MR. DONNELLY: Thanks, Jamie. I will not -- we have a very distinguished panel and the biographical materials are, I'm sure, in your folder, so I'm not going to dwell on the achievements of my colleagues, except to say that they all add up to a pretty large pile of achievements, both individually and collectively. And in particular, it would be hard to imagine a more sagacious group to talk about the subject matter.

The United States has been fighting two wars for many years now. They are -- the two wars are sort of oddly joined at the hip. We were talking in the -- before we began the formal proceedings -- about how troops deployed in one theater of war somehow seem to be opportunity costs in the other theater of war. So I think everybody will talk, sort of, holistically about the broad situation of what we've come to call the long war. But we'll just run-down the panel. We'll hear first from the refugees from the Brookings Institution, Ken Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon, and Gen. Barno will conclude.

So it's better for me to probe and prod as a moderator rather than give a long speech of introduction, so Ken, if you will just carry us along, and then Mike, just pick up when Ken is done, and General, finish up.

MR. POLLACK: Thank you, Tom. Thank you to FPI. I really appreciate your giving Mike and I yet another opportunity to destroy our credentials with our own party.

Let me start on Iraq by making the obvious point, which is that one of the reasons why I'm up here is because I am growing increasingly concerned by what's going on in Iraq. The situation is not a foregone conclusion. We're not in panic mode, but there are a number of troubling signs that are emerging that I think that the U.S. government has got to start paying attention to.

And I will start by the outset in saying that the problems that I see out there and the changes that I would be looking for are not really the kind of changes that would require greater resources. I think that that is something that all three of us on this panel would share, and I think it's an interesting topic to talk about.

It's not so much about the need for more troops in Iraq, or even more resources writ large, although there is some arguments to be made for some additional funding out there, it's mostly about how we use the resources, and I think that's my real concern, as what we've seen over the last six months or so is a shift in how the United States has approached Iraq, and how we are using the resources that we do have there, and we should remember, the resources that we have in Iraq are enormous, they are incredibly influential, and we're simply not using them in the way that we once did, and there are problems emerging.

I think the best way to kind of explain how those problems are starting to emerge is by stepping back a little bit, and if you will pardon me, I'm going to start with a little bit of, kind of, academic scholarship, because I think it's actually useful.

There are a number of people out there in the academy, scholars who have been studying civil wars for a very long period of time. And what's interesting is if you go to them, the data, the work that they've been doing for decades and decades, all says two things that are of importance to Iraq, which is one, a country like Iraq that has undergone a major civil war has an astronomically high likelihood of having that civil war reoccur and reoccur very quickly.

The tendency over the last 50, 60, 70 years is to have civil wars that look like Lebanon, like Congo, like Afghanistan, like the Balkans, where you get bouts of severe fighting for two or three years. Then there's a year or two where, kind of, the sides disengage, there are some fruitless negotiations, and then they start fighting again, and this goes on for decades. It goes on for 15 or 25 years. That is the typical pattern in these kinds of civil wars.

The second thing that they have demonstrated is that the one out from this trap, the one way that you get out of it is to have an external great power, typically the former colonial power, willing to make a long-term commitment to serve as peacekeepers and mediators. Now even then, the academics will all tell you, the likelihood of success is not great. In fact, it's on the lower side of 50 percent. But that is the one way out of this trap and we've got to think about that when we're thinking about Iraq.

Iraq has gone through a major civil war. To a great extent, that was our fault. It was a result of the mistakes that we made in 2003, 2004, entirely self-inflicted, but we are where we are. We can't roll back the clock. And that puts Iraq into this very dangerous, fragile category.

The second thing I wanted to do was talk a little bit about the history, because again, it's important to understand what the problems are in Iraq by understanding what happened over the last few years, and I'm not going to talk about it for very long, but I want you to think about it in a certain way, which is that what happened in 2003, the fundamental mistake that we made was that we created a security vacuum in Iraq after the fall of Saddam, and of course there was a political vacuum that went along with it.

And as a result of that, what happened was that the worst elements in Iraqi society took over the governing of Iraqi society. Now in some cases they took over because we installed them in power, and again, we made some terrible mistakes early on forming up what was then called the Iraqi governing council, and that kind of set the precedents all along the way. But to an ever great extent, our mistake was in leaving Iraq's cities to the tender mercies of Iraq's warlords and militias. We left that security vacuum.

We went off to chase al-Qaeda in Anbar province and, as a result, the worst elements in Iraqi society took over the streets. They grabbed the streets, they basically imposed a protection racket on the people, they used their control over the seats to force people to vote for them at the elections, and they then used their position within the Iraqi government to steal Iraq's oil revenues, to use control over various Iraqi governmental agencies to further expand their power or their influence, etc., in a kind of vicious cycle. And of course, they all fought with one another. And add to that al-Qaeda and Iraq and the other Salafi jihadist groups, who were deliberately trying to stoke a civil war between Shia and Sunni, and you got the conflagration of 2005, 2006.

What happened in 2007, 2008, which I will describe as -- everyone calls it -- the surge. And of course, the additional troops were important, but they were one element of what happened, and there were about a dozen different things that happened in that 2007, 2008 period, the change in strategy, the Anbar awakening, the battle of Baghdad, changes within the Shia community, a whole variety of different things happened.

But as a result, what's critically important to understand, is that we filled the security vacuum. That was really the key to what happened in 2007. We took back the streets. We pushed the militias off the streets. We made it so that the average Iraqi no longer had to vote for the militias, no longer had to look to the militias for protection and basic services. And as a result it allowed average Iraqis, who would like -- always wanted to do the right thing, to start to do the right thing, and it made it much harder for those Iraqis who wanted to do the wrong thing to do the wrong thing.

The new cover issue of -- or the new cover story in The National Interest of the piece I wrote on Iraq, I talk about a number of different stories, vignettes, anecdotes from times when I was in Iraq, in some cases with Mike, just stories about how the surge and everything that changed in 2007, 2008 began to change the incentive structure for Iraqis, and that allowed the better Iraqis to do the right things and forced the bad Iraqis to at least not do the wrong things, and in some cases to do the right things purely out of necessity.

What we've seen in the last six months and what is so troubling has been a tendency on the part of the U.S. government to pull back from Iraq and from its day to day politics. One of the things that nobody recognizes about the surge, one of the critical elements of it, and as I said, there are about a dozen, was the role that our ambassador, Ryan Crocker, and some of his staff played in getting the Iraqis to do the right thing.

In some cases Ryan would say to them, "You must do this," and he had the full support of David Petraeus, and he had the full support of Washington, and the United States was tremendously influential, and we were willing to use the influence we had to force the Iraqis to do the right thing.

At this point, of course, we've had the security agreement; we have a drawdown going on. It's clear that even under any set of circumstances the influence of the United States was not going to be the same, but we remain the most influential actor in Iraq by far. And at this point in time, what we need to do is less directing of the Iraqis -- "You must do this, that."

In point of fact, that's impossible to do, because they are now sovereign, they are feeling their oats. Iraqi nationalism is kicking in. It would be extremely difficult to do that even if we wanted, and quite frankly, it's unnecessary. Enough progress has been made that at this point in time what it's mostly about is simply ensuring that the Iraqis are playing by the rules, and that is where we are beginning to have problems.

We're not forcing the Iraqis to play by the rules. We're not insisting that both the Iraqi government and various Iraqi opposition groups work within the system. Increasingly you are seeing Iraqi actors, including but not limited to the Prime Minister, working around the system -- doing things that aren't necessarily unconstitutional, but are certainly extra-constitutional. And there are a lot of unconstitutional, and quite frankly, illegal things going on as well.

