chuckles.) And I think local wisdom, at times, has to be appreciated in commitment.
The third part is social policy. We need an activist social policy, but it’s a social policy that is to balance the market and redistribution together. I offer one example. We have 700,000 disabled in our country. An artificial foot costs between $3,000 and $15,000 in Europe or the United States. So it’s outside our affordability limit – and, hence, you see these people. But you know what? India has created an artificial foot that costs $40. It’s called the Jaipur foot. It does not require immense imagination to produce the Jaipur foot by Afghan women in poor urban neighborhoods who are unemployed, to hit two goals at the same time. A new social contract can be arrived at, that is both affordable and drives both the economy and the polity.
And related to this is, we need to approach development through creation of platforms. The National Solidarity program that I brought to your attention is a platform for rural development. A lot more could be built on it. For instance, in my count, 40 percent of the country could be provided with power through microhydro, and within two years. Thirty-5 percent of Nepal has this, so it is not outside the range. But one needs to think institutionally and create the linkages.
The fourth-order institutions, first and foremost, are about three things. First is public borrowing. Municipal borrowing could become an engine of municipal change. We have to get outside aid to trade in borrowing capability. But here is the constraint. One hundred countries around the world, Iraq being the worst, cannot spend their money. Everybody talks about the need for money – very few people talk about the expenditure constraint. The expenditure constraint is removed when you have a proper construction industry and the rules and regulations. And that is the lubrication when public borrowing becomes a driver of efficiency.
Second is regulation. Regulation is often considered a luxury. But it was failure of regulation in Afghanistan that created the deepening of the criminalization of the economy. So things that look like luxuries at times become very necessity. And here, particularly in terms of public cultural environmental assets, is critical.
I’ll give you just one example. I pay $400 a month for my Internet service in Kabul. What I would like to see is the first country that is Wi-Fi-free. The taxes that you will get from Internet are a fragment of the economic benefit that we could have if we created a Wi-Fi-free country. So one has to jump over a lot of things, because if we had a Wi-Fi-free country, with spectrum, education in the remotest areas could be brought to access. Market relationship would change; efficiency transparency will increase, et cetera.
Then, again, we need to come back to the centrality of human capital, because there are two predictors today of development: natural capital and human capital. We have the natural capital, but we do not have the human capital. And here what is required is a 10-year framework of the capabilities that are going to be required, and relentlessly investing in them.
For instance, if mining is as important as I’m arguing it is, then we need at least 500 people who understand the legal aspects of mining contracts. Or 500 other people who are going to understand every aspect of copper. We have probably the second- or third-largest copper deposits in the world. These things cannot be done unless there’s a framework.
What’s the strategic justification for the medium-term objectives? First, the country has had a history of stability. The first eight decades of the country – those of you who are old enough to have been on the Hippie Trail will recall that you went through Afghanistan paying $20, and you were never stopped. The last 20 years are an aberration. And those 20 years were the results of Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and then the decision of the West, and the Arab governments, to fight it. They are not typical.
Second, there has been a national consensus for state-building and institutional success between 2002 and 2005. Thirdly, the most-important factor: the Afghan people want to buy into the process of globalization and change. You know what we want? We want to be ordinary. My desire is to be able to go back to the village where my family has been for 400 years, and sit under a tree without a bodyguard. I cannot do that. There are 50 gangs in my province. But that desire for ordinariness is what drives the foundation, and provides us with a sense of justice and peace.
And here I think American military innovation is the next key strategic justification. COIN, or the counterinsurgency doctrine, connects to deep Afghan cultural roots – namely, the quest for justice. Thompson, who first worked in Malaysia, put the equation best: Legality plus construction plus results should equal government. Illegality plus destruction plus promises should equal insurgency.
Today, unfortunately, the first half of the equation is not there. But because COIN recognizes the centrality of government, COIN in Afghanistan is to be seen as a medium-term. It’s not going to be like Iraq, with a quick surge. This is going to require four to 10 years, at the minimum. And that is the important issue. And, lastly, internationally, donors now understand the costs of incoherence, and, I think, already – (inaudible). Everybody is talking about coordination, but not knowing.
So how do we get to those goals, given the current context? Five quick observations. One – get the elections right. The game-changer is not the insurgency and counterinsurgency battle to the finish. The game-changer is to produce a legitimate election, that the next government of Afghanistan can have a mandate for governing.
Two – make this international strategy coherent. We don’t have a coherent international strategy. Incoherence has been the name of this. It’s called “strategy” on paper, on the ground – it’s been advertising but strategic. Lower the objectives, by all means, or elevate them, but make it coherent – and stick to them.
