Full transcript of the July 30 event “Debating the United States’ Role in Afghanistan After 2014” hosted by the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center and Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security.

Welcome and Moderator:
Barry Pavel,
Vice President and Director of the Brent Scowcroft Center,
Atlantic Council

Speakers:
David Sedney,
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for
Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia,
Department of Defense

Shuja Nawaz,
Director, South Asia Center,
Atlantic Council

Joshua Foust,
Freelance Journalist.

Location:
Washington, D.C.

Date: Monday, July 29, 2013

Transcript by
Federal News Service
Washington, D.C.

BARRY PAVEL: (In progress) – event. Now, thanks for coming to the Loews Madison Hotel for this Atlantic Council event on the future roles of the United States and its allies in Afghanistan after 2014. This is my first event since the Atlantic Council moved and rebranded and transformed and all those buzzwords. And so I’m sure it’ll be a hundred times better than normal, but I do – we look forward to a really interesting discussion.

It’s not exactly a midsummer night’s dream, but it is a – this is a very timely and important debate. And we felt compelled to hold this forum because of what we were seeing being discussed as the various options and policy choices regarding U.S. and allied interests in Afghanistan. We at the council have paid special attention to developments in Afghanistan. And certainly the three panelists I have here today have been deeply, deeply involved, all of them, in the very issues that we are discussing. So I am really just thrilled and forgive me if I just end up watching and listening myself as opposed to moderating, but this is going to be a really interesting session.

So the Atlantic Council’s work on Afghanistan probably didn’t start in 2008, but there was a major effort led by General Jones who had just joined the council as chairman after leading NATO into command in Afghanistan. He published a very hard-hitting Atlantic Council report that I believe in the very first sentence said that the international community was failing in its efforts in Afghanistan.

Since then, Shuja Nawaz, on our panel, has been leading very intensive efforts across a number of years to continue to track events in Afghanistan and in the broader region and make recommendations to the relevant policymakers and players. And certainly the Scowcroft Center has also been following events through our work on NATO and the various ministerials and policy statements that have come out through that. And so what to do in Afghanistan after 2014 has been a major concern, certainly for NATO and for us. And this – we’ll – we will certainly address that lens in this discussion today.

NATO has been examining its options and various milestones since its involvement began. And the moment really is now for the United States and NATO to decide what are its roles post-2014, what are its interests, what should be its associated military missions and then, following that, the right amount of presence – the mix and number of forces. I, myself, do not prefer to start the conversation with the number of troops because that comes out of the other issues that I just mentioned, but we’ll certainly get to that as well today.

Many of you know the relationship between the U.S. and Afghanistan has been, to say the least, frosty and probably frostier over the last few months. If you’ve seen the press reports of President Obama’s video teleconference with Karzai recently was sort of one of many such very difficult discussions. You’ve seen the comments by President Karzai about the U.S., not very helpful in many – in many people’s opinion.

And in some ways all of this is diluting what should be the main topics – the topics I mentioned: interests, missions, forces, roles. That’s what we’d like to cover today. And there’ve been a lot of discussion in the press about the zero option, although General Dunford said as recently as yesterday that he is not planning against any option that looks like zero. Other options that have been discussed have been the suggested number of forces by General Mattis and General Allen, as well as the originally planned 8,000 number of residual troops.

Whichever option it ends up being, we currently have about 63,000 forces in Afghanistan, scheduled to drop to 34,000 in February and then, of course, we’ll see towards the end of the year. Many of the United States allies are awaiting this decision from the United States. Some have already made their decisions.

Denmark withdrew its forces earlier this month. And Germany and Italy have pledged to stay in terms of a training and advising role after 2014. So a wide range of players getting ready to make their decisions or already having made them. So this really to us is crunch time and hence the panel that we’re engaging today on these issues.

With that, I think I would like turn to introduce my panel. There’s a live Twitter discussion going on. The hashtag is an Orwellian hashtag, #wagingpeace. We can discuss that too, perhaps, during the – during this conversation. (Laughter.) I would have voted for other hashtags, but this is not a democracy here. (Laughter.) In any event, let me turn to my panelists.

David Sedney, a long-time colleague of mine. He most recently was former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs. He stepped down in June, so we’re going to get some very fresh views and, I have no doubt, very sharp views from Mr. Sedney. He was also the DASD for East Asia from 2007 to 2009. Before that he was DCM in Beijing from 2004 to 2007. And before that, he was DCM in Kabul from 2002 to 2004.

So, all in all, an extraordinarily accomplished and wide-ranging public service career and I’m really looking forward this next set of contributions in light of his background. These will be very important policy contributions from David on a wide range of issues in Asia, in South Asia and elsewhere. So I’m just going to keep watching him and hopefully following him on Twitter when he jumps on.

Second in the middle we have Dr. Shuja Nawaz who directs the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center. He has worked previously at RAND, the U.S. Institute of Peace, CSIS. He led projects on Pakistan and the Middle East at all of these organizations. One of our most important commentators on Afghanistan, Pakistan and South Asia, a great contributor to all of the debates surrounding this region and what’s going on in this region. He’s also an adviser for senior government and military officials in U.S., Europe and Pakistan, and a great colleague of mine at the Atlantic Council. I always love working with him and learning from him every time I engage him.

And then third, just another brilliant analyst on these issues is Josh Foust. He’s a freelance journalist who currently edits the State of Play collection at Medium which covers foreign policy issues. He was a fellow at the American security project. He was a senior political analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency and Army Intelligence and Security Command in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. He’s written profusely for – prolifically for The Atlantic, The New York Times, many other publications. I follow him on Twitter. He’s also a former young Atlanticist and attended the 2012 NATO Chicago summit in Chicago with us, the Atlantic Council, inside the perimeter where we had a range of discussions with NATO officials, and will do so, no doubt, again for the 2014 summit.

So without further ado, I’ll ask my panelists to give a few minutes of remarks each on sort of the main issues that I laid out. Then I’ll engage them a bit more. And then we want to have a conversation with you to get your thoughts, your insights and your questions for them as well. And so, David, we’d love to hear from you now. Thanks.

DAVID SEDNEY: Thank you. Thanks very much, Barry. I want to thank you, Shuja, and your colleagues at the Atlantic Council for putting on this – putting on this forum and for your very sophisticated and in-depth interest in Afghanistan over the years. Secondly, I’d like to thank all of you in the audience for coming down on a sultry Washington midsummer morning. And thirdly, I’d like to stress for all of you that while I was in the administration up until June, I am no longer. And my views and opinions are entirely my own, as you’ll – as you’ll shortly see. (Laughter.)

I agree – I agree very much with Barry that the focus should be on interest. And in answer to his question about post-2014, I think it’s really important that we all have clear idea of where we are today. And that’s really, really hard. We are all subject to a relentless, negative and false portrayal of Afghanistan in the U.S. and international media. I’ve made that point directly to representatives of The New York Times, The Washington Post, other journalists. And I think it’s very hard for the American public and for American leadership to make accurate judgments when they’re continually bombarded with what I call – with what I know is false information about Afghanistan.

Why do I say that? First of all, it’s because it’s relentlessly negative when there are huge positives about Afghanistan. And when I say that to audiences, people always look sideways at each other and think, what is this guy smoking? What’s wrong with him? Doesn’t he understand? And the answer is, yes, I do understand. The problem is that the environment around is such that it’s very hard for people to understand and to even think of Afghanistan and the events there over the last year, over the last 10 years really, in positive way.

Why do I say that? Well, let’s go back to the interest that Barry mentioned. What were our interests when we into Afghanistan in 2001? We wanted to prevent al-Qaida from ever doing an attack on the United States again. We wanted to ensure the Taliban, which had hosted the al-Qaida, was not able to take over the government of Afghanistan. And we wanted to give Afghanistan a chance to become a better society. We’ve succeeded in all three.

Al-Qaida is only a shadow of its former self. The Taliban is not now and will not in the near future – maybe even – I would say even in the medium to the long-term future does not have the ability to take over Afghanistan again. And Afghanistan has made huge progress in building its society, in building its economy. It’s been very weak on the political side. And if you focus just on President Karzai and the few high-level exchanges, the kind of things Barry was talking about, you get a negative picture.

But if you look at Afghanistan more broadly, a country where life expectancy has increased, infant mortality is sharply down, maternal mortality is sharply down, access to education has just exploded, a place where people’s economic – people economically are much better off than they were two years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, a place where the U.N. says it has made the greatest progress of any post-conflict country in recent decades.

Now, of course, Afghanistan started from a very low base. Its great progress still leaves it in a very weak and fragile position. And there are huge problems. You can read about those problems every day. But going back to my first point, if all you read about is the problems, if all you hear about is the problems, if all you think about is the problems, then you don’t realize that we have made great success in Afghanistan.

Therefore, the answer to Barry’s question, in my view, is it’s absolutely vital for American national interest, the interest that I laid out and, I would add, another vital interest – the credibility of the United States. We said we were going to go into Afghanistan and prevent it from going back to the Taliban and the al-Qaida. And we need to make sure we keep that promise to prevent future movements from thinking they can take a different path and to ensure that the Taliban and al-Qaida don’t come back.

In order to do that, we need to have a continuing security commitment. We need to have a continuing economic commitment. And all the bad news about Afghanistan that you can read in today’s Washington Post, New York Times or Wall Street Journal – they all had negative stories today and I can debunk every one if anybody wants to ask – but how many people have reported that yesterday the Swedish government announced that it was going to increase its assistance to Afghanistan next year by 50 percent – to go from 20 (million dollars) to $31 million of assistance?

Sweden is an important country. They’ve had a greater long-term commitment than almost any other country. And they are making the decision that continuing to invest in Afghanistan is worthwhile because of the success that Afghanistan has had. So I believe it is vitally important that the United States make a strong commitment. I agree with Barry that other countries are waiting to see what the United States does. I believe that every day we wait makes it less likely that we’ll succeed, less likely that the Afghans will succeed over the long term.

I think the danger is greater of negative interference from neighboring countries – Pakistan or Iran – than the threat from the Taliban. The biggest success story in Afghanistan, I’ll close by saying, is the Afghan National Army. The Afghan National Army has taken almost complete responsibility for security in Afghanistan this year. And it has done so with very little support from the United States and international forces – much less support than even a year ago it was counting on.

In every encounter with the Taliban that has either prevailed or if was – suffered a temporary setback, it’s been able to push them back. That’s not a story you read in the U.S. media but it’s a story that if you go to Afghanistan, if you talk to both Afghans, Americans, or if you talk to the Taliban, they’ll tell you the Afghan security forces are carrying the load. Will they continue to do so? Only if we stay the course as well.

MR. PAVEL: Thanks very much, David. You raised a lot of issues that I’ll want to come back to you on, but I thought you hit definitely all the right issues. And I’d love hear now from Shuja on – your views on these issues. Thanks.

SHUJA NAWAZ: Thank you, Barry. And I – and I should clarify that I’m the author of that so-called Orwellian hashtag – (laughter) – which is – and it certainly got your attention. And that was the whole aim.

So that is indeed the motto of the South Asia Center that we are going to violently wage peace in the region. And don’t stand in our way. (Laughter.) There is – I think, as David has pointed out, there is a cold war going on about Afghanistan. And the cold war is not just between the media and people on the Hill and people in the administration, but it’s also between the special inspector general on Afghanistan and the USAID and the Department of Defense.

I think almost every second day one gets a barrage of emails from the SIGAR office pointing out to what has not been doing and pointing out the discrepancies. And so that is really what is feeding the media frenzy in many ways. I think that’s an explanation perhaps of what we are witnessing. And this is not surprising because there is now a wave of pessimism that surrounds the Afghanistan adventure. People have talked themselves into thinking that the only way of saving the United States from any further embarrassment is to exit Afghanistan in a hurry.

And I wouldn’t surprise me if 2013 becomes the operative date given the way the temperatures have been rising between President Karzai and the U.S. administration, and how the U.S. Congress now seems hell-bent on trying to get out and focus back on domestic issues. Unfortunately, it appears that the president also is inclined to getting out and that he may well have checked out and is now focused largely on domestic issues. So Afghanistan may suffer yet again a fate of abandonment, which is what scares the daylights out of the leadership in Kabul, I’m sure.

But let’s look to the future. What after? What after 2014? The main thing really is what happens in 2014. There is an election that is scheduled. And we don’t know when that will actually take place. And if I may steal an idea from a very respected scholar and practitioner of U.S. policy in Afghan who’s in the audience, Ambassador Neumann, I think there’s perhaps a serious consideration that should be given to another surge, a surge at the time of the election in order to ensure that the election actually occurs and that it provides a security cordon in which the election can occur and in which no shenanigans occur so that the, at least on election day, regardless of what fixes have been put in prior to election day, that the elections are reasonably fair and open and competitive.

So that may be something worth looking at, perhaps even more so than reconciliation, which is going to be a very difficult task because the Taliban have known that the U.S. has set itself a very short deadline. It’s difficult to bargain when you – when you go in and say, you know, we just don’t have time. We are leaving, but we need to reach an agreement with you. (Laughter.) And they have the time. And they’re not going to reach an agreement to suit you. And so this is going to make it very difficult as we go forward.

Regional actors are going to be very critical, I entirely agree with David. It’s not just Pakistan, it’s Iran, it’s the Central Asian republics, it’s Russia, it’s China and, of course, India. You can’t minimize in any way the role of India on many fronts, particularly on the economic front. And on Pakistan, yes, there is the danger of continued sanctuary and the use of Pakistan as a base, but a senior U.S. government official has been consistently saying in Washington circles that only 10 percent of the attacks in Afghanistan are actually by the Haqqani group.

So the question really is, what about the rest of the country and the 90 percent of the attacks? Where are emanating from and how does one prepare the Afghan national forces and support them with the intelligence, with surveillance beyond 2014 so that they can do the job for which they’ve been trained? And that’s a challenge which still sits on the table. I haven’t seen any clear answers to that. Maybe David can enlighten us on what’s on the table on that front.

Economics, I think, is going to be key. Afghanistan, as you know, has a – has a GDP of around 16 billion (dollars), most of it financed with aid. It is sitting next to a country that has a GDP of – I’m referring to Pakistan – a GDP of somewhere between 200 (billion dollars) and 250 billion (dollars). That’s the formal economy. And if you add another 200 billion (dollars) from the informal economy, there is a tremendous possibility of codependence in terms of trade and development for these two countries. There is already a transit trade agreement; it’s very critical that the United States now use its relationships with Afghanistan, with Pakistan and with India to open the transit trade doors, to facilitate this corridor, because India is going to be the largest partner in this growth effort in Afghanistan. It has, after all, given well over a billion dollars already in assistance to Afghanistan. The good thing is that they are holding back on getting involved militarily, so that will help the relationship with Pakistan.

Similarly, the U.S. can help by having India and Pakistan talk to each other. This doesn’t mean a wide-open, public involvement, because nobody in the subcontinent will welcome it, but it certainly means using the power of moral suasion behind closed doors to do this.

Now, in order to achieve all of this, Barry, I don’t think the zero option is really a worthwhile option, because the zero option will become an absolute zero option. And once it starts going south, the United States is going to lose credibility and all the investment that the U.S. has made in Afghanistan is going to go down the tubes, the investment that David was referring to, in education, in the political system, in giving the infrastructure that could lay the basis for a stronger economy.

I go back to a report that the South Asia Center launched in 2009, and it’s still available at our website. It was a 10-year framework for the economic development of Afghanistan; I would say 90 percent of that is still waiting to be implemented, and it has to be implemented by Afghanistan itself. The rest of the world, whether it’s Europe or the United States, can help, but the Afghans have to get their act together; they have to work out some kind of a national compact so that the polity of Afghanistan remains intact and that any attempt to trying to divide the country along ethnic lines is nullified.

Let me stop at that and we’ll take the questions as they come.

