Summary

Kagan argued that the mission in Afghanistan is to eliminate transnational terrorist groups like al Qaeda, as well as those that threaten American and allied interests in South Asia, like Lashkar-e-Taiba. In Afghanistan, according to Kagan, we can directly “interact” with these groups and challenge them. With the proper approach, the challenge in Afghanistan is manageable, and it will not be the hardest thing the U.S. has done in recent memory. With the peak of this winter’s violence in Afghanistan less than a quarter of the peak in violence Iraq in 2006, the U.S. must not allow brief periods of intense violence shake our confidence or undercut our commitment to the country.

Tellis argued the President’s Afghanistan policy is “a courageous and responsible response” to the challenge. All three panelists highlighted areas where the U.S. effort in Afghanistan could improve.

First, the panelists agreed on the need to create a three-star headquarters in Afghanistan. Tellis also argued that the U.S. needs to better integrate civilian reconstruction efforts with the military counterinsurgency plan. General Barno pointed out that the whole has been less than the sum of the parts.

The panelists also addressed specific security needs in Afghanistan. Kagan stated that the United States, in response to the gap in security coverage in western Afghanistan, needed to increase the number of brigades in the country to ten or eleven and grow the Afghan National Army (ANA) to at least 250,000; Kagan stated the ANA force was scheduled to reach a strength of only 134,000 by 2011. Tellis said it was disappointing that the President did not commit to a more robust security force, arguing Obama should immediately fulfill in total U.S. Afghanistan commander David McKiernan’s full troop request.

Kagan and others on the panel worried that Washington would not provide enough resources for the mission. Kagan pointed out that one downside of the renewed American commitment to Afghanistan would be the continued stress on U.S. ground forces, stating that we need to expand the U.S. Army and Marine Corps given the strains on the force created by the Iraq mission, and the continued pace of operations in Afghanistan. He also argued that the U.S. needs to accept that some American aid will be misappropriated in Afghanistan, and that we need to take the inherent corruption as simply a cost of providing aid to Afghanistan.

Tellis argued that reconciliation with the Taliban can only succeed when the situation in Afghanistan improves to the point where individual insurgents start recognizing the benefits of defection. Reconciliation, he said, is the end product of successful nation building.

Barno added that the U.S. needs to think more seriously about how American forces can protect the “center of gravity,” the Afghan people, because Afghan security forces will not be able to do this effectively for several years.

Tellis said the Administration’s Afghanistan strategy requires more attention to the issue of Pakistan and how the United States can change course there, given the continued instability in country’s border regions and the influence that powerful Pakistani organizations exert in Afghanistan. Barno stated that success in Pakistan will not solve Afghanistan, but success in Afghanistan will give the U.S. tremendous leverage to influence a changed course in Pakistan. Kagan agreed, noting that we can best change the situation in Pakistan by defeating insurgent groups in Afghanistan. Tellis said we need to put our money where our mouth is, noting that the Administration’s strategy for Afghanistan must remain properly resourced, especially as it comes under increased scrutiny from the public, Congress, and our European allies.

Transcript

MR. SENOR: We are going to get started if people can take a seat, please. One quick housekeeping note. A couple of people during this last panel asked me where to get more information about the organization.

Jamie Fly -- is somewhere, I'm not sure where he is -- there he is -- is the policy director for the Foreign Policy Initiative. By all means, feel free to ask him questions. And I was remised in not doing this before, thanking him and Margaret Hoover and their team for pulling together this conference on relatively short notice. So thank you to both and to everyone involved.

This panel, we are going to broaden the discussion a little bit, dealing, obviously, with Afghanistan, but also the regional -- more of the regional context as well as it relates to Pakistan and the border areas.

The panel we have here includes Retired  Lieutenant General David Barno, who for over a year and-a-half was commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and had central command jurisdiction over Afghanistan, Pakistan and the southern parts of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. He has served in just about every role from lieutenant up to lieutenant general. He is now the director of the northeast -- I'm sorry the NESSA studies program at the Center for Strategic Studies at National Defense University and a prolific writer and analyst, and brings his perspective of the over a year-and-a-half that he served in the region beginning in October of 2003.

Dr. Fred Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for defense and security studies, and before that, a professor and associate professor for military history at West Point, and is widely regarded as one of the key analysts and architects involved in the development of the surge strategy of the United States adopted in late 2006 and early 2007.

And Dr. Ashley Tellis, who many of you  know, is also like Dr. Bob Kagan, at the Carnegie Endowment. He was senior director for South Asian affairs at that National Security Council, formerly with the Rand Corporation, and has written extensively not just about Afghanistan but the regional implications and consequences of what we do in Afghanistan.

With that I thought we would start with Ashley to provide some regional context, and then we will go to General Barno, and then wrap up with Fred Kagan. Then we will open up the floor.

DR. TELLIS: Thank you, Dan. It is a pleasure to be here this morning. Let me start off by offering some brief thoughts about policy as a whole that President Obama unveiled last week. I think I would echo something that Bob Kagan said earlier.

This was a courageous and responsible policy suddenly in comparison to all the hypocrisy that preceded. But it is a policy today that is afflicted by some understandable ambiguities and unresolved dilemmas. And I want to touch on all  of these dimensions in the next minutes.

You remember the debates before the President unveiled the policy. There were three competing arguments that were essentially vying for American attention. The first was to pursue a policy in Afghanistan that would focus on counterterrorism in a very narrow sense.

The second was to focus on al-Qaeda but reach some sort of an accommodation with the Taliban and laid out this position as clearly as anyone could in the last few months.

And the third was, of course, the policy of simply exiting Afghanistan altogether, of course in a graceful way. And this argument was laid out by in the piece that he wrote in "The New York Times" several weeks ago.

I think it is really to President Obama's credit that he has committed the United States to essentially stay the course, in fact, deepening our objectives in Afghanistan, even though the packaging has been both clever and cute. The packaging has focused on defeating  al-Qaeda and the Taliban, because the President refers to at several points in the speech of the need to avoid for return to Taliban rule, for all the consequences that it has for the United States.

And it is a policy that he has anchored very clearly, I think on the right basis as well, which is making certain that this part of the world ceases to be a source of threats to the United States and the international community at large. These are objectives that people understand, and therefore, I think it is important that the President stated this in the words that he did.

Now, the debate has, of course, has risen as to whether this policy means we are getting out of the nation building business. My own view is very akin to the view that Bob articulated in the last session, and that is we are involved in nation building in every way. And if you look at the white paper that the Administration has put out, among the two  objectives that are upper most identified in the white paper are the need to build an accountable and responsible government and to build national security forces. If this does not constitute a definition of building an effective gun state, then I'm not quite sure what is.

Let me say a few words about the ambiguities. There are ambiguities, and the ambiguities to my mind come here within at least along three dimensions. First, of course, is the refusal to own up to the fact that we are going to be involved in state building for a long time.

The second, which I think is potentially more problematic, is the unwillingness to admit that we have to stay in Afghanistan for the long term. This is implicit in the President's project, but it is never clearly stated either in his formal remarks or in the white paper that the Administration issued.

And the third ambiguity, which again was circumvented, was the refusal to say anything about the need for building a responsive or a  democratic government.

