<html><body>American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p> </o:p> Winning <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> <o:p> </o:p> October 19, 2005 <o:p> </o:p> <o:p> </o:p>      <st1:PersonName w:st="on">Thomas Donnelly</st1:PersonName>:  Okay, I m officially calling the meeting to order, and the first order of business is to welcome everybody to what is a very timely discussion of the situation in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  I particularly note that my colleague, <st1:PersonName w:st="on">Vance Serchuk</st1:PersonName>, who has pulled this together, has entitled this Winning Afghanistan.  In other words, it s a gerund, formulation suggesting pretty strongly that we re doing okay, but there s still a way to go in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  And just by way of shameless commerce, you re relieved somewhat of the obligation to take notes today because several of the panelists and moderators today have pieces upcoming in the November issue of Armed Forces Journal, so you may be able to refer to that and just enjoy the conversation today.      So without further ado, let me introduce the first panel and get things kicked off.  Our topic, as you ll see from your materials on the first panel, is to discuss the counterinsurgency campaign and military strategy in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, and I can t imagine that we would have a better lineup of folks to talk about it.  Kicking off things will be Colonel David Lamm, who is Chief of Staff at CFC Afghanistan.  If not the architect of the strategy, then certainly the scribe to the architect of the strategy, the right-hand man, and nobody more intimately familiar with the transition of the military strategy from counterterrorism to a broader counterinsurgency strategy.  Giving a reality check today and also talking a bit about Afghan National Army and Afghan national security development, we have Colonel Christopher Langton. I don't need to read people s bios in great extent because you have them in your package, but he s a retired British Army colonel who has joined the staff of IISS.  After a distinguished career, he is now head of the Defense Analysis Department there, an editor of the annual Military Balance report.  Following Colonel Langton, we have Bob Perito - I hope I m not overly familiar there who works formerly at the US Institute of Peace.      Robert Perito:  And currently.      Thomas Donnelly:  My notes are incorrect.  I m sorry.  Currently formerly and currently and possibly in the future, as well, at the US Institute of Peace - okay, I m sure Mrs. Perito is happy about that - and Coordinator of the Iraq and Afghanistan Experience Project there.  Batting cleanup will be Joe Collins of the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">National</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceName w:st="on">War</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">College</st1:PlaceType></st1:place>, who will attempt to connect the dots in a coherent fashion and summarize and draw some lessons learned and lessons going forward.  So without further ado, we ll just go down in order as you are here.  Dave, the microphone is yours.      David Lamm:  Well, it s a pleasure to be here, Ambassador Oakley, Minister Jalali.  Nice to see you again, sir.  I just wanted to make a few comments and, as Tom said, I had scribed a few things out on the counterinsurgency strategy.  I think what you need to keep in mind is the reason for being of CFC, the reason that it was founded and placed over there and stood up as the headquarters, was to, in fact, establish a closer political and military relationship with not only the US Embassy effort there, the US effort overall, but the international effort and then the political effort working with the Afghan government.      So beginning in the Fall of 2003, we stood the headquarters up.  General Barnell I arrived later and basically took a look at how we were going to move from basically what we had seen as a counterterrorist strategy where US forces and other coalition forces would move from point A to point B, conduct an operation of sorts, and then return to the base to a counterinsurgency strategy.  Which, in fact, meant looking at, to say a cliché, winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people and establishing security forces, working with the AMA, doing what we could do from the DOD perspective on working with the Afghan national police, establishing the rule of law, a large bit of that.  And then the other thing that we always had to keep in mind as we worked and we were very conscious of is everything that we worked on and did inside Afghanistan, we always worked to keep, as we said at the time and probably still do, keep an Afghan face on things.  It was always important to the Afghans to lead in all these efforts, whether it was humanitarian aid over the winter up in Uruzgan and areas that were cut off because of the harsh winter last year or how we would effect the mitigation of warlords, most notably Ishmael Khan, Alton Farat [phonetic], about a year ago in September, always to support as best we could the Afghans who are working the problems and then playing a secondary role and backup.      A couple red lines that you needed to keep in mind as we worked, particularly with the security forces.  The first one was on this counterinsurgency strategy was to get the Afghan National Army out, and there is a dilemma there.  The army, we thought, was progressing fairly well, and I think it would be fair to say that we had a great deal of work to do with the Afghan National Police.  And there were a number of dynamics of why, most of which, from our perspective, had to do with the interagency in <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Washington</st1:place></st1:State> and the ability of DOD to support and train and outfit the Afghan National Police, which I m sure Minister Jalali would have wanted, and we re working towards that.      But at the time, there were serious limitations on what the US DOD could do and CFC headquarters could do with the police, so we did it in a number of other ways and roundabout ways to give the Afghan National Police support in <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Herat</st1:place></st1:City>.  And as the election came on through the summer and into early fall and October and I think those were fairly successful.  Simple things like providing riot control gear and equipment to the Afghan National Police.  It s tough to be a police force if you don t have the basic tools to get those things done.  But the most important dilemma that we faced was, while we found the Afghan National Army to be very effective, the problem in the nation s democracy is, as things are growing, you can t throw the federal army at all the problems internally.  What you find out in the counterinsurgency is most of what you need to do is, in fact, rule of law and should be properly done by internal police forces and not military forces inside the country.  So we worked with that.      We had one red line as we went through the Afghan National Army, which I think our counterparts and I know my counterpart in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> picked up on very early.  The Afghan National Army was supported by embedded tactical trainers, which were US forces, which enabled the Afghan National Forces to, in fact, call in on radio <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> enablers anytime they re in trouble.  The red line for us as the headquarters working with the Afghans was we would never move or deploy the Afghan National Army into a situation or place of - anywhere in country working with the Afghans where it was going to lose on the battlefield.  That was just an absolute red line for us for a number of psychological reasons.      The Afghan National Army and police, anytime we moved it, we made sure it was supported to such a degree, working with the Afghans, whether you overdeployed forces into an area, but that the red line was in this counterinsurgency fight, you can t deploy Afghan federal forces, national forces, into an area and have them lose.  And unfortunately, in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Iraq</st1:country-region></st1:place> that had happened on several occasions.  For us, it was an absolute red line, and that meant basically that, over time, as we moved the Afghan National Army around - the Green Berets of the Afghan National Army around from place to place oftentimes, just their arrival, for instance, in Jalalibad several months ago after the newspaper incident I think magazine incident here on the treatment of the Koran.  There were some riots in Jalalibad.  Local mayors this is one of those great instances in the growth of the counterinsurgency effort.  There was rioting in Jalalibad.  The local mayors were summoned together.  President Karzai worked, Minister Jalali, all worked together and with very, very minimal US assistance, practically none, they were able to move in local forces and then police and then the Afghan National Army were moved.  And it was just their presence, in fact, the rioting stopped.  And if you were an insurgent out there or troublemaker, you new over time, because of the pattern of how we would deploy the forces in the Army, that once they arrived the game was up and you ought to pack it in because they are going to come and, in fact, do what they need to do to restore order.  And they will win, undoubtedly, in the long term.  So that helped immeasurably. The centerpiece, once we determined how we wanted to work the security forces with the Afghans, then the centerpiece of the counterinsurgency effort was, in fact, going from four PRTs, I think, in 2003 to 19 PRTs, mostly in the south and in the east.  And that effort is an interagency effort.  A PRT is a provincial reconstruction team for those of you who aren t familiar with those.  They re composed of roughly 80 to 100 interagency personnel from a number of countries, depending on where they are in the country of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region></st1:place>, and with Afghan participation heavy Afghan participation as well.  It is an outreach program that we thought paid probably the biggest dividends of anything that we were doing inside of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  And the thoughts of how they would come about theoretically and expand those things really sort of evolved over Lewis Sorley s book, A Better War, and a number of other pieces that we looked at in theory. But four PRTs are already established, and the notion was that, over the winter of 2004, I believe it was, we would place 19 of these PRTs, form them out of the 25th Infantry Division, which was CJTF, the Task Force 76, and then basically have them arrayed out in Afghanistan for the spring thaws when we would suspect the annual migration of our Taliban friends would cross the borders.  And they would have 19 PRTs to greet them, all of which were dispensing, I think, the first year, 2003-2004, it was about $42 million in commander s emergency relief program funds, [indiscernible] funds. This past year, that was $142 million, so and that s where you got, I think, the most bang for the buck was the local commander on the ground, local PRTs working with the local officials in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> doing local projects.  So that when the insurgents would come back in in the spring and attempt to set up camp for the summer, what they found was a rather apathetic group towards them, in some cases absolutely hostile.  In fact, I will tell you that most of the intelligence that we received from about 2004 to the present time on the presence of where insurgents may be, former Taliban troublemakers may be, in fact, came from the Afghan people themselves.  Where IEDs, where IED bomb making areas were, most of this very good intelligence was, in fact, coming from the Afghans themselves who had been formerly sitting on the fence.  This gave us a great indicator that the counterinsurgency strategy was, in fact, working over time.  So all politics is local.  It s the best place to spend the money, and to quote T.V. Lawrence, I think what we figured out in the strategy is it was a dollar well spent on the people of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> that s worth more than 10 bullets anywhere. Thomas Donnelly:  David, thank you very much.  That s a great introduction.  Colonel Langton, if that was the concept and the intent, how are we doing and how are the Afghans doing? Christopher Langton:  Mr. Chairman, thank you, and I d like to thank the organizers for inviting me to this rather large ambush, which is full of people I recognize from my military past in the British Army and others, including Ambassador Elias [sounds  like].  Very nice to see you again, sir.  We last met, I think, in 1993 training 25 IEDs to go to <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Haiti</st1:place></st1:country-region> at <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceType w:st="on">Fort</st1:PlaceType> <st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Polk</st1:PlaceName></st1:place> full of mosquitoes.  I don t wish to pretend that I have any particular knowledge.  I m an outside observer.  The opinions I express are my own.  I was very fortunate in May to be hosted by Dave Lamm on my left.  He gave me a very candid briefing at a time he could probably ill afford the time to do so. I m going to speak to notes because, in a sense, I m an academic, and I like to follow this theme.  On the 17th of November 2001, when Mullah Omar recognized that the Taliban would not be able to stand up to the US military might, which was coming from the north, he said that his regime would fall, and he said that quite candidly, and that Afghans would carry on the fight from the mountains, as they always had.  Now, I ve been asked to assess in the first part of my short presentation from my point of view some elements of the counterinsurgency campaign today.  Firstly, it is true to say that insurgent and terrorist attacks this year have shown that the Taliban and its allies retain the capacity to move with relative freedom, which isn t surprising given the terrain, and to put together tactically sound operations.  And I think this shows that the infrastructure, the training base and the logistic chain remains capable.  It does not indicate any particular failure, however, in the counterinsurgency campaign because of the long-term nature of such operations, but it does highlight the challenges posed by regular forces using asymmetric, unconventional tactics against a technologically superior conventional force on what is now termed as complex terrain and also where there exists a number of safe havens. My belief is that in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, as elsewhere, this needs to be looked at in the context of the complexity of Afghan culture and ethnicity, and I think the British learned this very sound lesson in the 19th Century.  As has been indicated by Colonel Lamm, the territory is the population, and particularly in this context the Pushtin population.  And lessons from the Soviet occupation, which are expounded on in Army General Mahmood, Garyev s excellent book, My Last War, show that mujahaddin then were able to operate in groups of 400-500, changing shape, merging, remerging, demerging, and, as he put it later, like oil spots on water, which I think is a very apt description.  The Taliban in some sense is the same for obvious reasons.  Also of relevance, I think, is the fact that every [indiscernible] is a bear net.  There is no logistic tale, meaningful logistic tale, eating up valuable manpower, and they are fairly much self sufficient. But crucially, this is really only possible while they are able to subsist off the local population on both sides of the Durand Line, if I may say so.  And it was really ignorance of the Pushtin factor which Garyev highlighted finally in his book - it was his main conclusion, and it made him very unpopular in <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Moscow</st1:place></st1:City> as the main reason for the failure of the Soviet campaign.  Now, you know, this is another discussion. So today, Taliban are observed crossing the Durand Line and are being engaged successfully in the southern provinces, being unable to defeat US-led forces when they meet them.  But I would also suggest that in counterinsurgency there is a need to be cautious of measuring success in terms of body accounts, as this seldom amounts to an indication of victory.  Indeed, we could also add that, in the culture of Taliban, death in itself is some kind of a victory.  They have succeeded in moving, I think, further north perhaps than they were last year, and this has added pressure on the processes which back up the military counterinsurgency campaign. As David Lamm has said, in other words, loyalty in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> is a very fickle bedfellow, and sometimes people have described it as being based on the principle of who can give me the most or who can hurt me the most.  The idea amongst some of the indigenous population is that the insurgency will outlive the counterinsurgency operation, allow some people to give pride of place to Taliban when it comes to loyalty, believing that they will last longer.  So as has been said earlier, in this type of operation it is the collective mind of the population which is the territory to be captured and held, not some hilltop nor town.  And programs to bring social and economic reform are ultimately more important in insuring victory than the military campaign itself, which is an enabler, rather than, if you like, the be all and end all of the victory. And police forces are probably more important, as Dave Lamm has already said, than the Afghan National Army ultimately as establishment of the rule of law, which is vital and really tells us that now the training of the Afghan National Police, which is, I believe, to some 62,000 by the end of this year, is a main priority.  And later on, we ll talk about why I think the ANP has had more difficulty reforming than the Afghan National Army.  As an aside, the rule of law in Afghanistan, really unlike, if you want to make comparisons, and I don t think it s particularly relevant, but some people do, unlike in Iraq, is a very difficult issue as there has been no real reconciliation of different legal systems in Afghanistan to date.  And this is being worked on, of course.  We re talking about secular law, Sharia law, and I think, to some extent and I look to the Minister we might think also of the adherence of the people of the south of Afghanistan, to Pushtin [indiscernible], the Pushtin Code and how that fits in to the factor when we look at the rule of law. But first, the counterinsurgency campaign, the military campaign, has to deprive the Taliban of oxygen, and this is the place where it gets its subsistence from.  Therefore, my observation and, in some sense, this is a criticism - it s one which has been voiced in Washington as much as anywhere else - is that more international forces have to be generated to enable this to happen.  It is a fact that the ratio of multinational counterinsurgency forces in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region></st1:place> is much, much smaller than you could find in other counterinsurgency campaigns.  We could say that what I understand to be the imminent concentration of US forces in the southeast or the east where the problem may be more serious as far as insurgents concentrations of insurgents is concerned, will allow in that arrow for a better ratio of insurgent to counterinsurgent.  But again, we go back and suggest that we need to beware of Garyev s oil spots and what happens when you break them up. NATO has to grow in capability, in my view.  There is no doubt about that, if it is to take over the roles and visions next year.  And we know of certain nations contributing forces to NATO placing caveats on the use of those forces, and I think we all understand constitutional and legal restraints of various nations.  However, this is a big test for NATO, and I would suggest that national caveats at this point are totally inappropriate.  