Peter Bergen | BIO
CNN National Security Analyst

Three senior administration officials outlined on Tuesday some of the concepts and processes that went into President Obama’s new plan for Afghanistan.

Between September 13 and November 23 the president chaired 10 meetings of his national security team to deliberate over the new strategy.

The president agreed with the ground commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal’s assessment from the summer that the key goal of the strategy was to reverse the momentum of the Taliban in the next 12 months. He selected from the menu of troop deployment options the one that got American boots on the ground in the most rapid manner.

There are six objectives those forces will try to accomplish.

First, reverse the momentum of the Taliban in coming months.

Second, deny the Taliban access to key cities and population centers as well as control of major roads.

Third, prevent al Qaeda from regaining a safe haven in Afghanistan.

Fourth, degrade the Taliban to the point that the Afghan army and police can take up responsibility for security in certain districts and provinces.

Fifth, build up the size of the Afghan army to 134,000 by 2010 and also the size of the police so that by the summer of 2011 the U.S. and NATO can start handing over security to the Afghan army in certain areas.

Right now, of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces only one, Kabul province, is entirely under Afghan military and police control. The officials emphasized that the handover to Afghan security services in 2011 would likely be possible only in "some parts of the country."

Sixth, to build up the key institutions of the Afghan government such as the Ministry of the Interior.

To help achieve those goals the US will deploy 30,000 soldiers into Afghanistan and NATO and other countries helping in the effort in Afghanistan are expected to contribute a further 5,000 to 7,000 soldiers.

The cost of the troop deployment will be $35 billion – some of that consumed by servicemen’s salaries and benefits and the rest to be spent in building Forward Operating Bases for the troops of the surge in a country with little infrastructure and also to supply mine resistant troop vehicles known as MRAPS. (In Helmand Province 80 percent of Marine casualties are caused by the mines known as IEDs.)

A further dimension of the strategy is to encourage the “reintegration” of those Taliban fighters willing to lay down their arms, although one official conceded that senior Taliban leaders had shown little interest in taking such offers up, as for the moment, they believe they are winning the war in Afghanistan.

For years, Afghanistan was considered the forgotten war but Americans have started paying attention again.

Peter Bergen
CNN National Security Analyst

We are losing in Afghanistan, on two fronts. The most important center of gravity of the conflict - as the Taliban well recognizes - is the American public. And now, most Americans are opposed to the war.

For years, Afghanistan was "the forgotten war," and when Americans started paying attention again - roughly around the time of President Obama's inauguration - what they saw was not a pretty sight: a corrupt Afghan government, a world-class drug trade, a resurgent Taliban and steadily rising U.S. casualties.

Many surely thought: Didn't we win this war eight years ago?

Americans, of course, hate seeing the deaths of fellow citizens in combat, but even more they hate to see those deaths in the service of a war they believe they are either not winning or maybe even losing, which is one of the reasons why they largely turned against the Iraq war in 2006.

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Program Note: Tune in tonight for more from Peter Bergen . AC360° at 11 p.m. ET.

Remote-controlled drones, such as the Predator, are proving increasingly popular with the U.S. military.

Peter Bergen | BIO
CNN National Security Analyst

The Al Qaeda videotape shows a small white dog tied up inside a glass cage. A milky gas slowly filters in. An Arab man with an Egyptian accent says: "Start counting the time." Nervous, the dog starts barking and then moaning. After flailing about for some minutes, it succumbs to the poisonous gas and stops moving.

This experiment almost certainly occurred at the Derunta training camp near the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, conducted by an Egyptian with the nom de jihad of "Abu Khabab." In the late 1990s, under the direction of Al Qaeda's number two, Ayman Al Zawahiri, Abu Khabab set up the terrorist group's WMD research program, which was given the innocuous codename "Yogurt." Abu Khabab taught hundreds of militants how to deploy poisonous chemicals, such as ricin and cyanide gas. The Egyptian WMD expert also explored the possible uses of radioactive materials, writing in a 2001 memo to his superiors, "As you instructed us you will find attached a summary of the discharges from a traditional nuclear reactor, among which are radioactive elements that could be used for military operations." In the memo, Abu Khabab asked if it were possible to get more information about the matter "from our Pakistani friends who have great experience in this sphere." This was likely a reference to the retired Pakistani senior nuclear scientists who were meeting then with Osama bin Laden.

In the pandemonium following the fall of the Taliban in the winter of 2001, Abu Khabab disappeared into the badlands on the Afghan-Pakistani border. The United States put a $5 million bounty on his head and, in January 2006, attempted to kill him and Zawahiri while they were believed to be in the Pakistani hamlet of Damadola, targeting them with a missile launched by a drone aircraft.

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CNN obtained this photo of a U.S. helicopter above Forward Operating Base Keating in the Nuristan province

Ed Hornick
CNN

Mountainous terrain and harsh weather in remote parts of Afghanistan have proven a deadly combination for the U.S. military in its push to reduce mounting violence in the country.

On Saturday, Taliban militants attacked American and Afghan troops in the Nuristan province in eastern Afghanistan. Eight American troops and two members of the Afghan national security forces were killed, according to the Pentagon.

It was the largest number of Americans killed by hostile action in a single day since July 13, 2008, when nine troops died, according to CNN records.

The fighting was so fierce that at one point U.S. forces "had to collapse in on themselves," a U.S. military official with knowledge of the latest intelligence reports on the incident told CNN. These revelations about the battle that engulfed Forward Operating Base Keating are a further indication of how pinned down and outmanned the troops were. Watch more on the attack in rural Afghanistan »

The base was scheduled to be closed in the next few days, CNN has learned. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, wanted to cede remote outposts and consolidate troops in more populated areas to better protect Afghan civilians.

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Peter Bergen | Bio
CNN National Security Analyst

Eight years after September 11, the "war on terror" has gone the way of the dodo. And President Obama talks instead about a war against al Qaeda and its allies.

What, then, of al Qaeda's enigmatic leader, Osama bin Laden, who has vanished like a wisp of smoke? And does he even matter now?

The U.S. government hadn't had a solid lead on al Qaeda's leader since the battle of Tora Bora in winter 2001. Although there are informed hypotheses that today he is in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province on the Afghan border, perhaps in one of the more northerly areas such as Bajaur, these are essentially guesses, not "actionable" intelligence.

A longtime American counterterrorism analyst explained to me, "There is very limited collection on him personally."

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A U.S. Marine sweeps for Improvised Explosive Devices (IED's) along the pathways around their base at Camp Jaker.

Peter Bergen | Bio
CNN National Security Analyst
Nawa District, Helmand, Afghanistan

If the southern Afghanistan province of Helmand were a country it would be the world’s leading producer of opium and its derivative, heroin. More than half the world’s heroin originates here – much of it destined for the veins of junkies living in Europe.

In June 2005, U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency officials and Afghan police raided the office of Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, the governor of Helmand, and found nine tons of opium in his office. He is no longer the governor.

According to an unpublished threat assessment by the Afghan army of the security situation as it was this April in Afghanistan which was obtained by CNN, Helmand province had the highest percentage of territory controlled by the Taliban of any of the country’s 34 provinces.

