In a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations today, Sen. Lieberman called for a significant expansion of the Afghan military:
"Most important of all, what is needed is an immediate commitment to a significant expansion in the end strength of the Afghan National Security Forces, in particular the Afghan National Army. In September of last year, the Bush administration belatedly agreed to double the Afghan army to 134,000 soldiers by 2011-a goal that the Obama administration has since reaffirmed. Unfortunately, this is still too little, too late. No less than a total Afghan security force of 425,000 to 450,000 is needed, including an Afghan National Army that is at least 250,000 strong. It is only when Afghan forces reach those numbers that the ratio of security personnel to population will achieve the level necessary for success in counterinsurgency. Some have suggested that we should first reach our goal of 134,000 soldiers by 2011, and then reassess whether further growth is needed. This would be a grave mistake in my view and a perpetuation of the Bush administration's incrementalist approach in Afghanistan. Given the country's population, size, geography, and security environment, it is apparent that a 134,000-strong army will be insufficient to the country's needs. There is nothing to be gained from postponing a recognition of this reality. On the contrary, given how long it takes to recruit, train, equip, and mentor additional Afghan forces, President Obama and our allies need to commit now to a significant expansion in the Afghan National Security Forces, in order to begin reaping the benefit of a larger Afghan army by the end of his first term."
Full speech after the break:
It is an honor to be here at the Council on Foreign Relations this afternoon.
As you know, the Council was founded nearly ninety years ago, in 1921, by a group of far-sighted leaders who recognized that the era in which America could remain safely disengaged from the rest of the world, protected by two great oceans, was over. This was by no means a popular position to take in the 1920s. On the contrary, after the bloodshed of the First World War, many Americans wanted nothing more than to withdraw behind our borders and pull up the drawbridge-putting in place protectionist economic policies, restrictions on immigration, and above all, avoiding any further entanglements abroad.
The founders of the Council stood athwart this isolationist tide and instead set out to build a new internationalist consensus in American foreign policy. In doing so, they invited Democrats and Republicans alike to join their ranks.
Today, preserving and expanding that bipartisan commitment to internationalism, here in Washington and throughout our country, remains a vitally important and sometimes challenging task-and it is especially relevant as we consider the future of our engagement in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Since his Inauguration three months ago, President Obama has significantly expanded America's commitment to the security and stability of South Asia. After years of under-resourcing, the President has ordered the deployment of over 20,000 additional American troops to Afghanistan along with a dramatic increase in the number of civilian experts on the ground. He has also backed substantially greater aid to the region. And he has appointed one of our most accomplished and talented diplomats, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, as special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
There were some who warned that the American people-tired of war and worried about our problems here at home-would not support such an ambitious new international commitment. But instead of encountering resistance, the President's new strategy has been greeted with broad support from Democrats and Republicans in Congress, as well as from our allies abroad.
Part of the reason for this, I believe, is that, although the American people are understandably focused on the extraordinary economic crisis we now face, they understand the importance of Afghanistan and by extension Pakistan, and know that we cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the past and turn our back on this region, as we did after the Soviet withdrawal. And they know that we were attacked from Afghanistan on 9/11, and will be again if we fail there. As President Obama himself rightly put it during last year's campaign, "As 9/11 showed us, the security of Afghanistan and America is shared."
At the same time, it is important to understand that the bipartisan consensus that now exists around our war effort in South Asia will probably be tested in the months ahead. As additional troops are deployed to Afghanistan, American casualties will rise, and things are likely to get worse there before they get better. Our commanders on the ground have requested additional forces beyond those authorized by the President, and these reinforcements are likely to be needed next year.
Despite these challenges, a long-term American commitment to Afghanistan and Pakistan is politically sustainable-if the President and all of us who support his policies in South Asia continue to make the case to the American people why they are so vital to our security here at home, and our values around the world.
The other key to the domestic political sustainability of our policy in Afghanistan is for it to succeed. The President has outlined a smart strategy and begun to provide the necessary resources. But now we need to make it work.
Unfortunately, our war effort continues to be hobbled by organizational incoherence. In Afghanistan today, we have a fragmented military command structure under NATO, an even more balkanized civilian effort, and no unified leadership between the two. This is no way to run a counterinsurgency-for in counterinsurgency, success depends upon bringing together all of the elements of our national power in a joint campaign plan. The current organizational incoherence also raises the risk that, even as we devote greater resources to this war effort, they will be spent ineffectively and wastefully.