Three – prepare a series of new national programs, along the models that I suggested. Four – use national solidarity as a platform. And five – because everything cannot be done at the same time, invest in creating eight model provinces this year. Afghanistan has 34 provinces. If we can demonstrate success in eight provinces, we would have regained the initiative vis-à-vis the insurgency.
The final message: It is doable. Afghanistan is difficult, but not impossible. South Korea in the ’50s; Singapore in the ’60s; and other places – Malaysia – all demonstrated enormous difficulties at the beginning. But there were changes that shifted the direction from incoherence and improvisation to coherence in pursuit of a clear strategy. And that give us the winners.
I hope, 10 years from now, we can celebrate the successes of a joint venture and adventure. Thank you.
MR. KEMPE: Thank you, Ashraf.
(Applause.)
MR. KEMPE: Thank you, Ashraf. I think I undersold you in the beginning when I said someone who knows the local situation intimately but understands the global context intimately. I think you’ve just heard a presentation on somebody’s country and its context in not only the regional order or global order – which is stunning – and that’s the reason we have published this report. Also for those of you who are here, we will do a full transcript of this proceeding so that you will also get Ashraf’s ideas off our Web site as soon as we can get it up there.
Let me also acknowledge Joe Snyder here, the former head of our Asia program, who got our Pakistan work on the report that we got going last year. I’m going to start with a question, but I’m going to turn to the audience right away, so please get ready. Here’s my first question – and I hate to go to news from today when we’re talking and we’re trying to have a longer gaze, but just as you can’t achieve tomorrow – just as you can’t know what to do today if you don’t know what you’re after tomorrow, you also won’t achieve tomorrow unless you recognize the dangers of today.
So the news – if you haven’t seen it already – is Secretary Hillary Clinton’s testimony today on the Hill where she talks about Pakistan posing a mortal threat – quote, “poses a mortal threat to the security and safety of our country and the world.” Pakistan’s government – Reuters reads, “Pakistan’s government has abdicated to the Taliban in agreeing to impose Islamic law in Swat Valley and the country now poses, quote, a ‘mortal threat’ to the world, said U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
Ashraf, I wonder if you could talk about this in two respects. First of all, do you agree? How would you respond to Secretary Clinton? And second of all, are we in danger of losing Afghanistan again as a priority in America? Before, it was for Iraq, but are we now going to go headlong in Pakistan, which one has to do, no doubt. But at the same time, have you seen signs or are you concerned that the Obama administration, which started with a very, very sharp focus on Afghanistan – and I’m not trying to say they’re separate, but one could see some distraction from what really seemed to be a very – a real shift from Iraq to Afghanistan as the place to focus energies on now.
MR. GHANI: Thank you. I studied Pakistan from 1980 to 1996. So in some ways, I know it better than Afghanistan. And the central issue is Pakistan has not figured out succession. There’s been – the process of succeeding to office legitimately has not been figured. Second, the Pakistani military is a real factor. Afghanistan does not have the equivalent. So in a context like this, what is – but the civil and the military have not reached agreement on rules of the game.
The fundamental issue, if Pakistan is going to shift to address that kind of situation, is going to be a civil-military alliance , realistically, because security in Pakistan has been deteriorating for 20 years. Karachi is not ruled – the largest port in the country. Three of Pakistan’s – from a perspective of neighbor or from perspective of scholar or World Bank official, et cetera, I’ve seen Pakistan – and then as a high rank of one government official.
I’ve never understood what Pakistan’s national interests are. I’ve had no difficulty understanding Iran’s national interest; I’ve had no difficulty understanding Uzbekistan’s national interest or Turkmenistan’s national interest. But as neighbors of Pakistan, we get to be very confused as to who speaks and what is the order of priority. And this is the challenge in Pakistan. Because of this, it is a very difficult environment.
Second, however, is we need – Pakistan’s need for a stable relationship with the West has not been addressed during the last 60 years. What’s been the pattern? Pakistan has been floated when there has been a regional crisis or global crisis and Pakistan has been dropped when that crisis has been over. If we want stability in Pakistan and in Afghanistan, I think a 10-to-20-year framework of partnership really needs to be put in place.
Everyone cannot be a member of NATO; everyone cannot be a member of the EU. But more innovative mechanisms have to be devised to bring these sort of issues together. Pakistan is suffering from fundamental insecurity – two-thirds of its borders are still not recognized. So we need innovative mechanisms in terms of.