Nearly 60 percent of Helmand in April was fully Taliban-controlled, and the remainder was classified as “high risk” for Taliban attacks.

According to a senior Marine officer 20 percent of the Taliban in Helmand are “ideologues’ who are not from the local area and are influenced by the Pakistan-based central command of the Taliban – such as its leader Mullah Omar. The other 80 percent are local “opportunists” who are making money being paid by the Taliban to do jobs such as planting roadside bombs known as Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs).

U.S. intelligence officials estimate that the Taliban can pay approximately $300 a month to its rank-and-file soldiers. An Afghan policeman is lucky if he makes $100 a month.

Since early July, some 4,500 American U.S. Marines and hundreds of Afghans soldiers have launc hed offensives against the Taliban in Helmand and, according to a senior US Marine officer, as a result the Taliban “are on their arse, literally.”

The officer said that of the 13 districts in Helmand, only one is now fully controlled by the Taliban. However, they continue to maintain a persistent presence in the province and are capable of launching IED attacks at will throughout Helmand.

In Dawa District, in central Helmand, Marines at a dusty, spartan base with no electricity or running water venture out on several-hour foot patrols. They move through canal-fed corn fields armed with metal detectors and a bomb-sniffing dog looking to discover and disable IEDs.

The IEDs range from simple victim- operated bombs, typically pressure plate devices made from wood and springs, to more complex devices that are remotely detonated using a command wire. The corn rows that stand 10-feet high provide an ideal environment in which the IED triggermen can hide.

During World War II, 3 percent of American combat deaths were caused by mines or booby traps. By 1967 during the Vietnam War the figure rose to 9 percent. In Iraq during the latter half of 2005, IEDs were the leading cause of American combat deaths, responsible for 65 percent of all fatalities and half of all nonfatal injuries.

According to Brigadier General Laurence Nicholson, who is in charge of the Marine brigade in Helmand, an astonishing 80 percent of the casualties of the Marines under his command are now caused by IEDs.

Just one more statistic that helps explain why Helmand remains one of the more dangerous places on the planet.

Program Note: For more on Afghanistan follow AC360° and ac360.com all this week. Anderson Cooper will be reporting live from Afghanistan and will be joined by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Michael Ware and Peter Bergen.

The crew boards a C130 at ISAF Kabul airbase.

Peter Bergen | Bio
AC360° Contributor
CNN National Security Analyst

Over the loudspeaker system, a female voice announces “ISAF flight number 44 from Kabul to Kandahar is leaving at gate 1.” Just like for any other flight we grab our hand luggage and boarding passes but what makes this boarding a little bit different is that all the passengers are wearing flak jackets and clutching helmets. We troop in double file to the whale-like C-130 transport plane operated by a crew of reservists out of Missouri and strap in for the ride.

On the plane is a motley crew of young Asian women likely destined to work at the massive US/NATO base at Kandahar Air Field; a smorgasbord of soldiers from various European countries, and American military contractors wearing their uniform of baseball caps, cargo pants and shades. Most snooze through the 75-minute flight.

As we fly south to Kandahar I start thinking about the perfectly good highway constructed for several hundred million dollars—much of it American taxpayer money– that connects Kabul and Kandahar and the fact that anyone on this flight would be likely committing suicide if they drove it without a significant security detail as it is now a gauntlet of possible Taliban ambushes.

In 1999 I had taken the Kabul-Kandahar road when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan. Then it was nightmarish slalom course though fields of massive craters and in most places was not much more than a track; a 17-hour drive if you did it without stopping. The Taliban ruled with an iron fist Afghanistan and the bandits who a few years earlier who would have demanded payment for passage on the highway were long gone when I made that trip.

After the new highway was built I took the road a couple of times again in 2005 and 2006. Then it was a smooth, hassle-free seven-hour journey down a black-top freeway.

The fact that the Kabul-Kandahar highway is today so dangerous says a lot about the state of Afghanistan right now. If the United States, other NATO countries and the Afghan army cannot secure the road that connects the two most important cities in the country–which is also the artery through which a good deal of the commerce of Afghanistan must pass–what does that say about the overall effort to bring real security to the Afghan people?

This year efforts are in progress to secure the highway in areas near Kabul and also near Kandahar with the aim eventually of eventually securing the entire road.

Later this month the Obama administration will submit dozens of benchmarks to Congress which will help lawmakers judge if progress is really being made in Afghanistan over the next year or so. At the top of my list would be making sure the most important road in the country is open for business to anyone who wants to drive it and who doesn’t have the luxury of hiring a posse of heavily armed guards to survive the trip without incident.

Program Note: For more on Afghanistan follow AC360° and ac360.com all next week. Anderson Cooper will be reporting live from Afghanistan and will be joined by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Michael Ware and Peter Bergen.

Peter Bergen | Bio
AC360° Contributor
CNN National Security Analyst

The first surprise is Kabul airport. The new terminal - “a gift of the people of Japan” - appears to have been airlifted in from a small American city; light-filled, modern and staffed by young men in uniforms of khaki pants and blue shirts who politely answer travelers’ questions as they direct traffic through the quiet, marble halls of the terminal.

This is quite a change from the old Kabul airport terminal, which was not much more than a big shed that broiled in summer and froze in winter with one wheezing baggage belt disgorging luggage to a chaotic press of travelers.

I have visited the Kabul airport since 1993 and it has been an accurate barometer of Afghanistan’s shifting fortunes. In the mid-90s the country was in the grip of a civil war in which hundreds of thousands died and the airport of the capital was littered with the carcasses of airplanes large and small that had crashed on landing or takeoff during the past decade-plus of war.

Under the Taliban - whose fantasies about establishing a 7th century utopia here on earth did not extend to the simplest acts of real governance - no effort was made to clear up this mess. Once their regime fell in 2001, gradually the rusting hulks of the crashed planes were cleared from the runways.

Then came the mine sweepers. Afghanistan is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world and the strategically significant Kabul airport was mined particularly heavily. It took years for the mine sweepers to clear the airport runways but now they are long gone, as they are from much of the country.

Lost in the deluge of the recent media coverage of the rising violence and the flawed presidential election in Afghanistan are the markers of real progress over the past eight years, which in a small but important way is exemplified by the turnaround at Kabul airport.

Consider that:

• More than five million refugees have returned home since the fall of the Taliban. This is one of the most substantial refugee repatriations in history, yet it is little remarked upon because it has largely gone so smoothly.

• One in six Afghans now has a cell phone. Under the Taliban there was no phone system.

• Millions of kids are now in school, including many girls. Under the Taliban girls were not allowed to be educated.

• In 2008, Afghanistan’s real GDP growth was 7.5 percent. Under the Taliban the economy was in free fall.

• You were more likely to be murdered in the United States in 1991 than an Afghan civilian is to be killed in the war today.

Some reading this may be thinking - can this really be right? But do the math: In 1991, almost 25,000 people were murdered in the United States at a time when the American population was approximately 260 million. In Afghanistan today some 2,000 Afghan civilians are killed each year by the Taliban and coalition forces out of a population of around 30 million

A comparison with Iraq is also instructive. As the violence peaked in Iraq in early 2007 more than 3,500 Iraqi civilians were being killed every month. Adjusting for population sizes, civilians in Iraq were 20 times more likely to be killed two years ago than they are today in Afghanistan.