Now, oddly enough, if you look at the Administration's project, the Administration is committed to doing each of these three things. And so, we find ourselves in the somewhat peculiar position that we are committed to doing something in deeds but not necessarily in -- to my mind, of course, a rose is a rose and by any way it sounds just as good to me.

Let me say a few words about the unresolved dilemmas. I think there are four unresolved dilemmas that we need to address as we work in the months ahead.

The first is the whole question of reconciliation with Taliban, which appears in the Administration's white paper. My own view is that reconciliation with the Taliban is likely to fail. It is certainly likely to fail because the Taliban has no interest in that. But even more importantly, it is likely to fail because it cannot succeed in the present circumstances.

Reconciliation with the Taliban, in my  view, cannot occur through some kind of negotiated compromise, but only through making the situation in the Afghanistan so much better that individual insurgents then progressively stop defecting from the insurgency to the government.

And so, if one wants to think about reconciliation, I think it is more useful to think of reconciliation as essentially the end product of a successful investment in state building, and rather than to invest up front in efforts as the Administration proposes, to engage in reconciliation, even with low level Taliban.

The second unresolved dilemma is the question of Pakistan. The white paper and the President's remarks describe the need, obviously, to have the right policy towards Pakistan, and to move Pakistan from the currently destructive course that it is locked into, into a course that is more favorable both to itself and to the United States.

But neither the remarks of the President nor the white paper actually identifies how we are  going to go about doing this. The fact that we have not succeeded in helping Pakistan move off its currently treacherous course is not for want of effort in the last Administration, but simply because the task is so difficult and because it implicates the interest of very powerful organizations within the Pakistan state.

There is nothing that I have seen so far in the Administration's approach that suggests that we have a better policy towards Pakistan and that we will have a better policy towards Pakistan than the one that we have had so far. And unless this is again an issue that is engaged, I think we will have difficulties in getting to be in the state that we want.

The third ambiguity is, of course, the whole problem about the number of troops that will be acquired and the need to build up a national security forces. I personally found it disappointing, as John Nagl said, that the President did not take the opportunity to commit to a larger indigenous national security force.  Nor did he identify the possibility that more American troops would be required for the much longer period of time than is currently participated.

The fourth ambiguity, which will need to be addressed, is the issues pertaining to commander control, which in Afghanistan are particularly vexatious at multiple levels and involve not simply how the military effort is managed, but also the very difficult challenges of integrating both the civilian efforts of reconstruction with the military challenges of counterinsurgency.

We have not done a good job of this so far. The Administration seems to recognize it. It talks about the need to do this right. But again, there is nothing that has surfaced that suggests to us how it proposes to fix this problem.

And the fifth ambiguity, which refers to one of the question that was raised in the last panel, is the issue of the elections. This is  critical because the elections could turn out to be a turning point in Afghanistan. And U.S. policy, to the best of my knowledge, has not given enough thought to how we want to manage the question of a possible Karzai reelection.

I think there are things that can be done, that the United States ought to do, including providing financial security support for all of the contenders in the Afghan election, providing them with the resources that, in a sense, levels the playing field, and gives the other contenders an opportunity to confront Karzai in an open context. These are the kinds of things that we need to do. Unfortunately, we have not given this issue some thought, and I think that will come back to haunt us.

Over the longer term, and I'm going to end on this note, the real question I think is going to be less what did the Administration's rhetoric about our commitments in Afghanistan and Pakistan are going to be, because at least thus far we have the rhetoric right. The real issue is  whether we are going to actually put our money where our mouth is and actually find the resources to sustain this fight that we have committed ourselves to.

There are going to be pressures from the American public, there are going to be pressures from the Hill, there are going to be pressures from the Europeans over a period of time to rattle our objectives. We have to be steadfast, and the President has to be steadfast. He has said all of the right things. I think the next few months will show whether we can actually make good on promises.

Thank you.

MR. SENOR: General Barno.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL BARNO: Thanks, Dan. It is great to have the opportunity to talk on a topic today that I spent a good bit of my recent life certainly involved with. I was out to visit Afghanistan in January of this year for several days and regional command south and got to go to Sargodha province, Kandahãr and Helmand province  and see firsthand for the first time in a couple of years what things look like there.

Also my youngest son just returned from a year in Afghanistan. So the family continues its personal commitment to success in that region, and I suspect he will be going back at some point down the road.

As Dan noted, I am at the National Defense University, and as a Defense Department person, my comments today will be my own. These are my own thoughts as opposed to anything reflecting current policy.

So with that let me, pose, perhaps, four challenges as we look at the road ahead here in Afghanistan, and then close with a few comments on Pakistan, which we have only briefly spoke to there this morning so far; four challenges.

And as I listened to the President's remarks at the White House on Friday and then heard a bit of the follow-on conversations with senior Administration officials later in the day, it is clear that the next major step in front of  the Administration is now implementation of this new policy. So the challenges I want to talk -- to focus on that very issue.

The first I think goes right to the heart of this thought of a counterinsurgency strategy, and that is the Afghan people is the center of gravity of our newly rollback strategy here. What does that mean and how are we going to implement the security of the Afghan people in particular?

One point of the huge challenges that we have had over the last several years is the increasing violence of the Taliban in contrast to a very limited and oftentimes fixed up number of American, International and Afghan troops. Those numbers have grown; the Afghan army and police have grown, but they have not grown commensurate with the levels of violence that have been increased around the country.

So, if, in fact, the core of our counterinsurgency strategy is protecting the population, a fundamental implementation challenge  would be to understand how to do that in Afghanistan over the next one, two, three years. We have heard implicitly that there is going to be a commitment to growing, perhaps an accelerating growth, of Afghanistan security forces. But as all of us who have been involved with that enterprise realize, that is a time-consuming effort. Not trading off quality and effectiveness as you ramp up the speed with which you produce and help those forces grow is a critical component.

So, how do we fill that gap between now and the time that adequate Afghanistan security forces will be available, which undoubtedly will be several years from now? How do we fill that security gap in terms of our focus on protecting the Afghanistan population?

As we found in Iraq, where we had a vast majority of Iraqi population in urban areas, we had to tailor a very carefully designed program focused primarily on the cities to protect the population there.

In Afghanistan, which is a nation about 50 percent larger in land mass than Iraq and about 4 million people greater in population, the vast majority of the population are not in cities. They are in the rural areas. And that makes the complexity of that population security requirement all the more difficult.

The second challenge I think we have now in implementation is how to create true unity of effort. We have talked about unity of effort at length over the last several years. And as John Nagl noted this morning, there are 41 different nations involved just in the military enterprise in Afghanistan.

There are several hundred, some would argue over a thousand non-governmental organizations. There is a widely disparate number of other civilian international agencies in Afghanistan. Our challenge is not too few players in Afghanistan. In some ways the challenge is too many players. And we have had immense difficulty in achieving that fundamental military principle  on the military side, unity of command, unity of effort simply on the military side because of the number of actors that when we multiply that into civilian dimension, it becomes even more complex.

So, what are we going to do in implementation now of the new strategy to fuse this effort together? Are we going to look at different organizational structures? Are we going to realign and refocus the leadership in some ways? We clearly are going to commit more people both in the civilian side and the military side, and it appears we are going to put in some very senior U.S. players on both of those enterprises.