The Obama administration seems to recognize this problem and has set out to solve it. In Afghanistan, for instance, General McKiernan has instituted a series of reforms that have begun to bring a greater degree of coherence to our military command structure. In addition, the British military has agreed to send an existing division headquarters to southern Afghanistan this fall to take charge of military operations in this critical theater, and that represents a huge improvement over NATO's past practice of staffing its regional headquarters in Afghanistan with ad hoc pick-up teams.
Still, much more sweeping changes are needed and soon. Given the near-doubling of American forces in Afghanistan this year, I think it is time to put in place a three-star corps headquarters in Kabul, to serve as an operational command for the war effort. This would replicate the successful command structure we have in Iraq, where-during the surge-General Odierno served as the three-star operational commander, responsible for running the day-to-day counterinsurgency, while General Petraeus served as the four-star strategic commander above him. It is too much to ask General McKiernan to do both these jobs in Afghanistan, where today, there is no operational headquarters to develop and coordinate the nationwide counterinsurgency campaign plan we need to defeat the insurgency.
Moreover, as we expand our civilian footprint in Afghanistan, we must also ensure that it is integrated, at all levels, with the military effort. The bureaucratic walls that have grown up between the U.S. Embassy and our military coalition need to be torn down quickly. Just a few years ago, the American ambassador and the coalition military commander worked in adjoining offices in the same building, and their staffs had in place a single nationwide civil-military campaign plan to defeat the insurgency. This needs to happen again, with General McKiernan and our new Ambassador, Karl Eikenberry.
Finally, it is very important that we forge an interagency process here in Washington that reinforces unity of effort in the field. Two years ago, the Bush administration made the wise decision to establish the position of Iraq and Afghanistan war czar at the National Security Council. That position now needs to be expanded to include Pakistan. It is critical that, as General Petraeus manages our regional military strategy and Ambassador Holbrooke, our regional diplomatic strategy, we have a single high-ranking person at the NSC, whose full-time job is managing the interagency process for these wars.
Let me now say a few words about the regional dimension of the challenge we face. Some have suggested that progress in Afghanistan is impossible as long as insurgent safe havens remain across the border in Pakistan. Others have gone further and questioned the strategic value of trying to succeed in Afghanistan at all, given that it is Pakistan-with its nuclear weapons, political instability, and al Qaeda sanctuary-that represents the greater threat to our national security.
I respectfully disagree on both counts. We cannot afford to fail in Pakistan, or in Afghanistan. These are two unique countries and peoples in one theater of conflict, but the conflict in each country is different and must be understood on its own terms.
In Pakistan, we have a vital national interest in helping our moderate allies combat the extremist groups that pose the single greatest threat to their national security, not just in the tribal region but throughout the country. This requires Pakistani leaders who will fight the militant groups throughout their territory, but who are also ready to break through the corruption and feudalism that has hobbled their country's development for so long, and that is creating a gap between the Pakistani people and their government that the extremists are now rushing in to exploit.
Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, on the other hand, will ultimately be won or lost among the Afghan people themselves, at the local level, not across the border in Pakistan. Although terrorist sanctuaries in Pakistan unquestionably make our task in Afghanistan harder, we can go a long way toward "hardening" Afghanistan against these safe havens by providing enduring population security at the local level and building up effective Afghan-led institutions. Indeed, that is what we have done in Iraq, where militant infiltration from Syria and Iran is sharply down, not because of a political decision by these neighboring governments, but because of the progress made by our soldiers and our Iraqi allies on the ground inside Iraq, which has made the country much less permeable to malign interference from outside.
"Hardening" Afghanistan may also help change the geopolitical dynamic in the broader region in ways that will help combat extremism in Pakistan as well. Let me explain what I mean by this.
Until the late 1970s, Afghanistan was a poor but largely safe and stable developing country, with a government that carried out basic functions and was broadly viewed as legitimate by its people. In addition, Afghanistan had indigenous security institutions that were sufficiently strong to deter its neighbors from thinking that they, or their rivals, could take over the country. As a result, Afghanistan was treated as a kind of buffer state by the region.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 upended this equilibrium and ushered in a new regional dynamic, in which neighboring states fought for control of Afghanistan by sponsoring indigenous proxies there. In Pakistan, it was through this pattern of proxy warfare that linkages were forged between elements of the Pakistani security establishment, namely the ISI, and Pashtun extremist groups like the Haqqani network and the Taliban. And it is in part because of a fear that the United States will once again abandon Afghanistan, and that the cycle of full-blown proxy warfare will resume, that some in Pakistan have been reluctant to break with these groups, and instead continue to maintain ties with them, as part of a hedging strategy.
