turkey. his most recent book, the last days of the afghan republic, a doomed evacuation 20 years in the making, which is co authored with arsalan nouri looks at how american policies led to the collapse of the afghan government in the 2021. his 2011 book, bazar politics, power and pottery in an afghan market town, based on 18 months of research on how a single town worked together to maintain peace even while the insurgency grew rapidly in neighboring districts. it was the first full length ethnography published on afghanistan in over 20 years. he's also also the author of numerous additional works on afghanistan. dr. vickers, you are recognized. >> thank you. co-chair choudhury and jackson commissioners, thank you for the opportunity to share my thoughts

on the afghanistan war. i would like to make three points in my opening statement. most of what i'm about to say is drawn from my recently published memoirs by all means available. so i refer you to ed if you'd like additional context and details. my first point is that it's important to remember that large scale us involvement in afghanistan began decades before the 9/11 attacks. during the last decade of the cold war, we waged the largest and most successful covert action program in american history to drive the soviets out of afghanistan and help bring an end to the cold war. it was the only war the red army ever lost. the afghan people suffered 1 million dead and saw one third of the country's population displaced as a result of the soviet occupation, but they continued to resist until they won. there are significant lessons in the u.s. experience for how to achieve escalation dominance and prevail in proxy war against a

great power, adversary. and unfortunately, there are also lessons on how to lose the peace after you've won the war. after our decisive victory, we disengaged from the region. a brutal civil war followed which led to the takeover of most of afghanistan by the taliban and the use of afghanistan's territory as a sanctuary for al qaeda. prior to 9/11, we treated al qaeda as just another terrorist group and pursued a reactive counterterrorism strategy that did not deny sanctuary to our enemy. simply put al qaeda was at war , with us, but we weren't at war with them. after the 9/11 attacks, we shifted to a proactive counterterrorism strategy that did deny sanctuary to aq and it ultimately led to the group's operational defeat. my second point is that the brilliant unconventional campaign that the u.s. conducted during the fall of 2001 was only the initial campaign of what would turn out to be a very long war across multiple theaters

against al qaeda, its allies and offshoots. a war that began in afghanistan would spread to four kinetic theaters. pakistan, afghanistan, syria, iraq, yemen, somalia and north africa and would include multiple non kinetic counterterrorism operations and several other theaters. after al qaeda's senior leadership escaped to pakistan at the end of 2001, the counterterrorism fight became largely operationally and geographically distinct from the counterinsurgency fight in afghanistan. from 2004 onwards, afghanistan became primarily a platform for the counterterrorism fight in the pakistan afghanistan theater rather than a battleground in the war with al qaeda. through a series of policy and capability innovations that i describe in my memoirs, our counterterrorism strategy was

transformed to reflect this reality. as a result, we were able to deny al qaeda and its safe haven providers any sanctuary, dismantle core al qaeda and prevent another 9/11 attack. let me now turn to our 19 year war with the taliban and start with the obvious. we won our wars with al qaeda and its offshoots, we lost our war with the taliban. one reason was that we couldn't solve the pakistan sanctuary problem. we could largely deny al qaeda any sanctuary after the group relocated in pakistan, but we couldn't deny the taliban sanctuary there. pakistan's army leadership mostly supported our efforts to disrupt dismantle and defeat al qaeda, but it saw the taliban as a strategic instrument it could use to create a government favorable to its interests in afghanistan. the pakistanis played a double game -- part open ally, part covert enemy.

to be sure our counterinsurgency , strategy in afghanistan was not without its faults. we succumbed to mission creep and strategic overreach in our nation building efforts and did not remain focused on the reason we went into afghanistan in the first place -- to overthrow the taliban regime, defeat al qaeda and prevent another 9/11 attack. we started way too late to build credible afghan security forces and wasted substantial funds on building the wrong security forces. as a result, we transitioned security responsibility to the afghan government much later then we should have. but the real reason we lost is that two american presidents decided that defeat was preferable to continued support for the afghan government and indirect conflict with the taliban. this was a protracted war in which we had an asymmetric advantage and escalation dominance and war after 2015 suffering very few casualties. the paradox of our war with the taliban is that while we couldn't win in a short period

of time with 150,000 u.s. and coalition troops, we couldn't lose with a few thousand advisors as long as we provided support for the afghan government and used our air power and extremists to prevent the taliban from massing and taking over the cities. we instead chose to defeat ourselves. the afghanistan war is full of lessons on effective and ineffective, covert action, counterterrorism and counterinsurgency strategies. the importance as commissioner crocker mentioned of strategic patience and persistence and the importance of standing by our allies and partners. i wish you all the best as you proceed with your work. >> thank you, dr vickers. i would like to now recognize dr coburn for his testimony. please go ahead. >> i want to start by thanking thank you. i want to start by thanking the

commission for the invitation to be here today as well as their willingness to take on this critical and really challenging piece of work. i think it's important to remember those images of the taliban marching into kabul in august 2021. while many were shocked at how quickly the afghan army and government fell. there was no great popular uprising in support of the taliban. either the taliban did not win as much as the afghan government with all its international backing became an empty husk that crumbled away. this was the result of a government and international community failure to build legitimacy, the empowering of afghan leaders who undermined the government and was until the later stages, i believe, avoidable. to understand the trajectory, i think it's important to return to those early days of us presence in afghanistan when there was a great deal of, of optimism, both political and economic among policymakers and afghans themselves. this was certainly the case when i first arrived in istalif, a small market town about 45 minutes west of bagram air base in 2005, the taliban had leveled most of

the town in 1997, and over the almost two years i spent there, people were building homes, opening businesses and getting married. the international presence was welcomed and upcoming elections were viewed with some curiosity. attitudes towards the us changed dramatically in the decade that followed. as afghan commanders and other politicians bought up gardens around the town, the economy increasingly revolved around a small set of power brokers who enriched themselves largely through contracts on bagram air base or through other international connections. the town never embraced the taliban but there was more and more sympathy for anti government groups and disillusionment with international presence. as i went on to work for the united states institute of peace, the afghan research and evaluation unit and a series of other organizations i got the , opportunity to travel across the country and observe how variations of this pattern repeated itself almost

everywhere. certainly there were areas where the taliban had deeper roots and allies, but the taliban victory was not due to affinity for their ideology, but the erosion of faith in the government and the international community's ability to improve the lives of ordinary afghans. ambassador newman previous previously spoke to the multiplicity of us policies over the course of the 20 year war. one of the issues with these policies was their siloed nature. counter terrorism and later counterinsurgency operations and priorities were built without enough consultation with other u.s. funded development, governance and human rights initiatives. in many cases, these projects actually undermined each other. at the same time, afghans did not perceive the distinction between coin development and government projects. they were all part of the same political economic shifts that were reshaping the country. this is particularly true during the third year when the amount of money being spent and the speed needed to spend it increased while the us government insisted it was not nation building throughout the war. many of its