Of course none of this is to deny the existence of epic corruption in Afghanistan, the massive drug trade, the scandal of billions of dollars of aid wasted on failed aid projects that have principally enriched giant American contractors like DynCorp, and the resurgence of the Taliban.

These are all too real, but they are only part of the story, and for Afghans who have lived through an invasion by a totalitarian superpower that killed one in ten of their family members, then a civil war that killed many more, and then the Taliban who brought security at the price of living in a completely failed theocratic state, the most important fact is that history is now behind them and that the future promises something better.

Editor's Note: Peter Bergen is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a Washington-based think tank that promotes innovative thought from across the ideological spectrum, and at New York University's Center on Law and Security. He's the author of "The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader," and the editor of the AfPak Channel.

A man carries a child injured in an explosion in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Tuesday.

Peter Bergen
CNN National Security Analyst

"Taliban Now Winning" declared Monday's headline in the Wall Street Journal based on its interview with Gen Stanley McChrystal. But the headline was a classic case of a editor hyping the substance of a story, which the reporters of the story themselves had already applied a little touch of their own gilding to when they characterized General McChrystal's position in their interview to be that the Taliban now had the "upper hand."

In fact, when the WSJ reporters actually came to quote him, General McChrystal said rather more innocuously of the Taliban, "It's a very aggressive enemy right now... We've got to stop their momentum, stop their initiative. It's hard work."

Read more...

A U.S. soldier takes his position near a building attacked by the Taliban south of Kabul, Afghanistan.

Peter Bergen | Bio
AC360° Contributor
CNN National Security Analyst
For Foreign Policy

"Taliban Now Winning" declared Monday's headline in the Wall Street Journal based on its interview with Gen Stanley McChrystal. But the headline was a classic case of a editor hyping the substance of a story, which the reporters of the story themselves had already applied a little touch of their own gilding to when they characterized General McChrystal's position in their interview to be that the Taliban now had the "upper hand."

In fact, when the WSJ reporters actually came to quote him, General McChrystal said rather more innocuously of the Taliban, "It's a very aggressive enemy right now... We've got to stop their momentum, stop their initiative. It's hard work."

McChrystal added that the Taliban were moving beyond their strongholds in southern Afghanistan to threaten formerly stable areas in the north and west. But that's a lot different than saying either that the Taliban is "winning" or has the "upper hand." (Would the pre-Murdoch WSJ have headlined the piece in this hyped-up manner? Just asking.)

McChrystal's views about the Taliban were more accurately captured by a USA Today article that appeared on the same day as the WSJ article in which he said "I wouldn't say we are winning or losing or stalemated... What I would say at this particular point is that the insurgency has a certain amount of initiative and momentum that we are working to stop and, in fact, reverse."

That doesn't sound much like the Taliban are "winning" or gaining the "upper hand" either.

Aside from the obvious implausibility of an American four-star general theater commander in the middle of a war saying that the enemy is "winning" in an on-the-record interview with a major U.S. newspaper - short of the Taliban appearing en masse at the gates of Kabul - there is another problem with this concept, which is that the Taliban are not winning or anything close to it.

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Program Note: Peter Bergen will be on tonight talking about the situation in Afghanistan. Tune in AC360° 10p ET.

Peter Bergen says it's crucial to know how many ex-Guantanamo prisoners have gone back to the fight.

Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann
Special to CNN

As President Obama awaits formal recommendations this month on issues surrounding the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, it is crucial that policymakers and the public have an accurate picture of the threat to the United States posed by those detainees already released.

Contrary to recent assertions that one in seven, or 14 percent, of the former prisoners had "returned to the battlefield," our analysis of Pentagon reports, news stories and other public records indicates that the number who were confirmed or suspected to be involved in anti-U.S. violence is closer to one in 25, or 4 percent.

During his first week in office, Obama signed an executive order directing that the Guantanamo prison be closed by January 22, 2010, and suspending the system of military commissions that existed to deal with detainees in what the Bush administration termed the war on terror.

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A U.S. soldier flies over Afghanistan aboard a Chinook helicopter in March.

Peter Bergen | Bio
AC360° Contributor
CNN National Security Analyst
For The Washington Monthly

Throughout his campaign last year, President Barack Obama said repeatedly that the real central front of the war against terrorists was on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. And now he is living up to his campaign promise to roll back the Taliban and al-Qaeda with significant resources. By the end of the year there will be some 70,000 American soldiers in Afghanistan, and the Obama administration is pushing for billions of dollars in additional aid to both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This has caused consternation among some in the Democratic Party. In May, fifty-one House Democrats voted against continued funding for the Afghan war. And David Obey, the chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, which controls federal spending, says the White House must show concrete results in Afghanistan within a year—implying that if it doesn’t do so, he will move to turn off the money spigot. If this is the attitude of Obama’s own party, one can imagine what the Republicans will be saying if his "Af-Pak" strategy doesn’t start yielding results as they gear up for the 2010 midterm elections.

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A guard talks with a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, earlier this year.

Program Note: Tune in tonight to hear more from Peter Bergen on AC360° at 10 p.m. ET.

Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann
For The New York Times

Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul and Said Ali al-Shihri may be the two best arguments for why releasing detainees from Guantánamo Bay poses a real risk to America. Mr. Rasoul, who was transferred to Afghanistan in 2007 and then released by the Kabul government, is now the commander of operations for the Taliban in southern Afghanistan. Mr. Shihri, sent back to his native Saudi Arabia in 2007, is now a leader of Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen.

Are these two men exceptional cases, or are they emblematic of a much larger problem of dangerous terrorists who, if released, will “return to the battlefield”? To help answer that question, a Pentagon report made public on Tuesday concluded that 74 of the 534 men who have been freed from Guantánamo were “confirmed or suspected of re-engaging in terrorist activities.” This is a recidivism rate of around 14 percent, which was up from the Pentagon’s previous estimate in January of 11 percent.

But are things this bad? While we must of course be careful about who is released, these numbers are very likely inflated. This is in part because the Pentagon includes on the list any released prisoner who is either “confirmed” or just “suspected” to have engaged in terrorism anywhere in the world, whether those actions were directed at the United States or not. And, bizarrely, the Defense Department has in the past even lumped into the recidivist category former prisoners who have done no more than criticize the United States after their release.

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A guard talks with a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, earlier this year.

Editor's note: The Defense Department reports that up to 14 percent of detainees suspected of terrorism and held by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay turn to terrorism when they get out of custody. The numbers are alarming. But are they accurate?

Peter Bergen says no. The CNN National Security Analyst believes the recidivism rate for suspected terrorists is far lower than the 14 percent estimate from the Pentagon. Together with his colleagues at The New American Foundation, Bergen concludes that less than 3 percent of released detainees engage in attacks or attempted attacks against the U.S. citizens or interests.

And there is more, as Peter tells us in his dispatch below:

Peter Bergen
CNN National Security Analyst

This is what we have concluded based on analysis of press reports, previous DoD statements and al Qaeda or Taliban statements.

Instead of a 14 percent recidivism rate, we found a TOTAL rate of 8 percent - even if you include people making anit-American statements when they got freed.

