Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. The program is about to begin. Okay ladies and gentlemen, if you could take your seats, we're gonna begin in 30 seconds. So if people could suspend their conversations in back, Candice Rondo, hello everybody. Colonel Wilson, we're starting. So if people could take their seats. Okay, if people could take their seats. Nice. Thank you everybody for taking your seats. We're about to begin and we're gonna open with Megan Keeler-Pettigrew of the Global Special Operations Foundation who will start off our day. Good morning. Thank you for being here and appreciate your patience as we got started just a little bit late. As Peter said, I'm Megan Keeler-Pettigrew. I'm the Chief Operating Officer of the Global Special Operations Forces Foundation and we're thrilled to be sponsoring this event for the third time with New America and the McCain Institute at Arizona State University and to welcome to the team the U.S. Army War College. The Global Soft Foundation's mission is to cultivate a network of special operators, their enablers both in and out of uniform and their partners be they in industry, academia or elsewhere. And this might sound simplistic but it's nonetheless true that our ultimate goal is to fortify the network of good guys and make sure that soft around the world are connected, postured, resourced to beat the bad guys. So to that end, we're very pleased to be hosting this event and this partnership with New America, Arizona State and the U.S. Army War College and with all of the speakers that are featured here today. We welcome this opportunity to discuss issues of importance to soft and to educate those that may not be as familiar with the community. Special Operations Forces have certainly carried a particularly heavy burden the last 18 years and their importance to national security is well known but at the foundation we realize we can't assume that will always be the case. So thank you for your participation today, for your support of soft and a special thank you to Anne-Marie Slaughter, Peter Bergen, that's a whole team here at New America for hosting this event and making it happen. It doesn't just happen, there's a lot of work so thank you. And before I turn it over to Peter, please bear with me as I read these off to you, follow the conversation online using hashtag soft policy and following at New America ISP, at GlobalSoft, at SSI Now, at McCain Institute and at future underscore of underscore war. So thank you. Thank you Megan. Well I get the pleasure of introducing my boss, the CEO of New America, Anne-Marie Slaughter of course with the first woman to run policy planning at state department. She'll surround the Woodward Wilson School Princeton. She's the editor or author of eight books about to start her ninth I think. And so in turn the floor over to Anne-Marie. Thank you, Peter. Actually I'm just trying to keep up with Peter who writes a great and best selling book roughly every one to two years. So New America is a place where we are expected to run things and write at the same time. But I'm really delighted to be here. This has become an annual September event and one that we are truly proud to host. I wanna start just by talking about our partners. New America works and has its impact through many partners which actually seems appropriate in terms of soft culture. And so obviously with the GlobalSoft Foundation and you just met Megan, but I also want to recognize Stu Bradens. Stu where are you? At the White House. At the White House, sorry. He was just here. He was the head of the GlobalSoft Foundation and we really prize this relationship. Also our partnership with Arizona State University and Dan Rothenberg is here and the McCain Institute which is part of Arizona State University. Arizona ASU is routinely recognized as the most innovative university in the country and having spent my life in academia I can say confidently it is reinventing higher education and we are thrilled. They talk about themselves as the new American university and we are new America. And indeed Nick Rasmussen is here also as one of our partners who runs the program on national security and counter-terrorism at the McCain Institute. Finally I also wanna thank Colonel Isaiah Ike Wilson who is probably here somewhere. Yes, there in the back. Who is the director of the Army Strategic Studies Institute and I will just say that we're very grateful to the Army for providing our second Army War Fellow, Colonel Frank Stanko who probably is also there standing in the back. So the cast of thousands to create the day but also the kind of work that GlobalSoft the foundation does connects to our programs the programs at ASU, the McCain Institute and the Strategic Studies Institute. Two words on new America and then I will introduce our panel and we will get going. So this is our 20th anniversary. We were founded in 1999. When you walk in you see we are dedicated to American renewal which is a grand mission but it is the mission to hold this country to our highest ideals in an era of rapid technological and social change. And we focus on technology. We focus on social change. We meet the challenges that are created by new technologies and by new demography but also look for the opportunities. And throughout it, we are guided by the idea that we need continually to renew our commitment to our best selves as a country. That's part of what renewing our vows is about renewing our commitments going forward into a very different time. We are also a home of big ideas and as much practical action as we can manage. And again, working with the GlobalSoft Foundation one of the reasons we love it is the thought that our special forces are some of the country's absolute best motivated by deep patriotism who blend that commitment with extraordinary action. So today we've got a wide range. We've got panels and presentations on the future of Afghanistan, how to integrate AI into special operations and the future of terrorism. So let me start now by asking our first panel to come out which I will also moderate and I will introduce them. So this is like hoping that the, let's make a deal door will open. Oh right there, sorry, please come on up. Come on up and have a seat and I will introduce you. There's no particular order except that I'm sitting. All right, so let me introduce Representative Smith who actually happens to be over on the, for this over. So Representative Smith is the representative for Washington's ninth congressional district as a Democrat. You will know him of course as the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and we are thrilled to have you here today at a time of where your committee is at the center of many things. He's been a very strong advocate for military personnel and their families. I'm not gonna read the entire bio you have it but I do wanna just say that he is, he created the congressional caucus for effective foreign assistance. From my time in the State Department I am a strong believer in what Secretary Clinton used to call the 3Ds of development, diplomacy and defense and so the connections between foreign assistance and what the military does and what our diplomats do is particularly important. To his left is Representative Mike Walts who represents Florida's sixth congressional district and is a Florida native, a combat decorated green beret of particular relevance today, a former White House and Pentagon policy advisor, a small business owner and I have to love this part, a proud father. I should also say that he is also an author, he's written a book called Warrior Diplomat, a Green Berets Battles from Washington to Afghanistan and he was a new America fellow right before I got here but we are always proud to claim our own. And finally, definitely not least, Representative Seth Molten is representative of Massachusetts. Representative Molten was called to service after 9-11. He joined the Marines in 2001. He was a leader of an infantry platoon and was among one of the first Americans to reach Baghdad in 2003. He served four tours and as he says, he served four tours and I think it's important for our discussion today in a war that he didn't agree with but he was proud to go as someone who wanted to defend our country. He has in Congress worked very hard to uphold the increasingly scarce bipartisanship working on a series of bipartisan bills including faster care for veterans and also modernizing government travel. So welcome to all three of you and I will now move over and become your moderator. So we're going to, we've got lots of things to talk about but I wanna start by talking about a set of issues that are particularly related to the soft community and then I wanna move more to the politics of the day and talk about the authorization of military force in Iran and where we are. So thinking about, let me just give me a second here. Let's just start with sort of the big question and I will start with you, Representative Smith. How do you think of Congress's role in maintaining the best, the maintaining the soft community? It's been a dramatic expansion of the course of the last, gosh, what was that, 10 to 10 to four? Did you hear in the back? I didn't think I was in charge of that. No you're not, you're not, they'll turn it up. You're definitely not.  We ready? Yeah, we're good. Take two. We've more than doubled the size of the soft force in the last 10 to 12 years and it has become just an enormous part of our foreign policy and our defense policy. As the special operations command says, when I meet with them, I said we woke up today in 85 countries, or 75 countries, or 91 countries, but it's a very high number. Now obviously some of those, it's a very small number of people who are there, but our soft force is everywhere in the world and certainly we think of the ones who hunt down, being the ones who hunt down terrorists, but what they also do in far greater numbers is they build relationships with potential partners, they train partner forces, and basically our forward effort to try to reduce terrorism, but also create greater stability. They're enormously important to what we do and they've grown, so I think the most important thing that Congress can do is make sure we provide the funds and support so the people who have to perform that mission can continue to do it because the demands that are placed on the people who serve in the special forces, certainly you know this better than I do, are enormous. I mean the number of deployments, in many cases these are high action deployments and the stress and the toll that takes on them and their families is something we have to pay constant attention to. Part of it is providing the funds and the resources to make sure they can continue to do that, but part of it also was understanding how do we change the deployments, what do we do to help their families, how do we make sure that this incredibly specialized group of people can continue to do what they do because right now it is crucial to what we do, as I said, not just in defense policy but I feel in foreign policy at this point, so that's the most important approach. So it's interesting to hear you describe the distributed nature of the force, when we think about hybrid warfare, we think about the future of war, 21st century warfare. I often think about distributed forces but as you say also distributed partners and when I was in the State Department we used to talk about not a multi-polar world but a multi-partner world and who's actually building those partnerships. So Representative Walts, when you obviously as somebody who was in the special forces, if you could talk a little bit about how you see Congress's role but specifically there are many veterans in Congress, they're not that many veterans who were actually soft veterans and what difference that makes as you think about supporting these new forces. Well, so a few things on what Congress can do, one of the biggest things that I focused on being here is focused on the families and taking care of the families and the families are struggling, they're suffering, even when the operators are not deployed and they're back here, they're not really here because they're out training, getting re-certified and getting ready to go again. We just buried the fifth green beret in two weeks on 9-11 and just lost another one yesterday. So the toll on the force is real, that particular green beret was on its fifth tour. But, and part of that is gold star legislation that really takes care of those back here and I think a way that's appropriate because right now they get three bad choices, they don't come home, they come home missing limbs or they come home but not quite the same mentally, obviously, as when they left. So that's one piece and that is a strategic issue with these families 18 years in and I think we'll talk about in a bit that I think this is only the beginning of a generational war on extremism despite multiple administrations wanting to wish the problem away, that if the families start truly breaking the volunteer force starts to break and then we have a much bigger problem on our hand, I think maybe in a follow on, the other piece is giving them the appropriate authorities to do I think what needs to be done in a hybrid warfare environment in a regular warfare environment and counter-terrorism environment, whether that's the 1202 authorities, the 127 Echo that we've all debated and reauthorized and looking at if we need to use more of, at least from my perspective, I'm sure my colleagues may disagree but look at do we need to use more of a deterrence model on hybrid warfare and at least demonstrating the capability to conduct those types of operations, whether that's inside Iran, inside China or inside Russia as a deterrence model for what they're doing. So you're anticipating absolutely my next question because I definitely do wanna talk about how we think about warfare in the future of war and warfare but before we get there, I do wanna ask Representative Milton to weigh in on Congress's role and again, you're a Marine, you are a Marine, you're always a Marine. I know better than always. But so again, so you're from one of the traditional services or the regular services and how do you think about this? Because obviously we have to take care of our entire military. Yeah, I mean, I would just make two comments to double down on what the chairman and Mike said. First of all, I decided a few months ago to for the first time publicly share my story of dealing with post-traumatic stress and I decided to do that because I think as a country, we have to be more forthright in recognizing this as a medical problem that just simply needs to be treated. And just like you are not embarrassed to tell your colleague at work, hey, I'm going for my annual physical. You should be able to say, hey, I'm going for my annual mental health checkup and we're so far away from that today. And I introduced, when I was running for president, I introduced this very bold, most ambitious mental health care proposal, really setting the standard for the country by using our troops as a model, by saying everyone in the military will get an annual mental health exam, it will just become routine. Something you're not afraid to embrace. And then literally just a few weeks after I introduced that, I mean, admittedly, on a campaign trail, the committee adopted in a bipartisan way a small first step towards that, which is accelerating the timetable for people coming out of a combat zone to get a mental health checkup when they come home. So I think that this is planting the seeds of a sea change, I hope that will start in the military but expand to the rest of the country. And by the way, the special operations forces are some of the pioneers in proactively dealing with mental health. It's special operations forces