And we are not using the influence that we have, and as I said, it remains enormous, even if it is not the dictatorial power that we once held in the country. We are not using it to push back and to demonstrate to the Iraqis that if they don't play by the rules, there will be a price extracted. And the problem, of course, is that this becomes that self-fulfilling prophesy. It becomes the same kind of a process that got us into the civil war in the first place. Because when good Iraqis see the bad Iraqis being allowed to get away with graft and bribery and in many cases murder, quite literally, and the United States doesn't do anything about it, the assumption that they make is that there will be more and more of that in the future.

And what you have to recognize, of course, is that people make decisions about what they're going to do today based on their expectation of the future. That's how these civil wars start. We actually know quite a bit about them. And that's how good people who don't want a civil war wind up taking decisions, hedging their bets, casting their lot with militias and warlords to protect themselves and their families in the future. And in so doing, those actions empower the warlords, dis-empower those elements who are arguing for stability and push a country into this kind of a civil war.

It's very early on. There's still lots of time for the United States to make changes, to demonstrate to the Iraqis that we're not going to allow them to stop playing by the rules, that we are going to impose severe penalties for doing so. We still have lots of leverage. And the truth of the matter is that when you talk to Iraqis, including Iraqi governing officials, they're terrified that the U.S. government will use our influence to stop them from doing these things, because they know full well if we exerted ourselves, they would have to stop, they would have to go back to playing by the rules. They would have to engage in that very cumbersome, very frustrating process of democratic politics, which they were forced to engage in in 2008 and 2009, and which produced the progress towards stabilization that we saw, and which right now is jeopardized by our own willingness to continue to exert that influence.

So let me just end by reiterating a point that I made early on. My concerns about Iraq are early. My concerns about Iraq, though, are very serious, in the sense that what you are seeing is the beginning of a process which over the course of years if it plays out could bring Iraq right back into that civil war. And we should always keep in mind that the history, the patterns out there make it very, very likely that Iraq is going to return to it if we don't exert ourselves.

But exerting ourselves in Iraq doesn't mean adding 30,000 more troops. In point of fact I think we could continue to draw down our troops if we were willing to continue to exert ourselves. It's really about politics and diplomacy, and about using all of the levers at our disposal -- diplomatic, political, economic, financial, military, everything else.

If we can do that, I think there's every reason to believe that Iraq can continue to make good progress and some day inshallah it will be a stable and even prosperous country.

If not, I fear we may be making the same mistake, if not worse, in Iraq that we did in Afghanistan, turning away from the country prematurely, turning away from it before it had stabilized, only to find ourselves in a few years coming back to a much worse civil war in a much more delicate part of the world.

MR. DONNELLY: So much for the good news.

Michael, it's a little unclear to me whether you're going to talk about Afghanistan, Iraq or both, but I look forward to -- I know it will be good whatever it is so please --

MR. O'HANLON: Moderator in charge --

MR. DONNELLY: That's right. No, I'm exerting -- I'm setting you up for the skewering to come.

MR. O'HANLON: That's right. Well, I'll just make one comment about Iraq on the transition over towards Afghanistan, which is as Ken just said, and I commend him for his analysis and for staying focused on this important, hugely important part of the world. Even though we need to exert our leverage, it doesn't necessarily require, nor is it even possible for us at this point to modify our troop drawdown schedule, so it doesn't require additional troops.

And I think the linkage here, and Gen. Barno may not totally agree with me and he'll have a chance to correct me in a second, but I don't believe that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are in direct fundamental competition for resources. They are in a secondary competition, especially in the next 12 months. There is admittedly some need to worry about where any additional brigades for Afghanistan would come from if they have to be deployed in the next six to eight months. And the short answer, I think, is going to be that we'll continue to ask so much of so few, the Army and Marine Corps institutions that have been working so hard, and will take a little longer to get to the kind of dwell times and recovery times that we really would like to see for our soldiers and Marines and other uniformed personnel.

But I believe you can actually go up three or four brigades in Afghanistan and sustain that for a while if we're going down from, let's say, 13 to 5 brigades in Iraq over the next 12 months. So I believe that an aggregate deployment that's basically on the order of 10 brigades for Afghanistan and 5 for Iraq, which is the place I think we may wind up in a year, is sustainable. And in that sense I believe that there is not a fundamental competition between these two wars.

Now that could change depending on circumstances, and as I say, there are complications in the next few months. But fundamentally, I believe we can look at each war to some extent separately based on its merits. So now let me do so for Afghanistan.

Ken joked a minute ago that we have the opportunity to again make ourselves unpopular with our own party. I'm going to, however, in this case make a partial defense of President Obama, but I'm not going to start with that. And in fact, what I'm actually going to do is begin with a defense of Gen. McChrystal, but wind up with a little bit of a defense of Obama, and most people don't seem to believe those two things are mutually compatible at this moment, but I'm going to try because I believe they are.

Okay, Gen. McChrystal. The basic idea of asking for more forces, as most of us now expect that he will -- the basic logic to this for me is fairly simple. Frankly, I don't think that the command is making a good argument or making a clear argument right now. I don't believe that the case is being articulated well at all, but I think the case is actually fairly simple to understand and it's something like this.

We have added about 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan in the last few months, and we've put them down mostly in the south of the country, and we've created, as counter insurgent theorists like to say, additional "ink spots" -- additional places where we've cleared and are now holding, because we don't want to vacate those places again and let the Taliban re-infiltrate, kill off the informants who have worked with us, sew more IEDs, and then have to repeat the whole thing over again.

So Gen. McChrystal is correct in my judgment to say that we should put those forces down, let them clear, begin to establish some governance, build up with Afghans the kind of institutions needed, and let them stay in one place.

The problem is those ink spots are sort of few and far between right now, they don't touch each other. You're not creating a contiguous zone of safety and security and economic activity, and what that means is that even if you're able to clear one city or one town, the next one over still has plenty of Taliban in it, or operating about in the area.

And what that means is the night letters and the assassinations, and the targeted violence and the climate of fear and intimidation continue, because even if you think you're holding onto this little town here, the next one over has enough nasty people still in it who are able to come back at nighttime, sneak in, you know, in guise, in camouflage or, you know, infiltrate among the civilian population, and then do their subterfuges against the population, that we don't achieve the climate of security and political and institutional recovery that we need.

So when you do these isolated ink spots, you're actually not being fair to your own troops, because they still live at risk of those IEDs being planted, of those assassination campaigns being carried out, and you're asking the 65,000 troops who are already there to accept greater danger in their day to day activities than they should.

That's the point Mr. Obama did not make on Sunday, and which he should have acknowledged. He basically said, "Well, I owe it to the soldier or Marine that might still deploy in the future to think through the mission before I send that person overseas."

Well, true enough, but what about the 65,000 who are already there? They are at greater risk right now because these ink spots are isolated from each other, and therefore we cannot create a general environment of security for our forces, for the Afghan population. And so the basic logic of counter-insurgency, I believe, is that you want to do this kind of a thing in a fairly comprehensive way in at least the key corridor of the country, the south, the Ring Road going from Helmand to Kandahar up to Kabul. You want to be able to cover most of that road, cover most of the economic zones and cover most of the main population centers all at once. That's the logic to me to doing this quickly.

I don't know if Gen. McChrystal is right or not to say that there's an imminent risk of defeat in the next 12 months if we don't. But even if he is too pessimistic in that assessment -- by the way, it's better to have generals too pessimistic than too optimistic, so I commend him for the sober and, you know, and hard-hitting, stark version of reality that he's conveying. But even if he's slightly too pessimistic, the logic remains that you want to create this zone of protection and of government capacity to govern the population and build up the institutions that are needed for Afghanistan throughout a whole area, because the Taliban are good. This is an insurgency that's very capable of using the next town over or the next sanctuary over, and then coming over and doing their dastardly deeds, you know, and then escaping. They're very, very talented; it's a very impressive insurgency.