When you take out those people and guys who joined insurgencies or terror groups that aren't anti-American-focused, the real number is no more than 3 percent. Here's the raw data:

Of 534 detainees released, 13 have engaged in insurgent groups that attack or attempt to attack the U.S., U.S. citizens or U.S. bases abroad. That's 2.4 percent.

Thirteen more engaged in insurgent groups that attack or attempt to attack non-U.S. targets. That's another 2.4 percent.

And 18 more got involved in anti-American propaganda or criticism of the U.S. government or military - but not in terrorism. That's another 3.4 percent.

If you add them up, you can conclude the recidivism rate is 8 percent. But more realistically, no more than 3 percent have gotten involved in groups that engage in anti-American violence. About 5 percent TOTAL are engaged with violent groups anywhere in the world. AND a not surprising 3-4 percent who get involved in anti American propaganda activities.

By comparison, the recidivism rate for convicts coming out of U.S. prisons is about 60 percent.

Program Note: Tune in tonight to hear more from Peter Bergen on AC360° at 10 p.m. ET.

A U.S. soldier looks out of a Chinook helicopter flying over Afghanistan.

Peter Bergen
CNN National Security Analyst

Afghan President Hamid Karzai travels to Washington this week to meet with President Obama and with his Pakistani counterpart Asif Zardari.

There will be much to discuss - principally, of course, how to reverse the rising tide of Talibanization on both sides of the Afghan/Pakistan border, which is a key foreign policy challenge for the Obama administration.

But how long will Obama and Zardari have to deal with Karzai whose five-year presidential term expires this month and who is now up for election on August 20th?

The question is not a small one for the success or failure of what has become 'Obama's War' in Afghanistan. Karzai has long been derided as the 'mayor of Kabul' because his authority supposedly doesn't extend much beyond the capital. And his government is rightly seen as rife with corruption. The non-governmental organization Transparency International, for instance, rates Afghanistan, as one of the most corrupt countries in the world.

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Peter Bergen says with all of its problems, Pakistan isn't in danger of being taken over by religious militants.

Peter Bergen
CNN National Security Analyst

In the past few weeks as the Pakistani Taliban have marched ever closer to the capital, Islamabad, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has sounded the alarm about the threat posed by the militants, who she said in congressional testimony pose "a mortal threat to the security and safety of our country and the world."

Some media commentators have even warned that the populous, nuclear-armed state might fall into the hands of the religious zealots.

This is hyperventilation. Pakistan has myriad problems - its economy is tanking; its political leadership is feckless; its military is not trained or equipped to fight a domestic insurgency; and the Taliban now can control the lives of millions of Pakistanis. But none of this means that Pakistan is in danger of becoming a failed state or that the religious militants are about to take over the country.

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Program Note: Tune in tonight to hear more from Peter Bergen on AC360° at 10 p.m. ET.

The New York Times
Peter Bergen

As President Obama orders an additional 21,000 troops to Afghanistan, he faces growing skepticism over the United States’ prospects there. Critics of the troop buildup often point out that Afghanistan has long been the “graveyard of empires.” In 1842, the British lost a nasty war that ended when fierce tribesmen notoriously destroyed an army of thousands retreating from Kabul. And, of course, the Soviets spent almost a decade waging war in Afghanistan, only to give up ignominiously in 1989.

But in fact, these are only two isolated examples. Since Alexander the Great, plenty of conquerors have subdued Afghanistan. In the early 13th century, Genghis Kha n’s Mongol hordes ravaged the country’s two major cities. And in 1 504, Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire in India, easily took the throne in Kabul. Even the humiliation of 1842 did not last. Three and a half decades later, the British initiated a punitive invasion and ultimately won the second Anglo-Afghan war, which gave them the right to determine Afghanistan’s foreign policy.

The Soviet disaster of the 1980s, for its part, cannot be credited to the Afghans’ legendary fighting skills alone, as the mujahideen were kept afloat by billions of dollars worth of aid from the United States and Saudi Arabia and sophisticated American military hardware like anti-aircraft Stinger missiles, which ended the Soviets’ total air superiority.

Read more...

Peter Bergen
CNN National Security Analyst

The Obama plan for Afghanistan and Pakistan announced Friday has a great deal to recommend it, with its emphasis on protecting the Afghan population and delivering more aid directly to the Pakistani people instead of to the Pakistan army.

These are just two among a raft of other sensible and long-overdue shifts in South Asia policy.

That the strategy is well-calibrated is not surprising, as some of the most able officials in the administration helped to put it together - Richard Holbrooke at the State Department, Bruce Riedel at the National Security Council and Michèle Flournoy at the Pentagon, supplemented, of course, by Gen. David Petraeus and his experienced team at Central Command.

But the new strategy does not answer the largest question that hovers over the entire "Af-Pak" enterprise because it is, to a great degree, unanswerable.

Every government official involved in the Af-Pak review understands that Afghanistan can never be stable if al Qaeda and the Taliban continue to be headquartered in Pakistan.

Yet the Pakistani government does not have any real strategy to defeat the militants on its territory.

How then can the United States have a strategy to succeed in Pakistan when the Pakistani government itself does not have a strategy to defeat its own proliferating insurgencies?

It's not simply that the Pakistan government is bifurcated into a weak elected civilian government that is barely functional and a strong unelected government, the Pakistani Army, which still controls the country's national security policy.

Nor is it simply that Pakistan has rarely produced leaders equal to the task of managing one of the largest and most chaotic countries on the planet.

While these are undoubtedly problems for the United States, the deepest difficulty is that neither the Pakistani military nor political establishment have articulated to themselves or to their own people the plan they have to rid the country of its jiihadist militants, which were once clients of the Pakistani state, but have now increasingly turned against it.

To root out those militants, the Pakistanis first tried the hammer approach in their tribal regions along the Afghan border in 2004 with a number of military operations that were essentially defeats for the Pakistani army, which is geared for land wars with India, rather than effective counterinsurgency campaigns.

The failed military operations were followed by appeasement in the form of "peace" agreements with the militants in 2005 and 2006, which were really admissions of military failure and led the Taliban and its al Qaeda allies to establish even greater sway in the tribal areas.

By 2009, the militants controlled all seven of the tribal agencies in the tribal region and their writ extended into the "settled" areas of the North West Frontier Province, almost up to the gates of Peshawar, the provincial capital.

The pattern of military failure followed by appeasement continued this year in Swat in northern Pakistan, whose verdant valleys and towering mountains had once been one of Pakistan's premier tourist destinations. It is now firmly in the grip of the Pakistani Taliban, who won it by force of arms, a victory that has been certified by yet another "peace" agreement with the government.

Despite this record of success, the militants are a long way from taking over the Pakistani state, as some hyperventilating members of the American commentariat have suggested. In the national election last year, militant religious parties were thrashed, dropping from 11 percent of the vote to a piffling 2 percent.

This suggests a way forward for the Pakistani government, and by extension the Obama administration. Ordinary Pakistanis have had it with the militants of every stripe. Their government needs to adopt a sound counterinsurgency policy against the militants in the broadest sense, typically understood as 80 percent political measures and 20 percent military action.