But how are we going to ensure that two years from now, three years from now we are not in the same problems that we have today, which is there are so many people that want to help and so many people that are involved that we still can't achieve a synergy where the whole is more than simply a sum of the parts? Some would argue -- I think Secretary Gates said this past year in Afghanistan the reality has been the whole it has  been less than the sum of the parts. We cannot simply use the same models, it seems to me, as we move down the road ahead.

The third, I think, challenge implementation is how to ensure that we can execute effectively both top down and bottoms up in Afghanistan. A tremendous amount of our effort over the last six or seven years has been centrally focused on Kabul and trying to improve aspects of the Afghan central government with the belief that if we do that, then we will be able to extend those capabilities out into the provinces.

Now, we have had, I think, uneven effort, in part because of the number of players on the bottoms up part of that. What does it look like at the village level, what does it look like at the district level? How are we going to organize that, perhaps, differently in the next two to three years?

I would particularly argue that in the south, as we merge and look at this unified civil military effort in what I call the  counterinsurgency zone in the country, the southern half of Afghanistan, which is distinct from the stability zone, the northern half of Afghanistan, where we have a very different, really a peacekeeping like challenge.

In the south we are fighting a war. It is a counterinsurge enterprise. And that zone and the requirements in that zone, the violence, the security requirements are dramatically different than they are in the northern half of the country.

How do we organize our military and civil enterprise down there from the bottoms up to unify military and civil action? I would argue that in a violent zone in the midst of a war there is a need for the military to take a leadership role, partnered with the supporting civilian effort in the south, not simply separate stovepipes that complement each other in some fashion.

This has got to be a focused unified effort, not unlike where we found some success in the American provincial reconstruction team  linkage to the military maneuver enterprise in the eastern part of the country. We have to look at that, I think, in some new ways across the whole of the south.

The final challenge of implementation, I think, is the challenge of time. The clock is running. It is not entirely clear, I think, to all of the actors involved, be it the Afghans, be it the United States military, be it NATO, be it all of those other players in Afghanistan, how much time is available on the clock in order to achieve if not success, at least a turnaround in the trajectory in Afghanistan.

How much time do we really have? When does our political will in Europe, and the United States, even among the Afghan people, trickle to a point where we no longer have the energy to sustain this effort? In all of our plans the implementation of our policy now has to be shaped in a way that understands that this is on a finite time line. I'm not sure what the answer to that question is. But we cannot develop an  implementation plan without a clear understanding of the time line that we are on.

If we build a five-year plan and we only have three years of time in the hourglass, this is not going to succeed. So I think that is a crucial challenge as we now look at recasting this broad policy into the operationalzing, as it has been put, of the policy into a plan of on the ground.

Finally, a quick comment on Pakistan and we have not fully -- simply briefly touched on that today. One could argue that Pakistan will present to the United States with its greatest strategic challenge in the region today. And realizing we are focused this morning on Afghanistan, I think we have to recognize that success in Afghanistan will create leverage and I think provide us additional capabilities to achieve success in Pakistan.

I don't personally accept the notion that the conflict in Afghanistan somehow is a subset of a broader set of challenges in Pakistan.  And I also don't personally believe that solving Pakistan will somehow allow us to solve Afghanistan. They are clearly interrelated. But the reality is we have, in my judgment, much more influence today inside of Afghanistan, and our prospects for turning that around are quite good if we aggressively implement the policy from last Friday. That success in Afghanistan will give us tremendous leverage in terms of where we want to go in Pakistan.

On the reverse of that, of course, failure in Afghanistan, as we heard from earlier speakers, will simply move Pakistan more rapidly down a slope towards further problems in that nation.

So, I think we have to look at Pakistan independently in a sense from Afghanistan in a related regional strategy. And part of our look at Pakistan with regard to the United States has to be how do we convince the Pakistanis that the U.S. is a long-term strategic partner with them in the region?

So much of their decision-making, in my view, is based upon the expectation that the Americans are simply requesting to walk out of the door at some point. How do we disabuse them of that notion? How do we build confidence that we are there for the long haul and that they can change their calculus to reflect that fact? That will give us a tremendous degree of increase capability in the prospects for success in Pakistan. And again, our success in Afghanistan I think will be a key component of that. Thank you.

MR. SENOR: Thank you, General Barno.

And next we have Fred Kagan, who just returned from Afghanistan, spent almost a month there. I will turn it over to you.

DR. KAGAN: Thank you, Dan. Actually, I spent about five days in Afghanistan, and another nine days in Iraq. And I apologize for the noises I have been making. I seemed to have brought back a souvenir.

I want to start off by saying I fully support the President's stated policy, and I will  work as far to help this President succeed as I worked to help previous presidents succeed, or rather to help his policy succeed, because I think it is absolutely important, absolutely vital to American security. And I hope and believe this actually can be a bipartisan effort and can remain a bipartisan effort, because it is so clearly in the nation's interest. And so, I am glad to see that there appears to be strong bipartisan support for this right now.

And I think that although I share the fear of that over time, some Republicans may find it opportunistically advantageous to shift positions, I think there is enough of an understanding among the Republican party of the importance of this war for America that that will not happen. There will be, I suspect, plenty of other issues for Republicans to run on against this Congress and against this President, and will not need to make this an issue.

I would like to try to get down to a few of the issues and offer you some specific  considerations of what is going on in Afghanistan, why we need to be there, what we need to do and try to focus a little more practically.

First of all, I think the mission is very clear as long as we understand it properly. The mission is to eliminate threats to American soil and American vital security interests emanating from South Asia. Al-Qaeda is part of that. But there are a number of other groups that operate in Pakistan as well that are also very significant threats to American interests if not directly to American soil.

The attacks in Mumbai has -- which has long enabled the Kashmiri separatists group, by the way, actually has regional if not global Jihadi ambitions. It certainly has a set of aims that if it were about to pursue them, would set afire a portion of the world with a one and-a-half billion people and a quite considerable number of nuclear weapons, including a critical American strategic partner in India, and of course, destroying Pakistan.

That the aims of that group would do that is completely unacceptable for American national interest for anyone's interest in the world for that to happen. And so, we have to be very concerned about their activities. And then there are a couple of other groups in Pakistan that I will talk about in questions if people want to discuss further, including the one that was accused of killing Benazir Bhutto, but have a much more limited aim of destroying Pakistan, a state of 170 million people with 100 nuclear weapons.

I would submit that American vital national interests are involved there, too. And I think that is -- not very many people would argue about that.

The point that we need to consider is these are enemies that we are going to have to deal with, and we have right now an opportunity in Afghanistan, in that we are touching the rear areas of all four of those enemies. None of those enemies have primary objectives in Afghanistan. None of them are particularly actively trying to  gain ground in Afghanistan. None of them are particularly pursuing the coherent policy in Afghanistan right now.

All of them do have operatives who are present in Afghanistan. But our presence in Afghanistan allows us to touch those group; allows us much greater visibility on their activities and on the threats that they pose than we would otherwise have; allows us to, shall we say, politely interact with them on occasion. And allows us to exercise influence within Afghanistan, and I'm not talking about predator strikes.

The fact that you have significant cross-border movement across the Durand Line works two ways: It makes our life in Afghanistan hard, but it is also an opportunity for us, if we can get Afghanistan moving in the right direction, to influence what is going on in the areas of Pakistan that we most care about, particularly the Pubtab (phonetic) in the North-West Frontier Province but also Balochistan.