Thank you again.

MR. PAVEL: Thank you, Shuja.

And now, I’d like to hear from Josh Faust on these issues. Josh?

JOSHUA FAUST: Thanks, Barry. I feel like I get invited to these things to be the resident naysayer.

You know, it’s –

MR. PAVEL: (Inaudible) – you’re correct. (Laughter.)

MR. FAUST: So it’s interesting talking about this rush to the exits in D.C., about how Congress wants to essentially defund the war, and how there’s this growing pessimism. And I would actually place that as the result of a considered value calculation, a value proposition, that a lot of people who are responsible for spending money in this country have made toward Afghanistan. The U.S. has spent an absolutely outrageous amount of money in that – in that country since 2001. These daily SIGAR emails are an attempt to actually follow where the money goes. And what they found is that most of it’s been wasted.

Just today, the SIGAR email that came out was talking about a huge number of subcontractors working for USAID, who have verifiable links to al-Qaida militants operating in Afghanistan. I think it’s a fair question for Congress to go back to that and say, why are we funding al-Qaida in Afghanistan through crappy contracting processes?

So when people look at the war and they see pessimism, they say, OK, we’re spending – what is it now, $70 billion a year, I think – some total – and we don’t know how much of that is going to the very militants we’re fighting. And this has been going on for many, many years and there’s been very little effort taken to address this or to minimize it in some way.

And I think at a very basic level, people look at that kind of a – of a proposition and think, well, what’s the point? Just today – Mr. Sedney referred to a story in the New York Times with General Dunford, who’s leading all of ISAF in Afghanistan. And he said there are about 75 al-Qaida left in the country, and that they’re on the run and hard to find, but 75. In 2009, Leon Panetta, when he was running the CIA, estimated there were 100. So in the last four years, we’ve spent, what, $90 billion, lost a thousand troops and gotten 25 al-Qaida fighters out of Afghanistan. I think it’s fair for people to look at that and say, what’s the point?

But beyond that, looking towards the future of Afghanistan, one thing that even Shuja, in his comments, I think, is completely skating past is the political reality of Afghanistan. And the simple fact of the matter is, it is in America’s interest to have a stable and sovereign Afghanistan, and the way you have that is by having an effective and legitimate government. And right now, the government in Kabul is neither stable, nor effective, nor legitimate, and despite all of the talk about troops and economic development and schools and medical clinics and whatever else – road construction – if we don’t have a functioning government, we will lose everything at the end of the day.

If the election next year, which is supposed to come off, isn’t seen as legitimate – which is not a function of sending troops to secure polling stations; it’s a function of how much fraud the politicians running commit during the election – if that doesn’t go off, we will lose big-time, because Afghans will have gone through, at this point, three presidential elections; all of them will have been stolen. And I’m convinced that that will permanently delegitimize the idea of a representative government in Afghanistan for the long run. And if that happens, we lose.

The biggest problem in the 2009 election in Afghanistan wasn’t violence at polling stations; it was the fact that Hamid Karzai stole millions of votes; even Abdullah stole millions of votes, and he still lost. There is this overwhelming sense that the government that’s running the country right now is not there fairly, and that they’re not treating people fairly. Over the last three years, the parliament in Afghanistan has passed almost a dozen laws that restrict various basic rights that we would consider fundamental to any kind of functioning government, and they’re doing this because that’s what they want, and I think it’s important to acknowledge that. But they’re also reversing all of these chances at a better society that we supposedly invaded the country to give them.

At the end of the day, when you look at the three pillars that President Obama built his entire surge strategy on in 2009, I think – I think Dave laid these out right: They were preventing al-Qaida from ever coming back, preventing the Taliban from getting a stake in the government and keeping the government alive long enough to have some sort of legitimacy. Those are all goals with negative values attached to them. It takes one exception for any of them to be invalidated. If the government isn’t valid, then we’re failing point three. If there’s al-Qaida still operating in the country, we’ve lost point two (sic: one). If the Taliban still has a realistic chance of gaining power, at least over a certain portion of the country, which they do, then we’ve lost point two.

This is the problem with the way the U.S. has structured its entire mission in Afghanistan. It’s been based on essentially proving negatives, so that as long as you have one positive example, the goals are therefore invalid, and therefore, we have to commit to the country years and years and years of expensive, thousand-soldier commitments, just to ensure that a negative doesn’t get proven in Afghanistan.

And to come back to it, I think this is why people, especially in Congress now, looking at a crashing budget with a troubled economy where they have to cut something, they look at that, and they say, what’s the point? In the long run, what are we accomplishing? Despite all of the efforts to build up the ANSF, which I agree, has been a really stunning success – I’m genuinely surprised, especially compared to where they were in 2009, how effective they are, but they still have a 25 percent dropout rate. Twenty five percent of the soldiers who sign up each year walk off the job. If that happened in this country, we would consider it a disaster. We would think that we have completely failed in our obligation to defend the country, if 25 percent of our soldiers walked off the job every year, just went AWOL.

So at a very, very basic level, despite all of this progress that’s going on, there are fundamental structural flaws built into our mission and built into our operations that are still not being addressed. I mean, I keep coming back to the political side of this here. The U.S. response to Afghanistan’s political witness has been to send more troops. They tried to send a civilian surge with the State Department in 2009 and 2010; they got, what, a third, I think, of the number of personnel they really needed. And even then, those civilian personnel hid out on military bases, took day trips to go visit occasional district governors or village shuras and didn’t spend any concrete time building up local political institutions. Some of them have worked in some places where there’s enough security for it to take hold, but at the end of the day, the fundamental Afghan experience of American-administered government is corrupt and abusive. And that’s something that’s going to poison our long-term efforts to build any kind of a stable government.

OK, I’m in danger of going on a rant right now, but I’ll leave it there as kind of an introduction. Like, the way that I would suggest looking at this is instead of looking at it as only a security commitment, or only a security force commitment, or only a limited counterterrorism movement, is actually looking at the fundamental basic purpose of what we wanted to get done there. Despite – 12 years now? – 12 years of commitment – almost 12 years, I should say – there are still al-Qaida fighters left in the country planning attacks. They’re still going freely back and forth across the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan to the point to where the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan are in almost weekly exchanges of artillery fire trying to kill each other’s militants that are straddling the border. The Taliban is still powerful in many parts of the country, is actively displacing the government and is actively displacing U.S. troops, which are in the process of withdrawal.

And again, this issue of the election next year – I don’t think we can overemphasize how important it is. If it is not a broadly legitimate election, we will be in serious trouble, because whoever takes over Afghanistan after that will not have any legitimacy in the local population. And if that happens, then we’ve lost our chance to influence any kind of positive outcome in the country.

MR. PAVEL: Thanks very much, Josh.

I want to sort of plumb into these issues more directly, and the ones that David rightly raised, the question of interests, and the three that have discussed and get – just the panel’s broader sense for how to measure this, how do we know it when we see it. Even when there is success, nothing is really irreversible. And so if we indeed decide that we have been somewhat successful in preventing a Taliban takeover, you know, in the near-term future, obviously, that doesn’t have – that can – you know, as time goes on, that becomes less and less necessarily a staying, you know, status quo constant.

So perhaps, David, just giving you the next – the next word on these three issues, which I was going to ask you anyway, before Josh, I thought, addressed them directly, how do we know we’ve prevented al-Qaida from being able to mount another attack? How do we know we’ve been successful in preventing a Taliban takeover? And then in terms of bettering society, all we can ever do is give them a good head start, and it’s not only government, but government’s important. I mean, sort of – how – what’s your sense of these metrics and why they’re trending positive?

MR. SEDNEY: Sure, I’ll – I’m going to start off by saying, of course, it’s clear from what I said, not only do I think that what Josh said is 90 percent wrong; I think it’s dangerously wrong. It is very dangerous to listen to such things that are so wrong. And I’ll hit a few of them, but I won’t be able to hit every one of them.

Let me start off with the al-Qaida – the al-Qaida example. The simplistic view saying, well, some people said there were 100 a few years ago, some people say there’s 75 now, sounds like there were 100, now 75 and 25 have gone away – that’s not the situation. The situation was there were some small number, but al-Qaida’s always been a small number. There are only a few hundred really important in al-Qaida. Most of those are dead.

Now, hundreds of new people coming to join the al-Qaida, people from all over the Islamic world, fundamentalists, have come to join the al-Qaida in Pakistan, in Afghanistan. They come through training camps, they get replenished and they get killed – or they spend most of their time trying to stay alive, trying to keep their organization just barely functional.

So to answer your question, Barry, another way we can tell that al-Qaida’s not been able to carry out attacks is because they haven’t. I think the fact that they still want to is very clear from not just their past, but also from the documents and videos that were recovered when the leader of the al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden, was killed a couple of years ago. It was very clear that al-Qaida’s objective of attacking the United States and our Western allies remained, and that they continued to – they continue to have that objective. They’ve not been able to carry it out – do they want to continue? Do those hundreds of recruits keep coming to Afghanistan? Yes. Do some of them go to Syria, Yemen, North Africa? Yes. But the heartland is still the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan, so that’s been a success.

On the Taliban being able to take over – contrary to what Josh says, the Taliban is not making advances in Afghanistan; in fact, the Taliban has not made any advances in several years. The Taliban has been pushed back because of the troop surge that the United States and our allies put in, and this year, the Afghan national security forces have maintained those gains. And if the Afghan security forces, by the end of the year, are able to control the same areas, the same district centers, that they began the year with, that’s going to be a signal victory, because you’ve gone from a highly modern and highly mobile air-supported military of the coalition last year, to a – to a(n) Afghanistan army that is very capable, but is very challenged, as well. And if they can hold those gains by the end of the year, that would be a major success for them.

And so far, the evidence on the ground is that they are holding their ground. They are not losing ground to the Taliban. With all due respect to Josh, that’s just false. They are actually holding the ground that they have kept. And all the indications are that they are willing to take the fight to the – to the Taliban in places, such as northern Kunar , where the United States and our allies left two, three, four years ago, the Afghan army today is moving up the Kunar River Valley in places that the U.S. left three to four years ago. So there are actually some places where they are asserting control that they didn’t have before.

And the third area, the Afghan government – I agree with both Shuja and Josh that the elections are really important. I absolutely disagree with – and you need to ask Afghans this – that the present government is not seen as legitimate. Yes, there were fraudulent – there were problems with fraud, as there were in many other elections in that region. Yes, there was violence, but the Afghan people broadly saw the results in 2004 and 2009 as legitimate. Did they meet our standards? Were they the kind of elections we’d like to have? Have we created Switzerland? Absolutely not. Once you set that standard, of course, Afghanistan will fail, and those who set such false standards then come up with an easy answer to failure.

But, in fact, Afghanistan does face a huge challenge to have a legitimate change of power. Pakistan, a country that has been in existence for much, much longer, had its first peaceful civilian transfer of power from one elected government to another, this year, after over 60 years. It took 60 years for Pakistan to do that.

Countries of Central Asia to the north have never had such a thing. Iran – I’ll leave it to an Iranian specialist, but you can argue that is not the case there, either. So Afghanistan is trying to do something that is well ahead of its neighbors and well beyond what – almost any fair test you should be able to expect them to do. If they can do it in a way that’s broadly legitimate, that will be a great victory.

I do agree with Josh that we’ve underinvested in the civilian political sphere in Afghanistan. We’ve overinvested in an individual, President Karzai, and underinvested in the broader polity, and that’s something that I would agree with Shuja. That’s where we need a surge. We need a surge on the political side to support the Afghan people’s desire to have a new government that is not like the present government, that is not – that is less corrupt and that it gives them a chance, a good chance, to have the kind of future that they deserve, that they’ve suffered so long in order to achieve.

MR. PAVEL: Thanks, David.

Others, did you have additional thoughts on those three issues and sort of how do we measure and –

MR. NAWAZ: I’m sure Josh has some rebuttal. (Scattered laughter.)

I just want to mention a couple of things. One, in fact, Afghanistan has been a national entity much longer than Pakistan. And Pakistan should recognize that and stop pretending that it has a controlling influence on Afghanistan, which has been a misguided notion that has soured the relationship between these two very important neighbors. I think that change is now occurring.

I don’t know how it will hold, and particularly, with the new civilian government in Pakistan, because it’s going to be fighting a war inside, in order to reassert civilian supremacy. Winning an election is just the first step; actually being able to govern and to show an ability to bring the people along and to show the military particularly that you can lead on security and economic issues both is going to be very critical for the success of this current adventure in Pakistan, which was the re-election for the third time of Prime Minister Sharif. So I think that’s a very important factor in this.

The other element that you mentioned was the role of the Afghan national security forces. I still – you know, having studied the military in that part of the world for some time, I still worry that the United States tends to put far too much emphasis on military partners and much less on developing political partnerships and civil society partnerships in the countries that it deals with, largely because it’s so much easier to press a button and get somebody to get something done, and your metrics then rise and, you know, you say, well done, you know, we’ve moved up the chart.

The danger of creating such a large military that the Afghan economy cannot support means that you’re going to, of necessity, require Western assistance, not just for the economy of Afghanistan, but also for the military of Afghanistan, to pay their salaries and to take into account the efficient rate, which is really going to be a hemorrhaging effect on the military.

But the thing that really worries me most is the potential for a military coup in Afghanistan, because if the political system cannot be righted and if the elections fail, then the only well-organized political party is going to be the military. And so there’s always a danger that Afghanistan may follow the route of Pakistan or Egypt, and I think that’s something that we would regret.

MR. FAUST: Yeah, thanks. I mean, it – to kind of respond to something Dave said, it wasn’t just some dude who said there were 100 al-Qaida there; it was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon Panetta, giving his assessment of the threat there.

But you know, it was interesting. Like, we – you were speaking earlier about how there’s this like endless wave of bad news and no one talks about the good news – this is the first time I’ve heard that there are hundreds of al-Qaida fighters going every year into Pakistan that are getting attrited by either U.S. counterterrorism efforts or by the Afghan national security forces. I mean, that’s never been in any of the 1206 reports that they put out; that hasn’t been in any of the official assessments.

So again, like, this comes back to when people look at the information available to them, and they don’t hear about apparently this massive population transfer of al-Qaida fighters in Pakistan, that – they look at the numbers of what the officials say when they’re trying to give their assessments of the war of what’s going on, that that’s what people make their decision off of.

But built into that, though, there is still no sense of how that actually stops. How do you stop hundreds of people from going to the hinterlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan? If apparently, hundreds of them are able to do so right now, in – after an enormous drone campaign attacking every al-Qaida camp that we can find in northwest Pakistan, in the midst of an incredible surge over many years, since 2006, to try to clear al-Qaida out of the northeastern Afghanistan – out of eastern Afghanistan, I mean, I think people living in Khost, Ghazni, Paktia, Zabul would all disagree that the Taliban is in retreat there – what do we – what do we do with that kind of information? How do we actually pivot from an ambiguous situation where people on the ground tell reporters openly that they’re terrified of what happens when the U.S. withdraws because they think the Taliban is coming back, because they know all of their neighbors who were part of the Taliban and put down their weapons while the U.S. was there and will pick them up again when the U.S. leaves again – how do you actually deal with that? That’s I think one of the fundamental questions that we’re trying to get at here is that despite the decade and – almost a decade and a half of effort that we’ve put into this country, we haven’t answered that fundamental question of how you actually take an insurgent force, which is the Taliban, get them to put down their weapons and adopt a political posture – which is how insurgencies tend to end is when a militant force is made political. That’s still missing, that’s still the missing part of the equation.