And to me, that was the most important thing that came out of the strategic assessment is the depiction of the enemy and how capable it's become, largely organized through this Quedeshura based in Balachistan, Pakistan, but having a shadow government really through much of southern and eastern Afghanistan. So the logic for Gen. McChrystal's request is very solid, and to me generally compelling.

But let me give two big caveats and then I'll look forward to Gen. Barno's comments and the broader discussion, and this is why I defend President Obama, at least for a while, at least for a few weeks of deliberation and indecision. If he is still in November where he is today, I will not be defending him, but I think where he is at this moment is understandable.

Let me begin with what could, if I say it wrong, sound like a bit of a critique of the U.S. military, but I'm going to take a risk at saying it wrong in order to make the point. When Mr. Obama came into office, he said, you know, "People like General Barno have been starved for resources throughout this war. I want to do the war right. I want to make it the priority that it should be, and I want to have a serious comprehensive review of strategy and do what my military commanders, including the, you know, very accomplished David Petraeus, are telling me that they think is best, and integrate that with a civilian strategy and a regional strategy, and let's make this the opening priority of my administration in national security terms," and he really did it.

He spent a lot of time on it in the first couple of months, and he listed to the Petraeuses and the Mullins of the world, and what they said was, "Let's go to a counter-insurgency strategy, protect the population, integrate with our Pakistan policy, and try to apply the resources needed to do this," and the number of resources that the generals told him that they thought they needed was apparently somewhere in the range of 75 to 78,000 U.S. soldiers, roughly speaking from what we gather from the outside.

As you know, President Obama did not give the exact number requested, but he basically doubled the size of the U.S. military commitment in Afghanistan in the first six months of his presidency. Go back and find another time in history when that's been done. And that's pretty serious resolve, and the people who are critiquing him for his supposed lack of resoluteness right now need to remember where we've come in the last six months. It's pretty darn impressive.

There are 65,000 GIs in Afghanistan today. At this time last year there were about 29 or 30,000. And yes, President Bush deserves partial credit for one of those brigades that went over in January, February, but he could only deploy that brigade in good conscience because he knew that the guy who was about to replace him was calling for the same thing.

So Obama's basically more than doubled the force. And the command that he interacted with at that time told him that would be most of what they thought they needed, if not nearly the entirety of what they thought they needed.

Lo and behold, Gen. Petraeus, who I greatly admire and is a good friend, and I do not criticize his performance in any way, but I'm just trying to tell the story from a different point of view. Gen. Petraeus and the team say, "We need this many forces," Obama gives them almost everything they want, but then Petraeus, Mullin, Gates recommend a change in command.

Gen. McChrystal goes to Afghanistan in June and does an assessment that was not originally planned as part of the March 27th strategy announcement, but that was appropriate under the circumstances of a new commander. And he comes back and says, "I need a lot more force, and this thing's going a lot worse than I thought." And for President Obama, it's a little bit of a, "Whoa, you know, what's going on here" moment.

I don't want to endorse General Jones' view and I'm not going to talk too much inside Washington baseball, but for those of you who remember, he went over to Afghanistan in June and Bob Woodward reported that Jones was delivering to commanders the message, "Don't even ask for more. Obama doesn't want to hear it." I don't like what Gen. Jones did, I don't think that's appropriate. But I do think commanders should say what they think they need, but the President should also digest that request and think hard about it before he approves the request.

And so here we are, less than six months after that first strategy review was concluded, and military commanders are now saying for the exact same strategy that they proposed and carried the day in endorsing back in March, they need umpteen extra thousand troops, well above and beyond what they thought they needed back in the January, February, March time frame when this debate was first unfolding.

And so Mr. Obama is entitled to think twice about that. He is entitled to wonder just how precise is all this military arithmetic, anyway? Just how promising is this new counter insurgency strategy, anyway?

And by the way, if Gen. McChrystal and Gen. Petraeus are only talking about marginally improving our prospects for success with this new proposed reinforcement, is it worth it? If you -- let's say right now the chances of success are 30 percent, and with the new proposal they would be 40 or 50 percent, is that enough to justify 30,000 more U.S. troops and $25 billion more a year, and perhaps a lot more casualties, although that one you can debate as to what is the riskiest strategy.

I'm actually not trying to oppose the McChrystal plan. In the end I probably will support it, but I got one more issue to address before I can do that. But just put yourself in the place of Obama, the debate he's been through, what he's already done for this strategy, what he's now being asked to do by many of the same people who told him that they thought maybe 75,000 American troops would be enough last winter, and now they're apparently now asking for a lot more than that. There is a moment of reflection that's appropriate for a Commander-in-Chief under those circumstances. Now I hope he will ultimately see the logic of this ink spot strategy and trying to fill in the gaps, but he's entitled to a little bit of deliberation. He better get on with it. This is not a excuse for further delay, but it is an argument in favor of some level of presidential deliberation.

Last point, and this also supports a little bit of delay. How can the United States not only send, you know, effectively triple our forces if McChrystal gets all of what he might be asking for now, triple our forces, in the course of Obama's first year in office at just the moment when President Karzai is trying to steal an election?

Think about this. If there's any one lesson from Vietnam we should remember, it's that we need a viable indigenous partner. And we can do everything right, and if our partner doesn't do its part, we're not going to be successful. So again, Karzai has done some good things. You can overstate the degree to which he is personally corrupt or personally stealing the election, but he's got a lot of bad friends, and they're doing some bad things right now.

And the message that would be sent by Mr. Obama generously and graciously and quickly giving whatever's asked of his commanders at just the moment when Karzai and his cronies are turning Afghanistan even to -- into more of a kleptocracy than it was before. And I'm dramatizing for the sake of argument, but I'm a little surprised this kind of argument is not more prevalent in Washington today. That is a bit of a non sequitur to me. That's a bit of an oxymoron or, you know, there's some real paradox in the notion that we can do everything, and the Afghans don't have to bother doing anything, or they can even be doing less, because Karzai is on less of a roll than he was a year ago.

A year ago he had appointed Atmar at Minister of Interior, he had appointed Wardack at Minister of Defense, he had done some good things. And the last few months, he's brought Faheem and Dostem back into his coalition, and his cronies are trying to steal the election. And we want President Obama to give 20 or 30,000 more U.S. forces at just that moment, by exercising no leverage in the process over the Afghans?

I think we have to think hard about how do we put pressure on the Afghans to clean up their act a bit, recognizing that not all things are possible in short order, and that we're going to have to be realistic about our demands. But nonetheless, it's a little bit of an unusual moment to think that every single thing that's requested by commanders can be immediately blessed by the White House.

Now this is a huge dilemma, and I'll stop on the dilemma, because we have more time to discuss it later and I'm sure Gen. Barno will have some very important thoughts, but the -- I'm not really trying to argue for indefinite delay. We can't afford that either. But I am suggesting that we need to figure out a way to leverage any potential American troop increase to get better performance out of the Afghans. This is a crucial moment to do that.

And even Malaki, back at the time of the surge in Iraq provided some additional Iraqi forces as we asked, for some of the Baghdad-centric operations that we wanted to carry out with the surge. As weak as Malaki was back then, as unsuccessful as he was in many other areas, he at least did that part. He did the one core, non-negotiable thing we needed from him at that moment. And then he began to fire some of his commanders in the national police who were most infiltrated in the militias, and so on.

