where we all can agree on the big picture. rape is a hainnuss crime and we need to provide our law enforcement agencies with everything they need to prevent it. and bring perpetrators to juss dis. so i just want to ask a few questions on this front. mr. redding, your testimony you said there was a need for improved infrastructure and lab capabilities so that d.n.a. evidence can improcessed as quickly as possible. the national institute of justice study revealed that six out of ten police departments surveyed, lacked computerized evidence tracking systems.ñi they rely on paper tracking systems. and it's no surprise that when some police departments review their inventories they discover stores ofñi untested kits. this append in detroit and los angeles. mr. redding and ms. stoilof,

how do your departments track d.n.a. evidence and what kinds of resources are available to help police departments set up the kind of tracking systems that they require? . . there. i don't have the same kind of

access in some of the smaller suburbs. there needs to be a uniform best practices, recommend to jurisdictions as to how long they hold on to evidence and how long they hold on to police reports. even some places, police reports are being destroyed within seven years and that is troubling to me as a prosecutor when we have expanded the statute of limitations, like we have in minnesota where we have a situation to go back to 1991 to prosecute these cases, but the police reports have been destroyed. we need a best practices about how long to keep evidence, how to keep track of that evidence and how long to keep something as basic as police reports. so it's very important and it's crucial. >>ñi we have over 35 municipalities in miami-dade county, so i can only address what happens with our agency.

i have no idea how they track evidence in the other agencies. we do have an in-house system which is a laboratory information management system. what that does is actually track. we know what we have in-house. as far as what's in the property room, even i don't know that from years ago. we have been doing cold cases since 2001, reviewing cold sexual assaults and cold homicides. we have pretty much covered everything with our own agency as far asñi what's been collect and stored. unfortunately, i agree with what steve said, there are issues that need to be addressed so there are uniform best practices with other agencies, too. >> i want to highlight the experience in some of the jurisdictions that have chosen as a default to test all or nearly all rape kits. these jurisdictions have seen their arrest rates for rape

increase by as much as 30 percentage points and had thousands of cold hits. our national -- our average national arrest rape in jurisdictions that have implemented a test-all kits policy climb up to 70%, three times the national average. what, in your mind, is keeping all jurisdictions from moving toward this model? >> i believe that there are three barriers as i outlined in my testimony. n.i.v. report indicated a big one is that local law enforcement agencies don't always understand the evidentiary value of d.n.a. evidence, that it can be used to solve crimes. so many law enforcement agencies in that n.i.j. survey indicated they were not forwarding kits for testing where there was not already a suspect. so that indicates one problem.

if a local law enforcement agency has heard that the lab is overloaded or already knows that it will take more than a year to get something back from a lab, they may not be forwarding information, because they know they can't get it in a timely fashion. and that would be directly related to funding to increase the capacity and reduce the lag time. but a third issue could be lack of will. we know in too many places, law enforcement agencies make a judgment as to the importance or value or credibility of the victim based on what they think a rape victim ought to act like. when talking to our members about the problems that they see, many of them highlighted the need to train law enforcement about sensitive response to victims of sexual

assault so they can better understand why a rape victim may be presenting with what's called a flat affect, no emotion, no longer hysterical. that law enforcement needs to be trained to know that does not necessarily mean she was not a victim. i would prioritize that as well. >> i'm out of time. i want to make one little point on the reimbursement issue. i want to highlight we have heard from advocates like human rights watch, that people are sleeping through the cracks and that some women pay for their kits up front and that some of them are never repaid the full costs. and my bill would close those loopholes. thank you, madam chair. >> thank you very much. senator whitehouse. >> thank you for your extraordinarily powerful testimony.