that are now practicing meditation and things like this to better prepare them for battle, not just deal with their invisible wounds when they come home. So that's the first comment. The second comment is, look, there's a reason why my first bill in Congress was a faster care for Veterans Act. If we don't show America that we take care of veterans when they come home, Mike's right. People aren't gonna volunteer. Families aren't gonna sign up for this. And we're not doing a good enough job right now. I made a commitment to continue getting my own healthcare at the VA when I got elected to Congress. And let's just put it this way. I could tell you some stories. I have a great primary care physician. There are some things they do really well. I had surgery a few years ago when they sent me home with the wrong medication. So again, we have a lot of progress to make but those are two areas where I think we can focus as a Congress and it will benefit not only our armed services but really the whole country. Thank you for that. I watched recently, they will never grow old which I strongly recommend. I just watched that myself. It's extraordinary. They've taken this footage of World War I and colored it and made it, I mean it's, you are there, you are, but that was where we first started talking about shell shock, right? When you read the accounts of World War I and you now look at that and think, of course it was unbelievably traumatic PTSD and to then think, of course, anyone who goes through great trauma and of course it can be on the battlefield, it could be a rape, it could be any number of things but to understand that our mental health is part of our physical health, I think that's just hugely important. What you don't see in that movie, of course, is that when those troops came home they were not taken care of. No, absolutely not. And World War I veterans were literally left out on the street. Yeah, yeah. So let's talk about the future of war. Let's say, so New America and ASU have a center on the future of war that Peter Bergen and Dan Rothenberg co-direct and we spend a lot of time thinking about drones and droids and all the ways in which the future of war will not be human or whether we keep, I hope we keep humans in the loop but so much of the discussion of the future of war is about technology and yet it's equally about our soldiers and how we're going to fight. So Chairman Smith, you mentioned the hybrid warfare. I'd love for you to talk about if you look out to 2040, say 2030 to 2040, how do you see the way we're conducting warfare and what our forces need to look like? Well, the first thing that occurs to me to say that is I have no earthly idea. That is the right answer. And I don't think most people do but in that reality, I think there's, the most important thing about how we're gonna build for the future is flexibility, upgradeability, adaptability. I always, former Secretary of Defense Gates used to always say that we had a perfect record of predicting what our next fight was going to be and that is that we were always wrong. And partially he was making that point about how we need to do a better job of preparing and everything but the point I always took from that was that's the nature of the world. So to spend an enormous amount of money saying this is gonna be the fight, this is what we're gonna be ready for, now you have to build flexibility and that brings us back to soft and what I'm so excited about how we've developed the soft community and with all of the challenges that my two colleagues mentioned that we do have to step up and meet. It has given us a capability that has that flexibility and adaptability. And I first started getting involved in this when I chaired the terrorism subcommittee for three years, 2007 to 2010 and traveled around the world to see what soft is doing. Yes, I went to Iraq and Afghanistan but also Africa and the Philippines and all the other places where we are out there and again this comes back to my central point in all of this which is building relationships. Preparation of the environment is the way soft refers to it. I visited a few soft people in Morocco and Bacana Faso back in 09 and 10 and at the time things were a little out of control there but nothing like they are now after Libya but the relationships that were being built helped us be in a better position to deal with what came. And obviously the State Department is incredibly, it's a team effort. It has to be CIA, State Department, DOD but what soft does because so much of what they do is about going into difficult contested environments, figuring out the terrain, who's here, what's going on, building relationships that that skill set that they bring, the medical training. They can go in and provide medical care to a village that desperately needs it and then get to know who they get to know. The future warfare I see is, yes it's great power competition but it's not like 200 years ago when you built up for the big war that you were gonna have with your rival. It's great power competition happening in smaller environments in a different way. It's not how do we beat them on some major field of war. It's how do we deter our adversaries and build the relationships necessary to advance the freedom agenda if you will. We believe in economic and political freedom. Our main adversaries don't. How do we do that? Soft plays a crucial role in inputting us in a position to do that over the course of the next half century. So you were already talking about a deterrence posture. I'd love to hear you say more about how you imagine the future war and particularly what that looks like. Well I think the broad question for me is how do we continue to conduct counterterrorism, deal with a growing and metastasizing extremism threat that I think is absolutely still a threat to the United States coupled with the rise of China coupled with a still very dangerous Russia rogue states overlaid with 22 trillion in debt and growing. And that is essentially the problem that is that we I think over the long term spanning multiple administrations need to figure out and solve. Part of that to me is taking a different look at the guard and reserves. I've talked a lot with our reserve component leaders. Yes, they need to be interoperable. Yes, they need to have the same model of helicopter or tank or what have you, that is important. But I think also where can they fit uniquely in our national security strategy? Are they better as soldiers who are also mayors and sheriffs and telecommunications executives as true warrior diplomats uniquely equipped with their civilian skills to do cyber, to keep up with the latest technologies to do stability operations, to be involved in our space enterprise with the pace at which technology is growing. I mean, we hear time and time again from the services that they are having a heck of a time recruiting folks for their cyber force. And then when they do and train them, then keeping them. But what's the entity that bridges that? The guard and the reserve, right? And do they take more of a leading role in those types of all of government types of work here? So I think I'm thrilled to hear the chairman has spent so much time looking at the soft-finer prize separately. I am worried that the pendulum will swing too far all of the 1980s back towards great power competition. I think that's the Pentagon in the industrial basis comfort zone. There is not a huge constituency for learning languages and understanding cultures. That doesn't create a lot of jobs in middle America but it is absolutely critical and we cannot walk away from that. And I just see it in briefing after briefing after briefing of, you know, we won't talk about the light attack aircraft. We've been asking about that for the better part of what chairman, 10 years. But yet, 100 B-21 bombers may not be enough. Let me just say it, I completely agree with everything he is. Final point, final point is I do want to say I thank God on a weekly basis that I'm on the Armed Services Committee where we can agree and we can disagree and we can't have substantive conversations that bipartisanship is not dead. But I think that commonality that we often see where we can agree to disagree but still move the country forward is that commonality of service or having spent a career around service and truly staying on what's important for the country. And when we see our other committees, our colleagues are flame throwing each other. It feels rhetorically on a daily basis. Sometimes pretty close. Yeah, yeah, great. Hourly. It should give you all hope that we do have these kind of conversations and disagreements and often at three in the morning during markup, but that's okay. I'll ask Representative Mulden to join, but I will say in 2014, I was in the Brussels forum when Russia invaded Crimea and it was Brussels, so it was NATO and you could just feel this crank. We're back to the world we know. I mean, it really was like we know how to do this. Russia has invaded. Although apparently we don't. Well, but I think your point about the comfort with the world we know versus seeing the ways in which the world is changing so dramatically. Yes, it's so far from lining up militaries. I mean, it's proxy warfare, it's special operations. And then again, you add that technology. So that point about pushing back against a very powerful status quo bias is critical. Representative Mulden. Do I? I mean, I couldn't agree more. And when Mike made a quick passing comment about the military industrial complex and where they feel comfortable, I think that that's absolutely right. And he and I are gonna be working together on a panel that Chairman Smith put together on the future of work or the future of defense. Now we don't wanna pre-biased the panel. The whole point is to have some debates and disagreements. But I certainly share his concern about a focus on big old-fashioned weapon systems at the expense of the smaller nimble, more dynamic force that we need. And frankly, that China and Russia are developing as examples of big powers that are embracing more of a hybrid warfare approach. So that is a real concern. Mike also mentioned that he thinks that terrorism is still a problem. You can't describe any situation with those two facts, but I think these two facts are kind of interesting to think about in the context of that question. One, there's not been a single major mass casualty, external terrorist attack on the United States since 9-11. Two, there are four times as many Sunni extremists in the world today than there were on 9-11. So what that says is that we've been doing a pretty good job, at least on defense. But you can't really look holistically at the war on terror and say it's been successful. And that means that yes, we have to keep fighting it, but two, we also really need to think about our tactics and our approach. And you mentioned in the introduction that I served as a Marine platoon commander. Just quickly, two other experiences that I had in Iraq and in the Marines that I think give me some interesting perspective on this. The second two tours I did in Iraq, I was on a small team of Marines working directly for General Petraeus. And traveling around, we lived either directly with Iraqis or with special forces. And as I lived with multiple different, mostly Green Beret teams around Iraq, there was a real difference in how... You have a beard. I did not. Wow. I decided I didn't need a beard to be cool, but... They do look cool. They do look cool. My wife thinks that too. But there were some teams that really embraced, I think, the spirit and ethos historically of the Green Berets, which is to be this very dynamic, kind of hybrid warfare type of force. And then there were others who all they wanted to do was kick down doors. And there was also a real divide between the salty old Warren officers who said, we're really losing track of our roots and what is actually important here. The teams that were more successful were the ones that worked on building internal capacity in the Iraqi military. The ones that looked good on paper, but were not ultimately successful in their areas, were the ones that just wanted to kick down doors. And that's what a lot of the young people were joining to do. So that's a real challenge. Very briefly, I also spent a little bit of time after my active duty tours in the Marine Reserves. And I completely agree with your comment. If I had to go invade Baghdad again, I'd pick my active duty platoon any day of the week. But in the rebuilding capacity, when I had plumbers and electricians and lawyers and scientists in my platoon, much better equipped to do that job. And that was in the Reserves. So now I wanna shift to some of the country issues that face us today and thinking about that. When you talk about the growth of Sunni extremists around the world, the growth of terrorist groups still around the world, obviously Afghanistan is still a source of terrorism, mostly within Afghanistan, Pakistan, but then the wider region. Where does diplomacy come into this? So let me ask you directly, were we right to walk away from the negotiations with the Taliban or conversely, were we right to try to negotiate with them? Where does diplomacy come into thinking about the future and the current war? You wrote the book. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Good, but you don't understand. Well, first and foremost, I think we need to send a message loud and clear that we, the United States, fully supports the democratic process in Afghanistan as imperfect as it may be sometimes as they're on the cusp of their national elections, which are always difficult, particularly in the middle of the war. We have our own difficulty here 200 years on with our own process. So I think I want to, from my own perspective, send that message and I've talked to a number of Afghans both here and over there and they're going to have a very difficult few weeks. Yes, we were, I think, as the deal as I understood it, we were absolutely correct to walk away and I do think we need to be careful that we can craft a deal that takes the situation from bad to worse. The ethnic divides and tensions between the various ethnic groups in Afghanistan are simmering just below the surface. Their political process is difficult and will be messy, but the canary in the coal mine for me is watching the Afghan army. And if they believe, as folks that I talked to were beginning to believe, that the United States was willing to cut a deal with their adversary, as they're actively attacking them and the Afghans, I think you could start to see the military fracture. So I think with the terms, as I understood them, we were right to walk away and the thing that particularly bothered me was that it didn't deal with the, the interim agreement didn't deal with Pakistan and didn't deal with the sanctuary that's in Pakistan. And I think if we ever are going to truly drive the Taliban back to the table in a way that they will break with international terrorism groups and will become a meaningful partner in the future of Afghanistan, we have to pressure their leaders in Pakistan. And that is a wide elephant in the room that we've all been trying to deal with for 18 years. But let me just say one more thing in that regard. The South Korean army, as an analogy, and there's a lot of smart folks who will poke holes in this, had a higher illiteracy rate in the 1950s than the Afghan army does today. So to the chairman's point on long-term partnerships and what is Congress's role, we have to support that partnership for the long term. And I remind folks that the South Vietnamese army didn't necessarily fall when we withdrew our advisors. It fell when Congress pulled the rug out from under the funding. And part of that was, and this has been my message over the administration, if we pull the advisors