Now, as to the danger, David Sanger’s book, “Inheritance,” is something that everybody should read. It is a frightening book because the risks that he indicates and underlines on the basis of very high level access to U.S. officials frightens both us in the region and should frighten the rest of the world. And I think Secretary Clinton is highlighting those. Now, from risk to risk management is a different issue. Now that the risks in Pakistan are recognized, how do we arrive at the strategy that manages these risks through mechanisms of partnership that are going to be medium to long-term?
The first of these: Do not rely on lynchpins. We have done this before. An individual cannot be a country. One has to strive towards building systems and this means now being a catalyst for building regional systems. It cannot be security per country. You know, there’s the whole joke of socialism in one country, and of course it imploded. But one needs security, regional arrangements and broader definition of them.
As to Pakistan taking all the oxygen the way Iraq did, that danger is real. And it’s because of this that I think we need to focus on the elections in Afghanistan and on the significant differences – both similarities, inter-linkages – but also differences. Afghanistan is difficult, but its easier establish democratic institutions in Afghanistan than it actually is Pakistan, ironically, because we do not have the military as a formidable contender and stakeholder to negotiate.
If, however, we understand, then, from a comparative perspective – not to speak as national but as a member of peer advisory board – Pakistan is a nuclear power, any instability in Pakistan will have deeply threatening effects on the region and on the world. But having said that, neglecting Afghanistan for a third time would have a very high price and we need to be able to make sure that now the definition of U.S. strategy is regional in the focus – stays regional in terms of the inter-linkages and getting there.
The U.S. team makes me optimistic. General Jones, Ambassador Holbrooke, Ambassador Eikenberry, Secretary Clinton – are all an enormously good team. So if cannot be done with this type of team, with the experience and forethought that they bring, then one would not be able to do it that way.
MR. KEMPE: Okay, thank you very much Ashraf. I see questions – I saw yours first and then we’ll go first. And please identify yourself as well as you ask your question.
Q: Good evening, my name is Andrea Kivandra (ph) from Georgetown University. I study anthropology and this area in particular so I know you are an anthropologist by training and I’ve studied your articles during my studies. So now my question is not so much to the former minister of the Republic of Afghanistan but to the anthropologist that, inshallah, will be the next president, hopefully.
So you talked about democratic institutions; you have talked about changing things; and the program that you envision fits perfectly, I would say, a liberal and Western-minded environment. Now, what I see, though, is that Afghanistan is hardly a liberal and Western-minded environment. Half of the country – namely the Pashtun section of the country – is a tribal society and mostly rural, which probably would have other ideas and, specifically, responses to democratic institutions as we see them.
So since the 1880s, Abdur Rahman and Amanullah and Mohammad Daud – they have tried to centralize, to endorse and enforce more democratic institutions. They have failed. They have failed because the tribal society has rejected these advancements, has rejected these modifications of their traditional way of life. So how do you think, now, your try – your next try – your attempt will overcome the problems that so many other people have had? How do you treat the tribal society?
MR. GHANI: Thank you. It’s an excellent question and I appreciate the question. First, tribes don’t have definitions. Afghan tribes are not corporate, meaning that there is no estate attached to an Afghan tribe. So imposition of the anthropological definition of an African tribe from the 1920s onto the Afghan context is a radical misreading. Western anthropology has been extremely bad in terms of reading Afghan culture.
And if you know my work, you know, I documented the last 400 years as a process of fluidity. Identity is not fixed. An Afghan, by definition, has multiple identities. That becomes very difficult for people from others to understand. Identity is situational. I’ll just give you one example from a Pashtun in Pakistan whose name was Walih Khan (sp) – the head of a major political party. He was asked whether he was Pakistani.
He said he was a Pashtun for 5,000 years, a Muslim for 1,500 years and a Pakistani for 32 years, so you judge – what’s his identity? We need to understand that symbolic systems have flexibility. A misreading – Khost is radically different than Helmand; Helmand is very different from Badhgis. To generalize too quickly would be problematic – that’s my first submission to you. So it requires reading context.
Q: So a local approach.
MR. GHANI: A local approach is one part of it in this model. The second is, you know, five million of us were refugees. You go to an Afghan village, you ask two questions. How many of you have been abroad? How many of you have relatives abroad? You will get the answer, usually, between 75 to 95 percent to one or both questions. To think that the Afghans of today are the Afghans of 19th or 18th century would be a vast misreading.
You know, we had electricity when we were refugees. Now, when we talk, and talk about electricity as defining the effectiveness of the state, it’s a different set of measures. Three, one-third of our society is urban; at least a third of us are living in cities. Fourth is the emergence of women. When I was talking to the elders of Khost as to who will determine the result of the election, you know what they said?
