become effective, either end up with scapegoats or end up being disbanded. whether that matters or not is a real issue. i suspect as the money grows weaker and smaller, corruption will revert to a more affordable pattern. we're not going to deal with insurgent sanctuaries in pakistan. it is brutally clear whatever our hopes are pakistan would turn against these insurgencies. pakistan will focus on its own internal security issues. we can talk, we can meet, we can get occasional cooperation. the various forms or groups of taliban are not going to be somehow pushed out unless there is some kind of anticipated peace settlement, the sanctuaries in pakistan in 2014 and 2015 will be very much what

they are today. that korea its a massive challenge to security. othe strans situation planned for the afghan national security forces is frankly not a plan. roughly a year ago, we were talking about expenditure levels of $7 billion to $9 billion a year through 2020 for the afghan national security forces, a force of over $300,000 of which roughly 40% would be five different police forces. and this is an important distinction because it's often confused with an army. we are now talking about $4.4 billion a year after transition, having cut our fy-13 request in half from what we spent in fy-12. we're talking about going down to gr 230,000.

none of us really knows which this means. and this focus on manpower numbers ignores the fact that when it comes down to transferring responsibility, both within the ministries, according to the department of defense reporting and in the training force, we have not yet been able to put together the structure to provide sustainability, the skilled elements of a forced structure as distinguished from battalion elements. within the police, we have a pattern of corruption, local influence, this is going to be the pattern of corruption and local influence when we leave. we have a peace negotiation. if you go on the website for the taliban, you will find that they declier the peace negotiation is victory. they won and basically we're forced to concede and we're talking to them because they won.

i think one has to remember what happened in cambodia where we ended up with a kinder, gentler pol pot taking over or what has happened closener nepal. pushing too hard for police too quickly. creates two problems. one is you may empower the opposition, the insurgents in the process. the other is no one knows what to plan for. if we don't know whether there will be a negotiation or it will be successful, how do you plan transition at any level. we never built up to the u.s. force levels that were called for in the original mckristol

plan and we built down more than we planned on building down. similarly we don't have the number of civilians that were called for in the strategy. i think the plans we had at the start of last year for holding on to the south and moving into the east are not tenable with the forces we're going to have left. and the rate of production of the courses between june and september this year is going to create major problems. in terms of afghan presence and structure is we look at the real power structure. we still have a question, can we have a successful election at the same year we're in transition? if so, who will the leader be. will it really matter. we often worry about the quality. nobody can explain to me what it

does besides assume assets. the constitution that basically gives the president power over virtually all of the revenues. that leaves provinces and districts with the structure that is inherently week. the last time i looked, we were about 25% of the goal for afghan officials in the field that we had planned in 2009. whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is going to measure. some would argue these are enough. when you look at the pressure that is coming from outsiders on what happens as we leave, we don't yet know that we are seeing a step up. what is truly striking is the

absolute lack of commitment so far on the part of china or russia both in aid and any other active kind of presence. the most russia has done is supports us in maintaining power projecti projection. in terms of the actual fighting, let me just make a comment about what i've seen. there are two sources of reporting on afghan security that are unclassified and official. one is a report by the department of defense called the 1230 report. it's a semiannual report. another is a report by the inspector general for afghan reconstruction. two years ago, those reports provided data on areas of insurgent influence, areas where the afghan government was or was not becoming more effective. maps of where aid was being

spent, a whole series of indicators. what we see is a pleasure that bears a striking resemblance to what we had in vietnam. we don't talk about insur jebt i fluns, we talk about significant incidents and initiated attacks. now strangely enough we pretend to win by those criteria. they don't take on our conventional forces and win. so the numbers become very favorable relative to the peak fighting of 2010. and that's exactly what happened in vietnam.

what did count was influence, the growth of the ability to control or intimidate the pop laugs, something we no longer report upon. it's very important to me that we do this. we do no provide meaningful measures on where the fighting is or the progress we're making or the areas of insurgent influence. wherever you see a massive drop in transparency, it is not a sign to success. let me just close with the economics of transition. if you go back to the bond conference, the afghan government submitted a paper that's been promising for the last six years.

in return for that, it asks for between $10 and $20 billion a year in aid through 2020. the figures were taken on a world bank study on transition. there's a little problem. the world bank estimate of the afghan economy is approximately half the estimate used by the state department and by the cia. we don't know basically where our money goes. we know how much reappropriate.

we have no formal measures of effectiveness as to what the programs are. please don't misunderstand. i think we have accomplished a great deal with roads, with water and individual aid projects. wove spent since there war began the highest domestic gdp over the same ten-year period. as that goes down, we risk a recession or depression of major proportions. and we do not have the most basic data on the afghan population, the afghan economy or exactly what we've been doing with aid money and exactly who it's going to. >> thank you.