MR. SEDNEY: Got to respond on two points. First, the attrition rate is entirely a false argument. My job over the last four years when I was in the Department of Defense was – my primary objective, my primary task was to help build the Afghanistan security forces. The attrition rate of the Afghan security forces when it was – when there were 60,000 is about the same; the attrition rate, the percentage of people who didn’t complete their – didn’t complete their tours was about the same as it is now. With that attrition rate, they’ve grown from about 60,000 to 350,000. There are many, many Afghans who are signing up for the Afghan security forces. In fact, if you look at the turnover rate in some forces – for example, the U.S. Marine Corps has a very high turnover rate by design. So a high turnover rate is not evidence of incapacity. It depends on who is turning over. And if people at the mid-levels and senior levels of the officer corps are not leaving, which they’re not, and if you’re getting a turnover at the rifleman level, actually, you can have a pretty good security force, which is what the Afghans are doing. So again, it’s a false argument, and people shouldn’t pay any attention to it.

Secondly, on the issue that – of the al-Qaida in Afghanistan, the al-Qaida are primarily in Pakistan. That’s where the al-Qaida leadership is. That’s where Osama bin Laden was found. The fighters in Afghanistan have been fairly low-level, and their numbers have been able to be kept down by continual attacks by the United States. But the key is Pakistan. And of course, the U.S. surge has not impacted Pakistan. The U.S. has not put forces into Pakistan. And that’s really an entirely separate question than Afghanistan.

Finally, I have been to Khost. I have been to Paktika. I’ve been to all those places, and I have talked to Afghans, both civilians and military. And they do not say that the Taliban is coming back. The Taliban did make an effort to come back in 2004, (200)5, (200)6, (200)7, (200)8, (200)9, and they are much stronger now than they were then, but that’s because the United States underinvested in Afghanistan because of our need – because of our, see, political need to go into Iraq. But since we began the surge in 2009, we have pushed the Taliban back. They are not expanding their influence right now. There is no evidence for that, and it’s very important that people not leave here thinking that that is the case.

MR. PAVEL: So let me move this further a little bit towards some other issues that are – that are of interest, and let’s focus for now on the security piece. What do each of you think might be the most appropriate missions for U.S. and allied forces after 2014? And then what – I mean, what do you think the U.S. should do? We’re gathered here to sort of assess the status of where we are but also to say – to make it – to render recommendations on what should be done. So what do you think the key missions are, and what do you think the key policy choices are for a presence post-2014 in Afghanistan, if you have views on those things?

MR. SEDNEY: Well, I will start off by first of all echoing Shuja’s concerns about the future of the Afghan military. And that’s why I think there’s an absolute need for continuing train, advise and assist mission by U.S. military and by our NATO partners who have done such an excellent job in building that military. I think it’s also important to continue those activities with respect to the police and the intelligence services because the concerns that Shuja raised I think are very valid, and in order to help ensure that the concerns don’t become reality, it’s important to have that train, advise and assist mission there, important to continue the support. And it is also for our own interest that we have the ability to carry out counterterrorism operations on those targets which the Afghan military won’t be able to carry out for some period of time in the future. Although that’ll be a small number of forces, it’s an important mission.

MR. NAWAZ: Barry, I think there’s been far too much talk about the numbers and much less about the details of what those numbers will do. And from what I hear David say, you know, how do you assist? And so in my view, apart from the CT aspect, the counterterrorism, the ISR aspect is going to be critical because the Afghans don’t have that capacity. Without the eyes and ears that United States and the coalition can provide, they’re really going to be at a loss. They’re after all fighting a asymmetrical war in which the enemy has a great advantage of being able to melt into the countryside into the communities. And for that reason it’s going to be quite critical also to focus much more on the community police to be able to keep them out of the communities rather than try to roust them once they’ve entered.

MR. FOUST: Yeah, I mean, I actually agree that – building up ISR capabilities, intelligence capabilities, analytic capabilities. But most important, logistical capabilities is going to be a really key factor here. One of the big weaknesses built into the ANSF is their total dependence on the U.S. military for a lot of long chain things that we kind of internalize. But for a military being built from the ground up, they wouldn’t really think of.

But I’d extend that a little further. I’d also say that transitioning the Afghan economy off of aid should be a critical security priority. A huge number of communities are almost dependent on CERP spending for very basic tasks. And building the capacity for them to generate those tasks on their own without a huge influx of U.S. military aid should be I think a big, big priority on the security side of things.

But I’m actually going to break with both of you and suggest that the U.S. should get out of the CT game in Afghanistan. In February I was at a meeting with Afghan human rights workers in Geneva who were talking about a lot of the counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan and how, in their view, those efforts were leading either to sympathy with the Taliban or at least to apathy towards the central government. And I think that’s one aspect that goes pretty understudied when we look at either the numbers or the body counts of what happens in CT operations inside Afghanistan.

And I’d even start that – I’ll make a somewhat bold assertion here and say that we should disband the Afghan Local Police immediately, take away their guns and put them under the monitoring of the Afghan National Police. And the reason for this is every time either SIGAR or journalists or NGOs or human rights groups go out and try to actually evaluate the performance of these ALP groups, they report abuse, massive rape, stealing children for sex slavery, murder, thievery, highway robbery – I mean, almost any crime that you can think of, these groups commit.

Part of that is a function of training. And training is one of those I think underremarked about the ANSF that does need to continue. But the ALP groups don’t get that. They get a couple of weeks of training, a gun and a lot of money, and they’re told to go secure their communities. And we shouldn’t be surprised if that does result in some abuse – not all abuse; they are effective ALP groups. And the closer they’re monitored by U.S. forces, the better off they do. But we don’t have the forces to monitor them all. And that’s something that has a growing number of negative consequences that we are not currently accounting for and has the long-term potential to really blow up in our face.

MR. PAVEL: Thanks very much. I’m going to ask a couple more questions and then open it up to questions from you. But let me sort of step outside Washington for a minute here and represent that view that I think, you know, we see in the heartland and just push the panel a bit.

You know, why – this has been a long war, America’s longest. We’ve spilled a lot of very precious blood of our men and women in our armed forces at great sacrifice by the families, by our – the forces themselves. In some cases these families are going to be dealing with these burdens forever, but there’s a long (tail ?) on the psychological and fiscal and other costs that our country has already borne but in particular our military families and their broader community. And this was certainly a legitimate mission in the aftermath of 9/11, but it’s time to bring our forces home.

You know, the caricature of the White House view – if it is a caricature, and you might address that – is, you know, we cannot get our forces out there fast enough because our public really does not have its heart in its mission anymore. And we could get attacked from a terrorist tomorrow from any country where there is some sense of – where a terrorist group can have some freedom to plot and train. We can come up with 10 countries sitting here in about a minute where we could end up in a similar mission. And so shouldn’t we cut our losses, bring our men and women back home and start to focus our fiscal and other efforts on rebuilding our own nation here? I mean, what do you say to that? I think it’s a really important question that in the bubble in Washington we don’t always feel compelled to address.

MR. SEDNEY: I guess since I’m sitting closest to you, Barry, I’ll begin. And I agree with you very much about the incredible sacrifice of our military members and their families and agree with you that we should only do that – that we should only put their lives at risk if it is in the essential interests of the American people.

And as I laid out before, I think it’s very clear that it is. The prevention of attacks from al-Qaida, the prevention of the Taliban from coming back and the efforts that we’ve made to build – to help the Afghans build a society that’s not going to allow what’s happened in the past to happen again are all huge achievements that go to the credit very much of those military people – those military members who have made that sacrifice, who have been wounded, who are living with those consequences, as you mentioned, every day.

We’ve left Afghanistan before. We cut our losses three times before. In 1978, after some militants killed our ambassador, we punished the then-Afghan government by pulling our aid and our assistance out, even though, of course, the Afghan government of the time didn’t really control things, the Soviet Union did, so we punished a government and a people that couldn’t – that actually weren’t responsible, and you could argue that that helped pave the way for the Soviet invasion the next year, the fact that we pulled out in 1978.

The second time we pulled out was 1989, following the pullout of the Soviet Union. We – if anyone has seen the movie “Charlie Wilson’s War,” you’ll have gotten I think a very good picture of the kind of effort that we put into the Afghan war then and the utter failure of our policies afterwards that I think it very clear led directly to the deaths of millions of people in Afghanistan and elsewhere and to the attacks in the – in the United States on 9/11.

The third time we pulled out of Afghanistan was actually when I was there, in 2002, (200)3 and (200)4 when we pulled huge resources out of Afghanistan, sent them off to Iraq and laid the groundwork for the resurgence of the Taliban and the losses that Barry mentioned that the Atlantic Council report a few years back so accurately characterized as us failing in Afghanistan. We’ve – we fixed that through the troop surge.

However, I want to stress one thing. We don’t need to send more troops to Afghanistan now. I agree with Shuja we need a civilian surge. Our casualties in Afghanistan are way down. Afghans have never wanted us to fight for them. They want to fight for themselves. Whether you talk to Afghan privates or Afghan generals or the Afghan population at large, they don’t want American troops fighting; they’re ready to fight for themselves, if we give them the support – and I agree with Josh on the kinds of support that are needed. So we are not going to continue to send Afghans – to send Americans to fight and die in Afghanistan. In the article that Josh mentioned this morning with General Dunford, he pointed that out. We – our commitment doesn’t need to be more lives lost, but our commitment does need to – does need to be the kind of support Afghanistan needs, militarily, economically and politically.

MR. NAWAZ: Barry, I think it’s a question of leadership. And the leadership defines the mission. We didn’t define it tightly enough when we went it. We kept redefining it as we went along. So that confused the people on the ground, and to some extent, that also confused the American public why were we there, what’s happening.

And as far as making a decision to exit, I think public opinion polls are now already showing that the U.S. public doesn’t want to be in Afghanistan. But all indications are that the president doesn’t want to be in Afghanistan and that he checked out of Afghanistan during the campaign. If you recall, there wasn’t much talk of Afghanistan in the campaign. So unless and until there is a very clear statement of intent on the part of the political leadership, the military can only do so much.

And I think it’s a disservice in many ways to the military for the kind of management of this war, particularly when you look at it – I mean, there are people in this room who know much more about the military than I do. David certainly knows the military much better than I do. When you are rotating military commanders at the rate of one a year, almost, that’s no way to run a war. And when you’re changing military leadership at a time of withdrawal, which is one of the most difficult phases of any military operation, that’s no way to run a war. So the way that we have prosecuted the war has really helped the enemy to some extent by not being able to put the full force of the U.S. military where it was needed.

So the problem still remains that – more of the emphasis on the military solution, much less on the political. And we just haven’t been able to concentrate on the political side or on the economic side. And for that we have to go to Kabul. That’s not a Washington decision. I’ll just leave it at that.

MR. FOUST: Yeah. You know, I think it’s interesting that Dave was going back to the mujahedeen. Afghanistan didn’t really enter a full-fledged collapse until the Soviet Union withdrew all of its economic aid to the Afghan government in about 1992, which was also when the U.S. aid actually took its – a serious nosedive. He’s right, the U.S. tends to get distracted and care about other things. In 1991 and ’92 it was concerned with trying to manage the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. And despite the consequences for Afghanistan, I think that was an understandable decision in the H.W. Bush administration of, wow, the collapse of the Cold War actually matters more than managing this small proxy war we’ve had for the last 11 years against a country that no longer exists.

From the Soviet side, though, the Najibullah government was actually marginally effective for the three years after the – after the official withdrawal of the Soviets and before the collapse of his regime in 1992. And one of the reasons for that was because the Soviets were essentially subsidizing the operations of his government. They were providing him weapons, they were providing a limited amount of training for troops, but it was mostly money that they were throwing into the country and that Najibullah was kind of running it on his own. If we’re really, really lucky – and I can’t believe I’m saying this – that will be what ends up happening in Afghanistan, is that Afghanistan can mostly function on its own. And there is this need by the international community, which is a more stable source of funding than the U.S. alone, to subsidize their operations. That’s at least some minimal level of sovereignty that I think we need to look at.

But mixed in with that I think it’s also a mistake to pretend like the zero option may not happen. That was an assumption that went into the negotiations with the status of forces agreement in Iraq, and those eventually fell apart, and we got stuck with the zero option. And it’s not worked out very well there. Part of that is because we haven’t planned. In that interview with General Dunford this morning he said he’s not planning for a zero option, and I think it’s a mistake to not plan for a worst-case scenario. Not planning for those scenarios is one of the reasons why we keep getting surprised by worst-case scenarios.

So at the end of the day, you know, zero troops doesn’t mean zero personnel. We’re still going to have an embassy there. We’re still going to have USAID. We’re still going to have NGOs. What those do isn’t the security. They do the economy and the politics. And I think we’re all in agreement that the political side of what’s happening in Afghanistan right now is really where the key conflict, the key struggle is going to be. And without focusing – if we don’t focus heavily, almost laser-like, on the issue of political succession in Kabul and what comes afterward as a new governing coalition tries to rebuild a legitimate government, if we’re not laser-focused on that, I think we’re going to really miss the boat.

MR. PAVEL: Thanks to my panelists. Now I would love to hear questions from the audience. There might be a few issues that have been raised that would merit – I think we have someone – a couple of people with microphones here. And I’d like to go to the second row on this side. This gentleman two in.

Q: Thank you. Ron Neumann. And thank you, Shuja, for that nice comment. I wanted to basically ask a question particularly of Josh, on the elections.

But let me just make one observation, and that is on the ALP, because I’ve just come back from spending two weeks as part of a team looking intensively at the ALP all over the country. And while I understand from the news and from the scholarly papers that have been done why Josh reached the conclusion he did, let me say that it is much too blanket and too broad, that there is far more mix; there are – there is both a correction – there are not nearly as many incidents. They are concentrated particularly – but it’s an incredible mix across the country, but it is not all one thing. And in a sense, that description sort of makes David’s point of a unidimensional public opinion – public reporting, which it in fact misses a great deal of the reality of the ground.

But my question is, particularly to Josh, you talked about the election with huge importance that hasn’t been hit by others. Is – it seemed to me I’m hearing a contradiction in a great deal of pessimism, while you yet look forward to something that has to happen, at the same time recommending that we have to focus on it laser-like. So I just wanted to ask you too, and the others as well, to broaden that. What does looking at it laser-like mean? What resources do we have, in your opinion, and what options, and what should we be pursuing beyond the rhetorical?

MR. FOUST: OK, I could – I could start that off. You know, there are exceptions to every trend, which I think you’re getting at. And there’s always a danger of generalizing in Afghanistan because there are exceptions to every generalization.

From the political side of things, though, the U.S. has an imperfect but very well-established system of organizations that are designed to promote the development of political parties, effective campaigning strategies, corruption monitoring and then also corruption and fraud response teams. They have never been empowered in Afghanistan to the degree that they need to. And I’m talking about the NED, NDI, IRI. There’s also the foundation for free elections or fundamental elections in Afghanistan, which is a local group. There’s also the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Council, which has suffered repeated political attacks by the Karzai administration, and the U.S. hasn’t stepped in to defend them from attempts either at politicization or co-optation by Karzai, who’s trying to prevent their monitoring his own government’s behavior.

Both funding the development of political parties, the support of political parties and also getting into training and mentorship about how to campaign, how to run effective polling stations and then also how to ensure legitimate counts afterwards – these are all areas where previous elections have fallen short, and they haven’t received a tremendous amount of attention, personnel, money, anything. That would be a good start.

To address your point about pessimism, I mean, despite the need, I think, to focus on the elections, I’m still actually fairly pessimistic. I’m not assured that they’re going to be clean or even seen as broadly legitimate. So that’s where my pessimism comes in. The only way that I can think of addressing that is by addressing the election issue and by trying as hard as we can to, I think first off – and this is something I forgot to mention earlier – not pick a winner. This is something that a lot of the D.C. punditry set has been fond of writing about in the op-ed pages, of the need for America to pick a pro-American winner, saying, we spent a lot of money, so therefore we get to choose. That’s not actually how legitimate elections work in a country, like Afghans need to have this sense that they can also make their own choice. They don’t have to either vote for the right person or risk losing aid or vote for the wrong person and risk something weird happening like another surge of U.S. troops to their country to support their polling stations.

