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THE ATLANTIC COUNCIL OF THE UNITED STATES
2010 YOUNG ATLANTICIST SUMMIT
SPEAKER:
GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS,
COMMANDER,
INTERNATIONAL SECURITY ASSISTANCE FORCE
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2010
Transcript by
Federal News Service
Washington, D.C.
GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS: Well, good afternoon to you all. Thanks for that warm welcome. Mike, thanks for your kind introduction, and much more importantly, thanks for your service in Iraq and the leadership you provided to your troopers with the Big Red 1, the 1st Infantry Division, during the surge and some very tough days in Iraq. It’s due to the courage, skill and commitment of leaders like you that we have seen such progress in Iraq in recent years. So thanks again for what you did and for what your comrades did.
Up front I should note that I am well aware of the challenge of addressing a large group that has already heard from multiple foreign ministers and the NATO secretary-general, the SACEUR and had a two-hour lunch. And I’m going to confront you with PowerPoint slides as well.
In situations like this, it is always good to recall the young boy’s school report on Julius Caesar, perhaps a familiar tale in this city founded so many centuries ago by Caesar himself. Julius Caesar was born a long time ago, the little boy wrote. He was a great general. He won some important battles. He made a long speech. They killed him. (Laughter.)
I will try to avoid Caesar’s fate today, but I would like to take advantage of the opportunity to share with you a bit of our endeavor in Afghanistan. Indeed, I’m honored to be here with you and in Lisbon, one of the world’s oldest and greatest cities, as NATO leaders take part in an important summit.
As you might expect of a serving NATO commander, I am a huge believer in the importance of the alliance. Having served in NATO assignments at many ranks, from lieutenant to lieutenant general and now full general, I have seen firsthand proof that a coalition of allies standing strong together and working side by side can overcome challenges that are too big and too complex for any one country to handle on its own.
Indeed, given the unique atmosphere of a military command that is home to multiple cultures, languages and institutional norms, I recognize that working together is vitally necessary. Winston Churchill, therefore, was right when he observed that the only thing worse than having allies is not having them.
So my thanks to Karl Lammers, Fred Kempe and Bernardino Gomez and your teams at the Atlantic Treaty Association, the Atlantic Council of the United States, and the Portuguese Atlantic Committee for your work in supporting NATO and the trans-Atlantic community, and in particular for your continued support of this group, the Young Atlanticists Summits.
This program is tremendously important for helping to build support for NATO and its principles well into the future, and I’m honored to be part of it here today. Indeed, it’s wonderful to see so many promising young leaders who are committed to the future of NATO and to the trans-Atlantic community. I have no doubt that among this impressive group are many of NATO nations’ future thought leaders and policymakers. My thanks to each of you for your commitment to serving in the arena of international affairs.
Whenever I address audiences of young leaders I’m reminded of a story from my early days as a young leader in the Army, shortly after I was commissioned as a new second lieutenant, fresh out of West Point. I was on my first field exercise with my platoon. We’d had a long day and we didn’t crawl into our sleeping bags until just before midnight. I’d only been asleep for an hour or so when my platoon sergeant, a wise old airborne veteran, elbowed me and woke me up. Sir, he said, look up and tell me what you see.
So I looked up at a beautiful night sky and replied, I see a million stars, platoon sergeant. And what does that tell you, sir? He asked. Well, not exactly sure what my platoon sergeant was getting at, I thought for a few moments and, wanting to impress him, gave an answer that I thought he would conclude to be truly profound and indicative of a keen intellect. (Laughter.)
Well, platoon sergeant, I said, astronomically it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Theologically it tells me that God is great and we are but small and insignificant. Meteorologically, it tells me that we are going to enjoy a beautiful day for training tomorrow.
There was a long pause as my platoon sergeant considered this weighty answer. Thinking that he might be speechless after such an impressive response, I finally asked him, what does it tell you, platoon sergeant? Well, sir, he replied, it tells me that somebody stole our tent. (Laughter. Applause.)
Well, thanks for laughing. You know the deal. When you reach my stage in life, you’re only as good as the material they give you. (Laughter.) And I’m guessing that that material will be flogged all across Europe vey shortly and they will have to dig for some new material in the near future. In any event, let’s move on to more serious matters.
I’d like to use the slides I’ve got loaded up here to talk about the current situation in Afghanistan, to take you through what we have achieved, in recent months in particular, where we’re headed and then to take your questions. Next slide, please.
I want to start off by pointing out that we have worked very hard over the last 22 months or so to basically get the inputs right in Iraq, and that implies that we did not have the inputs right prior to that time, and that would be correct. That’s not to say that we did not do a great deal of very important work and helped build institutions, human capital, roads, schools, health clinics, security forces and a host of other worthy accomplishments.
But the fact is that we did not have the organizations necessary to carry out a comprehensive civil-military counterinsurgency campaign, the kind of campaign that is necessary to achieve our objectives in Afghanistan. We didn’t have those organizations staffed right, in some cases with the right folks in charge. We didn’t have all the principles, concepts, and above all, civil-military campaign plans necessary. And most importantly, we did not have the resources required to carry out the kind of campaign that I’ve described.
And over the course of the last 22 months or so, in fact, the nations contributing to ISAF have deployed some 80,000 additional forces. We’ve added well over 1,000 additional civilians to the diplomatic and other organizations working there, and funding has been provided for 100,000 additional Afghan national security forces. All of this, again, to get the inputs right. And we achieved that goal really just recently, when the final large element of the deployment from the United States, which was some 68,000 during that time, and division headquarters for regional command south, took over down there in the earlier part of this month. Next slide.
Now what this enables us to do, as I mentioned, is to carry out the kind of comprehensive civil-military campaign that is necessary. These are the bad guys. These are the enemies, those who are trying to foment instability and violence in Afghanistan, to bring back what they had before, which is essentially to turn the clock back many centuries in Afghanistan rather than to allow progressive forces to proceed. Next.
This is what they need to maintain their momentum. And make no mistake about it, until very recently they had the momentum throughout the country in this effort, in this fight. What we have to do is apply pressure in all regards, to take away from them, or disrupt their access to these elements right here that are essential to the continuation of the campaign they have been waging so fiercely, particularly since somewhere around 2004, 2005, the point at which they had sufficiently regrouped, reconnected and re-inserted themselves back into Afghanistan after being evicted in 2001 and 2002. Next.
Now, what’s required is to use all of the elements at our disposal, not just military means but all civilian and other, if you will, weapons, tools in our arsenal. Certainly military force is necessary, but it is not sufficient. But it is necessary. It includes targeted intelligence-driven raids – and I’ll talk about what those have achieved in recent months in a moment. These take out the mid-level leaders, the key facilitators and others. That’s who they target.
But in and of themselves they don’t achieve what is necessary because you have to take away the safe havens, what Mike and his group did in Ramadi, for example. We banged away in Ramadi in Iraq for four years and we still couldn’t drive from one side of the city to the Green Zone without getting hit because it remained a safe haven under the control of the enemy. It was only when conventional forces cleared it, after years of hitting it with Special Ops every night, that we were able to take it away.
And of course you want more and more host nation forces, special as well as conventional or general purposes. And you should always try to employ local security solutions as well, and we have one of those in Afghanistan now. President Karzai’s Afghan local police initiative, which is essentially a Community Watch with AK-47s underneath the control of the ministry of interior at the district level, and it has already proved to be very, very important.
But again, military activity, while necessary, is not sufficient. You also have to have politics. Next. That, in this case, includes not just the establishment of decent governance at all the different levels – local, district, provincial, national, so that the people embrace and see it as legitimate in their eyes. And to do that it has to have these qualities here.
But equally important, you have to have re-integration of the reconcilable elements of the insurgency, and that is starting to take off, by the way, with over two dozen groups already having come forward to take advantage of new programs that are connected with President Karzai’s peace and reintegration initiative. And then, if you can get it, with the senior leaders of the opposition groups, true reconciliation.
Keep in mind that in Iraq what we actually achieved was this right here, although the term for it there was reconciliation. It was not the senior al-Qaida in Iraq groups – leaders that came in. It was their rank-and-file and it was the population that tacitly or actively was supporting them. Next.
Obviously intelligence is hugely important, and you have to pull it together. All disciplines have to be united, have to be fused. And in truth the big breakthrough in intelligence in recent years has not been in any one of the individual disciplines – in each of which there has been a breakthrough in imagery intelligence, signals intelligence, human intelligence.
The real breakthrough is in the integration of the products of all of these, intelligence fusion, as we call it, literally fostered by intelligence fusion centers that we created in Iraq during the surge and then have also sought to create in Afghanistan. Next.
You have to get into the other elements of the rule of law besides those you’re just training with your Afghan national security force effort. So you have to help them with the corrections arena and with judicial assets as well. Not necessarily at all taking it all the way down to the local level, where traditional justice mechanisms certainly can still function, but certainly pushing it down far enough to the level that is necessary. And we worked very hard in this arena. A lot of these national programs, rather than, say, ISAF, but nonetheless very important. And of course you have to get at basic services. Next.
The so-called nonkinetics that give the people the prospect for a brighter future than they could have under, say, the Taliban or one of the other groups fighting to control various parts of Afghanistan. Next.
Obviously this is a regional – there’s a regional context here, and so engagement in this case with Pakistan is very important. I’ve been over there several times since taking command 4.5 months ago, and again, the broader region as well, with the Central Asian states and so forth.
And then finally, this is also a war of ideas, and you must compete in that war. All of the different media elements out there need to have representation from what it is that we are doing and the Afghan government is doing to be part of that debate. Next.
Now, geographically this shows the areas of focus. Obviously we have to put particular emphasis on those areas that have to be deprived to the insurgency because they are the major safe havens. You’ll know that the recent major fighting has taken place in two districts to the west of Kandahar and one to the northwest, which are largely secured now and taken away from the enemy, including Mullah Omar’s former home turf right here.
A lot of effort in recent months, really, in the past year for the six central districts of Helmand and now expanding to the north and to the northwest. And then pushing up the major route, Route 1 out in the east around Kabul, pushing that security bubble out as well. Kabul having been an area in which the Afghan forces have taken the lead, are the face of security, in which there has been quite good security over the course of the past five or so months, despite constant efforts by the Hikani network and the Taliban to carry out attacks in the city.
Then areas in the north, where the Taliban achieved momentum, in some cases still has it, where we have to work, as you can see up there, and then over in the Badgis-Kormak (ph 15:05) area. But that gives you a sense of where it is that we are focusing our forces and Afghan forces in partnership to again take away areas from the Taliban, help establish local governance, local economic development and so forth, so that the people see that as a preferable alternative to what the Taliban might have to offer. And indeed, they remember what the Taliban did to them when the Taliban were in charge, and the vast, vast majority of the population does not want to see them return. Next.
Now I mentioned targeted, intelligence-driven raids, special operations – really special mission unit operations. I’d focus on this number right here, nearly 1,500 targeted operations in a 90-day period that ended on the 18th of November. And you can see nearly 390 midlevel important leaders and facilitators killed or captured. That is a very, very significant number.
This represents by far the highest tempo of these type of operations that our militaries have ever achieved. This is several times what we were able to achieve in Iraq during the surge. And again, a very important component, but one in which you must be very precise, you must avoid civilian casualties, you must treat the population well, and so forth. And that’s a key element to continuing these kinds of operations. Next.
Now there’s a paradox here, and it’s worth laying this out for you. The green line is the security effort, and you literally ramp it up. More forces come in, you start to achieve more effects. That’s this axis right here. But as that happens, as you start to achieve security, taking away areas from the enemy, violence goes up because they will fight back. If you try to take away Marjah, if you try to take away the districts west of Kandahar and so forth, the enemy wants to hang onto those and they will indeed fight back. So the violence goes up.