back and only leave a unilateral CT force, where is our reassurance that the taxpayer dollars are being spent effectively? And in a way that grows an Afghan military and security force that can eventually take care of its own. That's gonna be a decades-long effort. And no, I don't hear anyone complaining about the cost and expense of partnering with the South Korean army for 70 years. And I would argue that we're going to have to wrap our minds around doing the same with the Afghans for the foreseeable future. I don't actually disagree with the problem. Afghanistan, to my mind, is a much larger problem than either South Korea or South Vietnam. It is a part of the world that is not given to any sort of organization, whether you like it or not. And they fight. That's what they do. And how we're gonna wrap our arms around that and implant some sort of stability in there, I think, is an enormous problem because I completely agree with Mike. We cannot walk away from the problem. The starting point for me on Afghanistan and Pakistan is always, I really wish we did not have national security interests in that part of the world because it's a nightmare, it's an impossibility. But we do. And all these people are saying we've been at war for 19 years, that's ridiculous. It's like, well, what are we trying to accomplish? It's certainly not preferable and I would like to not have to do it. But if the alternative is worse, then just saying, well, we should just get out of there because it's a mess. And unfortunately, unlike South Korea and South Vietnam, this is a problem that absolutely will come home if we don't deal with it. The terrorist groups that are there and whatever you thought about dominoes and communism, whatever, there is absolutely no question that the violent extremist groups that prosper in that region wish to attack us, preferably at home, but certainly in a whole bunch of other places. So how do we contain that threat? And it sort of brings me back to the basic soft model I talked about with Africa. The way you contain the threat is we need partners in the region who are gonna work with us to contain that threat. That's what we do in the Horn of Africa. We work with Ethiopia and Somalia and Melonda, sorry, Ethiopia and Kenya and Melonda and we're trying to get to the point where we could work with Somalia to contain that threat with relatively small US numbers. In West Africa, we've built some of those relationships fractured and difficult that they were with Mali and Niger and Makana Faso. We've also had a lot of help, believe it or not, from the French and the British because of their relationships there. So we've got a model. Who are we working with to try to stop the threat?  And that's the thing. And if it's not the Afghanistan government, if we're not there and we don't have the relationship as difficult as it is, look around that region. Who? I mean nobody, okay? Pakistan, don't get into the details of that, but it's a very difficult relationship. So if we pull out of there, not only does the problem in Afghanistan get worse, I don't see who in the region we can work with at that point to even try and contain it. So trying to work with the Afghan government pretty much along the lines of how Mike described it, I think is our only option. Is this sort of the best worst option? Badest place? Yeah, something like that. At the time, and yes, I'd like to try to do it in a way that puts fewer American lives at risk, costs us a lot less money. We need to figure that out, but we cannot underestimate the fact that at this point, the Taliban isn't even the worst thing in Afghanistan. The rise of ISIS now is a greater threat. So I think it's beautiful. Were we wrong to even negotiate with the Taliban? Would you? No, I don't think we were wrong to negotiate with them. I think, I was like the court game of thrones, you don't make peace with your friends, you make peace with your enemies. So that's who you talk to. Used to be Klausavitz, now it's Gayne Frans, you know. That's right. I'm a pop culture kid. I look, I'm a complete Gayne with thrones addict. Representative Bolton. I mean, again, Mike and Adam are asking all the right questions. Another way to put this is- We're hoping you'll answer them. Yeah. Don't have any, but I'll tell you, but I think another way to put this is, what is our mission in Afghanistan? We don't have a clear mission. And there are some people who believe our mission is nothing, we should get out of there. Some people believe our mission is to prevent another 9-11, and it's really a counter-terror mission. Some people believe our mission is to make sure that all these amazing, beautiful Afghan girls who get to go to school for the first time in their lives can actually continue to go into schools and won't live lives of oppression. And in some ways there's a tension between three kind of levels of commitment. One is to ensure that every place where we open schools to women, they're gonna be able to keep going there. Another is to partner with the sort of one step down is to not do that, you know, to allow that some parts of the country may be taken over by the Taliban or whatnot, but we will continue working with the Afghan army and also do a counter-terror mission. And then the sort of lowest level is just counter-terror. We need to have a debate as a Congress and as a country about what our commitment is. And then once we are able to make that commitment, which I agree is going to be pretty long-term, we're gonna have a lot more leverage to negotiate with the Taliban. What I think the problem, yes, you do negotiate with your enemies, but the Taliban knows they can just wait us out at this point. We have really no legitimate leverage over them, I don't think, at this stage, because they say, look, you can agree to pull out your American troops, but you're probably gonna do that anyway at some point. We need to make it clear that, no, no, no, we might be reducing our forces, we might have a narrowed mission, but we are committed in a bipartisan way as a country to seeing this through and then go back and talk to the Taliban and say, you know, let's read this. That's the vast amount of folks that I talk to, they don't even know, much less care, whether it's 6,000, 8,000, 15,000, 20,000. The message they need to hear and our enemies need to hear is we are with you, you cannot out-wait us. And then secondly, I think the point of leverage is on their leadership and no campaign that I can think of in history has been successful when the enemy enjoys unfettered sanctuary next door. And we can dance around that problem, we have for many years and tried various things, but that's the core of the issue. So to put it bluntly, it's not wrong to negotiate, but I don't think this was the right time. So I'm gonna move from Afghanistan to Iran. And ask you a double question. So the first place, we are playing a game of chicken with Iran. Somebody I've taught international relations international law for years and you do the basic game theory, this is chicken, right? We are heading down the road, as President Trump said, we were locked and loaded over the weekend. That is exactly, this is Cuban Missile Crisis time. So one, should we be prepared to actually strike if that's where it looked like we were over the weekend, we pulled back, the Israeli elections, we're influencing timing, but as far as I can tell, we're gonna have to be making that decision very, very quickly. Should we strike, and equally importantly, today is the 18th anniversary of the passage of the AUMF. So we have been operating in all these countries under an authorization of the use of military force that is 18 years old, right after 9-11. Congress is supposed to have the power to declare war. And this is a different kind of war. Many of us, including myself, have written articles about what do you do when war looks completely different than World War I or World War II, or the Korean War, which itself was different. But at what point do we say, wait a minute, the people have to be consulted again. And of course, Barack Obama did that with the chemical strikes. But in general, this is, I think, an equally fundamental question about the future of war. When and how does Congress authorize it? So to boil it down to two questions, should we strike Iran, and do we need Congress's authorization to do so? There's a lot to unpack there, but I'll go with no and yes. Okay, we should not attack Iran. And we do need an additional authorization of... Well, and there's a whole much very important points there, but we were talking about what happened in Saudi Arabia. And let's say absolutely without question, Iran was behind it. People were talking about what should the US response. There is no legal justification for use of US military force in defense of Saudi Arabia. This is not, I mean. And if we allow the president to do that at that point, Congress is completely out of it. Now this whole Congress has the power to declare war thing is utterly meaningless. And this is why I do not like originalists when it comes to the Constitution because they are completely full of it. There is no originalist point for a lot of reasons. First of all, it was 200 some odd years ago that couldn't possibly have anticipated what's happening here. But second, the Constitution was written with almost, well, not almost, with purposeful ambiguity. We can't resolve this issue, so we're gonna resolve it in a way that makes both sides happy and we can just move on, all right? Nowhere in the Constitution does it define what war is. So the power to declare war is utterly, what does that mean, all right? And the president's the commander-in-chief of the military, what was that about? We don't know. So basically we've been making it up as we go along for well over 200 years. And that's okay, by the way. That's how civil society, democracies work things out. But this idea that we can go back to the text and it's gonna tell us what to do is ridiculous. I do however think that there needs to be a better balance and that executive after executive after executive has made completely irrelevant the House of Representatives. And this actually goes to Mike's point. What we need American support for what you said, in terms of what our policy is. And if the president is off acting on his own, well, Congress is as reflective of American opinion as you can get. We're up every two years in the same hour. So it's like, if we were to express that support, we would then be able to better send that message to the Taliban. If the president just goes off acting on his own, then it's like, well, there's gonna be another president. And there's no consistency to policy. So where Iran is concerned, there's a lot more stuff about what we're trying to do with Iran, how relevant it is to our broader national security interests. But the big thing is get Congress back involved in the process of how we use our military. Because I think the American people, part of their lack of fate in staying in Afghanistan or endless war and all this stuff is, we don't have a voice. We're out of it. And something that is fundamental to our country. Do we attack Iran? And do we need Congressional Authorization? This is where the Iranians are so clever. I mean, this is right out of their playbook in terms of escalating and having a strategic effect and causing an international crisis, but just under the level to where it elicits an absolute U.S. response. They did not strike a U.S. facility or U.S. ship. There's not massive casualties, but yet it was a strategic, it did have a strategic effect. Of course, we have a surrogate claiming, and the Houthis claiming responsibility, Iranian denials, and now we kind of have an international proven case. That's the future of war, right? The proxy war and technology. So I think it was, frankly, a brilliant move on their part because they knew in the West that we would be having this debate rather than eliciting a response. That said, I also believe firmly, if you look at the history of the Iranian regime, they will continue to escalate until stopped, or until they achieve their strategic goal, which is the relief of sanctions. So my message to the president, as Mr. President, keep up the pressure campaign. It is working. Including a strike? And, well, including the economic pressure because the biggest metric in my mind, and I was just over in Israel on the bipartisan trip over to Israel, and that Hamas has belong, the proxies, the Shia proxies in Iraq are having a hard time making payroll. And the thing the regime cares about the most is not its own people, it cares about its wallet. And it is, we've gone from two and a half million barrels per day to, depending on the oil trader, less than 200,000. That is a significant blow to the regime. And if you look in the late 80s, kind of how things escalated then under Operation Praying Mantis, originally it was international shipping. Then it was a number of facilities and offshore oil rigs, and then eventually it was an American ship and President Reagan sank a third of their Navy and they stopped. So the other lesson from the Iranians is that often escalating will get them what they want. The attacks in Beirut in the 1980s, we withdrew. They attacked, killed 500, and I know Seth was there. Killed over 500 Americans in Iraq. Very little response eventually we withdrew. So if you look at this from the Iranian standpoint, this could work. And we'll see, but I think if we do not respond, my own preference would be at this point, by, with, and through our allies. But to the chairman's point is providing support to a Saudi response, whether it's logistics, intelligence, you name it, in terms of that type of proxy response is that war? And I just get a quick, one part of the problems with this is, Saudi Arabia is problematic. So I don't want us to be in a position where it's like, oh, we in Saudi Arabia, we're just like this. You know, the Sunni extremists that came out of Saudi Arabia to begin with. So that's why I talk about, in addition to what Congress should do, what are our interests in the region? Is it in our interests to go all in on the Sunni side of a Sunni-Shia civil war? That would be a big no. And also, can we continue to support Saudi Arabia while they murder US citizens and have a very bad human rights record? So being sucked into that side of this conflict is something I also think we need to avoid. Sorry, I just wanted to make sure. So Representative Walts, I can, we're closing up because I know we're, but I can't let you off the hook. So what I heard you say was, we should keep up the economic pressure. We should be in a position to support a Saudi response. If we were to strike, do we need congressional authorization to do so? If we were to strike. I agree with the chairman. I do not see a legal basis. We do not have a mutual defense pact with Saudi Arabia. Not my lead. I asked the same question, you have to know that's still a reason. I did too. You get answers faster. And so I do think they would need to come back with authorization for a unilateral American response unless American interests were directly attacked in self defense. And that's why again, and again, that's why you see the Iranians dialing up, but just below the threshold and back, taking a full circle that this is a future of war. We got bipartisan agreement there again. Representative Molton, you're gonna close this out. So rather than just repeat and agree, I'll try to step back a little bit in this situation. And then let's just look at the administration's three publicly stated goals with their Iran policy, right? And there's some there in the background, but the three publicly stated goals are to stop them from developing a nuclear weapon, to deter them in the future from developing a nuclear weapon, and third to change the regime's behavior. With