To that end, the Pakistani military must end its counterproductive policy of punitive expeditions against the militants along the Afghan border and instead center its efforts in securing and improving the lives of the population there, hundreds of thousands of whom have already fled the violence in the tribal areas. That would demonstrate to the people in the tribal regions that they can put their faith in the government.

Pakistanis will support action against the militants if their politicians and generals explain that their country is now fighting to restore Pakistan to its rightful place as a stable, democratic state that is no longer the incubator of the most violent jihadist groups in the world.

Right now the Pakistani establishment hasn't articulated that goal to its own people, nor has it explained how it plans to get there.

Until that happens, any American strategy to deal with Pakistan and its militants, no matter how smartly constructed, is doomed to fail.

Editor's Note: CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen testified before the U.S. House of Representative's Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs today on the threat we face from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Below is his testimony.

U.S. soldiers patrol in Gandalabog province, Afghanistan.

Peter Bergen | Bio
AC360° Contributor
CNN National Security Analyst

Thank you Chairman Tierney, Ranking Member Flake, and members of the Subcommittee for the opportunity to appear before you.

I will try and answer three related questions today.

1. In what kind of war is the US engaged in general and how do the conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan play into this war?

2. Who are the United States and it allies fighting in Afghanistan? An important subset of this question is: What are the networks in Pakistan that support the Afghan insurgency?

3. Why should the US sustain its commitments in Afghanistan? After all, it is now more than seven years after 9/11 and al Qaeda is no longer headquartered there, but is instead located in Pakistan.

I will also suggest some policy proposals that flow from this analysis that are appended as an annex to this document.

1. In what kind of war is the US engaged in general and how do the conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan play into this war?

How does American policy in Afghanistan fit into what the Bush administration framed as the ‘war on terror’? President Bush declared an open-ended and ambiguous ‘war on terror’ and took the nation to war against a tactic, rather than a war against a specific enemy, which was obviously al Qaeda and anyone allied to it. When the United States went to war against the Nazis and the Japanese during World War II Roosevelt and his congressional supporters did not declare war against U-boats and kamikaze pilots, but on the Nazi state and Imperial Japan.

The war on terror, sometimes known as the Global War on Terror or by the clunky acronym the GWOT, became the lens through which the Bush administration judged almost all of its foreign policy decisions, which was dangerously counter-productive. The GWOT framework propelled the Bush administration into its entanglement in Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11 but was launched under the rubric of the war on terror and the erroneous claims that Saddam Hussein had WMDs that he might give to terrorists, including al Qaeda to whom he was supposedly allied, and that he therefore threatened American interests. None of this, of course, was true.

The Bush administration also painted the GWOT in existential terms. Nine days after 9/11 Bush addressed Congress in a speech watched live by tens of millions of Americans in which he said that al Qaeda followed in the footsteps “of the murderous ideologies of the 20th century…They follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism,” implying that the fight against al Qaeda would be similar to World War II or the Cold War. But this portrayal of the war on terror was massively overwrought. The Nazis occupied and subjugated most of Europe and instigated a global conflict that killed tens of millions. And when the U.S. fought the Nazis she spent 40% of her GDP to do so and fielded millions of soldiers. Communist regimes killed 100 million people in wars, prison camps, enforced famines and pogroms. And had the Cold War ended with a bang instead of a whimper much of the human race would have vanished. By contrast, al Qaeda might one day launch another attack on the United States, but its capacity to do so is very diminished today, and the group will never pose an existential threat to the United States.

While the Bush administration inflated the very real threat that al Qaeda and its allies pose, many Europeans have underestimated that threat. European politicians, who have lived through the bombing campaigns of various nationalist and leftist terror groups for decades, have often said that al Qaeda it just another criminal/terrorist group that can be dealt with by police action and law enforcement alone. This is not the case. A typical European terrorist organization like the Irish Republican Army would call in warnings before its attacks and its single largest massacre killed 29 people. By contrast, al Qaeda has declared war on the United States repeatedly as it did for the first time to a Western audience with Osama bin Laden’s 1997 interview with CNN. Following that declaration of war the terror group attacked American Embassies, a US war ship, the Pentagon and the financial heart of the United States, killing thousands of civilians without warning; acts of war by any standard. Al Qaeda is obviously at war with United States and so to respond by simply recasting the GWOT as the GPAT, the Global Police Action against Terrorists, would be foolish and dangerous.

What then is the war that the US is engaged in? The United States is clearly at “War against al Qaeda and its Allies.” And instead of the Bush formulation of “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” the American policy in this war should be, “Anyone who is against the terrorists is with us.” After all it is only al Qaeda and its several affiliates in countries like Iraq, Lebanon and Algeria and allied groups such the Taliban that kill U.S. soldiers and civilians and attack American interests around the globe. Everyone else in the world is a potential or actual ally in the fight against al Qaeda and its affiliates because those organizations threaten almost every category of institution, government and ethnic grouping.

To what extent then is the Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan allied with al Qaeda? If the Taliban isn’t allied with al Qaeda then it is part of the solution, and if it is an al Qaeda ally then it is part of the problem.

There was a fair amount of tension between Osama bin Laden and many leaders of the Taliban pre-9/11 but we need to be clear that the Taliban—never a monolithic movement—is much closer to al Qaeda today than it was eight years ago. Yes, there are local groups of the Taliban operating for purely local reasons but the upper levels of the Taliban on both sides of the Afghan/Pakistan border have morphed together ideologically and tactically with al Qaeda. Some examples follow:

-Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, sent suicide attackers to Spain in January 2008, is at war with the Pakistani state and sees himself as part of the global jihad.

-The Haqqani family, arguably the most important component of the insurgency on the both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border, has ties with al Qaeda that date back to the 1980s.

-Mullah Dadullah, a key Afghan Taliban commander gave interviews to Al Jazeera in 2006 before he was killed, in which he made some illuminating observations about the Taliban's links to al Qaeda. Dadullah said, "We have close ties. Our cooperation is ideal," adding that Osama bin Laden is issuing orders to the Taliban. Dadullah also noted that "we have 'give and take' relations with the mujahideen in Iraq.”

-Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a commander allied to the Taliban, has been close to al Qaeda since at least 1989.

-The use of suicide attacks, improvised explosive devices and the beheadings of hostages, all techniques that al Qaeda perfected in Iraq, are methods that the Taliban has increasingly adopted in Afghanistan and have grown exponentially there since 2005.

-Al Qaeda was founded in Pakistan two decades ago and bin Laden has been fighting alongside Afghan mujahideen groups since the mid-1980s. Al Qaeda Central on the Afghan/Pakistan border is much less of a ‘foreign’ group with far deeper and older roots in the region than Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) ever was in Iraq.

One could go on listing examples of the Taliban’s ideological and tactical collaboration with al Qaeda, but the larger point is that separating al Qaeda and the Taliban is not going to be as relatively simple as splintering Iraqi insurgent groups from AQI.

While, of course, the US should be splintering, buying off and co-opting as many elements of the Taliban as possible, we also need to be realistic about how much closer Al Qaeda and the Taliban have grown together in recent years.

This is why the formulation that the United States is “At War with al Qaeda and its Allies” is a useful way to frame American policy in Afghanistan (and Pakistan and elsewhere). If militant groups are willing to reject al Qaeda, recognize the legitimacy of their government, end their attacks on international forces and stop training terrorists for missions overseas then they there are no longer allies of al Qaeda and therefore the United States is not at war with them.