They weaken the operation and make it more difficult for the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> command, and they make it more difficult ultimately for other countries in that coalition who would have to bear the brunt of casualties ultimately. I mentioned some mathematics, but I don t think mathematical solutions are that relevant to the campaign as a whole.  It s simply, suffice to say, military forces in sufficient quantity to stabilize the environment, which then allows other strands of the counterinsurgency campaign to take root, social, economic, et cetera, and to remove underlying causes of insurgency that the military aspect of that is vital.  We can discuss other things like coffee and crime later, I think. To conclude this part, I would say, yes, the military campaign has an effect in curbing both infiltration movements and affecting the mindset of the Taliban.  And no, in my view, there are not enough troops to prevent reinfiltration to provide the sort of security that enables the all-important social and economic reforms which should follow military takeover of an area and which are now essential if the population in the post-election environment is not to tire of elections because they don t see any particular progress.  It s important to bring confidence that the process is working. To enable this, echoing Dave Lamm, it is important that Afghans form their own policy.  Too much foreign influence will be counterproductive in a country which harbors deep-seated suspicion of foreigners from the past.  And I think maybe one of the reasons why President Hamid Karzai said not many weeks ago that he would prefer it if house searches were to stop because they are probably counterproductive in a culture which views as a house search as an invasion of your personal life, not just your privacy.  This does not mean the international forces withdraw.  They are essential to bring the ANA to a state where it can begin to operate with increasing independence and allow the Afghan National Police to establish the rule of law, which is what I keep going back to. Why is the ANA more successful in, if you like, bringing itself up to speed than the Afghan National Police?  This isn t going to take me very long because I think the answers to this question that has been posed are fairly obvious.  The ANA benefited from being formed in a new image, which is attractive to many both former fighters and young people.  It grew under the tutelage of international militaries and went into combat with its <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> allies.  It was at the beginning better paid than the ANP, and this is one major failing, I believe, in what has happened when we talk about police, as it is always advisable in any environment to pay the police a decent wage.  And I think we know that.  But there are a few other reasons why perhaps the ANA fared better than the ANP.  The first is its remoteness from society, that is the army s remoteness compared to the police.  And therefore, it s also its remoteness from some of the corruptive pressures that can be placed on policemen working amongst the local population where former commanders, fighters, people who are maybe trafficking exist and threaten, in some respects, local policemen.  This is not the case with the army. Then the army, like all armies, has an ethos and a corporate morale, and those people who ve trained the Afghan National Army have sought to foster that from the very, very beginning.  And I believe from my own rather small observations on this and talking to people, this is very strong.  The ANP, being until recently the less well looked after, has not achieved this, and there is no integrated force within the ANP such as there is with the ANA.  I could also add that many local police chiefs are former commanders with a vested interest in their local areas.  Thank you very much. Thomas Donnelly:  Colonel, thank you very much.  That was quite an incisive presentation.  Mr. Perito, both Colonels Lamm and Langton have stressed the importance of local operations and the role of provincial reconstruction teams in both the concept and the execution of the strategy.  I would particularly ask you to give us some insight on how PRTs are doing. Robert Perito:  Thanks very much, Tom, and thanks for the invitation to be here this morning.  Clearly, the provincial reconstruction teams are a unique aspect of the counterinsurgency effort in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  What I m going to say this morning comes out of a project that we ve been running for the last year which we call the Afghan Experience Project, and under this project we ve interviewed about 60 people who either work in or worked on or worked around provincial reconstruction teams in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region></st1:place>.  And what I m about to say represents the results of in-depth interviews with these people, plus visits that I was able to make to Afghanistan a few months ago. Provincial reconstruction teams are small joint civil and military organizations whose mission is to promote good governance, security and reconstruction throughout <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  In July, there were 22 PRTs, 13 under US flags and 9 under ISAF-NATO flags.  Now there are a few more, somewhat less on the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> side, somewhat more on the ISAF side.  The pattern has been for the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> to establish these entities and then pass them off to either coalition allies or to ISAF. When I was there, I had a kind of standard conversation with people about PRTs, and I would start off and I would say what do you think about PRTs.  And they would say, I really like the concept, it s a great concept, but it s the implementation.  That s where we have problems.  And then I would say, well, what s wrong with the implementation, and they would say, well, there s the British model and the American model and then the German model and what the Lithuanians are doing.  And the conversation would sort of tail off from there.  In fact, the multinational PRT program has been characterized by an emphasis on flexibility, on the proliferation of national models and on an ad hoc approach to security and to development. Now, this approach has allowed for an adaptation of local conditions, but it s also created a lot of inconsistencies.  There is a PRT executive steering committee, but it does not have the authority to actually direct operations.  And there s a lower level working group, but its function is basically informational in providing information to all of the various entities in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region></st1:place> that are engaged in some way or form with this.  And then there s the issue we ve heard about already this morning, and that s the issue of national caveats.  Individual countries place restraints on their forces which restrict their ability to conduct certain kinds of operations, and you have some which are rather extreme, like some forces can t go more than a few kilometers from their camp or they can t operate at night, whatever.  And these national caveats make it very difficult to have a coherent strategy and a force that can work together. In the main operations of PRTs, they re very personality driven, and they reflect the local conditions.  In permissive environments, PRTs behave much differently than they do in conflicted areas.  There is no general set of guidelines for civil and military relations within the PRTs, so that each PRT operates differently.  In some cases, you have a real bifurcation between the civil and the military side, and in others, particularly in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region>, PRTs is an effort to try to make these two sides of the equation work together.  For the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>, however, there is no real interagency agreement on relationships, roles and missions, and so everything is done on a kind of ad hoc basis. As a result of these disparities, when we did our study of PRTs, we decided we would focus on American PRTs.  And we were engaged in trying to determine what lessons could be learned from this, and all of these lessons seemed to result mostly from the realities of American priorities, American policies, American bureaucratics and resource limitations.  And so, in this morning s presentation, I m going to focus primarily on American PRTs, but also, when it s appropriate, I ll talk about others. There is, in fact, an organizational model for US PRTs, CFC J-9 model, and under this model the American PRT has 79 military personnel and three civilian personnel, plus an Afghan Minister of the Interior police officer.  PRTs are commanded by an American lieutenant colonel.  The civilian complement is generally one office each from State aid and the US Department of Agriculture.  PRTs have two civil affairs teams, Army civil affairs teams, composed of a total of eight soldiers.  Civil Affairs Team A or the CAT A team is responsible for outreach.  These are the guys that go outside the wire and do projects, usually and almost exclusively using Afghan contractors.  The CAT B team is the one that operates the CMOC the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Civilian</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Military</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Operations</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">Center</st1:PlaceType></st1:place> and their responsibility is liaison with the UN and NGOs.  In the model, there is a military police unit staffed by three generally reservists who are probably police officers in their civilian life, and the purpose of the police unit is liaison with the local cops.  There are generally various kinds of intelligence teams.  There s a demining group, a psychological operations team and then generally a police colonel from MOI whose job is liaison with the local authorities. Unfortunately, however, most PRTs do not have all of these parts, and a lack of skilled personnel has been a significant restraint on PRT effectiveness.  To take a closer look at PRT staffing, the military commander is in charge.  This is a military organization, although there s a civilian component to it.  Looking at the State Department part of this, there are 19 billets, or at least in July there were 19 billets for State Department officers.  The State Department had been able to provide only 12 officers.  These officers served as political advisors to the lieutenant colonel commanding the PRT.  They served as advisors to the provincial governor.  They were members of the project review committee that decided on reconstruction projects that the PRT would undertake, and they were the primary eyes and ears of the United States Embassy.  These officers provided over 50 percent of the embassy s reporting back to <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Washington</st1:place></st1:State>. The problem was that the State Department has classified these jobs as FSO-1 and FSO-2, and, if you re all State Department here like me, you know that these are fairly senior positions.  But the State Department hadn t been able to recruit people at that rank, and so the people that they were able to send were a mix of either very junior officers or retirees that had been called back.  State made no attempt to support these people, so they were totally dependent on the military arm and the PRT for their logistics, for transportation, et cetera.  There were no particular training programs.  None of them got language training before they went to post. A did a much better job of staffing its side.  There were AID officers at all levels.  These were the only field officers in USAID.  Long ago, it seems AID got out of the business of putting people out, so these were the only AID people in the countryside.  Their roles were to advise on development assistance projects, to monitor what was going on, to work with the NGOs, the military CAT teams and the UN on development assistance projects.  And in a few cases, they actually had authority to supervise projects, but in most cases they were simply monitoring projects that were supervised out of <st1:City w:st="on">Kabul</st1:City> or out of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:State w:st="on">Washington</st1:State></st1:place>.  The problem here was that none of these people were career.  They were all contractors.  Only about five percent of the AID budget in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> flows through PRTs.  It s a very small amount.  And in cases where these people did not have actual contract authority, all they could do is look at the project and then report back to somebody far away to tell them that there was a problem. USDA has to be congratulated, I think, for making the effort to send out people to help.  Other <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> civilian agencies apparently didn t try.  But I think the USDA effort is really enigmatic of a general problem that we have in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> government, and that is that civilian agencies have very limited ability to search people, particularly in emergency situations such as stability operations.  What USDA did to find people was that they advertised throughout the entire USDA system.  They put up signs on the bulletin boards in every USDA agency saying how would you like to volunteer to spend six months working in a PRT in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>?  They got a group of volunteers.  When I was there, there were 10 USDA officers in the field serving in PRTs.  One was a forestry expert.  One was a dietician.  One was a large animal veterinarian.  One was a et cetera, et cetera.  And they were sort of spotted about, again, with no program funds, no general guidance, just go out there and see what you can do. The mission of PRTs as described in a terms of reference document, which was adopted by the Executive Steering Committee, is to do the following three things:  to extend the authority of the central government, to improve security, and to promote reconstruction.  If you ask American PRT commanders what their mission is, they emphasize expanding the grid of the central government.  That is their primary mission.  They translate this into supporting the local governor - the local provincial governor and the local police chief.  The problem with this is and the rationale for this is, of course, that provincial governors are appointed by the central government, by President Karzai.  The problem with this is that, in many cases, provincial governors, local police chiefs, are either former warlords or they re local power brokers, and their interests diverge in many cases from that of the central government.  In other cases, some of these people are thought by their constituents to be corrupt, and so the PRT has to walk a very fine line between trying to get the provincial government to do things which are supportive of central government initiatives, but not getting identified too closely if these people turn out to be unsavory.  In some cases, the PRT has actually been responsible for helping to remove local officials from office. In a national sense, the PRTs were very useful in supporting the selection of delegates for the constitutional [indiscernible].  They played a useful role in supporting and providing security for national elections for the president and the parliament, and they ve been effective in sort of reaching out to local influentials, tribal leaders, Mullahs, other people who help to shape the polity in their areas.  In Jalalibad after the riots, the PRT commander invited 200 Mullahs to lunch and spruced up a local mosque, which was run by a rather radical cleric, to demonstrate that the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> was not against Islam. In the security area, this is probably the most misunderstood of all the PRT mandates.  In fact, PRTs are mandated only to provide for their own protection.  They re not responsible for pacifying the countryside, for protecting internationals or for countering the drug trade or fighting insurgents.  The military unit in the PRT is generally a US National Guard infantry platoon, and its responsibility is force protection, taking care of the unit itself and the commander and the civilian components and taking these people out when they go outside the wire to make calls.  Now, this limited security mandate has in some cases come as a shock to international NGOs in the UN who thought that an extremist could turn to the PRT for protection.  And there s an infamous story about NGOs who were involved in a civil disturbance, going up to the gate of the PRT, knocking on the door and being refused entry. PRTs do provide a kind of psychological security presence.  They do frequent patrolling.  They re out and about.  They work with the local authorities, and just the presence of armed American military forces in an area has a way of calming things down.  They ve also made a significant contribution in terms of working with local authorities, particularly with the police, and one of the functions has been to provide the police with backup, but also with equipment and some training and moral support.  Now, one of the questions I had when I went out there was how could these small, lightly armed units exist, in some cases in very heavily contested areas?  And the answer for that is, in most cases where this is true, PRTs are co-located with American combat units.  In Jalalibad, for example, the PRT is located with a US Marine infantry battalion, with a US Army special forces group, with a helicopter squadron, with a couple of gun ships, with an ANA unit with an embedded training team, and so there s a lot of folks around. Now, in PRTs with commanders who are well liked and who are on top of their game, the PRT commanders take on the job of coordinating all of the maneuver units so that the various <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> units in a given area don t run over each other.  As one officer said, I don t want the State Department guy to go out and call on a tribal leader in the morning and then have the special forces team come out and arrest that guy in the afternoon.  Or I don t want to conduct an operation and block the road on a day when the seeds are coming in for the planting.  Excuse me, is there a problem? Male Voice:  No, no.  [indiscernible] Robert Perito:  Okay.  However, recently there s been a kind of change in direction, I understand, and particularly in the east along the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Pakistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> border.  Control has shifted from the PRT commander to the local maneuver unit commander, and, in fact, PRTs are increasingly seen by the combat commanders as another tool in the bag.  And so, one day I can send out the special forces team, and tomorrow I m going to send out the PRT. In the added reconstruction, PRT activities can be divided in sort of two general groups.  One is civil affairs, short term, quick impact projects designed to win hearts and minds and improve local attitudes toward a military presence, and then USAID longer term assistance projects aimed at creating sustainable security.  The civil affairs quick impact projects have been the most controversial, and I won t go into the rather bitter disagreements that s grown up between the military and NGOs about whether or not the military, by its presence there and by its engagement in these reconstruction activities, violates humanitarian space and, by blurring distinctions between civilian and military, places NGOs at risk.  But that has certainly been a feature of the NGO experience in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>. In the beginning, civil affairs teams tend to stress spend and build.  The result was a lot of uncoordinated construction, not part of an Afghan national plan, not coordinated with Afghan government ability to support.  And so, you had schools built, but there were no teachers, or hospitals put up or clinics put up, but no doctors.  And so, the impression often created was the Americans are really good, they built us this school, but the Afghan government, well, it s not so good because they didn t send us the teacher.  