policies suggested otherwise to the afghan public. this left afghans confused and politically uncertain. this was highlighted to me by a voter in paktia in 2009 who asked me who i thought he should vote for. should he trust one of the government bureaucrats who is attempting to build a state that might eventually bring some resources to the area or a commander who had stolen his land, but it would at least provide him with some protection from the taliban? later, more and more afghan communities confronting civilian casualties by the international forces and the afghan government's failure to provide resources turned to anti government groups who could at least provide them with some sort of stability. fueling this process. afghan communities watched coin funds taken by commanders that undermine both governance and human rights and massively poorly and poorly designed and poorly overseen development projects that enriched international contractors and afghan elites but did a little to improve development indicators. the elections of 2009 were a turning

point with a drastic increase in fraud and corruption which would mar all elections in afghanistan that followed. the u.s. backed settlement between hamid karzai and abdullah abdullah that finally resolved the election prevented violence in the short term. but ultimately, it was seen by afghans as evidence that the us was not truly committed to democratic country practices in the country. frustration with the failure of the afghan government to build legitimacy and local capacity resulted in policymakers making the same mistakes again and again. take for instance the conception of local governance as envisioned in the 2004 constitution through district and village councils, the government in a box approach at the height of the counter insurgency and most recently, the world bank backed citizens charter program. on a policy level, these programs looked very different were led by different organizations, but locally, each envisioned new centrally imposed local governance structures that would theoretically build

legitimacy. instead, each of these proved not just impossible to implement, but when they were partially implemented, created government interference not desired by many afghans while providing resources that were monopolized by commanders and other power brokers, indirectly fueling anti government groups . related to the siloing of these policies. i hope the commission also takes time to review the size and scope of contracting that went on during the afghan war. the shortcoming of contractors were most visible on the military side, where contractors managed everything from police training to fuel delivery, but development, governments and human rights projects were all largely contracted out as well. that means the government had little direct control over how money was spent and profit was prioritized over ensuring that the outcomes actually help us, and afghan government efforts. in many efforts, any instances, it would have been far more effective to spend less money well than the waste and distortion of the afghan economy

that created contracting created for afghan from afghan doctors who left hospitals to work as translators to a real estate boom on stolen land near the us embassy and traffic jams caused by armored cars, contracting money did not create sustainable economic growth as much as it created an economic free for all. it does not seem coincidental to me that the us is longest war to date is also the war that relied the most on contracting. some reflecting back on the afghan war have suggested that we didn't know and that for some reason the u.s. government could never really understand afghan politics or culture. i would strongly resist this urge. represented on this commission, andrew wilder's report on the relationship between aid and security. reporting on us military operations, empowered anti government actors and dipali mukata paya's work on the provincial governors were all timely well informed critiques of us policy which were widely read but rarely incorporated

into policy decisions. i believe it's worth the commission's time to ask you, how did so many people know there was structural failing with the u.s. government's approach? but why was it so unable to change course at inflection point? after inflection point, earlier lessons were not learned, opportunities were missed and a self defeating cycle of overly ambitious, overly funded, overly militated approaches continued. ultimately, it was the us military personnel, front line civilians and ordinary afghans who bore the burden of these shortcomings. and i appreciate the commission's careful inquiry into those areas. >> thank. >> thank you so much to both of these witnesses as well. dr coburn and doctor vickers, incredible work, incredibly informative for our efforts. um doctor vickers is a former boss and mentor of mine. so it's a particular honor to get to

question him today. your book laid out in really compelling detail, the wins of our counterterrorism campaign. what might arguably be the closest thing that we can point to as success in our 20 year war. i wonder what you think about that campaign and what our landscape might look like going forward. what do you think are the couple of biggest lessons and takeaways for policymakers? >> when you are facing a group like al qaeda that has global reach and global geopolitical ambitions, you have to treat it differently from other terrorist groups. the prism that we looked at terrorism through before 9/11 was really one of episodic security incidents to which a reactive counterterrorism policy was appropriate. and we had capabilities for that effect. that's not appropriate in the case of a protracted counterterrorism war where your homeland is at risk because of

globalization and, and other things. so you have to take a lot of different measures, expand the aperture of what you do across your government and, and security landscape to, to deal with that. turning operationally them, the most important thing is denying sanctuary. every time in the last 20 years when we've given these groups sanctuary, the threat to the united states has gone way up. so the period when al qaeda before 9/11 and then the period when al qaeda relocated into the afghanistan pakistan border region, the federally administered tribal areas, the threat, you know, we had the transatlantic airliner plot in 2006 -- attempt to blow up 10 airliners over the atlantic. and then as al qaeda grew in yemen for a period of time and then al qaeda in syria. and so in each case, when we gave these groups a couple years to plot and train

the threat went way up. and so one, there's the need to deny sanctuary certainly if you can and then to have a protracted campaign that deals with that. and then there's defensive measures too, so hardening our defenses. we had strategic warning that the aviation sector was a likely target, that symbols of us power, the u.s. capitol, wall street and the pentagon could be attacked but not tactical warning. but in the face of that, you know, you can't defend everywhere all the time, but you can harden your defenses both by expanding the fbi, which we did after 9/11, and by hardening cockpit doors and other other things that made a big difference. so combination of offense, defense, deny sanctuary and recognizing the nature of your adversary and then staying

focused on what's achievable. ambassador newman talked about this earlier, but our vital interests in pakistan and afghanistan really came down to two. one of them was to prevent another 9/11 attack and the other was not to have pakistan's nuclear weapons get loose and in the hands of some really bad actor, terrorist group or others. and so that focus on realistic and achievable objectives because it is important because this kind of war in the series of campaigns that's necessary could go on for decades. if you look at this as a global insurgency or at least a multi theater insurgency rather than an insurgency, they last a long time. >> in your book you talked about just the incredible efforts that our operators and our policymakers went to, to prevent civilian casualties. and indeed, this was something that you and i worked on together a really

important effort. and yet so much of the public narrative about our ct campaign does focus on things like civilian casualties. some of the partners that we worked with that were less than adhering to our same standards, you know, unjust tensions, things like that. i wonder how you think about those downsides in terms of what you did as a policy maker to try to mitigate them and in some cases, mitigate the perception of them because i think we know that they're not always entirely true as well. >> it is a twofold problem. one to try to limit them to the greatest extent possible and then to deal with the perceptions that often don't match reality. the standards for operations where al qaeda largely went after 9/11 into areas where we didn't have active us armed hostilities outside of afghanistan and iraq. so pakistan border region, yemen, elsewhere. the standards for kinetic strike

