Thanks for inviting me to appear before the committee today. It's a pleasure to be here.
I regret that I didn't hear the discussion with the previous witnesses. I was actually sprinting the entire length of Sparks Street, so I beg your indulgence as I continue to wipe my brow and recover from that unexpected run.
My message today is quite simple: the Afghanistan mission for NATO is in trouble and a new strategy is needed to turn the mission around. In spite of Canada's recent military successes in Kandahar province, the Taliban and its radical Islamist allies are operating more widely and more openly today than they were even a year ago, and they are continuing to enjoy the use of safe havens across the border in Pakistan.
The insurgency, which I'll call the neo-Taliban because of its diffuse character, has formed alliances with local drug traffickers and warlords in opposition to the government of Hamid Karzai. There is growing evidence from a variety of different sources that ordinary Afghans are becoming increasingly disaffected with their own government's inability to provide security and basic public services. If these trends continue, I fear that we and our NATO allies will be defeated in Afghanistan. Defeat, should it come, would come gradually, not on the battlefield but in the minds of ordinary Afghans, most of whom simply want security and opportunity for themselves and their families. If the legitimately elected government of Afghanistan and its foreign backers aren't able to provide such essentials, Afghans will look elsewhere. That is exactly what the neo-Taliban is counting on.
They are pursuing what appears to be a sophisticated political military strategy aimed at undermining confidence in the Karzai government through guerilla attacks on military and civilian targets, while at the same time offering ordinary Afghans a kind of alternative government in the form of religious justice, protection, and paid employment for those willing to join the neo-Taliban cause. It is in effect a strategy to win the minds, if not the hearts, of ordinary Afghans by forcing them to turn to their attackers for security and sustenance.
However, it is important to emphasize that the NATO mission is not a lost cause. Most Afghans want the reconstruction effort and the Karzai government to succeed, and the neo-Taliban still has only limited infrastructure within Afghanistan. The country has a functioning and energetic Parliament and an elected president. The economy is growing vigorously--even the non-drug elements of the economy.
An Afghan army is slowly being built, and although reports on its performance are mixed, certainly the consensus is that the units that have been trained are doing fairly well. NATO has shown that in a stand-up fight it can overpower the neo-Taliban and insurgent forces. So the problem isn't that our mission is lost; the problem is that our current strategy doesn't appear to be a winning one.
So what needs to be done? Permit me to make six suggestions as briefly as I can.
First, more foreign forces will ultimately be needed for Afghanistan. From the beginning, this mission has been hampered by a lack of international forces to help the Afghan government establish its presence throughout the country. We are dealing with the consequences today, as we belatedly enter regions that have been neglected for the past five years. So we are living the consequences of early decisions about under-resourcing this operation. In fact, for the size of the country and the population, this is the most under-resourced international stabilization mission since World War II.
Second, to put it quite bluntly, we need to suspend the poppy eradication program. It has utterly failed to reduce the size of the harvest, and worse, it is alienating poor farming communities, some of which now view the central government and NATO forces as aggressors, a perception that the neo-Taliban is strategically exploiting.
Third, we need to make police training a top priority. The police are mainly in the hands of local strongmen. They are undertrained, under-equipped, incompetent, corrupt, and accountable to no one. As the International Crisis Group has pointed out, in most districts Afghan police are viewed as a source of insecurity by the people rather than as a source of protection.
Fourth, we need to get serious about rooting out official corruption. President Karzai recently appointed a regional strongman with links to organized crime as the police chief of Kabul. And in the judiciary too, unqualified people are being installed because they are loyal to various factions. These are the kinds of decisions that are contributing to the erosion of public confidence in the Karzai government.
Fifth, NATO needs to build an Afghan army that can stand by itself. The retraining is going well, but it's slow. The current plan is to train an army of 70,000 Afghan soldiers, but this will almost certainly prove to be inadequate, because there are already roughly 70,000 international and Afghan troops in the country, and security remains a problem. Replacing the NATO forces with Afghan recruits will ultimately produce an army of similar size but with considerably less capacity. So Afghan forces will need to be larger if they are to stand on their own; and in order for us to leave, they will need to be able to stand on their own.
Sixth, the flow of insurgent fighters from their safe havens in Pakistan must be contained. The Government of Pakistan is not doing enough. At the very least, it is tolerating the existence of neo-Taliban operating bases on its territory. But there are also credible reports, including in the most recent issue of Jane's Intelligence Digest and from Seth Jones at the Rand Corporation, that Pakistani intelligence services are in fact providing material assistance and intelligence to neo-Taliban fighters based in Pakistan.
In my view, the international mission in Afghanistan can succeed if it reorients its strategy around these elements. But doing so would also require a renewed commitment to the operation from the alliance as a whole, not just from the few countries, including Canada, that have been willing to put their soldiers in harm's way.
If NATO chooses not to make this commitment, the alliance should begin planning a phased withdrawal from Afghanistan. This is, in my view, the stark choice we face now. It is the difficult decision that NATO must make over the coming months. Indecision is not an option, because making no decision means a continuation of the current strategy, and the current strategy appears to be leading us towards a defeat in slow motion.
I very much hope that NATO will not abandon Afghanistan, but it would be better to withdraw than to preside over a mission that lacks the strategy and resources that are necessary to successfully stabilize the country.
Thank you very much for having me here. I look forward to questions and discussion.