regard to supporting terrorism around the region. Yeah, around the region. Since pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal against the advice of the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and basically every military advisor in the administration, Iran has started moving towards a nuclear weapon, so that's gotten worse. They clearly have not, no, no, no, they've, General Dunford came to the Congress, and the bipartisan agreement. Now stop. We almost got there. But to be clear, General Dunford came to the Congress and certified that they had stopped progress. Within. So if you want to disagree with General Dunford, we can take that offline. But first, so they have accelerated. But to say that they were following the agreement is like going into a thief's home and the police can only search one bedroom with a month's notice. Okay. So we're gonna hold that. Let's hold them. The United States intelligence agencies do not agree with what you just said. Exactly. So that's gotten worse. They clearly have not been deterred from developing a nuclear weapon. In fact, they've been put into a corner where they said this is the only thing we can do now. And third, their behavior has gotten worse. They did not attack any Americans when they were under the deal. Now they're back to the situation we were several years ago when I was in Iraq where they are attacking Americans and killing our allies. So on the three publicly stated goals of the administration's policy, they're failing on all three. Now, the other goal that's out there, although they won't publicly state it, is regime change. And I think that they might actually get that with this continued pressure. That's the place where you and I might agree. They might actually get regime change out of this continued pressure. Wow. I wanna, how many people out there think that if we keep up this pressure on Iran, which is empowering their hardliners and we get regime change, how many people think it will be a better regime? Right. We are empowering all the people in Iran we do not like. And so if there is some massive internal convulsion because our pressure, the maximum pressure campaign is so painful for them, we're more than likely going to get a worse, a more adversarial regime because those are exactly the constituencies Iran were empowering. I have a meeting on the Hill. I think I'm gonna let the two of them sort this out. Seth, I'm sorry. That was a misleading statement. The intelligence community, the intelligence community is very clear that Iran is moving towards a nuclear program. Depends on how you define that. There is a weaponization component. There's a ballistic missile component. It is not simply the thistle material. And if they pause one and continue the other with a full intent within a decade to have a program, that is marching towards the program. Look, I have to close you out. Hang on, you guys are gonna take this offline. I don't want people walking away thinking about that. I don't want people walking away thinking that the classified briefings we had last year were not here, were any different than what they were today. What I do want to say, which is a very, next panel, but I really want to thank all of you. There was a lot of agreement, but even where there was an agreement, there was real fact-based debate. And that is something that all of us need far more on. These are essential issues. It needs to be public debate. I absolutely agree with you that people in the country do not know why we're doing what we're doing and so much of the debate is meaningless. But I mostly want to thank you for modeling what I would like to think happens a great deal up on Capitol Hill. And with that, we're gonna let the chairman go to his meeting on the Hill. Thank you very much. All right, great to hear all of that. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Yeah, sure. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, George. Thank you. Thanks so much, everybody. We'll move on to the next panel, or rather, talk by Nellie LaHood. My name's Danny Rothenberg. I teach at Arizona State University. And we're thrilled to welcome all of you here because this is the third year we've held the Global Special Operations Policy Forum. And it's the sixth year of the Center on the Future of War, which is an entity that links ASU and New America. Peter's my co-director. We're thrilled to have Cindy Seeger here from ASU as well. It's my colleague Jeff Kubiak. But more than just the names, we're trying to do something here. And we saw a great example just now of connecting different sorts of institutions and different players to build bridges and to break down silos. It's not that often where universities and think tanks and government representatives and those from the military and even more of those from the soft community get a chance to work together. So thanks for joining us. Nellie LaHood is a senior fellow with New America's International Security Program, the author of Al-Qaeda's Contested Relationship with Iran, the view from Abadabad. She's actually working on a book now about the documents released from the Abadabad raid. She is a senior research fellow at Belfer Center. She was at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, is faculty member and now teaches at Goucher College. And so let's welcome Ms. Lee. Thank you, Dan. And I need this to say I wouldn't be writing a book about the Abadabad papers were it not for the work of the soft community. So thank you for the documents. My presentation today focuses on what the Abadabad papers reveal about the effects of the drone campaign on Al-Qaeda. But I read all Al-Qaeda's internal communicators that were recovered from Bin Laden's compound, nearly 6,000 Arabic pages. And I'd be happy to discuss other aspects during the Q&A. My presentation will cover how Al-Qaeda reacted to the drone campaign, what Al-Qaeda did to counter it, and why the drone suppose an insurmountable hurdle for Al-Qaeda. For the most part, I will let the documents tell the story. And the story that you will hear is that the drones were highly effective at depleting Al-Qaeda's capabilities, even though Al-Qaeda figured out how the drones work and what to do to evade them. Whereas the Abadabad documents show that Bin Laden and his chief associate, Atiyah, adopted stringent security measures that allowed them to evade the world's mightiest intelligence community for nearly a decade. And they were both at pain to do whatever was necessary to keep their jihadis safe, they failed. And Bin Laden kept receiving condolences letters lamenting the losses of more brothers. But I want to say a few words about the debates surrounding the drone campaign. According to America's counterterrorism wars, a project that tracks drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen run by my colleagues at New America. This counterterrorism instrument is, and I'm quoting, shrouded in mystery with a government often denying that strikes took place or that civilians were killed. For those who raised concerns about unreported civilian casualties, they will find examples in the Abadabad letters to support their claims. Some letters reveal that women and children were the casualty of the same drone strikes that successfully eliminated high-value Al-Qaeda targets. For example, we learned that when Mustafa Abu Yazid Al-Qaeda's number three at the time was killed in May 2010, his Egyptian wife, their three daughters, and his granddaughter Hafsa were killed during the same strike. Also, the little son of a Tunisian fighter and some of the locals, either Pashtuns or Waziris, whose house he visited were also killed. But what did Al-Qaeda do about the drones? Around December 2008, Al-Qaeda set up a security committee to find ways to counter the drones. We have an internal report prepared by the committee dated May 2010, providing a detailed account of the work it completed during its 18 months of existence. The authors informed bin Laden that prior to the formation of their committee, their work, the work lacked institutional basis, and therefore when the person in charge was killed, his work died with him, and whoever succeeded him had to start anew as if nothing preceded him. When the committee was first set up, its members put together a framework for the security apparatus that they wanted to establish. It included divisions dealing with intelligence gathering, training personnel to attend to security matters, combating spies through surveillance, interrogation, propaganda to counter the enemy's narrative as well as assassinations. When they put their proposal to Mustafa Abu-Liazid, who was number three, he initially allocated 40,000 rupees at the time it was about $480 to fund them. This sum is not sufficient to feed the personnel associated with the committee they protested. He increased the budget to 50,000 rupees and instructed them to focus on combating spies. Al-Qaeda could not afford to spend more, he insisted. They made it clear to him that the work of all the divisions was interrelated and they could not proceed otherwise. Abu-Ali-Azid's letter suggests that Al-Qaeda was struggling financially at the time. But around May, when they were writing their report to Bin Laden, most likely because Al-Qaeda received $5 million in exchange for the Afghan diplomat they had captured, their budget was increased to 200,000 rupees. The authors wanted to leave no doubt in Bin Laden's mind that the losses, and I'm quoting we incurred during the past few years, would not have happened had we not neglected the security dimension and privileged the military side. So their report is also a funding application and an appeal to have greater authority within Al-Qaeda's chain of command. So what did the security accomplish? Let me quote them. On the positive side, within 18 months we were able to uncover, dismantle and destroy many of the spying networks. We were also able to uncover the enemy's plans and his methods of recruiting spies and how it conducts its espionage. About 30 to 40 spies were killed and were able to put together an information network to connect most of the groups present in the arena and intelligence was shared in an effective way. We learned from another letter that the committee uncovered other technical information about how the drones work. I'll cite a few. In general, they say the drones are not meant to miss their targets. Still, they made some rare mistakes here in Uzheiristan. The evil they call it or the calamity do nothing without eyes on the ground and that is the human element. That is why they, the CIA, need time to build the spying infrastructure.  They go on to list what the spies do on the ground to assist in identifying the targets, technical stuff. And based on discussions I had with a friend who knows about drones and though he could not share length how they work, he was impressed by their efforts. So what the security committee could not accomplish. We learned from the report of the security committee that security matters were not taken seriously and this attitude is widespread. Starting with the leadership and the budget pastifies to that they said. This in turn translates into a lack of responsiveness on the part of some of the sheikhs, the seniors to the orders issued by the security committee. This is an illness for which you have not found the cure, the author's lament. The uninformed interpretations amongst the sheikhs is worse than amongst the ordinary individuals. Our respect for their seniority prevents us from taking necessary measures towards them. And because the committee does not enjoy a specific authority as part of our kind as chain of command, their warnings were not taken seriously. We further learned that shared intelligence amongst various shihadi groups was not forthcoming. Many sheikhs, the report indicates, were not responsive to the committee's request for information. For instance, al-Qaeda had no prior knowledge of the operation that killed seven CIA officers carried out by Abu Dajna al-Khalib al-Khurasani. It was only after his death that al-Qaeda came to hear about it. This problem runs deeper. The other shihadi brigades and their committees have a negative view of the security committee, they said. They accuse its members of being spies and warn their members from cooperating with them. More despairing for al-Qaeda's security committee is the realization that their hard work, which they firmly believe could counter the drones if widely applied, is futile. They lament that, and I'm quoting them, we have come to ascertain that all the deadly strikes were the result of the brothers' own mistakes. It appears that the martyred brothers made preventable mistakes that everyone had come to know too well, such as leaving the car without a guard or the Arab brother decides to take it himself to the mechanics. So are the drones an insurmountable problem? The answer is yes. Evading the drones is simple, and they knew everything they needed to know about it, but they couldn't translate their knowledge into reality. The drone campaign poses a challenge to the shihadi psyche as we, and they have come to know it through the shihadi ideological literature. Regardless of their differences, all shihadis joined the shihad to fight, to make God's word supreme on earth, and in return, God rewards them with eternal life and paradise. The emphasis is on fighting. Yet in the fatah, al-Qaeda leaders found themselves facing an unmanned enemy that tracks them away from the battlefield. It watches them from the sky, recording their daily routine movements interminably if necessary. In time, al-Qaeda leaders came to realize that shihadism's greatest asset, namely the enthusiasm of men who do not fear death, racing to meet their creator, was a liability. The predator they were facing necessitated hiding, not fighting, hardly the kind of action the ideological literature familiar to most shihadis promotes. Such a shift amounts to an ideological disorientation to the average shihadi, and even to some who are not so average. They faced another profound problem. We learned from the security committee's report that when its members were doing their due diligence with respect to security matters, matters and trying to counter espionage effectively, they were perceived to be intruding on fellow Muslims' privacy, and were even accused of spying. Their good intentions notwithstanding, spying is unlawful in Islam and intruding on fellow Muslims' privacy is difficult to reconcile with Islamic teachings. Though al-Qaeda scholar in residence, Abu Yahya Al-Libi put out a treatise in 2009 that specifically addresses the danger of spies and why they must be fought to protect shihadis, it is unlikely that his research penetrated the broader shihadi culture, and one can appreciate why. It is not just because the very identity of a shihadi is to act and to fight, and therefore confront danger, but also so many of them rose against their rulers, precisely because of the policing regimes that spied on them even in their masks. This was a charge that al-Qaeda security committee had to face, they became the policing state themselves. Let me quote Atiyah to illustrate why the drones posed an intractable problem. Here it's a lone quotation, so bear with me. Most of the casualties he told bin Laden are the results of our own mistakes. It has to do with the fact that the groups are piled up in this area, the limits of our control, among other things. It is inevitable that we shall endure great suffering, and many of us shall be killed, because the shihadi's in the area are conspicuous, visible, and their movements in the open are excessive. As a result, we have become an organization that is almost 90% overt. It is unhelpful in such an environment, particularly of the regional and international conditions against us. The numbers