So this idea of essentially getting out of the game of trying to dictate Afghanistan’s political future and instead looking at how we can support Afghans building their own political future, including accepting the fact that a lot of elites, especially among younger people, are really antipathic towards the U.S. They think we’ve screwed up and we’ve broken promises and that we have to account for that in some way. When looking at – I mean, what is it, something like 60, 70 percent of the country is under the age of 25, and there’s a huge amount of disaffectation among younger people, who are going to be running the ministries in the government that we’re supporting in the next 10 years or so. And they don’t feel like they have a very strong voice. I mean, I talk with young Afghans all the time who feel like they’re excluded because all their rich old warlords are running things, and they don’t have a say in matters.

That’s something that we can fix. We can actually work at building up either youth organizations, youth parties, looking at youth participation in elections, getting young people involved in the elections monitoring campaign so it’s not just overpaid white people traveling around to polling stations. I mean, these are ways that you end up building a legitimate political consensus in the country. And it’s possible. It just takes money and time.

MR. NAWAZ: I would just add that the elections are really not an end. They’re a part of a process. They’re a means to an end. And this is not the only election that will occur. And so what we should be looking at is this election and then the one after that. And this is not a flip remark, but I think you need many more people who are willing to look critically at the processes that occur before the elections as well as on election day. So maybe we should recall Peter Galbraith and press him into service to stir the – (dove cuts ?).

So this is really one way of focusing attention on the process. And I entirely agree with Josh, you don’t want a horse race kind of reporting on this in Washington, which tends to be self-fulfilling. And then the Afghans are plenty smart. They know exactly when the U.S. is trying to tilt the balance one way or the other, and you don’t want to be put in that position.

MR. SEDNEY: Just to add that all of us are, I think, united in the importance of the elections. I don’t know of anybody who I take seriously who has advocated a particular candidate. That’s certainly not the position of the U.S. government when I was in the U.S. government, and I’m sure it’s not now.

The – and I absolutely agree with how important it is, however, to look at the entire process. That’s already begun. The election process in Afghanistan has already begun. The candidates are positioning themselves. People are seeking support. And it’s actually real politics going on in Afghanistan right now, and it’s something that we can and should support without choosing a winner.

One final point, though, about Afghanistan overall: The Afghanistan of today is radically different from the Afghanistan of 11 years ago. When I first went to Afghanistan in 2002, Kabul was a city of about 500,000. Today it’s a city of probably over 5 million. Other Afghan cities have shown similar percentage increases in growth. Afghanistan is a rapidly urbanizing society, as many other countries that are going in – that are changing because of the increase in life span, higher survivability of infants and changes in the economy. The country that Najibullah ruled that was in the ’80s with the mujahedin is not the country that’s there today. And the Afghans who are in the urbanized areas, the Afghans who are in – the millions of Afghans who have education, a phenomenon that’s never before happened in Afghanistan, they want a new kind of country. Those young people that Josh is talking about, they want change, and we should be supporting that.

MR. PAVEL: Thanks. I have a number of questions lined up. The gentleman right there. Thank you.

Q: Hi, Doug Brooks with the Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce. And my question is really in terms of commercial investment in Afghanistan. And right now there’s very little prospectus that anybody’s going to invest in Afghanistan. The security situation is so poor, and with the government taking over the private security, the companies have no security of their own to actually put their personnel on the ground. So if there is going to be a future for Afghanistan, we need to figure out some way that we can have some commercial growth. Are there any ideas how that can be fixed?

MR. FOUST: I can’t believe I’m actually mentioning this, but there was a Pentagon program a while ago called the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, the TFBSO. It kind of went away for a while when its director left to join the private sector. But last I’ve heard, they’ve been trying to rebuild their efforts, trying to come up with either, like, startup incubators in Jalalabad or an agricultural university, I think somewhere near Herat. There are efforts like that.

But you know, ultimately, if people don’t feel like they can have their own security, I mean, I think it’s hard to kind of play on someone’s patriotism to throw money into Afghanistan when they have no guarantee they’re ever going to get it back again. So I mean, beyond kind of, like, these managed investment opportunities that the government’s tried to do, I’m not sure if either of you are familiar with more recent efforts to do that. But I mean, I have no idea.

MR. SEDNEY: No, I meet regularly with Afghan business people – primarily Afghan businesspeople as well as Americans and people from other countries that do business in Afghanistan. And right now the biggest concern is not security; right now the biggest concern is the future, what happens after 2014, what’s the level of international commitment. And I think the biggest single thing that the United States and other countries could do would be to make that secure commitment, and that would lead to kind of – to increased investment. Many countries – many companies that I’m aware of are willing to take risk, are willing to invest in Afghanistan. Many Afghans are willing to invest in Afghanistan if they see the future as more assured than they do now.

MR. NAWAZ: I’d just add one point, which is that the best indicator for the investment climate of any country, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, is when you have domestic investment. Once the domestic investors put their money where their mouth is instead of moving it to Dubai, then foreign investors will also come in. And security plays a role, but there are ways in which the domestic investors find to operate in the worst of conditions because they know the country, they know the opportunities, and they can then partner with foreign investors.

So don’t expect that simply because you’ve created a wonderful plan that people are going to say, oh, this is great, and we’re going to come and do it, because businesses are there to make money, and they’re not going to go in unless there’s rule of law, that they can fight somebody in court if there’s a problem, unless there’s certainty, as David said, and unless there are local partners who are willing to invest instead of pretending to invest and taking their equity and moving it to Dubai.

MR. PAVEL: We’ll take two questions here in the front row, if we can bring the mic up. And we’ll take two at a time here, these two gentlemen.

Q: Thank you. My name is Aqab Malik. I’m an assistant professor, National Defense University Islamabad, also a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins SAIS. Just a couple of point – questions, very pointed, to all of you, I guess.

Realistically, the mindset that you’re dealing with in Afghanistan – I spent a lot of time there doing my doctoral research, even got embedded with the Taliban and the militants, et cetera, to fulfill that. Reduction in funding after 2014, likelihood that when the troops are predominantly out, majority of the population won’t really support much funding when it’s not on the horizon anymore – and that’s Congress, really. Funding from the Arab world especially, which is predominant as far as Taliban is concerned – we may have surge in that because that’s seen as a vested interest, as far as the Arabs are concerned, maybe in Afghanistan vis-à-vis Iran, et cetera, et cetera, and that means interference as far as peace processes are concerned.

So next, peace process – is it a peace process? Will the Taliban ever think about even negotiating before the next elections? And even if they do think about it after the elections, most likely they will only do so to a person that they feel is independent and not a puppet of the regime – of the United States, that is – in Afghanistan, which is a dominant force. That’s what it is. And on top of that, why would they negotiate? As far as they are concerned, democracy, to them, is an anathema to what they believe in. It is complete contradiction to what they think and how they – how they view the world in that respect.

And now, you were talking about the national Afghan forces. What about the Pakistan Taliban bases there who attack Pakistan from the bases in Kunar, for example? Who’s securing those?

Lastly, al-Qaida – not defeated, primarily because they proliferated everywhere in the Middle East, North Africa, and they’re setting up bases. When you’ve got Libya, one of the – the head of the intelligence, for example, is former al-Qaida – not really. How are you defeating al-Qaida, then? Just a couple of questions.

MR. PAVEL: Why don’t – why don’t I ask the panel to take any two of those five questions – (laughter) – and then we’ll – and then we’ll turn to the second question. So choose your – from the menu – (laughter) – al-Qaida’s defeat and spread and the other issues.

MR. SEDNEY: Well, again, to go back on the al-Qaida, the objective in going to Afghanistan was to ensure that we were not again attacked from the Afghanistan-Pakistan area. And that has happened. There have been no more attacks from that area. Has there been a proliferation, a franchising of al-Qaida? Yes. Is it as dangerous as it was in 2001? No. Is it still a big problem? Yes, and there need to be a variety of methods to combat it. But on the core area where the – where the al-Qaida leadership is still concentrated, that is an area where we – where we have had success. But it’s going to be a long – I think, a continuing long effort on that particular question.

On the peace process, in order to have a peace process, you’re correct, both sides have to want peace. That’s important for the Taliban to show they want peace, and it’s also, I think, key that the process be Afghan-led and have buy-in from all of the key parties, including the Afghan government and the opposition parties in Afghanistan as well. And that’s a process that I know a lot of people are working on right now.

MR. NAWAZ: On the fighting between the Taliban and the other forces inside Afghanistan which may occur, I think this is probably going to shift to a political war, an ideological war, much more than a hot war. And the point that Josh made, I think, is very important. The recent National Intelligence Council 2030 report indicates that by 2030 Afghanistan is going to be the only country in the South Asia region that will still have a youth dividend. So this youthful population in Afghanistan and the urbanization that has occurred in Afghanistan is likely to create a counterforce to the ideological stance of the Taliban.

And so the success of everything that David was talking about earlier, the investments in education, exposure to modern economics and so on, is likely to hinge on how those youth, most of whom were not around when the Taliban were ruling Afghanistan, how they coalesce and how they can counter it. I don’t think it’s going to hinge totally on whatever deal is cobbled between the coalition and the Taliban or between Karzai and the Taliban. I think that reconciliation attempt is probably not going to succeed before the elections occur, and that may be a wasted effort, in my mind.

MR. FOUST: I’ll actually raise eyebrows and suggest that in 2015 is probably when we’ll see two things happen. We’ll see Congress want to cut funding for Afghanistan severely, and that’ll create big, big, big fight with the White House. But then I also think that’s when you’re going to see the first truly serious attempt at some kind of negotiated settlement because the U.S. combat forces will be gone, and at least hopefully, we’ll have a non-Karzai government in power. And I think with both of those prerequisites met, negotiations have a much greater success of – much greater chance of success, not assured by any stretch, but I think at least at that point you will have removed essentially two of the biggest irritants that I think have been real barriers to getting the Taliban to come to the table.

MR. PAVEL: Thanks. And we had another question here from the front row.

Q: Thank you very much. I am Dr. Nisar Chaudhry with Pakistan American League. As Josh has mentioned that in four years they got rid of 25 al-Qaida leaders. But al-Qaida is running all over. If you see in Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Syria, they are recruiting more and more people. The number is expanding, not shrinking. And you have just mentioned that – got rid of 75 people. And if you see in Iraq, to get rid of the weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein, what is the cost? If you calculate that cost, then you will be amazed that even U.S., it can falter and fumble sometimes, even though the – my question is that does USA has the – really, the capacity, the intellect and the power to micromanage or build other nations? This is my first question.

And part two is that since such wise people, you have done so much of research work, what specific advice you will have? Because skepticism is there between even Afghanistan and USA, Afghanistan and NATO forces, Pakistan and U.S., Pakistan and Afghanistan. In every partner, every player is suffers from trust deficit. What specific advice you will have for the leaders of a country like Pakistan, Karzai and the president which can bring stability and peace in that region? Thank you.

MR. PAVEL: Thanks very much.

MR. SEDNEY: First of all, on the al-Qaida, I think it’s very important to recognize that the al-Qaida is based on ideology, an ideology of what I would call – others might differ – of Islamic extremism and extraordinary hostility towards the West in general and the United States and Americans in particular. That ideology got support from the Taliban government in the period before 9/11 that allowed the al-Qaida to grow into a force that was able to carry out the 9/11 attacks. So in answer to your question, yes, there are these outgrowths of al-Qaida elsewhere, none of them anywhere near as influential and as effective as the al-Qaida in Afghanistan before 9/11.

The most important way to address that ideological side of al-Qaida is for Afghanistan to develop into a secure, self-governing state. Both anecdotally and polls show that 90 percent of Afghans do not support the Taliban, do not want al-Qaida there. In fact, they want their own state where they are responsible for their own security, and they want al-Qaida nowhere near. So if that happens, then al-Qaida will have suffered a huge ideological defeat, which will then lead to a diminished ability to attract recruits and expand throughout the rest of the world.

MR. PAVEL: Other panelists with thoughts?

MR. NAWAZ: On the regional players, I would say not just Pakistan, but Pakistan and India need to resolve their differences in a manner where they can collaborate in creating economic and political stability in Afghanistan, because it’s going to help them, apart from helping Afghanistan. India will need every ounce of energy it can get from Central Asia. So opening those transit routes for the long run is really what’s going to happen. For the short run, some of the rhetoric coming out of Islamabad appears to be favoring noninterference, trying to assist the reconciliation process. But as I said earlier, I don’t think reconciliation is going to be doable before the elections. So I am of the view, as Josh is, too, I think, that – let the Afghans reconcile after the elections. It’s too much of an effort.

And in any case, we’ve discovered U.S. foreign policy, you can’t really concentrate on resolving two – you know, running two peace processes simultaneously; the secretary of state is very busy in the Middle East, and I’m not sure Afghanistan is getting the same attention that the Middle East is getting these days in the White House.

MR. FOUST: To address your USAID point, I think Afghanistan will benefit once we stop spending lots of money on huge projects that Afghans can’t maintain on their own, things like the Kajaki Dam, the various diesel generators they build where diesel costs more to import than they can charge for electricity. I mean, there have been a lot of really fraught projects like that that I think, once those end – when funding contracts, ultimately, Afghanistan will benefit from that, because they won’t a kind of moral hazard of this unending spigot of aid money.

In terms of practical suggestions – (chuckles) – let’s go with this. I mean, there are specific ideas that I think could dramatically lower tensions in the region; they’re not going to happen any time soon. Things like granting full political rights to the FATAH so that they can participate like normal members of Pakistan, and there won’t be room for a police-free zone where militants can gather; that would be a huge step for Pakistan. It would be a huge step for peace in the region. It’s not going to happen any time soon.

If Nawaz Sharif is able to reign in the military in some way and reign in the ISI in some way, that would be a huge step for peace in the region. It’s not going to happen any time soon. I mean, it’s easy, I think, to kind of look at these, like, big picture ideas that probably would address what’s going on, but in terms of, I mean, practical, day-to-day things, this is something that I think, without taking a long-term view of it, of – in the long run, how can you kind of say, institutionalize Pakistan’s security state into a civilian government? Those are things that are going to take much, much longer and much more work that we’re not going to address here. (Laughs.)

MR. PAVEL: Time for one or two more questions; why don’t we go to the lady here in the second row, and then – we’ll pick her up and then the lady in the back, and we’ll gather those two questions and then get final answers and comments.

Q: Hi; I’m Stacy Ravlin (ph) from Johns Hopkins SAIS. I was wondering what your thoughts on the future of the civilian side – U.S. State Department, USAID – mostly State Department. I mean, we heard a little bit about how, you know, they’re hiding in military bases and things like that, but especially with, you know, the recent passing of Ann Smedinghoff, does the U.S. have the space – will they give the space to their civilians to do the kind of public diplomacy work that we need to see, and how effective, really, is it to have the U.S. doing that kind of on-the-ground diplomacy?

MR. PAVEL: Thanks; there was a question right behind you, too, that I’d like to pull in.

Q: Thanks. My name is Tyler Duke; I just got back from 14 months in Kandahar with the Army. And I wanted to, one, address the – make a point to Josh here. You addressed your concern about the hinterlands and the civilian surge and how it failed in the hinterlands and the districts, and that’s where your concern is for the – Afghanistan going forward. And I’d like to say that I actually had the opposite experience in Kandahar – that the district support teams – this – the SOF elements and the civil affairs were absolutely fantastic in supporting district government to the point where every single district in Kandahar had a district governor and a district chief of police and these were highly-contested positions and that people were actually buying in and investing into the district-level government. And we continue to see stability there, even in the most fraught districts, including Ghorak in Western Kandahar.