I have made the same point in regard to Iraq. And I think that it is important there, too, the fact that you have a million Iranian pilgrims coming annually to the shrines in Iraq has a profound effect on Iraq. And we need to stop being so focused on the effect that Pakistan and Iran have on Afghanistan, respectively, and think about the effect that Iraq and Afghanistan can have positively on their neighbors.

And considering the very, very limited leverage that we otherwise have in Pakistan, I think it is very important that we retain and build on this particular means of trying to drive the conflict within this country in the right direction.

I would also add this is a very simplistic point, but it is amazing to me how often it is lost, we have a two front war, in that we are fighting enemies in Afghanistan, we are working with the Pakistanis to fight in some cases the same, in some cases slightly different, but related enemies in Pakistan. It is inconceivable  that you could succeed in Pakistan without also succeeding in Afghanistan.

And we can stabilize Afghanistan, I think, without getting everything we want out of Pakistan, but we will not be able to end the fighting in Afghanistan as long as the situation in Pakistan is unsettled. The only way for this to work is for it to work on both sides of the border. And we have different parts to play.

In Afghanistan we have a much more direct role to play. In Pakistan we have a much more indirect role to play, but the United States has to play both roles simultaneously and play them well in order for this to work. And so, these are two halves -- one is not subordinate to the other -- but they are two halves of a regional strategy.

One of the positive things that we need to note about the situation in Afghanistan, after all of the media hurrah about it is headed off the cliff -- first of all, just to put that in perspective, the peak of this year's winter  violence was less than -- significantly less than a quarter of the peak of the violence that we saw in Iraq at the end of 2006.

One of the things that happened in terms of the media excitement about this is that Afghan violence is very, very cyclical. There is a fighting season, there is a winter lull. This winter was a relatively mild winter, so the lull came later and was less of a lull. But there is a lull. The media started paying close attention to this war as the fighting season got into high gear and saw a trend line that went up like this, and then extrapolated it to infinity.

In fact, what happened is the trend line went like this, and we are back down to a relatively lowering. It will go up again this summer. But we have to be very careful as we ride the sign wave of violence in Afghanistan not to allow any given, you know, three- or four-week period or three- or four-month period to sway us as we pay attention episodically, which is one of the problems that American have with these kind of  wars, to this war. We say, oh, my God, we have had four bad months in row, well, we are going to have four bad months in row. That is what fighting is like in Afghanistan.

The question is how do they compare to the equivalent four months in the previous year, what was actually happening, what was generated by this, and so forth. So we are going to have to peel that back.

But one of the good news stories about Afghanistan compared to Iraq is that there is no civil war in Afghanistan. And it is incredibly important point, in my view, that is often forgotten. There certainly are armed groups among the Tarjiks and Uzbeks and Hazaras, because everyone in Afghanistan is armed. There is no Afghan community that does not have an armed group. But they are not engaged in fighting against the Pashtuns. And the Pashtuns are not engaged in fighting against the Tajiks and the Hazaras and the Uzbeks.

What you have in Afghanistan is a  straightforward predominantly overwhelming Pashtun insurgency against a government at whose head sits a Pashtun and will probably continue to sit a Pashtun.

So you don't have the kind of interethnic or inter-sectarian violence that you had in Iraq. And that is incredibly important, because that was the thing that was driving Iraq rapidly off the cliff.

What terrorized all of us at the end of 2006 and galvanized the Administration into making that courageous decision was the fact that the populations in Afghanistan were actually mobilizing at a very local level to fight each other. And that is -- there is a short road from there to the abyss. I don't think there is a short road to the abyss in Afghanistan. We are not looking at that kind of dynamic.

And so, this is an insurgency. It is a nasty fight. It is a serious set of enemies. It is very complicated. But for a wide variety of reasons I would submit this is not harder than  Iraq; this is not harder than Vietnam. This is not the hardest thing in the world. We are making it look very hard for a variety of reasons. And I think there are inherent problems here. But this is something that is perfectly manageable if we can maintain the will to do it, and if we approach it properly.

What are the things that we have to do concretely? We can talk about the term parody for population, and that is from a counterinsurgency perspective, and that has to be the focus of our troops' efforts. But our overall effort has to be focused a little differently than that. And that is, we have to work to be establishing the legitimacy of the Afghanistan government. That is how you end an insurgency. Okay.

And you don't usually have to make that point, but that is sort of an obvious point to a counterinsurgent. But unfortunately, in part because of the way -- in part because of the fact that the current structures that we have in Afghanistan were not built to deal with  insurgency. They were built to deal with a post-conflict situation where we thought that the insurgency was over. And we have not yet fully gotten over that mindset in the way structure is functioned. We have too much development going on in the way that development traditionally goes on in war, which is not focused on building the legitimacy of local governments.

And in particular, one of the things that we are not doing in Afghanistan is pouring a lot of money into the Afghan government so the Afghan government can spend it. Instead, we are doing a lot of aid projects directly, having spoken with locals and figured out ideally what they want, but then do we do the project; we contract the project.

This is a problem, because that doesn't give the government legitimacy. And in many cases, by the way, the Taliban takes credit for the projects. Either they will literally put a sign saying, brought to you by the Taliban, or more frequently what they will do is say, the  Taliban has decided, the Taliban council has decided that we will permit this project to go forward, and we will not destroy it; you know, congratulations to the Afghan people. And then they take credit for it in that way. But the government gets nothing out of it.

Now, one of the reasons for this, of course, is because of the extremely limited capacity in the Afghan government to spend money, and there is a real fear that the government which has been pervasively corrupted by narco money will misappropriate funds. I can guarantee you that it will misappropriate funds. I can guarantee you that it will not spend money effectively. I think we seen this movie before. It was called Iraq.

But it was incredibly important that we accepted the downside risks that some of our money would be misappropriated and some of it would not be spent, and lots of it would not be spent properly in order to accept the incredibly important upside benefit of working to legitimise the Iraqi government, which is, amazingly enough,  actually worked.

We are not moving down that path in Afghanistan. We are still intolerant of Afghan institutions that are not fully compliant with international standards of transparency. And if we continue down that road, we will never have a capable Afghanistan government that can be seen as legitimate in the eyes of its people. And this is very hard for us to tolerate, particularly in an economic downturn to say we are going to have corruption, our money is going to be misappropriated.

But this goes back to the question -- I think John Nagl put this very well -- do we ever want to be able to leave Afghanistan? If we do, then there are certain prices that we have to pay. And unfortunately, inefficient and some corrupt use of moneys that are donated from the international community is one of them.

I echo the sentiments of everyone who regrets the fact that the President didn't commit to increasing the size of the Afghan national  security forces. This is a no-brainer. Once you get in on the ground it is -- even if you get on the ground it is apparent, as John pointed out, even if you just do the math, this is something that has to happen. It has to happen much more quickly. And again, it is going to require accepting the downside risk that we are going to produce a force that is of less quality, it is less well-trained, it is less well read -- less well led -- it is also less well-read --

(Laughter.)

DR. KAGAN: You know illiteracy is a significant problem in Afghanistan. But, you know, the funny thing is you will hear trainers in Afghanistan talk about how there are not enough trainable Afghans because of the illiteracy rate. Go back and look at most armies in history. It has been the norm until very recently that most soldiers were illiterate. And under the norm in most cases, most officers were illiterate, too.