If, however, al Qaeda’s allies will not takes those steps then they are enemies of the United States. Today in the Pakistan/Afghanistan region, the Pakistani Taliban, the senior leadership of the Afghan Taliban, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezbi-Islami, the Haqqani network, the Islamic Jihad Union, elements of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohamed are all allies of al Qaeda who should be considered enemies of the United States unless they take the four steps necessary to prove otherwise which, to repeat, are, reject al Qaeda, recognize the legitimacy of the government, end attacks on international forces and stop training terrorists for overseas missions.

2. Who are the United States and it allies fighting in Afghanistan?

When President Bush left office the Taliban were stronger than at any point since they had lost Kabul seven years earlier. The Taliban, which in 2002 had barely been more than a nuisance, now control large sections of Afghanistan’s most important road, the 300-mile Kabul to Kandahar highway. And the south of the country is not only the source of the vast majority of the world’s heroin, but it is also quite dangerous for those the Taliban deems an enemy, which, in practice, means pretty much anyone who isn’t part of their movement. By mid-2008 more Americans soldiers were dying in Afghanistan every month than in Iraq. In early 2009 a US official involved in Afghan policy put the number of Taliban fighters somewhere between 12, 000 to 18,000. Whatever the exact number the Taliban today is obviously a larger force than they were in 2006 when US intelligence officials in Afghanistan estimated that they numbered at most 10,000.
Between the rising Taliban insurgency, the epidemic of attacks by suicide bombers and spiraling criminal activity fueled by the drug trade, by the time President Obama took office Afghanistan looked something like Iraq in the summer of 2003, when the descent into violent conflict began. As a former senior Afghan Cabinet member explained, "If international forces leave, the Taliban will take over in one hour."

When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan they were a provincial bunch; their leader, Mullah Omar, rarely visited Kabul in the five years that he ran the country and he made a point of avoiding meeting with non-Muslims and most journalists.

But this is not your father’s Taliban. Where once the Taliban had banned television, now they boast an active video propaganda operation named Ummat, which posts regular updates to the Web. They court the press and Taliban spokesmen are now available at any time of the day or night to discuss the latest developments. The Taliban had banned poppy growing in 2000; now they kill government forces eradicating poppy fields, and they profit handsomely from the opium trade. The Taliban also offer something that you might find strange, which is rough and ready justice. The Afghan judicial system remains a joke, and so farmers and their families–the vast majority of the population– looking to settle disputes about land, water and grazing rights can find a swift resolution of these problems in a Taliban court. As their influence extends, the Taliban has even set up their own parallel government, and appointed judges and officials in some areas.

The Taliban’s rhetoric is now filled with references to Iraq and Palestine in a manner that mirrors bin Laden's public statements. They have also adopted the playbook of the Iraqi insurgency wholesale, embracing suicide bombers and IED attacks on US and NATO convoys. The Taliban only began deploying suicide attackers in large numbers after the success of such operations in Iraq had become obvious to all. For the first years after the fall of the Taliban suicide attacks were virtually unknown in Afghanistan, jumping to 17 in 2005 and 123 a year later. Just as suicide bombings in Iraq had had an enormous strategic impact—from pushing the United Nations out of the country to helping spark a civil war—such attacks also have made much of southern Afghanistan a no-go area for both foreigners and for any reconstruction efforts.

By the time President Bush left office there were 31,000 American soldiers in Afghanistan, the most that had deployed there since the fall of the Taliban. Afghanistan is a country ideally suited to guerrilla warfare with its high mountain ranges and a land mass that is a third larger than Iraq’s, while its population is some four million or so greater. Yet, by early 2009, there were four times more soldiers and policemen in Iraq than there were in Afghanistan. 560,000 members of the Iraqi security services and some 130,000 American soldiers were in Iraq, while Afghanistan had only 140,000 local soldiers and police and around 60,000 US and NATO troops. Classical counterinsurgency doctrine suggests that security forces need to be at a ratio of 25 per thousand of population to secure a country. Given its more than 30 million citizens, Afghanistan needs as many as 600,000 policemen and soldiers, yet by 2009 there were only a third of that number.

The relatively low number of soldiers means that American and NATO forces can clear the Taliban out of areas but can’t hold many of those cleared areas and then rebuild them, the critical sequence in any successful counterinsurgency. One western diplomat in Kabul in 2008 described military operations in the south of the country as much like “mowing the lawn” every year. NATO forces went in and cleared out Taliban sanctuaries there and then had to go back and do it all over again in the same place the following year.

In addition to the small numbers of boots on the ground necessary to secure the country, Afghanistan’s ballooning drug trade also helped to expand the Taliban’s ranks. It is no coincidence that opium and heroin production, which by 2009 was equivalent to one-third of Afghanistan’s licit economy–spiked at the same time that the Taliban staged a comeback. Afghanistan is the source of an astonishing 92 percent of the world’s heroin supply.

The drug trade not only helped fund the Taliban it also fueled Afghanistan’s pervasive corruption. By 2008, according to the watchdog group, Transparency International, Afghanistan was rated one of the most corrupt countries on the planet, alongside such completely failed states as Somalia.

What are the networks in Pakistan that support the Afghan insurgency?

A key to the resurgence of the Taliban can be summarized in one word: Pakistan. The ‘Quetta shura’ headed by Mullah Omar is located in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan and the ‘Peshawar Shura’ is based in the capital of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. In addition, Hekmatyar operates in the Pakistani tribal areas of Dir and Bajur; the Haqqani network is based in Waziristan, and al Qaeda has a presence in Waziristan, Bajaur and Chitral. The headquarters of the Taliban and its key allies are, in short, in Pakistan.
The Taliban has deep roots in Pakistan. Many members of the movement of religious warriors grew up in refugee camps there. Not only that, but the Taliban, an almost entirely Pashtun organization, draws strength from the fact that, at some 40 million, the Pashtuns are one of the largest ethnic groupings in the world without their own state, and they straddle both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border, a line that was drawn by the British in 1893, that, in any event, many Pashtuns don’t recognize. Indeed, there are almost twice as many Pashtuns in Pakistan as there are in Afghanistan.

The Pakistani government routinely denies that it provides a haven for the Taliban leadership. An explanation for the seeming dichotomy between the fact that U.S. military and intelligence officials universally hold the view that the Taliban is headquartered in Pakistan and the government denial of this, is that the Pakistani government has never completely controlled its own territory. And when civilians are at the helm, nor does it even control its own military. ISI, the Pakistani military intelligence agency, at some levels has continued to tolerate and/or maintain links with Taliban leaders throughout the ‘war on terror’.

How did this happen? In part, because Pakistan’s generals supplemented their decades-old policy of supporting Kashmir jihadi groups with a doctrine they termed “strategic depth,” which meant they wanted to ensure that they had a pliant, pro-Pakistani Afghan state on their western border in the event that India attacked over their eastern border. In practice, the doctrine of strategic depth led Pakistan to support militant Pashtun Islamists in Afghanistan like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and later the Taliban, who the Pakistani government believed were most closely aligned with their own anti-Indian policies. Both the Kashmiri jihadi groups and the Taliban would evolve Frankenstein-like into groups that the Pakistani state could eventually no longer control, and would start to attack Pakistan’s government itself.