thank you for your voice on behalf of victims across the country and thank you for your service in law enforcement. clearly the science of d.n.a. has speed far, far ahead. my first realization was a murder case where we were able to get d.n.a. off a beer bottle that the perpetrator of the crime had taken a swig out of during the course of his time in the home of the murder victim. and i suspect it's rocketted forward in the years since then. so i think it's a very valuable tool. and i assume that all of you would support mandatory d.n.a. testing of violent criminals. >> yes, i certainly would, senator. anyway that we can get the

d.n.a. from a person who has committed crimes and been arrested as i said, get into a data base of convicted offenders along with a larger data base of crimes that have been tested. when they are searched against each other, we get more hits, the bigger they are. >> the record reflect that all five heads were nodding in agreement. yeah, because at that point, you're no longer confirming evidence and using it as a tool of proof, it becomes an investigatingtive tool against a larger audience and adds to the d.n.a. samples. in terms of prioritizing rape kits, does the priorityization need to take place more at the lab or more at the investigative side in the police and prosecute's office? i don't know the answer to the

question, or do we need priorityization at both points? >> at least from my point it is not at the lab. the labs that i deal with are properly prioritizing. the problems is the priority isation within the police department and some within the prosecutor's department. >> that's the area? >> that's the area. and when we have changed that and we get more kits, we do get better results. and i want to briefly comment on police making that determination about whether a victim's credible or not. many victims are most vulnerable victims are homeless and a chemical dependency problem or some other problem, possibly mentally ill problem and so they are preyed on and we need to get those victims d.n.a. results

into our data base as well. they can be linked to other cases and we have done that on a number of occasions and been able to prosecute cases where we have gotten multip am hits. >> -- multiple hits. i have a minute or so left. one is, do any of you fear that a broader regime of mandatory d.n.a. testing would test the capacity of the private laboratories to run the d.n.a. or is there not that kind of a capacity problem? >> there's definitely a capacity problem. all laboratories nationwide have a capacity problem if there's a mandate that we have to do every single kit. even without mandating every sing kit, the -- >> mandatory testing of every single violent criminal. >> it's actually done -- it's

separate. there is convicted offender laboratories for each state and then there are local and state labs that process evidence. it would necessarily different. the money would be allocated by the state. >> so the additional burden of processing offender data would not impede the evaluation of d.n.a. evidence in current inactive cases? >> there are separate laboratories. the forensic labt would have the capacity to do the evidence cases and the convicted offender data base lab would have the capacity. any time you mandate testing like that, the funding has to go with it. we have had quite a few unfunded mandates even in florida that now they've learned to add right in that if it's not funded, it can't happen. >> just one last question to the law enforcement representatives

for the sake of the record, the effects of delay in processing evidence in an ongoing investigation are often more than just loss of time. could you each briefly comment on some of the collateral damage that takes place in an investigation when the investigation can't move rapidly forward and doesn't hvm timely access to key evidence. >> that can be devastating to victims. it's devastating to wait years and to get a call from a police officer or a victim witness advocate in my office and say, you know that thing you have been trying to put behind you and trying to forget all these years, we're going to reopen that wound for you for good reason, of course, but that's very painful. it's not an easy call to make. it's not a call that we ever want to make.

so i would like to see the system take care of that and at the same time process sexual assault cases and other evidence kits. >> from a prosecute's time of view, you also lose witnesses, raise cross-examination issues. setting aside for a moment the effect on the victim, the effect on the case itself is often significant beyond the simple delay, is it not? >> yes, it is. it can be severely compromised. evidence goes away. it gets lost, memories change. we have had a number of cases where important witnesses are deceased by the time that we get the d.n.a. result. and so that compromises our case. we are looking at some of those cases now in an attempt to see if we can work around that problem, but that certainly is a problem. >> thank you very much. i just have a few follow-ups

here. i wanted to go at this issue again and senator whitehouse touched on it, the national data bases and how comprehensive they are. in your written testimony you talked about how wisconsin discovered it had 12,000 convicted offenders who were not in the convicted offender data base and this i don't think was an issue of the testing as much as the data wasn't dumped in, is that right? >> that's correct. my understanding is that some of this is this reaction to an unfunded mandate. some of the localities are required, of course, to collect kits tr all convicted offenders within a particular county. and i'm aware that that costs money to the counties and somewhat of a burden to counties which are strapped. and as a result, those counties are not as vigorous as they should be in collecting that data. i'm sure that wisconsin is not