But my question, actually, is something that Josh alluded to as well in terms of the potential of Karzai actually still being there after this election. And I wanted to get the panel’s take on what you assess the chances of Karzai running again or rigging the election in terms of a Loya Jirga in that context and securing a third term. And if this were to occur, how would this impact the relationship with Afghanistan and with the international community, particularly in light of the Tokyo conference? Thank you.

MR. PAVEL: Thanks. And then, Max (sp), just pick up that last question from the lady right there, and we’ll wrap it up.

Q: Hi, I’m Andrea Peterson (ph) with State. I wanted to ask about the drug trade, which is almost 10 percent of the GDP. And the rest of the GDP, as we’ve been talking about, seems as if it will eventually be going away as the aid goes away. We talk about foreign investment – trying to incentivize that in Afghanistan. We talk about the warlords – how do we keep them from retaining control? And we talk about the election of a legitimate government. How will that happen if we don’t address the drug trade, and does the U.S. and NATO – do they have a role in addressing that problem in the future?

MR. PAVEL: Thanks very much. So three questions: public diplomacy, Karzai, the drug trade –

MR. FOUST (?): Yeah, I mean, we could probably even start with the drug trade. I think when the Marines first surged into Helmand, they made a very smart decision, which was to stop focusing on the drug trade as much and focus on, first, establishing security and then trying to build up governance. Ultimately, you can’t fight a drug trade if you don’t have some marginally effective government in place as well as some marginally effective security force in place. I think Colombia is a good example of that – of how – when the government was either illegitimate or marginally legitimate, and they had a completely dysfunctional internal security and police force, they couldn’t make much headway against groups like the FARC and other kinds of drug production and smuggling operations.

I think there is something to that. I mean, for a while, William Wood was sent in as ambassador directly from Bogota to Kabul, I think, in ’07 to try to kick-start that. But again – like, this problem of not investing in the political and institutional development of the country paid dividends down the line, which is that we still don’t have sufficiently developed institutions. But, you know, that’s something where I think the State Department arguably is going to have a much bigger role to play, at least in the long run, than the military is, because it’s the State Department that’s going to be left when all of the combat troops pull out of Afghanistan. And they’re going – the embassy is going to be really the point person.

And I think this gets at your question, too. Especially since the attack on the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, it’s kind of come to light that U.S. diplomacy – and the State Department in general – diplomats face this really nasty catch-22, where they’re the most effective when they’re out on the ground, but they also have the least effective security for themselves compared to the military, at least. And they also face really restrictive rules about when they can leave, when they can go into contested environments and when they can put themselves at risk to go do the kinds of necessary, on-the-ground work that they have. I don’t know how to resolve that; I’m just presenting it as a dilemma.

But I think, especially when we have combat troops withdrawing, and we’re facing fundamentally, like, political and economic issues like the drug trade, that’s going to be the kind of dilemma that starts really taking hold of how you can actually perform those kinds of – I hate using the word “capacity building,” but capacity building in contested areas if you also have a lot of restrictions on what you can do and where you can travel.

MR. NAWAZ: Just on the drug trade – there is a domestic element, which you have covered. But there is also an international and regional element, and the drug trade is the one thing on which I think we are probably on the same page as Iran and with the Central Asian Republics. They have a tremendous self-interest in stopping this drug trade, and that’s something that we need to concentrate on to try and build that capacity and build some coalition, but that means bringing Iran to the table. I think that’s something worth remembering.

MR. SEDNEY: A couple of quick points. The change in focus that Josh mentioned actually came about from Richard Holbrooke, my former colleague and late special representative. He pushed very hard for that change in focus. Yes, the Marines carried it out, but the direction came from the State Department and Ambassador Holbrooke. I think it was exactly right to focus on security and economic development first, because the – addressing the drug trade does require that kind of security.

The Afghan economy is not – is heavily influenced by but not dependent upon the drug trade. Afghanistan is still primarily a non-opium agricultural economy, and there is – there is a lot of room for agricultural growth in that economy in the future, along in many other areas. I agree with the comments here about the challenges for the State Department and other civilian agencies in terms of being effective, but also agree with Mr. Duke’s statement about, there have been a wide number of really incredible performers in the State Department, in USAID, U.S. Department of Agriculture and elsewhere that have had huge impacts in Afghanistan, and being able to continue to have that impact as the military footprint goes down and we have to depend on Afghans for our security, which is what we do in other countries in the world; we depend on local security forces for our security. Making that transition is going to be very difficult and very – and potentially dangerous for people, but that’s a transition we’ll have to make to relying on Afghan security.

And finally, on the question of President Karzai staying on, I think that has a huge amount to do with the amount of commitment from the rest of the world. If the rest of the world commits to Afghanistan’s future, Afghans will follow that lead and find a way to have a legitimate change of government the way we have all stressed is important. If there isn’t that commitment from the rest of the world, then I think the chances of a – of a less positive outcome go way up.

MR. PAVEL: Well, unfortunately, we’re out of time; we could probably spend the rest of the day addressing these issues, but please join me in thanking our panelists for their excellent insight. (Applause.)

(END)

Full transcript from the June 3, 2013 South Asia Center event “Towards Regional Stability in South Asia.”

Welcome and Moderator:
Shuja Nawaz
Director, South Asia Center
Atlantic Council

Speaker:
Mani Shankar Aiyar
First Consul-General of India, Karachi (1978-1982);
Member of Parliament,
Rajya Sabha

Location:
Atlantic Council
1101 15th Street, NW, 11th Floor
Washington, DC 20005

Time: 2:30 p.m. EDT
Date: Monday, June 3, 2013

Transcript by
Federal News Service
Washington, D.C.

SHUJA NAWAZ: Good afternoon, everyone. I’m Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center. And on behalf of my colleagues and our president, Fred Kempe, I’d like to welcome all of you to this very special session on “Towards Regional Stability in South Asia.”

And we are honored and delighted to welcome Mr. Mani Shankar Aiyar. He’s a well-known personality. And I’m sure that the reason why most of you are here, you know about him, but let me just say a few words about him.

He has been a member of the Indian Diplomatic Service, and we listed amongst his earlier accomplishments being consul – the first Indian consul general in Karachi in Pakistan. Of course later on he was high commissioner or ambassador in Islamabad. And so he has been holding many different positions in his service to India in the Foreign Service.

He was also a member of the cabinet in the first government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. And then more recently he was nominated to be a member of the upper house, the Rajya Sabha. He’s a very frequent commentator and writer. He has published six books, including “Pakistan Papers” and “Confessions of a Secular Fundamentalist.” And he is the editor of the four-volume “Rajiv Gandhi’s India.”

Mr. Aiyar is going to speak for about 20 minutes, and then the two of us will begin a conversation in which I hope all of you will participate. And if all goes well, we will be wrapping up at about 4:00. So I’m looking forward to this because I don’t think that we could have found a much better person to help us understand the situation – the evolving situation in South Asia, particularly in post-election Pakistan.

So we asked Mr. Aiyar to take a look at the issue of regional stability, but with particular reference to the recent events in Pakistan and the elections there. And of course I’m sure he will probably talk about what is happening in India and the impending elections in India, which have to occur by next spring.

So without wasting any more of your time, I’m going to ask Mr. Aiyar to come and speak, and then we’ll begin our conversation. Thank you all for coming.

MANI SHANKAR AIYAR: Thank you very much, Mr. Shuja Nawaz and friends, for taking time off this afternoon to come to this event.

I was most intrigued that the Atlantic Council should have any interest whatsoever in South Asia until I realized that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has unlocked landlocked Afghanistan by turning up there and linking it to the Atlantic Ocean. So perhaps it’s not surprising that the Atlantic Council should be interested in regional stability in South Asia.

I had thought it was going to be difficult enough to deal with eight countries in 20 minutes, but I’ve just been told by Mr. Nawaz that he defines South Asia as extending all the way from the Gulf to Burma. So that gives me about 30 seconds for each of the countries. So you will appreciate that I will have to deal with this matter with a broad brush rather than deal with individual countries or their interstate relations. That perhaps could be addressed if any one of you was interested in any particular aspect of the relationship during questions.

But I think, quite correctly, Mr. Shuja Nawaz has identified the heart of the problem as being the India-Pakistan relationship. And there, to put it in a few words, I am delighted that Nawaz Sharif has won the election, and won it so decisively.

And I’m also delighted that his party, the PMLN, has not succeeded within state governments anywhere outside Punjab. This means that any decision that he takes with respect to a neighbor will be influenced not only by his party but by the attitude of the PPP, which is in office in Sindh; by Imran Khan’s party, which is in office in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa; and by the quandaries (ph) of parties that are in office in Balochistan, all of which are distanced from the three major parties. In other words, a consensus that emerges under Nawaz Sharif is likely to be a pan-Pakistan consensus, and this I think needs to be emphasized in moving forward.

Also in the course of the last few years, I think the Pakistani army has shown that it would rather deal with a very profitable Fauji Foundation than handle a bankrupt Pakistan economy. They somehow seem to have become “Pakistan Incorporated” rather than try and run the polity.

Some various opportunities were given under the previous regime to the army to take decisive action against the civil forces. And when Kayani moved his own man in as the head of the 10th Brigade at Rawalpindi, a lot of Indian commentators – particularly Indian experts who loved to be experts in things like knowing who are brigade commanders – they saw this as the first step towards bringing in the brigade to capture the government in Islamabad. Nothing happened.

And then the other gentleman, whose name is shared by Shuja Nawaz, who’s the ISI chief, was not given the extension that he thought he was going to get, and so repeatedly incidents took place which seemed to me to establish conclusively that the Pakistan army, at least for the moment, is simply uninterested in getting caught up in the coils of Pakistan politics.

So we have a situation where it’s not merely symbolic that, for the first time ever, a civilian government has given way to another civilian government, thereby in a sense providing an anchor for Pakistani democracy, but that the army has not, despite all the rumor-mongering, actually involved itself in the process. At one point when a cleric from Canada arrived and gathered several – well, I don’t know how many people he gathered. Some said hundreds. Others said thousands. Still others said tens of thousands, and yet others said hundreds of thousands.

He gathered them mostly in salubrious conditions in Islamabad to protest against – well, effectively to protest against the elections, saying that the elections provided a choice between equally undesirable people, which is probably true. But for that reason it seems silly to want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In any case, he disappeared suddenly. He came in as suddenly as he went.

And the election process was I think about as fair as you can expect in South Asia. There will always be charges and countercharges. You’ll never get to know the truth as to how far allegations are genuine or motivated. But I don’t think anybody can really claim that the elections were unfair or rigged. If they were rigged, they were rigged in the direction in which the results were going, in any case. And therefore I think it’s really very uncricketmanship-like on the part of Imran Khan to suddenly wake up in his hospital bed and say that things were fiddled. I don’t think they were significantly fiddled.

So we have – we have a new political chapter genuinely opening up in that country. And I think we need to take – in India we need to take that into account, while at the same time taking into account at least three much more fundamental factors, which I’m afraid people in India are not taking into account. First and foremost, that there’s a huge generational change in Pakistan, which profoundly impacts on Pakistani perceptions of India.

That generation which won independence for Pakistan through the partition of British India, they were Indians on the 13th of August and on the 14th of August they suddenly became Pakistanis, and therefore asked the question which they perhaps were not on day one but did increasingly have to ask themselves as the years rolled by as to, why I am a Pakistani?

It couldn’t be on account of religion, because there were huge numbers of Muslims left in India. It couldn’t be on account of culture, because most of the cultures of Pakistan, particularly the principal ones at that time – the Bengali culture and the Punjabi culture – had their counterparts in India. Linguistically too there was much greater similarity between the principal Pakistani languages and Indian languages than between the minor Pakistani languages and the major Pakistani languages.

They declared as their national language Urdu, which was the mother tongue of only less than 5 percent of the population of Pakistan, according to a brilliant book by Farzana Shaikh, which I always cite, called “Making Sense of Pakistan.”

So here was a country that needed to define itself. And finding that on almost any parameter which one would use for defining nationhood it was not possible to distinguish Pakistan from India, they fell back on the one parameter that would necessarily distinguish India from Pakistan, and that parameter was to say I’m a Pakistani because I’m not an Indian.

And this negative definition of Pakistan became the siren song of that generation of Pakistanis. When I got posted to Pakistan between 1978 and 1982, about – a very large number, perhaps 60 or 70 percent, of those who came to my office asking for a visa belonged to that generation. But already they were moving towards being perhaps half the population.

Today a – (inaudible[11:09]) – child like myself, his counterpart in Pakistan would have no memory of having been an Indian – and I’m 72 – have no memory of having been an India. And of course anyone younger than us couldn’t have a memory of being an Indian because they were born in Pakistan and they are Pakistanis.

So where you got 100 percent of the population as former Indians, today you have about 95 percent of the population as Pakistanis who don’t need to ask themselves the question that the earlier generation had to ask. And this profoundly affects their mindset.

The second very major development in Pakistan is that having learned during the Afghan war that it was possible to use terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy – and they used that in the Kashmir area. They used it earlier too and it had always failed, and it failed once again. They suddenly discovered that all these terrorists they were nurturing for use against India were beginning to turn on Pakistan itself.

And even if it is true to say, as most Indians love emphasizing, that Pakistan is the home to global terrorism based on religion, they all have to accept, I think, that the evidence is clear that the biggest victim of Islamic terrorism is Pakistan itself. And if you don’t go to a mosque for fear that you won’t come back to your wife’s biryani for lunch; if you cannot go to the bazaar without being absolutely sure that you’ll bring back your saris with you return home; if you don’t know when your children go to school whether they will return from school, then I think priority No. 1 for any rational human being becomes let’s end this terrorism.

At one stage perhaps there were elements in the Pakistani establishment who thought that you could distinguish between terrorism directed at India, terrorism directed against the West, and terrorism directed against Pakistan, and concentrate only on finishing those who were against Pakistan. But I think they’ve increasingly realized that it’s almost impossible to untangle this web of terrorism, and that the same elements that are used in a jihad against India or a jihad in Afghanistan can also be used – and are being used – in a jihad against the ISI’s headquarters in Lahore, the army headquarters in Rawalpindi, the naval headquarters in Karachi.

And therefore, terrorism and fighting it is the single-biggest domestic issue in Pakistan, and it’s not possible, really, to use terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy and not to have it come back like a boomerang to hit you in your own country.

And the third major realization in Pakistan is that since 1954, when they joined the pacts that were being set up by the Washington security establishment to contain communism, which was neither a threat to Pakistan nor really a deep concern of theirs, they thought they were buying security support for their war on India or a possible war by India on Pakistan, and therefore agreed to become a frontline state in someone else’s cause.

And over the last 70 years, the Americans have been very careful about not letting them use, at least for any length of time, any weapons supplied by the United States to Pakistan for aggression against India or even defense against India, so that it’s really a rather one-way relationship where Pakistan assists the Americans in their perceived security interests but the U.S. doesn’t really assist Pakistan in its perceived security interests.

And the consequence of being the frontline state is that their own country is brewing up from within, apart from reinforcing the role of the armed forces inside Pakistan. So I think the third factor that we need to take into account is that Pakistan, or Pakistanis, are increasingly deciding that they should be a frontline in their own interests and not a frontline in somebody else’s interest.

So if you take these three factors together, the visceral anti-Indianism of a previous generation is almost out of the picture now and will be totally out of the picture about the time that they lower me into the grave; and secondly, that terrorism is the worst – the worst sin, crime being inflicted on the Pakistani people themselves; and thirdly, a desire to have an independent foreign policy, you can then see that there is – there are objective reasons why Pakistan should wish to be friendly towards India.

But while all these three factors – and several other specific factors that I don’t have the time to go into – have contributed towards a major change in the mindset in Pakistan, I’m afraid nothing similar has happened in India. Instead of being relieved that Pakistan is no longer that home of opposition that it used to be, there is a kind of clinging to the belief that since the Pakistanis have been hostile in the past, they are necessarily hostile now, and therefore Indians should behave like housewives who heard on the radio that a convict has escaped from the nearby jail and start putting up more and more barricades instead of seeing the opportunities that are arising.

