The U.S. Legacy in Afghanistan: Past, Present, and Future

thanks for joining us and welcome to the center for strategic and international studies i am excited to have two outstanding experts with me we're here to discuss afghanistan and related counterterrorism issues the focus is on the past the present and the future of afghanistan i have our carter malcasian with me he's sitting to my left and he's the author of the new book that i'm holding up right now the american war in afghanistan which now is now available for purchase including on amazon congratulations carter thank you seth thank you very much carter and you can take a look at his bio is in addition to being the author here is is the former special assistant for strategy to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff general joe dunford as well as has had extensive experience in afghanistan among other war zones and carter i think i've run into you in a range of places including in asadabad kunar province so good to see you in washington now not not in one of those locations well hopefully someday i'll get a chance to go back to this autobot that's right maybe the next time next time we can do this from somewhere in afghanistan and then i've got gina bennett sitting to my right she's a senior analyst at the national counterterrorism center and has written extensively on counterterrorism she's had a 30-year career at the central intelligence agency she authored the 1993 report that warned of the growing danger of osama bin laden and the 2006 national intelligence estimate trends in global terrorism implications for the u.s gina thanks for joining us as well thank you for having me so um i'm going to start with the situation today in afghanistan and then i'm gonna go uh to the past and then we'll end with the future so we're gonna we're gonna weave time into this carter let me start with you uh there's been a lot of speculation in the media and news reports and frankly uh at least in my in my view not a lot of good analysis about current taliban advances in bad geese and kunduz and other provinces details still remain a little murky for example about some of the fighting in in badges capital some reports have also suggested that the the taliban control roughly 150 or 400 district centers but let me just turn to you you've been looking at this for a long time what is your assessment today of the taliban strategy what are they what are they trying to do and what's your general sense of their strength right now thank you seth thank you for having me today um and as you know like better than i do it's always really hard to figure out what the taliban are actually doing and so i always i don't want to presume that i know more than i actually do because it's always like trying to read heat leaves um and you can interpret a small piece of information to me much more than it actually is so i think that there's probably there's two things that i'm thinking about as i look at the taliban strategy right now one is that their strategy is to try to capture kabul and take over the whole country and this is a phase of that um and so what we're seeing right now is that they're taking out the districts and then they will move on to the cities and provincial capitals and then kabul itself in due course now there's another strategy that they could be playing out here and this is what zabila mujahid basically said today and he said a few times prior to that which is that they're not actually moving on the provincial capitals right now um they're not moving on the cities right now they're taking out the countryside and now they're then going to surround the provincial capitals mujahid has not said this part surrounded provincial capitals and pressure them such to get concessions from the government at the negotiating table and those would probably be some very severe concessions they would be after um now this theory could also be seen in the fact that taliban have said that they intend on announcing a plan soon for negotiations and put out their own plan for how the peace settlement is going to go so the military pressure they're applying right now could be a means of creating leverage such that the government will do the things that they would want to see in whatever their peace plan is going to be but but i would suspect that to be things the government in no way would want to do like surrender power but again very hard to know what the exact strategy is going to be so just a follow-up question for you carter then what is your sense about the status of the peace negotiations for some it's been low probability of success anyway prospects are largely dead now that the us is withdrawing you may have a different view though well i was someone who earlier was optimistic on the peace talks um but i fear that events have proven me wrong um it looks like the peace talks are pretty stalled right now i don't want to say that they're dead um because the the two groups are meeting uh the two groups are in doha they do have meetings from time to time there were the meetings in tehran that happened just yesterday in the day before that out of which came a communique that said they're both going to they think that peace is the best way forward on but we're not seeing major movement on the part of the taliban and the government too has been recalcitrant for some time i mean it does look like that our withdrawal has reduced some of the impetus um to negotiate but for me that was something that was naturally going to happen in the process of the withdrawal and that didn't necessarily mean that we shouldn't withdraw yeah so gina let me turn to you on the terrorism picture uh i think a lot of americans probably are still wondering or at least curious about what the threat looks like today most people are probably aware that there has there is at least a relatively small presence of al qaeda particularly al qaeda