Then there’s a lag between achieving decent security and the establishment of governance and rudimentary economic development. And then understandably, a further lag between that and the establishment of actual confidence on the part of the citizens, especially with the Taliban understandably continuing to resist, to use night letters, to employ intimidation, assassination and so forth. Next.
Now just to give you an example of an area where this has played out, Nawa is one of the districts of central Helmand province, one of the six central districts I referred to. You can see in late summer, early fall of 2009, when the US Marines increased their forces there, and as they fought, the level of violence went way up. You can see this represented by these pink lines right here.
And we started to achieve security over here, level of violence starts to come down, but it took quite some time. Gradually were able to help the Afghans establish decent local governance. That started to take off, and get economic development going, repair the schools, the mosques, the health clinics and the other elements of basic services, and then to see Afghan confidence start to take hold here. You can see how that played across. Red is bad, yellow is better, headed toward green in some of these areas. Next.
Now this is a bit of a complicated slide but it shows what can be done with the use of these Afghan local police initiatives that are built on what are called the village stability operations campaigns. This is February 2010, right here, and you’ll see, we’ll walk our way through all the way to November, very recently here. The little green triangles, upside-down triangles are Special Forces teams that have been inserted into villages, living with the people. And they are in quite insecure locations. Again, red is bad and so – and you can see, by the way, the lines that the Taliban used to come into this area.
This is Irisgun (ph 4:25), Daykundi, Helmand, Kandahar, and Zabul right here. So this is just to the north of that area I talked about the recent fighting. And again, you can see the bulk of this area, out of the control of the Afghan and ISAF forces, with the exception of the Terenkalt (ph 4:41) bowl right here, the capital of Irisgun.
Now over time these small little locations started to garner popular support. Indeed, in April of 2010 the citizens of Ghizab (ph) rose up and threw off the Taliban and said we want you out of our village; you are taxing us, you are stealing our food, you are violent and so forth. And our forces and Afghan forces helped them and in so doing cleared a valley between Nili, the capital of Daykundi, and Ghizab, right there. This is all in Daykundi.
Now fast forward to July and August. Now we’ve got the Afghan local police initiative going. The initial locations in Ghizab, Pasa Uruzgan (ph 5:30) and some of these other areas right here now taking hold. And operations are mounted to clear some of the other valleys, the passes, because this is all very mountainous. This is the part of the Hindu Kush right there.
And over time, as of a couple of weeks ago you can see substantial areas cleared, and you now have a route that literally runs from the capital of Kerenkaut (ph 5:48) through the Shutu (ph) valley, up to Kazhran, Nili down through Ghizab and this valley right here, and then also the Hasarisgan (ph), and so on.
So as the enemy now is being pushed out of Helmand by the operations way down here by the U.S. Marines and the British Task Force Helmand, they’re going to run right into these forces, and that is now starting to happen.
The same as they’re coming out of Zabul province and also those trying to go up into Shawallikat (ph) from Kandahar. That’s how a campaign like this has shaped up. We can take this out even farther and show you the whole regional command south area, and you can see a somewhat similar picture. Next.
Now, critical to all of this has been the growth of the Afghan national security forces, and this has had enormous challenges. The lack of human capital, illiteracy at 70, 80 percent rates and so forth. All of these pose enormous difficulties for those trying to carry this out. But it has increased very substantially in terms of quantity and also in terms of quality, which recognizing that it’s one thing to train an infantryman and it’s another thing to develop – because that’s the process that’s required – a battalion commander or brigade commander or a corps commander.
But that is all moving along, and these very aggressive growth goals do seem attainable all the way out to next year and the 304,000 goal for the security forces. And indeed the gradual development of leadership and so forth is taking place as well, albeit with enormous challenges and many setbacks as well as successes. Next.
Now, what else has been going on? Because it’s very important to recall, as I said earlier, that military activity, while necessary, is not sufficient. So let me talk a little bit about the infrastructure growth and then we’ll turn to your questions. The number of roads paved. This is all added just since liberation in 2002. You can see the Route 1, all complete now except for this section right here, which is very, very difficult terrain and enemy infested in some of the areas as well. But quite an accomplishment to cut down travel times the way that these roads have. Next.
Electrical grid access. Again, still relatively small in terms of a population that’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 (million), 27 (million), maybe even 30 million. There is no accurate census. But growing and increasing steadily. And in places like Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat, Jalalabad, the access quite good. Next.
This is a huge success story here. You can see how little access there was under the Taliban to education in Afghanistan. You can see what it has reached now, and you note the percentage of that that is now girls as well as boys. And access, of course, that was not available to women, young women during the Taliban days. And a lot more effort going on in this regard. Next.
So finally, there’s been progress but it is all hard and it is hard all the time. We do believe that we can achieve the goal that President Karzai has laid out of Afghan forces in the lead by the end of 2014, and that we can, as I will mention tomorrow, begin transition of some locations and some tasks to Afghan forces and institutions next year. But we do need to be very cognizant of the enormous challenges that are out there, not just on the military front but also because of sanctuaries in neighboring countries, because of the difficulties in the governance and development arena, to be sure.
And I’m delighted, I heard that Ashraf Ghani, I think, is going to be one of the next speakers, who is a very senior adviser to President Karzai, very important and thoughtful on this count, as well as my civilian diplomatic wing man, NATO senior civilian Ambassador Mark Sedwell, and the UNAMA SRSG Staffan de Mistura, one of the finest international diplomats out there, who was in a similar position, I might add, in Baghdad, and who I persuaded, among – with others, to go to Kabul well before I ever knew I was going to go there.
So I’ll leave you with this parting thought and now open it up to questions. Thank you. (Applause.)
Q: General, it’s truly humbling to be before you and I thank you very much for your words. I work for the organization, the US-based organization Human Rights First, who brought together in 2009 a coalition of retired senior military leaders. And on the second day of President Obama’s day in office, he executed an order to ban torture in presence of those military leaders.
I’d like to ask you one general question and very precise question, if you don’t mind. My general question is the following. Could you provide, please, your personal – your thoughts and analysis on the main interconnections for you between human rights and global security in the fight against terrorism? That’s my first question.
And my second question is more precise than that. I believe that you said that the images of torture from Abu Ghraib are nonbiodegradable, and I would like to ask you, what would you say to Americans who are urging to return to the use of enhanced interrogation techniques? Thank you.
GEN. PETRAEUS: Well, thanks very much, and thanks for what Human Rights First has done. And my answer to the latter question is to say that we should not go there. Don’t go there, girlfriend, as they say in the United States.
I am on record – first of all, not only did we develop a counterinsurgency manual during my 15 months as the commander of the Combined Arms Center, which oversaw all the schools and centers and staff colleges and combat training centers of the U.S. Army in 2006. We also developed what was called the Human Intelligence Collector’s field manual, which is also known as the interrogation field manual.
It does not include enhanced interrogation techniques, and it does not because, A, we think they are not necessary, and B, we think they’re wrong. And in fact, it took on the force of law when Sen. McCain – who knows something about enhanced interrogation techniques, having had them used on him for some seven years in Hanoi – felt very strongly about it, and we very strongly supported his efforts in the Senate to make that field manual actually take on legal authority.
You may know that in the fall of 2007, when I was in Iraq as the commander – it was still in the first year of the surge – we received the results of a survey that actually had been done about 10 months earlier. It was back before – I think it was in late 2006. I took command in early February of 2007. And it indicated a willingness of our troopers to tolerate what we know to be actions that violate the law of land warfare and various norms and values. I was quite concerned by that.
It showed a greater predisposition to that, I think, frankly, because of the tremendous violence that our troopers had seen visited on their fellow soldiers during the height of the violence in late 2006 and into 2007. And I put out a letter, and it acknowledged the challenges of the battlefield we were on and the difficulties we faced, but noted that it was critical that we live our values. That was the theme of that particular letter.
I argued that there are two reasons to live your values. One is of course really centuries, I guess, generations certainly in our case of Americans that fought to protect and preserve those values. And again, it was the right thing to do. I also argued, though, that if you think it’s not – if you’re not persuaded by the normative argument, I would argue that there’s a practical argument, and that is that it tends to bite you in the backside in the long run. Expedient behavior will always backfire.
And indeed, I stand by what I said about the photos from Abu Ghraib, and some other incidents as well. Each of those is somewhat indelible, some much more so than others, some attaining, as we describe it, nonbiodegradable status. Those will always be out there on the Internet. They will always be pulled back up to become part of – they’re not just mythology, but they will take on almost mythological proportions, and it’s very difficult to deal with those.
Indeed, frankly, some of our challenges in Afghanistan – and I had a very good dialogue with President Karzai this past week – do stem from past history. And it is, again, images that are indelible for him and for other Afghans, and which are very, very difficult to try to assuage, to submerge, to get out of the consciousness, and noting what we have done to address those kinds of issues.
So the bottom line is, again, I think it is imperative that we do indeed live our values. We have found, for whatever it’s worth – and in fact, Sen. McCain was just out in Iraq last week and we specifically wanted him to have some time with our special mission unit, which does have a detention facility and interrogation facility that absolutely meets all the requirements of our field manual and of all the acknowledged conventions.
And indeed, it is open to various groups that do monitor that. We cannot always name them by name because of various conventions, but they have all visited these facilities. There are no secret ones in Afghanistan, and so on. And in fact, we’ve also had President Karzai’s legal adviser, a number of members of his staff we’ve allowed to go in there as well.
So I feel pretty strongly about this. I think that you undermine your cause by practices such as water-boarding and other so-called enhancements. And in the end of the day I don’t think they – certainly are not worth it, if you will, and in fact do cause us problems in the long run. Next.
Q: Thank you so much for being here today. My name is Mark Goldberg. I’m an American delegate. I was wondering if you could expand a little bit on this 2011 to 2014 transition phase. Specifically under what criteria do you expect to judge whether, when and how the transition can occur, in which provinces and which districts. And also what role should we expect for American forces in Afghanistan after 2014. Thank you.
GEN. PETRAEUS: Well, first of all, we have developed – do you all have the back-up slide deck, by any chance? Where is my team back there? Can you pull up the conditions for transition by any chance? They’re on their game. This is fantastic. Actually who’s back in the booth? Is that Capt. Benedict? Just out of curiosity. We’ll give him credit. (Applause.) They are the unsung heroes, the PowerPoint rangers. He happens to be a great combat Army officer – also a Rhodes scholar, I might add – and a wonderful young American.
These are, first of all, the principles that we developed to guide transition, and very important of course. Everyone has acknowledged it should be conditions-based, based on objective evaluations of the conditions by our leaders at the ground. It should be something that’s done from there, from the bottom up. Not, you know – we’ll take help from the nearly 50 capitals out there that have an interest in this, but it can’t be driven with various-length screwdrivers from those capitals because, indeed, at the operational command level we have to do the so-called battlefield geometry that keeps all this knitted together with our Afghan partners.
So it very likely is going to be at district or even city level, as Ashraf Ghani will describe it very likely, and then progress to province, because these provinces are awfully big when you look at the map. And what will likely happen is there will be transition in one district with a re-investment of some of that transition dividend, the troops that are harvested from that in the contiguous district.
Headquarters really matter in this because, having done this in several different countries over the years – the Balkans, Iraq and elsewhere – they become – they’re the platforms for your provincial reconstruction teams, your mentoring teams, the intelligence links, communication, quick reaction force, medevac and so forth.