We're getting the opposite dynamic out of Karzai right now. We're getting worse performance, not better. And so again, I'm really trying to create tension in the conversation, more than I'm trying to argue against McChrystal. In the end, I support him, but I think we have to figure out the timing on this and figure out the leverage, and get the Afghans to do a bit more. I'll stop there.

MR. DONNELLY: David, I'm shocked that there's corruption in Kabul. That never occurred to me until recently, but it is a good question. What is the marginal value of increasing our prospects for victory in Afghanistan?

GENERAL BARNO: Well, let me talk to this in a couple different ways. First, a disclaimer: I'm still at National Defense University, but I'm going to provide only my personal outlook today, so you'll get my ¢25 opinion, instead of really well informed governmental thought here.

And I think terrific commentary by Michael here in looking at some of the challenges out there, and it really frames the, you know, the pro versus con in some very useful ways that I hope I'll touch on, and I'm sure we'll explore more in the Q & A.

I think one of the things we have to keep in mind, because it's very easy for us to dive right down into the tactics in Afghanistan and think about the ink spot strategy, and how many brigades we need here and how we're going to outpost different provinces in Afghanistan. We need to take a few steps back and look at the overall strategy here.

In one sense the question is what's our end game in Afghanistan? What's this look like if we succeed? What might it look like if we fail? And clearly, that's not just about Afghanistan, it's about the region. It's about Afghanistan, Pakistan, it has tremendous influence on the northern tier of Stans, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan. It has implications for Iran out to the west, and it has dramatic implications for the India-Pakistan, you know, longstanding cold war between those two countries.

So this isn't simply about success or failure in Afghanistan, it's really about what's our strategic end game in this region for the United States and for our allies, so I think we need to think about that a little bit.

And one way to ask that question, I think, because ultimately this is going to be perceived that way in the region, one of the ways we're going to have to ask the question is do we stay or do we go? Are we going to have a long-term presence in the region, or are we not? And I don't think that there is clarity of understanding of that right now.

We certainly have not articulated an end game for Afghanistan in terms of what that means five years from now, ten years from now, if we succeed. And that, in many ways, is a liability to our overall program, and I'll talk a bit about that.

And when I talk about do we stay or do we go, I'm not -- my outlook -- and I'll come back around to this at the end and talk about it to wrap up -- but my outlook is not, you know, we stay with 150,000 troops or 120,000 troops, you know, for the next 40 years as we did in Europe after World War II, but I think the fundamental question that so much of the enterprise, so much of the effort in the region rests on is, is the United States going to be there for the long haul or not?

And what does it mean to me, the individual Afghan, what does it mean to me, the individual Pakistani, what does it mean to me, the Afghan governmental official, the Pakistani government official, if the answer to that is no? How does that effect my calculus? I want to come back and talk about that at the end.

I think we have in broad measure four major challenges out in front of us here today, and I think Gen. McChrystal's assessment, which I've read in some detail is a superb document and it's worth reading cover to cover. There's a lot of subtle points in there and there's a lot of detail in there that has not yet been caught, I think, by some of the media reporting, and it's worth a very careful read.

It would not be difficult at all as a military -- formal military man to take that and create a blueprint and operations plan from that document. It's got that level of guidance and detail and understanding in it. So I think it's a very, very well written piece of work that needs to be studied very, very carefully.

But again, I think there's basically four challenges that are out here, and the challenges are at multiple levels. They're not only President Obama's or the administration’s challenges, they're Gen. McChrystal's challenges, they're the Afghan government's challenges, and they're really the international efforts' challenges in a way in Afghanistan.

The first one is, I think, to defeat the Taliban's strategy in Afghanistan, to defeat the Taliban strategy. We talk a lot about defeating the Taliban. We talk about disrupting, dismantling, defeating al-Qaeda, but to defeat the Taliban strategy, I think bears some scrutiny.

I would describe that strategy in very simple terms as "run out the clock," run out the clock. If this were a football game, the Taliban's view is that it's the fourth quarter of the game, they're ahead on the scoreboard, they're controlling the ball, and their strategy for the rest of the fourth quarter is simply to run out the clock, to control that ball and to be the last man standing on the field when the clock runs out.

We have a tremendous vulnerability in our approach to the region to fall right into this strategy. Our history reflects us going in and coming out, having a very erratic pattern of involvement in the region, and so there's a lot of credibility behind what the Taliban are telling Afghans, what the Taliban are inferring and perhaps telling the Pakistanis about the staying power of the United States.

And so the question is how do we defeat that strategy? That's not simply going to be defeated in some tactical battle, but it's going to be defeated in whether we stay or whether we go, whether we have a credible presence in the region that people out there can rely on for the long haul.

We're asking people to trust us, both on the Pakistan side of the border, on the Afghan side of the border. We're going to have to think very hard about ensuring that we take actions and we make decisions with that in mind because I'm utterly convinced that the ultimate calculus driving many of the decisions in the region is a hedging strategy against the day after the United States leaves, that that impacts our friends, it impacts our enemies. It has a tremendous corrosive effect, and again, it plays right into the Taliban strategy.

The old cliché we've heard from the Taliban over the years is that when they talk to the Afghans, they remind them that, you know, the Americans may have all the wrist watches, but we have all the time. We're going to be the last man standing on the field.

So defeating that strategy of being there for the long haul and actually owning the battlefield then after the West leaves is an important thing we have to understand how to defeat.

Secondly, I think we have to work to rebuild trust, and I mentioned that in the region, but also inside of Afghanistan, and Gen. McChrystal talks to this in his document. There has to be a rebuilding of trust between the Afghan government, the next Afghan government and their people, and there has to be a rebuilding of trust between the international security forces, the military, the ISAF, and the people of Afghanistan. That trust is essential to success in this counter-insurgency campaign.

Right now there's been a tremendous fragmenting of trust, a fracture of trust between the Afghan people and their government. The results of that are playing out to a degree today in this very uncertain aftermath of the election, and we don't know yet how that is going to be resolved. That's a very unsettling factor in the region right now. Hopefully in the next few weeks we'll see the path to resolving this, whether it's a run-off election or a conclusion to this election.

But there has to be in this next government in Afghanistan regardless, a critical effort, and McChrystal refers to this in here, to help rebuild confidence and trust between the Afghan people and their government.

At the same time it has to be true with ISAF. He notes the civilian casualties, the impact of ISAF operations, the impact of not being out among the population in Afghanistan. It's really separated the ISAF force from the Afghan people in many parts of the country. That's got to be changed, and he talks about changing the operational culture over and over again in this document, to bring the military force in closer contact with the population to rebuild trust.

Third, I think restoring and rebuilding and creating unity of effort in Afghanistan. Again, McChrystal talks about this in great detail, about the lack of unity of effort. And inferred in this document, if you read it carefully, is the reality that the last three years at least of the NATO enterprise has been a fragmented operation all across Afghanistan -- that by any measurement the whole of the military operation since NATO has assumed command of this at the beginning of 2007, the whole of the military operation has been less than the sum of the parts. The idea of military operations is that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. We've been on the opposite end of that spectrum here for the last three years.

So fixing that by creating another echelon of command that can watch over the day to day operations in Afghanistan, unifying the training mission between NATO and the U.S. training elements, the Afghan security forces, creating battle space ownership out there at the local level where we'll have military commanders partnered with their Afghan counterparts, but also having a civilian senior staff representative in their headquarters and coalition control through kind of a unified headquarters of entire pieces of Afghanistan. That's a whole new way of doing business in Afghanistan.