It’s the women. They said, it’s the women, stupid. If you don’t get the women, you’re not going to win the election. They are not following anybody. So anthropology is very useful when it’s processural (sic) – when it takes the long process. Anthropology is extremely dangerous when it’s static. And contemporary anthropology has become very ahistorical.
Q: (Inaudible, off mike) – diachronic approach.
MR. GHANI: It’s a diachronic approach that really needs to – in your jargon – (chuckles) – to become important to them. The question is between history and agency. People make their history, as – it’s been frequently recognized, particularly from the Balkans, you know, history is both a constraint and an opportunity. We have too much history. I want to overcome our history. And I think the way I read my people – I’ve talked, at least, to tens of thousands of people since July in a very organized process of consultation. I don’t hear what you say.
What they want is a functioning government that is accountable to them, foreign forces that are directed by rule of law, a development discourse that really is about change of opportunities. Then the question of which system of legitimation you put at it is much easier. Last observation on Islam: The Islam that I’d like to see is the Islam of 1,000 years ago. I want to go back 1,000 years ago in order to move 1,000 years forward.
A thousand years ago, we were the center of a global synthesis that brought India, Persia, Rome and the emerging Islamic world together. And it created the Abbasid-Ghaznavid synthesis. That Islam is enormously confident. You know, there was one man called Abu Rahihan al Biruni; he lived in Ghazni 1,000 years ago. His mathematical outputs alone are 20,000 current printed pages. We need to feel back – you know, that’s the man who transferred zero and the so-called Arabic numerals to the West.
So we need to reclaim part of our past, because our problem has been that a lot of my generation falsely embraced Western notions and lost its roots. I stand very firmly within that global Islamic tradition of dialogue, where we are not afraid, where we know who we are in certain senses and in other senses, we converse. So we have to shift to what President Khatami of Iran has also called the dialogue of civilization, not the clash of civilization. That, I think, is what I read. And I hope I’m right and that – I feel that the Afghan population – the public – is about five miles – for the first time in our history – ahead of our intellectuals and ahead of our political leaders. I think we can govern from the center.
MR. KEMPE: Thank you for that answer. I’m going to go to a board member of ours toward the back and then I’ll come to you second. Before Jim Woolsey asks this question I want to say one thing since the last questioner brought it up. We at the Atlantic Council realize that Ashraf Ghani is a candidate for president of Afghanistan. This project was started long before that; in fact, it took you a long time to put out this paper. (Laughter.) We are nonpartisan in the United States, so it only follows that we’ll be nonpartisan globally. And so we do not endorse any candidate for the presidency of Afghanistan.
MR. GHANI: And I’m not campaigning –
(Cross talk.)
MR. KEMPE: No, but I want to make clear that this is not the purpose of this meeting or this is why we’re doing it. We do endorse every word of this terrific paper and we are fundamentally against corruption and failing democracies. So let me just say that. Jim Woolsey?
Q: Jim Woolsey, Stanford University – (inaudible, off mike). I wanted to ask about the distributive generation of energy. The water and energy projects that you talked about are extremely important but also seem to require – (inaudible) – great deal of – (inaudible). And there’s a long history going back well before Jefferson was arguing with Hamilton about – (inaudible) – farmers, and Gandhi – (inaudible) – that suggests that global economic competitions, including energy does extremely positive things for a society. Claire (ph), earlier, was talking to – (inaudible) – progress and work she was doing in Afghanistan on solar, wind and biomass, done locally, used locally – (inaudible).
MR. GHANI: Sure. Well, thank you again, Mr. Woolsey, for being here and for the question. First experiments that took place were using literally the transformation of swords into plowshares – namely, taking the dynamo of a Russian tank and turning into an engine for generating power at the local level. There are lots of villages in Afghanistan that are generating, you know, five kilowatts to 50. It’s beginning; what’s the problem? The problem is that we don’t have manufacturing capacity with control. We have one million tons of scrap metal, but it’s fast disappearing.
So it’s – my first proposal is precisely to make national solidarity a vehicle for delivering micro-hydro. Essentially, the design is quite simple. You need an engine that can last – DARPA is examining some of the engines now to see. Then you need a patent to manufacture that engine so it can be reliable. And third is local involvement. There is a woman in Ghazni; she read about the fact that water could be turned into electricity. Her husband and her sons were all working in Iran. She mobilized the women, got stones to harness this form, then brought the men to work on the heavier stones.
