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Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Afghanistan in Transition: A Trip Report with Anthony Cordesman Speaker: Anthony Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy, CSIS Location: CSIS, Washington, D.C. Time: 9:30 a.m. EDT Date: Tuesday, March 19, 2013 Transcript by Federal News Service Washington, D.C. ANTHONY CORDESMAN: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am going to violate a long-standing CSIS principle and actually begin on time. (Laughter.) I apologize for that, but I promise you it will not happen again. First, thank you very much for coming. I am really talking about a trip, as well as a long series of previous studies, to Kabul, RC North, RC South and RC East and other areas. I went with four of my colleagues, each of which I think are outstanding analysts in this area and will be speaking on their own: Ambassador Ronald Neumann, Michele Flournoy, Stephen Biddle and Michael O’Hanlon. But I want to stress that what I’m going to say are my views. They are not those of my colleagues, each of whom are very capable of expressing their own views. We did have the support of ISAF during this trip, but we set the schedule as to who we wanted to talk to and where we wanted to go. It was not a trip where there was any effort made to develop any kind of party line or to somehow educate us in the sense of trying to establish an ISAF or U.S. position. We did meet with a very wide range of U.S., allied and Afghan officials. I am not going to name any or to attribute any views to them. I think all of you must realize, given what’s happened over the last two weeks, that perhaps the last thing we need is more tension and controversy around personalities. And I think we need to be extraordinarily careful in attributing positions to individuals that are not theirs. And I will leave it to them to speak. But I’m going to focus on three areas that emerged as critical problems during our trip. One is the broader political situation and the impact of the election, which will occur in the spring of 2014, well, with some level of confidence. The second is what is a relatively rapid set of changes in the assessment of the security situation, the way we will approach the strategy and in the way we will approach the development of the Afghan national security forces. And the third are the problems that are emerging in economic aid, in governance and in economic stability inside Afghanistan as we move toward transition. Let me begin with the situation surrounding the election. It is already clear that this is going to be a time of very deep tension. It is something where everyone we talked to was concerned, sometimes frightened, of what might happen, because the election might not occur, because it might be manipulated, because it might not produce leadership and because it might not produce unity. It didn’t much matter whether it was Americans in the field, our allies or Afghans. That concern was a universal. There were questions about the role that President Karzai might play in seeking to choose a successor, but there were many questions about how you could forge a coalition, about what candidate could do a better job or a good job of leading. And it was quite clear that no one as yet had picked out how a coalition might be shaped and there was no one in the lead. And there were great reservations about moving too quickly and taking positions too early that might lead to problems. What was in many ways more of a concern, however, was the focus on the way the election would be held, on having the best possible, the most secure, the widest possible election, with the best identification cards, the best commission and the best complaints group. The focus far too often was on the election per se and not what would happen after the election, how a new leader would take over, would be able to govern, how you could deal with rapid changes in ministers, which are an almost inevitable result, in the middle of a critical period in 2014, with most U.S. combat troops outside the country, with major problems in expenditure. It is nice to focus on a perfect election. It is much wiser to focus on an adequate government and effective leadership and meeting the needs of the Afghan people. And I did not see that focus at almost any level. One other problem that was quite clear was the extent to which Afghans really did not understand the degree to which support is beginning to wane for continuing the funding, for continuing this conflict, for supporting them after 2014. In many cases, the argument was made that Afghanistan is more important to the United States than it is to the Afghans. This is an argument which I suppose you have to visit the country to fully understand, but it is a dangerous argument, and it is one where the Afghans need to fully understand some realities. There were Afghans – and I should make this point clearly – that did highlight the fact that they face serious security and economic challenges, that there might be a crisis in the economy and the ANSF. There were Afghans which saw the peace process as a major area of uncertainty. And I think in general, there was, on the part of the Americans we talked to, people from other countries and the Afghans, great concern that the peace negotiations might turn out to be hollow and little more than an extension of war by other means. There was very little faith that the negotiations could produce a stable or meaningful result, much as many people wanted that result as a solution. I will not belabor the subject of Pakistan, but I would say that if there was anyone who felt that Pakistan was changing its behavior relative to the sanctuaries and the support of given insurgent groups and the behavior of the ISI, they were almost universally among the small minority deeply committed to having some kind of stable peace before the end of 2014, and it seemed to be much more a triumph of hope over experience or the evidence. I would like to believe that Pakistan will change, just as I would like to believe that the Taliban will change. But if the indicators are there, we did not see them on this trip. There were Afghans who were firmly worried about what will happen as they have to manage the money that comes from aid if, indeed, the goal of giving the Afghan government at least 50 percent of that aid to manage is met. As is, I think, clear from the Department of Defense reporting and the reporting from the Afghan special inspector general, it is fairly clear that there has been no significant improvement in the problem of corruption or power brokering. In the reality, the problem you have in Afghanistan is you have in many ways the shell of a democracy, a legislature which is more a form of career than it is of substance, a structure where the president still controls virtually all of the money that goes through the government and virtually all the use of money is through ministries which basically can bypass or avoid the appointed governor at the district or provincial level or combine that with power brokering. And that is going to be a massive problem as we shift towards the financial and budgetary aspects over the coming year. The fact is that at some point in the next 18 to 24 months, a country where virtually all of the aid money has been spent around and outside the central government will, one way or another, either have to be spent through that government or under conditions where we do not have military or civilians in the field. The PRTs are already folding back. The ambitious plans to have consulates are being collapsed. The presence and the ability to monitor what is happening, which is already remarkably weak, will be in many cases simply not there. And these are critical issues. I think that this, because we cannot change many aspects of that, requires us to really start talking to the Afghans in a different way. It is one which is going to require a great deal of diplomacy, particularly up to the election. But we need to make it clear there is conditionality here. What the Afghan government does over the period between now and the election, and particularly after it, will, in the real world, determine, to an amazing degree, whether we do or do not support this effort beyond 2014. There already are some tools that would make this possible. The Afghan government laid out a long series of reforms and steps forward at the Tokyo conference. It is never going to happen that all of those steps are met or are met on time, but some of them can be met, and some of them have to be if the money is to be used either in aid or in developing the Afghan national security forces. If we are going to have a bilateral security agreement, it has to be where we have clearly defined the terms. It has to be clear that we can actually perform the mission in that agreement, what the limits are.