In the past it's been a series of stove pipes at all level, reaching down into all part of the country. Clearly, from this document, if it gets fleshed out and if it's implemented, you're going to have a unified effort down at the grassroots level in Afghanistan.

It's notable in here that special forces are going to come under those battle space owners. These are now maneuver commanders, American, ISAF, and Afghan that own this battle space. There's going to be a civilian component of that effort that's partnered with the Afghan government there. There's -- the trainers for Afghan security forces are going to be under the command of these local commanders. This is all unprecedented in Afghanistan. And it's fairly detailed, but it's a huge sea change in the way of doing business there to try and have a singular effect out there at the local level. That's simply been absent in the past.

That's more important in my judgment locally at the district level and the province level than what happens in Kabul, but unity of effort in Kabul is going to be important as well. That falls far more in the diplomatic dimension than it does in the military. And I think rightfully this document focuses on how to achieve those effects locally.

And then finally, I think the -- going back to the strategic level for a moment, reframing the narrative here in the United States and among our allies in Europe is essential. I think we have to explain in much more clear terms to the American people why we're in Afghanistan, what the costs of failure of withdrawal are and what the positive impacts of success in Afghanistan are.

We've really had a bit of muddled dialogue over the last, not just one year, but two years, three years, four years on Afghanistan. As we've gotten further away from the 9/11 attacks, we've lost that clear focus of why we're in Afghanistan and what failure in Afghanistan could mean extending it into the future.

We also haven't explained very clearly how the Afghanistan-Pakistan dimension connects to each other. We have American troops fighting today in Afghanistan, yet we recognize most of al-Qaeda is inside of Pakistan. We've not connected stability in this region in making this entire region inhospitable to al-Qaeda to our overall narrative to the public.

This is even worse of a problem in Europe, and we're seeing that play out in the governments in Europe here today. So re-framing this narrative and explaining clearly to the American people not only the costs of failure, which I think are clear but we haven't articulated in a long time, but also the benefits of success, the benefits of getting this to be a stable area that's not longer hospitable to terrorists as it was before the 9/11 attacks.

So let me come back finally to this issue of the end game here in Afghanistan, what's success going to look like and how can we talk about that. The biggest vulnerability I think we have strategically in the region is the absolute confidence in our adversaries that we're going to leave the region lock, stock and barrel, and the uncertainty among our friends about whether we're going to stay or whether we're going to leave.

Again, I'm convinced that everyone in Afghanistan, everyone in Pakistan hedges their bets based upon uncertainty about the staying power of the United States and the staying power of the international community. We have got to come up with some ways to dispel that.

Our end game has got to include a long-term presence of some sort in this region, and I don't, again, see that as tens of thousands of troops or thousands and thousands of diplomats and development specialists. But we have to make sure that we don't talk so frequently about an exit strategy that all of our friends believe that means we're leaving entirely, because that will change, again, all of their strategic calculus about who to support and whether this effort's got any prospects for success.

So again, I think that we have at least four major challenges out there in front of us. I think Gen. McChrystal's assessment is a very sound document. It requires some careful analysis. I don't dispute Michael's contention that clearly the administration has to think about that and has to reflect on that, and that can't be done overnight.

But I also think, as was noted in some of the commentary here this morning in the paper, that the issue needs to be resolved in matter of weeks and not months, because we're -- the clock is ticking on requirements for additional resources that by most measures, most evaluations are needed there today, and we have to get that train moving as quickly as we can to get them there as soon as we can.

MR. DONNELLY: Thank you. Thank you all. I would like to toss out a couple of things by way of moderator's prerogative and particularly to pick up on Gen. Barno's last point, which seems to me to be a theme that runs through everything, in that there are new questions about American's fundamental commitment to both the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I think it's fair to say about American posture throughout the greater Middle East or whatever term of art you want to use. Ken, I'd like you both to tell us a little bit about how the Iraqi actors are posturing, but drawing on your broader particular, you know, Persian Gulf regional expertise to open the aperture a little bit farther.

And to go to the other end of the spectrum, Gen. Barno, having waded through the 66 pages, I quite agree it's particularly a very good analysis of what's wrong with ISAF as it's been passed down. Two things, however, it curiously ends with the admission that the current operations plan, the sort of plan of record, is what we have to go forward with for the moment because we -- not only do the Afghans understand it but our European allies understand it.

One of the things that's happening is inevitably that this is becoming a more Americanized operation. You mentioned that the politics in Europe are pretty dire, our allies are bugging out faster than we can even. How -- if we get past this current decision point in hope, you know, with prospects for the future -- how do you see this playing out, not only this year but beyond? We've been so focused on the immediate situation. But what are we trying -- what do we think we can achieve and what would we -- how would we recognize we've established conditions for a really, you know, larger-scale success?

And, Michael, I want to put you a little bit more on the spot in defending the President. Why is waiting better than making sure we make the right decision? And if we accept that really it's critical to convince Americans that this is worth the cost why does waiting make that better? If anything it seems to me that it establishes a higher bar and that anything short of full support, 40,000 or whatever the exact number is that Gen. McChrystal would like to have, is inevitably going to be read, as even back in March the decision was read, as a half-meal, piecemeal commitment. So if we're willing to, you know, cut the President some slack, what does he have to do, in your judgment, in order to rally support for whatever decision he finally takes?

And we can go in any order but, Ken, why don't we start with you?

MR. POLLACK: Sure. Thank you, Tom. I think your question is just a superb one.

MR. DONNELLY: I've been saving my fire for now.

MR. POLLACK: It gets to exactly the set of issues that we need to think about and I think the administration really needs to think about which is that there is a sense all across the Persian Gulf of the United States that is pulling back at a time when things are getting more dangerous. And, in particular, we're going to have a series of events starting tomorrow and, you know, going well through the spring of next year that could be very influential in determining how actors in the Persian Gulf.

And I'll start, as you asked me to, with Iraq where, as I said, what you're seeing with the Iraqis is an increasing sense that the United States is not going to be there to determine what the rules of the game are and enforce them and that therefore they can get away with, you know, in some cases figuratively and in some cases literally, murder, and an expectation that their opponents will do so and that if their opponents are going to do so they have to be prepared to compare at the same level. And, again, it's low level but you're starting to see that and I'll, you know, point to a few examples.

In particular there are some things that the Maliki government has done which it's very clear that the United States doesn't want to see happen and nevertheless is forging ahead with them. They're mostly about the Iraqi elections which are going to take place in January 2010 where the Iraqi's are increasingly indicating that they're going to go with closed-list elections.

We've seen closed-list elections in Iraq. We saw them in 2005, they were disastrous, they helped propel the country into civil war. We've also seen open-list elections. We saw those in the provincial elections of January 2009. They were very good, they helped to further stabilize the country, they helped reinforce all of those positive incentives that I was talking about that began in 2007-2008 with the changes in U.S. strategy and some of these that the Iraqis did what we all talk about as regarding the surge. So that's one.

Another one is this issue with the referendum. Nobody really talks about this but it is a huge issue. The Iraqis built into the security agreement between then and us a referendum whereby their people would get to vote on the security agreement. And everyone expected that if the people ever voted they'd probably be voted down, but it was nevertheless put in there as kind of a -- to various Iraqi Nationalists Parties.

It was supposed to have happened in July. Well, the government postponed it in July and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Unfortunately, what Maliki has decided to do is to hold the referendum at the same time as the January election. If that happens it will be disastrous because it will turn the election into the referendum and no Iraqi politician will want to play with Iraqi nationalism and therefore, no Iraqi politician will stand up and support the security agreement and therefore, it will go down in flames. And if that happens it means that U.S. forces must leave Iraq within a year.