The generality of Indian public opinion is far behind the generality of Pakistani public opinion in respect of the India-Pakistan relationship. And into this is woven the China factor. China is seen by these same elements who won’t grow up vis-à-vis Pakistan as being the main supporter of Pakistan. And therefore we’re not merely looking at a tiny little Pakistan to contain; we have to look at this giant China, which is backing Pakistan and which has become the substitute for the United States in the 21st century, and that this country has major territorial claims on us and it has a naval presence increasingly in the seas around us.

And there are incidents from time to time of the kind that took place in the Depsang Valley a few weeks ago, which indicate that the assumption of a friendly China is a misplaced one and that the hostility of China and the inevitable jealousy that it will have with respect to its only – its only possible rival, India, is such as to let us – make us realize that Pakistan is the sword in China’s hands, and that China is the shield in which Pakistan depends. And therefore we must construct our foreign policy in terms of assuming the hostility of both Pakistan and China.

Now, I think that’s, again, hugely misplaced. I happened to be with Rajiv Gandhi when he made this breakthrough visit to China in 1988. The benefits that have flowed to us in terms of trade in particular are so enormous that it does seem as if the amount of money spent on his having a reserved Air India plane to fly all the way to Peking and back has been much more than repaid, that it is – China is perhaps our single-most important trade partner now. There are prospects in investment which are very encouraging.

And as petroleum minister I did what most of my colleagues – certainly my Foreign Office – said were impossible, namely sign an agreement on cooperation in petroleum exploration in third countries with China. I took less than 24 hours to negotiate it. So my personal experience of the Chinese, Chinese diplomats and so forth, is that they are a friendly country; that yes they have their perception of what constitutes their border and we have our perception of what constitutes our border, and both of these are rooted in a history that doesn’t belong to the present.

I’m not sure that what Raja Gulab Singh decided in the 19th century, or what Younghusband did when he sneaked his way into Tibet, constitute a valid basis for us to say, not an inch; not one blade of grass will be handed over to the Chinese. And the Chinese, although they oratorically do emphasize their claim to what they call Southern Tibet, have done next to nothing to enforce it. They even withdrew from Taiwan, which they didn’t have to do, after the 1962 war.

And so I think 1962 was the result of misunderstandings, more on our side than on theirs, but they were also caught at that time in the throes of the complete collapse of the Chinese economy. And the desperate need to distract attention from various kinds of dissidents that were taking place not only within China but in the China-USSR relationship.

To look at what is happening today through the spectacles of 1962 would, I think, be a huge mistake and would bring upon our heads exactly that which we are attempting to prevent from coming upon our heads. So it is an imperative – an imperative that we ought to recognize that the best security is to be found in friendship with Pakistan and friendship with China. And if we can’t make friends with Pakistan, what’s the point of having a foreign policy which knows how to make friends with Paraguay? After all, the Pakistanis would have been Indians but for what I still regard – and begging the pardon of the Pakistanis present – as an accident.

(Audio break) – very important conversation, and I’m glad that you have lived up to your reputation of being bold and frank and very open. And I just – I’m delighted, of course, that at the South Asia Center, where we have a motto of waging peace in the region, that somebody like you is willing to stand up and talk peace and actually offer practical solutions.

Let me take you back to the beginning of your talk, and you were very hopeful about the emergence of a strong central leadership in Pakistan. And yet with the balancing between the states and the center, which is very critical in Pakistan’s federal constitution, when you look at the other side, in India, you still have a very weak coalition government, subject to the same kind of blackmail that the previous government in Pakistan was subjected to. What do you see as the emerging political scene in India that would allow a counterpart to the Pakistani situation that would lead to then some kind of a balancing or rebalancing of this relationship in a more positive trajectory?

MR. AIYAR: I don’t –

MR. NAWAZ: You don’t.

MR. AIYAR: – which is why I think the present government, despite the fact that its lease on life is very short, ought to take initiatives that could not be reversed. And therefore I’m an impassioned advocate of Dr. Manmohan Singh fulfilling a long-standing commitment on his part to the Pakistanis and a strong desire on his own part to make the visit to Pakistan and, whatever time frame he sets for making that visit, to use the interim to really intensify the dialogue to the point where he can come back to India claiming that, you know, he’s settled this or that, but more importantly, setting up the framework for an uninterrupted and uninterruptible dialogue.

And that will bind the Indians as much into the process as it will the Pakistanis. And I think the Pakistanis are ready to be bound by this embrace of love. I’m not sure the Indians are. But what I do know is that in India, the people in foreign policy, especially with respect to Pakistan and China, tend to follow the leadership rather than insist that the leadership follow them. So does the prime minister of India have the courage of his conviction to move forward? I don’t know. I’m not the prime minister. I don’t know what constraints he’s subject to.

But I do know that I would want him, even in these remaining 12 months, to schedule a visit to Pakistan. After all, Vajpayee did it, although it was in the context of a SAARC meeting, in January 2004. It didn’t do him much good, but the process that he started in January 2004 has enabled the opposition, for the last 10 years, to claim that the Congress government has done nothing but follow the Vajpayee path, which is one way of keeping the opposition with us when we make these moves. But since we’ve allowed the dialogue to collapse at every little hurdle, I’m afraid nothing has been achieved where so much could have been achieved.

MR. NAWAZ: You said something very powerful, and I’ll quote you. You said most statesmen are idiots. I thought you meant to say most politicians are idiots because in my definition, a statesman is – a politician is somebody who’s thinking of the here and now, and the statesman is one who thinks of the next generation. So was that a – did you misspeak? Because given the South Asian context, you have a statesman in – at the helm of affairs in India, but he hasn’t been able to deliver on that promise. How will that change?

MR. AIYAR: See, my definition of a politician and a statesman are different. I define the statesman as a successful politician. And I have – I – and this – I see no wisdom in what happened from Helen of Troy onwards, which is why that book by Barbara Tuchman has become my Bible, if you like, that she shows repeatedly how people who get to the top and know what the consequences of their actions are find themselves unable to act on their best perceptions and allow events to bring them down, when they could so easily have stopped it.

So I think being right at the top is a very dangerous place to be. You’re told by all your sycophants that you’re the greatest and that all you have to do is one more step and you’ll get to Norway and you’ll win the Nobel Prize, which is, after all, the only – the only achievement that remains for anyone who’s not a first-term president of the United States. He got it within a month for the expression of an intent, which he’s done absolutely nothing about realizing since he spoke at Prague. But that’s the way – that’s the way human beings are.

And I would – I’d stress that, yes, Dr. Manmohan Singh is a statesman in your sense of the term, but he’s got himself into a political tailspin in India. But it’s not a tailspin that can prevent him from undertaking a major foreign policy initiative. And he’s done so with respect to China. After all, the pressures on him at the time that the Chinese military presence in Depsang Valley was revealed were enormous. But he stuck to his guns. He’s also stuck to his guns when anchormen in India – it’s they, much more than MPs, who matter now – when these anchor – and the female of the species tends to be much deadlier than the male, so the women anchors –

MR. NAWAZ: (Who get him into very dangerous waters. ?) (Chuckles.)

MR. AIYAR: The women and the male anchors – the way in which they attempt, evening after evening, to ruin our relationship with our neighbors and with everybody else within the country – to have stood up to that and said, we will not do tit-for-tat when it came to those two soldiers whose heads were returned without the body – or the body was returned without the heads, or when Sarabjit Singh was assassinated in that jail – I think there was a maturity in the Indian response that was reflected again in the Depsang Valley incident. So the leadership has shown itself to be statesmanlike in your sense of the term.

But if they’re going to leave a mark on history, if they’re going to do something that remains irreversible despite a change of government, in case there’s a change of government, then I think that initiative will have to come now because the next government that comes in will be – or an alternative government that could come in would be innocent of foreign policy and therefore terrified of taking controversial steps with regard to countries like Pakistan and China.

So I think our best bet would be to take the necessary initiatives now. And what Rajiv did with China in December ’88 has proved its worth over how many years now, 26 years. And there’s nobody who can fault it for that. And we’ve had, I think, nine changes of government in between, but nobody has attempted to radically alter the direction in which India-China relations is going. And I think we need to do that with respect to Pakistan.

MR. NAWAZ: Thank you. I don’t want to hog the conversation, so I’m going to open it up to the audience. Please indicate – and I’ll try and make sure I catch you in the right order. So the gentleman over there. Please wait for the microphone to reach you, and if you could please identify yourself for the record and then ask a question.

Q: Hi. My name is Jeremy Iloulian. I’m from Young Americans for Diplomatic –

MR. AIYAR: Sorry, can you just put your mic a little – I’m very hard of hearing.

Q: OK. Better? Hi. My name is Jeremy Iloulian. I’m from Young Americans for Diplomatic Leadership. I have two questions. The first one deals with the Lakshar-e-Taiba, Lakshar-e-Taiba in Kashmir and with Pakistan. Pakistan seems to have sort of basically created the organization and is in a situation where to make any sort of peace over Kashmir and work with India in a difficult situation if something might come up – I guess, how does Pakistan sort of deal with the terrorist organization and move forward in any sort of agreement with India?

And the second question deals with thorium nuclear reactors. I know there’s been new technology developed in India. Do you think there’s a chance, even with Fukushima and the other – and the global nuclear perspective right now, that thorium reactors will develop in the Indian economy?

MR. AIYAR: OK, quickly summarize the question.

MR. NAWAZ: So if I could understand him, the first question was the potential for the Lashkar-e-Taiba to be a stumbling block in the relationship with India, particularly on Kashmir. And the second one was on nuclear power, the – after Fukushima particularly, whether there was a chance that India would be able to overcome constraints to expanding its nuclear capacity for civil purposes, right?

MR. AIYAR: Especially –

MR. NAWAZ: Especially with thorium reactors.

MR. AIYAR: OK. With regard to the first question, yes, the Lashkar-e-Taiba can prove a formidable hurdle, and it could knock any Pakistani attempt to move towards friendship with India head over heels. But they will succeed only if acts of theirs result in a disruption of the dialogue, which is why I’m not so concerned with Dr. Manmohan Singh actually coming up, like a conjurer, with solutions to all our problems when he visits Islamabad so much as setting up a dialogue that is uninterrupted and uninterruptible, because once the Lashkar knows that nothing they do can disrupt the dialogue, then any act of terrorism is an act with an end in itself. It’s an act of terrorism aimed at terror. Today an act of terrorism could so easily derail the dialogue, and therefore derail the possibility of a rapprochement between India and Pakistan.

So I think we should stop making the Lashkar-e-Taiba the single biggest obstacle, because it is we who are stopping it. We are saying, get hold of this man Hafiz Saeed; hang him. Well, and we make that a precondition for beginning the dialogue.

So who is – where is the Lashkar-e-Taiba as of today proving a deadlock? In Islamabad – a roadblock. Is it in Islamabad, or is in New Delhi? So I think we should think this through more carefully than we tend to do.

The other thing is about nuclear power. I have, owing to these very serious environmental concerns that have been generated as a result of Fukushima and activists on the ground – these activists are not merely those who shout slogans but also very senior members of the atomic energy establishment like Dr. Gopalakrishnan, who seems to have a morbid knowledge of what is happening in nuclear energy around the world. And he pulls out all these inconvenient facts, confronts the government with it, and then we are forced to modify our policies, on the one hand, and on the other, the limited liability legislation of the government of India, which has satisfied nobody, and certainly not satisfied the suppliers – I don’t know that our nuclear program will really get off the ground. It doesn’t – it seems to be running into a lot of difficulty just now.

It is certainly the hope of the government of India, as well as of our business community, that the quicker we can get to nuclear energy, the better it is for India. But at (Jadavpur ?) in West Bengal, where these nuclear plants are supposed to come up, there are objections by the local people. And so in some ways, I think that it is not until Dr. Manmohan Singh, who lives at number 3 Race Course Road, builds a nuclear power plant at number 1 Race Course Road that the country will be satisfied that this is a safe form of energy. So there are difficulties there.

The thorium phase is the third phase, after uranium and plutonium. And if we ever got to the thorium stage, then India will be the Saudi Arabia of nuclear energy, for no country has as large a stockpile of monazite sands as we have. And this was discovered by Oppenheimer back in the very early ’50s. And because he was under surveillance, he had a letter send to Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, who was the sister of Jawaharlal Nehru, and the Indian ambassador here. It’s been revealed in a book that has just been published, but I mean just two years ago, that Oppenheimer got somebody else to deliver a letter to Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and have her send it to her brother in which he pleaded with her, the Americans are about to make an offer that, in exchange for monazite sand from Kerala, they will give us all the food aid that we want. And he pleaded with Nehru that please don’t fall for this because then the world will be blown up before any food reaches you.

So this has been a holy grail for a long, long time. And were we to ever reach that phase – and that’s what animates Indians who are in favor of nuclear energy – that should we ever move out of plutonium – out of uranium and plutonium and into thorium, at that point we’d have a perfectly recyclable raw material. The quantities of it available in India would be approximately equal to the share of sunlight that Saudi Arabia gets. And we’d be there. We’d have all of you on your knees begging us for thorium. (Chuckles.) But I think that’s a bit of a holy grail and that what is much more important than thorium is to – is to keep India floating until we reach the thorium age.

And to keep India floating till then, we need Iran. We need Iraq. We need Azerbaijan. We need Turkmenistan. We need Pakistan. We need Burma, or Myanmar. We need Malaysia. We need Indonesia. We need Australia. There’s no lack of energy in the world, but we need to put it towards ourselves instead of being the victim that we are of the New York metal exchange.

Why is the price of oil at this level? It’s the – it’s at this level because if you give no interest on your bonds and your dot-com bubbles make people nervous of investing in the stock market, the best place to go gambling outside Reno is on the New York metal exchange. And so while there’s been no objective change in the supply and demand conditions for oil, where the United States of America grew into such a powerful machine with our oil at a dollar a barrel, today it’s $110 a barrel. How will we ever make the grade unless we establish an Asian oil and gas community that enables the emerging demand of India to be met by the emerging supply of Asia – of India and China – to be met by the emerging supply of Asia?

So I would imagine that while keeping alive this holy grail dream of the thorium phase, we must do something about lasting out from 2013 to 2o73, before which I don’t think we’re going to get to the thorium phase.

MR. NAWAZ: That’s a pretty long-range forecast now. Any other questions? Yes, sir. Please wait for the microphone and identify yourself, please.

Q: Harisarup Singh (ph), a retired diplomat. About China, I do believe that dialogue will not lead to a solution, and nondialogue may not. So it’s better to talk to them. But I see no change in their recent actions on the border areas, their statements from time to time over the years in think tanks – the Chinese scholars have been very aggressive. I heard a long discussion with Daisy Schaffer (ph) afterwards at CSIS, and they had plans to encircle us. It’s going on today. And therefore I do believe that we will have problems in times of – (inaudible) – and weapons systems and all that. And therefore we will have to not have the strength – if you don’t have the strength in offensive weapons, we should make the cost of offense against us, through having such a strong defensive action, that people would think twice. And therefore I don’t know what we can do. But China, as far as I can see – I see no signs. And at the same time, I agree that we should talk to them but keep our powder dry. But your enthusiasm in, hopefully, the success of dialogue – could you please comment on that again in the light of my reservations?

MR. AIYAR: Well, we’re already the world’s second-largest importer of arms. Gandhi’s India is the second-largest importer of arms in the world. The budget that we have for defense is the – is the sacred cow, the new sacred cow. You can’t touch it. It keeps increasing every year. It’s more than – it’s more than our entire budget for poverty alleviation and social security schemes.