Then she collected $20 per villager – she brought an association of villagers together. Without a single NGO, without a single foreign influence, she generated power for her village. And it’s the cleanest village, probably, in Afghanistan today. So local initiative is extremely important in this. But if we want to go to scale and change the dynamic, particularly for women, we need to bring to scale to it. And that means bringing production and distribution together and then investing in it and allowing for it.
In terms of meso-level, the French have come with – about 20 years ago – came with a method that puts the turbines in the middle of a river. So you don’t need the great, old dams like Hoover Dam or the dams of China or others. If you took a river – and this has been done in Canada and Thailand, as two examples – and really treated it as a network of these small to medium dams, you could generate the same amount of electricity as two or three huge dams that have a lot of environmental and social adverse cost. And this has none.
And that is my proposal. We need – you know, we have this great capability in PRTs as engineers. But they are not networked. If we could use the engineering capability of the Army Corps of Engineers to design our electric systems, we could really move very rapidly – or bring, for instance, Norway, which as enormous experience in this regard, or Canada. A lot of things could be done differently.
The reason I am emphasizing medium and then large power is because neither agriculture nor mining nor services can really move without power. I’m very much in favor of small participation. And the design of national solidarity – the way I designed it – was that in five years, the bulk of it would turn into national rural enterprise. The model that I really have is that most Afghan villages should become enterprises. We will not be able to afford a model of social policy that distributes forever.
So you need to generate the wealth that can pay for this. And that, I think, brings the two together because information technology today could bring – be the critical linkage between decentralization and centralization. Decentralization should be at the level of administrative practices. Centralization should come from economic magnets that attract people and link them.
Jewelry, for instance, could provide probably 500,000 jobs to Afghan women if the design connects us to major museums, to major shops and centers of outlet. An Afghan woman can produce enormous things of quality. Their problem is not production of quality; their problem is access to the global value chains. Heroin is linked globally, but not the fruit, not the textile, not the jewelry that an Afghan woman can produce.
MR. KEMPE: Thank you. Please.
Q: David Isby (ph). Sir, I note your frankness in which you identify the failures of Afghanistan’s political elite as contributing to much of the current problems, and I’ve seen much of that failure results people being mobilized not to a national vision but to either ethno-linguistic or local at different levels. How can a government, which by it’s constitution is not a federal system, incorporate its diverse ethnicity, prevent things fissuring on that line, when wealthy countries such as Belgium and Canada find intractable issues? How does Afghanistan do that?
MR. GHANI: Sure. Well, the first thing is we are the only country in South Asia that has never had a separatist movement. That is worth noticing. Every single province of Pakistan has had a separatist movement. No one in Afghanistan, during the worst of our days, has raised the question – the specter – of separatism. That speaks for a history that largely has a symbolic, common identity. The second issue is the question of segmentation. How do we segment really matters.
You know, the beauty of General Petraeus’s approach to Iraq was that, you know, everybody else was dividing and subdividing Iraq into 40 categories of Shia, 25 categories of Sunni, Kurds, et cetera; he came and simplified it to reconcilables and irreconcilables. It changed the dynamic of the strategy. In Afghanistan, there are three numerical majorities that are economic and political minorities today.
First are the poor. They constitute 80 percent of the country. Poverty in Afghanistan does not know ethnicity. Second are the youth. They are 71 percent of the country and again, the youth are not – both being divided and not being divided along ethnic lines. Third are the women. They are the third majority. But they are a minority, politically and economically. One has to focus on an agenda of creating the empowerment of these groups. Where is the common bond and where is the problem?
The problem is the vacuum of a political vision. Ethnicity filled a vacuum because the Islam ideology of resistance to the Soviets failed to deliver governance. They became warlords and fighters, not statesmen. The communist ideology failed to deliver because it gave us red terror. There was a democratic project that needed to be articulated in terms of citizenship rights and rule of law that the Afghan elites were treated for. Once that happens, ethnicity was the structure in reserve.
But ethnicity has not delivered development. You know, vote-banks have still not been created. There is a lot of dissatisfaction, but that dissatisfaction is taking the general characteristic of disenchantment with lack of development and absence of rule of law. So the turnaround issue is how can you use the center to become a magnet instead of the source of the repulsion? That means roughly 3,000 Afghans have to take a fast from corruption for 10 years. If we can persuade 3,000 Afghans in key, core government positions, you don’t need the 400,000 bureaucracy. You just need 3,000.