And it's important to think about it this way: if that happens, American influence in Iraq goes down the drain overnight because everyone will know that the Iraqi people have turned down the agreement with the United States, there will be no basis for the United States to exert any influence on the Iraqi people.

It is a very, very dangerous step and I think it goes to the fact that Maliki, right now, is wrestling with this question of how much does he need the United States and how much are we a problem to him. And I think that there's evidence on both sides for him but if he goes ahead with the referendum at the same time as the election I think it will be a clear sign that he has decided that our preventing him from doing all of these things that are advantageous to him, working around the system, that that is more harmful to him than the good things that we bring him like the assurance that the security situation won't fall apart and all of the longer-term benefits.

Just to focus on the larger issues you asked me to. We have to figure out the fact that Iraq is not the only thing in play, Iran is, as well. And I didn't hear the last panel but I know members of the last panel very well and I'm pretty sure I know what they said. And we need to recognize that this situation with Iran is very precarious as well. The President has now vested a great deal in what's going to happen with Iran, and quite frankly, the other states of the gulf region are very, very unhappy with what they're seeing from Iran and with what they are seeing in terms of the unwillingness of the international community to put real restrictions on Iran, controls on Iran, and punish it for its willful disobedience of the international community.

And what they're looking for right now is the United States willing to step up, step in, and lead. If we're not, if they believe that the United states makes a -- is going to make a halfhearted effort at sanctions and then turn away and basically accept a nuclear-armed Iran, you are going to see the states of the region, just like the Iraqi politicians, increasingly going their own way as well. You will see the Saudis and the UAE move toward a nuclear program to match the Iranians. You may see other states either accommodate with the Iranians or take their own steps to guard against the Iranians. In particular, most of these states are going to expect that once the Iranians cross the nuclear threshold that they are going to make a much more aggressive effort to destabilize them.

Whether that's true or not, who knows, but given the fact that you've got the hardest of the hard-liners more formally in control in Iran, that seems like a pretty good bet to me. And if I were a Gulfy I'd be making the same calculation. And if they don't -- if they believe that the United States is not going to be there to push-back on the Iranians, they will increasingly do it themselves and they will start taking actions that will further destabilize the region that will be provocative to the Iranians that will play into Ahmadinejad's world view and his rhetoric and you could see the Middle East moving increasingly, over the course of the next five or ten years, in a very dangerous and unstable direction.

That's why the events beginning tomorrow at the U.N. and extending through the Iraqi elections in January and then on into the spring are going to be very important. And we're going to find out whether this administration is willing to step up and say, "The Persian Gulf is too important a part of the world to simply allow it to go its own direction." You know we learned between 1979 and 1991 that that was a huge mistake. Just allowing the Persian Gulf to take care of itself will not result in any good for the people of the Gulf, for the people of the world, for the United States of America. And right now the Gulf is trying gauge whether the Obama administration still believes that or whether we're going to turn inward and just focus on our problems here, in which case, they will make their own arrangements.

GENERAL BARNO: Tom, I'm taking issue with one of the comments you made about it appears at the end of this assessment that McChrystal is simply going to take the operations plan and continue it because everyone understands it. My reading of that was there are segments of it that deal with the diplomatic and some other non-military aspects he's going to continue but he is going to make major changes and issue a new operations plan quite soon that revises, dramatically, the plans there today. In the meantime, he's going to issue what the military calls fragmentary orders, which are like software updates to the plan to say, "Here's what we're going to change right now so we keep doing what's wrong in this plan until we get the new plan out," which is a whole new version of software. So I think that that's clearly, you know, a right-turn from what he inherited.

Now, one of the things that we have not really absorbed, I don't think, is that when the President made his policy speech in March he still had Gen. McKiernan there and he had what I can now call the old plan in place and he had the old troop request based on the old plan. So it's not simply that we have a new commander but now the new commander with his assessment is designing a plan that's a variant from the old plan.

The old plan, if you read this document and read the assessment, is in some ways fatally flawed. I mean there -- it is clear that there are -- not only is there what he refers to in here a couple times as a "culture of poverty" in the command, which has nothing to do with GDP, it has to do with the command collectively. And I was out visiting him and I saw this clearly earlier this year, the command collectively doesn't know what to ask or is too inwardly-focused, is too mired in NATO bureaucracy to be really an effective organization.

Gen. McChrystal, coming out of, you know, what in Iraq became, I think, really our super-bowl level capable command enterprise over the last two years, has come in and looked at this very carefully and realized that there's an immense gap between what's possible in a military structure there and what's there today. So he's addressed that quite clearly in this document here. He's going to make some major changes, some of which are changes to the command structure, some of which has already -- there's a continual infusion of hand-picked people going in to this command and people leaving the command quietly at the same time, that are going to make a big difference in all this.

To your question on what should we be looking for a year from now, I'm not a -- personally, not a big metrics fan. I remember coming back from Afghanistan in 2004 and being proudly led down to a basement room in the Pentagon that had -- was the Iraq metrics room. And it was a room full of computers. There were two dozen computers in there and all of them had different sets of metrics on them. They were all red or yellow, which was bad, so I absorbed that much, but the fact that we had that many metrics told me we had no metrics. We didn't know what we were measuring. We were measuring everything and we were measuring nothing.

So I'm not willing to go out and say, "Here's what the top-five metrics ought to be," but there shouldn't be 100 metrics. There ought to be handful of metrics. Some of them ought to be dealing with violence, some of them ought to be dealing with Afghan popular perceptions, some of them ought to be dealing with levels of corruption and how we measure that, but 150 metrics or 100 metrics is not the right answer. And I think we have to be looking carefully at that. We can build probably a handful of those, you know, 10 or 12, whatever, that are the critical metrics that we can measure against come next year, but a lot of this is going to have to do with the perceptions we see in the population out there, the degree to which we see violence, continuing, rising, getting less.

One of the things that's vital to note in McChrystal's assessment is that he judges that he enemy has the initiative right now. If you're a military guy, that's a red flag, a big red flag. The enemy now has the momentum, he is on a role. He's ahead on the scoreboard and he's controlling the football. He has the initiative. So, one of McChrystal's key objectives here is to break enemy's initiative in the next 12 months.

Well, you're going to judge that by, in some degree, number of violent incidents out there in the country. The additional forces are going to be used specifically to be able to break that momentum. And he's worried that if he doesn't break the momentum in the next 12 months that there's risk of mission failure. So I think that those are some things that we ought to be looking at about a year from now.

In a way, implementing this plan is like getting on an antibiotics regiment. You don't find the morning after you start taking antibiotics that you're cured and stop taking the antibiotics, you've got to take this for the entire duration of the treatment and then see where you are at the end of that. And you may have to take another treatment if you're not quite there.

That doesn't mean you just keep adding troops forever, but you have to give the plan and the resources some time to work. And I think about a year from now is when you're going to be able to put the dipstick in and say, "Okay." And you're going to have some interims along the way, some markers along the way, but we have to give any plan, whatever plan the President approves, time to take effect. These are not, you know, instant-tea type of formula that you can simply lay out there and see the results when you get up tomorrow morning.

MR. O'HANLON: A few things, Tom, in response to your question. First of all, I agree with Gen. Barno that the decision needs to be made in weeks not months if we can. And the caveat is the Afghans. And so let me talk about how you try to establish leverage with them because I don't -- I think it's an ongoing process and I'm sure others have thoughts and hopefully I'll hear those too. I'm still trying to sort this one through after the administration.

One thing you do is you actually do try to hope for a little bit of a resolution on the first round in the course of October. If we get lucky we'll get some. And, by the way, we should commend the Afghan institutions that for the most part are finding all this fraud and refusing to certify the election. That's actually an encouraging thing. And so there are elements of good news in this that we can build upon if we can turn it the right way.

