1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036
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Throughout the 2008 campaign, President Obama promised a renewed effort to address the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan. In the last year, insurgents have established control over large swaths of the country; the drug trade has escalated; and fighters, weapons, and other resources have continued to flow across the border
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from Pakistan. With critical Afghan elections scheduled later this year and the administration now poised to deploy tens of thousands of new forces into the country, the United States must take decisive steps to reorient its strategy in Afghanistan if it is to prevent the country from slipping further into chaos.
At this event, AEI scholars Thomas Donnelly, Frederick W. Kagan, and Gary J. Schmitt will be joined by Lieutenant General David Barno (U.S. Army, retired) to provide an overview of strategic challenges facing the United States and its partners in Afghanistan and assess the necessary components of a successful campaign plan for the coming year. Danielle Pletka, AEI's vice president for foreign and defense policy studies, will moderate.
| 8:45 a.m. | Registration | |
| 9:00 | Panelists: | Lieutenant General David Barno, National Defense University |
| Thomas Donnelly, AEI | ||
| Frederick W. Kagan, AEI | ||
| Gary J. Schmitt, AEI | ||
| Moderator: | Danielle Pletka, AEI | |
| 10:30 | Adjournment | |
American Enterprise Institute
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036
Phone: 202-862-4870
E-mail: VRodman@aei.org
Speaker biographies
Lieutenant General David Barno (U.S. Army, retired) has served since April 2006 as the director of the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University. He has served in a variety of command and staff positions in the continental United States and around the world. He has commanded at all levels from lieutenant to lieutenant general in peacetime and combat operations, including command of more than twenty thousand U.S. and coalition forces in Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. In this position, he was responsible to U.S. Central Command for regional efforts in Afghanistan, most of Pakistan, and the southern parts of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. General Barno frequently serves as a consultant on counterinsurgency, the changing nature of war, the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, and civil-military relationships.
Thomas Donnelly is a resident fellow in defense and security policy studies at AEI. He is the author, with Frederick W. Kagan, of Ground Truth: The Future of U.S. Land Power (AEI Press, May 2008); the coeditor, with Gary J. Schmitt, of Of Men and Materiel: The Crisis in Military Resources (AEI Press, 2007); and the author of The Military We Need (AEI Press, 2005), Operation Iraqi Freedom: A Strategic Assessment (AEI Press, 2004), and several other books. From 1995 to 1999, he was policy group director and a professional staff member for the House Armed Services Committee. Mr. Donnelly also served as a member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. He is a former editor of Armed Forces Journal, Army Times, and Defense News.
Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar in defense and security policy studies at AEI. His most recent book is Ground Truth: The Future of U.S. Land Power (AEI Press, May 2008), coauthored with Thomas Donnelly. Previously an associate professor of military history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he is the author of Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy (Encounter Books, 2006), The End of the Old Order: Napoleon and Europe, 1801–1805 (Da Capo, 2006), and coauthor of While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today (St. Martin's Press, 2000). A contributing editor at The Weekly Standard, Mr. Kagan has also written numerous articles on defense and foreign policy issues for Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Policy Review, Commentary, Parameters, and other periodicals.
Danielle Pletka is the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at AEI. Her research areas include the Middle East, South Asia, terrorism, and weapons proliferation. Before coming to AEI, Ms. Pletka served for ten years as a senior professional staff member for the Near East and South Asia on the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Since joining AEI, Ms. Pletka has developed a conference series on rebuilding post-Saddam Iraq, directed a project on democracy in the Arab world, and designed a project to track global business in Iran. She was a member of the congressionally mandated U.S. Institute of Peace Task Force on the United Nations, which released its final report in 2005. She recently coedited Dissent and Reform in the Arab World: Empowering Democrats (AEI Press, 2008) and coauthored the 2008 AEI report Iranian Influence in the Levant, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Gary J. Schmitt is a resident scholar at AEI, where he is director of the Program on Advanced Strategic Studies. Prior to coming to AEI, he helped found and served as the executive director of the Project for the New American Century, a Washington-based foreign and defense policy think tank. Previously, Mr. Schmitt was a member of the professional staff of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and served as the committee's minority staff director. In 1984, he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the post of executive director of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board at the White House. Mr. Schmitt is the coeditor, with Thomas Donnelly, of Of Men and Materiel: The Crisis in Military Resources (AEI Press, 2007). Mr. Schmitt has written books and articles on a number of topics, including the founding of America, the U.S. presidency, intelligence, and national security affairs.