And therefore I don’t really know what is the scope for increasing this import of arms and the domestic production of really sophisticated arms. We somehow don’t seem to have the ability to do it because all our bright people are exported as computer coolies to California. So all our brainpower has been drained into the United States of America and into the United Kingdom, and the flotsam and jetsam that are left behind in India haven’t been able to make a battle tank, where we don’t even have a trainer jet of our own.

So yes, we should be as strong as we possibly can be to deter any possible Chinese attack, but if in the process we bankrupt ourselves, I’m not sure that becoming economically weaker is the best way of increasing our defense security. That’s one concern. I think we need to recognize that we are already straining the absolute edges of the fabric of Indian fiscal responsibility to even build ourselves up to the stage that we have.

Secondly, when it comes to aggressive statements in think tanks, we’re – we have our Brahma Chellaneys also, who go around the world, you know, glaring at Chinese and showing them his teeth. I think – I think we also ought to take into account the very large number of reasonable Chinese who are going around to these think tanks and not being as nasty as some of their counterparts are. We’ve got nasty Indians; they’ve got nasty Chinese. How can they help it? They’ve got 1 ½ billion, and we’re catching up with them fast. (Chuckles.) So there are bound to be a large number of rather stupid people on both sides of the border. What is important is that the state should not listen to them.

The third thing is what happens now? The Chinese prime minister schedules a visit to India. It’s his first visit to any Asian country. Just after coming into office, after what, by all accounts, has been a very convoluted political process inside China that threatened, at one stage, to destabilize the Communist Party and its hold over China, but then he emerged and says that he wants to come to India. And about the same time, somebody moves a Chinese unit into the Depsang Valley.

Number one, that area – what we are both agreed on is that we will not cross the line of actual control, as established in 1962. What we haven’t agreed on is where this line of actual control is. There is a Chinese perception of where it lies, and there’s an Indian perception of where it lies. And this area happens to be one of those where the Chinese perception is at variance with the Indian perception of where it lies. And this area happens to be one of those where the Chinese perception is at variance with the Indian perception and has been; it’s not as if they were saying, yes, yes, to us from 1962 to today and suddenly turned nasty. From 1962 on they would say that you are not in the Depsang Valley, and therefore, don’t come in now. We built ourselves up then in pursuit of the doctrine that you were just mentioning. That’s (why ?) they sent in a unit. And our side tells me that we built it up in order to get the Chinese to not build it up, and when they did build up something, we got them to dismantle it in exchange for dismantling what we didn’t think was necessary.

Now, the reason why Daulat Beg Oldi is so isolated in the Depsang Valley is that we have deliberately decided not to build the infrastructure that goes right up to Daulat Beg Oldi for fear that the Chinese will then have a quiet stroll on their evening walk and fetch up where it really matters. Now we started building it, so the Chinese want to know what is the Indian intention in building up something that we hadn’t built up for 60, 70 years?

So our actions destabilized the situation on the ground. The Chinese action destabilized it even further. The Chinese prime minister insisted a solution could be found, and therefore he was maintaining his visit to India. And the Indian government did the same thing, said we’ll try and find an answer, and we are not to cancel the visit.

And while this was on, two officers of the level of joint secretary settled the issue between themselves. There was no meeting of defense ministers. There was no meeting of external affairs ministers, except in the sense that Salman Khurshid did some preparatory work. The bulk of the work was done by joint secretary level officers. We have a rather bright ambassador in Beijing who I think is more likely to fetch up here than any other prediction that I could make. He’s a very bright officer, speakers absolutely fluent Chinese and was able to sort things out with them. And the visit has gone through. It’s been most successful. Manmohan Singh is going back.

Now, I think what we ought to do is to approach these things with a cool head and knowing that if there is a problem, there is probably something happening on the other side which we ought to get to know about and sit down and talk and say, if your coming into Daulat Beg Oldi is the preliminary step to your capturing Delhi, then we have some objections, but if your primary objective in coming to Daulat Beg Oldi is to go back from Daulat Beg Oldi, can we facilitate your return back to where you were. And that’s exactly what happened.

So let us please not assume that the Chinese are dreaded enemies who have the most evil intentions towards us. I don’t think they have. They got enough on their plates. There’s enough of a problem inside China. It’s the problems of success. There is an entire generation – like I was talking about the generation of Pakistanis – there are more Chinese who’ve never heard of Mao Tse Tung or didn’t live under him. They were not part of the revolution. For them, Sun Yatsen is as ancient as the Emperor Ashoka is for us. So their reality is the contemporary reality of shopping malls, and they don’t want to let go of their shopping malls. And (if ?) they start fighting with everybody, all their neighbors, they’re going to lose their shopping malls sooner than later.

I think Chinese prosperity is one of the best things that’s happened for us. And it’s also one of the worst things that happened for them, because they have to sustain this prosperity, and they’re having a very difficult time sustaining it. And we can live with poverty because it’s a perennial condition. The Europeans or the Americans don’t even know how to cope with transient poverty. They get into such a mess over it. But if they were Indians, they’d know that every time I come to the West, and especially in the last five years, I look around me and say, if this is recession, can I please take a piece of it back with me home? (Laughter.)

MR. NAWAZ: I think we had a question there, and then I’m coming to the front. We’ll move forward from there.

Q: Thank you. Shaun Tandon. I’m a journalist with the AFP news agency.

I just wanted to see if you could expand on your – what you mentioned, that anti-Indianism is on the out in Pakistan. For what you see from Prime Minister Sharif, Prime Minister-elect Sharif, what do you – what do you sense in terms of his policy toward India, how it will be? And your statement on anti-Indianism being on the out in Pakistan, how to you reconcile that with the strength of groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, for example? Do you still see those as groups that can be a threat to the – to the process?

MR. NAWAZ: I think he wants you to reconcile the statement about the more positive inclination of Nawaz Sharif versus the presence of groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, which continue to be on an anti-Indian bent.

MR. AIYAR: Yeah. Well, first and foremost, I don’t think Nawaz Sharif belongs to the Lashkar-e-Taiba. And I don’t see how sitting in the opposition to the PPP government in Islamabad, he needed to have – unnecessarily raise the hackles of the Lashkar-e-Taiba.

But I think the fact that Pakistan is the single worst victim of Pakistani terrorism is such an overwhelming fact, such an overwhelming piece of reality in Pakistan, that no Pakistani prime minister, whether he is Nawaz Sharif or anyone else, could possibly actually become a collaborator of the Lashkar-e-Taiba. They were at a time when it was possible to distinguish anti-Indian terrorism from anti-Western terrorism and Pakistan-directed terrorism, but these three have now become – they’ve got so many interwoven links that you either fight terrorism or you don’t. You cannot support anti-Indian terrorism and still fight anti-Pakistan terrorism.

So this is – this is the objective reality in Pakistan. And so I imagine that in Nawaz Sharif, whose own family industry has more to gain from economic relations with India than any other single element of the Pakistan society, he’s bound to want to promote a relationship in which he’s able to emerge as somebody who legitimizes himself, not only through the Pakistani electorate, but also through his ability to handle India in a manner that retains Pakistani self-respect but reduces the threat from India. Don’t forget that all these threats are mutual. If we are going to be frightened of Pakistan, the Pakistanis have ample reason to be frightened of India. And it’s only by mocking the desire to be frightened that I think we can move forward.

And Nawaz Sharif has committed – has at least made statements. For instance, he said that the day after he becomes prime minister, he’s going to abolish all visa for Indians to visit Pakistan. Now, he’s obviously going to be prevented from reaching that magnificent point, but I’m sure the intentions is to ease these visa restrictions as much as possible, to promote business contacts between the two countries. He gives an intention – he gives an – he gives a statement on the day he’s elected that they have some coal in the Thar Desert in Sindh, but they don’t know how to exploit it because the Pakistanis have never developed coal technology, whereas India has. And he says that he’d like Indians to come and invest in remote Sindh, where we could easily spawn as many terrorists as we want to go against the Pakistanis.

It’s an amazing statement for a man to – for a Pakistani prime minister to make, even before he takes his oath. But he’s quite clear, I think, in seeing that a good relationship with Pakistani will pay – with India will pay him huge domestic political dividends and that the best way of doing this is not take the Lashkar-e-Taiba on absolutely upfront but to try and restrain them and certainly prevent Pakistani state actors from aiding and abetting Pakistani nonstate actors.

MR. NAWAZ: And to cut the ground from underneath them, which is essentially what he’s trying to do.

MR. AIYAR: Well, I don’t know that I’d go that far because his record is not a very happy one. It’s also known from Sartaj Aziz’s biography, autobiography, that he did know about Pervez Musharraf’s Kargil plans. He knew about them within the month of March, within a month of Vajpayee’s visit. And the only question he asks, says Sartaj Aziz – he’s a nice chap, I like to believe him, but it may be that, you know, things gets exaggerated in his own mind. What he says was that when Pervez Musharraf came and outlined to Cabinet his plans for the action in Kargil, Nawaz Sharif’s sole question was, can you see the lights of Srinagar from the mountaintops over Kargil? And Pervez Musharraf said yes. So he says that if we allowed you to do this, how long would it take you to reach Srinagar? And Pervez Musharraf is supposed to have replied, a week, at which point Nawaz Sharif suspended the meeting and asked them all to give thanks to Allah for having provided Pervez Musharraf, who would lead the triumphant march, which Nawaz Sharif would follow, into Srinagar.

So if you – I am not suggesting that there is something divine about Nawaz Sharif because he’s a Penjabi and he knows how to do a – (inaudible) – that therefore we should trust him. It just seems to me that any leader in Pakistan today would be better advised to listen to the councils of his – the council of peace of his own people than to listen to the war cries of Hafiz Saeed and people like him.

MR. NAWAZ: We’ll take the last two questions together. So the gentleman there and then the gentleman there. And then if you wouldn’t mind answering both together.

MR. AIYAR: OK. Sure.

MR. NAWAZ: We’ll just wrap it up.

Q: Thank you. I’m professor Wayne Glass from the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California with my group of outstanding young students here. We’re in Washington – thank you for – the Atlantic Council for including this in your session today. We’re in Washington studying nuclear issues.

And your final remarks, Mr. Aiyar, about India’s energy needs and the need to meet the requirements between now and 2070 or whatever, and therefore the turn towards Iran for fossil fuel support is a – causes, of course, great concern to the United States because of our predilection to put the clamps down on Iran everywhere we possibly can. I think I heard you say, and maybe I misheard you say, that in that context, if Iran’s motivation is to pursue a nuclear weapons program, given India’s concerns about the nonproliferation treaty and the inegality (ph) that is a part of that, if I’m reading between the lines, I almost got – I almost heard you say that you might support an Iranian motivation to – for a nuclear weapons program. Is that – am I misreading your statement?

MR. NAWAZ: Thank you. We’ll take the next question also and get both of these together. Go ahead, young man.

Q: My name’s Matt Wu (sp), and I’m from USC as well. And my question was also about nuclear weapons, but in terms of the relationship between Pakistan and India. With the – just the fact that nuclear weapons are such a big part of Pakistan’s national identity as well as their national security, and in the past there has been a lot of conflict between India and Pakistan over that, and in addition to that, the fact that Pakistan, India and China have all increased their nuclear warheads within the last year as well as potential nuclear agreements between China and Pakistan and the U.S. and India, how do you think that those nuclear issues between Pakistan and India in terms of weapons can be resolved in the future?

MR. NAWAZ: That’s it.

MR. AIYAR: Yeah. OK.

MR. NAWAZ: Can Iran go nuclear – (inaudible)?

MR. AIYAR: Number one, the declared nuclear policy of Iran is not to go in for the weaponization of nuclear energy. It’s disbelieved in Washington. It’s disbelieved in Western capitals. And yet it is repeatedly iterated and reiterated by the Iranians. And so I think that recognizing their sovereign rights, we should allow for the possibility that they do not intend to make nuclear weapons. And there – we should take no actions, the world should take no actions that pushes them in that direction and – instead to take actions that will increase their own sense of security, which first and foremost means recognizing that Israel is a nuclear weapons power, which has been ignored, and working towards attempting to defuse rather than promote the tension between Israel and Iran.

I think second, we need to recognize that we cannot – I don’t believe anybody can stop Iran from becoming a nuclear weapon power should they choose to. There was an attempt to stop Iraq from becoming a nuclear weapon power, and it’s left such a huge mess, creating, in fact, the most dangerous face-off in the 21st century by bringing the Shia majority of Iraq into power in Baghdad and placing them absolutely cheek-by-jowl with the most fanatical Wahhabi Sunni element of Saudi Arabia. That we are trying – that the one result of what George W. Bush Jr. did was to recreate the situation that ended in 648 A.D. when the battle of Qadisiya was resolved in favor of the Arabs and against the Iranians and has therefore kept Iraq as a buffer zone between Iran – between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia for 1,400 years. I mentioned this to Hillary Clinton on the one occasion I met her, and was very disturbed that she had never heard of the Battle of Qadisiya. So there seems to be an absence of understanding of other people’s histories before going into these areas.

These are very highly developed civilizations with a very highly developed sense of nationhood, and therefore a sense of nationhood that has been repeatedly insulted, and not least by Kermit Roosevelt in 1953, when he led the CIA revolt against – on the streets of Tehran against Mossadegh, who was a duly elected prime minister, who wanted to do no more with Iranian oil than the Saudis today are doing, which is to say it’s our oil.

So the assumption that the Iranian mullah is an enemy, that the ayatollahs have to be somehow finished, and that whether the Iranian people want them or not, we don’t want them, and therefore we can get rid of them, to promote regime change, to do so by economic sanctions – economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein resulted in half a million dead Iraqi children. If that is not genocide, what is? Before the war. This is not the consequence of what happened in the wars. Economic sanctions. And now they’re trying to tighten the noose around Iran, which has, A, got a more democratic government, a much more lively people; and to portray them as an axis of evil and so forth is to be so self-defeating.

And in the process of doing this, why should India have to have its trade relations strangled? The Americans have now said the Asian Clearing Union can’t function. So the Iranians can’t pay, and we are, therefore, into some kind of a primitive barter arrangement with them. We are trying to build the Chabahar port in Iran for them and getting paid in – you know, like red Indians here, with beads and so forth. And that’s the situation to which you’re reduced two great countries of Asia because you’re unable to sort out their quarrels.

Now, we’ve got into the position where, very legalistically, we say that we can make the bomb because we didn’t sign the NPT, but that Iran shouldn’t make the bomb because it did sign the NPT. Well, so did North Korea. And North Korea simply said, I’m walking out of the NPT, and what can you do about it? Well, nothing. The reason why Libya got bombed was that that stupid Gadhafi gave up his nuclear bomb. If he’d not given up his nuclear bomb, how would you have gone into that country? And please read – if my memory is right, it’s either page 248 or page 264, but I may be mistaken, of Tony Blair’s political autobiography, where the immortal sentence is there that if only Saddam Hussein had done what Gadhafi did, we would not have needed to invade Iraq. Today I can only say, ha-ha-ha. And the whole of the American political establishment is being thrown into a tizzy over what happened in Benghazi? Has anybody asked what has happened to the Libyan political establishment as a result of what happened before that in Benghazi?

Revolutions have a right to come into existence against injustice, and revolutions have a right to overthrow the unjust. But when their war is taken over by somebody else and a new cause is introduced, then it renders the result illegitimate. And that is what is happening all over the Middle East. And when a revolution is allowed to play out its natural course, the fear that you have of the current Egyptian regime – you can’t wish Islam away, and therefore, you can’t wish away extremist Islam. You have to deal with it. And I don’t see how we can have any kind of settlement in Afghanistan without recognizing that most of the social practices advocated by the Taliban are the extant social practices of much of rural Afghanistan, and that they don’t regard your removing the veil as an act of liberation. They don’t. But then, they’re peculiar.