Secondly, you can commit to a deployment plan and yet reserve the right to turn off the spigot. Now this is one of those situations where we're sort of each other's codependence and mutual hostages and we'd be, you know, cutting our own nose to spite our face if, in fact because Karzai does something wrong we don't give McChrystal the forces he needs. And yet we are inextricably linked in this thing. And to some extent our degree of commitment, I believe, is a function of Afghan performance at some level.

And third, we can remind President Karzai and other Afghans of that fact and point out the following, "You know, Afghanistan's important to us but Pakistan is the one we need to keep stable." And the best strategy for stabilizing Pakistan is probably to stabilize Afghanistan. However, if we can't stabilize Afghanistan we will have to look for other ways to achieve our fundamental core objective in this part of the world. And we can tell the President of Afghanistan that and we can say, "We don't have any good ideas for how to do it yet but we do know that at some point we stop reinforcing failure."

And on top of that, even though this American President is committed to this was pretty well right now, he has -- he's got some doubts and his party has a lot of doubts, and if and when this war goes badly for another year-and-a-half and they lose the Congress and the fiscal situation is still a mess potentially, the Afghan war is going to be hard to sustain. I think we should tell that to our Afghan friends. Does that add up to a sufficient strategy for leverage? Probably not, but it's a step in the right direction and I think we have no choice but to think in these terms and hopefully do better than I've done here in this initial set of comments, but that's a start.

MR. DONNELLY: I believe we have, Jamie, some time, 15 minutes or so for questions. I'm going to start way in the back and work to the front just to be perverse. And if you'll wait for the microphone, tell us who you are for purposes of the transcript, and make your comments in the form of a question, we can move through this efficiently. We'll probably take a couple of questions a time, but the gentleman in the red shirt in the way back.

MR. KOBER: Stanley Kober with the Cato Institute. I see the television cameras here. So let's assume -- Omar and his team are watching this and they've heard you say, "Okay, we've got a year to do this in Afghanistan." They're an adaptive enemy. So flip to the other side and their response would be, "Okay, to frustrate the Americans we will do what?"

MR. DONNELLY: Anybody want to volunteer? Let's hold that question and get a second one from the audience. Actually, I'm going to -- there, again, the gentleman in the -- yes, exactly so.

MR. LOBE: Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service. I just wanted to ask to what extent you thought that Iran could be -- could make our position in both Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention Pakistan, either more difficult or somewhat easier. How important is it to win Iran's goodwill or is it not important at all?

MR. DONNELLY: And let's try one more from this side. Good. I'm relying on the judgment of the microphone people.

MR. BLACKLOW: Could the three of you -- oh, Willie Blacklow. Could the three of you briefly discuss the proposal by Senator Carl Levin?

MR. DONNELLY: Let's start, again, with Ken.

MR. POLLACK: I'll just pick the Iraqis.

MR. DONNELLY: Yeah, good.

MR. POLLACK: I think there's no question that Iran could make our lives harder in both Afghanistan and Iraq. It could make our lives easier in both Iran and Afghanistan. Now the Iranians have influence in both places but, two important buts, the good news is that Iran is not all-powerful in either country and there are very important forces of nationalism and other structural impediments to the Iranian controlling other countries. And we shouldn't think about it as if something really dramatic happens in either place we are going to lose Iraq to Iran or lose Afghanistan to Iran. That's not the way that these places work, the Iranians are not 10 feet tall. And while we need to be concerned about what the Iranians are up to we shouldn't give them more credit than they're due.

The bad news is that I think that it's unlikely, given the internal politics in Iran, that we're going to have an Iranian regime that's interested in cooperating with us in either place. Yes, it is certainly true we have seen the Iranians cooperate with us, especially in Afghanistan in 2001-2002, but the world has changed very dramatically. They showed no interest in cooperating with us in Iraq in 2007-2008. And given the fact that you now have, again, the hardest of the hard-liners in charge in Tehran, at least for some period of time, these are people who define their -- view as being inimical to that of the United States. And so while I think it would be wonderful if we could get Iranian support and for eight years I have been calling for us to try to do that, I think that the likelihood now is quite low.

MR. DONNELLY: Ken, if I could just sort of turn the question around a little bit and ask -- and particularly since you have written so eloquently about how we are often getting our hearts broken in outreach efforts to Iran -- how critical do you think it is if we are ever to come to an accommodation with an Iranian government of some sort, not the current regime, how critical is it for us to be perceived in Tehran to have been successful in Iraq and Afghanistan, however you wish to define that.

MR. POLLACK: I think it's very important, honestly. The Iranians, especially this group that's now in power, they're all about strength, and if they see weakness that's the way that they're going to approach us. Remember, as I've just said, this is a group of people -- and I'm not speaking for all Iranians, I don't want to make this, you know, some kind of a caricature -- but this group of people that really has defined itself as being the enemy of the United States and us being their enemy. If they perceive weakness, that is going to reinforce their view that they ought to be more aggressive and more assertive with us. It is most likely that we will find them more accommodating if they believe us to be very strong. So the weaker our position in Iraq and Afghanistan, the less likely it is that they're going to compromise with us.

MR. DONNELLY: Okay. Dave, Michael.

GENERAL BARNO: On the first question, I'm not going to be wiling to give advice to the enemy so I don't think I'm going to answer that. They will figure this out and hopefully we'll beat their strategy. On the question about Senator Levin's proposal, which broadly is to rather than focus on combat brigades going to Afghanistan -- this is my understanding of it at least -- it's to focus on surging in trainers to rapidly accelerate the buildup of the Afghan national security forces. I think that this is an "and" proposition not an "or" proposition. We have got to do that regardless of everything else we do but we cannot do it in the absence of additional combat forces.

One of the problems Gen. McChrystal has right now is the enemy is getting stronger, the enemy has the initiative, he's escalating effectively, the Taliban is, and a buildup of Afghan security forces can't meet that. We have to do that so we have those forces available to be able to take over some of these missions from ISAF combat forces a year-and-a-half, two years from now, but we simply can't fight the Taliban at the same time with the same forces that we're generating. So we're going to have to build Afghan security forces concurrently with fighting the Taliban and reversing the initiative that he's got. Rolling him back on his heels, at the same time we're building these forces that are going to be fed in to the fight as they become available.

So I agree that we absolutely have got to make that a top priority but at the same time we can't simply, you know, maintain the status quo with the Taliban because they are getting stronger with the status quo. I think that's one of the fundamental reading between the lines in Gen. McChrystal's report here that clearly he is asking for more combat forces or may ask for more combat forces in order to reverse this momentum and you can't do that simply with trainers.

MR. O'HANLON: And I'd add on that point that Senator Levin should see Gen. McChrystal as his great ally because the McChrystal plan and the forces request that I believe is forthcoming, both place a lot of emphasis on this partnering concept. And we all know how well the U.S. military did this mentoring inside Iraq where we put 10 and 20 person teams within Iraqi units, McChrystal's way beyond that. He's not only doing that but he's also proposing this one-to-one partnership where units, one Afghan and one NATO, do everything together, live together, train together, plan together, deploy together, patrol together, fight together. It's even above and beyond much of what we did in Iraq and I think it is, in essence, what Senator Levin's proposing.

Very quickly on the Taliban point, I won't -- I probably should give advice to the Taliban because with my military abilities if they listened they'd be worse off. But nonetheless, the point I'll say is the following: I'll try to think offensively, the things that we should think about doing, if we could get a little bit of momentum going and we can start to work better with the Pakistanis as we have in the last six months, at some point, asking the Pakistanis to disband the Quetta Shura is not a crazy request.