With the arrival of the USAID personnel and a lot of the experience, this has changed, and civil affairs projects are much more focused now on infrastructure, on security related building and on doing things in areas which are too dangerous for other actors NGOs to go into. PRTs have also taken on a sort of longer term development look, and they become very expert in mixing and mingling all the various kinds of development assistance funding that s available.  When I was there, they said, well, you know, we use SERP [phonetic] for this, and we use QUIP [phonetic] for this, and we use DAKA [phonetic] for this.  I get lost in all the initials and the acronyms.  One of the things I think that this whole project could use is a sort of rationale or a rationalization of the funding sources so that everybody has access to the same kind of money and can use it where the expertise is present. Finally, I d like to talk about the future of the PRT program.  The <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> is transitioning the PRT program to ISAF.  This has already occurred in the north and in the west and is going on now in the south.  The Canadians have just taken over <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Kandahar</st1:place></st1:City>, the British, and I understand the Dutch are moving in to take on the other PRTs in the south.  I want to hold up a copy of this map.  There ll be a stack of these out on the counter if you want to pick one up, but basically the north and west being controlled by ISAF, south going over to ISAF, and the US being left with this group here on the border in the most conflicted and most dangerous area. The question arising out of this is this issue of national caveats.  The assumption being made here is that in the west, in the north and increasingly in the south, these ISAF-led units will be able to conduct themselves in a way consistent with traditional peacekeeping.  They won t have to fight anyone.  Now, whether this works or not is open to question.  It presumes that things are going to get better and better.  In fact, there are a lot of people out there in the west and the south and the north who are not Taliban even who have complaints, criticisms and could cause problems.  In the east, the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> will keep the responsibility for the PRTs, and those will be closely integrated with combat units.  Shifting these responsibilities from the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> to ISAF raises the question of what is the future of the civilian components. In many cases, when ISAF has taken over, the civilian units have just stayed the State guys there, the aid persons there.  Sometime it s been a matter of good fortune.  I understand when the Germans took over in Kanduz, the State Department guy who was there spoke fluent German, so he just stayed on.  No arrangements were made.  He just sort of ingratiated himself and kept right on working.  But the question is, is the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> going to be willing to operate under foreign flags? One of the most positive things, I think, to come out of the PRC experience is something that hasn t happened.  One of the things that hasn t happened is that the PRTs have resisted what you might call the Christmas tree effect.  They have not generally allowed themselves to be tasked with a larger and larger number of operations, nor have they allowed themselves to replace the Afghan government.  And the overall objective still remains that the PRTs will phase out, and the Afghan government will take over these responsibilities, both on the civilian and the military side.  Thank you. Thomas Donnelly:  Thank you again.  Joe, you ve got both a hard task and an easy task.  The easy task is that the previous speakers have given us both very precise and insightful presentations.  The hard part is that they ve set a very high standard of excellence.  So with that mixed introduction, I ask you to try to pull some of these threads together for us. Joseph Collins:  I ll do my best. Thomas Donnelly:  And to turn the microphone on.  There you go. Joseph Collins:  Okay, that s always the first step.  I think we re all in violent agreement essentially about most things.  I was particularly delighted to hear Bob s report on the investigation of the PRTs, which was I remember the PRT program when it was two view graphs in Task Force 180 headquarters.  Colonel, you d be happy to know that the real author of the PRT program was a British colonel by the name of Nick Carter, and I m sure there s something in the history of the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">UK</st1:place></st1:country-region> that is the forerunner of the PRT.  But I can remember when we pushed them through the interagency process here.  I m happy to see that we have 12 of 19 State Department.  That was above average for some of the time that we were there.  And some of the same organic problems remain, but I think lots of interesting things have happened. If all of you out there are going to sit through both of these panels, you re going to hear a lot of words about what we re doing in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  The words on this panel were sort of organized around counterinsurgency, but you might also hear counterterrorism, reconstruction and stabilization, stability operations, the famous nation building.  Remember that one?  And the more accurate state building or institution building.  And all of these things are really sort of facets of the same stone.  They are, in a way, the words required if you are, in fact, going to win in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region></st1:place>.  And to win in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, you re going to have to win the battle against the insurgents, the battle to build a decent political system, the battle to build the functioning legal economy, and the battle to create a functioning state infrastructure with particular emphasis immediately in the military and the law and order sector.  Not just police, but the entire law and order sector. How are we doing?  I think most of us up here sort of lean in the direction the fact that we are winning.  Many tremendous things have gone down.  In any speech by the President or the Secretary of Defense or State about <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, you can hear an amazing array of numbers thrown at you.  You know, 60,000.  It s sort of like the old McDonald s, how many billion served.  60,000 militia disarmed, 30,000 soldiers, 50,000 policemen, now 21,000 coalition combat soldiers, over 10,000 NATO peacekeepers, and on and on and on.  And lots, in fact, is being done.  There s a tremendous amount to be done.  It s important to remind ourselves, as we pat ourselves on the collective back, that we re in a period of time where the Taliban has been reinvigorated. There is still, throughout the countryside, the atmosphere of rule of law is still relatively weak in many areas.  The military and the police that we ve trained are desperately in need of infrastructure, staff bureaucracy, training and all sort of the sinews of those forces.  Drug production, not mentioned up here today, is an enormous problem, and the progress in fighting this demon has been miniscule.  And actually, that s a positive statement because six months ago I would have said none at all.  And in fact, we ve stopped backsliding.  That s our battle cry for this month.  Health and economic problems throughout the countryside remain tremendous.  Infant and mother mortality in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> are probably among the highest in the world among countries where such records can be kept.  There are probably a few worse places in Central or <st1:place w:st="on">West Africa</st1:place>, but we don t have the data on that.  So if we re winning, we have begun to win, I suppose, is a way of saying this. Now, in my instructions from the Chair, I was also asked to talk about some lessons, and we are talking now about lessons drawn or lessons observed in a game that s in the fifth inning.  And that s always a dangerous position to be in, and I m going to do this from a very parochial, <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> standpoint.  Lesson number one is the importance of preparing the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> armed forces for combat on the low end of the spectrum.  In fact, our skill at conventional war has forced most of the people who encounter us on the battlefield to realize that insurgency and terrorism are probably the only two routes that they can take, unless they re in a nuclear or weapons of mass destruction business.  We have to remember this not only when we talk about operations, but also when we talk about forestructure priorities and transformation.  And education, extremely important.  We have first rate combat training, and our strategic corporals and lieutenants need better training and education in this type of warfare. The second lesson follows from the first, and it is really the stuff of the education problem, and that is the importance of language and cultural training.  Frankly, we are broke on this front, and I ve seen all sorts of horror stories where armies from <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place> and other places are coming with translators with a density of 10 times as many translators in some units as American forces.  Why are we doing that?  Why do we have to do that?  We don t have to do that.  This is just rank and competence, in terms of not on the part of our soldiers in the field, but on the part of our planners and whatever.  The language problem in particular in the armed forces has always been cast as a training problem.  That is completely wrong and wrong-headed.  It is first and foremost a recruiting problem, and, if we think of it that way, we can solve it very rapidly. Lesson number three, counterinsurgency is a political military sport.  It s an interagency game, and in that game the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> armed forces need a lot more help from State and AID.  Bob talked about that wonderfully.  We have no surge capacity.  We need an expeditionary State Department and AID, and we need it quickly.  The Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense are convinced of that.  The Secretary of Defense has even offered to put up Defense money to fund some of it, but this is very, very poorly supported in the Congress.  And all the right ideas and all the right things are being said at State and Defense, and the Congress is not buying it. Lesson number four is the importance of empowering indigenous forces.  One of the most important things we did in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> was to throw away the peacekeeping playbook.  The peacekeeping playbook as described by <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iran</st1:place></st1:country-region> tells us that we needed 500,000 western peacekeepers for <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  I couldn t think of anything that would have been worse and more dysfunctional.  I think we re pioneering a new model for <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  I think the PRTs are an extremely important part of that. Lesson number five, similar to the fourth, indigenous leadership extremely important.  And here I d like for you to sight sitting in the front row our Minister of the Interior, Ali Jalali, who is back now, a colleague on the faculty at the National Defense University.  He has been a colonel in the Afghan Army, an executive at the Voice of America, and he did a remarkable job with the Afghan police.  The Minister of the Interior in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> is also responsible for the state governments.  They answer to him first before the president.  And in terms of cleaning up the act of any number of state and local officials, Mr. Jalali deserves another medal for that.  And we re glad to have you back, sir. But when we think about our problem in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> and our problem in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, as someone said to me the other day, we re still looking for Karzai in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  And truth be told, this is a complex statement.  You are talking about different conflicts with different groups, but, when it comes to rebuilding countries, state building, it has to be an indigenous enterprise.  It has to be led from the front.  There can be no more American seizures.  It just doesn t work.  And again, one of the things that we ve done in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> is consistently put a lot of weight on Afghan leaders, and now they re in the lead.  And we re following them, and I think that s extremely important. One final lesson is the importance of taking the long view, and we, as Americans, have a problem.  We ve got a real problem.  The conventional wisdom is that successful counterinsurgencies take nine years, and we know from the lips of George C. Marshall himself in the middle of World War II that democracies cannot fight a seven-year war.  That leaves us a couple of years short.  And in truth, the United States, one of the remarkably consistent things that we have done or not done, depending on your perspective, is to hang in there and to be persistent and to take problems like Haiti and take them from a crisis through assistance into reconstruction, and, too, what my friends at the US Institute of Peace call a viable peace.  We re not getting there.  We re not getting there.  We ve got to hang in there both in Afghanistan and Iraq, and, in the end, the key to this, of course, is explaining what you re doing, showing progress and keeping the support of the American people. Dave mentioned the wonderful book that I think only military read by Bob Sorley on what happened in the last few years of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Vietnam</st1:place></st1:country-region>, and Bob Sorley points out that we were doing much better in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Vietnam</st1:place></st1:country-region> than anyone in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> still licking their wounds from the mid-1960s ever realized.  And in the end, the folks in that country fell victim to losing the support of the American people much more than they did their own shortcomings, and we have to keep that in the forefront.  And this will be both our key policy and our key public relations problem in the next few years.  It s one thing to go around the world and try and explain ourselves to countries all around, and I salute Karen Hughes for taking a shot at that very, very tough mission.  But the most important people we need to explain ourselves to is the American people, and we need to do a lot more, both for Afghanistan and Iraq in that regard.  Thank you. Thomas Donnelly:  Thank you, Joe.  Thank you all.  I m going to briefly exercise the prerogative of the moderator to ask a quick question.  One theme that has run through everybody s presentation that I d like people to elaborate on is this moment of transition from <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> predominance of PRTs and other kinds of security operations to ISAF taking a larger role.  And to just kind of paraphrase Joe a bit, it may be that <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region></st1:place> is about to sever from displaced exit strategy syndrome in the sense that Americans are hankering for drawdowns and withdraws and exit strategies and stuff like that.  But it strikes me that, again, just reading between the lines of the presentations, that this is quite a crucial moment, and perhaps people would elaborate on it and do a little forecasting.  Again, it just sounds like a crucial moment in the overall success of the longer campaign.  So if everybody who wants to will take a swipe at that.  Dave? David Lamm:  Yeah, just [indiscernible; microphone breaks up] PRTs, as we move forward with PRTs and ISAF transition, it is the intent or was as I left this summer we would leave a PRT in each of the regions.  So they d leave one in Maza [phonetic], and the one at Furaz stood up, and that keeps a presence there.  It also is a way, quite frankly, to funnel the SURP [phonetic] money through, and that gets us now to the NATO piece and ISAF.  There is no commanders emergency response program funding on the NATO side, so, if you re looking for $143 million to spend on the local governments under a NATO rubric, you will not find it. The other problem is, of course, fourth generation, and this is a pretty wide open topic.  But our NATO allies wrestled and flopped very painfully to come up with the fourth structure that they would need just for this initial set.  How they will continue to do this will be a dilemma, and they will not bring with them so if you re looking from a US exit strategy perspective of cost savings overall, which lots of folks are interested in in Washington DC, I can tell you just by adding the numbers you will not realize a cost savings.  Just to run <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Kandahar</st1:place></st1:City> alone is $339 million a year.  The <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> is going to pay that bill.  You may get Canadian and British forces to move into the south to operate, but the high cost enablers, the logistics tail, is going to continue to remain a US-paid operation. So when you consider the fact that you re going to pay the bills and those nations I know the Canadians and the British have worked with us very closely, and I don t see a national caveat [indiscernible] the Canadians and the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">UK</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  In fact, we have had, quite frankly, planners with us in the headquarters with us for about a year now on the transition, and we think that that will go very well.  The issue is what you get after the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> and Canadians in the south, what country antes up.  And then, when you rack and stack national interests of what the US might want to do with our Afghan colleagues and then what the next government who is going to take over because you remember, these are, at best, nine month to one year cycles.  So you get <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">UK</st1:place></st1:country-region> and Canadians now.  The next iteration could be Italian.  It could be German.  And I will tell you, working through those rubrics becomes very problematic on the ground.  Consider just for instance what you may want to do from a counterterrorist perspective and what your authorities are going to be in somebody else s place on the ground, and we learned our lesson just, I know personally, in Bosnia with a small area known as Polai where one guy we really wanted to get at all the time hung out.  And when we drew up the boundaries, it just so happened to be in another country s area and made going to get him very difficult. So all that has to be kept in mind, but from cost savings overall, the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> taxpayer, we could pull most of the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> combat forces out of the country.  And the NATO contribution, if we re going to continue the effort in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> contribution in financial terms is going to be just as large.  So I didn t mean to disappoint you, but we pay the lion s share of the bills.  And if you re doing that, do you want to then have somebody else be doing the lion s share of the policy?  You ve got to ask yourself that question. Thomas Donnelly:  If I could toss one other element into the mix, I d be interested for predictions on what the Afghan response to this might be, as well.  Joe? Joseph Collins:  We re very, at least in the Department of Defense, very interested in finding people to pick up part of the burden, and it s sort of interesting.  It s interesting to me what a stealth operation this has been, the expansion of NATO assets and NATO command and control in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  And how, when we talk about alliances and coalitions, we rarely trumpet the fact that the allies are doing quite a bit, including a number of allies that we re twitting and fighting with all the time, <st1:country-region w:st="on">Germany</st1:country-region> and <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">France</st1:country-region></st1:place>.  