are large, much greater than this area can take in. It is not just us Arabs present in this area, others are present in much greater numbers, the Turks, the Uzbeks, the Bulgarians, Azerbaijanis, Pakistanis, et cetera. This kind of presence is unorganized without forethought, lacking proper control, and everyone tries to influence everyone else. Our affairs suffers from a significant degree of chaos, and we shall not be able to be straightened out at all. This is my opinion in brief. That is why, not long ago, I advised that we change our discourse, without which seeks to mobilize people to join the jihad. Atiyah had indeed written on this issue publicly, and his letter to bin Laden allows us to appreciate what calls him to do so. He had publicly written that the area, the arena of Afghanistan needs no additional fighters. Muslims would do better to send money to jihadis there, rather than join the jihad themselves. But if their jihad calling is unstoppable, he told them, then they should head to arenas of jihad other than Afghanistan, such as Somalia. One cannot stress the importance of what it means for al-Qaeda to be changing course on the issue of departure to jihad. It was not long when jihadi ideologs and leaders argued that jihad today is faradayn, the individual obligation of every Muslim. And when it is the case, it is a call to arms. By 2010, it seems, the sound of the drones altered the call to arms from a call to fight into a plea to hide. Thank you. Just a second before the next panel, I'm stored with Peter Bergen speaking with the ambassador from Afghanistan, Roya Ramani. If you can sit over here. Okay, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's really a great pleasure to welcome to New America, Roya Ramani, who is the first female ambassador of Afghanistan to the United States. She comes to the United States at a, obviously at a very interesting moment between the United States and Afghanistan. She was formerly the ambassador to Indonesia. She worked in the foreign ministry in Afghanistan and also the ministry of education. She recently returned from a trip to Kabul. I'm gonna engage her in conversation for a little bit and then we're gonna open it to your questions. I just also wanna recognize one person who's here, Mark Neuch, who flew up from Tampa this morning. Mark led the horse soldiers into Afghanistan shortly after 9-11, 18 years ago, hooked up with General Dostum and liberated the city of Mazah Sharif and is a real hero. Tell us a little bit about your personal journey to come to, you know, arguably the most important job in the foreign service is, other than being foreign secretary, is the job that you're holding. So tell us how you got there and what the significance of it is for other Afghan women. Sure, good to see you again. And assalamualaikum and greetings to all the audience here. About my personal journey, I would like to just frame it with a few words and that is that, first of all, it's my presence here and the journey that took me here is a depiction of the reality of today's Afghanistan. The fact that demonstrates our resilience. It is the resilience that you have to continue to stand against all the odds and challenges at the face of all the doubts that are cast to you and you still believe that there is possibility to make it. It's also perseverance and work under the difficult circumstances and the belief and hope that you will be able to make it. I have a personal motto and that is that you always have to make the best out of whatever is possible and available to you and that will take you to the next step. But it's also very important to mention that the fact that brings me here today is a matter of respect and observation of our constitution and the policy of the current government. I could tell you that it was probably not possible for anybody to envision this in the past, not even 10 years ago, maybe not even five years ago to have me here. It was not only the natural evolution of how women in Afghanistan and everything has evolved but also the top down approach that the government, the current government and particularly President Ghani had made a point to ensure that constitution is respected and women are given equal footing and opportunities to realize and materialize their capacity. That being said, this is actually also setting the environment for real change to happen. These changes are not reversible. Once you put somebody at the position that they never hold, that's how you make history and how you, that serves as a breaking point. It's not only my position, I am a example. Women has really come to hold positions within this government that they never did in the course of our history. Aren't there more women in the Afghan parliament than in the U.S. Congress? It's 28%. I think the answer is yes. But let me also say this. It's not only the government position and their representation at the official capacity. It's also at the local level and I will share one data fact with you and that is that since 2001, 100,000 women at the local communities have been elected to represent their communities at the development councils where decisions about their communities development are being made. 100,000 women. In a future where the Taliban might come into some sort of power sharing arrangement, if that ever happens, which it might not, do you think they would be open to the idea of you serving as the ambassador of Afghanistan to the United States? They better be. That's a great answer. They better be. Well, I say that with the confidence because it's not about a personal position but rather accepting the realities of the new Afghanistan, whether it's me or another female representative, this is where we are and this is what we can accept. So one of the very red lines and bars that are very clear for us moving forward as we are looking for a political settlement to be found to end this conflict is that there should be respect to women's rights and equality and the gains that we have made over the past 15 years. And again, thanks to you and all your contribution for making that possible and helping us and supporting us in this journey. This is a special operations policy forum. What's the role of US and other special forces since there are other countries have special forces operating with the Afghan military? How important is that for your military? I don't know if I can do justice talking about special operations given we have so many experts here in the audience but the little that I know, I would say that the role of special forces have been absolutely critical. They have served as enablers for the rest of the military, both for the US and the Afghan military to conduct their mission. And some of the very important elements that they have been extremely supportive of course in terms of intelligence, providing strategic advice, charting the way forward, support for the air force and most importantly the civil military engagement that special forces always lead is absolutely important. The conflict in Afghanistan is an insurgency. The enemy always seeks shelter among people. They do not come in a uniform that they can be easily identified. So what the special forces have done is to the civil military engagement knowing the communities, understanding their concerns, getting into the psychology of the people and knowing how they could strike more effectively have been of monumental importance. You were just in Kabul, what was the mood and sort of relatedly you were there obviously in the middle of these negotiations which the president canceled earlier this month. What first of all, what was your reaction to the cancellation as an individual and also as a government official? Particularly if there was a difference. It's difficult for me to do it in these two different persons. So I will first take the middle ground and say that of course we are very supportive of all the peace efforts and initiatives. However, it's also very important to recognize and realize that the people who will be directly benefiting from a peace process are the most critical part to be part of these negotiations which was not necessarily the case in these negotiations. About the cancellation and the statement of the September 7th, the statement that President Trump made, the one point that I would like to share is that this level of sadness and frustration that was shared by President Trump over the death of Sergeant Orthes is something that is also very deeply and intensely shared by all Afghan people. In the past two weeks that I was in Afghanistan, there were 347 casualties, 127 of them were civilians. So in an environment that violences used as an instrument of leverage, it's very difficult to perceive that the other side is really looking forward to a peaceful settlement. The next stage of this settlement would have been integration. So the societies that you continuously strike and they are losing their family members, their lives and their limbs. It's very difficult to get reintegrated. So my personal opinion, if I could share or reaction to that statement as an Afghan woman, as an ordinary citizen of Afghanistan, was that I was relieved. You were relieved. I was relieved. Why? Because of, so now I will also try to address the other parts of your question which was what was the mood in the past two weeks that I was in Afghanistan. And let me also set the timeframe that I was in Afghanistan. So I got there around the 26th of August, but before, right before the statements were made, I departed Afghanistan. So I'm explaining this so to put it in the context. When I was in Afghanistan, President Trump had not yet made those statements. Just saying that the negotiations are dead. That's right. So in that context, the mood that I found in Afghanistan, I could again summarize it by two words. It was hope and concerns. Hope is something that we have developed and we cherish and we hold on to over the past 18 years and even prior to that. It's that principle that helps us move forward. And let me explain it with a few examples. When I say hope, it is due to the people's resolve for democracy. They were gearing up for an election to happen. The private sector who came and met me and they said that they were very interested to explore market for Afghan value added products. Their statement is was that we don't want to put our hand out and ask for aid and charity from our partners. We want to put our hand out and ask for a partnership for enabling possibilities to help us get off the ground and be responsible to get to economic self-reliance. It was hope because during the time I was there in Herat, one of the, for the first time there was a regional women film festival. People from region came to celebrate films made by women. These are, there is a digital school being established in Afghanistan, making sure it's not, when I say digital school it's not something to do for kids to learn online. It is a technologically enabled school as they put it in New York at least, that kids are using iPads and digital boards and robots to enhance their learning. This was the positive part, the hope that we have continued to hold on to. The other aspect of it was great concerns. Great concerns about what the talks will bring to them, what the future will hold to them and I would like to also share an anecdote. Again, that really touched me and it was one of the very prominent women's rights activists who shared this with me. She said that all her life she has been fighting and working for promotion of women's rights, for children's rights on development projects and it was this element of hope and making a difference that helped her carry on. But in the past 10 months she has become more and more disappointed that she even feels humiliated and I said why is that? She said that for the first time I think not only the work that I am making is not making a difference and it may be all in vain but also that we are not in charge of our destiny. The destiny that we were working step by step towards making it seems to have gone completely out of our hands and the enemy, the extremism and terrorism that we have been fighting has been given the leverage and possibility to come back. What was your reaction, what was your government's reaction to being excluded from these negotiations? Your predecessor made some public statements that were pretty strong on the subject. I mean tell us, it seemed curious that these negotiations would be conducted without the elected representative of the Afghan people. Well this is why the official statement has always been while we support initiatives towards peace but a peace deal to be struck and to implement and be durable it must be made among Afghans. The government by nature and mandate is to be representing the Afghan people and its responsibility is to make sure that their voices, values and aspirations are reflected in a peace deal to be struck whenever it's possible. And we also have, it is public knowledge that for any peace process to succeed it must be backed by the national vision. It must have popular buy-in. It must ensure that it will pave the way for a hopeful, prosperous future. It provides opportunity for the youth. And this is, I'm making this point specifically because Afghanistan is a very young country. It's the youngest country beside the continent of Africa. 68% of our population are under the age of 25. This means it is a great asset and opportunity and particularly for our partnership with the United States because what it means is the 18 years of this partnership has enabled them to flourish and aspire to values and possibilities for their future. That's very much aligned and understandable between the two countries. But at the same time they are a restless society so this is the risk that it poses. Well, now we have the election on September 28th which will be the fourth presidential election. Certain elements of the US government were trying to persuade your government not to hold this election as my understanding, is that correct? The election is scheduled for the 28th of September and it will go forward because this is the way forward. It's a priority and it is the only way forward. And the argument against it is dangerous when there was this attack on President Ghani's rally yesterday in which dozens of people were killed. 