And think innovatively about private-public partnership in ways that Spain did or Singapore did – a democratic model and a more authoritative model. Then the capacity – the energy that is there – can really be harnessed. Not to go too long about it, but what – Afghans are an entrepreneurial people. We’ve known money for a couple of million years. The word check was invented by us and went to other languages. We were transferring money long before anybody knew what money was. We understand market signals.
The other is that collective conscience really is very powerful. Individual judgments can be problematic. But there is a collective conscience and it’s the harnessing of that – is it difficult? Absolutely, because the playing field has become strewn with a lot of mines. Is there an alternative to building that kind of vision? No, because what would be the alternative? It would be 40 years of conflict.
We can go to a prolonged type of conflict, like Columbia, but be much more intense. And it will have devastating consequences. So 1991, you could have gotten Afghanistan right roughly with $500 million and five days of attention in Washington. You didn’t. We got 9/11. Now, the scale of the problem and the nature of attention required is vastly different, but I don’t think we have an alternative but to focus to get it right.
Q: Thank you.
Q: Thank you. Thank you very much for this report. I have rarely seen a report that deals directly with the long-term issue as it should be. And especially in Washington, the comprehensiveness of the report and the policy options – very solid. So having said that, let me take issue with one item of the report, especially in relations to the short-term recommendations. I think that the nature of the insurgency today in the region – as you have mentioned, this is a regional issue – is such that, in my opinion, it’s very likely that it would actually overwhelm the short-term issues, recommendations that you have just described.
I could imagine a scenario that now, the insurgency certainly are taking territory across the border, and in the South of Afghanistan, have a certain amount of control. So if that is the case, you know, people refer to the fact that Pakistan will be – the army will take over and it will be okay. But this time, it will be different, because the army actually have to fight against this insurgency that’s very powerful and sophisticated. So we will see bloodshed and somewhat of a chaos that would affect Afghanistan.
My question is that given that likely scenario, that the nature of the insurgency is imminently important, perhaps there would be a way of viewing the short-term recommendations from a different context. In an otherwise excellent report, I think this is one aspect that is somewhat missing.
MR. KEMPE: I think that’s an excellent question, Ashraf, and let me pile an additional question onto that, which is, how does the situation now look on the ground with the insurgency in Afghanistan? There, of course, is this surge – whatever you want to call it – that’s happening in terms of U.S. troops. On the other hand, you speak of a Taliban that’s enormously well-financed and seems to be getting more sophisticated and perhaps even more capable. So building on that question is my own question.
MR. GHANI: Sure, I think – thank you for an excellent question and observation. The section on threats clearly underlines the logic of what the insurgency is doing. The contrast between the insurgency’s learning and counterinsurgency’s absence of learning is really quite striking. The insurgents are building on everything in the last thousand years of tradition of insurgency in the region, and are incorporating everything from Mao to Diep.
The counterinsurgency, by contrast, is not a learning organization, particularly on the part of the Afghan government. The Afghan government is not standing for governance. So the problem is, where would you need a game-changer? Unless the election becomes the critical game-changer, you’re not having anything else. The current Afghan government is not capable of ruling. They have been in power; can they point out to a single program that they’ve initiated to arrest the decline?
Instead, the game has been on whether the term of the president runs on the 22nd of May. We’ve wasted enormous amount of time on an issue that, really, the elite cares about. You know, whether he stays in office six more months or others is neither here nor there. The national interest would have required about two days’ discussion on this and a mechanism of resolving it. So if you’re pointing to the mechanism that the insurgency’s threat can be addressed in the short term, without the election, you’re not going to get it.
So it’s not that I’ve not considered; it’s that my considered judgment is that change is not going to occur. Too, in terms of where the situation currently is, my reading is that the Taliban has upgraded their capacity to all 34 provinces. The plan of action that they have arrived at is targeting a two-phase series of actions. Phase 1 is choice of targets; Phase 2 is simple verification. And they’ve put a structure for doing this. Now, this produces a changing environment for the new forces.
So the question is, who’s going to have the initiative? The Afghan government is not. It has not produced the kind of governance, the kind of district administrators or the kind of strategy to be able to get a reputation for good governance or delivery of services or tackling agriculture or tackling any of the major needs. The international community has not been coordinated. It failed miserably to address last winter’s drought and the consequences of it.
What will the implementation plan look like? The strategic goals are the right goals; the deployment has taken place; but what is the implementation arrangement on the ground? We are going to find out. So in that regard, on the one side, we know the nature of the threat has become enhanced, but the nature of who is going to take the first initiative is not known.
And I think this is the critical set of decisions that is going to confront both the new key international players on the ground and the Obama administration, because changing context is going to bring a series of decision where the contours of the strategy, where different things were accommodated within the same paper, would need to be defined much more clearly.