And so even as you are thinning out the forces underneath those headquarters, rather than just handing off, which we’re not willing to do – even as you think them out you want to retain those headquarters. In fact, anyone who’s followed Iraq knows that we kept a brigade headquarters in Kirkuk while sending the bulk of its forces home because that brigade headquarters is really important.
And then we should keep in mind, this is not just about geographic areas. This is also about transitioning tasks performed by institutions and by organizations that perform various functions. And then we added this one, at the reminder of an ambassador when we briefed the ISAF nation ambassadors recently. He said, you’re going to get one shot at transition, General, and you need to make sure that it is irreversible. You’ve got to get it right.
Now, to get it right we have created various measured, if you will, and we’ve done the initial assessments of districts and provinces. And we obviously look at the state of security as the most important, the foundation for all else. You have to look at the friendly forces, the enemy forces, trends, and how are the Afghans doing, what’s our posture, and so on. Then you look at the other factors that bear on this and make it irreversible in terms of local governance and development, which are so important to capitalize on what you’ve achieved in the security arena.
What we envision is beginning this in 2011, at districts in most cases, although there are some provinces in which, to be fair, they’ve almost really already transitioned, we have very few forces. But we will probably formally do that there as well, including, by the way, in Kabul itself, I think, is a likely candidate, which is quite significant considering that one-sixth of the population of all of Afghanistan lives in Kabul province, not just in Kabul city.
So that’s how we envision that playing out. And then over time, gradually working the battlefield geometry, shifting forces, occasionally sending some of those home to be sure. But a process whereby the Afghans stand taller and taller but they don’t stand alone. We are still there with them. We’re still providing enablers, assets, in some cases logistics and a host of other enabling functions, given that those elements of their force are still being developed and will be for some years.
And then beyond 2014, we’ll have to see at that time, needless to say, but we would certainly envision some form of security assistance role, perhaps what we’re doing in Iraq now, where you may recall we still do have 50,000 forces there, but it is the Iraqis who are in the lead in security, some 700,000 of them now. And despite the violence of recent months periodically, by and large the number of attacks on an average day is below 10 or 15 or so, to contrast with the, say, 220 or more that we saw in May and June of 2007.
Next question, please. And then we’ll go to the back one there.
Q: Thank you very much, General. I’m a Russian participant. Your presentation was extremely interesting, especially for me because my Ph.D. deals with NATO and Afghanistan. I have a short question. Do you personally think that moderate Talibs exist, or can Talib be moderate? And do you think that negotiating with so-called moderate Talibs will bring results? Thank you.
GEN. PETRAEUS: (In Russian.)
Q: (In Russian.)
GEN. PETRAEUS: And actually, can I offer up front first, perhaps, a desire that we sketched out at various times when I was the commander of Central Command and we included in the 20 countries that we oversaw the Central Asian states.
It was our hope, and one that we communicated to various Russian ambassadors, among others, that the new “Great Game” in the Central Asian states, the new competition for power and resources and so forth, could be transformed into a broad partnership against extremism and the illegal narcotics industry, two threats that Russia takes very, very seriously, as you know, and which it is in the interest of all nations of the world to combat. And I think, by the way, that there is a greater recognition of the wisdom of doing that rather than approaching the area as a zero-sum game.
With respect to moderate Talib, I think – look, the Taliban, like any insurgency, have elements that span – run the gamut, the whole spectrum, if you will, from what we call the 5-dollar-a-day Taliban to the truly hardcore, irreconcilable extremists, arguably terrorist leaders. And certainly there are elements within the Taliban that can be reconciled. They are being reconciled in some small numbers. I don’t want to overplay this so far. I think I mentioned somewhere around two dozen groups that we count so far that have been – come forward, have laid down their weapons, renounced violence, and agreed to be reintegrated into society as part of President Karzai’s new peace and reintegration concept.
So I do think that this is very much realistic, but it has to be done in accordance with the red lines that President Karzai has laid down, very wisely, that not only a renunciation of violence and cutting of ties to al-Qaida and transnational extremists, but also an acceptance of the Afghan constitution, which is shorthand for saying that the rights of women, minorities and other groups have to be preserved, even as these individuals become part of the solution rather than a continuing part of the problem.
Back there, please, and I think this will be the last question, I’m afraid.
Q: Thank you, sir. I had several questions. The first one –
GEN. PETRAEUS: I think we probably need to keep it to one, though.
Q: Yes. It’s going to be extremely quick, if you let me. The transition as far as on the studies based on the building up the Afghan security forces, last year when I was in Kabul I learned that the attrition rate was 70 percent, and I was wondering what kind of mitigating things you have been building to – you understand me, I guess.
The second point is, maybe you should get a slide to show us how you share responsibility with the civilians on the anaconda strategy. And if you have time, what will you say to the people that are criticizing the counterinsurgency concept? Thank you very much.
GEN. PETRAEUS: Well, first of all, on the Afghan national security forces, we have indeed focused quite intently on the problems of attrition, most significantly the absent-without-leave problem, AWOL, which is particularly challenging in Afghanistan because when the individuals go home on leave, this is not a simple proposition. They just can’t get on their neighborhood bus or subway and be taken home. It’s quite a chore in some cases to get someone, say from the battlefields of Helmand province up to Badakhshan province up in the northeast.
We actually now are contracting for fixed-wing aircraft just to get them to Kabul so that we cut down all of the travel and security challenges that we experienced in the past. And indeed, attrition has come down quite substantially, although it is not yet at the levels that we would like to see it reach.
On the other hand, enlistment and reenlistment have gone way up, especially enlistment, and that is what has enabled the achievement of the growth goals that I laid out for you here. And so we’re focusing quite intently on those issues and indeed have made progress, but have not yet made the kind of ultimate progress that we would to make on the attrition front in particular.
With respect to the civil-military integration, I think it is pretty well known that, first of all in the counterinsurgency field manual it notes that unity of effort is critical. It’s essential. It’s something without which you cannot do. And indeed, when Ambassador Crocker and I worked together in Baghdad, we worked literally as one. We also worked very closely, by the way, again with the SRSG you’ll see in a moment, Staffan de Mistura, again, an extraordinarily talented individual.
In Afghanistan, on the second day that I was there, even the day before I took command at a 4th of July celebration on the 3rd of July, I announced to the embassy staff that the ambassador and I saw that cooperation was not optional, that we would indeed integrate the civil and military efforts of the campaign, recognizing that while there are indeed some 49 or so troop-contributing nation embassies, the US embassy is involved in about somewhere in the range of 70 percent of the development aid, although it varies in different categories.
So clearly we had to work together and we have been working together and we integrate our efforts. And there are certain what we call battle rhythm events where the ambassador and I join together for different meetings, sessions, trips and do on.
I also have a NATO civilian counterpart, and you’ll see him in a moment, another extraordinarily talented ambassador. He was the U.K. ambassador to Afghanistan before becoming NATO’s senior civilian representative, and we worked very closely together as well, right in the same headquarters. And then once again the UNAMA SRSG, the EU special representative, Vidoudez Osakis, and a core group of the major troop-contributing nation ambassadors, and then all of the ISAF-contributing ambassadors as well. So that is how we go about this. And as I said, again, it is the essential component of any comprehensive civil-military counterinsurgency campaign.
And then with respect to the approach, to the strategy, if you will, I guess that I would ask those who question it what they would propose instead. This is not my first rodeo, as they say in the United States. I have done this in some other countries, including nearly four years in Iraq.
Afghanistan is not Iraq, to be sure. It has all of its own unique circumstances and complexities, but the principles in many cases are the same, and it’s a matter of understanding the local circumstances with enormous contextual appreciation that is the key to applying those principles properly in a place like Afghanistan, or indeed, any place. Because as they say, all politics are local, so are all counterinsurgency operations.
With that, let me just end again by saluting this organization, saluting the organization that it promotes – NATO – and thanking you all for the opportunity to spend time with you this afternoon. Thank you very much. (Applause.)
(END)
THE ATLANTIC COUNCIL OF THE UNITED STATES
2010 YOUNG ATLANTICIST SUMMIT
SPEAKER:
GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS,
COMMANDER,
INTERNATIONAL SECURITY ASSISTANCE FORCE
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2010
Transcript by
Federal News Service
Washington, D.C.
GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS: Well, good afternoon to you all. Thanks for that warm welcome. Mike, thanks for your kind introduction, and much more importantly, thanks for your service in Iraq and the leadership you provided to your troopers with the Big Red 1, the 1st Infantry Division, during the surge and some very tough days in Iraq. It’s due to the courage, skill and commitment of leaders like you that we have seen such progress in Iraq in recent years. So thanks again for what you did and for what your comrades did.
Up front I should note that I am well aware of the challenge of addressing a large group that has already heard from multiple foreign ministers and the NATO secretary-general, the SACEUR and had a two-hour lunch. And I’m going to confront you with PowerPoint slides as well.
In situations like this, it is always good to recall the young boy’s school report on Julius Caesar, perhaps a familiar tale in this city founded so many centuries ago by Caesar himself. Julius Caesar was born a long time ago, the little boy wrote. He was a great general. He won some important battles. He made a long speech. They killed him. (Laughter.)
I will try to avoid Caesar’s fate today, but I would like to take advantage of the opportunity to share with you a bit of our endeavor in Afghanistan. Indeed, I’m honored to be here with you and in Lisbon, one of the world’s oldest and greatest cities, as NATO leaders take part in an important summit.
As you might expect of a serving NATO commander, I am a huge believer in the importance of the alliance. Having served in NATO assignments at many ranks, from lieutenant to lieutenant general and now full general, I have seen firsthand proof that a coalition of allies standing strong together and working side by side can overcome challenges that are too big and too complex for any one country to handle on its own.
Indeed, given the unique atmosphere of a military command that is home to multiple cultures, languages and institutional norms, I recognize that working together is vitally necessary. Winston Churchill, therefore, was right when he observed that the only thing worse than having allies is not having them.
So my thanks to Karl Lammers, Fred Kempe and Bernardino Gomez and your teams at the Atlantic Treaty Association, the Atlantic Council of the United States, and the Portuguese Atlantic Committee for your work in supporting NATO and the trans-Atlantic community, and in particular for your continued support of this group, the Young Atlanticists Summits.
This program is tremendously important for helping to build support for NATO and its principles well into the future, and I’m honored to be part of it here today. Indeed, it’s wonderful to see so many promising young leaders who are committed to the future of NATO and to the trans-Atlantic community. I have no doubt that among this impressive group are many of NATO nations’ future thought leaders and policymakers. My thanks to each of you for your commitment to serving in the arena of international affairs.
Whenever I address audiences of young leaders I’m reminded of a story from my early days as a young leader in the Army, shortly after I was commissioned as a new second lieutenant, fresh out of West Point. I was on my first field exercise with my platoon. We’d had a long day and we didn’t crawl into our sleeping bags until just before midnight. I’d only been asleep for an hour or so when my platoon sergeant, a wise old airborne veteran, elbowed me and woke me up. Sir, he said, look up and tell me what you see.
So I looked up at a beautiful night sky and replied, I see a million stars, platoon sergeant. And what does that tell you, sir? He asked. Well, not exactly sure what my platoon sergeant was getting at, I thought for a few moments and, wanting to impress him, gave an answer that I thought he would conclude to be truly profound and indicative of a keen intellect. (Laughter.)
Well, platoon sergeant, I said, astronomically it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Theologically it tells me that God is great and we are but small and insignificant. Meteorologically, it tells me that we are going to enjoy a beautiful day for training tomorrow.
There was a long pause as my platoon sergeant considered this weighty answer. Thinking that he might be speechless after such an impressive response, I finally asked him, what does it tell you, platoon sergeant? Well, sir, he replied, it tells me that somebody stole our tent. (Laughter. Applause.)