2,500 polling stations are not gonna open. 7,400 I think, I mean. So obviously the policy country will be difficult to vote but what do you make of those arguments is too dangerous or and also whoever wins this election will they have a mandate to really negotiate directly with the Taliban from the Afghan people? Let me first clarify something about the numbers. The total number of polling stations is 5,000 plus. It's not 7,500 because that and this points to something very important. A lot of the data, a lot of the narratives that people are hearing and using and circulating are old data. That number comes from a 2009 report, not even 2014. There is around 5,000 plus polling stations and something around 400 of them will not be open. That's number one. Number two, this is the first election that will be funded, secured, and prepared solely by the Afghan people. We had a test case during the parliamentary election. Despite all the difficulties and imperfections that it faced, the reality is today we have a setting parliament that can fulfill its function. Democracies hold elections and this is a matter of preserving our constitutional order. This is the order that so much blood and treasure has gone into it and this is the determination of our people. Of course, nobody can challenge our results for democracy because during the parliamentary election, despite huge amount of threats, people went and stood in lines for hours to cast their ballots. The security is a challenge. Of course, it's the attack the rally because Taliban made a very clear statement that they do not want elections to happen. The reason is that when elections happen, it means stability, it means continuity and it means that they will have a strong counterpart that they would have to negotiate. It would make it more difficult for them to imagine that it is possible to take over at least partially or implement some of their ideas and ideologies. So elections are imperative. It will move forward and this is also a priority and the top priority. It is the best way to secure the gains of the past 18 years. Are you concerned that so many of the Democratic candidates are advocating full withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan? And should that happen? What does that mean? Would the Taliban take over much of the country? Some of the country? Would ISIS do well? Would Al Qaeda do well? What would it look like? And are you concerned that so many Democratic candidates are advocating for this withdrawal? I cannot, of course, speak on behalf of the American people and policies and whatnot, but when I am listening to this, what my question usually, or the question that raises in my mind is, I understand the politics behind why they would advocate for withdrawal. But I sometimes wonder, do they also think thoroughly about the consequences of what they are advocating for? Is that something that they... Are they only making a political slogan? Or is it really something that will ensure American national security interests? Because what we know is that all this blood and treasure has not been in vain. The results of it is a country that is your partner in that region. And just looking at that region, there are not many partners you can count on. The other aspect of it is we have very same and shared goals. The Afghan people and government want to make sure that Afghanistan is not a cradle of terrorism, is not a threat to our neighbors, that terrorism does not continue to hamper our potential for progress and self-reliance. And this is the same thing you want. We want to reach economic self-reliance and we have a plan for it. It's not just pie in the sky and talking about random things. In fact, for the first time, we do have a plan, a vision and the human capital of how to achieve it. So that would also make us your partner because this is other aspect of our shared vision. It is how we become your partner and not your dependent. And last but not least, in order to honor, cherish and make sure that all the investments that were made are honored and basically receive the deserving recognition that they have whether it was through military or through the development investment and that's possible. So we have the same goals. We have shared goals that we can work on to ensure that we can get what we need to. And this is where our interests converge. Great. I think we have time for a couple of questions. If anybody has a question, can you raise your hand and wait for the mic? We'll take Candice Rondo of ASU and New America in the back to begin. Ambassador Rahmani, thank you so much. First, I need to commend you and perhaps even President Ghani for being so forward-looking. I think also your presence here demonstrates the courage of the Afghan people. As some of you know, I lived in Afghanistan for a long time working for the Washington Post as a bureau correspondent there and also for ICG. I spent a lot of time thinking about Afghanistan and I think you raise many good points about the situation we find ourselves in with regard to the Taliban and negotiations. My question for you is you raise also a valid point about elections which I will say and I have said publicly I think are problematic. However, of course, it's up to the Afghan people to make that determination as to whether to go forward. I think that there is a determination. We do get a president, let's hope, within the next couple of months we've got some clarity on that. We have another five years then of a new administration. What should that administration do to engage the people more on the question of peace? How can we move away from this lockstep of loyal jurgas that exclude the people and only include elites and this sort of monopolization of the conversation around peace at the government level? Where do we get more input from the people of Afghanistan, all 32 million of them, on this question of peace and negotiations with the Taliban? Thank you for that question. I'm glad you raised that but provide an opportunity to clarify some of the things. So under the assumptions that you presented and I would say it should not be an assumption I'm pretty positive that we will have an election and we will have a new government mandated to represent the people of Afghanistan. What is the way forward? The way forward is number one people of Afghanistan particularly our security forces are determined to continue to defend our people. As long as we are attacked by terrorism and extremism we will continue to defend our people. Having said that the Afghan government was the first one to roll out the unprecedented agenda for peace negotiation in February of 2017. It was the first time that we rolled out a seven-point agenda inviting Taliban to talks. There were no conditions for the talks but of course peace will come on basis of the conditions. Some of the efforts that you mentioned how do we go forward? The Afghan government of course has a plan about representing people building the consensus. In fact that consensus that you are talking about has already been built. People have already come together to voice their concern. The jerga that you are pointing out the peace jerga that was held last April you mentioned two things. One was something like that it was exclusive and not representative of the people. Let me clarify something. Initially the jerga was planned to be attended by 2,500 delegates. At the end there were 3,200 delegates present there. It was because of the will of the people who came forward and came in groups from provinces from remote districts where voices were heard. There was a very transparent process of how delegates were elected. If anybody claims that that jerga was not inclusive here is what I have to say. The entire setting parliament of Afghanistan by default was part of the jerga. The two turds of senate because one turd was not in place because of the district elections that had not taken place they were all present. So if anybody claims that the jerga was not representative then it means that basically they had no basis. All these people who are sitting in the parliament are not their representatives. And about the elite I want to also share with you a personal note that to me it was such a relief to say to see that that was our 7th jerga that in that jerga for the first time I saw that the first rose which is usually occupied by the political elite or influencers the second rose the third rose had the faces that you have never seen them before. It spoke to the changing environment of Afghanistan to the fact that we have a new political class the fact that the young people have stepped up and they are filling up those chairs and they are lending their voice for their future. The jerga gave a mandate for peace so based on the constitution based on the mandate of the peace jerga the new government continue to have an open door for negotiation and peace. It's the same thing that is continuing now and as long as they are determined to fight we will fight. But at the same time the doors for negotiation and settlement is open and very much encouraged. We have a collective vision an idea of what real peace should look like and what are the frameworks and what are the boundaries that outlines what is acceptable for the people of Afghanistan and it was very well elaborated in 23 points declaration that was the outcome of that peace jerga. Okay we have one more time for one more question and we'll take this lady over here. Thank you very much ambassador my name is Viola Gengar I'm with Just Security a blog on national and international security issues at New York University Law School I have two quick questions one is what is the Afghan government sense of the capability gaps that have led and allowed the recent very high profile attacks in Afghanistan in the past few weeks and the casualties that you cited earlier what are the what are the capability gaps that have allowed that to occur and what are the government doing about that second question is we often hear here in the United States commentators former government officials policy experts refer to the US goal in Afghanistan not being to create some sort of or not to expect some sort of Valhalla what do you think about that kind of comment creating a sort of heaven is that the question what was the second question there are often these comments that seem a bit derisive of Afghanistan and Afghan aspirations that we don't expect Afghanistan to ever be any kind of Valhalla and I wonder how do you react when you hear that on your first question regarding the capabilities I want to share with you one fact that this year was one of the first years that waves of intensified Taliban attack were defeated by the Afghan forces of course as you keep hearing about a huge number of incidents not something that you would imagine but there was immense number of intensified attacks a lot of it was also because they were trying to seek leverage at the negotiation tables and the tactical shift because they were really pushed back and they could not really have an attack and try to take over a municipality office for some days like they did in the previous years and try to hold on to it and try to boost their influence in terms of their control over populations they had a tactical shift and the tactical shift was let's try attacking and hitting centers of population so that the propaganda and threat is going to scare people but at the battlefield every wave of their attacks were defeated together with the support of the coalition forces but with the Afghan forces at the forefront the missing capability is still because they are using human shield the pores that are still very present in the Afghan-Pakistan border the way that things are being transported these are all the issues that still allow for these unfortunate incidences to continue in terms of the US goals I want to backtrack and just mention one thing right now what we hear a lot is that it's very clear that President Trump wants to reduce the cost of this war at the same time reduce the risk for something like that from the American side I would say you need a partner you need to do that with a partner that's reliable that you can work with that has the capability and understanding of how this work can be done usually in the business world you cannot bring cost and risk down at the same time but it is still possible if you work in a very coordinated manner and creatively with a partner who knows how to carry on a counter-insurgency mission to fight against terrorism like they have done over the past ten years the reduction of cost also depends on how you are doing this in a coordinated manner and manner that will not affect your capabilities on the ground that does not further empower the enemy to strike and basically catch you in the by surprise is possible with a partnership that we have been basically investing in and the other your point about what people think I also believe that a good number of Americans are concerned about some of the values that they have invested like freedom democracy and that's again possible through this partnership that is determined to move on and ensure that Afghanistan remains a democratic country and as well as the by ensuring that the gains and investments that we have had in the past 15 years are secured that's the way forward well thank you very much thank you very much we're going to transition to the next panel transition to the next panel it's going to be colonel like wilson is going to be moderating from the army war college linda robinson from rand and also an author who's written extensively about afghanistan I should also mention that colonel wilson ran the commander's advisory group at saint com before he was at the army war college he worked with the army king who's the CEO and founder of global venture consulting who just returned from afghanistan last week or so who worked for stan mccrystal and runs a hoplite group also a former jsoc air force colonel who lives in afghanistan and not least our army senior fellow dank stanco who just joined us here at new america and is also somebody who's done multiple tours in afghanistan so i'll hand it over to colonel wilson to get us going here great thank you peter and uh sure folks want water morning everyone we've got the easy task this morning to grapple the future of afghanistan economically and militarily it's a pleasure to be with this august group of experts on the panel frankly i'm personally very excited about talking about spending about 40 minutes talking about the future of afghanistan presumably mostly from the perspective of the land of the afghans in the afghans perspective happy to be the moderator what we're going to do this morning is an opener i'm going to use a little bit of moderator prerogative here and just kind of steal about a minute just to kind of try to put a framer and frankly the framer is just to express for all of us and myself included some of the consternation that i've felt in thinking about preparations for the panel and thinking about my own experiences over the last 18-20 years in my own couple of moments in afghanistan as an active military officer and as a scholar studying these factors from an academic standpoint just try to share a little bit of that with you and then we're going to change the order from the sequence in the agenda a little bit give each of our folks about 3-5 minutes to give some opening comments lay out some questions some ideas, some provocations on the table and we'll actually start here in a moment with jiani and he'll lead us off followed by emily and then linda and frank will back clean up if you will after that if we have time a couple of questions give the panel opportunity to react to each other's comments that they place on the table and then we'll open it up and spend the rest of the remaining time in a full living room conversation to elicit your questions, points discussion but if you forgive me a little bit in a minute or so I'd like to just pose some ideas to frame frankly maybe to provoke some ideas and so here goes from my perspective preparing for this panel frankly even trying to figure out the right appropriate and relevant questions to ask the panelists about the future of afghanistan and about afghanistan's future pose quite a bit of a forgive me if you will but a bit of a gordian knot from an americans perspective we've been arguing about nova questions that can be capturing at least three bins and all three of these bins of questions pertaining to the subject of the wars as americans have understood them that followed the attacks of 9-11-2001 just let me lay out these bins as I've experienced them maybe you have experienced them similarly the first bin would fall into the category of whether we should have gone to war in the first place certainly in afghanistan but have been in the context of iraq as well this bin includes the sub-debates about the bad war in iraq if you all remember those debates through the 2000s as being a distraction from the good war in afghanistan and whether waging either war truly advanced u.s. interests and protected us against external threats I would pose that in terms of the war of choice and the war of necessity dichotomy but another dichotomy still persists and I would offer a dichotomy that's less considered but equally if not more important and that would be the dichotomy of their war as compared