We can work with that. Afghans are good fighters. They can get organized. We have to  accept risks there. Otherwise, you end up accepting risks only in the area of your soldiers -- our soldiers. And that is the problem. Right now, that is the area where we are accepting risks. We don't want to accept risks in our money and we don't want to accept risks with the kinds of Afghan troops that we are building.

I want to talk for a minute about Pakistan, which I agree is incredibly important, and I just want to put a flip on the way this discussion is usually had in Washington. I don't think it is the case that what we need to do above all is reassure Pakistan that we are going to take care of Afghanistan and stay there so that they don't need the Taliban and they don't need to support the Hakkani network, because I don't think that that is the only reason they are supporting those groups.

First of all, there is no such thing as Pakistan from the standpoint of Afghanistan policy. Just as there is no such thing as Iran from standpoint of drug trade in Afghanistan.  There are elements in Iran that benefit from the narco trade. There elements that are legitimately and seriously trying to defeat the narco.

There are elements in Pakistan that understand, including, I believe, President Zardari, that understand the importance of helping to stabilize Afghanistan restricting commitment. There are elements, particularly in the ISI, that believe the opposite.

But those guys are not just worried about a vacuum. Those guys are worried about India. And the people who are most hard over in Pakistan on supporting the Taliban and supporting the Hakkani network see us as a Trojan Horse that is injecting Indian influence into Afghanistan. They are just as concerned about the fact that Indian firms are building roads in Pakistan as they are about the possibility of Indian troops coming into Afghanistan.

For those guys it is not enough to tell them that this going to be okay, you don't need to worry, because they are going to worry. What we  have to tell them is your proxies are going to lose, and if you commit yourself -- if the ISI commits itself to having influence in Afghanistan via the Taliban and via the Hakkani network, it is not going to have influence in Afghanistan at all.

And so, we have to do both things. We have to commit to fixing the problem, but we also have to commit unequivocably to defeating the proxies. And then you can go to the ISI and say, if you want to influence in Afghanistan, you have to play with us, and you have to play with the government of Afghanistan. If you do that, you will be able to shake things in a direction that pleases you.

I think the matter of time and the question of the Washington flock versus the Afghanistan flock is very important. The funny thing about this is it is sort of more like a soccer than anything else. You never know quite how long a soccer game is going to go. And you can sort tell when you are getting to the end of a soccer half, but then there is always some amount  of injury time, which is only the referees know exactly how long that is. So you can think that you have a bunch of time and then the whistle blows or you can think that your clock is out, and then it turns out that you have another 10 minutes to play.

We need to focus on this, but we need to understand that as a soccer player can sometimes help put more time on the clock, as it were in a different way -- I think not by lying on the ground and moaning -- we have to work putting more time on the Washington clock. And that means helping people understand how important this is, helping people understand that it is doable and setting a reasonable set of expectations about what progress is going to look like.

And here I will tell you 2009 is virtually certain to be more violent than 2008; 2010 may be even more violent. We are not going to conduct, in all likelihood, decisive operations in Afghanistan in 2009. The conditions are not set for that.

If we are fortunate and if we get our stuff together, we can set conditions in 2009 to conduct decisive operations in 2010 and 2011. But that is the kind of time frame that we are talking about. And again, if we just watch the Iran metric, we are going to have a real problem.

And the last point that I want to make that has not been mentioned but is very important. We talked about building up the Afghan national security forces. We have not mentioned building up the American military.

But, look, if we pursue responsible strategies, as the President of the United States has already outlined both in Iraq and Afghanistan, if you put those two strategies together, you see a steady state requirement for the deployment of American ground forces for the next two to three years, because you get into who you are in a one thorn tradeoff right now with troops coming out of Iraq going into Afghanistan. I think if we actually resource this fight properly, that is going to continue to be true well into next year.

We have been talking now for eight years about how overstrained our ground forces are. And we excused ourselves from dealing with that on a wide variety of bases, including what is important that we should not have done in the first place, and we should just get out, and so forth.

President Obama has laid out the strategy in Iraq and a strategy in Afghanistan, both of which have significant bipartisan support and are the right thing to do. They have force requirements. When you add them up, they exceed the capabilities of the current United States military.

And in that context the one very distressing note in the national security debate on the Hill is that the question apparently is, how much are we going to cut the defense budget, rather than how are we actually going to undo one of the major mistakes that President Bush made in failing to mobilize adequately for the missions that he had given the armed forces? Thank you.

MR. SENOR: Thank you, Fred. Before we  open it up, I just want to ask one question that relates specifically to the events of this week.

General Barno, as you know, even what is happening today at The Hague or has already happened and what will be happening at the NATO summit later this week, there will be much discussion about the contributions from our allies to Afghanistan. You know, civilian resources, troops, equipment, funding, and as John Nagl said earlier this morning, the optics of 41 nations involved in Afghanistan is extremely important on the ground, and it is extremely important globally.

And on the other hand, he talked to folks on our side who are serving over there, and they continually speak to the dysfunctionality, some of what Ashley talked about, the problems with the, you know, chain of command and the unity of command and unity of decision-making both within the military but also between the military and the civilian side.

NATO still does not include the word  "war" in its plans in describing the mission in Afghanistan. While a number of our allies have performed well over there, even the Brits and the Canadians still have to check with their capitals before conducting any major operation that we initiate or we are calling for.

So, on the one hand we want their participation, their contribution and all of this equipment and resources and people; on the other hand, we have to sort of strike a balance between that and the risk of incoherence and dysfunctionality. And how would you describe that balance? And we talked a lot about the need to bring everybody together under one command. It has not truly happened operationally, and what would you advise the Administration in the days ahead to deliver on that?

LIEUTENANT GENERAL BARNO: I think that is a key question on the military side. And arguably the NATO assumption of the overall military mission in Afghanistan that occurred several -- I guess about a year after I left, has  been very problematic in terms of its execution.

NATO, when I first arrived in Afghanistan in October '03, was about a 6,000, 7,000-soldier force in Kabul in the municipal areas devoted to essentially security of the capital. And over a period of time they began a push, that the U.S. obviously supported, to move into other parts of the country very slowly based on conditions out there.

NATO was originally enlisted to come to Afghanistan, broadly speaking, because it was moving to a security place that was very calm. And by the time I left there I can recall in the spring of 2005, we had actually -- one of our tactical headquarters had built a chart that said how do you know your enemy is defeated, and they had checked off half of the blocks on that chart by the spring of 2005.

We had a month in early '05 where, as I recall, there was no violent incidents related to the Taliban. The numbers were just flat. The election, essentially, took all the air out of the  balloon, which was part of our strategy in '04. And that, you know, a year and-a-half later was dramatically different.

So in part that many would argue that change occurred because as the U.S. announced it was transitioning in NATO and the U.S. also announced in late '05 we were withdrawing 2,500 combat troops, we sent the message that we were on the way out of Afghanistan. And that changed the calculus.

Fast forward it to today, we now have this essentially NATO structure that was originally brought in to do more of a peacekeeping mission involved eyeball deep in a very tough counterinsurgency war, especially in the southern half of the country. The northern half of the country is still, in effect, a peacekeeping area. There is very little in the way of violent incidents right there now.