But NATO had sworn ultimately to take over the entire mission in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  This is considered to be the number one priority by the NATO Secretary General.  They re working it.  They took PRTs in the northwest and then in the west, and that was sort of three out of five zones, if you will, in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  They re now moving into the fourth of five zones, which is the zone around <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Kandahar</st1:place></st1:City>, which is a zone of very active combat, and this is not just a question of taking over PRTs any longer.  This is a question of providing combat troops, and they ll be British and Canadian combat troops at least in brigade strength in the southern part of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  And I know the Canadians have been there before.  They were there in late 2001, early 2002, and they are viewing this as a combat mission, which, of course, is exactly what it is.  They ve already taken over the PRT there. There is a number of problems with NATO doing this.  Theoretically, NATO should be able to do this entire mission.  However, NATO s inherent weaknesses and the interesting little peccadilloes of its command and control arrangements are such that it s going to be extremely problematical.  Bob pointed out the prevalence of national caveats, and that is sort of an incredible phenomenon.  The Germans, for example, have a big PRT operation in Kanduz, and one of the things that the German Parliament did for them was to give them a very, very circumscribed mission statement.  The big problem in that part of the country is narcotics.  However, the Germany PRT in Kanduz doesn t have anything to do with narcotics because it s not on their mission task list as provided to them by their Parliament.  It s sort of an incredible situation. If that s what NATO is going to do, then partnership is the best we can hope for.  They re going to have to get a lot better.  They re going to have to throw away the caveats.  They re going to have to become much more centralized.  They re going to have to form joint logistics units.  You can t have every nation providing 100 soldiers and then a 75-man support group for the 100 soldiers, and when you look at ISAF in Kabul today, what you find is the troops that are really patrolling Kabul are only a small fraction of this tremendous ISAF force there, most of which has become sort of a self-licking ice cream cone.  They re there to support themselves because they re there. So this is something that really needs to be watched.  We, in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>, obviously desire for this to come about, but it can t come about unless changes and common sense procedures and standard military doctrine is sort of put into place. Thomas Donnelly:  Joe, I m glad you used self-licking ice cream cone.  If we don t use that, then we broke our license to hold conferences on military affairs.  Bob, I think you had something you wanted to say. Robert Perito:  Yeah, I, first of all, endorse what s been said about the military aspects of this, but I want to talk about the civilian aspects of it, which I think are very important for the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  One of the roles that PRTs play is that they provide a platform.  They re a place where, if a civilian agency wants to send people out, a place where people can go, where they can stay safely, where they can get a hot meal, where they get transport, where there are people there that know the local territory and can direct them and guide them.   As the PRT program transitions to NATO, the question is how do <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">US</st1:country-region></st1:place> civilian agencies continue to operate in these environments.  Clearly, in some cases, for example in Herat, it would probably be possible for the US to disengage from the PRT and to open an office or a small consulate or some other kind of straightforward civilian diplomatic kind of establishment. In other areas, it s probably not so clear, and the question is are we going to continue to operate in environments where we really don t have clear understandings of the people that we re working with.  Do we want to phase this out?  There s been some talk of civilianizing PRTs and creating a completely civilian PRT, but if you did that, then it wouldn t be a PRT anymore.  It would be something else because a PRT, by definition, is a joint civilian-military entity and draws on the strength of both of those institutions.  So this is a and what happens to the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> civilian component of this is something that I don t think has been really looked at or thought through. Thomas Donnelly:  Christopher, [indiscernible; microphone cuts out]? Christopher Langton:  Yes, two very quick ones.  One is a military one relating to US forces and NATO expansion, for want of a better word.  Dave Lamm mentioned they simply couldn t do without the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> in a number of areas, but one particular area is in the area of air, so air power, air transport and particularly in the use of helicopters.  If you look at the European member countries of NATO, what they can actually generate in helicopter lift is very, very small, and helicopters, as we all know, in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> are a critical part of military operations for obvious reasons.  So from that point of view alone, the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> and again, sorry to disappoint the audience is likely to have to remain for some considerable time. My second point on NATO, just to reemphasize, this is a watershed for NATO.  It s the first time it s done an operation outside its traditional area.  There are fissures between member states, as there are in any international or multinational organization.  The issue of the caveats is a very serious debilitating issue, which has to be catered for, and we don t know how it s going to go.  And I would suggest I think the question was how will this go at the beginning.  The next few months, as we go into British, Canadian and <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">New Zealand</st1:place></st1:country-region> taking over in the south, are critical.  If that goes well, and addressing the question of what would Afghan people think, then, if they see that going well, I think I m right in saying, Minister, then there are prospects for the next task.  But we don t know who comes next, and whoever does come next will come with a completely different shit load of equipment, doctrine and everything else. However, on a more positive note, NATO does bring one major strength to this operation and has done ever since October 2001, and that is it brings a set of common operating, commonly understood operating standards, which has enabled multinational air operations to operate out of Menah, outside Bishkek, involving up to six different types of aircraft from some nine different countries simultaneously.  And that is something that NATO can do and does extremely well. Thomas Donnelly:  Thanks very much.  We ll now go to audience questions.  I want to remind everybody of the three AEI rules.  First of all, ask a question. Second of all, identify yourselves and wait for the microphone.  And third what was the third one?  Yeah, ask a question.  Ask a question, don t make a statement.  That s it.  Let s start over here, and we ll kind of work left to right. Audience Member:  Hi, I m Dan Scallons [phonetic] from News Hour with Jim Lehrer.  I have a question for Colonel Lamm.  At the military headquarters, what kind of debate is there and has there been about what to do about <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Pakistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> being a safe haven for insurgents? David Lamm:  We re on the record. Male Voice:  Pay no attention to the David Lamm:  Yeah, no cameras in the back.  We not only debate what we can do with Pakistan between us and the government of Afghanistan, but have, in fact, worked out a series of relationships on the tactical and operational level and on the strategic level.  There is a trilateral commission which meets monthly with high level delegates from <st1:country-region w:st="on">Pakistan</st1:country-region>, <st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region> and the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">United States</st1:country-region></st1:place> to talk about a range of issues.  I think it s significant to point out that the first person who voted in the Afghan presidential election was, in fact, a person voting from a refugee camp inside of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Pakistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  And while I think everybody would like the Pakistanis to do more, President Musharraf walks a very delicate balance there.  And, in fact, operations last summer and even through the winter this year lead us to believe that the Pakistanis have been quite supportive of the operations and are very cognizant of what goes on on their side of the border and our side of the border, as well.  On the Afghan side of the border. I think it s also important to note that there s a great deal of military operational and tactical collaboration along that border, and, while some of the details oftentimes get out, the Pakistanis have been very cooperative in that arena.  So we debate what needs to be done continually with the government of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  What we would like to see around the border, Pakistani operations last summer and in the winter along the Afghan border, that side were coordinated.  I should say yeah coordinated in a loose sense.  It s not that we were telling the Pakistanis what to do, but we were aware of what they were doing, and that allowed us and the Afghans to synchronize some of the things that we were doing on our side of the border, as well.  So from where we were a year or 18 months ago, we re in a much better condition now and situation along the border.  Do crossings still occur?  Yes.  Are there other folks on the Pakistani side who may allow that to occur?  Yes, there are folks.  Does that have the complicity with the government and <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Islamabad</st1:place></st1:City>?  Probably not - se just have to continue to do that.  And then working with the Afghan system.  To tell a small joke to lighten things up [indiscernible] Minister Jalali.  There s a joke that we tell in our headquarters that, if the President wakes up and the lights don t come on somewhere in the palace, that somebody in <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Islamabad</st1:place></st1:City> has thrown the switch.  But that s not indeed the case, and he knows that.  And in fact, I think it s important to keep in mind that the first formal visitor to meet with President Karzai after the election was President Musharraf, and both of them together spent [indiscernible] Liberation Day in <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Islamabad</st1:place></st1:City> watching the festivities there.  So I think the relationship is getting much better. Thomas Donnelly:  I would just say that there s a small nastygram about the Pakistani Army in the Zawahiri letter, which is a significant Audience Member:  Confirmation. Thomas Donnelly:  And a significant laurel for the Musharraf government.  Barney, since you re in the next panel, I m going to try to get to some others.  And I ll try this gentleman here in the middle.  My apologies, but you get your turn at the microphone. Audience Member:  I ll be brief.  Stanley Cohen [phonetic] with the CATO Institute.  I d like to throw this idea out, the future of NATO.  Colonel Langton said that we had too few soldiers for successful counterinsurgency, that NATO has to grow capability.  What are the odds of that realistically?  What are the odds that the national restrictions will come off?  You ve all discussed that.  If that does not happen, you ve said this is a watershed for NATO, which suggests that the implications are not only for the future of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, but for NATO itself.  This could be a crunch time.  And I d like you to explore that. Christopher Langton:  Thank you very much.  I don t think anybody thinks any other than this is a major test for NATO because of the reasons I said.  It s doing something it s never done before in a way that it s never done before.  It might be involved simultaneously in combat operations and restructuring operations.  Will nations contribute more realistically?  I think if the first phase is seen to be successful, then those nations who are not contributing or reluctant to contribute and could contribute more might well do so.  And so much depends really on the next few months, in fact, the next year, to see how the British and the south get on. Thomas Donnelly:  And I m sure that with a heavy heart the CATO Institute will climb on board with continued exercise on American power.  I think we have time for just one more. Joseph Collins:  May I have just a word on that? Thomas Donnelly:  Joe, sorry about that. Joseph Collins:  This may be an area of dispute, so I didn t want to let it go. Thomas Donnelly:  Well, we need at least one small one. Joseph Collins:  I think that we re sort of getting to the point where raw numbers are not really a problem.  You ve got now almost 12,000 people in the NATO ISAF contingent, 21,000 in the US, 30,000 in the Afghan National Army backed up by 50,000 police, and this doesn t count various and sundry militias that are out there.  That s a significant force.  It s over 113,000 just in those numbers that are realized right there.  You know, when you start thinking in terms of raw numbers what sort of ratios you need, maybe the problem is not so much the numbers, but it s where they are, their degrees of training and professionalism.  But I think in quantitative terms, we re probably getting to where we need to be. Thomas Donnelly:  Okay.  Yeah, I m sorry for having so little time for questions, but I think we ll take one more from David, if you - I m told I was disciplined.  Oh, we have two microphones. Audience Member:  David Isby [phonetic].  A question in general.  One of the issues in the past has been lack of unity of effort in that you had the PRT world, the other, if you will, black world, special operations forces and ISAF.  And with decreasing forces, how do you, A, avoid several - just a deconfliction, as well as showing continued commitment for the benefits of our friends in <st1:City w:st="on">Rawalpindi</st1:City> and inside <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>? Thomas Donnelly:  I think that s primarily for David Lamm:  It sounds like it s for me.  We would deconflict just the military operations and even the [indiscernible] civil operations with Patrick Fine almost on a daily basis.  I would meet with my friend, Larry Sampler [phonetic], weekly, and then when things were hot almost daily as we would run up to elections.  I think that whatever headquarters comes in and takes over from CFC-alpha needs to realize that the major function of General Barnell s headquarters while I was there was to sort of synchronize and integrate all of these efforts on the ground.  So there was not a, as you say, a black operation going down somewhere that quite frankly wasn t approved by General Barnell and had knowledge of.  That then progressed to the point where, I think last summer it was, we met with all the members of the Afghan government and worked out an arrangement where those operations, to include the black operations to some degree there was some foreknowledge inside there, trusted their folks inside the Afghan government.  So those things go on, and that would be the most difficult peace, working with the international community, the UN, synchronizing that piece. The last ISAF rotation, which was headed by the Turks, we had wonderful coordination with coordinating the operations, counter-narcotics operations in the areas that were going on with the Afghans and ISAF when we would run an operation up there.  In fact, in many cases, there were times when ISAF would ask for Afghan pandas [sounds like] help support in the north.  They came with US ETTs and, hence, could call them <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> air enablers.  All of that was coordinated very, very rapidly.  And I think one thing I would like to point out which is not probably common knowledge in Washington, I think, as I sit back and reflect and hang out in the town of big bureaucracies, that one of the things that made this work was how small the headquarters were on the ground and how quickly the bureaucracy could move and assist the Afghan government.  It was actually rather remarkable, and, as I traveled back to <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region> and commensurated with my Chief of Staff friends there, I think you d find that the bureaucracies are a bit larger.  And in counterinsurgency you have to move fast, and I think the smaller and more nimble you are, the better off you re going to be. Thomas Donnelly:  Thank you, David.  Thank you all.  Those were four really superb presentations and made the moderator s job very easy.  One administrative note, we re going to conduct a fairly rapid passage of lines here and roll right into the second panel.  But we should take a moment to thank our presenters for their efforts.  [audience applause]  Okay, so we ll take about a five minute break while we switch over. [break in session to set up second panel] Vance Serchuk:  This is the 10-minute warning for this panel.  Calling on all speakers to come up to the dais. [continue break for second panel to set up] <st1:PersonName w:st="on">Vance Serchuk</st1:PersonName>:  Good morning.  We re going to try to get our second panel underway.  If I could ask everyone to take a seat.  My name is <st1:PersonName w:st="on">Vance Serchuk</st1:PersonName>.  I m a Research Fellow here at the American Enterprise Institute where I work on <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, among other issues.  It s really my pleasure to be able to introduce and moderate what I think is going to be a great panel with a very high standard having been set by our preceding one. I think that we re employing a little bit of a hammer and anvil approach to our conference, insofar as we ve just had a panel ostensibly about the military side, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism.  But one of the things that I think we heard from all of our speakers was the extent to which, as much as the US military obviously plays a lead and critical role on the ground in Afghanistan, it s ultimately questions regarding the law and order, the growth of institutions, and economic development that are every bit as much going to define success or failure in this mission for the United States, the international community and for the Afghans themselves.  As we look back over the past couple of years in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, it s reasonably clear that we do some things fairly well. The Afghan National Army, we ve heard, is a great success story.  As we saw a month and one day ago, the international community is also pretty good at actually the act of holding elections.  What s less clear is how good we necessarily are with what comes after them, and with sorts of questions related to building institutions, cultivating elites who can staff those institutions, spurring economic growth, changing the way power is effectively accumulated and wielded in a place like Afghanistan.  And that s why I think it s appropriate that after the first panel that we had this morning we now follow on with this panel where we can talk about the political and economic trajectory of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> since the ouster of the Taliban.  And perhaps, as the person, as Tom pointed out, who is responsible for the title Winning Afghanistan, for those of you who registered early you saw that initially it was just called Strategy in Afghanistan, and we decided we had to sex it up because not enough people were registering.  