Well, thanks for laughing. You know the deal. When you reach my stage in life, you’re only as good as the material they give you. (Laughter.) And I’m guessing that that material will be flogged all across Europe vey shortly and they will have to dig for some new material in the near future. In any event, let’s move on to more serious matters.
I’d like to use the slides I’ve got loaded up here to talk about the current situation in Afghanistan, to take you through what we have achieved, in recent months in particular, where we’re headed and then to take your questions. Next slide, please.
I want to start off by pointing out that we have worked very hard over the last 22 months or so to basically get the inputs right in Iraq, and that implies that we did not have the inputs right prior to that time, and that would be correct. That’s not to say that we did not do a great deal of very important work and helped build institutions, human capital, roads, schools, health clinics, security forces and a host of other worthy accomplishments.
But the fact is that we did not have the organizations necessary to carry out a comprehensive civil-military counterinsurgency campaign, the kind of campaign that is necessary to achieve our objectives in Afghanistan. We didn’t have those organizations staffed right, in some cases with the right folks in charge. We didn’t have all the principles, concepts, and above all, civil-military campaign plans necessary. And most importantly, we did not have the resources required to carry out the kind of campaign that I’ve described.
And over the course of the last 22 months or so, in fact, the nations contributing to ISAF have deployed some 80,000 additional forces. We’ve added well over 1,000 additional civilians to the diplomatic and other organizations working there, and funding has been provided for 100,000 additional Afghan national security forces. All of this, again, to get the inputs right. And we achieved that goal really just recently, when the final large element of the deployment from the United States, which was some 68,000 during that time, and division headquarters for regional command south, took over down there in the earlier part of this month. Next slide.
Now what this enables us to do, as I mentioned, is to carry out the kind of comprehensive civil-military campaign that is necessary. These are the bad guys. These are the enemies, those who are trying to foment instability and violence in Afghanistan, to bring back what they had before, which is essentially to turn the clock back many centuries in Afghanistan rather than to allow progressive forces to proceed. Next.
This is what they need to maintain their momentum. And make no mistake about it, until very recently they had the momentum throughout the country in this effort, in this fight. What we have to do is apply pressure in all regards, to take away from them, or disrupt their access to these elements right here that are essential to the continuation of the campaign they have been waging so fiercely, particularly since somewhere around 2004, 2005, the point at which they had sufficiently regrouped, reconnected and re-inserted themselves back into Afghanistan after being evicted in 2001 and 2002. Next.
Now, what’s required is to use all of the elements at our disposal, not just military means but all civilian and other, if you will, weapons, tools in our arsenal. Certainly military force is necessary, but it is not sufficient. But it is necessary. It includes targeted intelligence-driven raids – and I’ll talk about what those have achieved in recent months in a moment. These take out the mid-level leaders, the key facilitators and others. That’s who they target.
But in and of themselves they don’t achieve what is necessary because you have to take away the safe havens, what Mike and his group did in Ramadi, for example. We banged away in Ramadi in Iraq for four years and we still couldn’t drive from one side of the city to the Green Zone without getting hit because it remained a safe haven under the control of the enemy. It was only when conventional forces cleared it, after years of hitting it with Special Ops every night, that we were able to take it away.
And of course you want more and more host nation forces, special as well as conventional or general purposes. And you should always try to employ local security solutions as well, and we have one of those in Afghanistan now. President Karzai’s Afghan local police initiative, which is essentially a Community Watch with AK-47s underneath the control of the ministry of interior at the district level, and it has already proved to be very, very important.
But again, military activity, while necessary, is not sufficient. You also have to have politics. Next. That, in this case, includes not just the establishment of decent governance at all the different levels – local, district, provincial, national, so that the people embrace and see it as legitimate in their eyes. And to do that it has to have these qualities here.
But equally important, you have to have re-integration of the reconcilable elements of the insurgency, and that is starting to take off, by the way, with over two dozen groups already having come forward to take advantage of new programs that are connected with President Karzai’s peace and reintegration initiative. And then, if you can get it, with the senior leaders of the opposition groups, true reconciliation.
Keep in mind that in Iraq what we actually achieved was this right here, although the term for it there was reconciliation. It was not the senior al-Qaida in Iraq groups – leaders that came in. It was their rank-and-file and it was the population that tacitly or actively was supporting them. Next.
Obviously intelligence is hugely important, and you have to pull it together. All disciplines have to be united, have to be fused. And in truth the big breakthrough in intelligence in recent years has not been in any one of the individual disciplines – in each of which there has been a breakthrough in imagery intelligence, signals intelligence, human intelligence.
The real breakthrough is in the integration of the products of all of these, intelligence fusion, as we call it, literally fostered by intelligence fusion centers that we created in Iraq during the surge and then have also sought to create in Afghanistan. Next.
You have to get into the other elements of the rule of law besides those you’re just training with your Afghan national security force effort. So you have to help them with the corrections arena and with judicial assets as well. Not necessarily at all taking it all the way down to the local level, where traditional justice mechanisms certainly can still function, but certainly pushing it down far enough to the level that is necessary. And we worked very hard in this arena. A lot of these national programs, rather than, say, ISAF, but nonetheless very important. And of course you have to get at basic services. Next.
The so-called nonkinetics that give the people the prospect for a brighter future than they could have under, say, the Taliban or one of the other groups fighting to control various parts of Afghanistan. Next.
Obviously this is a regional – there’s a regional context here, and so engagement in this case with Pakistan is very important. I’ve been over there several times since taking command 4.5 months ago, and again, the broader region as well, with the Central Asian states and so forth.
And then finally, this is also a war of ideas, and you must compete in that war. All of the different media elements out there need to have representation from what it is that we are doing and the Afghan government is doing to be part of that debate. Next.
Now, geographically this shows the areas of focus. Obviously we have to put particular emphasis on those areas that have to be deprived to the insurgency because they are the major safe havens. You’ll know that the recent major fighting has taken place in two districts to the west of Kandahar and one to the northwest, which are largely secured now and taken away from the enemy, including Mullah Omar’s former home turf right here.
A lot of effort in recent months, really, in the past year for the six central districts of Helmand and now expanding to the north and to the northwest. And then pushing up the major route, Route 1 out in the east around Kabul, pushing that security bubble out as well. Kabul having been an area in which the Afghan forces have taken the lead, are the face of security, in which there has been quite good security over the course of the past five or so months, despite constant efforts by the Hikani network and the Taliban to carry out attacks in the city.
Then areas in the north, where the Taliban achieved momentum, in some cases still has it, where we have to work, as you can see up there, and then over in the Badgis-Kormak (ph 15:05) area. But that gives you a sense of where it is that we are focusing our forces and Afghan forces in partnership to again take away areas from the Taliban, help establish local governance, local economic development and so forth, so that the people see that as a preferable alternative to what the Taliban might have to offer. And indeed, they remember what the Taliban did to them when the Taliban were in charge, and the vast, vast majority of the population does not want to see them return. Next.
Now I mentioned targeted, intelligence-driven raids, special operations – really special mission unit operations. I’d focus on this number right here, nearly 1,500 targeted operations in a 90-day period that ended on the 18th of November. And you can see nearly 390 midlevel important leaders and facilitators killed or captured. That is a very, very significant number.
This represents by far the highest tempo of these type of operations that our militaries have ever achieved. This is several times what we were able to achieve in Iraq during the surge. And again, a very important component, but one in which you must be very precise, you must avoid civilian casualties, you must treat the population well, and so forth. And that’s a key element to continuing these kinds of operations. Next.
Now there’s a paradox here, and it’s worth laying this out for you. The green line is the security effort, and you literally ramp it up. More forces come in, you start to achieve more effects. That’s this axis right here. But as that happens, as you start to achieve security, taking away areas from the enemy, violence goes up because they will fight back. If you try to take away Marjah, if you try to take away the districts west of Kandahar and so forth, the enemy wants to hang onto those and they will indeed fight back. So the violence goes up.
Then there’s a lag between achieving decent security and the establishment of governance and rudimentary economic development. And then understandably, a further lag between that and the establishment of actual confidence on the part of the citizens, especially with the Taliban understandably continuing to resist, to use night letters, to employ intimidation, assassination and so forth. Next.
Now just to give you an example of an area where this has played out, Nawa is one of the districts of central Helmand province, one of the six central districts I referred to. You can see in late summer, early fall of 2009, when the US Marines increased their forces there, and as they fought, the level of violence went way up. You can see this represented by these pink lines right here.
And we started to achieve security over here, level of violence starts to come down, but it took quite some time. Gradually were able to help the Afghans establish decent local governance. That started to take off, and get economic development going, repair the schools, the mosques, the health clinics and the other elements of basic services, and then to see Afghan confidence start to take hold here. You can see how that played across. Red is bad, yellow is better, headed toward green in some of these areas. Next.
Now this is a bit of a complicated slide but it shows what can be done with the use of these Afghan local police initiatives that are built on what are called the village stability operations campaigns. This is February 2010, right here, and you’ll see, we’ll walk our way through all the way to November, very recently here. The little green triangles, upside-down triangles are Special Forces teams that have been inserted into villages, living with the people. And they are in quite insecure locations. Again, red is bad and so – and you can see, by the way, the lines that the Taliban used to come into this area.
This is Irisgun (ph 4:25), Daykundi, Helmand, Kandahar, and Zabul right here. So this is just to the north of that area I talked about the recent fighting. And again, you can see the bulk of this area, out of the control of the Afghan and ISAF forces, with the exception of the Terenkalt (ph 4:41) bowl right here, the capital of Irisgun.
Now over time these small little locations started to garner popular support. Indeed, in April of 2010 the citizens of Ghizab (ph) rose up and threw off the Taliban and said we want you out of our village; you are taxing us, you are stealing our food, you are violent and so forth. And our forces and Afghan forces helped them and in so doing cleared a valley between Nili, the capital of Daykundi, and Ghizab, right there. This is all in Daykundi.
Now fast forward to July and August. Now we’ve got the Afghan local police initiative going. The initial locations in Ghizab, Pasa Uruzgan (ph 5:30) and some of these other areas right here now taking hold. And operations are mounted to clear some of the other valleys, the passes, because this is all very mountainous. This is the part of the Hindu Kush right there.
And over time, as of a couple of weeks ago you can see substantial areas cleared, and you now have a route that literally runs from the capital of Kerenkaut (ph 5:48) through the Shutu (ph) valley, up to Kazhran, Nili down through Ghizab and this valley right here, and then also the Hasarisgan (ph), and so on.
So as the enemy now is being pushed out of Helmand by the operations way down here by the U.S. Marines and the British Task Force Helmand, they’re going to run right into these forces, and that is now starting to happen.
The same as they’re coming out of Zabul province and also those trying to go up into Shawallikat (ph) from Kandahar. That’s how a campaign like this has shaped up. We can take this out even farther and show you the whole regional command south area, and you can see a somewhat similar picture. Next.
Now, critical to all of this has been the growth of the Afghan national security forces, and this has had enormous challenges. The lack of human capital, illiteracy at 70, 80 percent rates and so forth. All of these pose enormous difficulties for those trying to carry this out. But it has increased very substantially in terms of quantity and also in terms of quality, which recognizing that it’s one thing to train an infantryman and it’s another thing to develop – because that’s the process that’s required – a battalion commander or brigade commander or a corps commander.
But that is all moving along, and these very aggressive growth goals do seem attainable all the way out to next year and the 304,000 goal for the security forces. And indeed the gradual development of leadership and so forth is taking place as well, albeit with enormous challenges and many setbacks as well as successes. Next.