So the structure in the north is probably about right, in my judgment. In the south, though, I think as we can bring in  17,000-plus American troops and 4,000 trainers and potentially as many of the speakers have noted that is a down payment on a future force. But we need to amp up and change the headquarters arrangement to accommodate the fact that we are now going to have instead of two or three or four brigades on the ground, we may have six or seven or more brigades there.

That eventually gets us to instead of having a one four-star headquarters in Kabul with just the regional commands, I think that we have to look at whether -- as the U.S. reasserts leadership now in this nation, that we need to bring in some American division headquarters beyond the one that is here today. And perhaps even an American corps of headquarters of three-star headquarters to help focus on this counterinsurgency fight in the southern part of the country.

Now, that has been in the debate mix for a while. I'm not sure we are going to be moving in that direction anytime soon. But I think that  would be a very useful addition.

MR. SENOR: Fred, go ahead.

DR. KAGAN: I would like to second that and say that it is not only a useful but an essential addition. I don't think we are going to be able to develop and execute a proper campaign strategy without adding a three-star headquarters to this fight as quickly as possible.

And I would like to make a point -- two quick points about alliance. First of all, when we put NATO -- when we NATO-ized the Afghan mission, the primary beneficiary of that was meant to be NATO. We need to remember that that was back in the day when we were looking for ways of justifying the alliance's continued existence and trying to get it to do this kind of area thing, part of that.

The assumption, as General Barno said, is that the war was over, basically, and we were in post-conflict, peacekeeping state where we could afford to do that. Some of us -- I suspect General Barno were uncomfortable about that  decision from the outset, but we did it.

Now this isn't about NATO anymore. And it is not about NATO for two reasons:

First of all, it is not about NATO because we actually in war, and war matters. And so, preserving the processes of the alliance is much less important than helping the alliance win, because if you are interested in NATO, what matters at the end of the day in Afghanistan is whether we did not lose, not whether all of the NATO alliance processes have worked out to everyone's satisfaction. And that is what happened when you are in the war as opposed to a post-conflict environment.

And also the center of gravity of NATO has shifted to Europe, for anyone who has been following the Georgia/Russia conflict. And I think the future of the alliance is no longer going to be determined in Afghanistan, frankly, unless, perhaps, if we lose.

But I want to make one last point. And so I would say we have to stop imagining that the  purpose of the alliance in Afghanistan is the alliance. The purpose of the alliance in Afghanistan is supporting the military effort, and it has to be focused on that.

I have been cudgeling my brain to think of another example of an actual alliance-based counterinsurgency in history. And the only one I can really think of is the Boxer Rebellion. There is probably another one or two out there, but it is really hard. Alliance warfare is always hard. Alliance counterinsurgency is not only hard but extremely rare.

What usually happens when you have multiple states involved in a kind of insurgency is that one of them is the dominant state and the others follow the lead, which is not always the case of coalition warfare, was not the case of the Boxer Rebellion. I don't think this is the Boxer Rebellion.

So, I think that there is a real question here about how we are going to make this work in an alliance context, given that there is  very little historical predicate or precedent for even thinking about how to do this.

MR. SENOR: Now, one more question before I open it up. Jackson earlier today talked about the concerns abroad about the true bipartisan commitment to what we are doing in Afghanistan.

And while there are concerns -- and certainly the folks up here have talked about outside of this conference is the concern -- that what you are seeing right now are some people on the right side of the political spectrum and Republican and conservative circles basically saying it is time to get out of the nation building business. This is Obama's war, he campaigned in the summer and fall on Afghanistan, the importance of making Afghanistan the center piece of our global war on terror or OCO or whatever we call it now; and that we made good on our war, we turned Iraq around, let Obama on Afghanistan. Of course, there are some on the left that are beginning to say, let's just get out  of the war business altogether.

And yet, as we have seen -- as Bob alluded to, as we have seen, you know, throughout recent history, once a President commits to a major military commitment, unlike in domestic policy it is very hard for the Congress to unwind. Now, certainly Republicans -- once President Clinton committed to the Balkans, it was very hard for congressional Republicans, despite their opposition, to unwind it. As we saw with some of the debates over Iraq over the last couple of years, once the President committed it, is very hard for his critics to unwind it on Capitol Hill.

At the end of the day, President Obama has committed to Afghanistan in a major way. And despite there being growing opposition to it, don't you think -- just the logistical and resource commitments involved -- you just can't unwind that kind of commitment quickly.

DR. KAGAN: Well, I think you can't. And I think in particular I think one of the biggest problems is that there does appear to be a  powerful lobby within the Democrats on Congress against this policy. But I think they are going to discover something very quickly, if they haven't already; namely, that a Democratic Congress cannot run against a Democratic president. And it cannot play the same kind of games that they played against Bush.

So, I think the danger is actually more subtle and more complicated. And I think we are starting to play out. I think there is pressure from certain congressional leaders on a Democratic caucus to press the Administration to change its goals. And I think that the danger is that whereas President Bush was well-known for being extremely stubborn and unswayable once he had committed to a policy --

MR. SENOR: Principle.

DR. KAGAN: Yes.

(Laughter.)

DR. KAGAN: I was trying to look for a neutral -- on the other side.

MR. SENOR: Yes.

DR. KAGAN: -- it is less clear that President Obama will have that same degree of determination. Perhaps he will. He is just an unknown quantity in that regard.

And so, my concern is not that Congress is going to try to turn off this war. Nancy Pelosi cannot vote against President Obama's supplements. But that, rather, that they will put pressure -- try to convince the President that he is losing support, and therefore, that the war is unsustainable, and therefore, try to sway him and work with those within the Administration who disagree with this policy to undermine it from within.

And in that sense, vociferous Republican opposition will help them make that case to weaken the policy, which is why I think it is very important that we maintain a very strong bipartisan support for this effort, so we can just take that issue off the table.

MR. SENOR: Let's open it up for questions.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Hi, just a quick question about the direct trade. From some of the articles that I read here, it sounds like the direct trade is this great undermining effort that is really going to destroy all of our efforts in Afghanistan.

First of all, is that assumption correct?

Secondly, I would just like a little clarification of exactly who this poppy money goes to. I understand that some in Iran and some in the Afghanistan government benefit. It doesn't make it to Mullah Muhammed Omar, the Hakkani network, who exactly is getting those funds?

And finally, how do we reconcile the problem that this money is directly funding our enemies, but at the same time if we destroy this crop we alienate the population? So how do we reconcile that? What is Obama's policy and what is your suggestion?

DR. KAGAN: I'm glad you brought that up. It is a very important question. I wish that  we had the answer to where does all of the drug money go. But unfortunately, it is a cash and carry kind of business, so it is sort of hard to track receipts and figure that kind of thing out.

In general terms, the sort of accepted statistics are that it is about a $4 billion a year business in Afghanistan. Estimates range from 100 million to $500 million of that goes to the Taliban, goes to the enemy, but principally I think to Mullah Omar's group and to the Hakkani network. I tend to think that it is probably at the higher end of that range, closer to 500 million.

It is hard to know what they get from other sources. They certainly get significant funding from the Saudi -- from certain Saudi individuals -- not the Saudi government, but certain Saudi individuals. They certainly get support from Pakistan and from other groups. Could they survive without any of the drug money? Probably not.

But the question is how much of that  drug money could you take away in what kind of time period? And when I was there I got an interesting briefing from the guys who do the poppy eradication. And it became clear that you can take maybe 20 to $30 million off of the street in terms of poppy production in a year. Okay.