In fact, it's never been a crazy request, it's always been a reasonable one, they just never wanted to do it. But, you know, instead of expecting them to go in with a raid and seize all these guys and send them to Bagram, what we can do is say, "Can you go in and disperse them, maybe put them under house arrest if you need to keep them as your sort of long-term strategic hedge against our departure?" We don't like that but we can live with it as long as they're not talking to each other and running this headquarters which has a remarkable ability to maintain a shadow government in through southern and eastern Afghanistan. At some point it's not unreasonable to expect the Pakistanis to consider that.

Maybe we have to go one step beyond the Kerry-Lugar bill in order to do that. Maybe we need another six, twelve months of proving to them that we are a long-term committed partner and I very much admire Gen. Barno's comments along the lines of needing to send out that message. But I think at some point that becomes a tactic we should consider against the Taliban. There are other things as well but that would be, perhaps, the Achilles heal they've got right now. They need that Quetta Shura and there's a chance that we can get the Pakistanis to disband it.

MR. DONNELLY: I think we can, if we're very efficient and very pointed, get in another quick round of questions. So I'm going to take, actually, just the two gentlemen right here in front. And, again, please be brief.

MR. HANNAH: Thanks. John Hannah, The Washington Institute. I wonder if I can ask, especially Mike O'Hanlon and Gen. Barno, how worried are you by the -- all the backbiting and leaking and even, I would say, direct efforts to diminish the contributions of Gen. McChrystal in terms of this assessment. I've even seen some comments on background about Gen. Petraeus and wanting to avoid a situation of coming back in September of 2007 like he was Moses down from Sinai with the tablets. How worried should we be about this in terms of overall civil military relations?

MR. BOYLES: Wayne Boyles, with the Boyles Company. You have -- how -- if you could address economic development strategy for Afghanistan and Iraq, that is a necessary element and -- because I do not feel we will be able to win it with military power alone, you've got to increase the infrastructure to allow both economies to grow and to lift the -- both countries out of poverty and create the vacuum that allow radicals, you know, to come in and wreak havoc.

MR. DONNELLY: Let's go with Gen. Barno and Mike and Ken if you have any final comments.

GENERAL BARNO: On the -- military dimension, you know, one of the great parts about being stationed in Kabul for 19 months is not being in Washington for 19 month. So, I mean, that's almost the nature of the beast, I mean I don't see anything dramatically new, different, surprising. Disappointing, of course, but not anything shocking and, you know, unprecedented in kind of this give and take here, back and forth between the various, you know, back channels and deep backgrounds in, you know, all dimensions here.

I think it's a mistake to assume, as apparently some have, that Gen. McChrystal leaked this plan somehow or another. This plan, if you look at the caveats on it, is released to everyone in ISAF, which is all of NATO countries and I think it was released to all of the other countries that are involved in Afghanistan, that's 41 different players had this. And then, of course, it was brought back, put up on the Hill. And so I think that the thought, since this has been in existence for a number of weeks now if not longer than that, that somehow Gen. McChrystal was the guy who leaked this. I think that's flat wrong.

So I infer that I think they've got their own motives. So I'm -- but broadly I'm not that concerned about, you know, some great crisis in relationship. I don't think that's what we're seeing. On the economic dimension, I'm probably not the right guy to describe that, but by the time I left Afghanistan I was convinced that if we could fix the economy everything else would follow that. So I don't -- we're in a slightly different place today, particular with regard to security, but it's still critical.

MR. O'HANLON: I'll just add to John's question, a very important one, and I guess my thought is that I think General McChrystal and Ambassador Eikenberry should be asked back because I think they can explain what they're doing in considerably more and better detail than even the Adm. Mullens and Secretary Gateses of the world can do for them. And I think just in the spirit of a sound democratic debate the country is entitled at a moment like this to get the best advice it can from its battlefield commanders and ambassador.

And one of the reasons I come to that conclusion is not just a broad theoretical argument of the type I just made, but the specific sense that somehow we're not really understanding in the Washington or U.S. debate what's going on on the ground in Afghanistan and I think a prolonged period of questioning and Q & A would help establish that. I really believe, from my limited experience and very short trips to Afghanistan but nonetheless, I think there is a picture beginning to emerge of these ink spots that are the places where we have cleared and where there are at least the inklings of hopefulness.

And I could go on and say a few other things but just one example is that our intelligence operations, as you probably know, are now focused much better on trying to map out the local population, the tribal structures, who we can work with, who wants to work with us. There's a level of intensity of effort that happens once we clear an area and begin to establish ourselves within it, which then creates opportunities for further progress. That level of good news at the micro scale is not being conveyed.

Our whole debate is about, you know, sending tens of thousands of forces into the quicksand of Helmand and it just -- people have this image of just no matter how many forces you send the terrain will swallow them up and they make no difference. And I think that's partly because we don't have the people who really understand the battlefield speaking enough publicly. Gen. Barno understands it and so, you know, he's a very good voice to have in the interim, but obviously the current commander has a special role to play.

So leave aside the internal administration politics, that's just my view about what would be most informative to the debate and so I firmly support that kind of a return trip, even if our commanders are not necessarily anxious for it themselves and are pretty busy where they are.

MR. POLLACK: I'll just make a quick couple of remarks. Your question about economics is absolutely critical. There's so much to be said there so let me just make a couple points. First, early on, essentially after the surge, the U.S. government's perspective, the IMF's perspective, the World Bank's perspective was, "Look, we've got to deal with Iraqi unemployment and we've got to get some -- pump some money into the system to do a whole variety of things."

So there was a decision to put emphasis on the government sector and on oil production as the ways to do that. That made a lot of sense at the time. But Iraq is starting to shift out of that and unfortunately we're still very much in that mindset and right now we're doing a lot of things, we, the IMF, others that are needlessly crippling the Iraqi private sector. And doing it, in some cases, stupidly because we don't quite realize what we're doing. We're treating the Iraqi economy as if it were a first-world economy as opposed to a third-world economy and that does desperately need to change.

But a second point that I'd make is that I think we do need to rethink our own approach to the Iraqi economy and we're no longer the viceroys of Iraq. Well, on the one hand I do want us to take a much greater role in kind of setting parameters around Iraqi politics. Our ability to control, guide, revive, the Iraqi economy is changing and really diminishing and I do think that we need to think about changing our relationship to Iraq economically. In many ways that is one of those points of leverage that we have, the Iraqis need us. They need our trade, they need our aid, and they need our expertise. And rather than regarding that as something that we need to do for the Iraqis, increasingly I think we can look at that as something that the Iraqis need for us and we should be willing to provide it but it all needs to be generally conditioned on a fundamental change in the American perspective. And one of the nice things about changing from Bush to Obama is that Bush had a personal commitment to Iraq, there was a legacy issue, there was -- and the Iraqis understood that and it did create a bit of a moral hazard problem. President Obama can go to the Iraqis, and I think he's been trying to do this, and say to them, "Look, I'm not tied to you in any way, shape or form; I wasn't elected to stay in Iraq. But I recognize that the United States has a strategic interest in a stable Iraq and so if the government of Iraq is willing to move in a direction that increases its own stability which serves our strategic interest, the United States will be glad to help. But if you're going to move in a different direction, a direction that is not going to increase your own stability and therefore does not serve America's strategic interests, you're going to go that path alone."

MR. DONNELLY: Thank you, Ken. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Gen. Barno. Please join me in a round of appreciation. Spent double the time, thanks for some great presentations and we'll go right to --

FEMALE VOICE: We'll take a short break and then resume in five.