and contrasted to our war or wars the war by nature and the war by policy choice dichotomy something to consider in terms of bin one the second bin of questions that frankly haunt me a bit go to the methods and the ways how the wars were waged counterterrorism indoor mostly in the context of verses counterterrorism versus counterinsurgency strategy in afghanistan this bin of questions are those that have found the u.s. and its military arms heavily focused on discovering or attempting to discover the best most appropriate operational approaches and methods for conduct of warfights which argued we have largely overshadowed in many respects the focus on the purpose of the war or the wars itself or themselves and finally for me the third bin would be what should our future course be in afghanistan again from the american and international community perspective and this would include an array of possible answers of which take on an even larger consequence as they speak to what I call a bigger maps larger wars including the ever spring movements the conflicts and the wars that came with them and certainly the consternations over the wars or wars in war wars in Iraq where renewed violence often followed the american withdrawals of troops at the end of major military force interventions while the questions have defined u.s. interest over and presence and behavior regarding and within the future of afghanistan these questions have not necessarily had any import on afghanistan's big questions about the future of the land of afghans for afghans for afghans themselves in fact our questions have likely overshadowed to a large degree theirs for the past 18 plus years to put it lightly and kindly that might be most evidenced by the current administration's lack of interest in bringing in the government of afghanistan with what were ongoing talks with the Taliban which have recently been declared dead for the past 18 years the questions over the future of afghanistan have been placed secondarily to these three bins I would offer and they've really swung between two positions either an all in from the american perspective or an all out perspective with the future of the real questions of buying for afghans for afghanistan for afghans being swinging between those pendulums let me end on this and then turn it over to the panel sticking with the gordian knot theme a little bit here I would offer pointedly that despite perhaps what have been good intentions on the part of the united states approaching what has been was framed as our four part peace framework between the US and the assumed homogenous Taliban was from inception perhaps a not good enough effort to say the least to simply sever our knottedness from that of the afghan futures wrought with potential tragic long term consequences for everyone involved so the big question for me might be has the US want or need for an ending to our war compromise the promise for real peace for afghans and for a relative peace for afghanistan as they might come to know it so with that as a provocation up front I'll turn it over to Gianni to get us started here and in three minutes I'm sure I'll give all the answers to those questions so I'll start by laying out sort of where we are obviously ambassador her excellency the ambassador for afghanistan laid out some of this already and congressman waltzel so mentioned a lot of some of this so I've scratched a good minute and a half of what I was going to say but it's important to lay out the fundamentals for our conversation this about two weeks ago now almost two weeks Trump put a stop to the negotiations now what's important about that is that for the last year those negotiations really represented american policy towards afghanistan we were absolutely looking to do this as the way out the other thing about it once you want to peel the onion a little bit backwards I would say that the state department has had this notion for quite some time that they were the answer to the problem in afghanistan is actually reaching a political accommodation which in their mind was very much characterized by a negotiation with the taliban obviously the complex negotiations aside I don't want to minimize that or the need to talk to belligerence between belligerence the answer is clearly that those negotiations were inadequate at least that's what everybody even those that were believers in the negotiations come out and say now I would submit to you that they were quite frankly unrealistic not just inadequate when the thinking and the strategy is inadequate we shouldn't be surprised that the outcome is actually inadequate so at the same time though as the negotiations were going on at least in the department of defense side of things people were still going after their missions in afghanistan advise and assist and train the afghan security forces and in many regards if you look back at security oriented dilemmas that they faced they've done fairly well against some items I mean we haven't lost a provincial district or provincial capital but we've obviously had some setbacks in terms of areas of afghanistan that have gone over to the Taliban I would submit to you that the negotiations in many regards have been boldened Taliban on the ground so that's part of the cost but now the pendulum has shifted again and part of the I'm so glad that you mentioned now the pendulum has shifted to words such as we're going to hit them harder than we've hit them in the last 10 years which of course that pendulum is also that side of the pendulum is also inadequate and quite frankly unrealistic the thought that we're going to hit them harder and somehow that's going to get them to the negotiation table has proven false over the last 18 years so maybe that's not the answer so what I would submit to you is that some of the questions that we keep on asking ourselves are getting admittedly less complicated because we are no longer trying to solve a complicated issue and we're looking for a simple solution so my answer is going to be deceptively simple so we went from how do we win to what does winning look like you know and then we later actually went to how do we get out as we saw in the last year and now what's next so what's next is afghan government is next afghan government is happening no matter what we want to talk about whether we want to talk about 14,000 to 8600 you know withdrawal versus meeting the south asia strategy goals however you want to discuss at the end of the day the afghans are going to the polls on the 28th much to the dismay of some others that have unrealistically again thought that maybe we'll just hand this off to warlords, gangsters thugs and somebody else you know to be named later as a positive thing I mean it's unbelievable that we thought that but let's say that you know the fact is on the 28th they're going to the polls they're going to elect a new government that new government like it or not is going to have the mandate of the afghan people to whatever degree you want to assign to it and the fact is is that you know that's who we have to work with now I would submit to you and this is the last minute trust me because I actually want to bring this up later on if that's okay for the last five years the DOD has been working to train up and train their replacements in many regards and the afghan national security forces the rest of the US government has been looking to make a deal with the Taliban and we have not been working so hard to get the afghan government to do something more on their own so my kind request or my goal next five years is to actually push the note that hey how about the rest of the US government actually step up and help out the afghan government be all that they can be at the end of it this isn't state building or whatever anybody else wants to label this is guaranteeing our investment and that return on the investment is not going to come by only one arm of the US government working to train up their replacement and then the rest of us working to build up and train the enemy to be better partners for this so with that in mind I would submit to you the thing that we need to let sink in is that afghans are going to solve afghan problems all we can do is help them build a stronger state so when the question of average afghan citizen is who do we support do we support the Taliban and what they are bringing to the table or do we support the afghan government and what do they bring to that table we make that choice difficult for them as far as the Taliban are concerned because we built that state stronger and that's how we get out of there we build a stronger afghan state thank you Emily yes hi everybody some of you might be wondering why there's a geologist sitting on a panel about number one the future of afghanistan and two at a soft policy forum the answer to that question is I'm going to call out some people in the audience because I love to make you guys uncomfortable and nothing makes you more uncomfortable than public recognition so going back years ago Kevin Trujillo who is sitting in the second row up here helped my team at the pentagon get our first samples of chromite out of wardak province I learned at that time that if you tell a soft guy that you need a rock they're going to turn it into a crossfit competition and bring you one back this big not baseball size right Kevin also took me with him to go meet with the governor of wardak province shortly thereafter where he was talking about security issues in wardak and I got to ask the governor about the illegal trade in chromite mining and the governor at the time actually knew very accurate pricing on what chromite was going for in the international market which might surprise a few of you in the audience you know a little while later Bob Wilson who actually now works with us at global venture was the soda feast commander who supported a village stability operations program that we our team was an enabler for in kunar where we put in a small chromite processing plant and worked with the BSO enablement program to do that to create an alternative or an option for the ALP to have employment in sort of a you know if you work with the Americans will create economic development in this area as well so the reason I'm here is because I work in mining in Afghanistan and many other emerging and frontier markets all across North Africa and other locations and I've been working in Afghanistan since early 2010 to attract international investment into Afghanistan's mining sector and I hope none of the seals are here who I convince some of those samples were gold when they were really high right full of gold but I've been to 15 different mineral locations around the country starting in 2010 and now as a private business since 2013 we are still advising private sector investors who are going into Afghanistan's mining community quietly so that they don't attract a lot of attention but those chromite projects grew into a four million dollar investment from an American company to build a chromite processing facility outside of Kabul that processing facility has convinced now an additional investor to put 10 million dollars into small legal chromite mines and none of that would be the case if it weren't for the support and the vision of the soft community I see this consistently in other countries that we work in and that we hear about a few of you have talked to for example Mindanao right another location where we have Islamic extremism and co-location of small mining that is funding that extremism right so when I think about the future of Afghanistan a few of you have heard this line before the economic stability of the country is not really going to come from pomegranates or saffron those are wonderful industries they employ people I buy Afghan pomegranates saffron but mining is really the only industry that can come in and create a tax base an economic base jobs infrastructure everything that's needed for Afghanistan to become what we like to call economically sovereign much like what the ambassador was speaking about and we see that happening every day I would throw out a little bit of a perhaps contentious suggestion that as we look at the negotiations with the Taliban whether it's the Afghan government the American government that the only way to realistically economically reintegrate the Taliban back into Afghanistan's economy is with mining mining can create jobs in very rural locations it can do so with what we would call industrial minerals that require very little international investment it can be done with small amounts of money it can work within the hierarchy that the Taliban is used to with commanders running small processing facilities or becoming the brokers for small miners and those miners would contribute to the economy of the country tax base, royalty base logistics, jobs the average mine employs seven people outside of the mine itself to support what we call satellite industries so that's what I see is the economic future of Afghanistan is integration with jobs in the mining industry and also convincing Afghan business people to reinvest their money back into Afghanistan it's a huge trend that we're seeing right now we're advising on two in large scale investments in the mining sector both of those investments are Afghan businesses bringing their money back into Afghanistan because they believe now is the right time to invest in mining believe it or not with all the political uncertainty, with all of the security issues they think that now is the time to put their money into the sector thank you very much I'm delighted to be here a part of this panel and following an excellent discussion between Peter Bergen and the ambassador I would like to make a few comments about the broader picture and some of the broader issues that I just raised but I think I can also contribute by sharing some of my observations about the special operations specific experience what it means and where what I think the community can take away from that and its application to the future both in Afghanistan and elsewhere I recognize first of all there are many operators in the room many people have been to Afghanistan so I think that with that kind of experience we, I'm assuming everyone is quite up to speed and immersed in the current events but I would like to point out I think the key observation I would make about now and where do we go from here is its absolutely vital to get the political negotiations started and the Afghans have to be at the table determining the terms of the agreement that is the end game the exit strategy the transition point and I think that we can talk about all of the other small pieces the recent complications but that to me is essential and I think there's a consensus in the US military and the US government that there is a strategic stalemate that there is no military solution and that this is the proper way ahead I would make the critical observation though that I think that could have happened during and with the surge at least if not before I think that that is we've been very delayed in getting a serious political process going and again these we can talk about of it that's my kind of headline and so resuming talks using here's my second headline point it's very critical to use the US NATO leverage the presence of the US forces to link to force not only the beginning of talks but link it to a roadmap the completion of some actual terms with verification mechanisms and conditions so that the thing doesn't fall apart as soon as we walk away and this is there are many precedents there's a whole literature on trying to link political military means to political ends but I think we've really fallen down and on your macro war issues I think it's very critical that we come away I've done a lot of work both in my books and now it ran on what are the lessons and I