Well, the problem is that they don't know -- when the poppy eradication guys go out, they don't know whether the field that they are cutting down belongs to somebody who is going to give the money to Mullah Omar or it belongs to somebody who is going to give the money to some of the Afghanistan government.

And so, if they were actually attacking specifically the $100 million a year, you might imagine that over time they might make some progress. But what they are actually attacking is the $4 billion year at $20 million a year in eradication.

In that sense eradication is irrelevant to the counterinsurgency mission, simply because you are not going to be able to take enough money  out of the pockets of the enemy in any period of time that matters. And so, we should not imagine that that is part of the coined effort. It is part of the long-term effort to build a stable Afghanistan, of course.

And, you know, we should not give up on carrying narcotics, but we should separate it from the notion that it is part of the counterinsurgency fight, except in one respect. One of the most important things that is delegitimizing the current Afghan government in the eyes of its people is that belief that has considerable justification that the government is pervasively corrupt with drug money.

A large portion of that $4 billion goes to people in the Afghan government. Portions of it also goes to the Iranian Kurds force, portions of it go to elsewhere. But a large portion goes to the Afghanistan government.

I would submit to you that we would make much more of a dent in helping establish the legitimacy of the Afghan government by persuading  the Afghan government to prosecute even a small number of senior Afghan leaders who have their hands all over this drug money. And it doesn't have to be Karzai's brother --

(Laughter.)

DR. KAGAN: -- we can start with other people, but get them to do that. And I think that one or two even high-profile prosecutions and convictions would be worth more that $20 million worth of poppy eradication.

How can we do this? Well, one of the things that we can do is recognize that in contrast to the kinds of criminality we saw in Iraq, drug trafficking is an international crime. And we can build evidence packets against Afghan narco traffickers, including people in the government. And we can threaten the Afghanistan government. We can bring those people up on charges ourselves. We can bring it up in front of Interpol.

Now, none of that is a good solution, because what you want is the Afghans to prosecute  their own people. But we have leverage here that we not using. And that is partly because we are so focused on killing poppies that we are not focused on what the actual problem is undermining our effort in the most fundamental sense. It is not the enemy. It is what it is doing to the Afghanistan government.

MR. SENOR: Yes, sir. We need a mic right over there. Thanks.

MR. DUSS: Mat Duss, Center for American Progress. In regard to Dr. Kagan's point about maintaining bipartisan foreign consensus, there seems to be something of an agreement on the two panels today that however President Obama's plan is being spun, it is, in fact, a long-term, large-scale commitment to nation building in Afghanistan.

Now, understanding that one of the reasons that the American public kind of soured on the Iraq effort was that there was the perception that President Bush was not being completely candid and forthright in describing the situation  on the ground there for a number of years.

How will it be possible for President Obama to maintain public support for the effort in Afghanistan without being completely candid about what he is trying to do there?

DR. TELLIS: I think there are two ways to deal with that. One is the approach that seems to be embodied in the current policy, which is to convert the entire effort to the struggle to defeat al-Qaeda and its constituents and hope that that carries you through the process. Why do you conduct nation building as a accept.

The other is to come out at some point and be candid that this is ultimately a state of nation building effort, and that we have to be committed both in terms of resourcing it as well as staying the course over the long term. I'm not sure in my own mind about which of the two is better today.

I think because of the issues that Dan raised about getting the Europeans on board, particularly in the next few months, the idea of  focusing on al-Qaeda may be a better tactic. But I think I agree with you that over the long term there is no way you cannot sustain a policy like this based on a lie or based simply on the expectation that people will buy into the anti al-Qaeda justification for sustaining such a long-term effort.

So, I hope that as the process evolves, the President will find opportunities to tell people clearly what this is about.

Now, you have to remember part of the partisan politics that is involved here. Admitting that this is ultimately a state of nation building policy implicitly involves admitting that there is a residual Bush legacy that was actually correct. And I can understand that this may not be palatable to announce, certainly in the immediate aftermath of an election. But if that is what the truth requires, then at some point we have to face up to it.

DR. KAGAN: Let me come briefly to the President's defense. Obama has not been dishonest  with the American people. He has been less than forthcoming about what the full cost and commitment. But I think we have to take the political environment into account.

I don't think any American imagines that we are going to wrap this up in a short period of time. And President Obama gave no indication that he thought that we were going to wrap this up in a short period of time. And so, I don't think there is an implicit promise out there in the President's current stated strategy that this is going to be a short-term thing and that it is not going to require a significant commitment, that it is going to be easy, and so forth and so on.

I think that I would have preferred to see a more straightforward exposition of, you know, how significant a commitment it is going to be, how we have to be committed over the long term, and so forth. But I don't think that we are right now in a position where the President has implicitly promised one thing and is going to deliver something else. I think it is simply a  question that he has not emphasized as much as some of us might like the magnitude and length of this effort.

So I think the risk of people waking up a year from now and saying, hey, I thought that you said this was going to be done by now and what is going on with this is very low. But I think at some point, Ashley is right, he is going to have to convert this into an argument for, no, this is really, you know, a defining struggle of our time and it is something that is going require our effort over a long period. But I agree I don't think it is was vital for him to do that just at this moment.

MR. SENOR: Yes, sir. Go ahead.

MR. WELL: Hi, I'm Christian Well with Military, dot, com.

Fred, I would like to see if you can burrow into the details a little bit on the commitment -- the military commitment that is needed in Afghanistan. You helped craft a pretty detailed plan for the surge in Iraq.

I would also like to get the perspective of Lieutenant General Barno here. What specifically would you do with the increase in U.S. forces besides the training? You know the terrain in Afghanistan is a lot different, it is harder to secure, it is harder to resupply, it is harder to provide fire support, it is harder to do air strikes. It presents a tactical challenge that Iraq did not.

Can you give us some suggestions on how we could craft a strategy that would work there?

DR. KAGAN: I -- burrow into the details, Christian. Thank you. That is what I really would like to do.

Iraq presented some challenges that Afghanistan doesn't either. The Iraqi insurgent tension for fighting within populations made the task of routing them out a lot harder. Afghan insurgents don't tend to do that on the whole. They tend to prefer to fight outside of hibernation centers, which makes targeting them easier in some respects. So, there are some  tradeoffs there, although in general terms I think you are right.

But we will be up to seven American combat brigades deployed in Afghanistan by the end of this year with all of the things that the President has committed. We were at 22 in Iraq at the height of the surge.

My own estimate is that we are insufficiently focused on some of the gaps in our deployment pattern, particularly in RC West. I think that the provinces of Farah, Herat, Badghis and Ghor are likely to become increasing flash points as we succeed in RC South and we drive some of the leadership at poppy cultivation, a variety of things into those provinces, which right now are very close to being devoid of any coalition forces and even Afghan forces, which is even more distressing.

There are virtually no effective Afghan national army troops at RC West right now. And in (inaudible) I don't think we even have PRTs, frankly. So that is sort of a black hole.

I look at that and I think there is probably a requirement for two or three additional American combat brigades -- well, I would love for them not to be American, but I think they will have to be American, and there is also the question of maintaining a theater reserve, which is something that we have never had in Afghanistan. We had it sporadically in Iraq, and it turns out to be very important.