alone, that there is a problem of uncollected -- >> you're not picking on them because of the packers? >> no. >> you believe this happens in other states, it's the actual physical entry of the data? >> i do. i would be shocked if it didn't, yes. >> do you know if we have that going on in minnesota? >> there is a problem in minnesota we are attempting to correct right now, but it is an issue. >> i was thinking about how the nitty-gritty testimony makes us realize that the miami-dade police department is note like "miami vice" and there is a lot of work that is done in the lab every day to catch the perpetrators. can you comment on the information in the data bases. >> the priorityization helps with the lag. on the priority cases, especially in cases, in

homicides where you have so much evidence collected at the scene that we have meetings in-house with the detective assigned analyst and the prosecute to resolve these issues and identify what needs to be analyzed right up front. it's a short turnaround on current cases. for cold cases, it's a different story. you have the technology to solve the crimes, but then you have a problem finding witnesses, et cetera, et cetera. so it's two-fold. as long as we adopt best practice in addressing these issues immediately as soon as the cases are submitted that should help solve it. and no, we don't drive hummers. >> rile remember that. the thing you mentioned in your testimony which i heard from our lab directors is forensic scientists and the amount of

money that is put in to train them by the government and get them up to speed and what i have heard -- and i don't know if this was in your testimony, a lot of times they may leave and go somewhere else and go to the private sector and it becomes a bidding war and i have heard this in our state. do you want to comment on that? >> we have the same issue. as nice as miami looks on tv, we do have a problem that forensic science is a hot place to go and if they want to come and be trained, we have had the misfortune to lose a few. >> where do they go? >> usually home. >> they go to other labs? >> other labs. it's not a situation where they are seeking a job anywhere else. i don't want to portray that miami-dade police lab is bad but they are going to where their familiesr so that becomes a

problem. it is a two-year training process for d.n.a. from the date of hire to get them hired in-house and two years training, it is two years. i may have zero vacancies but carry them as non-d.n.a. analysts for two years. >> anyone else like to comment? >> that is a tremendous issue. we can hire a prosecute and throw him right into the room. you can't do that with a d.n.a. analyst. you have to wait for them to complete the training and it's a long training. so when you lose an analyst like we lose them in the minnesota c. b.c.a., you can't throw someone else in there right away so it is a significant problem. >> anything more anyone wants to add? i want to thank you for your testimony today for taking the time to be here. as you can see, we are very

devoted to working on this problem. we know there have been improvements and there have been improvements. and we know there is a backlog issue and we want to be smart about how we tackle that. anyone who has worked on the front line as a prosecute understands this unfunded mandate issue and we have to figure out how to be smart to get the right rape kits tested and get them tested, that we also have to do better with training, everything from the nurses to the forensic scientists and i was interested in some of your points about the coordination with the police and prosecutors in the lab and improvements that can be made there. those are the things we are working on right there. my former job, which i loved very much, i think very back lovingly to that job especially what we have been going through here in washington but i have these memories that are etched

in my mind about how we were able to use the science to not just convict horrendous murderers and rapists but i will never forget that case and steve remembers this, we had someone come up from north carolina, that was a state who had identified who she thought was her rapist many years before and he had served something like six years in prison and then the d.n.a. tests showed it wasn't him. and he got out of prison and the two of them actually became friends. the real person was already in jail, convicted and they went around the country talking about witness i.d. and improvements that need to be made to that. i remember where we had a burglary and the burglar had broken some glass and got blood on the glass and that blood matched in another state and we

were able to charge as number thrike 34546. we don't know and that was a memory i have of improvements we have made in this technology and the tool that it is as you have pointed out for any kind of case. i'm optimistic of the work that can be done here, the place that science has taken us and all of you in your respective roles have been a big part of that. thank you very much and we look forward to working with you on the re-authorization of the act and all the work we will be doing in this area. thank you very much. we will keep the record open for one week for any additional submissions. and the hearing is adjourned. thank you. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2009] [captioning performed by national captioning institute]