were near certainty, near certainty that the target was who you thought it was and near certainty that there was zero collateral damage. now, that does mean perfection. you may miss a hostage could be hidden that you do not see. but in you're planning your operations, you have to make sure that if a child suddenly darted in at the last minute, you could do what we call shift, cold, move the weapon to a safe spot so you are minimizing to the largest extent possible. now, in war zones, those standards are a little lower because there's just a lot more combat going on and it's reasonable certainty. and so the combination of using air power and then raids, you know, did lead to more civilian casualties than we would like, even with precision strike forces, you know, doing the raids. what help there, and it took us about a decade to do, this was

one using more partner forces to do it, but we should have done that sooner, but also doing call outs, you know, in a lot of cases and that meant we could achieve our objective without, you know, kinetic action. and so again, it doesn't reduce it to zero, but it, but it helps a lot. and then the trouble with reporting is it is all over the place. the u.s. government has its statistics which generally are pretty darn accurate, but other groups had some that were very, very different and, and, you know, it depends who you talk to and others. i'm confident in the us government statistics not to be perfect but to be quite accurate. >> thank you very much. i will take the opportunity to ask you a question. one thing i very much appreciate about your testimony and your book, the work that you've done is that you are rooting the war

of the past 20 years in a deeply historical context that goes back to the cold war. it's not a narrative that um is part of the american popular consciousness when we think of the war in afghanistan. so i think that's uh very important. it's a good model for us as we do our work that we must consider the past is prologue dynamic. and so my question is a little bit about that. given that we disengaged at the end of the cold war from afghanistan, from pakistan after what was tactically a very successful engagement, how are we equipped to respond to the need when 9/11 happened? can you talk a little bit about the relationship that the united states had, the insights into both afghanistan and pakistan, not just in terms of ct capabilities, but also

diplomatically? because i think that diplomatic reinforces the ability of ct so they are connected. i would love to hear you elaborate on that, please. >> sure. after the soviets withdrew from afghanistan, you know, 1989 was this miraculous year where you had the fall of the berlin wall and liberation of eastern europe and u.s. attention turned toward europe to consolidate the reunification of germany and other things. and then we had legislative impairments, a thing called the pressler amendment in afghanistan that once the president couldn't president george h. w. bush, in this case couldn't certify that pakistan , wasn't past the point of no return on its nuclear weapons. we had to cut off aid to pakistan and that led while we didn't disengage completely from pakistan, it led to what the pakistanis called the trust

deficit for 12 years. up until nine we really had a minimal relationship. our interests weren't always aligned. we try to replicate that. we tried love, we tried some threats and other things. we could never make it really work in the same way. with afghanistan it was more of a disengagement. we could maintain some intelligence and some diplomatic actions but essentially we were more building from scratch in the years right before 9/11, would we sent people in to reestablish contact with some of our former commanders. and then right after. we were building from a low base to develop knowledge that we had essentially lost over a decade. >> thank you.

i would like to turn to co-chair jackson. >> thank you. i guess one of my questions which is you have a hook in your testimony, dr. vickers, on this escalation. first you could explain what that means to a non specialist audience. i think it's a compelling part of your argument. the second is a larger question which is related to the sort of work the 9/11 commission did, which is making an arcane set of topics legible to a non specialist audience. so you say that the war against al qaeda starts in afghanistan and then spreads to these four separate theaters. can you walk us through just in generalities why that spread occurred? >> the idea of escalation dominance is something that comes from the nuclear strategy literature. thankfully, no one was ever able

to achieve it even though both sides tried in the cold war a lot. i tried to apply it in my memoir , why we could win in afghanistan against extremely difficult lives in the 1980's and lose in syria. why were we effective in some of our counterterrorism campaigns, pakistan, and it took longer in other places to do it with the same government in the same tools? it's where you can get an advantage over your adversary that can bring about their deceit and they cannot respond. now, that doesn't mean, you know, that it's escalation, dominance at a certain level of the conflict. with the soviets they had options to invade pakistan or use nuclear weapons or others,

but they were generally deterred from doing that. so at the level of their occupation of afghanistan and our support for the afghan resistance by a series of actions where we essentially increased our commitment to afghanistan by a factor of 12 in 12 months. we won that battle of the surges. and so that's how i use the concept and then to talk about al qaeda. up until 9/11 and a little bit after that, al qaeda was a single organization with operatives around the world but one organization that was controlled out of the sanctuary in afghanistan. beginning with the u.s. invasion of iraq, a local group became al qaeda in iraq, its first affiliate. al qaeda in yemen was established in 2006, you know, and part of this is conditions in the islamic world that led to the growth of these groups and

connections and communications. in 2009, al qaeda in yemen and al qaeda operatives in saudi arabia merged and al qaeda in the arabian group in in north peninsula. a group in in north africa became al qaeda and the islamic maghreb after 2006 or seven, al shabaab in somalia declared allegiance to al qaeda in al 2012. qaeda in syria was established under various names with the beginning of the syrian civil war. and then the only and then al qaeda in the indian subcontinent was established by ayman al zaw zawahiri, the emir of al qaeda in 2014. taking advantage of conditions in various areas and sending emissaries was how they expanded. it's one of al qaeda's successes in the islamic state as well in being able to spread their reach

after 9/11. >> i have one quick follow-up. so how should we think post metastasizing about the significance of afghanistan distinct from these new theaters? because i think that's one of the questions for an educated lay audience that is elusive. >> al qaeda remained in the afghanistan pakistan border region. a few leaders led to iran, some are still there after 9/11 but most went to pakistan. and so that be that remained the most dangerous threat up until 2012, 2013, between 2008 and 2012 under new counterterrorism strategy, we really decimated court al qaeda. and then the greatest threat to the american homeland became al qaeda in yemen for a few years. and then al qaeda in syria and you know, we took actions

against them as well. but the pakistan-afghanistan theater remained, you know, and that's where the senior leaders were. so it remained the principal theater strategically, if not operationally. >> thank you. i would like to recognize commissioner bob taft, who is joining us remotely, for his time. >> thank you very much. i am very honored to serve as a member of this commission as an appointee of ohio congressman, mike turner. i was serving as governor of ohio on september 11, 2001. almost overnight, our agenda turned over to the topic of homeland security. over a 20 year period, thousands of ohioans served in afghanistan

, tragically, too many, losing their lives or sustaining life changing injuries. so from that standpoint, all ohioans and of course, all americans as well, really deserve a credible independent assessment of u.s. policy in afghanistan. our work and our recommendations will be even more important to protect the future national security of our country. so i really appreciate the honor to be able to serve. i want to be able to thank both of our distinguished witnesses. i do have one question for dr coburn, you suggest that the failure to build legitimacy of afghanistan government institutions was a serious failure and that it was avoidable. so my question would be, looking at the conflict from the early

stages of u.s. involvement, what could have been done differently to build a greater level of government legitimacy at both the local and national levels? >> thank you. i think that is a really important question. i would say that the ultimate legitimacy of the afghan government lay in the hands of the afghan elites that created the government. that being said, i think u.s. policy did a lot to undermine and distort priorities for afghan leaders. listening to dr. vickers, i think one of the strong contrast between the mujahideen period when they were fighting against the soviets was the leaders during that period that we were supplying weapons to wanted to win. they wanted the same outcome that we did. increasingly over the course of