So there was, in fact, no judgment beforehand.  It was strictly for the sake of image, and all of you are here, so clearly it worked. So now we can turn to just a distinguished group of people and hear from them about the other, I think, critical piece of this puzzle.  Speaking first will be Barnett Rubin, Director of Studies and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Cooperation at NYU.  From November through December 2001 he served as Special Advisor to the UN Representatives of the Secretary General for <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, Lakhdar Brahimi, during the negotiations that produced the Bonn Agreement, and he s considered one of the world s foremost experts on <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> and the surrounding region.  We re very honored that he is able to join us before flying off to <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Berlin</st1:place></st1:State> and then on to <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> this evening. Next, Larry Sampler, adjunct staff member of the Institute of Defense Analyses, who served as the Chief of Staff for the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, UNAMA.  Before that assignment, he was a consultant to the Afghan government in support of the Afghan Constitutional Loya Jirga, and he had also performed a similar role for USAID in support of the Afghan Emergency Loya Jirga in 2002.  He s held positions at USAID, OSCE in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Bosnia</st1:place></st1:country-region>, and he s also served in the Special Operations community of the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>. Rick Barton, Senior Advisor at CSIS and Co-Director of the Post Conflict Reconstruction Program there, a genuine expert on all things related to reconstruction post-conflict reconstruction.  He also continues to teach at <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Princeton</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">University</st1:PlaceType></st1:place>, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Woodrow</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Wilson</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceName w:st="on">School</st1:PlaceName></st1:place>, where he was the Frederick H. Schultz Professor, Economic Policy, and a lecturer in public and international affairs. And last, but the very much not least, S. Frederick Starr, Research Professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and Chairman of the Central Asia Caucuses Institute, previously President of the Aspen Institute and of Oberlin College, also an extraordinary talented jazz musician.  Let me at this point just step back and turn it over to the panel.  I suggest we just go down the line.  Barney, the microphone is yours. Barnett Rubin:  Well, thanks a lot, and in honor of Fred I m just going to improvise a few bars here.  And I m very sorry to hear that Winning Afghanistan is just a slogan for the sake of image.  I hope that does not become that doesn t have wider implications than simply the name of this panel, but I m a little worried that it might have wider implications because I m increasingly getting telephone calls from journalists who ask me how can we be so successful in Iraq as we are in Afghanistan.  And if I could just have one big point that I would like you to come away with today, it s that we re not actually being that successful in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> and that we shouldn t think necessarily that we are winning.  So far we re not losing, but I think the situation is quite fragile, and I will go through a few indicators to give you an idea of why I say that. If you look at just some objectively measurable indicators about things that will happen and where <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> is and what <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> is, it becomes very hard to put together a scenario for the next five years that does not involve some very major crises.  So second point, I think, is that the previous panel, which was mainly talking about the military effort, discussed, except for the discussion of NATO, placed the Afghan project very much in a bilateral framework, and President Karzai and President Bush did that as well when they signed the declaration of a strategic partnership in the White House on May 23 of this year. But one of the reasons for the relative success of the project in Afghanistan has been that it has been a multilateral project, that it had the full support of the official international community, that the political process under which all of this took place and our military colleagues, of course, in the first panel emphasized that what they can accomplish is to make it possible for political and development processes to take place, and that s where you actually succeed.  They cannot actually bring about the success, but the political process took place under the sponsorship of the United Nations and was based on the Bonn Agreement.  And that, in turn, required the support of numerous donors, of which the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> is the largest, but certainly not the sole donor and in some areas not the main donor. Currently, the Bonn Agreement is coming to an end of its implementation schedule by common agreement.  That is to say, the Bonn Agreement was an agreement about political change to make a clearly illegitimate or non-legitimate and non-representative government that was put together through a meeting of un-representative people meeting outside <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region></st1:place> into something more legitimate and based on some kind of legitimate legal framework.  And for that, there were three benchmarks basically.  The first benchmark was holding the Emergency Loya Jirga in June 2002 to indirectly elect a more representative government.  The second benchmark was the passage of a new constitution for <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> through the Constitutional Loya Jirga which met in the December of 2003 and January of 2004.  And the third benchmark was the holding of elections.  The Bonn Agreement didn t say what kind of elections because the constitution hadn t been written yet, but, given the type of constitution that Afghanistan adopted, eventually it required two rounds of elections, first presidential and then elections to the Lower House of Parliament and also the provincial councils, which will at least choose part of the Upper House of Parliament.  So, although there s certain processes that haven t taken place, that will put in place the major political institutions of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>. But political institutions do not function in a vacuum.  They require support institutions.  They require funds.  They require a state over which they have political authority through which laws can be implemented, as well as enacted.  They require the ability to actually govern the country, to affect the way people make decisions.  And in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region></st1:place> today, those political institutions do not have command over a state that enables them to do any of those things.  Just one indicator, Colonel Lamm mentioned that the early cost of running the <st1:country-region w:st="on">US</st1:country-region> military presence in <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Kandahar</st1:place></st1:City> is $339 million.  That is more than the entire domestic revenue of the Afghan government.  So there might be some more cost effective things you could do with at least some of that money, even if the Afghan government is not that efficient. Now, the international it s extremely important that this bilateral agreement with the United States be placed in a multilateral framework, both for the sake of the neighbors and also for the sake of the Afghan people, who, of course, while they I wouldn t say they welcome, but they accept the international presence in their country right now because of the threat of insecurity that they have experienced from their neighbors.  But precisely, those neighbors are still there, and they will still be there even if the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">United States</st1:country-region></st1:place> and others do stay for nine years.  Nine years later, the same neighbors will still be in exactly the same places.  Or even 18 years later, the same neighbors will still be in the same places.  So if the neighbors do not buy into this project in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> will become unstable again.  And the overarching multilateral presence with the UN and so on has helped to provide a framework for that. Now, therefore, there are discussions now, but what was called the post-Bonn Agreement is now being called the Kabul Agenda.  I hope it will be called the Agenda for <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, since it should affect the whole country and not merely the capital, as many people in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> think it is up to now.  And that will be to reengage, again, the entire international community through a declaration that is likely to be agreed to in London in January, and that will also have concrete benchmarks and timetables for, in this case, not just the Afghan authorities, but also for the international community, for the donor states and the troop contributors, on the principle that Afghanistan cannot be required to accomplish goals for which it lacks the resources.  And, at the same time, the Afghan government will be held to task in order to carry out needed institutional reforms so that the aid and troop contributions can be effective. This actually, in many ways, is a more demanding task than the Bonn Agreement because it will require actually launching a process of development and, as Joe Collins said in the previous panel, and state building, which is much more difficult than holding certain events that take place at a certain moment.  Even though election is quite complex, especially in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region></st1:place> where they have to mobilize, among other things, a number of camels in order to get the ballots to all the locations.  Nonetheless and, of course, the election is not over until all the ballots are counted, and they re still not all counted.  But the type of things we are talking about next, which are, roughly speaking, grouped under three headings, which I ll mention in a minute, are much more difficult. Those three headings are economic development, governance and security, and those three are interdependent.  Now, those benchmarks will include both building up Afghan security forces and making them more effective by the rule of law.  It will include maintaining the growth of the whole economy of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region></st1:place> while we are committed to destroying its largest sector, that is the narcotics economy, which is a very difficult task and which is usually resolved by treating those two things separately, as if they had no effect on each other.  But, in fact, that is not true, and we have to do them together.  And it will require reforming and building up the institutions of government in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, both administration and judiciary, as well as the security institutions in all provinces of the country.  In all districts of the country, it won t be possible within the next three years. Now, let me just mention a few of the obstacles to this.  I m just going to go through some indicators, and this time I will talk about their dynamic interrelationship.  First of all, something that I think Joe Collins referred to it briefly in the last panel usually we don t hear much about it that is the poverty of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  That is, according to measures of basic human welfare, life expectancy, health, literacy and so on, if Afghanistan had good enough data to really be compared internationally, which it still doesn t, it appears that it would rank 173 out of 178.  That is to say, it would be slightly better than <st1:country-region w:st="on">Burundi</st1:country-region> and <st1:country-region w:st="on">Sierra Leone</st1:country-region>, but not quite as good as the <st1:country-region w:st="on">Ivory Coast</st1:country-region> or <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Liberia</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  Or maybe it s about the same level as <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Liberia</st1:place></st1:country-region>. Now, bear in mind, a country which is at that level of extreme poverty is one on which we are relying for a very important security task.  That is a very fragile read.  That has security implications because it means you can recruit someone to an armed group by giving them one meal a day.  If you can guarantee that, that s a big help to their family.  It means that the government does not generate enough revenue to pay salaries for enough officials to even be present in every province in a meaningful way.  It has a lot of other implications.  It s not just the humanitarian issue.  It means that <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> cannot generate enough resources actually to govern itself and to provide security to itself.  I will come back to that. It was always a poor country, but it was never this poor before.  Its economic profile is not similar to any other country in <st1:place w:st="on">Asia</st1:place>.  As I said, it looks like one of the poorest and most war-torn countries of Sub Sahara and <st1:place w:st="on">Africa</st1:place>.  Of course, related to that is it has one of the weakest governments in the world.  If we look at the basic indicator of that, proportion of GDP that is mobilized by the government through taxes and other services, the current government has more than doubled that in the past four years, and it is now up to five percent five percent of GDP which is the lowest figure for any country in the world on which we have data.  I presume <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Somalia</st1:country-region></st1:place> is less, because it s at zero there, but, therefore, we have no data.  So it means <st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region> s government is, in that sense, weaker than the government of <st1:country-region w:st="on">Nepal</st1:country-region> or many countries or <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Laos</st1:place></st1:country-region> and so on, in terms of the resources that it can have if it were relying on its own domestic revenue. Now, that means that, unless the poverty and government revenue are addressed, the institutions that we are hoping the Afghans build cannot be sustained by <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  The Afghan National Army, which has been successful in its operations thus far, and, of course, as we heard in the last panel, that is because its operations have been very carefully chosen to be only those in which it would obviously be successful.  Costs last year, according to the best estimates, 17 percent of the GDP of Afghanistan.  That is 17 percent of the GDP of one of the poorest countries in the world, which desperately needs to spend money on health education and so on.  Fortunately, <st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region> didn t have to spend that because it was entirely paid for by the <st1:country-region w:st="on">United States</st1:country-region>, but <st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region> cannot have a national army that is 100 percent paid for by the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region> forever.  In fact, I talked to someone in coalition headquarters who suggested it might have that for three more years.  And of course, if it had it for longer, eventually people would not look at it as an Afghan National Army if it s entirely paid for by the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  Certainly, the neighbors of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> would not look at it that way, and Afghans would not either. And it s not only the army.  Of course, it is important that police should be well paid, and, if police are well paid, they ll also have to be paid by donors.  And then, in a few years, they won t be paid at all unless the economy grows and the capacity of the government grows considerably.  <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> has to have a lot of elections under the current constitution.  The parliamentary elections cost $150 million.  That is half of the domestic revenue of the Afghan government.  They re supposed to have six elections in the next decade, according to the constitution.  So again, unless the cost of those elections come down, which it will to some extent because there won t be as many foreigners involved in them, they won t be able to have that either. So just looking at the scenario of the cost of what we are building and the resources that will be available to pay for it, there s some kind of a crunch coming.  We call police and army security forces, but they re not security forces when you don t pay them.  They become insecurity forces.  Now, in addition, police are not really security forces if you don t have a competent judiciary, and <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> right now does not have a competent judiciary.  It has an outspoken press, and a private TV station recently exposed the judiciary quite dramatically.  But there is a reason why judiciary reform has hardly started, and that is because the judiciary is controlled by the Islamic clergy, the Ulamahs, who are quite influential in Afghanistan and have actually a much better network of communication and linkage to the people all over the country than the government does and who are able to mobilize people quite effectively when the people are sympathetic with what they re trying to do.  They can t make people do something they don t want. And the Ulamahs are questioning the legitimacy of the government and of the international presence.  They are not openly challenging it.  They have not made a consensus, but this has enabled the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to essentially blackmail the government by saying that he s the only person who is keeping the clergy quiet and essentially to fend off attempts at judicial reform on the grounds that this will stir up the Ulamahs, which is extremely dangerous for any government in Afghanistan.  But unless the judiciary is reformed and made more effective, it won t be possible to bring security.  It will not be possible to encourage investment in the private sector or to develop the country. Next, the regional situation, of course we know that, following the Soviet withdraw, <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> was the engine of the conflict or the escalator of the conflict in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, was involved in it by regional powers.  Actually, the regional powers on the whole accept and conditionally support the presence of the <st1:country-region w:st="on">US</st1:country-region> and the coalition in <st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region> because they actually prefer that someone should prevent them from competing with each other and pulling <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region></st1:place> apart because they all are benefiting economically and, to some extent, in terms of security from it.  But they re becoming increasingly concerned that the United States is using their agreement to its counterterrorist role in order to establish in order to seek strategic gains in the region, which are not in their interests, which is what led to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization calling for the closure of the US bases in Central Asia to certain actions on behalf of Iran, which led to President Karzai not attending the inauguration of President Amir Nejad. And <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> cannot survive economically without regional cooperation because it is a landlocked arid country, and its water is shared with all of its neighbors.  