>> coming up former cia analyst gives a historical perspective of america's presence in afghanistan. following that, a discussion on possible future threats to the united states. and later, a special presentation of our documentary "the blair house, the president's guest house." >> tonight on "america and the courts," presentations from c-span supreme court week special. supreme court journalists on covering the court. former u.s. slol general and appellate attorney on arguing before the court. that's tonight at 7:00 p.m. eastern here on c-span. >> in the mid-1990's, wasow was

one of the most influential people to watch in cyber space. helped found a charter school in brooklyn and explained new technologies on "oprah." sunday night he talks about his current studies at harvard and what's ahead. >> former cia analyst bruce riedel chaired president obama's initial policy review of afghanistan and pakistan. he now gives a historical perspective of the past eight years of america's presence in the region, the president's decision to send additional troops and the prospects for defeating the insurgency. this hour-long talk came at a recent conference hosted by the jamestown foundation.

[ >> i have been referred to the architect of obama's afghan strategy. bruce well suited for all of that and today you will be delighted to know he is not only going to speak for 10 minutes but 40-minute talk planned and i think there will be an opportunity to hear what are his thoughts on the strategy in afghanistan and this very critical time in america's foreign policy. bruce is a senior fellow at the brookings institution and retired in 2006 after 30 years of service at the central intelligence agency with many postings overseas. senior adviser in asian middle east and on the staff of four presidents. he was negotiator in several

peace sum myths. he was at the present timey assistant secretary of defense in nearest and south asian senior adviser at nato. in can january 2009, president obama asked bruce to chair a review of american policy towards afghanistan and pakistan, the results of which the president announced in his speech on march 27, 2009. more importantly, he is the author of this book "the search for al qaeda, its leadership, and i'dology." bruce will be available for book signing in the back and if you purchase the book, he will say a few words to you and will sign the book. it is coming out in paperback. your last chance to get one in hard copy. bruce will be available for that briefly. after his talk, he will take a few questions and answers, which will address the audience and i would like to turn the floor over to bruce and we are

delighted to have you here today, bruce. [applause] >> thank you, glenn, nor that kind flukes -- for that kind introduction. i'm pleased to speak to the jamestown tounges -- foundation. it has provided people around the world as to what is going on in the terrorism world. it is a special pleasure to be the keynote speaker today. 10 months ago and a few days, i was minding my own business in my home on the eastern shore of maryland when the phone range

and a voice came on and said, please hold for the president. a couple of seconds later, on came a voice, hello, bruce, it's barack and i got an offer like the offers you get in the mafia movies you couldn't say no to. and the offer was to share a 60-day review on america's policy towards afghanistan and pakistan and of course towards al qaeda. as the president explained then, in his judgment, this is the single most important foreign policy and national security issue he will face as president of the united states. perhaps a little background is in order. in order to also help you understand my remarks, i retired from the cia in november of 2006. in march of 2007, two

individuals from barack obama camp asked me if i would like to be an adviser to the campaign. i agreed on one condition, i didn't want to get a job for myself, i wanted to find a job for the senior senator from illinois in the federal government. i should also tell you i went home that night i told my wife, this will be lots of fun, but it won't last very long. there is no way barack obama is going to become president of the united states. so bear that prediction in mind as i go forward. [laughter] >> what i would like to do then over the course of the next 40 minutes or so is review the key judgments of the strategic review that i chaired, talk a little bit about what has happened in the interim when the closure of that strategic review in march and the president's comments at west point and then look at the road ahead.