20 years in afghanistan a lot of leaders were profiting from the war and did not necessarily want the u.s. money coming into slowdown. i look at this primarily on a local level but i think this works for national level elites, as well. so just to give you one small area where the u.s. did spend some money looking at how local -- looking at how local leaders do dispute resolution. dispute resolution is really important in areas without a strong government process. so what you do is you bring it to a leader who has a certain reputation. he resolves the issue because the community respects that leader, they enforce the resolution and his reputation grows. so he is incentivized to make sure this dispute remains resolved. the alternative is if the leader

has an alternative source of power, like international funds or international weapons. all of a sudden that leader is no longer responsive to the people that he is living amongst. we saw many afghan leaders who would have been more listening to their constituencies and ordinary afghans in their communities who ultimately turned away from them. and let me just tie this to a couple of issues that were brought forward earlier. one issue of u.s. policy here was the total lack of total ambiguity around the time frame. how long was the u.s. going to be afghanistan? when were we going to leave? because if you are an afghan leader, particularly one of these former muja deen leaders, if you think that the afghan the u.s. is truly going to be there for the next 30 years supporting

a democratic process, you're going to in that and try to become a part of it. if you think they might leave tomorrow, you're more incentivized to grab as many resources as you can in the short term. because it was always ambiguous leaders were incentivized to grab the cash and just take what they could today because who knows what there would be tomorrow. >> thank you. commissioner taft, you have a couple extra minutes. would you like to use your time or yield it? >> i would like to recognize commissioner jeremy bash who is joining us remotely. >> thank you to the cochairs and fellow commissioners. and today i want to offer some comments and questions on behalf of myself as well as my co commissioner michael allen, whose travel to this hearing got upended by the flight

cancellations overnight. but together, we both agree that the work here must be rigorously bipartisan and nonpartisan. and to date, it has been, i visited afghanistan many times between 2005 and 2013 during my service on the staff of the house intelligence committee at cia and at dod and i was part of the leadership team at cia that oversaw the operations against al qaeda, senior leaders with whom the operation against osama bin laden. and i want to thank ranking member, adam smith from the has for appointing me to serve on this commission. but i think most consequentially for me and personally, for me, i sat at the right elbow of a cia director and a secretary of defense as he signed the deployment orders, sending our men and women into harm's way to afghanistan. and i stood with him at dover and at arlington cemetery to welcome home our fallen heroes including the

special operators referenced earlier by commissioner molino. to jennifer to liz, to darren, to harold to scott, to dane and to jeremy and to their families. we can never repay the debt of gratitude we owe you. and i want to just pose this thought and question to my long time friend and colleague dr vickers because i think you really kind of put your finger right on the essence of the hard problem here at the heart of the commission's work is a very difficult question -- how does the u.s. youth its instruments of national power to deny safe haven to terrorists that threaten the u.s. and our interest and our citizens and our allies without having to physically occupy that territory and without having to find and trained and equipped and secure a government that may itself be

threatened by violence? how do we help a government crack down on violence while at the same time, expand that government's popular support from its citizenry so that we can leave. and can you conduct effective counter counterterrorism operations from over the horizon platforms without physical occupation of territory that i think is one of the questions at the very heart of this commission's inquiry. what is the distinction between being physically present on the ground and being able to do things from a distance from standoff from over the horizon? >> one, there is the tension between small footprint and large footprint operations. and you know, what's important for strategists to remember is

there's a political context to this. the more you raise the stakes you have a large footprint approach, the more the american people and political leaders are going to expect results in the near term. and so if you think you're going to have to sustain this over a long time, you have to have a sustainable strategy. and part of that is, you know, focusing on our objectives, as i said, -- the dangers that come with large flows of money in the disincentives to come with that. since terrorism has become a global problem, building a global counterterrorism network is an important instrument of ours, of shared instruments, instruments to disrupt a lot of these plots before they get kinetic and to capture them. in areas where you do have these

sanctuaries, assuming we have the capacity to do very precise surveillance and then strike if necessary, to have that capability and being willing to use it on a sufficient scale. to your question about -- democracy i agree it is a multi generational project. one mistake we made after 9/11 is thinking we had to transform the middle east to achieve our counterterrorism objectives. and one, it wasn't achievable and two, it wasn't necessary. and democracy is a good thing but it is not something you will be able to implement in a fairly short. of time. in the latter years of the obama administration we developed capabilities in the event that we would need them. over time they degrade. it is always better to have a

host country partner. we lost all that in afghanistan with the taliban came to power. we lost all the afghan forces that we trained that we could use to help achieve our objectives. they are now relying on the ability to strike remotely and intelligence that will degrade over time. intelligence is something you gain from your host country partner and what you contribute yourself. it's a gap filler in the near term. its not the ideal situation. >> thank you. i yelled back. >> thank you. i would like to recognize commissioner ashley. >> i was remiss in not thanking the vfw not only for hosting us but what you do for all of our veterans and to acknowledge senator warner's leadership on the oversight committee and for the appointment and to be a part of this commission.

thank you for being with us, dr. vickers. thank you to our witnesses. my question is for dr. vickers. several months ago -- passing that on, fascinating book. not only the story from your time -- first hand view of what you saw over several decades. a story that you might or might not remember. you came to see me. i had been there two weeks. everything we were doing. you asked me a really hard question. are we winning? it made me think about what we have talked about today. fundamental things we need to

understand and the questions we have to ask. it was a very unsatisfying answer. you don't have to nod or acknowledge that. but that's. so the answer was it was a very unsatisfying answer. when you think about your time as undersecretary for intel and we look at the intelligence reform, terrorist prevention act, the 9/11 commission, we came out with the dni. as you look at what you want to achieve as a senior intelligence, what are your take aways in the war in afghanistan of what we did well, and is there any structural changes a we should be thinking about as we go forward? >> so in terms of afghanistan,

and the 20-year engagement there i think what we did well was prevent another 9/11 attack from emanating from the pakistan/afghanistan border region, and you know, what we did terribly was lots of things along the way but at the end the biggest sin was abandoning of afghan government, excludeing them from the talks but then also thinking like, i'll be very blunt, you know, the idea that handing afghan over to the taliban which reportedly our top leaders were warned about doesn't sound like a great idea to me even 20 years after 9/11. and particularly when you maintain a government there at

fairly minimal, whatever we had done in the past by 2020, you know, we had only a few thousand troops there and an embassy presence and we could have sustained that. so i think that was the thing that we did. there were lots of things along the way, i tried to explain in my book, but that's the big one. in terms of structural reforms, a lot of the u.s. government right now is focused on great power competition in china and russia and the economic and particularly technological competition, and if you imagine yourself like this is 1947 again, how to fashion the government to deal with the new challenge, the new cold war. on the counter terrorism side the great danger is we go back to pre-9/11 both in policy and in cutting back the capabilities too much. some of our, if you look at a

lot of things that led up to 9/11 and the big one is not tee niing sanctuary and understanding this group well enough, but we also had capability, capacity, policy and legal shortfalls that contributed to that. you know, we didn't have enough special operations for the wars we found ourselves in, iraq, afghanistan, the global fight against al qaeda. and that took a decade after 9/11. we had experimental predator aircraft that weren't armed. we got a look at osama bin laden in end of september 2000 and couldn't shoot him so we recommendied that afterwards but then it took a decade plus to build up a sufficient fleet. the f.b.i. was transformed after 9/11 and that took time, you know, poltsy changes and ct. the legal domestic intelligence divide.