MR. KEMPE: So in other words, the signs of progress we’re reading about in the U.S. press and otherwise right now are over-exaggerated?
MR. GHANI: It’s a difficult balance, because the fighting season has not started in earnest. And once the fighting season starts, we will know the full nature of the threat.
MR KEMPE: General there, I see you. Yeah, thanks. And if you could identify yourself for the audience too, please, if you don’t mind.
Q: I’m Bob Magnus and I’m the one who is going to ask all of the questions, but I will ask just one. (Laughter.) Thank you very much for an excellent presentation and response to some very difficult questions. So you’re – even though this isn’t a political forum, you’re well prepared. (Laughter.) It’s not a big surprise, given what I will call the seasonality of the insurgency – I mean, there’s winter, there’s planting season, there’s harvesting season and there’s fighting season. I know because I’ve had the pleasure to be in your country with an enormously talented society, even though by standards of Iraq or the United States, we think that it’s primitive. But in fact, there’s a tremendous resilience of the people.
The concern I’ve got is exactly this flow of good and bad news and the distraction that it creates in Afghanistan or it creates when the shift goes to someplace else, like Pakistan. And understanding that this is inevitable, but the problem is, it’s no surprise that we’re going to get more news out of Afghanistan and more good news out of Afghanistan because we’ve got more U.S. forces going there. And on a transient basis, they will do some good, and the good will be reported and hopefully, there will be a few number of tragedies, but there will be in war, and those will also be reported.
But to be careful, as we are a very – we’re very fluid people; we like to see a problem, solve a problem and move on – to mistake what happens in this harvesting and fighting season as a long-term trend for the society. And I think the biggest problem we’ve got is not so much that the country will be distracted by the – our leadership will be distracted by Pakistan – but, in fact, that our populous will become weary of these ebbing and flowing – and I agree with you that this is a multi-year problem; four years is – I’m not saying it’s optimistic, but clearly, that was the lower band of something which we have.
So could you talk to us, as Americans, and to the quote, “West,” about how to translate a coherent U.S. strategy, which is now Af-Pak, but also a coherent NATO and ISAF strategy into something that we can sell ourselves over time? I think the Romans had a word called tolerance, which was not the kind of thing that Americans think of in tolerance; it was the ability to endure pain and suffering. And this is something where we, along with the Afghan people, have to endure.
MR. GHANI: Well, thank you. I had to count on you for asking difficult questions, and I’m delighted. Thank you and thank you for the service that you’ve rendered, both to your people and to Afghanistan. My first observation is, in a counterinsurgency environment, or in war, it’s the direction of the news, not the final result, that really matters. So we have – the first game-changer would be to produce a series of good-news stories from Afghanistan – not that they’re good news in the sense that the media temporarily reports it, but that there are changing events that convinces the American public that the blood and treasure that they’re putting is producing results.
So how do we do this? There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit. We pick the low-hanging fruit in order to create the sense of confidence among the Afghan people that things are going right, because if things are prioritized – when I was finance minister, I carried a reform every four months, but I carried 100 percent. I would not start something that I wasn’t intending to finish. I centralized the revenue in six weeks. Our strongmen had taken control of customs; we generated the political consensus and then I implemented it relentlessly. That created a sense that we knew what we were doing.
If we want to regain the initiative, we have to go from improvisation to a bit of choreography, because then you can provide a sense of where you’re going, and once you get there, you can tell people what you have done, and then say the next step. The first change with the new Afghan administration would be a 100-day plan of action. And it would have to be credible enough to create, then, the environment for subsequent things.
Let me shift, just slightly, grounds and see why I’m arguing this. You know, you’ve had troops in Korea – in South Korea – for decades. Is it really dawning on American public as to how many troops you have in Korea? They take it for granted because they’re not front news. Because there is not a threat on a daily basis, tolerance in the second sense – and in the first sense – is increasing. So we have to bring a condition. Second is the justification for the American public and for the European public is to be really there, front and center. Where is the justification coming? The justification is going to come from Afghan citizens.
When women stand up and say they want to go to school, even though people throw acids at them, that convinces the American public that these are people worth supporting. You know, Dexter from the New York Times – yeah – has just ended up, because of that story, he’s in Kandahar right now. You know, incidentally, congratulations – he’s won the Pulitzer. A lot of American citizens wrote and provided money to that school – I think over $25,000 has been collected by small checks, to just give to that school.