in the indian subcontinent as well as a relatively small number of islamic state coruscant what's your sense about the threat to the u.s or even the terrorism threat to the region right now no it's a very good question and i do need to caveat that i am here providing my personal views as you know not representative of the government so i have to just say that for the record but in general i i don't think anyone is going to be surprised to know that any one of the terrorist groups and probably individuals and organizations that we haven't even been able to name yet are going to continue to pose a terrorist threat terrorism is just remains a very easy tactic so we all know that but i think in terms of threat to the united states the question is really more what does the united states today consider a threat to it from al-qaeda from isis from any other group after surviving 911 we're almost 20 years since that attack facing you know mass shootings on a regular basis in this country and concerns about white supremacist terrorism and other types of terrorism in the united states i'm not sure that the calculation for americans is quite the same i think that they should anticipate that al qaeda isis these other groups have more reason now than ever to attack us revenge has always been the number one motivation of terrorism and so we have had a military footprint for 20 years in the middle east i don't see that their desire to attack us is going down whether or not they can at any given time frame is a different story of course yeah and we'll come back gina to your sense about uh to what degree the u.s period in afghanistan and pakistan for that matter because the u.s obviously struck al-qaeda targets in pakistan was successful so we'll come back to that a little bit later there have also been some concerns just to ask a follow-up about some of the anti-indian groups like lashkar-e-taiba operating from afghan territory recent conversations i had with senior indian officials they they were definitely concerned particularly with continuing states of tension over jimmy and kashmir about afghan territory being used by the groups that would target them is that is that a concern is that a concern in your perspective it's not it's not as much a u.s concern but certainly would be a concern about regional instability sure i mean it is it should be i mean we're going to go into a period of time where afghanistan becomes less predictable we're going to see more instability these are always the havens for that kind of activity it's a lot easier to hide somewhere where there's chaos already so i think india and other countries have every right to be concerned about that kind of activity i mean to me it reminds me a lot of the becca valley in the 1970s so i think they should be concerned they i'm sure are you're right i don't know that it will raise much for us as much as it does for for india but um i don't to me it's just like the past it's so much like the 1980s in afghanistan right now where you did see such a tremendous diversity of insurgent groups terrorist groups extremist groups of all types going and hiding and getting training and fighting a little but also getting the kind of clandestine training and weapons training and other things and networking that they needed to go back to fight whatever it was they were going to fight yeah and now we i think one of the interesting prospects which we'll discuss a little bit later is uh and it was certainly the case in the 1980s as well as the 1990s a rise in uh activity from all the states in the region and their intelligence and clandestine military forces that provide training to a range of sub-state groups so carter let me turn to you then um uh and go back to the past okay so i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna shift us to your book which uh which actually has some lessons for the next segment which is the future um so let let me begin with uh your book the american american war in afghanistan a history which is uh which is just out can you what's the main question you're asking uh so that folks understand you say on page five for example that your goal in part is to explain how the american war came to a disappointing resolution but can you put put your finger on what the main question you're asking is well the there's probably three main questions to the book but the main one that relates the thing you just mentioned is why did we lose and lose is a powerful painful word to say it might be easier to say why do we not meet all of our objectives but so that's and what do you mean by lose for example so what does lose mean here lose would mean here that we're if we've stated our goals many times to make sure that when we leave afghanistan that al qaeda or terrorists will not be able to use it again our meeting that objective is questionable a goal for a long time was enable the afghan government to stand up on its own that appears not to have been met although there is some possibility that things will reverse themselves and it will be met but that doesn't look good in that respect on and then there were other goals related to democracy and development of afghanistan on that also haven't been met although the main one for the united states has long been on prevent a terrorist start in the united against the united states and enable the afghan government and their forces to stand on their own and your argument here can you outline your argument i mean i found one other thing that's interesting here is you don't focus a lot on issues like the or just the performance of governments like the united states you don't focus on even necessarily the um uh the performance of the afghan government or the role of pakistan i'm going to read uh from page five here you say the taliban exemplified something that inspired something that made them powerful in battle something closely tied to what it meant