The general backwardness of Pakistan’s tribal regions, where many of the militants are located, can be gauged by the female literacy rate, which is only 3%. And an indicator of the ferocity of the tribes are the compounds in which they live, generally mud or concrete fortresses studded with gun ports ideal for fighting off raiding parties. Larger compounds are defended by artillery. In Pashtu the words for “cousin” and “enemy” are the same, which is indicative of the endemic low-level warfare that is the way of life in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where all males are armed and the blood feud is a multi-generational pursuit that the tribesmen seem to genuinely enjoy.

It was in this remote, ungovernable region that al Qaeda rebuilt its operations from 2003 forward. An American intelligence official stationed in Pakistan said that by 2008 there were more than 2,000 foreign fighters in the region, while a US intelligence official who tracks al Qaeda put the number somewhat lower, saying the foreign militants in the FATA consisted of around 100 to 150 members of the core of al Qaeda who had sworn bayat, a religiously-binding oath of personal allegiance to bin Laden; a couple of hundred more ‘free agent’ foreigners, mostly Arabs and Uzbeks, living there who were “all but in name al Qaeda personnel”, and thousands of militant Pashtun tribal members, into whose families some of the foreigners had intermarried.

The militants’ training camps are relatively modest in size. "People want to see barracks. [In fact,] the camps use dry riverbeds for shooting and are housed in compounds for 20 people, where they are taught calisthenics and bomb-making," a senior American military intelligence official explained. The existence of these camps boded well for Al Qaeda, since terrorist plots have a much higher chance of success if some of the cell's members have received personal training in bomb-making and terrorist tradecraft rather than merely reading about such matters on the Internet, as many freelance terrorists have done.

To root out those militants the Pakistanis first tried the hammer approach in the FATA in 2004 with a number of military operations that were essentially defeats for the Pakistani army, which is geared for land wars with India, rather than effective counterinsurgency campaigns. The failed military operations were followed by appeasement in the form of “peace” agreements with the militants in 2005 and 2006, which were really admissions of military failure and led the Taliban and its al Qaeda allies to establish even greater sway in the FATA.

Today the militants wholly control all seven of the tribal agencies in the FATA and their writ extends into the “settled” areas of the North West Frontier Province, almost up to the gates of Peshawar, the provincial capital. They also control Swat, whose verdant valleys and towering mountains had once been one of Pakistan’s premier tourist destinations, and is now firmly in the grip of the Pakistani Taliban. The Taliban conduct their own kangaroo courts publicly hanging men for infractions such as drinking, and shooting burqa-clad women for supposed promiscuity.

America handed more than $11 billion to the Pakistani military after September 11 for its help in the ‘war on terror’. Yet the Taliban and al Qaeda remained headquartered in Pakistan throughout the Bush administration’s two terms. By July 2007 the sixteen American intelligence agencies that collectively make up the US intelligence community all signed off on a National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that al Qaeda was not on the wane but was rather resurging, and further warned that the terror group “has protected or regenerated key elements of Homeland attack capability, including a safe haven in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants, and its top leadership.”
By early 2008 the Bush administration had tired of the Pakistani government’s unwillingness or inability to take out the militants in the FATA and greatly expanded the number of strikes from Predator drones armed with missiles targeting militants in the tribal regions. In 2007 there were three Predator strikes in the tribal areas, while in 2008 there were 34. Several of those strikes killed al Qaeda leaders such as Usama al Kini, the mastermind of the 2008 bombing of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad; Abu Khabab al Masri, who had overseen al Qaeda’s investigations into chemical and biological agents, and Abu Laith al Libi, the number three man in the al Qaeda hierarchy (perhaps the most dangerous job in the world given the half dozen or so men who have occupied that position who have subsequently been captured or killed). Under President Obama the missile strike program has actually accelerated, with five strikes already since he took office.

The missile strike program is, however, deeply unpopular among Pakistanis who see it as an infringement on their sovereignty. A poll released in June 2008 found that 52% of them blamed the United States for the violence in their country, while only 8% blamed al Qaeda! American officials have to weigh the risks from allowing al Qaeda operatives continuing to build up their network in the FATA-where they had been training Europeans for attacks in the West-against the possibility that strikes that kill civilians are a recruitment tool for the Taliban and might destabilize the government.

Despite American criticisms that the Pakistanis could do more to fight the Taliban and al Qaeda, Pakistan’s officer class feels strongly that their country is doing as much as it can to combat the militants, citing as evidence the 1,347 of their soldiers who had died fighting the militants between 2001 and 2008 (a number that outweighs the 1,065 NATO and US forces who died in the same period fighting the Taliban across the border in Afghanistan.)

While there is no doubt that elements of the Pakistani army had done much to combat the militants, lingering suspicions remains about the military intelligence agency ISI, which had been instrumental in the rise of the Taliban and a number of the Kashmiri militant groups. The most dramatic evidence for the continued links that some in ISI maintained with terrorists was the suicide bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul in July 7, 2008, which killed more than 50, the single worst attack in the capital since the fall of the Taliban seven years earlier. Both the US and Afghan governments said the bombing was aided by elements of the ISI, an assertion they based on intercepted phone calls between the plotters and phone numbers in Pakistan.

The new civilian government installed following the February 2008 election tried to bring ISI under its control. Just before Prime Minister Gilani traveled to Washington in July 2008 his government announced that the ISI would hence forward report to the Ministry of Interior. Within a few hours of that announcement the Army countermanded the order, which showed who is wearing the trousers in the military-civilian relationship.

The tension between army and the civilian government could also be seen in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks in late November 2008, which were carried out by militants from Pakistan. Gilani said he would send the ISI chief to India to help with the investigation, a request that the military agency simply ignored, making it clear that Pakistan had effectively two governments: a weak democratically elected one and a strong unelected body that controls almost all decisions related to Pakistan’s national security and foreign policy.

The Mumbai attacks also underlined how little things had really changed inside Pakistan’s jihadi culture since 9/11. The group that carried out the attacks, Lashkar-e-Taiba, (LeT) had been officially banned in January 2002, but that did not prevent it from organizing the 60-hour attack on Mumbai, much of it carried live by news channels around the world, a series of assaults that was often described as ‘India’s 9/11.’ The Mumbai attack underlined the fact that Pakistan had lost control of its jihadists who sought to undermine the creeping rapprochement between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir issue.

What is worrying as Pakistan heads in to 2009 is its economy is in free-fall, a plunge that preceded the global financial crisis. And the high Pakistani fertility rate puts it on track to become the fifth largest country in the world by 2015 with a population of almost 200 million. The combination of a sharply rising population with not enough jobs will likely play into the hands of the militants who often recruit young men with time on their hands. Unless Pakistan changes that equation the plague of the Taliban, al Qaeda and the Kashmiri militant groups will only grow there.
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Annex: Policy proposals the committee members might consider

1. Press for better information about trends in Afghanistan

Congress must press for more information to be made public about Afghanistan from the US military, State Department and other US agencies. While the minutest trends in Iraq are a matter of public record, similar information is either not collected and/or not publicly disseminated about Afghanistan. If we don’t know were we are coming from it’s hard to know the direction we are headed in.