We need us to humanize the situation – to get the ordinary Afghan citizens to say their lives are improving in fundamental ways. Second is NATO needs to have an exit strategy in a very conscious way – not in the sense that NATO has to run away or break apart, but it has to have a sense of what will Afghan security institutions and political institutions look like to enable it to get out. This is what this paper attempts to lay down, because if you look in 2002 or 2004, the expectations were just the opposite. They were not arriving at an architecture of governance with us; it was a temporary set of measures in order to accommodate temporary considerations.
I think wisdom will now require really arriving at a four-to-10-year framework and relentlessly pursuing it. And this means two things: One, recognizing the limitations of every contributing country, that if they are not going to contribute troops to a real command structure, then it has to be understood as such. Two, what is the other contributions that they can make? Europe can make enormous set of contributions to the economic area. And if that area is brought, then the key insight of counterinsurgency, that it’s 20 percent use of force and 80 percent about governance and development, could become the mechanism of how to engage.
In this context, I think we have to develop joint decision-making mechanisms. The agricultural commission that was created for China by President Roosevelt, and actually signed into law by President Truman, is a model of the type of joint decision-making that one has to explore a lot of other mechanisms so that this fission that comes from parallel organizations in attempting to do things the most expensive way is changed. Illustration: One-third of U.S. forces today are doing civilian tasks. Are those civilian tasks really to be performed by American civilians, or can we perform them by Afghans?
You know, PRTs for instance, contract building of wells and building of schools – each supervision of a well takes a convoy of six to 10 cars. It’s a very risky adventure. Afghans have been digging wells for about 5,000 years; I think we should be trusted with digging wells. It will be done at one-tenth of the cost. So some simplification of the mechanisms and creating the mechanisms of joint ownership and decision-making could go a long way. And then the type of news that comes would be reinforced.
If the direction is right and the fight is seen as just, I think a cause matters both to the American public and to Afghan public. American public, in my reading – you know, I have two American children – are very patriotic. If the patriotic sense is harnessed to this global effort and that the threat is regional and the threat there is to lives here, the justification could be established, but they have to see movement. And I think movement is possible.
MR. KEMPE: Thank you, Ashraf. I know there are more questions in the audience and I particularly apologize to a couple of people who I just didn’t get to. And I’m sorry about that and I’ll get you first at the next meeting. Let me just say, in brief, that there’s a lot to chew on in this report and what you said today. I think the whole idea of matching short-term actions with long-term goals is such a simple one, but it’s one that so rarely is done – and the fact that we’ve laid out the long-term goals here against which the short-term actions can be matched.
Now, will that always be perfect? No, but you at least have to have them in front of you. And I think the long-term goals you’ve laid out are actually inspiring in the sense that they’re doable, there’s a lot there, there’s enormous possibilities in Afghanistan. And I think one of the things that one has to combat in this town is, you know, too rapid a fatigue about a situation and great cynicism, very often, about situations. So I think this is a very important report.
There’s also some interesting news in all of this today, for anyone who was following that. I think the response to Secretary Clinton’s remarks on Pakistan was quite interesting, and the doubts about what’s going on in terms of counterinsurgency on the ground in Afghanistan from someone who’s just come back from the ground in Afghanistan.
The election is a crucial turning point, of course, and the call for a hunger fast on corruption for 3,000 senior officials. Not to mention, for all of those who follow anthropology, I think we have delved into anthropology in a depth that is not usually done at the Atlantic Council.
So I want to thank you on behalf of the audience, Ashraf. But I want to thank you in the way that you thanked General Magnus for your service to your country, Afghanistan, for your service to your other country, the United States, for your service to the world – but, most of all, for your service to the Atlantic Council, of course. Thank you very much.
MR. GHANI: (Chuckles.) Thank you. (Applause.)
It’s a treat to be with you. My last thing is, there’s a 300-page version of this in Pashto, Dari and Uzbek that is really going to, hopefully, launch a national debate in Afghanistan. So we are not keeping this confined to English and thanks to Fred’s prodding because, without your prodding, I think I would have never done this or that one. (Chuckles.) So thank you.
(Laughter.)
MR. KEMPE: Every week. So where’s that tenure – (inaudible, laughter). What do you mean they’re running for president? We haven’t finished the report. Thank you very much, Ashraf.
(Applause.)
MR. GHANI: Thank you.
Transcript by Federal News Service, Washington, D.C.
Shuja Nawaz, director of the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center, spoke on NPR’s Morning Edition . He shared his thoughts on the newly introduced House bill calling for $10 billion in “military aid and development assistance” to Pakistan over the next five years.