Its access to the international market depends on all of its neighbors.  And ultimately, its security will depend on all of its neighbors.  So if its neighbors believe that <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> is serving as an American base to help the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> extend its strategic influence in <st1:place w:st="on">Central Asia</st1:place>, then it is quite likely that they will resist that economic cooperation, at the same time that the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> presence is still necessary there in a variety of ways. Finally, I would say thus far the international performance and aid delivery and state building has been fairly lackluster.  I note that Administrator Natsio said in the Financial Times yesterday that the aid system is dysfunctional, sounding like some of his harshest critics.  I won t go into the tales about it, but there are immense problems with aid delivery.  And the aid community and Afghans are living in two different worlds in Afghanistan, as far as this is concerned, because one can, again, try out lots of figures and see projects, but still, whether they re technically right or wrong, a politically relevant perception of most Afghans is clearly that they have not received the aid that they expected and they have not seen concrete improvement in their living conditions.  And that was reflected in some of the electoral results, in particular the victory of Ramazan Bashardost, the populist anti-NGO candidate in Kabul who had no money or weapons with which to bribe people. So the Bonn Agreement, the post-Bonn Agreement or the Kabul Agenda or Agenda for Afghanistan will propose a set of interlinked measures to address these what I would call risk factors, and I haven t talked about drugs, but I would say the main contradiction you will face in addressing that is that you have to get the economy to grow while you re destroying its largest sector.  And you have to reduce poverty while you are destroying the main thing that is preventing many people from falling into poverty.  And you have to produce security while you are attacking the power base of many of the most powerful people around the country.  So it s a rather complex task, which is not amenable to a frontal assaults.  [indiscernible] are trying to accomplish easy victories in a few years. Basically, very few people in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> are ideologically or permanently committed to narcotics trafficking.  There are some, and they have to be targeted.  If they had alternatives, alternative livelihoods, not just in agriculture, but for employment, construction and other things, then they would choose them.  But thus far, they don t see those alternatives really being opened to them, and that s what we have to produce in the next few years.  Thank you. Vance Serchuk:  Thank you so much, Barney.  Why don t we move now to Larry.  Barney has obviously set forward, after our first panel, a somewhat more dire set of facts and I think a more nuanced read on some of the challenges that we re facing.  From the perspective of UNAMA [phonetic] and the international civil authority which is going to be helping <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, how should this play out? Larry Sampler:  Well, speaking after Barney is always daunting.  It s a bit like in fact, I m prompted to ask, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play question, because it s hard to follow after that, and it is a fairly gloomy prognosis.  I ll try though and be a little bit more operational regarding the strategic, and I ll certainly be less erudite and more anecdotal in some of the observations that I offer.  I also I m actually quite pleased to see an empty chair in front of me.  I m humbled when I do these in part by the people on the panel and the friends and colleagues in the audience who spend so much time focused on Afghanistan, but certainly by the presence of Minister Jalali. If there s anyone in the room who was thrust into a difficult situation and underequipped and, in some ways, undersupported by the international community, it was he and his colleagues, who have taken the lead on building a new country.  But also, by the other what I ll call heroes in the room, there are people here who ve done things that are fairly remarkable.  The troop contributing nations, I saw <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">New Zealand</st1:place></st1:country-region>, <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Turkey</st1:place></st1:country-region>, the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">UK</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  Enough can t be said about, first of all, the hospitality they provided me when I visited their PRTs, but also certainly the contribution that they ve made despite some fairly fractious and difficult beginnings.  It s important to remember that a lot of the conundrums that we re facing now and have been facing for four years, there are some very reasonable erudite men and women who are addressing these things.  And we ve come up with a solution that s not perfect and it s not the aspirational best, but it s certainly not failure either.  It s kind of a middle ground. And then finally, I m humbled by the presence in this empty chair here of Hadji Jabahaya [phonetic], who, in my first meeting with him in the Jalalibad region trying to get permission to begin some of the Emergency Loya Jirga work, after letting me ramble on for about 20 minutes about how important this was for democracy and all the grand schemes of things, he said, boy, my beard is older than you are.  And he said we re sitting on carpets that are older than your entire country is.  And so I m humbled and reminded that we re talking about Afghanistan, which, while they may not demonstrate a lot of the attributes of democracy and politics as we understand it, they certainly do understand politics, and they certainly do have attributes of their own that are worth noting. If there were a poster child for the title of this particular conference, Winning Afghanistan, I would suggest that it would be Mallah Lajoya [phonetic].  Some of you may remember in the Constitutional Loya Jirga she was the courageous woman who stood up and berated the Mujahaddin and some of the leaders who had taken the platform suggesting, in fact, that some of them should have been sent to the War Crime Tribunal rather than to the Loya Jirga.  That was good news.  The immediate following bad news was that we had to put here in protective custody, and she slept in my office guarded by ANA police officers who were, in turn, guarded and watched by British military forces.  The fact that now, a couple years later, she can stand for election in her home providence, not on the set aside women s ballot, but in the general election for the assembly, and not only win, but win decisively - she placed second in terms of number of votes running against the men in her providence is, I think, the poster image for winning in Afghanistan.  And it s the germ of optimism that helps me continue to think that things may go well there. I will turn the topic of this panel on its head.  Rather than talking about institution, politics and democracy in the order presented, I think institution building is where the international community has the most focus.  Even though it s listed last, I ll address it first, and I ll move from the macro to the micro.  At the macro level within the international community, one of the things that we struggled with was what is the desired effect that we were trying to achieve.  And no, certainly not the UN or the internationals.  We don t have the military crisp and clean commanders intent.  We came up with the intent that there would be a sovereign state that was secure, stable and sustainable, and what that means is that it would be secure internally, which requires the institutions of the Afghan National Police, specifically not necessarily the ANA.  You don t want to get into the habit of using the national army for internal security.  And also secure externally and regionally, which requires an institution of a national army.  It needed to be stable, and that meant also internal and external.  Internal, the Ministry of the Interior, is essential to stability, not just in terms of managing police, but also the 32 providences and the governance at the time.  And then stable externally and regionally is the function of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and, as Barney referenced, it s a function of integration of trade and economic activity with partner states regional partner states. Often neglected in the tripartite definition of success was sustainability.  Sustainable in terms of governance and good governance, which means the capacity of the local governors had to be improved.  nd also the relationship between the center and periphery, which was so important, had to be addressed.  There was a lot of uncertainty about what that relationship would be, but whatever it s going to be, in terms of strength and relative capacities, it has to be defined and then fleshed out.  And finally, again, as Barney alluded to, it has to be fiscally sound. So in terms of institutions, the role of the international community as external support to <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, those are sort of the three pillars of work.  In terms of democracy, I think it s good to have people fresh back from <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> because transitional democracies are always difficult.  To paraphrase a friend from Justice, it s a bit like a mermaid.  It s not enough of a fish to fry and not enough of a woman to love.  And by that, I mean it s hard, when you re designing the metrics for a transitional democracy, do you take an adversarial approach?  Do you say they re not doing this, and they re not doing this other thing, and they haven t yet done this, and these are all the failures that they ve chalked up?  Or do you approach it from the aspirational and say this is a transitional democracy, we recognize that there are things they must do, and we ll work on those, but we also need to give credit for the things that have been accomplished? A transitional democracy does not give democracy.  And it needs to be recognized in the capitals as well that there are going to be things that happen that are not necessarily attractive to us, and there are going to be things that happen that are not necessarily viewed as being in the right direction.  And it s difficult to put metrics on that that satisfy the people who fund our activities in these places. I ll note, too, that the <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Bonn</st1:place></st1:City> process articulated the manifestations of democracy, the two Loya Jirgas and the constitution and the elections that we ve held.  But it s not possible to articulate through democracy.  I think sometimes the international community works from the perspective of, if we teach it to walk like a duck and to quack like a duck, it ll be a duck eventually, and that doesn t work with democracy.  You can create the manifestations of a democratic state, and you can do that very quickly.  But I would argue that state building is more along the lines of planting an old growth forest than it is planning tomatoes in the backyard.  The green field period for democracy is set, and it s a long number of years.  It can t be accelerated.  No matter how much money, effort or personnel you pour into it, you just won t be able to accelerate it. I ll move quickly.  The last bit was the politics.  I learned both in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Bosnia</st1:place></st1:country-region> and in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> that as an outside coming in you may think that you understand the politics of these situations, but you don t.  And I constantly surrounded myself with Bosnian and an Afghan staff who were bold enough to remind me of that constantly.  I think if there were sins of the international community, the first that I would consider among them is the sin of thinking that we know what we re doing and thinking that we know with respect to meddling in the local politics that there s a causal relationship that we can identify and manipulate and that, if we do this and they ll do this other thing, then we ll be moving on the path to democracy.  I think the most that we can hope for is to study the politics and understand what we can, but then to create a fertile environment for them to grow their own political situations, certainly shaping around the edges and certainly helping with mentoring and identifying unacceptable behaviors in the international realm of diplomacy.  But internal politics of a place like <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> is incredibly complicated, and just the layers and the multiplicity.  There s something in the military called network analysis, and I think it probably drove computers to short circuit and some of the network analysis to pull their hair out to try and identify the different nodes and links in these Afghan power centers. Let me close by talking about a few of the obstacles that I think we have to address, again, from the perspective of the international community and operationally.  Institutions are dependent on civil service.  One of the things that we collectively have not given enough attention to is the creation of a civil service.  It also has a green field period.  It also cannot be accelerated, although certainly it can be accelerated more, with greater ease, than can something like democracy.  But we haven t done it.  We re talking about institutions, we re talking about ministries, we re talking about police departments, and we haven t created the institutions.  One of the early comments I heard from the Germans who were doing some police training early on was that, out in these providences, sending well trained police officers back to the providences where their department has not been trained and has not been overhauled is like putting a fresh drop of water back into a salty ocean.  It s quickly absorbed back into whence it came.  So we have to work on civil service, and we have to support the Afghans in their effort on civil service. And I would liken it in terms of the paradigms we take.  It s a bit like rule of law.  Four or five years ago, rule of law was just something that people like Bob Perito and a few others had identified as a necessary fundamental of post-conflict intervention, and now it s coming to the fore a bit more often and with a bit more attention.  I think in four or five years we ll sit in these conferences and civil service reform will be something that people understand has to be addressed early on. I m taking a different tact on narcotics.  I was going to go the entire presentation without mentioning either narcotics or security, but I think the impact of the narcotics problem is the corrupting effect of organized and well-financed crime.  It doesn t have to be opium.  It can also be gemstones that are being smuggled.  It can be timber that s being smuggled.  In different parts of <st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region>, it s different things, and the unifying impact of this or the across the board impact is the effect of well-funded organized crime on <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region></st1:place>.  I was in a conversation in 2003 late 2003 where the discussion with Afghan counterparts was the Afghans were saying what do we do about this drug problem.  And I think that the right answer at that time was given by a young buck in the back of the room.  He said <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> doesn t have a drug problem.  The rest of the world has a drug problem.  It s a supply and demand issue.  As long as there s a demand a voracious demand for this product, someone is going to grow it, and it s going to be impossible to stomp it out.  At that point in time, we had an opportunity to address this problem in a different way.  We haven t, and now we are going to have, as Barney said and as others alluded to, a very difficult row to hoe in terms of eliminating narcotics. I do think, however, that we also need to address this as a law enforcement problem.  To talk about the counternarcotics problem is a bit ephemeras and a bit, for an operations person, it s hard to get your hands around.  But to address it as a law enforcement program allows you to identify which experts to bring in and which programs to support to help alleviate the problem. And then the last thing I ll say is discontinuity and security.  With regard to discontinuity, the United Nations is losing most of their senior staff in the course of about a six-month period of time, and I don t just mean UNAMA [phonetic].  I m also referring to UNIC CR [phonetic] and the other UN agencies, as well.  The <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Bonn</st1:place></st1:City> process is drawing to a close in many respects.  People who ve been here for four years or been in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> for four years have just about had enough, and they re ready to go do something else for a while.  Some of the talented Afghan expatriates who were taking key positions in ministries have moved on.  So there s a tremendous loss of institutional knowledge on the civilian side.  It s mentioned in the earlier panel the transition from the CFC alpha to ISAF and to NATO.  That s also going to represent a point of discontinuity, and I think this comes at an awkward and difficult time.  So I would just raise in terms of potential obstacles to continued success this point of discontinuity. And then a last thing on security, it is worth mentioning.  It s the 400-pound elephant in the room that can t be ignored.  I would just offer this.  There s a bit of a symbiotic relationship between the function of this panel, which was politics, democracy and institution building, and security.  And in an insurgency like the one that we face in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region></st1:place> where traditional military forces are limited in their ability and how much of the insurgency they can eliminate, I think we, the international community, have to focus on those things that we can manipulate and those things we can affect.  We can affect the ability to build institutions that are clear, transparent, capable and credible.  We can affect the ability to foster democratic reform, even down at the state level.  And we can affect things that allow the government of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> to win the hearts and minds and to protect their reputation from the insurgents.  We have to depend on the military forces, both Afghan and international, to combat militarily and defeat decisively the military aspects of that insurgency.  But we can t expect them to do it alone.  We have to focus, as well, on these civilian aspects. I ll close by a note for Dave Lamm and coalition forces.  I hope in the not too distant future to see one of these conferences that does capitalize on and does focus on what did the coalition forces and the international community do so right in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  In terms of victories, I think one of the things that we have yet to recognize is coalition forces and <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region></st1:place> and UNAMA [phonetic] and key embassies in the international community and key organizations, there was unprecedented sharing of information, sharing of objectives, the engagement of key ministries as they became robust in 2002 and 2003.  I think <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> we began to break the code on how you build a coalition of the capable and the willing to do these things better, and so it s a bit of a tip of the hat.  I am surprised Dave said something at the end about friends of a Chief of Staff, and I didn t know Chiefs of Staff could have friends.  But aside from that, I think General Barnell is one of the unsung heroes in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> in working to integrate our efforts.  Thank you. Vance Serchuk:  Thanks so much, Larry.  