or means to be afghan in simple terms they they fought for islam and resistance to occupation values enshrined in afghan identity so can you explain what you mean there yeah absolutely um and i don't mean to suggest that that's the only thing that enabled them to succeed there are some con there are a variety of conditions that exist pakistan is foremost there and in the introduction i did not talk a lot about it hopefully more in the book you'll find more on the corruption within the government or the mistreatment that the government had towards its own people or that the warlords had towards it towards the afghan people that plays a role the lack of unity within the government forces and the tribes that compose it versus the relative unity that the taliban have that's not to say there's some kind of cohesive military force they're not but if you compare the two relatively the taliban look a lot more coherent than the government does um so what i wanted to do in the book though was highlight this other factor that was striking me repeatedly um as i studied afghanistan that something more was going on here that i can't explain how the government is being defeated or the afghan military is being defeated if i look at solely the factors that we discussed here let's take pakistan for example pakistan is a powerful factor here but on the battlefield if 200 afghan police and army are confronted with 50 taliban or less than that and those government forces retreat that doesn't have a lot to do with pakistan that has to do with something else um and the the thing i wanted to highlight there was how the afghan forces have difficulty inspiring their men to fight hard on the taliban can claim to be fighting for things deeply central to afghan identity if an occupier here on you need to go and fight against that occupation it's in the history of the country and honestly it's not something that solely in afghan history is something that tends to be important for peoples we saw it in vietnam we've seen it on our own american revolution so that and that is a point the taliban are able to use the government on the other hand has great difficulty using that point because they're aligned with us on and because they there's more questioning about is the government really fighting here for what's entirely right now the islam part of this is is one we need to be extremely careful with because what i'm not saying here is that islam is like inherently violent or something like that what i am saying is that for someone who's fighting for the government to know that they're fighting on the side of a foreign occupier plus a foreign occupier who shares a different set of beliefs they'd be more difficult to gather motivation which i don't think is something terribly hard to to understand but again i do want to emphasize that i see a multiplicity of causes here but i think this is an important one that deserves highlight yeah let me let me turn to gina for a moment uh so carter's raised the issue of uh religion i mean it's islam what is your sense as as you look at the 1990s leading up to the 2001 attack on 911 uh how would you differentiate the ideology of al qaeda at that point with how they were able to establish a sanctuary in afghanistan how were they able to relate to the taliban the taliban's leader how different is that from the taliban's diobondi ideology what as you get to 911 what's the taliban's ideological objective and how does that differentiate from the taliban from al qaeda yeah sorry i just want to make sure because we could legitimately talk about two different taliban at this point but that's a lot of question let me try to unpack it first of all i agree with so much of what carter has already said i don't think the the taliban the taliban's ideological goals or its objectives back in the early or mid 1990s i think is the same as it is today to bring authentic governance to afghanistan and to its people who are also pashtun especially so that's not going to change and i don't think you know that's ever going to change so win or lose i think that's what they're trying to do in terms of al-qaeda i think it's important to also remember that al qaeda was a transplant to afghanistan in 1996. bin laden had the organization in sudan with him prior to that after leaving of course the afghan war when the soviets withdrew eventually there was a lot in between but eventually so coming back into afghanistan he wasn't known to omar or the taliban he had to ingratiate himself with the new rulers of that part of the country to begin with and i mean all the history books show us there was no love between the two of them but once a guest you know pashtun wally code taking over i don't see that mullah omar really had much different situation moving forward clearly there are a lot of members of the taliban who are not friendly towards al qaeda after what happened but i think there's still an authentic code and an authentic culture that is not going to be easily changed so i expect the same tensions to play out as we saw in the late 1990s and early into the 2000s so i'm not sure there's going to be a good deal of change when it comes to that so uh gina as as you look at the u.s actions on 9 11. and then carter's book starts to take us through some of the different stages of the war uh over the next 20 years or so but from your perspective you know there were efforts by the u.s to get the taliban to break links with al qaeda in september in october of 2001. that didn't succeed and so how much of that failure on the u.s side to try to break links uh sort of goes to the explanation of what you're talking about and and how what does that mean moving forward that that was too late i mean by that point we had already there was already an us versus them there i think you know we already had the airstrikes in 1998 against afghan territory the time to have talked to the taliban