so lots of those had to be addressed and i think successfully were and the challenges maintaining it. i used to get really frustrated in department of defense strategic reviews when some eager booefer on the joint staff would say all right what is it, is it going to be china or al qaeda? why would i choose that? you know. i mean, they're both threats to the united states. nuclear weapons and conventional forces. no, i kind of need both. >> thank you. i would like to recognize commissioner crocker. >> thank you. you spoke of the importance of history, a point that was emphasized by the previous panel i think very effectively. the writ of this commission extends for 20 years.

that is an entire generation. we had service members who fought in afghanistan who had no living memory of 9/11. and that time is history didn't begin in 2001 and it didn't end in 2021. you referred -- so an appreciation of history as you've emphasized i think is very important. you mentioned the cold war era, the fight against the soef -- soviets. i seem to remember that the press aechlt became law in 1985. is that correct? >> it did but it wasn't implemented until 1990, meaning the president each year the president had to certify because of the law and we were very aware of this at c.i.a. at the time without going into detail.

but 1990 is when it got triggered. >> right. and just help me with my recollection here. i haven't looked at this in quite some time. in the period between 1985 and 1990, in which pakistan was a critical ally, i think i recall that the administration got a waiver to the provisions to the presser amendment so that it did not go into effect during the war itself. >> that may be true. i don't recall that. i mean, you know, the key dates for me was monitoring the program and when you would be able to get a waiver. i just don't recall that. and then 1990 when it was triggered. >> and in 1990 of course it went into effect after the anti-soviet jihad was over and won and in which, as the pakistani narrative goes, the united states no longer needed them as a critical ally.

so they went from the most ally of allies to the most sanctioned of adversaries overnight. and as the pakistani version of history goes, the presser amendment was held in abay answer because of their critical role. and i would ask if you see any dots to connect in tower testimony between the close pakistani alliance and the cold war era and the way it ended with the sanctions imposed by the presser amendment to the later part of your testimony in which you note that pakistan saw the taliban as a strategic instrument it could use to create a government favorable to its interest in afghanistan. the pakistanis played a double game part open ally part koefrt enemy. so do you see any connections between the pakistani version of

the history of the presser amendment and the way it ended the alliance and their decisions vis-a-vis the taliban? >> that's a fantastic question and you're really making me think and reach back into history. you know, i do in the sense that a big lesson besides the lack of reliability, the pakistani, a big lesson the pakistanis took from the end of the cold war when they were a frontline ally that could be invaded by the soviets was the u.s. was ephemeral. when it didn't see its interest it would tone it down and go back. that care rid forward after 9/11, that same mindset about how much they would cooperate with us and were sympathetic to

their new problems which then became more india so they looked at afghan p through the end of india. they wanted the afghan government to get rid of it. but also, in thinking that we would leave, the comment was made earlier about -- or no, dr. coburn made the point about do you think you're leaving soon or staying for the long term? pakistanis thought we were on the way out in 2003 when we went to iraq, and not surprisingly that's when they kind of took the muzzle off the taliban a little bit. they had, they had given them sanctuary after 9/11, but really

2003 is when they really started unleashing and supporting the tall bans because they thought we were leaving and they wanted a government favorable to their interest and they were able to get away despite large u.s. aid and other things during that decade. but i think you're right in terms of the strategic mindset in terms of these guys aren't staying here. so we have to protect our interest even if it means opposing their interests from time to time. and that's what made them such a peculiar ally for us, that on the one hand we needed them for counter terrorism and we wanted a stable government so we didn't have loose nukes but they were sponsoring people who are killing americans and we have no other ally in the world that does both at the same time. >> thank you. again, the lessons of history. i just have a bit of time left. i would like to put a question to dr. coburn. in your testimony you note the

size and scope of the contracting during the afghanistan war. i particularly focused on the civilian side, the role of u.s. aid. it is said that during the vietnam war that usaid had more officers in the cords program that they had globally at the time of afghanistan. you talk a bit about the problem of corruption in contracting but can you just drill down briefly on the developmental costs that you see in handling our development portfolio through contractors vice through usaid directly. >> thanks for that question. i think you're hitting on a key point. i think sometimes the examples we look at are the most spectacular ones where we see this corruption happen. i would argue that there's actually even deeper structural

flaws. just to give you an example, from something i've been thinking about recently, working at a college seeing an overhaul something like our registration process, there's two ways to do this. i can go to the office that does registration and ask them how they might do this and they'll say well this might be difficult. we do this, we do that. i can also find contractors who tell me i need to do this, they'll do it perfectly all for a price. so i think what one of the issues that we've heard constantly is that there were real challenges getting information back to washington. and on the usaid side one of the issues with the contracting models was contracting out to development groups that would say oh we can do that. this is great.

just do this. everyone will be happy and weren't getting those reports back that really tee scribed the actual situation on the ground. and some of this wasn't malicious, just the way the contracting process is set up. it was just one further disportion and a, there was not enough acknowledgement that contractors simply don't have the same incentive to do as good a job that was connected to the actual strategies of the overall government policy than if you were to do it effectively in-house. and i think that's the most glaring on the usaid side and i've heard similar points made on the military side as well. >> thank you. >> i would like to recognize commissioner fata. >> thank you. i'm going to stay with dr. coburn and pardon me if i don't look at the screen because all these cameras confuse me.