Rick? Rick Barton:  Thank you very much.  Good morning.  It s a pleasure to be here with you.  Vance, thanks for the invitation.  Barney, thanks for all your backbreaking work, which we ve used shamelessly and relied upon on many occasions, and, Larry, for your good work in the field.  It really takes those people in the field who are seizing on everybody s ideas and bringing them to life or trying to bring them to life.  And also, the members of the prior panel that have helped us with our work, Bob Perito and Joe Collins, Dave Lamm.  They ve all been incredibly important.  I want to introduce Morgan Courtney [phonetic] one of my colleagues who has authored our latest report, which is called In the Balance.  And essentially what we ve tried to do in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region></st1:place> over the last year is to see if there s some way to measure progress in a place where almost all of the data is thoroughly unreliable and the anecdotes are mostly rumor-filled.  So how do you establish a baseline so that when you re moving you actually realize that you re going in the right direction rather than just moving along?  And I hope that many of you will have a chance to look at that.  It s an effort to create a bouillabaisse out of an awful lot of raw material that doesn t necessarily come together in a necessarily flavorful way in every occasion. I do think that what I d like to do just very briefly is to suggest some of the findings that we seized upon, and then to just make some rather practical recommendations that we think might keep things moving along.  And you will notice that many of these findings do parallel with comments that you ve already heard throughout the day, but I think they re perhaps worth repeating just to create a context that we share.  The first finding really is that there has been real progress in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  It s clearly been the best three years that the country has enjoyed in decades, and many elements of it had been inspiring.  There s no question there has been an expansion of freedom.  On the negative side of that, we ve been working at pretty familiar territory.  We were fighting the war, we were bringing refugees home, we were doing a lot of humanitarian work, we held elections, and we ve done a lot of construction.  Those are all things that we know how to do, and that s not really what has to come next. Second finding, there s a huge need for longer term assistance.  We ve chosen to say 10 years just to suggest that it s longer than most of our planning horizons.  Not to fall into some Kremlin-like methodology, but 10 years is a long time, and we see at the same time that there is what has been described by other panelists as a diminishing likelihood of those funds being sustained for that period of time.  And that s certainly the case in most of the other post-conflict reconstruction stories. The third is that there s been a real even though this is a country of incredibly resourceful people and not always in a positive sense, there has been, I think, an international misjudgment of the absorptive capacity, and that has in large part been driven by an excessively centralized approach for security and other reasons, but oftentimes, our own preferences at working with counterparts who hold positions that are similar to ours, driven by a Kabul-centered model. A fourth finding is that we have had we ve made many, many good choices, but we ve also had some rather questionable priorities.  And I think the references to some of the large expenditures that we re making in certain areas with very slim likelihoods of success and the other choices that might be available in the country that should be pursued, I think that if you put together just the numbers that the prior two speakers mentioned regarding they didn t the number for fighting the poppies, but I think it s generally assumed that it s around $700 million or so.  If you throw in the elections, which are around $150-160 million, you throw in the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">US</st1:country-region></st1:place> military effort in Kanduhar, you re well over $1 billion.  And you re asking, okay, would these be the three places that you would spend your billion dollars?  I m not sure that we have done it that way.  We have those available pools of money sitting in our familiar places here in our system, but that doesn t necessarily align with what s needed on the ground in the country, especially when we transfer really modest efforts that have had modest successes in other places, and then we re copying that model in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  We have to ask ourselves about our priorities. And finally, we found an extremely hopeful public with growing expectations.  We interviewed 1,600 people around <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> in 20 of the 34 provinces, and we found that people had real hopes for their country.  They were generally rather modest, but they were now beginning to expect something quite different from the public officials, at least those that they could recognize.  So some pretty basic findings, and what I d like to do is then sort of apply it to some recommendations.  And what we ve tried to do with these particular recommendations is to show that the macro and the micro really need to come together, that we have to have a much more focused approach inside the country if we re likely to be successful, we re going to have to be much more agile than we have been up to now, in other words, break out of our industry-like patterns.  Every choice that we make probably has to have a tripling or quadrupling effect.  You cannot just do one-offs.  You cannot stay in your lane.  This is not a swimming race.  This is if it s a swimming race, it s going to have to be a very sophisticated relay, as opposed to six or eight lanes all swimming as fast as they can. What we find in these post-conflict places is oftentimes you have 100 success stories that add up to one failure, one big national failure.  And you wonder how did that happen?  So we ve obviously got to look at it in a rather different way.  It has to have a much stronger Afghan face, not just for the reality of the internationals leaving and the turnover and the other issues that have been raised, but because that s what s got to happen to be successful, and there has to be constant repetitive messaging.  That s something that s actually been done fairly well in many of the parts of Afghanistan that we ve been to, especially in light of the very difficult infrastructure problems that exist all over the country, with the exception of the cellular phone. So with those rules in mind, what are four recommendations that we might pursue and why would they have a multiplier value for us?  The first that I d suggest is that we need to secure the four major border crossings.  They happen to correspond to very strong local warlords or organizations and former warlords and may still be run by shadow warlords who could well be the same individual.  But those major border crossings, and we re not just talking about putting new border guards and then they re getting paid twice as much as they were paid before and maybe getting regular paychecks.  We re probably talking a real opportunity for the new Afghan Army to show that it has some capacity without getting into full scale war.  But also the beauty of this approach is it not only takes on the warlords, but this is clearly where you may get increases in national revenues that are going to be necessary. When you look at the national budget projections for the government, they re rather optimistic in terms of what they re going to collect, the revenues they expect to collect, although they re still heavily dependent on international funding.  But it s also probably the right place to take on the poppy issue without some of this imaginary world that we can take it on all over the country.  The enormity of the place needs to be kept in mind at all times.  So it has those benefits.  Its revenues, its warlords, its poppy, and it s a good test for the new military. The second would be something that the international community hates to do, but we re doing it all over the place in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  We re just not necessarily doing it in the right places, and that is pay the salaries of the teachers, the police, the women s centers and the other people who may, in fact, become the anchor of the new Afghanistan.  It s clear that you have to have a new <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region></st1:place>, and these people are your middle class building blocks, if you can call it that.  Right now, they re not getting paid.  If you expect that the government of <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Kabul</st1:place></st1:City> is going to be able to figure that out when it s difficult for any of them to even get out of <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Kabul</st1:place></st1:City>, it s way to optimistic. On the other hand, we have people who are refugees living in remote parts of the world who somehow manage to transfer through remittances direct support to their family members in the most obscure parts of the country.  So it s not impossible.  It s just not possible the way we normally do business.  So we have to think about that.  We have to reach into the countryside, and we have to put real people into many of the buildings and centers that we have helped to construct and create in the last few years. The bad news about that is we re probably going to have to do that for 10 years if you want those people to be paid.  And again, if you want them to be a stable base and a building block, part of our whole view is that you want to have an <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> to talk about in 10 years.  And Barney s suggestion of the next five years full of major crises is not an alarmist view, I don t think.  I think it s just a very challenging context for all the reasons that both of the speakers have suggested. So we would anchor around those people and make sure you get to them, and it s not likely that <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Kabul</st1:place></st1:City> is going to find them.  So how do we do that?  We are paying for the entire military, and this seems like a fair tradeoff as well because basically, when you travel around <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, when you get to a small town, you re not likely to see the military.  You re likely to see the police, and it d sure be nice if they were getting paid something more than one-quarter of what the new Afghan Army is getting paid and actually receiving paychecks.  Those would be things that would help with their performance. A third recommendation that I think, again, has a practical base is that we have to get the investments and the assistance out to the governors and the mayors.  Again, it s a big, complex country, terrible infrastructure.  It s going to be very difficult, and we ve got to find some more governors and more mayors who are likely to be winners.  And we have to have high conditionality on that assistance.  It s not going to happen from <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Kabul</st1:City></st1:place>, but, if we set the basic conditions, there are real possibilities, prospects, for some of those people to grow up and be rather promising leaders.  We re seeing some of that in the partnerships with the PRTs, but, again, it s rather happenstance, and I m not sure the political test that the PRTs are putting to those individuals are sufficient. And finally, I d say there needs to be a focus on a critical resource, and we would suggest that that resource be water.  Again, a water multiplier is phenomenal in terms of its hydro potential, in particular for micro hydro.  There are some residual macro projects from other times that need to be revived, but this is not a country that s going to be able to afford to in the list of things that Barney said we cannot afford, he didn t speak to rising energy prices.  But there s also the great potential for irrigation and for sanitary and for its use with water and sanitary.  So this would be one area that, if you want to start to produce some efficiencies for the average Afghan, it s going to have to be seized upon in a much more aggressive fashion and much more focused way and, again, not necessarily with macro projects. So what are expectations for <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> in 10 years?  Well, our expectations are that you will still have an incredibly poor country, but hopefully it will be a more stable, more open and more connected to the region and the world.  Thank you. Vance Serchuk:  I just wanted to mention one thing, Rick.  I m sure just because you re used to speaking this way you several times mentioned paychecks.  It s important for people to understand people don t get paychecks in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  They get cash because there isn t a functioning banking system, so we have to bear in mind that sometimes we assume the existence of things that aren t there. S. Frederick Starr:  An hour has passed, and I m cleanup hitter.  I ll be brief.  I d like to touch on some points that have been made by previous speakers and highlight them, and I d like to specifically to ask you to look at this entire process from below.  Not from <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Kabul</st1:place></st1:City> for a moment, not from here for a moment, but actually from the way the millions of Afghan citizens view it.  And below is ultimately the provincial, but beyond that the district, and beyond that the village level.  This is where people live.  This is where people are.  This is where the ultimate judgment on the success of this entire enterprise is going to be made. Let me speak just about elections.  Suppose you were in a village in a small town.  Somebody has to register candidates.  Someone has to vet them in terms of eligibility.  Someone has to organize an electoral process in the towns, the villages, deal with 60 parties that exist in the country.  Someone has to train people to carry out an election.  Someone has to educate the public and respond to endless questions.  Someone has to implement changes and orders coming from the central electoral authorities.  Someone has to adjudicate conflicts over these matters, has to keep records, send data to the provincial capitals, print ballots, send data for printing ballots, checking them, registering the voters, getting the data, making sure there are no double registrations.  And then someone has to conduct the voting, opening the polls, closing them, securing them and guaranteeing the safety of voters.  And after the vote, someone has to assist and enable those elected to fulfill their functions, whether in local councils or towns or whatever.  Someone has to provide them with information on what s going on in <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Kabul</st1:place></st1:City> and in the provincial capital.  Someone has to send information back up the line. Now, beyond this at the most local level, you have the needs of normal governance.  You need someone to recruit the local police.  They re not coming from elsewhere.  There s no central place from which this is done.  Someone has to find qualified people locally to do it and prepare them.  These local police and security folks have to adjudicate daily little conflicts on the street, deal with outlaw behavior, including the entire drug issue.  They have to arrest people, hold people, turn them over to whoever is going to decide their fate.  Someone locally has to restore and maintain buildings, including schools.  Someone has to hire people to do those things and to make sure it s not just his brother and his cousin. Then there are all the other local services agricultural matters, seeds.  How do the seeds get out?  Reconstruction of irrigation projects, a hugely important task.  But someone has to oversee it.  It s not an abstraction in some development office.  It s a reality on the ground.  Civil engineering projects have to hire people locally.  And then finally, someone locally in the local administration has to facilitate and enable local businesses to do what they want to do and to make sure that they do it within the law and not milk it. Now, these are all very serious areas, and they are obviously utterly essential to any talk about democracy, about elections, about anything that we ve discussed.  And there are real people who do this.  And with Minister Jalali here, who is the world s authority on the subject about which I m daring to speak, I think it should be noted that everything that I ve enumerated here has to be carried out in 360 districts.  It s a huge task, and any country and in a country with the geographical problem, not to mention the problems of communication that exist in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, it s overwhelming. Now, the communication issue alone, in order to enable these people to do their job, is enough to challenge the best technolobes in the world, even if they have all the money they need.  It s a monumental task, and I want to stress it s utterly key to the conduct of free and fair elections.  This is the key.  If there is any naivety, and indeed there was, and to some extent there still is, that you can solve the problems, meet the challenges I ve just enumerated through NGOs, it s wrong.  This cannot be done from outside the government.  NGOs can play a supportive role.  It can be role of constructive critics.  They can play many positive roles and do, but, if there s not a normal functioning civil administration from the village right up to <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Kabul</st1:place></st1:City>, there is no government.  There is chaos, and everything that has been achieved in these years and I do stand with those of you who see the glass as perhaps more than half full everything would be lost.  This is the test, in other words. Now, I want to just note that <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> policy was slow in understanding this.  We didn t think that these problems were as central as they are.  Western policy was slow in acknowledging this.  We really had some illusions about what could be accomplished through what we mistakenly called civil society, mistakenly because an externally-funded body totally dependent on outside support and personnel is not a Tocquevillian voluntary association.  Anyway, the challenge right now, I would suggest, is in the area of state building, but state building starts with the foundations, and the foundations are at the local level.  If those foundations aren t solid and secure, there will be no structure above that will be of any use to anyone. Now, in the last few years under Minister Jalali, most of the governors have been replaced, most of the chiefs of police have been replaced, most of the district heads have been replaced, most of the mayors have been replaced.  There has been introduced in certain functions civil service testing and screening, but this is a huge task, and it s only begun.  There is training, fast track courses, for newly appointed police chiefs and so forth.  There is an embryonic civil service academy, but only very embryonic.  There exists, thanks to Minister Jalali, an <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> stabilization program that costs about $260 million.  It presently has, for looking into the future, a shortfall of that amount.  This is a bargain.  This really is a bargain.  When you consider the huge figures that we bandy about so comfortably, $260 million to get the fundamental Cine Quanon structure operating is nothing. Now, the point that I want to conclude with is that this is government.  This is the key to democratization.  This is the key to development.  And frankly, we haven t give it the due that it requires.  This is the only way there can be any sustainable development process in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  It s the only way, by having normal local administration, that you can address the drug problem at that level, although I would stress, since this is a demand-driven process, most of the demand is in Europe.  We should be focusing overwhelmingly on the traffickers, the launderers, the banks and so on that are engaged in this enormous process.  