would have been in 1996 when we rejected that idea when the taliban might have been willing to consider what we're asking them now don't let this plotting take place in your territory or it will come back to haunt you you understand you have you know your guests it's your country your territory but you know out of respect for the rest of the world things like this that might have made a lot more sense in 1996 than they do today so i think by 2001 it was too late to try to have those conversations it's for them to be at all meaningful i mean if you i try very hard to think about the flip side like imagine the scenario played out in the united states you know how friendly would we be or how willing would we be to talk to somebody after they have already attacked us so you know it's just it's very difficult see how difficult it is we don't we're not talking to al qaeda we're not coming to the table with al qaeda right they're the ones who attacked us could you imagine us being willing to negotiate with al qaeda in you know a couple months after 9 11. of course not and i just don't think it's different because we're talking about a different country or different set of actors human nature to reject that at that point i would say for 2001 just in terms of our reaction to it i think it's really important to especially now 20 years later with hindsight be more honest about what we've done and why we did it because i think carter that's one of the things i really appreciate about your approach in this book is surfacing some very difficult and uncomfortable conversations about winning losing these kinds of things but i have a slightly different view and that i really do believe after 9 11 for whatever strategy overlay you may put on what happened we were out for justice and revenge um it was a very guttural emotional reaction to being attacked at a time when an attack of that nature was so shocking having just survived the mutual assured destruction years of the cold war to to have something like this happen by individuals who weren't even the same nationality you know they were stateless they had no military they had no advantage of any kind and they conducted an attack like this which in three cities that killed over 3000 people it was just so shocking that i think america reacted in a way that is very human and that is to want to see justice punishment and revenge i think the problem is as good as that might feel it's not a very sound strategic idea and it is especially not sound or strategic if you don't first understand what would actually punish your adversary i mean instead we thought of what would punish us and we applied that we mirror imaged i don't think anything that we necessarily did was exactly what would have made al qaeda suffer the most so it's this question of winning losing success failure it's it's not a mirror image of each other you know what what we would see as victory is not the same thing that al qaeda would see as victory what al qaeda would see as defeat is not the same thing as what we would see is al qaeda's defeat and we're continuing that's what we've continued to fight with over 20 years is that misalignment so carter let me let me take what gina said and ask you you know the initial gut reaction uh from the secretary of defense at the time and you talked about this a little bit don rumsfeld was actually his instinct was to actually have a pretty low footprint and not hang around for for a long time uh was he right donald rumsfeld and it's of course time to let you bring him up on had on was in in some ways prophetic and in in many ways he could see some things in the future now he also took a lot of actions that meant that his vision became kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy because he could see the future but he wasn't able to change the things that that he was doing um and i think so you know something goes back to that's very important to what gina just said the feeling of an attack on the united states the beginning of 2002 after we toppled the taliban was still very very close i mean it's closer than president biden's election was it's closer than the um than the the the attack the insurrection on the capitol is so that still feels sharp today at that time in in the beginning of 2002 the attack on it still felt very sharp public opinion polls were about 85 percent of people saying they felt a terrorist threat against the united states at that time and so i think it's um it's tempting to look back from today and say we toppled the taliban we made osama bin laden run we should have gotten out of afghanistan at that time but i think that we're forgetting the context of the time and it's not to say that it's not that it's impossible that we couldn't have done it it's just to forget how visceral it was at the time how many people still wanted revenge at that moment and also what the political implications for president bush would have been if he had pulled us out and then a terrorist threat suddenly re-emerged in afghanistan and to be frank if you look at the 10 years after 9 11 there were plots emanating out of the afghan border areas there was najib zazi there was faisal assad the times square bomber so with at least at least the next decade after that there was every reason to believe uh there were terrorism threats coming from afghanistan i mean gina when from your perspective when did or has the uh the threats subsided from afghanistan to the homeland again there were there were plots over the course of the 2000s uh you know i it it to me appears that the threat levels have declined to the homeland but how long did those threats to the homeland continue from the afghan-pakistan region oh definitely for years in terms of the ones that we knew were active at at the time of 9 11. i mean i think for a lot of americans 9 11 was a day it was a horrible day but for those of us who were in the thick of