Now, what else has been going on? Because it’s very important to recall, as I said earlier, that military activity, while necessary, is not sufficient. So let me talk a little bit about the infrastructure growth and then we’ll turn to your questions. The number of roads paved. This is all added just since liberation in 2002. You can see the Route 1, all complete now except for this section right here, which is very, very difficult terrain and enemy infested in some of the areas as well. But quite an accomplishment to cut down travel times the way that these roads have. Next.
Electrical grid access. Again, still relatively small in terms of a population that’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 (million), 27 (million), maybe even 30 million. There is no accurate census. But growing and increasing steadily. And in places like Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat, Jalalabad, the access quite good. Next.
This is a huge success story here. You can see how little access there was under the Taliban to education in Afghanistan. You can see what it has reached now, and you note the percentage of that that is now girls as well as boys. And access, of course, that was not available to women, young women during the Taliban days. And a lot more effort going on in this regard. Next.
So finally, there’s been progress but it is all hard and it is hard all the time. We do believe that we can achieve the goal that President Karzai has laid out of Afghan forces in the lead by the end of 2014, and that we can, as I will mention tomorrow, begin transition of some locations and some tasks to Afghan forces and institutions next year. But we do need to be very cognizant of the enormous challenges that are out there, not just on the military front but also because of sanctuaries in neighboring countries, because of the difficulties in the governance and development arena, to be sure.
And I’m delighted, I heard that Ashraf Ghani, I think, is going to be one of the next speakers, who is a very senior adviser to President Karzai, very important and thoughtful on this count, as well as my civilian diplomatic wing man, NATO senior civilian Ambassador Mark Sedwell, and the UNAMA SRSG Staffan de Mistura, one of the finest international diplomats out there, who was in a similar position, I might add, in Baghdad, and who I persuaded, among – with others, to go to Kabul well before I ever knew I was going to go there.
So I’ll leave you with this parting thought and now open it up to questions. Thank you. (Applause.)
Q: General, it’s truly humbling to be before you and I thank you very much for your words. I work for the organization, the US-based organization Human Rights First, who brought together in 2009 a coalition of retired senior military leaders. And on the second day of President Obama’s day in office, he executed an order to ban torture in presence of those military leaders.
I’d like to ask you one general question and very precise question, if you don’t mind. My general question is the following. Could you provide, please, your personal – your thoughts and analysis on the main interconnections for you between human rights and global security in the fight against terrorism? That’s my first question.
And my second question is more precise than that. I believe that you said that the images of torture from Abu Ghraib are nonbiodegradable, and I would like to ask you, what would you say to Americans who are urging to return to the use of enhanced interrogation techniques? Thank you.
GEN. PETRAEUS: Well, thanks very much, and thanks for what Human Rights First has done. And my answer to the latter question is to say that we should not go there. Don’t go there, girlfriend, as they say in the United States.
I am on record – first of all, not only did we develop a counterinsurgency manual during my 15 months as the commander of the Combined Arms Center, which oversaw all the schools and centers and staff colleges and combat training centers of the U.S. Army in 2006. We also developed what was called the Human Intelligence Collector’s field manual, which is also known as the interrogation field manual.
It does not include enhanced interrogation techniques, and it does not because, A, we think they are not necessary, and B, we think they’re wrong. And in fact, it took on the force of law when Sen. McCain – who knows something about enhanced interrogation techniques, having had them used on him for some seven years in Hanoi – felt very strongly about it, and we very strongly supported his efforts in the Senate to make that field manual actually take on legal authority.
You may know that in the fall of 2007, when I was in Iraq as the commander – it was still in the first year of the surge – we received the results of a survey that actually had been done about 10 months earlier. It was back before – I think it was in late 2006. I took command in early February of 2007. And it indicated a willingness of our troopers to tolerate what we know to be actions that violate the law of land warfare and various norms and values. I was quite concerned by that.
It showed a greater predisposition to that, I think, frankly, because of the tremendous violence that our troopers had seen visited on their fellow soldiers during the height of the violence in late 2006 and into 2007. And I put out a letter, and it acknowledged the challenges of the battlefield we were on and the difficulties we faced, but noted that it was critical that we live our values. That was the theme of that particular letter.
I argued that there are two reasons to live your values. One is of course really centuries, I guess, generations certainly in our case of Americans that fought to protect and preserve those values. And again, it was the right thing to do. I also argued, though, that if you think it’s not – if you’re not persuaded by the normative argument, I would argue that there’s a practical argument, and that is that it tends to bite you in the backside in the long run. Expedient behavior will always backfire.
And indeed, I stand by what I said about the photos from Abu Ghraib, and some other incidents as well. Each of those is somewhat indelible, some much more so than others, some attaining, as we describe it, nonbiodegradable status. Those will always be out there on the Internet. They will always be pulled back up to become part of – they’re not just mythology, but they will take on almost mythological proportions, and it’s very difficult to deal with those.
Indeed, frankly, some of our challenges in Afghanistan – and I had a very good dialogue with President Karzai this past week – do stem from past history. And it is, again, images that are indelible for him and for other Afghans, and which are very, very difficult to try to assuage, to submerge, to get out of the consciousness, and noting what we have done to address those kinds of issues.
So the bottom line is, again, I think it is imperative that we do indeed live our values. We have found, for whatever it’s worth – and in fact, Sen. McCain was just out in Iraq last week and we specifically wanted him to have some time with our special mission unit, which does have a detention facility and interrogation facility that absolutely meets all the requirements of our field manual and of all the acknowledged conventions.
And indeed, it is open to various groups that do monitor that. We cannot always name them by name because of various conventions, but they have all visited these facilities. There are no secret ones in Afghanistan, and so on. And in fact, we’ve also had President Karzai’s legal adviser, a number of members of his staff we’ve allowed to go in there as well.
So I feel pretty strongly about this. I think that you undermine your cause by practices such as water-boarding and other so-called enhancements. And in the end of the day I don’t think they – certainly are not worth it, if you will, and in fact do cause us problems in the long run. Next.
Q: Thank you so much for being here today. My name is Mark Goldberg. I’m an American delegate. I was wondering if you could expand a little bit on this 2011 to 2014 transition phase. Specifically under what criteria do you expect to judge whether, when and how the transition can occur, in which provinces and which districts. And also what role should we expect for American forces in Afghanistan after 2014. Thank you.
GEN. PETRAEUS: Well, first of all, we have developed – do you all have the back-up slide deck, by any chance? Where is my team back there? Can you pull up the conditions for transition by any chance? They’re on their game. This is fantastic. Actually who’s back in the booth? Is that Capt. Benedict? Just out of curiosity. We’ll give him credit. (Applause.) They are the unsung heroes, the PowerPoint rangers. He happens to be a great combat Army officer – also a Rhodes scholar, I might add – and a wonderful young American.
These are, first of all, the principles that we developed to guide transition, and very important of course. Everyone has acknowledged it should be conditions-based, based on objective evaluations of the conditions by our leaders at the ground. It should be something that’s done from there, from the bottom up. Not, you know – we’ll take help from the nearly 50 capitals out there that have an interest in this, but it can’t be driven with various-length screwdrivers from those capitals because, indeed, at the operational command level we have to do the so-called battlefield geometry that keeps all this knitted together with our Afghan partners.
So it very likely is going to be at district or even city level, as Ashraf Ghani will describe it very likely, and then progress to province, because these provinces are awfully big when you look at the map. And what will likely happen is there will be transition in one district with a re-investment of some of that transition dividend, the troops that are harvested from that in the contiguous district.
Headquarters really matter in this because, having done this in several different countries over the years – the Balkans, Iraq and elsewhere – they become – they’re the platforms for your provincial reconstruction teams, your mentoring teams, the intelligence links, communication, quick reaction force, medevac and so forth.
And so even as you are thinning out the forces underneath those headquarters, rather than just handing off, which we’re not willing to do – even as you think them out you want to retain those headquarters. In fact, anyone who’s followed Iraq knows that we kept a brigade headquarters in Kirkuk while sending the bulk of its forces home because that brigade headquarters is really important.
And then we should keep in mind, this is not just about geographic areas. This is also about transitioning tasks performed by institutions and by organizations that perform various functions. And then we added this one, at the reminder of an ambassador when we briefed the ISAF nation ambassadors recently. He said, you’re going to get one shot at transition, General, and you need to make sure that it is irreversible. You’ve got to get it right.
Now, to get it right we have created various measured, if you will, and we’ve done the initial assessments of districts and provinces. And we obviously look at the state of security as the most important, the foundation for all else. You have to look at the friendly forces, the enemy forces, trends, and how are the Afghans doing, what’s our posture, and so on. Then you look at the other factors that bear on this and make it irreversible in terms of local governance and development, which are so important to capitalize on what you’ve achieved in the security arena.
What we envision is beginning this in 2011, at districts in most cases, although there are some provinces in which, to be fair, they’ve almost really already transitioned, we have very few forces. But we will probably formally do that there as well, including, by the way, in Kabul itself, I think, is a likely candidate, which is quite significant considering that one-sixth of the population of all of Afghanistan lives in Kabul province, not just in Kabul city.
So that’s how we envision that playing out. And then over time, gradually working the battlefield geometry, shifting forces, occasionally sending some of those home to be sure. But a process whereby the Afghans stand taller and taller but they don’t stand alone. We are still there with them. We’re still providing enablers, assets, in some cases logistics and a host of other enabling functions, given that those elements of their force are still being developed and will be for some years.
And then beyond 2014, we’ll have to see at that time, needless to say, but we would certainly envision some form of security assistance role, perhaps what we’re doing in Iraq now, where you may recall we still do have 50,000 forces there, but it is the Iraqis who are in the lead in security, some 700,000 of them now. And despite the violence of recent months periodically, by and large the number of attacks on an average day is below 10 or 15 or so, to contrast with the, say, 220 or more that we saw in May and June of 2007.
Next question, please. And then we’ll go to the back one there.
Q: Thank you very much, General. I’m a Russian participant. Your presentation was extremely interesting, especially for me because my Ph.D. deals with NATO and Afghanistan. I have a short question. Do you personally think that moderate Talibs exist, or can Talib be moderate? And do you think that negotiating with so-called moderate Talibs will bring results? Thank you.
GEN. PETRAEUS: (In Russian.)
Q: (In Russian.)
GEN. PETRAEUS: And actually, can I offer up front first, perhaps, a desire that we sketched out at various times when I was the commander of Central Command and we included in the 20 countries that we oversaw the Central Asian states.
It was our hope, and one that we communicated to various Russian ambassadors, among others, that the new “Great Game” in the Central Asian states, the new competition for power and resources and so forth, could be transformed into a broad partnership against extremism and the illegal narcotics industry, two threats that Russia takes very, very seriously, as you know, and which it is in the interest of all nations of the world to combat. And I think, by the way, that there is a greater recognition of the wisdom of doing that rather than approaching the area as a zero-sum game.
With respect to moderate Talib, I think – look, the Taliban, like any insurgency, have elements that span – run the gamut, the whole spectrum, if you will, from what we call the 5-dollar-a-day Taliban to the truly hardcore, irreconcilable extremists, arguably terrorist leaders. And certainly there are elements within the Taliban that can be reconciled. They are being reconciled in some small numbers. I don’t want to overplay this so far. I think I mentioned somewhere around two dozen groups that we count so far that have been – come forward, have laid down their weapons, renounced violence, and agreed to be reintegrated into society as part of President Karzai’s new peace and reintegration concept.
So I do think that this is very much realistic, but it has to be done in accordance with the red lines that President Karzai has laid down, very wisely, that not only a renunciation of violence and cutting of ties to al-Qaida and transnational extremists, but also an acceptance of the Afghan constitution, which is shorthand for saying that the rights of women, minorities and other groups have to be preserved, even as these individuals become part of the solution rather than a continuing part of the problem.