let me be careful and clear, i'm speaking here as a senior fellow . i'm not here as a supposeman for president obama, for the united states government. do not interpret my words as reflecting the views of the united states government in anyway whatsoever. i'll start with the bottom line right up front. president obama inherited in january a disaster in afghanistan and pakistan. a war that had begun with a brilliant military success at virtually no cost was squandered. and for seven years the previous administration dithered about afghanistan and pakistan and did not act. as a consequence, an insurgency which should never have been

allowed to grow threatens afghanistan and threatens to defeat nato's first ground operation ever. worst than that, the disaster in afghanistan is destabilizing south and central asia as a whole. most particularly, next door in pakistan. the situation the president inherited is bad and has gotten worse in the 10 months since then. but we have no time machine. we cannot go back and do it over. we can wish for that, but that is not a realistic strategy. so what is the situation today? let me start with al qaeda. we would not have 70,000 american troops in afghanistan and 35,000 more enroute if not for september 11. we all know that. so what is the status of al qaeda today? i will summarize what we have

done to al qaeda in one sentence. like any one-sentence summary, it lacks subtle ti. in eight years, we have succeeded in moving the al qaeda core leadership, their senior operational planners and propoganda instrument from kandahar, afghanistan to a location unknown, believed to be about 100 miles away somewhere in pakistan. that is not to diminish the hard work of our soldiers, our intelligence officers and our diplomats and allies in fighting al qaeda. it is not to diminish the accomplishments we have had like bring cleedcleed under detention and killing many others. al qaeda remains a deadly enemy. it is the first truly global

terrorist organization in history. its reach and scope in the last eight years is almost breathtaking from algiers to washington to bali to madrid. this organization has struck again and again and again around the world. it has developed franchises. it has developed surrogates. it has acquired allies to increase its reach. it has become more than a terrorist organization, an idea, a narrative that inspires a small minority of muslims, a very small minority of muslims to carry out acts of mass violence. most of its attacks are indiscriminate, but it has demonstrated a chilling capacity to strike against targets like beautyo, like the u.n.

headquarters in baghdad and against the deputy minister of interior in saudi arabia. we see its reach in the united states today, both direct and indirect. the afghan american arrested by the f.b.i. in colorado demonstrated the direct connection. what happened in fort hood demonstrates the indirect connection of the global islamic jihad. the only sustained significant pressure on the al qaeda core comes from between 30,000 and 60,000 feet in the air from the drones, the predators. the drones are a technological marvel and they have provenñr highly successful against a limited range of targets in a limited piece of geography.

they have, to some extent, and it's hard to know if you're not a member of al qaeda, how big that extent is, disrupting al qaeda in recent months. but drones are a tactic, they're not a strategy. they are like attacking a bee hive one at a time. you will not destroy one bee at a time. it's ironic eight years, osama bin laden is a voice we hear, but virtually invisible man. we have no idea where this man is, that despite the biggest manhunt in history and a $50 million reward. he could be in the room next door as far as we know. last week, the bbc put out a report poorly sourced that he was in afghanistan in february.

what was notable about that report was not how good the report was, but how rare we evei get bad reportsñr about where osama bin laden is. second thing i would suggest to you about al qaeda today is that in afghanistan and pakistan, it is part of a much larger syndicate of terrorist organizations within which it is embedded. why what do i mean by that? the afghan taliban and the pakistan taliban and they are really one taliban in many ways, a whole bunch of other groups whose names change but who we know are the same basic characters are a syndicate of terror. they don't have a single leader. they don't have a single agenda, but they cooperate with each

other. individuals within these movements move back and forth within organizations. they do not respect the lanes that we try to impose on them. and most of all, none of them in eight years have been willing to turn on al qaeda and give up its core leadership. what is remarkable when you look at it is that more than any other individual, it is omar that the syndicate pledges his allegiance to. and he claims to be commander of the faithful, a title which if you think about it for a minute shows a man with a remarkable ego, commander of the faithful of 1.6 billion muslims worldwide. i'm very skeptical we can negotiate with the taliban and

skeptical that we can negotiate with someone who is inflated with his own importance. al qaeda is embedded in this larger syndicate of terror, which is why it is hard to go after him. i would suggest to you, the single most dangerous element, it has struck with awesome fury. and as we are learning its global reach is also something to worry about. let me say a few words about afghanistan. you can also summarize what we've done in afghanistan in one sentence and where we are today. we are losing the war in afghanistan, but it is not yet lost. i hope. general mcchrystal's report courtesy of bob woodward all of