counterterrorism and national security it lasted for years because it took that long to really get to the bottom and disrupt all of the plotting that we at least knew of at the time but to go back to donald rumsfeld again the unknown unknowns so we don't know what we don't know and i think i think it's more important for the american people to be thinking ahead about how they're going to react to the next attack rather than is it going to happen or isn't it going to happen or how are we going to stop it because it's it's that reaction that matters whether or not it's a success for the terrorists or not so you know i i remember when president bush said as i think it was black friday was coming up in 2001 he wanted everyone to go out go shopping but that fear was really present we also had the anthrax letters and things like this right and he was he was criticized for saying that but what he was saying was if you don't let it change you and make you afraid then there you're defeating the terrorist point you know you're taking you're robbing them of their ability to sow fear and there's nothing more critical for them than being able to make us afraid so it's you know if we can ever get to that point where you do have politicians of that level especially willing to say things like that to the american people the power to defeat terrorism is entirely in their hands they just have to not be afraid of it yeah i couldn't agree with that more like it's resilience it's not not worrying about it and if an attack happens what we can handle and carry through we've already shown that and retaining the independence of your decisions as an individual as a nation it's no different as an individual deciding i am not going to look at a muslim differently because bin laden did that as a nation it's we're going to do what we're going to do in the world we're not going to change what our interactions in the in the world of foreign policy or national security are because of that attack that is resistance resilience that is real strength but it's very hard to do again the emotional reaction of wanting revenge wanting to punish the people who did it those two things don't work well together so i want to turn carter uh a big chunk of your book looks at actions than including that the u.s took uh inc you know ones that i was involved in directly as were you the surge what is your sense about decisions that the u.s took over the next decade and a half in particular after 9 11 which how did how how do you rate kind of this successive u.s military strategy over there what were some of the big drawbacks and maybe even successes on so i think our strategy overall we could have managed the war better we could have made some decisions that would have cost less resources and lost fewer lives on and the beginning of the war is easy to cite a few of those uh the some taliban at least were willing to negotiate in the very beginning of the war um we we rejected that and that probably wasn't the best idea you talking in part about uh the the absence of the taliban for example at bonn yes that that that's that's a part of this um and where the the we we decided that they shouldn't be a bond there's some information that they even sent a letter on that they were interested in being at bond but that was turned down by us i don't want to play all that up too much because i understand the complexities of the time but that was that probably wasn't helpful for our strategy we took a long time to build an afghan military and i think if we had worked harder on training it better on building it up quicker it would have made things more difficult for the taliban and would have made things easier for us and so i was in kunar on and and wes morgan of course has written a great book on on the whole all the fighting i saw you in kunar yeah um but you have to look back and ask why were we sending troops to fight in these high mountains it's incredibly difficult to fight in it it gives the taliban opportunities for creating casualties and if you look over you look over time you have to ask well maybe we shouldn't have been employing forces in that way the surge which you mentioned and i guess the surge has been covered so much that i don't really want to get into it in a huge amount of detail on but looking back now and where things are in afghanistan today just about i think every game the surge made has now washed away which means that the one of the biggest things we should have done and that our military strategy should have focused more on were more options different things to do than surging and i was there at the time so i know it's not the easiest thing and i and i wasn't at the time arguing vociferously for more options so i don't mean to be pointing guilt to people when i'm probably guilty myself on but we should have considered more options at that time because what in retrospect would have been better would have been to not increase or increase very small numbers but think about the long haul and how we're going to have to be there for a while to meet what our objectives were or at least have considered that more fully as an option so i think i'd point that as a as as as a as a military um carter a follow-up on this um and and obviously this question does not undermine the patriotism of all of the men and women that in the military that served in afghanistan and those that died as well but as we look back at some past decisions and then we look at some of the lessons that we might want to take for the future what is your general sense about a war like afghanistan which is an insurgency it's not a state on state war it's the taliban we're not fighting with some modest exceptions like uh around operation medusa and kandahar we're not fighting conventional operations they were fighting this was maoist fighting guerrilla attacks how well i mean was was it a wise decision to have our conventional