Back there, please, and I think this will be the last question, I’m afraid.
Q: Thank you, sir. I had several questions. The first one –
GEN. PETRAEUS: I think we probably need to keep it to one, though.
Q: Yes. It’s going to be extremely quick, if you let me. The transition as far as on the studies based on the building up the Afghan security forces, last year when I was in Kabul I learned that the attrition rate was 70 percent, and I was wondering what kind of mitigating things you have been building to – you understand me, I guess.
The second point is, maybe you should get a slide to show us how you share responsibility with the civilians on the anaconda strategy. And if you have time, what will you say to the people that are criticizing the counterinsurgency concept? Thank you very much.
GEN. PETRAEUS: Well, first of all, on the Afghan national security forces, we have indeed focused quite intently on the problems of attrition, most significantly the absent-without-leave problem, AWOL, which is particularly challenging in Afghanistan because when the individuals go home on leave, this is not a simple proposition. They just can’t get on their neighborhood bus or subway and be taken home. It’s quite a chore in some cases to get someone, say from the battlefields of Helmand province up to Badakhshan province up in the northeast.
We actually now are contracting for fixed-wing aircraft just to get them to Kabul so that we cut down all of the travel and security challenges that we experienced in the past. And indeed, attrition has come down quite substantially, although it is not yet at the levels that we would like to see it reach.
On the other hand, enlistment and reenlistment have gone way up, especially enlistment, and that is what has enabled the achievement of the growth goals that I laid out for you here. And so we’re focusing quite intently on those issues and indeed have made progress, but have not yet made the kind of ultimate progress that we would to make on the attrition front in particular.
With respect to the civil-military integration, I think it is pretty well known that, first of all in the counterinsurgency field manual it notes that unity of effort is critical. It’s essential. It’s something without which you cannot do. And indeed, when Ambassador Crocker and I worked together in Baghdad, we worked literally as one. We also worked very closely, by the way, again with the SRSG you’ll see in a moment, Staffan de Mistura, again, an extraordinarily talented individual.
In Afghanistan, on the second day that I was there, even the day before I took command at a 4th of July celebration on the 3rd of July, I announced to the embassy staff that the ambassador and I saw that cooperation was not optional, that we would indeed integrate the civil and military efforts of the campaign, recognizing that while there are indeed some 49 or so troop-contributing nation embassies, the US embassy is involved in about somewhere in the range of 70 percent of the development aid, although it varies in different categories.
So clearly we had to work together and we have been working together and we integrate our efforts. And there are certain what we call battle rhythm events where the ambassador and I join together for different meetings, sessions, trips and do on.
I also have a NATO civilian counterpart, and you’ll see him in a moment, another extraordinarily talented ambassador. He was the U.K. ambassador to Afghanistan before becoming NATO’s senior civilian representative, and we worked very closely together as well, right in the same headquarters. And then once again the UNAMA SRSG, the EU special representative, Vidoudez Osakis, and a core group of the major troop-contributing nation ambassadors, and then all of the ISAF-contributing ambassadors as well. So that is how we go about this. And as I said, again, it is the essential component of any comprehensive civil-military counterinsurgency campaign.
And then with respect to the approach, to the strategy, if you will, I guess that I would ask those who question it what they would propose instead. This is not my first rodeo, as they say in the United States. I have done this in some other countries, including nearly four years in Iraq.
Afghanistan is not Iraq, to be sure. It has all of its own unique circumstances and complexities, but the principles in many cases are the same, and it’s a matter of understanding the local circumstances with enormous contextual appreciation that is the key to applying those principles properly in a place like Afghanistan, or indeed, any place. Because as they say, all politics are local, so are all counterinsurgency operations.
With that, let me just end again by saluting this organization, saluting the organization that it promotes – NATO – and thanking you all for the opportunity to spend time with you this afternoon. Thank you very much. (Applause.)
(END)
THE ATLANTIC COUNCIL OF THE UNITED STATES
2010 YOUNG ATLANTICIST SUMMIT
SPEAKER:
GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS,
COMMANDER,
INTERNATIONAL SECURITY ASSISTANCE FORCE
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2010
Transcript by
Federal News Service
Washington, D.C.
GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS: Well, good afternoon to you all. Thanks for that warm welcome. Mike, thanks for your kind introduction, and much more importantly, thanks for your service in Iraq and the leadership you provided to your troopers with the Big Red 1, the 1st Infantry Division, during the surge and some very tough days in Iraq. It’s due to the courage, skill and commitment of leaders like you that we have seen such progress in Iraq in recent years. So thanks again for what you did and for what your comrades did.
Up front I should note that I am well aware of the challenge of addressing a large group that has already heard from multiple foreign ministers and the NATO secretary-general, the SACEUR and had a two-hour lunch. And I’m going to confront you with PowerPoint slides as well.
In situations like this, it is always good to recall the young boy’s school report on Julius Caesar, perhaps a familiar tale in this city founded so many centuries ago by Caesar himself. Julius Caesar was born a long time ago, the little boy wrote. He was a great general. He won some important battles. He made a long speech. They killed him. (Laughter.)
I will try to avoid Caesar’s fate today, but I would like to take advantage of the opportunity to share with you a bit of our endeavor in Afghanistan. Indeed, I’m honored to be here with you and in Lisbon, one of the world’s oldest and greatest cities, as NATO leaders take part in an important summit.
As you might expect of a serving NATO commander, I am a huge believer in the importance of the alliance. Having served in NATO assignments at many ranks, from lieutenant to lieutenant general and now full general, I have seen firsthand proof that a coalition of allies standing strong together and working side by side can overcome challenges that are too big and too complex for any one country to handle on its own.
Indeed, given the unique atmosphere of a military command that is home to multiple cultures, languages and institutional norms, I recognize that working together is vitally necessary. Winston Churchill, therefore, was right when he observed that the only thing worse than having allies is not having them.
So my thanks to Karl Lammers, Fred Kempe and Bernardino Gomez and your teams at the Atlantic Treaty Association, the Atlantic Council of the United States, and the Portuguese Atlantic Committee for your work in supporting NATO and the trans-Atlantic community, and in particular for your continued support of this group, the Young Atlanticists Summits.
This program is tremendously important for helping to build support for NATO and its principles well into the future, and I’m honored to be part of it here today. Indeed, it’s wonderful to see so many promising young leaders who are committed to the future of NATO and to the trans-Atlantic community. I have no doubt that among this impressive group are many of NATO nations’ future thought leaders and policymakers. My thanks to each of you for your commitment to serving in the arena of international affairs.
Whenever I address audiences of young leaders I’m reminded of a story from my early days as a young leader in the Army, shortly after I was commissioned as a new second lieutenant, fresh out of West Point. I was on my first field exercise with my platoon. We’d had a long day and we didn’t crawl into our sleeping bags until just before midnight. I’d only been asleep for an hour or so when my platoon sergeant, a wise old airborne veteran, elbowed me and woke me up. Sir, he said, look up and tell me what you see.
So I looked up at a beautiful night sky and replied, I see a million stars, platoon sergeant. And what does that tell you, sir? He asked. Well, not exactly sure what my platoon sergeant was getting at, I thought for a few moments and, wanting to impress him, gave an answer that I thought he would conclude to be truly profound and indicative of a keen intellect. (Laughter.)
Well, platoon sergeant, I said, astronomically it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Theologically it tells me that God is great and we are but small and insignificant. Meteorologically, it tells me that we are going to enjoy a beautiful day for training tomorrow.
There was a long pause as my platoon sergeant considered this weighty answer. Thinking that he might be speechless after such an impressive response, I finally asked him, what does it tell you, platoon sergeant? Well, sir, he replied, it tells me that somebody stole our tent. (Laughter. Applause.)
Well, thanks for laughing. You know the deal. When you reach my stage in life, you’re only as good as the material they give you. (Laughter.) And I’m guessing that that material will be flogged all across Europe vey shortly and they will have to dig for some new material in the near future. In any event, let’s move on to more serious matters.
I’d like to use the slides I’ve got loaded up here to talk about the current situation in Afghanistan, to take you through what we have achieved, in recent months in particular, where we’re headed and then to take your questions. Next slide, please.
I want to start off by pointing out that we have worked very hard over the last 22 months or so to basically get the inputs right in Iraq, and that implies that we did not have the inputs right prior to that time, and that would be correct. That’s not to say that we did not do a great deal of very important work and helped build institutions, human capital, roads, schools, health clinics, security forces and a host of other worthy accomplishments.
But the fact is that we did not have the organizations necessary to carry out a comprehensive civil-military counterinsurgency campaign, the kind of campaign that is necessary to achieve our objectives in Afghanistan. We didn’t have those organizations staffed right, in some cases with the right folks in charge. We didn’t have all the principles, concepts, and above all, civil-military campaign plans necessary. And most importantly, we did not have the resources required to carry out the kind of campaign that I’ve described.
And over the course of the last 22 months or so, in fact, the nations contributing to ISAF have deployed some 80,000 additional forces. We’ve added well over 1,000 additional civilians to the diplomatic and other organizations working there, and funding has been provided for 100,000 additional Afghan national security forces. All of this, again, to get the inputs right. And we achieved that goal really just recently, when the final large element of the deployment from the United States, which was some 68,000 during that time, and division headquarters for regional command south, took over down there in the earlier part of this month. Next slide.
Now what this enables us to do, as I mentioned, is to carry out the kind of comprehensive civil-military campaign that is necessary. These are the bad guys. These are the enemies, those who are trying to foment instability and violence in Afghanistan, to bring back what they had before, which is essentially to turn the clock back many centuries in Afghanistan rather than to allow progressive forces to proceed. Next.
This is what they need to maintain their momentum. And make no mistake about it, until very recently they had the momentum throughout the country in this effort, in this fight. What we have to do is apply pressure in all regards, to take away from them, or disrupt their access to these elements right here that are essential to the continuation of the campaign they have been waging so fiercely, particularly since somewhere around 2004, 2005, the point at which they had sufficiently regrouped, reconnected and re-inserted themselves back into Afghanistan after being evicted in 2001 and 2002. Next.
Now, what’s required is to use all of the elements at our disposal, not just military means but all civilian and other, if you will, weapons, tools in our arsenal. Certainly military force is necessary, but it is not sufficient. But it is necessary. It includes targeted intelligence-driven raids – and I’ll talk about what those have achieved in recent months in a moment. These take out the mid-level leaders, the key facilitators and others. That’s who they target.
But in and of themselves they don’t achieve what is necessary because you have to take away the safe havens, what Mike and his group did in Ramadi, for example. We banged away in Ramadi in Iraq for four years and we still couldn’t drive from one side of the city to the Green Zone without getting hit because it remained a safe haven under the control of the enemy. It was only when conventional forces cleared it, after years of hitting it with Special Ops every night, that we were able to take it away.
And of course you want more and more host nation forces, special as well as conventional or general purposes. And you should always try to employ local security solutions as well, and we have one of those in Afghanistan now. President Karzai’s Afghan local police initiative, which is essentially a Community Watch with AK-47s underneath the control of the ministry of interior at the district level, and it has already proved to be very, very important.
But again, military activity, while necessary, is not sufficient. You also have to have politics. Next. That, in this case, includes not just the establishment of decent governance at all the different levels – local, district, provincial, national, so that the people embrace and see it as legitimate in their eyes. And to do that it has to have these qualities here.
But equally important, you have to have re-integration of the reconcilable elements of the insurgency, and that is starting to take off, by the way, with over two dozen groups already having come forward to take advantage of new programs that are connected with President Karzai’s peace and reintegration initiative. And then, if you can get it, with the senior leaders of the opposition groups, true reconciliation.