So I think that you are looking at a requirement, a real requirement of 10, possibly 11 American brigades in a surge -- I will call it that -- that will probably need to last 18 to 24 months, assuming -- and this is the key thing -- that we actually accelerate the development of the Afghan national army. If we don't accelerate the development of the Afghan national army, we will have to be there in a much greater strength for the long term, because right now we are programmed to get 134,000 in the ANA by the end of 2011. And that was already an acceleration. Originally it was supposed to happen by 2013.

One hundred and thirty-four thousand is totally inadequate in that country. I think 250,000 would be a minimum for the Afghan national army, and we have to work on the Afghan police, border police. If we accelerate that, which is not a part of the current plan, unfortunately, then I would imagine a requirement for 10 or 11 American brigades for that period and then start to ramp down.

What do they do? Well, they are going to have to secure the population, and that means they are going to have to do non-traditional counterinsurgency missions of identifying enemy sanctuary and support zones within Afghanistan, going to clear them out. Our guys go after this in some areas and other areas they are not. The terrain and so forth makes it more complicated to do, Afghan culture makes it more complicated to do.

You don't just drive into a Afghan village and set up a checkpoint the way we would do in Iraq. If you do that, you are likely to  generate more violence rather than improving the situation. So, cultural sensitivity is important. You will have to work on that.

And we are going to have to find a way to get the non-military components of this coordinated with the military effort or even with each other, which right now is not happening. They are not coordinated with each other, and they are certainly not coordinated with the military effort.

But in order for that to happen, you have to have a coherent and comprehensive military campaign plan into which these things can fit or a joint campaign plan between built jointly between the embassy -- well, in Iraq it would be the embassy, you don't even have the equivalent of that in Afghanistan -- built between the non-kinetic components of the military.

None of that is happened. And I would submit that with the current state of the headquarters both on the military side and on the civilian side over there, there is not the  capacity to do that kind of planning right now. That is one of the reasons why I think that actually fixing the headquarters problem, including getting a three-star headquarters over there, but also, you know, supporting the McKiernan's efforts to building up the U.S. forces Afghanistan staff -- but somebody has got to figure out how to do that on the civilian side.

I hope that that is what Holbrooke is taking on, but it is big task, and he doesn't have any international mandate to do that.

And then you have to do planning. And that is one of the reasons it is going to take a long time, because right now we are deploying forces into theatre. Those guys will get on the ground and do good things. They are not going to be counterproductive. But neither are they going to be used optimally or anything like optimally, because we simply don't have the planning structures in place to figure out how to do that.

So, if I were -- you know, the thing that distresses me most about the strategy other  than the ANA, is that there is a lack of urgency about fixing the command of control arrangements on both the civil and the military sides so that we can do the planning we need to do.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL BARNO: Quick comment. When the military does their analysis on what they require in the way of forces, they do what is call troops to task. They identify what are the tasks you are trying accomplish, then they back off of that to say here is what kind of unit, here is how many I need to do that.

In Afghanistan there is a myriad of tasks out there. And again, these plans may exist. They have not been made public at this point, but there is some fundamental questions: What is our strategy for dealing with population security in the rural areas? The vast majority of the country is rural. The majority of the population lives outside of cities. What is our plan for how we are going to approach that? And then what does that imply in a way of troops?

How are we going to use special  operations forces? Are we going to use them primarily in strike missions? Are they going to train Afghan national army units, commando units? Are they going to organize local protection forces in various parts of the country? Are they going to have a role on the border, in the interior? How are we thinking about that? What is the type of forces we will need for lines of communications security, how to make sure we can use the roads and the Afghan population can use the road, which is their lifeline as well? And how do we protect that? What kind of forces are going to be needed for that?

What are we going to do along the borders? Are we going to provide any military capability there? That is a 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, the distance from Washington, D.C., to Denver, Colorado, much of it looking like the Rocky Mountains. That is a daunting task, but are there some focused areas that there may be some military requirements?

So, all of that goes into this calculus  of what do you need in the way of troops and what kind of approach you have. Each of those things I have described has several options associated with it. And so, you have to rationalize all of those and come up with a comprehensive -- as Fred knows -- a joint campaign plan. And that is just the military, the joint the campaign plan, the civil military aspect.

The one principle I think that is essential that hopefully we will see laid out on the ground that we started when I was there, and we do it in parts of the country but not other parts is what I call area ownership, which is military units own, from the standpoint of responsibility, pieces of territory, whether they be provinces or districts or multiple districts. And within that, the military commander -- and this is primarily in the east today -- has overall cognizance of all the effort that is going on.

He doesn't command civilians, but the civilians work in support of his unified civil military vision of that area. It is a  collaborative effort. But the military guy, effectively, is held accountable for that territory. And he is partnered with an Afghan governmental official and usually an Afghan military official as well. Again, we have examples of this in the east. This is not how we operate in the south right now.

I think that idea of area ownership of having one person in charge or at most, two people in charge, military and civilian, and having accountability for the results in a defined area that they are going to work for their tour is a very important principle. And I hope it becomes part of the operational plan on the ground.

MR. SENOR: We have time for one more question. Go ahead.

MR. PETROUS: Hi, my name is Jerry Petrous from Georgetown University. We talked a lot about the differences between Iraq's and Afghanistan's conflicts. I think one of the important parts of Iraq was the Sunni tribal awakening.

My question to the panel is, how does that sort of local engagement fit into our strategy in Afghanistan and whether that is competing with building the legitimacy of the Afghan central government?

DR. KAGAN: It depends on whether you do it right or do it wrong. It is not going to look anything like the Anbar Awakening. Afghanistan is very different in this regard and the tribal dynamics are very different.

I think the tribes are not going to be very helpful in this regard. I think that whereas in Iraq you could go to tribes, I think in Afghanistan I think you have to work at the village level, you have to work at the community level.

There is a program in place right now, the Afghanistan provincial protection program or something like that the PPO stands for, which is trying to do something like this. But I think it is a flawed concept, because it is focused at the district level. And as soon as you get to the  district level, you have tribal politics, which makes this stuff break down, and it also is very heavily depending on central government involvement.

But I think what we are going to have to do is address the fact that 30 years of war have destroyed social structure in local Afghan villages. So community elders are not in charge. Some of the locals have been driven off or -- and people don't have a sense of trust in their neighbors that Afghans traditionally have to protect them against outside threats.

How do you deal with that? Our guys go out, we as Afghan national security forces counterparts and we help reassure the population, find out what the actual threat is, help them address it, and get to the grievance that -- the number one grievance a year ago in Afghanistan was is sense of insecurity, which is pervasive even where the security is actually pretty good. And I think that that goes back -- goes to this social breakdown.

So it is going to be a very different phenomenon, and I think it is not going to be the sort of thing which sort of expands across Afghanistan freely the way the Anbar Awakening sort of did in Iraq. It was a little more complicated than that. But I do think that the basic concept is that we have to build bottom up as well as building top down. But in this case, bottom up is helping villagers understand that the organs of security that the Afghans central government has to provide to them working with us can give them the thing that they want most, and that, in turn, feed back to the notion of legitimacy.

So I think it can be made to work properly.

MR. SENOR: Okay. Thank you, everybody, and thanks to General Barno, Fred Kagan and Ashley Tellis.

The game plan we will take a short coffee break right now. At 10:45 we will began our panel with Representatives Harman and McHugh.