forces uh as part of the surge as well most of them that hadn't trained for this kind of operation was it a wise decision to do that and part of the reason i ask is because when you fast forward to say 2015 and 16 and 17 in syria the strategy that we used to take back islamic state territory was not to surge conventional forces but to leverage uh train equip uh local forces to do it what i look at what happened in in syria and and and i got to look a decent amount of that through other work syria the operations in iraq and even the operations in afghanistan that have occurred over the past three or four years represent the maturing of our concepts into something different into something that is less costly for us and involves the loss of fewer lives on involving much heavy reliance on airstrikes heavy reliance on isr and drones reliance on advisors soft small otherwise footprint of conventional forces um so i would argue that that that is more of the way to go and that's something that would be more sustainable and i mean general scott miller is one of the foremost people who brought this kind of strategy to bear yeah so gina uh part of then the next two decades after 9 11 it there's a pretty heavy focus on in addition to operations against the taliban focus on countering al-qaeda in afghanistan and pakistan how would you rate the uh our u.s success in weakening al qaeda over that time period that's a very good question and it it does come back to the question of strength and weakness and how you define those things uh tactical and strategic level you know for one thing on 9 11 there was one al qaeda it was one group branded al qaeda and today you see numerous al-qaeda groups around around the globe same is true of course of isis at first there's one now there's a whole bunch i mean part of that is a brand all of the groups and the networks and individuals and insurgencies that brand themselves and rebrand themselves were there beforehand and they will be there after with the next brand and the next brand until they get what they want in their own locations so i think it's you know i i think it's important not to read so much into that as all of those groups being wanting the exact same thing as like the core of isis or al qaeda on the other hand there was one al-qaeda today there are more there are there are more certainly trained and experienced fighters as we would have called them back in the day to mujahideen in the world than there were before 9 11. so it you know if you look at these things and you add them up those seem like failures on our part or at least not success or you could look at them and say that's success on their part because they've grown their numbers they've grown their brands that all may be true on the other hand i think you know going back to did we punish did we get revenge i would say yes we punished we got revenge i mean the only there's only a couple of people left from the al qaeda that was involved in the 9 11 alive and they're clearly not including bin laden right and they're clearly not living the the best existence so we got our punishment we got our revenge in that sense and if that feels good then that's that's a success um i'm not necessarily saying that i agree with that but i'm just you know just from a very you know calculating way looking at it but i think what's what's really missing in all of this is really going back to 9 11 in having had the restraint to stop in the moment and recognize we are reacting in a very emotional way but we can't turn that into a strategic objective in that in that case if you were to really evaluate how do you weaken al-qaeda at that point in time it wouldn't have been what we did i mean we raised every single al qaeda member and all their wannabes and supporters stature to the level of being enemies of the united states military if anything could weaken the reputation of the united states military it's that so i think that was strategically a very bad idea raising their stature you're feeding the narcissism of terrorists it's all psychological warfare for the most part so if you really wanted to weaken them you have to take away their relevance you have to take away their following you you you have to make them unimportant and that's really hard it's the same thing we tell our kids about you know bullies on the school yard the more you react to them the more they're going to feed off of that it's no different at this level so i think in the reality is al qaeda was defeated when it started and isis is same way they're all defeated at the strategic level you do not see muslims flocking to become part of these very antiquated and rigid and idiosyncratic versions of a caliphate on the part of that these two groups of spouse even in syria even when isis had its own caliphate it was not tremendously popular statistically zero percent of muslims believe in this zero percent if that's the case then 1.6 billion don't believe in it why aren't they us allies you know why haven't we harnessed that and helped them crush this outlier within their own world i think the problem is we saw an enemy at a strategic level that did not exist i mean al qaeda and isis are not strategic enemies to us or anyone but we give them power because yes terrorist attacks are horrible they're shocking um and they're tragic i mean i'm not dismissing the tragedy but we add to it when we react in this way so one one one follow-up question on the threat is it's almost at the tactical level which is did u.s actions military and otherwise against al qaeda after 9 11 over the next two decades did it some would argue it was also it may have been problematic in raising the stature of al qaeda elements of it were successful in eliminating or in seriously downgrading the ability of al qaeda at least out of afghanistan and pakistan to attack the u.s homeland your sense of whether those people are being too