Keep in mind that in Iraq what we actually achieved was this right here, although the term for it there was reconciliation. It was not the senior al-Qaida in Iraq groups – leaders that came in. It was their rank-and-file and it was the population that tacitly or actively was supporting them. Next.
Obviously intelligence is hugely important, and you have to pull it together. All disciplines have to be united, have to be fused. And in truth the big breakthrough in intelligence in recent years has not been in any one of the individual disciplines – in each of which there has been a breakthrough in imagery intelligence, signals intelligence, human intelligence.
The real breakthrough is in the integration of the products of all of these, intelligence fusion, as we call it, literally fostered by intelligence fusion centers that we created in Iraq during the surge and then have also sought to create in Afghanistan. Next.
You have to get into the other elements of the rule of law besides those you’re just training with your Afghan national security force effort. So you have to help them with the corrections arena and with judicial assets as well. Not necessarily at all taking it all the way down to the local level, where traditional justice mechanisms certainly can still function, but certainly pushing it down far enough to the level that is necessary. And we worked very hard in this arena. A lot of these national programs, rather than, say, ISAF, but nonetheless very important. And of course you have to get at basic services. Next.
The so-called nonkinetics that give the people the prospect for a brighter future than they could have under, say, the Taliban or one of the other groups fighting to control various parts of Afghanistan. Next.
Obviously this is a regional – there’s a regional context here, and so engagement in this case with Pakistan is very important. I’ve been over there several times since taking command 4.5 months ago, and again, the broader region as well, with the Central Asian states and so forth.
And then finally, this is also a war of ideas, and you must compete in that war. All of the different media elements out there need to have representation from what it is that we are doing and the Afghan government is doing to be part of that debate. Next.
Now, geographically this shows the areas of focus. Obviously we have to put particular emphasis on those areas that have to be deprived to the insurgency because they are the major safe havens. You’ll know that the recent major fighting has taken place in two districts to the west of Kandahar and one to the northwest, which are largely secured now and taken away from the enemy, including Mullah Omar’s former home turf right here.
A lot of effort in recent months, really, in the past year for the six central districts of Helmand and now expanding to the north and to the northwest. And then pushing up the major route, Route 1 out in the east around Kabul, pushing that security bubble out as well. Kabul having been an area in which the Afghan forces have taken the lead, are the face of security, in which there has been quite good security over the course of the past five or so months, despite constant efforts by the Hikani network and the Taliban to carry out attacks in the city.
Then areas in the north, where the Taliban achieved momentum, in some cases still has it, where we have to work, as you can see up there, and then over in the Badgis-Kormak (ph 15:05) area. But that gives you a sense of where it is that we are focusing our forces and Afghan forces in partnership to again take away areas from the Taliban, help establish local governance, local economic development and so forth, so that the people see that as a preferable alternative to what the Taliban might have to offer. And indeed, they remember what the Taliban did to them when the Taliban were in charge, and the vast, vast majority of the population does not want to see them return. Next.
Now I mentioned targeted, intelligence-driven raids, special operations – really special mission unit operations. I’d focus on this number right here, nearly 1,500 targeted operations in a 90-day period that ended on the 18th of November. And you can see nearly 390 midlevel important leaders and facilitators killed or captured. That is a very, very significant number.
This represents by far the highest tempo of these type of operations that our militaries have ever achieved. This is several times what we were able to achieve in Iraq during the surge. And again, a very important component, but one in which you must be very precise, you must avoid civilian casualties, you must treat the population well, and so forth. And that’s a key element to continuing these kinds of operations. Next.
Now there’s a paradox here, and it’s worth laying this out for you. The green line is the security effort, and you literally ramp it up. More forces come in, you start to achieve more effects. That’s this axis right here. But as that happens, as you start to achieve security, taking away areas from the enemy, violence goes up because they will fight back. If you try to take away Marjah, if you try to take away the districts west of Kandahar and so forth, the enemy wants to hang onto those and they will indeed fight back. So the violence goes up.
Then there’s a lag between achieving decent security and the establishment of governance and rudimentary economic development. And then understandably, a further lag between that and the establishment of actual confidence on the part of the citizens, especially with the Taliban understandably continuing to resist, to use night letters, to employ intimidation, assassination and so forth. Next.
Now just to give you an example of an area where this has played out, Nawa is one of the districts of central Helmand province, one of the six central districts I referred to. You can see in late summer, early fall of 2009, when the US Marines increased their forces there, and as they fought, the level of violence went way up. You can see this represented by these pink lines right here.
And we started to achieve security over here, level of violence starts to come down, but it took quite some time. Gradually were able to help the Afghans establish decent local governance. That started to take off, and get economic development going, repair the schools, the mosques, the health clinics and the other elements of basic services, and then to see Afghan confidence start to take hold here. You can see how that played across. Red is bad, yellow is better, headed toward green in some of these areas. Next.
Now this is a bit of a complicated slide but it shows what can be done with the use of these Afghan local police initiatives that are built on what are called the village stability operations campaigns. This is February 2010, right here, and you’ll see, we’ll walk our way through all the way to November, very recently here. The little green triangles, upside-down triangles are Special Forces teams that have been inserted into villages, living with the people. And they are in quite insecure locations. Again, red is bad and so – and you can see, by the way, the lines that the Taliban used to come into this area.
This is Irisgun (ph 4:25), Daykundi, Helmand, Kandahar, and Zabul right here. So this is just to the north of that area I talked about the recent fighting. And again, you can see the bulk of this area, out of the control of the Afghan and ISAF forces, with the exception of the Terenkalt (ph 4:41) bowl right here, the capital of Irisgun.
Now over time these small little locations started to garner popular support. Indeed, in April of 2010 the citizens of Ghizab (ph) rose up and threw off the Taliban and said we want you out of our village; you are taxing us, you are stealing our food, you are violent and so forth. And our forces and Afghan forces helped them and in so doing cleared a valley between Nili, the capital of Daykundi, and Ghizab, right there. This is all in Daykundi.
Now fast forward to July and August. Now we’ve got the Afghan local police initiative going. The initial locations in Ghizab, Pasa Uruzgan (ph 5:30) and some of these other areas right here now taking hold. And operations are mounted to clear some of the other valleys, the passes, because this is all very mountainous. This is the part of the Hindu Kush right there.
And over time, as of a couple of weeks ago you can see substantial areas cleared, and you now have a route that literally runs from the capital of Kerenkaut (ph 5:48) through the Shutu (ph) valley, up to Kazhran, Nili down through Ghizab and this valley right here, and then also the Hasarisgan (ph), and so on.
So as the enemy now is being pushed out of Helmand by the operations way down here by the U.S. Marines and the British Task Force Helmand, they’re going to run right into these forces, and that is now starting to happen.
The same as they’re coming out of Zabul province and also those trying to go up into Shawallikat (ph) from Kandahar. That’s how a campaign like this has shaped up. We can take this out even farther and show you the whole regional command south area, and you can see a somewhat similar picture. Next.
Now, critical to all of this has been the growth of the Afghan national security forces, and this has had enormous challenges. The lack of human capital, illiteracy at 70, 80 percent rates and so forth. All of these pose enormous difficulties for those trying to carry this out. But it has increased very substantially in terms of quantity and also in terms of quality, which recognizing that it’s one thing to train an infantryman and it’s another thing to develop – because that’s the process that’s required – a battalion commander or brigade commander or a corps commander.
But that is all moving along, and these very aggressive growth goals do seem attainable all the way out to next year and the 304,000 goal for the security forces. And indeed the gradual development of leadership and so forth is taking place as well, albeit with enormous challenges and many setbacks as well as successes. Next.
Now, what else has been going on? Because it’s very important to recall, as I said earlier, that military activity, while necessary, is not sufficient. So let me talk a little bit about the infrastructure growth and then we’ll turn to your questions. The number of roads paved. This is all added just since liberation in 2002. You can see the Route 1, all complete now except for this section right here, which is very, very difficult terrain and enemy infested in some of the areas as well. But quite an accomplishment to cut down travel times the way that these roads have. Next.
Electrical grid access. Again, still relatively small in terms of a population that’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 (million), 27 (million), maybe even 30 million. There is no accurate census. But growing and increasing steadily. And in places like Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat, Jalalabad, the access quite good. Next.
This is a huge success story here. You can see how little access there was under the Taliban to education in Afghanistan. You can see what it has reached now, and you note the percentage of that that is now girls as well as boys. And access, of course, that was not available to women, young women during the Taliban days. And a lot more effort going on in this regard. Next.
So finally, there’s been progress but it is all hard and it is hard all the time. We do believe that we can achieve the goal that President Karzai has laid out of Afghan forces in the lead by the end of 2014, and that we can, as I will mention tomorrow, begin transition of some locations and some tasks to Afghan forces and institutions next year. But we do need to be very cognizant of the enormous challenges that are out there, not just on the military front but also because of sanctuaries in neighboring countries, because of the difficulties in the governance and development arena, to be sure.
And I’m delighted, I heard that Ashraf Ghani, I think, is going to be one of the next speakers, who is a very senior adviser to President Karzai, very important and thoughtful on this count, as well as my civilian diplomatic wing man, NATO senior civilian Ambassador Mark Sedwell, and the UNAMA SRSG Staffan de Mistura, one of the finest international diplomats out there, who was in a similar position, I might add, in Baghdad, and who I persuaded, among – with others, to go to Kabul well before I ever knew I was going to go there.
So I’ll leave you with this parting thought and now open it up to questions. Thank you. (Applause.)
Q: General, it’s truly humbling to be before you and I thank you very much for your words. I work for the organization, the US-based organization Human Rights First, who brought together in 2009 a coalition of retired senior military leaders. And on the second day of President Obama’s day in office, he executed an order to ban torture in presence of those military leaders.
I’d like to ask you one general question and very precise question, if you don’t mind. My general question is the following. Could you provide, please, your personal – your thoughts and analysis on the main interconnections for you between human rights and global security in the fight against terrorism? That’s my first question.
And my second question is more precise than that. I believe that you said that the images of torture from Abu Ghraib are nonbiodegradable, and I would like to ask you, what would you say to Americans who are urging to return to the use of enhanced interrogation techniques? Thank you.
GEN. PETRAEUS: Well, thanks very much, and thanks for what Human Rights First has done. And my answer to the latter question is to say that we should not go there. Don’t go there, girlfriend, as they say in the United States.
I am on record – first of all, not only did we develop a counterinsurgency manual during my 15 months as the commander of the Combined Arms Center, which oversaw all the schools and centers and staff colleges and combat training centers of the U.S. Army in 2006. We also developed what was called the Human Intelligence Collector’s field manual, which is also known as the interrogation field manual.
It does not include enhanced interrogation techniques, and it does not because, A, we think they are not necessary, and B, we think they’re wrong. And in fact, it took on the force of law when Sen. McCain – who knows something about enhanced interrogation techniques, having had them used on him for some seven years in Hanoi – felt very strongly about it, and we very strongly supported his efforts in the Senate to make that field manual actually take on legal authority.
You may know that in the fall of 2007, when I was in Iraq as the commander – it was still in the first year of the surge – we received the results of a survey that actually had been done about 10 months earlier. It was back before – I think it was in late 2006. I took command in early February of 2007. And it indicated a willingness of our troopers to tolerate what we know to be actions that violate the law of land warfare and various norms and values. I was quite concerned by that.
It showed a greater predisposition to that, I think, frankly, because of the tremendous violence that our troopers had seen visited on their fellow soldiers during the height of the violence in late 2006 and into 2007. And I put out a letter, and it acknowledged the challenges of the battlefield we were on and the difficulties we faced, but noted that it was critical that we live our values. That was the theme of that particular letter.