you have had a chance to read, is an excellent summary of the situation in afghanistan. i think he hit the nail on the head. he got it exactly right. if there is one part of that report, which i urge you to look at, which talks about detention facilities in afghanistan in which he says, we no longer control the detention facilities in which we are keeping captured insurgents. they are under the control of al qaeda and the taliban, more radicalization and more recruitment for al qaeda takes place in those detention facilities than anywhere else in afghanistan today. when you have lost control of the prison camps in which you are putting insurgents in a counterinsurgency, you are in a deep, deep hole. ever measure we have demonstrates the momentum is entirely with the taliban today.

bob gates reiterated that several times in his statements last week on the hill. but it is not yet lost, because we do not face an afghanistan, a national uprising. what we face in afghanistan is a pashtun insurgency, which is confined to the pashtun ethnic community. the soviets faced a national uprising, virtually the entire country was in opposition to soviet occupation. and soviet behavior reinforced that opposition. we face an insurgency which is, for the most part, confined to the pashtun community. by definition, that means the majority of afghans do not favor the taliban. and more than that, we know from reliable polling that the majority of pashtuns don't want to see a return to the islamic

return of afghanistan. no one in their right mind would want to go back to living that omar created in the 1990's. it is the self-constraining factor on the taliban which offers us the most hope to be able to turn this around. thirdly, let me talk about pakistan. pakistan is today the strategic prize in this part of the world as well as the most dangerous country in the world. why do i say that? because all of the things that should worry americans about the future of the world in the 21st century come together in pakistan in a unique and combustible way. nuclear war and peace, proliferation of nuclear technology, terrorism, the future of islam, the future of democracy in the islamic world, the relationship between

military and civilçó world in t islamic world, all these issues are alive in pakistan like they are no where else in the world. pakistan has the fastest growing nuclear arsenal in the world today. it has more terrorists per square kill meter. world's second largest country and yet its government is teatering on the brink of collapse. pakistan is trying to make a transition from a military dictatorship to what they hope is democracy. we should support that effort with everything we do. but this is the fourth time pakistan has tried to make that transition and you have to believe in the triumph of hope over experience to believe it's going to be successful. today the government appears to have a very limited shelf life. the president may stay on as a figure head, but power is slipping away from him every

day. the alternatives are not particularly bright either. we may see a return to sharif as two times as prime minister should not fill you with confidence. we don't get to choose who's pakistan's leaders. and when we have done so, we have remorse. the second point about pakistan, pakistan has a dynamic, confusing and complex relationship with the syndicate of terrorism, which i talked about earlier. pakistan either created or was the midwife for these terrorist organizations. it retains very close links with some of them. it has been a passive supporter of omar for most of the last seven years and active supporter

of omar up until the 12 of september, 2001, when armitage threatened it with being thrown back into the stone age. it has a capacity to both be a patron ofñi terror and a victimf terror, which is very hard for most western minds to put your head around. it is today very much at war. this is a serious conflicts. the attacks demonstrate that this war is not going particularly well for the pakistani army today. if it spreads further south into the sin, it may deal an economic death blow to pakistan today. why does pakistan have such a complex relationship? because of its obsession with india. the pakistani army believes and has believed for 60 years that

asymmetric warfare is part of its tactics for defeating the indians. it has not succeeded, it has not worked. but this view remains deeply entrenched in significant parts in the pakistani officer corps and the pakistani elite. in short, the stakes in afghanistan and pakistan could not be greater. the future of al qaeda, the future of the nato alliance, possibly nuclear war and peace in southeast asia, all of these issues come together. on the 27 of march, president obama rightly focused the mission of american forces in this combat zone although on a more narrow one, on disrupting, dismantling and defeating al qaeda and destroying its sanctuary along the afghanistan-pakistan border.