so i found your written and verbal comments interesting and thought provoking and i think the question just posed by commissioner crocker is a good lead for what i want to talk about. in your comments you talk about contractors perhaps not being as efficient or as motivated as our uniformed forces and those that wear the u.s. government badge. you also commented that there was the afghanistan war, you could argue iraq, too, had the most amount of contractors ever. and you referenced world war ii when you referenced vietnam. the reality is following the first gulf war and then with the clinton drawdown we downsized and we decided we were going to outsource that kind of

capabilities. so as secretary rumsfeld would say, you go to war with the military you have, not the one you wish you had. right? so i think that becomes an important factor as to why so many contractors were deployed and i'm sure secretary victors and others will, and dr. jones, will support the comment that when you have the simultaneous wars of iraq and afghanistan you needed as many uniformed trigger puller folks as possible. so the contracting community plays a very important role so i want to put that out second. i do believe based on your written testimony that there's a dangerous inference you make when you say it does not seem coins dental to me that the u.s.'s longest war to date is also the one that had the most contracting. i just think that it's a dangerous inference in that it almost sounds like the war was

dragged out for war profit year tiering. i think as this commission and us as commissioners have acknowledged the contracting community also lost lives. many former military, many former fsos, aid and development community workers, teachers and others decided to go down range to use that term in order to help, in order to make a difference, in order to train, in order to provide security. they lost their lives like many of us know some of those folks. and so it wasn't for profit. was there bad profits made? is i am sure. but i'm sure that exists in every walk of life. and my point here is i think that those who went, it isn't a zero sum. people lost their lives trying to do the same thing. so i just ask that you bear that into mind into your commentary. and for secretary vickers, thanks. good to see you again.

it's been a while. i appreciate all you did. i would just be curious. as we're talking about resourcing and others and then your comments about we lost sort of the narrative we had strategic overreach. how much did the simultaneous of iraq and afghanistan play into this? thank you. >> so let's go dr. vickers first and then dr. coburn, please. >> so just briefly, you know, the -- they say the simultaneous of iraq and afghanistan caused us to have to expand the army and marine corps significantly in 2006 to meet the tee mandz of rotational forces of you know as afghanistan was starting to grow and iraq was very big from the beginning. but the subtler effects were important. the effects of the pakistanis that we were leaving that

theater, and then also the difficulty that we had in iraq caused the period of time that afghanistan looked like the good war in u.s. politics and iraq the bad war, and then that flipped over time. the thing you have to be careful about as a policy maker national security policy maker is as i said, when you set really ambitious objectives, you'd better be sure. i think ambassador neuman talked about that. you'd better test them. you can actually achieve this thing because otherwise it's going to politically sour on you. if you think you're going to sustain something for decades you're better off with a smaller approach. for instance, that's what we did. i hate this term forever war. i think it's corrupted u.s. politics. and in 2020, from 2015 on afghanistan had largely been handed over to the afghan

government for security responsibility. you know, we helped the colombians for half a century against insurgent groups in colombia. never had direct u.s. forces involved but assistance and advisers and it largely worked. so you know, it took us constrained resources on afghanistan for quite a while. there's no question to that. but there were many other effects as well. and the big problem was just the concept that underlied it, which is you have to transform the middle east into a bunch of democracies to eliminate the terrorism problem which is just a bad strategic assumption. >> thank you. >> dr. coburn please go ahead. >> just briefly. i want to make clear that i think in my written statement that i was referring to contracting, not contractors. i think the companies and individuals here who i think oftentimes worked in good faith

and had many of the same goals as the u.s. government were responding to policies by the government and incentives. but i think the role of contractors and how decisions were made should be explored. for example, during the surge there was a rapid set-up of forward operating bases and other outposts all over afghanistan stood up very, very quickly. the question of how to supply these bases was not taken into conversation -- was taken into conversation through contractors. the military said we don't have the capacity to supply them but there are contracting groups oftentimes run by local afghanistan militias who will supply them. and i interviewed quite a few members of these. and when you're now paying a local afghan group to supply fuel to a base, then they're concerned about attack by the taliban. and by the way they have

backdoor connection to the taliban. then they're going to just pay off the taliban not to attack those fuel deliveries. and this is how we get seepage of u.s. funds to the taliban through these afghan contractors that were subcontractoring. i think if the u.s. said ok we want to roll out a series of bases and we'll supply them ourselves, we would have been much more strategic. so it enabled other forms and incentives for folks that were supposed to be our allies. >> thank you. i recognize commissioner jones. >> thank you very much. my first question to dr. vickers is i wonder if you can talk about why americans from a counter terrorism perspective should care about afghanistan. take us back to those early post

9/11 periods. how would you characterize the threat to the u.s. homeland security and over the next several years you mentioned the trans-atlantic plot that was disrupted in the u.k. with mi-5 and police arrested with direct help from the united states, 2009 we get alsdasie arrested and al qaeda plot in the united states. 2010, the time square bomber who had been trained in the afghan-pakistan border regions. how serious was the threat emanating to the united states from afghanistan and pakistan for that matter and why should we have cared? >> so first 9/11 resulted in

more casualties than pearl harbor, so it was the grand daddy of terrorist attacks. and the threat was high pre-9/11 as al qaeda had a sanctuary for five years prior to build up and attract jihadists to the region. and then as they resettled in the pakistan-afghanistan border region, the same thing largely occurred. you mentioned the trans atlantic airliner plot but there were other threats to the american homeland. and until we really started disrupting and dismantling that group and that sanctuary 2008 to 2012, that after that the threat went down. so why should you care? because mass casualty terrorism is a real threat and there are all sorts of foreign policy

consequences as well as human consequences when you're wrong about that as people say they've got to be right once we've got to be right all the time. and you have to take it seriously as a national security threat to make sure you've got the intelligence apparatus and the foreign partners and the instruments. and it doesn't require a big commitment on the u.s. part. it just requires a commitment and then on afghanistan, besides generically abandoning an ally that fought for us for 20 years and all the strategic reasons, given in a i'm an old guy, they really -- that country that no one thinks about helped us in the cold war and they suffered greatly in helping us win that. so if we screwed up after the end of the cold war, we had a

chance to make it right after 9/11 and then screwed it up again. >> but it is your judgment that even after 9/11 the threat to the u.s. homeland remained serious for roughly a decade at least guest: yes. yes. it did for at least a decade. and it took them a little period of time between 01 and 03 there were plots from other areas as well. but the threat rose steadily during that period. and then it increased in yemen and syria, the threat to the homeland and europe as well. and the conditions are still there that that threat could rise again. it's not eradicated forever. >> thank you. i wanted to follow up with a question that both came out of your testimony and your response to remarks which is in a sense gets to the footprint issue.

even in your book there is a lot there about the utility of special operations forces and isr assets including orbits. the question that sort of comes out about that as you reflect, as you reflect based on your time not just involved in the war in afghanistan but also thinking retrospectively about it, would the u.s. have been better off in your judgment with a much smaller sustainable footprint that was geared towards on the military side special operations types of forces for train, advise, assist, and other kinds of actions rather than a large conventional footprint? >> i think so, if you look at it in two aspects. you know, right after 9/11 as

president bush looked for options to go to afghanistan, the initial d.o.d. response was what we had done in response to the embassy bombings in east africa, cruise missile strike, or a little more ambitious air strike, and then a massive invasion of afghanistan that would take six to nine months to build up forces in pakistan. and president bush wisely said i want to do something now and i want to do it smaller and i don't want any of those options. so that's how you got essentially the c.i.a.-led option that central command folded in on and proved very effective. at least in overthrowing the taliban and displacing al qaeda. and then as i mentioned, if you look at it, the surge in afghanistan was motivated by the deteriorating security threat but also the idea that we could replicate what we did in iraq.