I argued that there are two reasons to live your values. One is of course really centuries, I guess, generations certainly in our case of Americans that fought to protect and preserve those values. And again, it was the right thing to do. I also argued, though, that if you think it’s not – if you’re not persuaded by the normative argument, I would argue that there’s a practical argument, and that is that it tends to bite you in the backside in the long run. Expedient behavior will always backfire.
And indeed, I stand by what I said about the photos from Abu Ghraib, and some other incidents as well. Each of those is somewhat indelible, some much more so than others, some attaining, as we describe it, nonbiodegradable status. Those will always be out there on the Internet. They will always be pulled back up to become part of – they’re not just mythology, but they will take on almost mythological proportions, and it’s very difficult to deal with those.
Indeed, frankly, some of our challenges in Afghanistan – and I had a very good dialogue with President Karzai this past week – do stem from past history. And it is, again, images that are indelible for him and for other Afghans, and which are very, very difficult to try to assuage, to submerge, to get out of the consciousness, and noting what we have done to address those kinds of issues.
So the bottom line is, again, I think it is imperative that we do indeed live our values. We have found, for whatever it’s worth – and in fact, Sen. McCain was just out in Iraq last week and we specifically wanted him to have some time with our special mission unit, which does have a detention facility and interrogation facility that absolutely meets all the requirements of our field manual and of all the acknowledged conventions.
And indeed, it is open to various groups that do monitor that. We cannot always name them by name because of various conventions, but they have all visited these facilities. There are no secret ones in Afghanistan, and so on. And in fact, we’ve also had President Karzai’s legal adviser, a number of members of his staff we’ve allowed to go in there as well.
So I feel pretty strongly about this. I think that you undermine your cause by practices such as water-boarding and other so-called enhancements. And in the end of the day I don’t think they – certainly are not worth it, if you will, and in fact do cause us problems in the long run. Next.
Q: Thank you so much for being here today. My name is Mark Goldberg. I’m an American delegate. I was wondering if you could expand a little bit on this 2011 to 2014 transition phase. Specifically under what criteria do you expect to judge whether, when and how the transition can occur, in which provinces and which districts. And also what role should we expect for American forces in Afghanistan after 2014. Thank you.
GEN. PETRAEUS: Well, first of all, we have developed – do you all have the back-up slide deck, by any chance? Where is my team back there? Can you pull up the conditions for transition by any chance? They’re on their game. This is fantastic. Actually who’s back in the booth? Is that Capt. Benedict? Just out of curiosity. We’ll give him credit. (Applause.) They are the unsung heroes, the PowerPoint rangers. He happens to be a great combat Army officer – also a Rhodes scholar, I might add – and a wonderful young American.
These are, first of all, the principles that we developed to guide transition, and very important of course. Everyone has acknowledged it should be conditions-based, based on objective evaluations of the conditions by our leaders at the ground. It should be something that’s done from there, from the bottom up. Not, you know – we’ll take help from the nearly 50 capitals out there that have an interest in this, but it can’t be driven with various-length screwdrivers from those capitals because, indeed, at the operational command level we have to do the so-called battlefield geometry that keeps all this knitted together with our Afghan partners.
So it very likely is going to be at district or even city level, as Ashraf Ghani will describe it very likely, and then progress to province, because these provinces are awfully big when you look at the map. And what will likely happen is there will be transition in one district with a re-investment of some of that transition dividend, the troops that are harvested from that in the contiguous district.
Headquarters really matter in this because, having done this in several different countries over the years – the Balkans, Iraq and elsewhere – they become – they’re the platforms for your provincial reconstruction teams, your mentoring teams, the intelligence links, communication, quick reaction force, medevac and so forth.
And so even as you are thinning out the forces underneath those headquarters, rather than just handing off, which we’re not willing to do – even as you think them out you want to retain those headquarters. In fact, anyone who’s followed Iraq knows that we kept a brigade headquarters in Kirkuk while sending the bulk of its forces home because that brigade headquarters is really important.
And then we should keep in mind, this is not just about geographic areas. This is also about transitioning tasks performed by institutions and by organizations that perform various functions. And then we added this one, at the reminder of an ambassador when we briefed the ISAF nation ambassadors recently. He said, you’re going to get one shot at transition, General, and you need to make sure that it is irreversible. You’ve got to get it right.
Now, to get it right we have created various measured, if you will, and we’ve done the initial assessments of districts and provinces. And we obviously look at the state of security as the most important, the foundation for all else. You have to look at the friendly forces, the enemy forces, trends, and how are the Afghans doing, what’s our posture, and so on. Then you look at the other factors that bear on this and make it irreversible in terms of local governance and development, which are so important to capitalize on what you’ve achieved in the security arena.
What we envision is beginning this in 2011, at districts in most cases, although there are some provinces in which, to be fair, they’ve almost really already transitioned, we have very few forces. But we will probably formally do that there as well, including, by the way, in Kabul itself, I think, is a likely candidate, which is quite significant considering that one-sixth of the population of all of Afghanistan lives in Kabul province, not just in Kabul city.
So that’s how we envision that playing out. And then over time, gradually working the battlefield geometry, shifting forces, occasionally sending some of those home to be sure. But a process whereby the Afghans stand taller and taller but they don’t stand alone. We are still there with them. We’re still providing enablers, assets, in some cases logistics and a host of other enabling functions, given that those elements of their force are still being developed and will be for some years.
And then beyond 2014, we’ll have to see at that time, needless to say, but we would certainly envision some form of security assistance role, perhaps what we’re doing in Iraq now, where you may recall we still do have 50,000 forces there, but it is the Iraqis who are in the lead in security, some 700,000 of them now. And despite the violence of recent months periodically, by and large the number of attacks on an average day is below 10 or 15 or so, to contrast with the, say, 220 or more that we saw in May and June of 2007.
Next question, please. And then we’ll go to the back one there.
Q: Thank you very much, General. I’m a Russian participant. Your presentation was extremely interesting, especially for me because my Ph.D. deals with NATO and Afghanistan. I have a short question. Do you personally think that moderate Talibs exist, or can Talib be moderate? And do you think that negotiating with so-called moderate Talibs will bring results? Thank you.
GEN. PETRAEUS: (In Russian.)
Q: (In Russian.)
GEN. PETRAEUS: And actually, can I offer up front first, perhaps, a desire that we sketched out at various times when I was the commander of Central Command and we included in the 20 countries that we oversaw the Central Asian states.
It was our hope, and one that we communicated to various Russian ambassadors, among others, that the new “Great Game” in the Central Asian states, the new competition for power and resources and so forth, could be transformed into a broad partnership against extremism and the illegal narcotics industry, two threats that Russia takes very, very seriously, as you know, and which it is in the interest of all nations of the world to combat. And I think, by the way, that there is a greater recognition of the wisdom of doing that rather than approaching the area as a zero-sum game.
With respect to moderate Talib, I think – look, the Taliban, like any insurgency, have elements that span – run the gamut, the whole spectrum, if you will, from what we call the 5-dollar-a-day Taliban to the truly hardcore, irreconcilable extremists, arguably terrorist leaders. And certainly there are elements within the Taliban that can be reconciled. They are being reconciled in some small numbers. I don’t want to overplay this so far. I think I mentioned somewhere around two dozen groups that we count so far that have been – come forward, have laid down their weapons, renounced violence, and agreed to be reintegrated into society as part of President Karzai’s new peace and reintegration concept.
So I do think that this is very much realistic, but it has to be done in accordance with the red lines that President Karzai has laid down, very wisely, that not only a renunciation of violence and cutting of ties to al-Qaida and transnational extremists, but also an acceptance of the Afghan constitution, which is shorthand for saying that the rights of women, minorities and other groups have to be preserved, even as these individuals become part of the solution rather than a continuing part of the problem.
Back there, please, and I think this will be the last question, I’m afraid.
Q: Thank you, sir. I had several questions. The first one –
GEN. PETRAEUS: I think we probably need to keep it to one, though.
Q: Yes. It’s going to be extremely quick, if you let me. The transition as far as on the studies based on the building up the Afghan security forces, last year when I was in Kabul I learned that the attrition rate was 70 percent, and I was wondering what kind of mitigating things you have been building to – you understand me, I guess.
The second point is, maybe you should get a slide to show us how you share responsibility with the civilians on the anaconda strategy. And if you have time, what will you say to the people that are criticizing the counterinsurgency concept? Thank you very much.
GEN. PETRAEUS: Well, first of all, on the Afghan national security forces, we have indeed focused quite intently on the problems of attrition, most significantly the absent-without-leave problem, AWOL, which is particularly challenging in Afghanistan because when the individuals go home on leave, this is not a simple proposition. They just can’t get on their neighborhood bus or subway and be taken home. It’s quite a chore in some cases to get someone, say from the battlefields of Helmand province up to Badakhshan province up in the northeast.
We actually now are contracting for fixed-wing aircraft just to get them to Kabul so that we cut down all of the travel and security challenges that we experienced in the past. And indeed, attrition has come down quite substantially, although it is not yet at the levels that we would like to see it reach.
On the other hand, enlistment and reenlistment have gone way up, especially enlistment, and that is what has enabled the achievement of the growth goals that I laid out for you here. And so we’re focusing quite intently on those issues and indeed have made progress, but have not yet made the kind of ultimate progress that we would to make on the attrition front in particular.
With respect to the civil-military integration, I think it is pretty well known that, first of all in the counterinsurgency field manual it notes that unity of effort is critical. It’s essential. It’s something without which you cannot do. And indeed, when Ambassador Crocker and I worked together in Baghdad, we worked literally as one. We also worked very closely, by the way, again with the SRSG you’ll see in a moment, Staffan de Mistura, again, an extraordinarily talented individual.
In Afghanistan, on the second day that I was there, even the day before I took command at a 4th of July celebration on the 3rd of July, I announced to the embassy staff that the ambassador and I saw that cooperation was not optional, that we would indeed integrate the civil and military efforts of the campaign, recognizing that while there are indeed some 49 or so troop-contributing nation embassies, the US embassy is involved in about somewhere in the range of 70 percent of the development aid, although it varies in different categories.
So clearly we had to work together and we have been working together and we integrate our efforts. And there are certain what we call battle rhythm events where the ambassador and I join together for different meetings, sessions, trips and do on.
I also have a NATO civilian counterpart, and you’ll see him in a moment, another extraordinarily talented ambassador. He was the U.K. ambassador to Afghanistan before becoming NATO’s senior civilian representative, and we worked very closely together as well, right in the same headquarters. And then once again the UNAMA SRSG, the EU special representative, Vidoudez Osakis, and a core group of the major troop-contributing nation ambassadors, and then all of the ISAF-contributing ambassadors as well. So that is how we go about this. And as I said, again, it is the essential component of any comprehensive civil-military counterinsurgency campaign.
And then with respect to the approach, to the strategy, if you will, I guess that I would ask those who question it what they would propose instead. This is not my first rodeo, as they say in the United States. I have done this in some other countries, including nearly four years in Iraq.
Afghanistan is not Iraq, to be sure. It has all of its own unique circumstances and complexities, but the principles in many cases are the same, and it’s a matter of understanding the local circumstances with enormous contextual appreciation that is the key to applying those principles properly in a place like Afghanistan, or indeed, any place. Because as they say, all politics are local, so are all counterinsurgency operations.
With that, let me just end again by saluting this organization, saluting the organization that it promotes – NATO – and thanking you all for the opportunity to spend time with you this afternoon. Thank you very much. (Applause.)
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