>> i'm going to focus my comments on the risks. the military piece of what we're doing is going better. the problem for me is that the military piece of it never has meshed with other elements is essential to us being capitalized on the gains the military is making. we have never had that right in afghanistan. and now with the clock ticking down to 2014, some of the essential bargains that we made in afghanistan, i think need to be revisited in order for the

transition not to simply result in something we're not going to like a whole lot better than we liked the 2001 version of afghanistan. the first big thing i think we are not doing is investing in rethinking the structure of the electoral system and the distribution of political power in afghanistan. there's a terrific posting on shadow government by my colleague today that looks at the choices that we made sch are political institutions, which are political bargains that we made. and what strikes me is the centralized nature of control. and that's so out of character with a vibrant state and local

challenges to federal authority that it leads me to believe the basic reason we do it is because it's easier for us to maintain it that way. but that's a terrible match for the culture and the politics of afghanistan. and then essentially is what we have done is allowed the afghan political elite to carry over the constitution from when afghanistan had a king. and karzai is invested in those powers. there's not a regional balance to it or a parliamentary balance to it. it seems to me that focussing on the structure of governance, to provide for more pluralistic and representative afghanistan is

something we ought to invest an awful lot of time and attention. if karzai honors the pledge he will not run again in 2014, there's a real opportunity to bring forward a generation of political leadership and put in place structure and practices that will make it a lot better than that is. their loss of faith in their government is a huge impediment to our capacity to carry out our strategy. a second risk that i think i see, and here's the second place i differ with tony. it does look to me like afghanistan does actually have the potential to revert to the 2001 afghanistan. if we apply the end game the

obama administration applied in iraq, i think that's. >> just a recipe for an afghanistan that reinforces the al qaeda narrative. this is their big victory. ten years they achieved nothing, they control the country. why wouldn't al qaeda make that essential node of their worldwide operations? it would feed the narrative that we spent so much time and effort trying to pull up by the roots. and to substitute with a narrative that's about us having a positive vision for the country. it's certainly a battle of narratives and who has a battle we 4r play into. america's ability to change and

influence the world whether it's worth it to do it. but i think it feels to me a lot like the end of vietnam. these countries don't deserve our help. they're fighting against us as well as with us. our ideas and values aren't something they share. it's been too expensive and too hard to try to create positive change. while i'm actually sympathetic to a lot of the emotion behind that, because it is really hard, and failing and winning these kinds of war is confusing and contradictory and it's hard to tell when you're making progress. and very often you only know far in retrospect when the victors in the country you're trying to

affect tell their story. if we allow ourselves to begin to believe those thing, that leads us to vice president biden's counterterrorism strategy. you just kill bad guys wherever you can find bad guy and don't try to send girl school, solve childhood nutrition, improve the quality of governance. in my reason, one of the reasons united states has perpetuated its global power is because most people and most countries in the world actually want us to succeed. countries and people don't actually work very hard against what we are trying to advance in the world very often. and that's a huge, positive element of american strategy. if we stop being more than our military mite, the likelihood of

other people wanting us to succeed and helping us to succeed drops dramatically. not carrying about whether, you know, ten years ago there were 10,000 afghan girls in school. now 2.6 million afghan girls in school. that creates a different afghanistan in the long run. and we're about to convince ourselves that that stuff doesn't matter. we can't do it and they don't want it. and that seems to me likely to cause us a whole lot of problems in the coming two decades. another risk i see in the end game of afghanistan, if we adopt this approach and decide hearts and minds are unwinnable and it's too expensive and hard to do, it makes it much more difficult to get positive cooperation for other things we want to do.

if we don't see that through to a positive finish, why would other countries we are trying to persuade to do what's in our interest, they neert going to see how they and we benefit. and perhaps the country that's most important to per said in this regard is pakistan for reasons that tony eluded to and i think are self-evident. another risk internal to the american logic on this is that whole of government operations is really hard and we're not very good at it. and we're about to convince ourselves that we can't do this. the military is good at their job and nobody else is good at their job and we need. >> strategy where the military

gains aren't weighed down by failures in our diplomacy and our development and other things. i'm sympathetic to the critique. american developers and workers aren't nearly as capable as they could be. we need to fix this. it's a structural fix. it's not impossible. in fact, businesses all over the country succeed at this. the military succeeds at this. we can fix this. we just haven't. and we're looking at the consequence quinces. our military success outfaces our capacity to capitalize on it in diplomatic and economic terms. but the solution to that isn't falling back to strategies that don't have constituent elements of diplomatic and development and other aspects, it's making