Our single best weapon to alter this calculation in Pakistan is to commit ourselves in Afghanistan, unambiguously and for the long-term, to help Afghans get their country back on its feet, and make clear that we will not permit a security and governance vacuum to emerge there again. Conversely, the more we hedge our bets in Afghanistan, the more the Pakistanis will hedge their bets too-in ways that will make our fight against extremism throughout the region monumentally more difficult.
In Afghanistan, therefore, what is needed is patient, resource-intensive, and system-wide support to build up Afghan governing institutions, both top-down and bottom-up.
What is needed is a redoubling of our support for proven Afghan success stories, such as the National Solidarity Program, which empowers Afghan communities at the village level by offering them grants to design and implement their own development projects.
What is needed is more direct investment in the Afghan people, with a major scholarship program to bring thousands of Afghans students and professionals to the United States and other coalition countries every year-much as we did with South Korea in the 1950s, when that country was still mired in poverty.
And, most important of all, what is needed is an immediate commitment to a significant expansion in the end strength of the Afghan National Security Forces, in particular the Afghan National Army. In September of last year, the Bush administration belatedly agreed to double the Afghan army to 134,000 soldiers by 2011-a goal that the Obama administration has since reaffirmed. Unfortunately, this is still too little, too late.
No less than a total Afghan security force of 425,000 to 450,000 is needed, including an Afghan National Army that is at least 250,000 strong. It is only when Afghan forces reach those numbers that the ratio of security personnel to population will achieve the level necessary for success in counterinsurgency.
Some have suggested that we should first reach our goal of 134,000 soldiers by 2011, and then reassess whether further growth is needed. This would be a grave mistake in my view and a perpetuation of the Bush administration's incrementalist approach in Afghanistan. Given the country's population, size, geography, and security environment, it is apparent that a 134,000-strong army will be insufficient to the country's needs. There is nothing to be gained from postponing a recognition of this reality. On the contrary, given how long it takes to recruit, train, equip, and mentor additional Afghan forces, President Obama and our allies need to commit now to a significant expansion in the Afghan National Security Forces, in order to begin reaping the benefit of a larger Afghan army by the end of his first term.
To be clear, our core national interest in Afghanistan is to prevent that country from once again becoming a terrorist safe haven. But the only realistic way to prevent that from happening is through the emergence of a stable and legitimate political order in Afghanistan, backed by capable indigenous security forces. That is our goal in Afghanistan, and it is consistent with our national values as well as our national security. But we cannot get from here to there without a significant and sustained American commitment. Just as in Iraq, there is no shortcut to success, no clever "middle way" that allows us to achieve more by doing less, no strictly "military" solution.
History and our own experience tell us that Afghanistan is not doomed to be an ungovernable graveyard of empires. In the first place, poll after poll show that Afghans themselves want a functioning, uncorrupt government that provides basic services and keeps them safe, and that they overwhelmingly reject the Taliban. We have seen how, when we work in partnership with the Afghans, significant progress is possible.
We should also acknowledge that, although we face many problems in Afghanistan today, none of them are because of the good things we have already helped Afghanistan achieve since 2001. None are because we have made it possible for five million Afghan children, boys and girls, to go to school, or because child mortality has dropped 25 percent since we overthrew the Taliban in 2001, or because Afghan men and women have been able to vote in their country's first free and fair elections in history.
On the contrary, the reason we have not lost in Afghanistan-despite our many missteps-is because our country and our values still inspire hope of a better life for millions of ordinary Afghans, and because we have already delivered it to so many of them. And the reason we can defeat the extremists in Afghanistan is because they have not.
Ultimately, the global war with Islamist extremists is an ideological war. Military strength is a necessary but, by itself, insufficient basis for victory. We need to help the Afghan people establish security first, but then it is as critical to help them establish a legitimate and lasting political order that makes freedom and opportunity possible.
That, then, is the real opportunity and objective that is ours to seize: to make Afghanistan into a quagmire-not for America, but for al Qaeda and its extremist allies.
Thank you.