the extraordinary success we had in a short period of time, and afghan wasn't iraq. as bob gates said we should push the taliban back to maybe 2006, 2005 levels of violence but we couldn't eliminate them as long as they had the sanctuary and conditions in afghanistan. and this was going to be a long war. and the trouble is you can only keep those big forces there so long and then it creates this mentality that forever war seems to me to have a concept that of the surge and you know rather than we had transitioned to the afghans after 2015. so you know, it's more effective operationally in the short run but you have to be wise i think about whether it can really achieve decisiveness in the long run or you're better off with a

persistent or smaller approach. >> thank you. >> i'm going to congratulate commissioner jones for getting in the most questions within the appropriate timeframe. no one has done that yet. ok, let me recognize commissioner molino. you have the floor. >> it's good to see you again. counter terrorism efforts are often referred to as mowing the grass. never ending, tedious requirement. and i hate the analogy. it's too sim mrisic. the other thing about the mowing the grass analogy is that it offers a single solution uniquely military solution. and this commission's intentionally considering the effort of all departments and agencies involved. so i think the analogy, i'm

going to show my cards here, by considering what it takes to grow and establish one. proper watering, airating, overseeding. awareness of germ nation temperatures. for your particular kind of grass. and when necessary targeted weed killing or weed removal. in your book you talk about the need for a flexible strategy that can respond to changing tactics and geographic shifts of terrorist organization. so i would like you to offer just some words of advice to up and coming future policimakers, operators, analysts. how should they be thinking about preparing for the terrorism threats of the future? or we can talk more grass. >> i would be happy to have you mow mine.

so as i said, counter terrorism when you think about appropriate strategies you need a mix of offense and defense and sustained campaigns to deal with if you see it as a global threat like al qaeda and isis. but it starts with a network of partners around the world and then good intelligence. and that's what, to get away from the mowing the grass but that helps you mow the grass a lot before things get too bad. and then you need a capability to deal with those sanctuaries in the most effective way possible or you know, but what you -- what we say with counter terrorism is you're buying time for other things. so people don't like the term mowing the grass because it sounds like i'm going to be doing this forever if you

carried the analogy too literally. but it's also buying time for you to build up local security forces that can handle more and more of the threat and do other things that deal with it. and that just takes time. so -- you know, the phrase as you said also is kind of rejected that, well, if i do this surge i'll win the war but i won't have to mow this grass any more. well, you know, it doesn't work that way in some conditions. and so you know, you are stuck with what i said, which is you're in a long-term intelligence war, you're in a war that you've got to make sure you have partners and then you've got appropriate instruments to deal with this and you don't want to overcommit because that can cause you to lose. in other words, you know, when we overcommit we tend to lose,

we may have eliminated the grass for a while or darned near eliminated it. but it grows back even bigger because we're gone. >> thanks for the response. maybe a challenge for the research team that will look at testimony and the various things that we uncover over the period of the commission something for them to consider is that if you simply mow and you don't employ the other instruments of u.s. national power what you end up with is a yard full of weeds. when you mow them short it looks like we've done a really good job but what you actually is a massive terrorism problem that you're just holding at bay. so i appreciate your comment about intelligence assets, i appreciate your previous comments about the need for access and placement in order to drive a very targeted operation that do that weed removal.

so forgive me on the analogy. >> it's a good one and it gets at strategy in the sense that if you look at al qaeda now and isis to a lesser extent, we've mowed those weeds down to where there aren't that many of them. but the conditions that give rise to them are still there and thees essence of counter terrorism is disrupt and when you have sanctuary dismantle. so what the part that people miss is you have to prevent their reconstitution and you have to do it in multiple places and we can't do that. we depend on our foreign partners to do that, to eliminate these ungoverned spaces. and that's lots of other instruments of power that -- so that's why i say, it buys time and it maybe mitigates a threat

but it's an operational solution not a strategic solution. >> absolutely. thank you. to dr. coburn, i'll turn briefly on zoom. i think you make a very important point that relates to this in terms of where we invest and how much or how little. near the end of your written testimony you make a point essentially that the inverse relationship between u.s. intervention and success in certain geographic and operational efforts in a sense success often occurred in areas with less political and financial intervention. i just wanted to give you an opportunity to respond to that, the education model specifically. but are there other areas we should be looking at in that context? >> yeah. importantly tied to the the conversation is who were the allies that we had in afghanistan that we did not support, did not develop, that could have helped us in this wider mission? and i think the example you point to that i have in my written testimony that i didn't

have time to discuss was the higher ed system. i think it's really worth the commission's time to look at a few of the things. what did -- what was effective in afghanistan over those 20 years? and in 2001, there were a couple of crumbling universities in afghanistan. and by 2021, there were 39 public institutions, 128 private ones, 400,000 students, a quarter of them were women. that's a real success. it's not actually a place where the u.s. government relatively threw a ton of money. a lot of that was actually private, a lot of the universities were private actually, and it created this growing educated class that i think he spoke to most articulately. this was a long slow process but it was gaining traction. however, we continued to allow the elite from that earlier

commander period to ultimately have the final say in the government. so those educated class increasingly became bureaucrats low level officials but were never put and able to get into those positions of power. and i think that was a real loss for us and in many ways it's that generation of afghans that were most abandoned when we pulled out in 2021 and the taliban returned. >> thank you both for your thoughtful response. >> i would like to recognize commissioner. >> thank you so much to both of our witnesses, what a rich amount of expertise here. professor, i'm going to start with you. as a father you have spent your time studying the intersection of western intervention and the afghan political autonomy. and for the commissioners on our staff, i think your book is the best book that's been written on

this, at this intersection. our mandate as a commission oryents our research process towards key american decisions, and i'm wondering how you would advise us to think about the relationship between u.s. decisionmaking and afghan politics, economics, and state society relations in terms of how you think about doing this work. and for dr. vickers, i'm going to belabor the lawn analogy for a moment and say the first question that i have is who owns the lawn? which i think is where you were going in your last remarks. so i wonder if you can reflect for me, this is a very fundamental question for this commission. do you think at a theatrical level the projects of counter terrorism and state building -- forget democracy but just state-building -- were ever

actually compatible? how was the afghan state ever to establish itself as a sovereign power again even if we set aside internally and legitimate, just as a sovereign state, when the u.s. and a number of other foreign actors maintained the perpetual license to this day to use force inside its territory? >> so that's one of the features of counter terrorism that these ungoverned spaces where a government may not have a -- so part of yemen, somalia, north africa, afghanistan, pakistan border region. you know, the u.s. feels it has to protect its interests, would prefer to do it through a government but in some cases a government has no writ there. or is unwilling and incapable of