think this is the macro lesson that we have to become much more clear about how to achieve the desired political outcomes from any application of military force and this is not a criticism for anyone who has served I think that responsibility resides at the policy level and it's not a comment about Democrats or Republicans this is the giant lacuna of American strategic conduct in the world and so we can talk about that but I think it's important to note I also believe given the current status of the development of the Afghan government and the Afghan national policies is that they're going to need continued aid and this was the big lesson from the Soviet era of course you must continue to support this force or it will collapse in the face of a robust insurgency I would say there should be a small long-term hopefully non-combat presence I know there are people that would advocate a CT element on the ground but I think one of the hallmarks of this government here has been to develop capable of forces and they might be supported we've just been through a large operation inherent resolve campaign where the US combat was minimal and the forces on the ground did it and that's the model and I think everybody in the room knows this but there's I think also a very important political level of commitment this administration cut the aid to Pakistan to an important day March a critical prod to the Pakistanis that we were serious to release Malabarator and to get a real the right people at the table so we can talk more about the stay behind conditions but I think it's important and I want to note I think this we can debate if you think there's a strategic stalemate there are a lot of people with on the ground experience I know you Emily have just been there to defend the strategic stalemate comment with a few quick comments these are using the latest DOD figures so enemy initiated attacks are 10% less year on year this quarter compared to the quarter last year the ADSF casualty rates are the same this quarter as year on year last quarter and the fill rate for the ADSF is 77% these are all hallmarks that I mean because we can argue yes there are areas they've been shadow government in many areas for years but I think those few data points sort of supports the strategic stalemate so if I could turn quickly and I'm mindful because I think the conversations really the most important part of this event here and they've given a small amount of time for many topics the aside from we need to convert our military pressure into political outcomes I think the big lesson here is CT only is not the solution this was is an insurgency into which foreign terrorist organizations are embedded and a fit or small coin approach which I've laid out many things that I've written is really the way ahead and I know that my successor panelist here will talk in depth about the soft GPF piece and I think that's very critical that's one of the major lessons coming out but I do I did as many of you may know wrote a book about the ASO the ASO ALP program the local defense model was the right model for Afghanistan but I think it's the right model in many places that was of course linked into the ministry of interior now they're doing the territorial force linked into the MOD but this is the right idea for the makeup of Afghanistan the VSO piece village stability operations of which Emily participated many many of you in the room I believe I think it's important to know that connectivity to the population and not just to extract intel from them but really working that civ mill and the population basis to that local security force is legitimate and remains legitimate and is overseen in a that to ensure it's at behavior remains ethical I would like to everyone here probably knows the giant success of Anasoc Afghan special operations forces the growth of it I was quite nervous when the expansion orders came down I think there is and this is the case with all soft how big can you get you got to really make sure that tipping point isn't crossed and I would like to add here I don't know how many international soft partners are in the room but the special police units were absolutely critical are are critical and the key for all of these units is how to ensure they become completely independent and I have written some critical things about the continued dependencies and we need to be able to get after that I also think there's a really important hallmark in the NATO soft headquarters and I know we'll have later today Admiral McRaven will be speaking I was actually at the event he presided he was rolling out a report this morning at the Council on Foreign Relations and I took as my guest Colonel Magne Rodal actually General Rodal for those who know Norway soft who was his partner in setting up the NATO soft then coordination center now NATO soft headquarters so this idea it wasn't just the U.S. didn't know all of you guys in uniform know that and gals if your service members as well it was very critical the roles they played and that is something that pays dividends well into the future because we now have this experienced integrated interoperable NATO soft community that is very needed in Europe can go to other out of area missions and I think it's less known in this country the role that has been played there year in and year out and has just with the NATO meeting just concluded they're committed to be there with us so I think the burden is on this administration to get back to the table or facilitate and Norway is also playing a big role in this getting that real negotiations started and not lose the momentum that had been created you can criticize the way in which they went about it but I'd rather look ahead and say we must get to real negotiations. Frank. All right good morning and so first of all I want to thank New America and the supporters of the panel or this panel that I'm a U.S. Army fellow and so I mean I'm on active duty and I'd also like to take the opportunity to thank all the soft guys because over the last 18 years I've worked with many of your organizations hand in hand so thank you for the sacrifices and all that you've done the other thing is while I'm a U.S. Army guy this is what I talk about is really my own opinion it's not the official position of the United States Army or the military and so just take that into account as we look at Afghanistan and we all have our own unique experiences I view mine through the lens of a a conventional ground force commander I'm not a soft expert I will tell you that I left Afghanistan in 2018 in December and I consider myself dated because it changes there so fast what goes on and so you know just take that into context so I've had the opportunity to work with over the last 18 years with numerous soft and the incredible leadership that commands those organizations and I think it's important as we're looking at the elements of national power and I bring the the mill perspective it's good to have a historical contextual understanding of of the fight and I won't replow old ground because most of you know how it's unfolded because we're back where we started and many things unfolded during that and a lot of lessons learned and so I do not think that you can go to the future without understanding the past to inform it but you cannot go to the future in a soft perspective unless you understand the impact writ large of the force where we are now because that obviously impacts at the soft but what I'd like to do is just give you two examples and then we can get into the discussion and maybe it opens and if you want to talk about how the fight unfolded with soft and conventional we can talk about that but I'll highlight two examples so in as we transition from a counter into counter insurgency from counter terrorism I would tell you that early on early on this fight did not have a very clear strategy with well defined end states and so what we decided to do was you know we gave battle space owners and people that were working independently there was no unity of command there was no unity of effort and so there was definitely there were friction points and so as these people operated in the ground force commanders battle space who was in charge and so there was a really a need for information sharing and some transparency of who was doing what and it was not intuitive to me you know how this process was to unfold and so and we were building it in stride but I will tell you that once we got that those processes in place once we got the information sharing architecture once we got the communication the most part the trust in place we found that the better communication allowed in the information sharing allowed the conventional force and the soft to work hand in hand to set conditions for both operations because early on it suboptimized how we were moving forward with coin operations and we were not making many gains with security but once we started that lash up it set conditions it allowed better enabler support during their mission the post mitigation of the operations we saw exponential increase in security and then what we do is intelligence drives operations and you all know that we allowed we could use that that intelligence underpin the direction in which coin operations not so much counter terrorism operation were conducted and we saw a lot of gains so I will tell you that where we were at the beginning and where I left in 2006 it was in a different place then I like to highlight where we are today so 2019 I was the I was the chief of fires for targeting for the theater and what we have today is we are going back to where we are you know counter terrorism coin to counter terrorism with a TAA piece of SBAP and NATO all of which those enablers are absolutely critical to make it happen so it was early on in the fight it has now become a a well oiled synchronized machine where there is communication across organizational boundaries there is shared understanding there are these the things that we are going after are all linked to a theater commander strategic objectives and everybody knows it so there is transparency resources are prioritized and it really became a joint fight and so a great example this was the joint targeting process where the conventional force oversaw the process numerous intelligence agencies added to the process the Air Force provided a phenomenal reach back capability but the agility and the flexibility of an action arm of the soft team really employed it and I will tell you that that was a significant contributor to ramping up pressure on the Taliban to come to the negotiating table and so those are two things of where we started where we are and they will certainly inform us of where we are going and so again I know you want to get to the discussion but that is what I would offer we are in a pretty good place thanks Frank as you were laying out this construct the general purpose force with soft really I might cast it this way special operation forces enabled by precision intelligence surveillance reconnaissance and that married with general purpose forces on the ground for many years that force on the ground being largely coalition but over the 18 year period the trick and I think it gets to Linda's earlier point of where the pitfalls of thinking of counterinsurgency or reverses counterterrorism because the marriage of the two and the transition where we may be today in terms of this transition of that indigenous ground force actually the whole recipe of soft plus PGM in a capable ground element really being the transfer the political transfer perhaps how wars begin to end that being a transfer and all three of those attributes to the Afghan people themselves the Afghan government to be the monopolist over the arm of violence which would make this thing a political affair which war and warfare is all about I just want to put one more I want to put one question on the table and then we're going to open it up and I want to go to Emily where's all the gold where's all the gold Emily you had you gave us a very you started to paint out a very interesting map an economic geoeconomic map of Afghanistan we were talking before also about the context of security and some of the foreign direct investments I think it would be interesting if you could share some of that piece but really I'd like to begin on your economic map and maybe get your ideas maybe ideas from other panelists if they want to weigh in briefly with that economic map what does that imply what does that require in terms of the political map that might match and go with it as a geologist it's something else I have in common probably with a lot of the military folks in the audience I have a difficult time talking without a map on the table frankly but the mineral resources of Afghanistan are spread throughout the country but they are different commodities are concentrated in different parts and I could give a geology lesson that I won't but a lot of the large copper gold resources for example are in the south eastern stretch you have things called pegmatites which hold both rare earth elements and gemstones right along the border with Pakistan you have potentially lithium deposits along the border with Iran that actually cross over the border along with copper and iron you have gold and coal and more gemstones and oil and gas in the north so when we talk about politically who will control or who does control currently different parts of the country I think as Americans looking at it from a policy and a military perspective we forget that maybe our adversaries are fighting over areas because they contain resources right or that's at least a part of their calculation so they're oftentimes it's not clear to folks until you work with Afghan mining companies, Afghan transportation companies that move commodities the people in Pakistan and Uzbekistan who import the commodities that come out of Afghanistan there are huge deposits that I personally feel are on the negotiating table with these political negotiations and our adversaries know where they are and in some cases they're already making them and making money off of them and so if we're going to talk to folks about which areas are kind of given different levels of federal government control, local control whatever that looks like and if we talk about what parts of the government might be held by different political parties within Afghanistan it's naive to think that they aren't thinking I want the Ministry of Mines and Petroleum right that they control that Ministry that they control the money right it's naive to think that they don't know that there's a huge gold and copper deposit smack dab in the middle of Ghazni province right or a rare earth mine in the middle of Helmand right or the lapis lazuli mines that the government just took control back over just last week right so there is a economic reality to what's going on in the fight and I do wish I had a map to draw it out does that answer your question that's wonderful and it really tees up perfect for at least a couple of questions I'm going to steal some time here a couple of questions gentlemen in the front here thank you very much my name is Ayub Elfani Ayub Elfani I'm advising the First Vice President of Afghanistan also because I had some road to connect the first US Special Forces back in November 2001 US Special Forces in the northern part of Afghanistan to defeat Halloween in Al Qaeda so still I'm working with them, advising them I was in Kabul last night I flew from Kabul to DC because on September 11 we we had a big gathering in Kabul to commemorate the 9-11 and also to screen the 12 strong film the first time in Kabul the very translated version taking this opportunity since I was talking to a different group of people in Afghanistan women MPs and politicians leaders of ethnic and political groups about I talked abou