if you read his speech carefully, it was clear while there was a specific mission, to get there, we had to stabilize afghanistan and pakistan, and that's a much, much broader mission. the review that i gave to the president which he endorsed, has 20 major recommendations in it, 180 subrecommendations. i'm not going to go all of them here today. most of them are outlined in his speech on the 27 of march and his speech at west point. what i want to stress is this, this is resource-intensive. this is going to come with a big cost, to send one american soldier to afghanistan for one year costs $1 million. if you think there's economy of scale, forget it. sending 30,000 is going to cost more than $30 million. it doesn't get cheaper by sending more. it gets more expensive.

and on the nonmilitary side, it is expensive as well.ñi the president has signed the kerry-lugar bill. before last fall if i said $1.5 billion, people would have said and say wow. but $1.5 billion over 10 years is $15 million and make pakistan the largest single repository of american economic assistance in the world outside of afghanistan and iraq. what happened in the eight months from march 27 until his speech last week at west point? many, many things, but two which i want to highlight. first on the military side. we had an unprecedented event or virtually unprecedented event. the strategic review called upon

the commander of isaf forces in afghanistan to come up with an operational plan for a counterinsurgency strategy in afghanistan. that was given to general mckern and. he was judged to be the wrong man for the job and was fired by secretary gates. that was a huge thing. the last time we fired a battlefield commander during wartime was 1951. and the issue then was whether or not to use nuclear weapons against communityist china. i don't know what the general did, but if he got in as much trouble with douglas mcarthur, it must have been pretty big. but the important thing is, we lost time. we lost two months and had to take three months to get general mcchrystal comfortable with the situation on the ground. instead of an operational plan

being delivered in may, it was delivered at the end of august. in the interim, the military situation in afghanistan deteriorated sharply. and more importantly from the president's standpoint, support for the war and among democrats on the hill dropped through the floor. what had been the good war a year ago was just like every other war, a bad war and skepticism about the war had become widespread among the president's core supporters. the second thin that happened was on the -- thing that happened was on the political front. the expectation in march was that we would be able to work with the then afghan government and with the international community to produce something that would look like a legitimate and credible presidential election. instead, we got a fiasco followed by a disaster, no one

can pretend this afghan presidential election was legitimate or credible. president karzai's supporters produced one million fraudulent ballots. that's a lot of fraudulent ballots, even by the standards of florida or illinois, this is cheating on a global scale. he got caught and he got away with it. i'm not sure how illegitimate his government looks in the eyes of afghans, but it looks illegitimate in the eyes of americans and of our european and noneuropean isaf partners. this administration has to bear some of the responsibility for this. this didn't happen on george bush's watch, it happened on its watch. its behavior towards the afghan election was a little bit like the famous deer in the headlights, it could see the problem coming but seem mess

merized until it was run over. here again, we don't have a time machine and go back and fix it. we will have to work with president karzai. we may find that this was the fatal blow, i hope not, to our efforts to defeat the taliban. we don't know that yet. and i think we can yet turn it around. but mrs. clinton now has her date for the next three years. she will be managing mr. karzai. she needs to avoid demonizing and avoid temper tantrums and needs to find a way to bring out the best in president karzai. so where are we going forward from here? let me offer you three observations. first, this is a bold gamble. what the president has embarked upon today has no guarantee of

success. there's no assurance that this is going to work. there are all kinds of things that may fail. trying to build an afghan army and police force may be a lot harder and i suggest will be a lot harder than we think. trying to reverse the taliban's momentum is going to be difficult. for sure, casualties are going to go up significantly. and domestic dissent here and in other nato countries over this war is going to get stronger and harder. there are several potential game changers that could change everything literally in a matter of minutes. another 9/11 attack inside the united states and it doesn't have to bring two of the largest buildings in the world to be significant that comes out of pakistan will be a game changer. the president of the united states will not simply be able