doing something. but as you said, it's not a long-term solution in a sense that the goal of strategy is to have the local government build up enough capacity to eliminate those ungoverned spaces; otherwise, you are in a perpetual, even if it's a small counter terrorism fight, you're in that forever. there's no exit. so ultimately the question of who owns the grass, it's the local government and you don't want to do thing that is undermine them on that. it may take a long time. you may be -- you're unrealistic if you think i can do this in just a few years so you need decades long engagement, if that's required to protect your interests, but you don't want to undermine them by saying get out of the way, i'm going to do it myself. you know, every time we've tried that it hasn't led to good outcomes. >> two related points i think in

response to your question. the first is linked back to my previous point about the growing urban educated class as a missed opportunity for us to build allies. another group were more local regional elite who are not involved highly in the bond process but were pulled into the political process over the next shall we say five years, and this is really setting the stage in the early years. and just as a quick little story, the local commander in my town, he would serve as small time commander, he had fought against the soviets. he was loosely allied with karzai. early on he had taken his weapons, turned in most of them but not all of them as he would say karzai allowed him to keep some for his own protection. and karzai essentially gave him he said a toyota dealership.

but he found selling toyotas beneath him so he made his son do that. and in 2005-2006, he was basically in retirement. by 2009, however, he was running for parliament in part because he had been pressured by a lot of his allies that, listen, in 2005 he was still worried about getting prosecuted for war crimes or enemies coming after him. he was unsure what was u.s. was going to do. the by 2009 it was sort of clear to him that he was probably safe and a lot of his allies were saying we need to make some money, we need to get into this game over here where everyone is trading deals. and so by 2009, he had been pulled firmly away from some of these processes. or sort of pulled into processes like elections which were perceived as from the afghan public's point of view a corrupt way of getting into government and getting ahold of some of these government resources.

and this is tied to my previous point that it was the unthoughtful interference in afghan elections, comments by holbrook, the way that john kerry so publicly negotiated that deal between karzai and abdullah that really eroded the u.s.'s ability to have any credibility around elections being what we said they were. and this is purely an afghan-led process. and i think what this meant was afghans all watched this ordinary afghans sort of watched this first-hand and oftentimes i think they gave the u.s. government and international community much more credit than they tee served. they assumed that the u.s. government was somehow doing some of these things intentionally even when it was unintentional. and you would often hear and i know you've heard many times the

taliban are a bunch of rural fighters, the u.s. is the most sophisticated military in the world how could the u.s. not defeat the taliban? and that to many, many afghans, was evident that the u.s. wanted to be there and was intentionally losing the war and to keep a toe hold in afghanistan and that undermind our legitimacy and the legitimacy of our afghan partners. >> thank you very much. i recognize dr. jackson for those additional questions and then some closing remarks. >> thank you. one last question for dr. vickers. you alluded in your statement in an interesting way that we were late to build local security forces that we needed to be able to leave. and that ultimately we built the wrong kind.

your biography included designing a surdpat force to so many extent. if you think we built the wrong kind of security forces for the afghans or provided them with the wrong tools or wrong structure, what would the right structure look like in your opinion? >> that's a great question. early on and the previous panel talked about the tensions between institution building and security that certainly were present there. but early on our aim was to build small essentially affordable afghan security forces and centralize as part of a centralized state. so one, the force was too spaul for the threat for us to leave. second, afghan is not inherently a centralized state. so trying to recruit people when this problem persisted to join the army and leave your village,

and we're going to send you to another part of the country that's the size of texas, well you might as well be sending them to the moon. they don't -- and jumping isn't going to get there but we were trying. and so it was a very flawed strategy from the beginning. and then the other thing, the tensions about the militias and the warlords and all that. but it gets back to this local centralized of how you have stability in afghanistan that goes historically as ambassador crocker mentioned. so one of the more effective things we did, and commissioner jones worked on this a lot, was the afghan local police and village stability operations. it was a lot more cost effective, the taliban feared it more than a lot of other things. why? because they were local forces defending their village and they were denying -- as we built more, they were denying more of the rural areas. now, there were problems with that, too, but i think a mix of

more village defense forces and an army big enough to hold the cities, and then special operations forces to do raids essentially would have been a better approach. we were also late on giving the afghans an air force to move their forces around, and that's very expensive and everything. but if you're ever going to leave, again, the country the size of texas, they've got to be able to move places to nip some of these threats in the way that we did as well. so i think our security -- and again, you know, what do we do? we create core structures that looks like us and it's just -- so, it still would have been costly and more effective had we had a better mix and started early. and then transitioned earlier.

>> thank you. i'm now going to offer just some last framing thoughts more for the audience than for the commissioners who are aware of this. as several of the witnesses have alluded to, our greatest challenge in some ways is narrowing the scope of the things we can accomplish within the time we're given. we're very cognizant of that but one of the key decisions we made based on the congressional legislation was to focus primarily as a unit of analysis on key u.s. government decisions. this acknowledges the point that was made earlier that we can't think about those fully without thinking about afghan reactions. that said the unit of analysis is u.s. government decisions. so a fair question is but what decisions are you going to look at? the easy answer is we're going to consider a much larger set of

decisions than we can possibly cover in detail and there will be a very difficult winoing process. the second point is that those decisions may ironically fall not just in the washington area or in brussels but often a series of decisions that are either labeled theater decisions or implementation decisions may reside as a country team or u.s. forces afghanistan level. so just to give a sampling. at the macro policy level, we will certainly look at the u.s. decision to invade afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, what other alternatives were considered if any, how wide was the range of options. the second obvious point of interest will be the decision to surge forces in afghanistan. there are a whole host of nested decisions within that, how big a surge, how long, whether to remove it, when. a third set of decisions relate to negotiations with the

taliban. should we negotiate with them? if so, should we negotiate without the afghan government present? these were profound decisions that had outsized impacts. this gives a sampling of the very macro level. leaving you with a point that for every one of these suboird nat elements in country were making very difficult decisions, how to follow this prod policy toward something that could be tangible. decisions like the ones i asked dr. vickers about how do you design the security forces of the afghans osh how do you support their design? strategic choices by u.s. military commanders as to whether to pursue largely enemy

centric strategies or largely population centric strategies. these are not just military decisions in the development field, there were corresponding decisions about what to develop, why, and to what effect. so this gives you a sense of both the sprawl of decisions, but i just wanted to offer that as a closing comment. and last and on a more personal note i think also general to this point of the importance of bipartisanship, i was appointed by senator jim inhof republican of clook long time senate armed services chair and ranking member. he passed away on july 9th and we hope that the work that we do as a group not me as an individual will reflect positively on a great public servant and one who i think cherished his