They ve never been touched so far, and all the emphasis has been on the farmers, but that s an aside. Now, how do you pay for this in the long run?  Barney has raised this.  Every one of you have raised this point, and it s crucial.  There is no real income stream for the Afghan government.  Every one of these civil servants, we re paying their salaries right now.  And the question then, where is the income stream?  I would submit that, putting aside the drug issue, that the big engine for income, economic development and for an income stream for the government through taxes and [indiscernible] and duties is regional and continental trade.  This is not some new discovery on my part.  It s been known for thousands of years in this region. How do you translate all of this into policy?  If you want to develop that regional trade and the several of you who said that <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> can t move forward in isolation then you need really a regional vision, not an <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> vision.  <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> legislation is, at this point, still based on totally bilateral relations.  There is no regional framework, and yet the first steps towards this have been made.  Policy, just to remind you, is not made at international conferences.  It s not made by experts.  It s not even made by bureaucrats and federal agencies.  Ultimately US Congress.  And there is under preparation a new Silkroad II act, and it does conceive this as a single region with Afghanistan as now, again, part of Central Asia, which is going to have at a central place this role of trade.  If that is the case, one can realistically hope that there might be the beginnings of a real income stream that will fund local governance, which bottom up is where the action is in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, as elsewhere. Vance Serchuk:  Thank you so much, Professor Starr.  Why don t we now move to question and answer for the remaining time.  Let me also just use the I also can t say it the prerogative of the moderator to just throw out one question.  It seems as though everyone on the panel has emphasized the extent to which really success and failures turn on our ability to dig deeply into sort of [indiscernible] workings of Afghan [indiscernible; sound cuts out] governance.  And at the same time, be able to create institutions that work on the grassroots level that, while certainly receiving some support from us, will also be sustainable in the long haul so that ultimately these things will begin to take on a life of their own and go off into the world to create a sort of virtuous cycle. As a recovering history major, I can t help but ask are there appropriate analogies for this task?  Right after the Taliban fell, a lot of, I think, very good hearted, but fundamentally mistaken people, said, well, we need a <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Marshall</st1:place></st1:City> plan.  That s what we do immediately.  We need a <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Marshall</st1:City></st1:place> plan, lots of aid, which I don t think anyone really says anymore, but recognize that it s a very different challenge, and it s a lot more subtle.  You do hear a lot though about a Balkans model now.  Particularly, you hear this in reference to the idea of the kind of way that we re going to structure civilian aid and maybe a high representative or something like that.  And yet, one goes to a place like Kosovo, which is the size of a postage stamp and just has this massive infusion of international aid, it actually hasn t created any of the things that you re describing, other than the Kosovo Fleet Service, which is kind of done on an Afghan National Army model.  It just doesn t exist. Is there anywhere that you would look for this sort of transition from a patronage based system to an institution based system, other countries that have tried to do this, countries that have done this on their own?  This is why I m clearly a recovering history major.  It s not a popular question to ask.  Are there good models or is this the first time? S. Frederick Starr:  Rephrase the question slightly.  Has any previous interventions, to use the fashionable term, focused appropriately on civil administration and local administration?  I don t have a glib answer to that.  My guess would be I would look at some perhaps unlikely prospects.  The <st1:place w:st="on">Ottoman Empire</st1:place> when it was functioning well.  The <st1:place w:st="on">Roman Empire</st1:place> certainly understood this when it moved into the Danubian area and then across into <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Britain</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  I think the post-war reconstruction in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Germany</st1:country-region></st1:place> immediately focused on administration, as well as political institutions.  Now, the point that I think we have to understand vividly is that nothing was more thoroughly destroyed in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  No buildings, no customs, et cetera, were more thoroughly uprooted by the Soviet invasion and then by the Civil War than civil administration at the local level.  This is what was gone. Now, of course, life went on, and this much maligned term, warlord, hides a lot of people who were local leaders who, by default, ended up being the government.  But there was no local civil administration when the new government came into place.  And therefore, I think it behooves us to recognize the absolute centrality of this function as we undertake the next steps. Vance Serchuk:  Let s go to the audience.  Right there, if you could please wait for the microphone and identify yourself before you ask your question.  Thanks. Audience Member:  I am Kumar [phonetic] from Amnesty International.  Everyone touched on the income aspect for <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  One issue that has been played even during the Taliban time is oil and gas pipeline from <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Turkmenistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> to <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Pakistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, and, as most of you knew, even Unocal brought Taliban here on tour study tour rather.  Is it back on the table and is it taking place now because that s a major income bringing source?  Thanks. Barnett Rubin:  Well, a bigger question is what s the role of natural resources in the development of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>?  And I think that there is some potential for natural resource development, but, first of all, it s only possible within a regional framework because that s the only way to get any of these resources to market.  As far as this particular project is concerned, basically what I understand is that there is a feasibility study by the Asian Development Bank, but there is still some question about the available ability of adequate quantities of gas in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Turkmenistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> because TurkmanBashi may have sold some of the gas more than once.  And so, they re checking on some of those things before they actually start investing in the pipeline. But I think that there is some potential for natural resource development in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, but natural resource development could not be the engine of economic growth in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  It could provide a bonus or a cushion if, in particular, there were mechanisms in place to insure that it did not just feed corruption of the central government, which is what natural resource-based development has tended to do in countries around the world. S. Frederick Starr:  It is a resource issue, but I would suggest that much more so this, too, is a transport issue.  It s a transport of energy, and this project the ADB study is very positive on it.  And there are a lot of big players circling around in the stratosphere looking down at it, some of them good and some of them rather scary.  What if Gasprom came into this?  Now, that is only part of the energy transport issue.  There is also the and by the way, the supply concern there Barney has it right about <st1:country-region w:st="on">Turkmenistan</st1:country-region> but it s also possible to feed into such a line gas from <st1:country-region w:st="on">Uzbekistan</st1:country-region> and <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Kazakhstan</st1:place></st1:country-region>. But that aside, there is also the electric transport issue.  There is a huge hydroelectric potential on the river in the north and elsewhere, and the best market for this is <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Pakistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>. The question is who is going to pay for the infrastructure to get it there in a cost efficient way?  All these come down to the same issue of regional and continental trade and transport, and that s why I say this is the key to <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> s future development and economic viability. Rick Barton:  Let me ask a question of the audience.  How many people in the audience have spent time in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, just so we can get a sense of this audience?  Well, for those of you Vance Serchuk:  They cluster together. Rick Barton:  For those of you who haven t been there in the winter, you very quickly get a sense of just where this country is.  You almost I think I went into one building that there was central heating.  I was clearly visiting the best places in the country most of the time.  There was really no reliable electricity anywhere that I was.  I almost froze to death at the Governor s house in Ghazi one night.  The best road in the country is not traveled by a whole lot of people, even though it s a fairly decently built road.  There is no snow plow, so if it s just snowed you ve got another complication.  You really have to understand when you see somebody walking across a field, you realize that that person is going to spend their whole day essentially walking across that field.  That s the efficiency of life in many parts of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  So you really have to understand what the starting point is here.  This has been a subterranean country that is now enjoying Groundhog Day.  It s not exactly had the whole experience yet, so when people start talking about the energy and the rest of it, there isn t really much going on in a whole lot of the country.  And it s going to be very tough to afford.  Furthermore, it s not all that safe when you re traveling in a lot of places.  So I think it just I really want to make sure that we understand where we are. Barnett Rubin:  And I might mention that the Taliban are people who grew up walking across those fields, not getting annoyed when it takes them 15 seconds to download a file. Vance Serchuk:  All right, let me take a follow-up question.  Right here, if you could wait for the mic. Audience Member:  Jean Shiafay [phonetic], MDU.  Everybody here talked a lot about financing, and you mentioned <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Marshall</st1:place></st1:City> stuff.  George Marshall in his testimony in the 50s said he believed in having one person in charge of everything except the finances, encounter bureaucratic messes, encumbered by bureaucratic messes.  Part of the success of the PRTs that I gather is that the US PRTs, they have a lot of control over where they can distribute their resources, and they can react agilely because of that.  And right now, the Ministry of the Interior is this rather monolithic thing that takes on so many different aspects, and it s able to move around its resources effectively in that sense, as well. But all the problems that you all identify, all of you have identified problems financially and how to create stability, sustainability, it s a financial problem with the government in the future to large part, in addition to other things border crossings and trade within the region yet there isn t a real banking sector.  And right now, the structure of the government the bureaucratic structure it s not going to lend itself to easy and effective distribution of resources, especially in the provinces in the future once we re gone.  Are there any steps that you ve made to tackle these issues to build a base in which the economy can rebuilt itself the local economy and in which the bureaucracy can actually distribute its resources to get them to the local populace without the need for US or international vehicles to do that with? Larry Sampler:  You ve actually described what I hope will eventually be my dissertation statement, which is that the need for coherent management in post-conflict reconstruction and the alleviation of the inefficiencies and the inability to target things, whether it s human resources or financial resources or tangible resources or capital resources, are put.  To use a military analogy, what you re describing is the equivalent of a precision-guided munition, in terms of targeting resources on a specific need.  We in the international community are still in the age of the catapult.  We have large groups of resources that we fling in the right direction, and we hope that some of them land with the appropriate effect. It also ties in with the earlier question about historical analogies.  I don t think the historical analogies that we should be looking for deal with the interface between the international community and the host nation.  What we need to be the lessons we need to focus on now is how do we, the international community, better facilitate the kind of precision applications that you re asking for?  Minister Ghani and others in the early periods of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region></st1:place> were clamoring for a recognition of their nascent sovereignty and their ability to manage these resources.  The AACA, the mechanism that Minister Ghani set up to administer aid in Afghanistan, failed miserably because we didn t recognize it.  And we re now getting to the point with the APP [phonetic] and some of the other programs, the PRT Executive Steering Committee, where there are sovereign mechanisms managed by Afghan ministers which do fairly precisely target specific projects and specific places. So to answer your question, yes, they re emerging now.  With the sovereignty of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, the ascendancy of the Minister of Interior and others, they re beginning to apply some management tools to have the international community spend resources.  But we ve been there three-and-a-half or four years, and it s just now coming to fruition. Rick Barton:  I think we d be remiss if we didn t here at AEI make mention of a model that I think shows more promise than most of the international models, and I hope that Larry s thesis will capture some of the potential that s already out in the marketplace.  But let s just talk about the cellular phone business for a few minutes.  Barney can tell me if there was a cellular phone industry there five years ago, but I suspect not.  Barney can tell me if there were people on the street selling you cards on every corner in the country for that cellular phone industry three years ago or not, and I would say I suspect not.  The whole thing works in a way that seems to they ve found a market.  Granted, there are a lot of internationals paying for these things, but there are a lot of Afghans who are connected to it, as well. The way they move the money around, I don t know how the money gets from that kid in the street who I just bought my card so I can call back to <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Washington</st1:place></st1:State>, but somehow that money is probably getting back to the man somewhere, I would guess.  These are functioning models that are working in a place where we re sitting around talking about the lack of capacity and untrained and unskilled Afghans who can t possibly handle money and these kinds of things.  I believe they can do these kinds of things, and, if we don t put the people first and if we don t have people first programming, we re never going to be successful in these places.  If we think that we re going to build an effective bureaucracy in <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Kabul</st1:place></st1:City> in the next five years, if I went down to Dick Cheney s office right now and I said, Mr. Vice President, here s my plan, I m going to have 50,000 bureaucrats operating in Washington in two years in an efficient fashion that s going to reach every point on the compass of this country, he would throw me out of there as if I was nuts.  What is our plan in <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Kabul</st1:place></st1:City>? Vance Serchuk:  The only point to probably add on that is that, of course, if you were to tell the Vice President that you, as soldiers in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region>, are using Iranian cell phones for all their communications, that might also further complicate his Rick Barton:  But again, a really smart choice.  Why do we care if they re using Iranian cell phones?  If we want them to communicate, what kind of mega-political point do we think we re making to that?  We re going to really complicate our work in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> every time we fall into these other little games.  This regional view is a very good view, but not if we start to try to take care of several other agendas at the same time. Vance Serchuk:  It s a fair point, I think.  It is striking, in fact, we have them.  And we do, which I think shows also the extent to which people on the ground in Afghanistan make reasonable judgments, which, if it had, say, gone through certain institutions here, it might not have come out quite the same way.  Barney, please. Barnett Rubin:  Just briefly, one very important issue to this question is that control over money is a central issue of sovereignty, and, if someone is going to be the decision maker in Afghanistan, it will be the Afghan government and people or it will be broken up into all these various organizations.  So we have to find a way to put the money through the government more than we have done thus far, through various mechanisms which I can t go into now. But, and this is an important point for <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Washington</st1:place></st1:State>, something that [indiscernible] mentioned in the Financial Times yesterday.  Congress will not authorize funds very easily that will go for general support or for state building.  They want to restrict them to specific programs as much as possible and maintain <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">US</st1:country-region></st1:place> operational control over the implementation of those programs and even require that US contractors and NGOs be used to carry out those programs.  So that is and the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> is not the only aid donor that does that.  In fact, aid donors generally do that, and that is a method of operation that greatly undermines attempts to build up the capacity and authority of the local government, although it also recognizes the fact that, at the moment, we can t just send money to <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Kabul</st1:place></st1:City> and assume that it will get everywhere.  So you have to find other mechanisms of doing it. Vance Serchuk:  I m afraid that s probably going to have to be the last word since we are out of time.  I want to thank all the panelists here today.  This will not be our last event on <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:place></st1:country-region> hopefully because we do Not Losing Afghanistan is probably a more accurate title for the event, and we would like to have one called actually Winning Afghanistan at some point.  So please give a round of applause for the panelists.  Thank you so much for coming, and we hope to see you next time. [end of session]</body></html>