ourselv ourselves as good at those other things as we make our military success. another risk that i think tony rightly pointed out is the afghan national security forces can not do what we expect them to do. this seems to me very much a an open question. while i see positive signs, for me, the most significant one recently was the comparison of the studies that the american military did about green on blue attacks in afghanistan. and one the afghan army did. the american military did what the american military did so wonderfully and indeeringly well. it critiqued what we could do better. we need to be more sensitive, we need to be more knowledgeable and respectful of the afghans and i'm sure that's all true, but it focuses on us and the

solution. the afghan army also did a study and what they found is that the majority of green on blue attacks occurred -- the perpetrators of them, their families are living in pakistan. so that tells you something about their commitment to afghanistan. it tells you about the potential for hostage taking. it tells you something about the likelihood of radicalization. not only did they identify those factors, but they also have moved to require all afghan soldier soldiers to have their family living in afghanistan. that suggests to me the afghan national security forces are perhaps better than any of us are giving them credit far. that for me is an important sign. that said, to the extent that our military operations still depend so heavily on night raids, i think there's a real

question whether afghans, when they are in the leadership are going to be willing to do this in a way that we've done this. i was an tabak in general allen's testimony that we conducted 2,200 night raids in the course of the last year. and he also said that 82% of the them captured their intended target and only 1.5% of those raids resulted in civilian casualties. that's a very admirable statistic. but that means at least 330 times a year afghan civilians are being killed in the conduct of night raids. right? that's almost a death a day or several deaths a day over the course of the year. but it's understandable to me why that's difficult for them to

sus tin. it's understandable to me that when it's afghans conducting the raids, they will have a much more difficult time building political support for that. and to the extent our strategy continues to depend very heavily on that, it seems to me problematic. two last quick points. first, i think we are at risk of adopting a strategy where we quarantine failed states. and i would want to be a lot more confident in our ability to play defense before i would shift our strategy that way. it does seem to me that bomb threat in december 20099 suggests to me that we want to have a layers defense and we want to be a lot better at the defense piece of it before we start to shift our strategy that way. and lastly, perhaps the biggest risk of all of the trajectory that we're on in afghanistan is that we're reinforcing pakistan's paranoia about us

abandon them, about india taking over in afghanistan, about our fundamental hostility to their security interests. and we really ought to in the course of the next 18 months find a way to deal with that if we want an in state and afghanistan that we're going to feel achieves our security interests. >> i've learned over time, as many as you have when a speaker says i only have a few things to say or i'll be brief, you should understand this is a statement of faith and not of fact and settle back in your chair. nevertheless i'm going to try to actually be on nine minutes. afghanistan is not going well. you've heard a lot about that and seen a lot about it in the press. it's also an incredibly

complicated situation and the result of that is that it's very convenient for cherry picking. those who consider it everything impossible can find ample evidence to support the conclusion. those who say the strategy is going well will pick a different array of facts. the battling goes back and forth and positioning get harder but not wiser. it's very difficult to get out of this because it's so complex that those who study it or visit it as they begin to develop positions can almost invariably find the examples to support the position they take in. maintaining an open mind in this kind of situation is extraordinarily difficult frankly. a few basics but not to the exclusion of all the

complexities. to my mind, there are two big categories of risk. to us strategically in afghanistan. one is that a premature departure leads to a civil war. i don't think it leads to a taliban reconquest, but i do think it leads to a civil war. afghans are talking about a civil war today and thinking about how they would conduct themselves and position themselves. not planning. no one is going to start a civil war. the amount of talk increased by march of 2011. it had become sort of common wisdom the end of that year.

that brought in all the usual suspects. afghanistan, pakistan, russia. take lebanon as an instralllust in point. they were less capable then a those who will play in afghanistan. that civil carry as the potential to destabilize a very large part of central asia. we cannot allow the indians and their northern alliance encircle them, so there are many who will prevent that to happen including those we are fighting with. i find it difficult pakistan will be simultaneously able to do better at coping its own extremism while supporting close cousins of the extremists in the war in afghanistan. so i think the risk in pakistan gets worse.

and then a point that my colleagues mentioned, it's a huge propaganda and moral shot in the arm, to use a simply fied term, jihadist. the second superpower defeated god is on our side forward to victory, i don't know where that plays out, but if you think that's a risk that's not a risk, then i think you should think twice about it. it is possible that we will fail. i will say the margin for a kind of messy success is quite narrow. and it is narrower now than it was a couple of years ago. and some of that is our own doing. i would like to propose, though, that the debate about this needs to deal with two basic questions.