2. The U.S. must decouple the Taliban from the drug trade, which has been one of the principal motors of their resurgence.

‘First, do no harm’ is a sensible injunction in combating any insurgency, but the United States adopted a boneheaded counter-narcotics strategy in Afghanistan. Every year American taxpayers paid more for that anti-narcotics policy than Afghan farmers make from the gate price of their opium crops. Meanwhile, with almost every new growing season Afghanistan has produced ever-larger amounts of opium and its byproduct heroin. A more failed policy it was hard to imagine, yet the U.S. gamely pressed on with its main policy prescription, which was the eradication of poppy fields.

The Bush administration's counter-narcotics policy placed eradication at its center, even though it was met with growing Afghan skepticism and, in some cases, violence, and coincided with a general decline in public support for the U.S. and NATO mission in Afghanistan. Why was the policy so unpopular? Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world and so many rural Afghans have very few options to make money other than to engage in poppy growing. Abruptly ending the poppy/opium trade was not an option as that would have put two million people out of work and impoverish millions more as the only really functional part of the economy was poppy and opium production. You simply can not eviscerate the livelihoods of the millions of Afghans who grew poppies and not expect a backlash.

The eradication approach has only created more enemies for the coalition as the farmers who had their crops destroyed are generally the poorer ones who couldn’t pay the bribes to have their fields left alone. Needless to say those farmers prove easy recruits to the Taliban cause. The U.S. government, in short, is deeply committed to an unsuccessful drug policy that helps its enemies. The Taliban derives not only substantial financial benefits from the opium trade, but also political benefits from its supportive stance on poppy growing, masterfully exploiting situations in which U.S.-sponsored eradication forces are pitted against poor farmers.

As General David Barno, the US military commander in Afghanistan from 2003-2005, has wisely pointed out, the measure of a successful counternarcotics policy should not be hectares of poppy destroyed every year, but hectares of other crops that are planted.

To that end:

-The United States should send more agricultural advisers to Afghanistan, an overwhelmingly agricultural country, and provide them with incentives such as fast-track promotions for working in Afghanistan.

-The United States and other NATO countries should open their markets to Afghan farm products and handicrafts.

-The international community should help Kabul set up an agency, modeled on the Canadian Wheat Board, that would purchase crops from farmers at consistent prices, and market and distribute them internationally.

-To end the culture of impunity that Afghan drug kingpins currently enjoy, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration should make public the list of the country's top drug suspects, including government officials, a practice that would likely see results in Afghanistan's shame-based culture. It appears that the list has so far not been published because it would embarrass certain officials in the Karzai government. Publication is long overdue.

-Because Afghanistan's judicial system is still too weak to handle major drug cases, Washington and Kabul should sign an extradition treaty allowing Afghan drug kingpins to be tried in the United States, as has happened in the past with Colombian drug lords.

-The United States should also endorse a pilot demonstration project to harness poppy cultivation for the production of legal medicinal opiates such as morphine for sale to countries like Brazil that are in short supply of cheap pain drugs. While there are some legitimate criticisms of this idea—principally that it would be difficult to make sure that Afghan opium was only going into the legitimate market—one low-risk approach would be to allow the legalized opiate trade to debut as a pilot project on a small scale in a province with reasonable security. Farmers engaged in legalized poppy growing would enjoy financial incentives that could be revoked, and they would face criminal penalties if they tried to divert their product to the illicit market. Congress could amend the law that requires U.S. opiate manufacturers to purchase at least 80 percent of their opiates from India and Turkey (affording them a guaranteed market) to include Afghanistan. This preferential trade agreement, which was designed to serve U.S. political and strategic interests, should be recalibrated to fit our present-day strategic interests in Afghanistan, where vital national security interests are at stake.

3. Press for security-led reconstruction.

The United States should focus on completing two high-profile projects that will have real benefits for the Afghan people. The first is to secure the important Kandahar-to-Kabul road, which was opened as a blacktop freeway with much hoopla in 2003, but which is now a suicidal route for anyone driving it without a security detail. This would have broad economic benefits to the country and would send the same kind of signal that securing Route Irish between Baghdad city and Baghdad airport did two years ago, which is that the coalition can bring security to key roads. The second is to finish the work on the Kajaki Dam in southern Afghanistan, which will provide electricity to some 2 million Afghans, most of whom live deep in Taliban country.

American aid should be tied, in part, to an Afghan public employment program similar to the Works Progress Administration program that President Roosevelt instituted during the Great Depression. Afghanistan has a chronic 40 percent official unemployment rate. It also has a desperate need for new roads and dams, and must repair the agricultural aqueducts destroyed by years of war. Meanwhile, Kabul and other major Afghan cities are awash in debris and trash. Cleaning up that rubbish would have a salutary effect on the residents of those cities. Much of the labor required to fix Afghanistan's problems does not require great skill, and millions of Afghans could be set to work rebuilding and cleaning up their country. It is puzzling that the manual labor for major Afghan projects such as the Kabul-to-Jalalabad road has been performed by Chinese workers. This practice must end and contracts for such projects must specify that Afghans are hired for those jobs that they can perform.

4. Much of the terrorism in the region emanates from Pakistan. What can be done about this?

-The mapping of the social networks of terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan should include the identification of the clerical mentors of suicide bombers, as it seems likely that only a relatively small number have persuaded their followers of the religious necessity of martyrdom. Armed with such intelligence, the United States and NATO could ask Pakistan, where most of the suicide attackers originate, to rein in especially egregious clerics.

-The United States, together with the Pakistani and Afghan governments, should also target the production and distribution networks of As-Sahab, al Qaeda's video/audio production arm, as well as the Taliban's analogous Ummat propaganda division. Given the close connections between these networks and al Qaeda and the Taliban, such an effort would also provide important clues to the whereabouts of terrorist leaders.

-The president should take every opportunity to make it clear that America's commitment to Afghanistan is not just until the next election cycle, but for years to come. The American public, which understands that Afghanistan's reversion into a failed state would be a prelude to al Qaeda regaining a safe haven in the country, will support this approach. Elements of the Pakistan national security apparatus are not prepared to eliminate militant groups on their territory because they are a means of asserting de facto control over Afghanistan should the Americans withdraw. Only an unambiguous declaration of long-term U.S. commitment will convince Pakistan's government to end its passive tolerance for the militant groups headquartered on the country's western border.

-To help tamp down the insurgency in FATA and other areas of the NWFP, America should help the Pakistanis build up their counterinsurgency capabilities. The Pakistani army is built for a land war with India, not for fighting terrorists and insurgents. Pakistani officers should be encouraged to attend counterinsurgency courses at American war colleges, and the United States should support such courses at Pakistan's National Defense University. None of this would cost a lot of U.S. dollars and would yield potentially large results, as the new U.S. counterinsurgency strategy has done in Iraq.

-Small amounts of discrete U.S. aid in support of deradicalization programs for jailed Pakistani militants could also yield large returns. Such programs have had some success in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and Singapore, but have not been tried in Pakistan. Pakistani officials would benefit from learning about best practices in countries that have already spent years in building up their own counter-radicalization programs.