to call up islamabad and say, do something about it. he will have to do something about it. another mumbai-style mass casualty attack coming out of pakistan will also be a game changer. the indian government's capacity to absorb mass casualty attacks, i suspect, has been reached. it will not send dumarche to islamabad the next time. as hard as it is, it is the best of the bad options we have today. we only really had two other options. one was cutting and running. we can define cutting and running in a lot of different ways, downsize the mission, readjust the mission, but all of them come down to cutting and running one way or another. i think the president wisely ruled that out from the

beginning. if we are defeated in afghanistan by the taliban, it will also be a global game changer. this will be the second superpower as the taliban loves to remind us, defeated in afghanistan and the global revere bations of that will be enormous and no more so than next door in pakistan. thirdly, this issue is now going to consume this presidency, which is why it took them 92 days to come to a second conclusion because they don't like that answer and i wouldn't like it either if i was rahm emanuel or david axelrod. this is going to be the foreign policy that the president will be judged by the american people in november, 2012 and foreign policy that the congress of the

united states is judged less than a year upon. other issues may outweigh it, the economy, but this will be the foreign policy issue that the people will look at. it will need to be explained to the american people again and again why they are sending their sons and daughters to the other side of the planet to fight a war which has been going on now longer than any war in american history. and it's going to have to be explained how we intend to win that war and how we hope to be able to get out of it. that will mean political energy, political capital and the most precious thing in any white house, the time that the president will be devoting to this issue. wars consume presidencies and this war stands on the verge of consuming this presidency. last thing i would say, my final note, the good news in all of this, i genuinely believe we will know in july, august of

2011, whether this strategy works. why do i say that? because by then we will have the additional forces in for six months -- i'm sorry, for more than a year. we will have found out whether we can break the momentum of the taliban. we will have found out how pakistan reacts to all of this. we will have found out whether we can build an afghan national security force. we will not have achieved victory. the end will be no where in sight but we will at least know whether we have a strategy that has a promise of success. if it does, i would suggest to you that there will be very, very few american soldiers coming home in the summer of 2011. if it doesn't work, we will then face the very, very difficult decision of owning up to that and deciding where we go next.

i sure hope he doesn't call me that day. thank you very much for your attention. i look forward to your questions. [applause] >> thank you, bruce. we'll open the floor and we'll have time for questions and answers. i would like to call on somebody who hasn't asked a question yet today. if there is no one else -- anybody have a question? all right, you're the man. sorry. we'll go back. >> thanks for this talk and i would like to ask one question, if we use the strategy of cut and run, do you recommend any psychological tactics to make the enemy feel defeated?

because we can still do cut and run as long as we are covering this with proper psychological tactics that can give them the feel of defeat. >> it's a clever idea. nothing springs to mind immediately as to how we can turn retreat into victory. i mean, there are various levels of cut and run. we don't have to completely give up. we can say we're afghanizing the war more quickly. we can hope that the afghan government that we leave survives as long as the previous government survived. after all, the communist government in the afghanistan outlived the soviet union, but only barely. it's not a parallel i think we want to spend a lot of time thinking about. i don't think there is a downsizing the mission

alternative. i know there's a view out there let's go to pure counterterrorism. it won't work. as an intelligence professional who spent a great deal of time trying to persuade people to commit treason, they won't do it if they don't think you'll be around to give them a check after you complete your mission. it doesn't work that way. >> this morning, ambassador benjamin gave an interesting talk and during the course of his 15 or so minutes, he failed to use three words that you used in the first five minutes of your talk, which was global islamic jihad. i'm curious from your advisory perspective to what level was this broader struggle, how did that resonate in the current administration?

there seemed to be a pushback at looking at the problem through that lense. >> i'm saying whatever i want to say.ñi he is a very good friend and colleague and he's now in the administration. the similar left answer i would say this administration does understand this is a battle of ideas and narratives and has to come up with a counternarrative to the narrative of the global islamic jihad that ayman zawahiri has created over the course of the last decade or so and that is the president's speech in cairo. the president's speech in cairo was addressed to ayman zawahiri. what is the narrative of the global islamic jihad? short version is that the united states is now