So what I do every time I’m told, you know, these Taliban are a backward people is to look at photographs of the seaside in Brighton or here in the United States of America a hundred years ago. Where were the bikinis? They weren’t’ there. It was regarded as immodest to uncover yourself to the extent which is absolutely normal today on – in the beaches or the swimming pools of the United States of America. And in Victorian England – that’s only 150 years ago – in Victorian England, they used to put cloth around the legs of tables because Victorian gentlemen would get unnecessarily aroused by looking at any legs, even if it were the wooden legs of a table.

So societies change, societies evolve, and it’s ridiculous to try and impose the civilizational norms of one civilization on another. True, they may turn around. The Iranians have gone to the extent of actually putting on the suits that you make. They haven’t agreed to putting on the tie, for the ridiculous reason that they think it looks like a cross. I’m not sure that it looks like a cross at all, but that’s why they don’t wear a tie. Well, let them not wear a tie. Do we really have to make them all wear ties? And in any case, it makes some sense for people to wear suits in Iran because it can be quite cold in the winter and quite pleasant in summer. Will we make Indians wear suits? The only record that India has in today’s New York Times is the temperature in Delhi. It’s 111 degrees – thank you very much – and no other capital in the world comes close to our century-plus-11.

So I think all this business of assuming – and then I come back to the fundamental question. I think all nuclear weapons are bad. I think they’re terrible. I think they should never have been invented, and if they have, they should be disinvented. I think there should be total, total nuclear disarmament. And that applies as much to India and Pakistan as it would to potentially Iran and certainly the United States today. But if the United States – and that was the point I was making – says nuclear weapons are necessary for our security, on what plane of logic can you tell another country, whether it’s Iran or anybody else, that it’s not necessary for your security? And can we decide what is necessary for the security of another country?

Now, link that up with the other question which you asked about Indo-Pakistan nuclear détente. Please remember that it was when the Chinese had their atom bomb explosion above the air in 1964, there was tremendous pressure on India – it was just two years after the Chinese invasion. Two years. There was tremendous pressure on us to start our nuclear weapons program, and it was resisted. It was resisted by a series of three or four prime ministers of India, from Jawaharlal Nehru into Lal Bahadur Shastri, then Indira Gandhi, and then the challenge that took place.

But in 1971, we had a horrendous experience. What was happening in East Pakistan was being reported all over the West. Mrs. Gandhi stopped the hawks from sending the Indian army into East Pakistan because she thought that she could get restraint exercised by going to the Western capitals. And she traveled to all the Western capitals. And we now know what conversations took place between Nixon and Kissinger over what was happening in 1971. Nixon was calling her a bitch and saying, who’s the bloody woman trying to upset the order that I’m setting up? Because he wanted to be known as the one who had gone to China and made the breakthrough there, and because they couldn’t get to China except through Peshawar, they felt that it was necessary to keep Pakistan on their side. And what was this Indira Gandhi doing trying to disturb this noble, divine order by complaining about what Pakistanis were doing to Pakistanis? That that was an internal matter for Pakistan.

And we faced first an influx of 6 million and finally an influx of 10 million refugees from East Pakistan coming into our country. And so when the war started, the Soviet Union told us we’ll give you exactly – give you 18 days; we can’t keep the veto going beyond that. Every single country in the U.N. except for Bhutan voted against us. And we succeeded in finishing that war in 16 days, but not before the USS Enterprise, nuclear powered, had been sent towards the Bay of Bengal by Henry Kissinger.

Now, in these circumstances Mrs. Gandhi decided that we shouldn’t be trusting either democracy or the good will of the West. And she made what I regard as a big mistake, the first Pokharan blast. And once she made the first Pokharan blast, we had Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan saying that they’d eat leaves. And because they needed the money, apart from stealing the technology, needed the money, he said it will be an Islamic bomb, not only a Pakistani bomb. And so we both slid into this.

We slid into it, and then in 1987, gratuitously, the infamous A.Q. Khan called an Indian journalist and told him that we have the bomb. And at that time, in a private conversation with Rajiv Gandhi, Rajiv said to me, Mani, if Pakistan gets the bomb, even I can’t stop India from getting it. Because he knew me as a peacemaker, and he didn’t want to fall, I think, in my moral eyes, and therefore he wanted to stress that he was against the nuclear bomb. But it seems as if he gave permission for the bomb to be further developed. It was already a screwdriver away from being used.

But then we kept off it for a good 10 years, and then this silly government of the opposition came in, and to show themselves to be – (inaudible) – I’ll define that for you – you kill 30 – which means you kill 30 flies and claim you killed 30 human beings – he exploded this bomb. His entire government didn’t last a year, and he exploded the bomb, and sure enough, the Pakistanis did it three weeks later. They could have done it at any time before. We could have done it at any time before.

And neither of us were bound by the NPT because we refused to sign this unequal treaty. And having refused to sign this unequal treaty, we were in the clear. The Iranians are not, because they are signatories to it. And they insist that they are signatories to it. They say they don’t want to move out of it. They say that they will attend the NPT review conference. They are the chairman of the nonaligned group, so they’re going to be speaking on behalf of 120 countries, to the Americans, who will be speaking on their own behalf. And they’ll be asked, the Americans, again and again, but what happened to Article VI of the NPT, which said that you were going to reduce your nuclear arsenals with a view to eliminating them?

So we live in a very unequal world. We live in a very unjust world. We live in a world in which morality is not on any one side. What we need to do is to arrive at sensible – (inaudible) – where we don’t slip into war.

And so might I just end my remarks just now by referring you to the origins of the First World War. The First World War did not accidentally begin on the 4th of August, 1914. It began actually on the 26th of June, 1900, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand had fallen in love with a countess, but she wasn’t a peer of the realm. He fell so madly in love with her that he insisted on marrying her. And the high priest said that you can have a marriage but it will be a morganatic marriage, which meant that she would never be described as the queen of – the empress of Austria Hungary. And her children could never aspire to the throne.

But Franz Ferdinand was so much in love with Countess Sophie that he said despite its being a morganatic marriage, I’ll marry you. And for the next 14 years he was extremely upset about the fact that whenever he was on a public platform, she was not allowed to come on the platform with him, and she was always being slighted by the other members of the royal entourage.

So when Austria succeeded in capturing Bosnia, he was made the commander in chief of the Bosnian army. And he immediately asked, when I go there to take my salute, can I take Countess Sophie with me? And the high priest said, yes, you can, because Bosnia is still not a part of the Austrian Empire, so she will be treated equally with you. And so he drove down to Sarajevo with his wife, only because he loved her so much that he wanted her to be honored equally with him. And that is where Gavrilo Princip shot both of them dead and the First World War started. So the world war did not begin as a story of hate; it began as a Mills & Boon story of love. So you never know when these wretched nuclear weapons would be used. The circumstances of their use will never be known before they’re used.

And once they’re used, it’s the only war in history that will never get reported. And nobody is going to get a professorship at the University of Southern California to write on the Third World War, because none of us will be there. So why do you want these wretched weapons? (Laughter.) So let us all decide that we’ll get rid of them. And I’m sure India and Pakistan will get rid of them along with everybody else.

MR. NAWAZ: Thank you very much, Mr. Aiyar. And I do hope that people listen to you so we can continue to study these issues at the USC and at other universities rather than resolve them with nuclear exchanges.

Please join me in thanking Mr. Aiyar for his talk. (Applause.)

(END)

Held on May 11, 2013, Pakistan’s general election signifies the first civilian transfer of power following the successful completion of a five year term by a democratically elected government.

In addition to events held on the topic, Shuja Nawaz–regional expert and South Asia Center director–appeared on many news outlets before and after the country’s historic vote. The Center’s Emerging Leaders of Pakistan program shares photos and insights on the elections from a unique perspective.

Events

• Governance Opportunities and Challenges for the Incoming Pakistani Administration – May 20, 2013
• Beyond Pakistan’s Elections: A Mountain of Challenges – May 17, 2013
• Pakistan’s Economic Challenges and Solutions: A Business Perspective – May 3, 2013
• Elections 2013: Pakistan’s Turning Point? – April 10, 2013

Media Appearances

• Shuja Nawaz Speaks About Pakistan Elections (CCTV America) – May 13, 2013
• Shuja Nawaz Response to Pakistan Election Results (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) – May 13, 2013
• Shuja Nawaz on Foreign Policy Challenges for New Pakistani Government (VOA) – May 10, 2013
• Shuja Nawaz on Pakistan’s Upcoming Elections (NPR) – May 10, 2013

Blog Posts

• The Treacherous Road to Pakistan’s Historic Elections – Shuja Nawaz – May 9, 2013
• Pakistani Politics: Perils and Paradoxes – Harlan Ullman – May 9, 2013

Photo credits: Wikimedia (top) / Mechid TV (front page)

South Asia Center Director Shuja Nawaz joins a live Google Hangout organized by RFE/RL to discuss Pakistan’s historic elections.

South Asia Center Director Shuja Nawaz joins CCTV America to discuss Pakistan’s historic elections.

Video

South Asia Center Director Shuja Nawaz joins Voice of America’s Access Point in the lead-up to the Pakistani elections to discuss the foreign policy challenges of the next Pakistani government and how different governing coalitions may get along with the United States.

South Asia Center Director Shuja Nawaz speaks with NPR’s Steve Inskeep about Pakistan’s upcoming elections.

 

Pakistan’s upcoming elections on May 11 provoke both fear and hope.

The last time Pakistan held a reasonably free and fair election, in 1970, the country ended up splitting into two, as Bangladesh emerged out of the ruins of a horrible civil war that led to Indian military intervention. This time, the election has been marked by a violent campaign by the Tehreek-e-Taliban of Pakistan against selected political parties, even while a raging insurgency in the border region with Afghanistan is keeping some 140,000 troops of the Pakistan army fully occupied in a holding pattern. A nationalist insurgency and sectarian and ethnic battles in Baluchistan have raised fears of another “Bangladesh” in the making, though these may be exaggerated.  Absent a robust civilian administration, the prospects of the military’s counter insurgency moving beyond the “hold” phase to “build and transfer” are dim. Meanwhile, the United States needs a stable Pakistan, among other things, to allow the Coalition to exit Afghanistan in an orderly manner and to prevent the economic and political implosion of nuclear-armed Pakistan: something that keeps leaders in the region and around the globe on edge. Behind these complex issues, there is much to discover: both positive and negative.

More on the elections Shuja Nawaz on Foreign Policy Challenges for New Pakistani Government (VOA) Shuja Nawaz on Pakistan’s Upcoming Elections (NPR) Shuja Nawaz speaks about Pakistan elections (CCTV America) The South Asia Center’s Emerging Leaders of Pakistan program shares photos and insights on the elections from a unique perspective.

These elections in Pakistan represent the clash of expectations and realities. While many are calling this a watershed moment in the country’s benighted history, the elections are not likely to create any immediate seismic shifts in the political landscape. The powers of incumbency weigh heavily in favor of the mainstream parties at the constituency level, where tribal loyalties play a huge role in voting behavior.  It is possible some major parties will team up to throw back the challenge of upstarts like the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI ) of Imran Khan. The injury that took him out of active campaigning in the final days of the campaign may garner him some sympathy surge of support, making his challenge to the status quo even more powerful. Overthrowing a well-entrenched system of political spoils that has created a rentier state in Pakistan may be impossible in short order. Politicians, civil administrators, and even the elements in the military have become used to a Culture of Entitlement that provides heavily subsidized state-owned land and other perquisites to the chosen few, creating palpable disaffection among the general public.

Khan’s PTI may surprise the political system if enough youth and new voters actually come out to vote. So voter and youth turnout will be important. He has created a couple of changes that will have far-reaching effects on Pakistan’s politics. He has awakened the youth vote. Some 34 per cent of the registered voters today are below 30. He also held intra-party elections, a foreign concept for the autocratic “selection” system of appointing party officials among most of the dynastic main stream parties for whom politics is family business. Only the Jamaat-i-Islami routinely holds internal elections.  If these moves take root they could change the political landscape over time.

The legacy of the civilian administration of the Pakistan People’s Party is a mixed one. By devolving political and economic power from the Center to the provinces, it did the right thing but implemented it in a hasty manner. As a result, confusion reigns on the economic and political front on the funding and implementation of projects in the provinces. But this shift of power to the provinces will give greater heft to the results of the provincial elections, because that is where future economic decisions will be made and development projects implemented. Also, the provincial legislators will be a key part of the Electoral College for the election of the next President of Pakistan later this year.

Conventional wisdom borne out by numerous recent polls in Pakistan appears to favor a return to power of the former Prime Minister Mian Mohammed Nawaz Sharif though there are still many unknowns, among them the almost 40 million new voters on the rolls, most of whom are disaffected youth who, according to a new British Council poll, fear the worst for their country and have little confidence in their political leaders. Sharif’s base is the Punjab, an economic and political powerhouse. If he wins, this will be the first time in a long while when the Center and the Punjab are in the same hands, promising potential economic stability and growth that could lift the entire economy out of the hole that the PPP government dug. Sharif also promises to open the border with India to trade and traffic, allowing the deep-seated hostility between these old rivals to become muted and both to prosper economically. An India-Pakistan détente would augur well for Afghanistan too, supporting transit trade and links to Central Asia via Afghanistan. But that is a long-term prospect.

For now, Pakistan would do well to survive the elections on May 11 without creating further fissures in its polity and without raising the specter of military intervention, something that appears remote at present but is seen as a default option by some Pakistanis. The best the military can do, as promised by army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, is to provide a secure environment for the elections with 70,000 troops deployed on Election Day. Then back to the barracks, hopefully. They still have an internal war to fight, against their homegrown insurgents and terrorists. And the new government will have its hands full fixing a broken economy.

Shuja Nawaz is director of the South Asia Center. This piece first appeared on Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel.

On April 1, 2013, South Asia Center Director Shuja Nawaz traveled to Pakistan to convene discussions with the Pakistani contingent of the India-Pakistan Track II Military and Water Dialogues. Mr. Nawaz led working groups for both dialogues in Lahore.

The South Asia Center also co-sponsored a seminar in Lahore with Madadgar Trust on the “Rights of Rivers,” which focused on the Ravi River and provided recommendations for curbing environmental abuse of the Ravi. The Ravi River, a transboundary river that flows through Northwestern India and eastern Pakistan, is an integral part of the Indus River Basin and its water was given to India under the Indus Water Treaty of 1960 while Pakistan had ten years to build canals from northern rivers to the Ravi.

While in Rawalpindi, he worked on a study on the links between the military education school system and the potential for broader reform within the system. He also met with the Indian and UK high commission staff, US embassy staff, and senior Pakistani civil and military officials.

Hassan Abbas, professor of international security studies at National Defense University; and Knox Thames, director of policy and research at the US Commission on International Religious Freedom visited the South Asia Center on March 13, 2013 to discuss ethnic and sectarian violence in Pakistan.

At the discussion titled “Ending Ethnic and Sectarian Violence in Pakistan,” the speakers addressed the dire domestic security situation facing Pakistan in light of recent growing targeted killings and ethnic violence, and offered their advice to the country’s leaders and the international community. Expressing concern over an inadequate response by the government, Mr. Thames stated the need for more visible consequences for perpetrators and suggested international engagement with the provinces, beyond the federal level in Pakistan. Dr. Abbas, citing an unprecedented 34 attacks on Sufi shrines, underscored the widespread nature of this problem affecting everyday Pakistanis. He stated the two paths to change are education and police reform, and cautioned the US of favoring sides in sectarian conflict. In his opening remarks, Moderator and Director of the South Asia Center Shuja Nawaz challenged the common critique of the Pakistan government by stating, “if Pakistani society fails to protect its own, it is the failure of everyone, the State, the civil government , the military establishment, the civil society, and each and every Pakistani. Passing the buck will not solve this cancerous problem. Nor will simply citing the litany of loses caused by the mayhem.”