optimistic i mean we're never going to know the counterfactual right um i think we we put too much we pat ourselves on the back too much that there hasn't been another homeland attack because of everything we've done that may be true it may also be that there was never going to be another homeland attack it was an aberration in terms of the history of terrorism so maybe that was never going to happen maybe we've spent trillions of dollars for something that was never going to happen i don't know but it it it may or may not be right but you know i'm in the intelligence community so i'm going to say that the things that we did in the intelligence community very behind the scenes had more you know had more impact on disrupting al qaeda's capabilities than what the military did in a very conventional way the other thing is i think it's also humbling to remember that al qaeda had the advantage of two years for knowledge of 9 11. we didn't so if we thought we were going to dislodge them from afghanistan and they were going to run and we would never hear from them again that that was um that would not have been a very smart prediction because again they knew what was going to happen and so after the 1998 air raids too i'm quite sure they realized that they had to have an ability to continue to operate and and make leadership decisions in a dispersed way so a terrorist group a terrorist entity is not a state and you just cannot defeat it the way you can a state and even then i think it's questionable whether or not we defeat states so yeah so uh carter uh i want to read we we've got a few questions from the audience uh one of them i'm going to read is is to an observer it looks as if the us never had a coherent strategy in afghanistan your your thoughts on that or the challenges there and and what is your book what what does your book say about that so i it's hard to debate the question itself because it depends like how you define coherence um some people argue that the united states never had a strategy i don't think that's true there was a strategy it might not have been coherent or it might not have been good but there was a strategy we've had objectives and aims throughout um throughout the entire the entire experience the book would talk about the problems and the strategy had to deal with how we were managing things on and would also have to do with that our expectations were often too high about what could be accomplished the expectations at first being that we were going to be able to basically defeat the taliban defeat al-qaeda and defeat the taliban for most of the bush administration that was basically what the goal was plus set up a set up a democracy on that that changed with president obama and president obama's objectives became much more reasonable on to again to to defeat al-qaeda breakthrough to stand up on its own i think that strategy was fairly well formulated minus the surge parts that we've talked about but over time we too discovered that those expectations were too high and that those couldn't be attained well then towards the end of our time in afghanistan from about 2015 onward the de facto strategy up until the negotiations were completed was really that we're staying in afghanistan not because we think the government's going to be able to stand up on its own not because we think we can defeat al qaeda or not because we think we can defeat the taliban we're staying in afghanistan because we recognize there could be a terrorist threat and the way to suppress that is to stay with sufficient numbers to suppress and prevent the government from falling and it's what general dunford would call term life insurance it only exists as long as you're there once you leave it disappears um and so that strategy of course is not very inspiring it's in no offense of course the general dumper but it doesn't it doesn't grip um the american people as wow this is a strategy this is something you're moving forward it's it's it's uh um it's it's it's like taking medicine um this is just this is all we can do is this and we're doing it on to protect america and because we think the costs are sustainable um and then we shift of course to the to the strategy of we're negotiating and that was basically negotiating to get out as we've seen so you talk a little bit about weighing costs and benefits what is your sense of whether afghanistan by the time now that u.s forces have withdrawn is in a better position than when we started and how would you answer that some might point to health conditions have improved economic conditions for the moment have improved mortality rates um education obviously then there's also the violence level so how do you weigh whether the country is better off now than it was in 2001. ambassador klulzlad has a very uh very good quote and it's that afghanistan's exposure to the united states has been tremendously beneficial and what he means is relation to i think what he means is that some of the things you've just spoken about um much improvement in women's rights education on improvement of things like roads even if they've gone bad since then and even if our funding wasn't exactly well spent um they did have a lot of benefits to a lot of the the the afghans there and for afghans in certain parts of the country they did have five years or almost in some places two decades of living in relative peace so that's that's something for the afghans and for those afghans our presence has been better that doesn't mean it's been worth the cost to us for that did it put them in a better place than if we had left earlier or if we really hadn't come in at all on in a better place to deal with the taliban maybe we're going to see some of that maybe the place is a little bit better even if they fail in the end maybe they're in a better position they otherwise would have been does it put the people in a better position in terms of their human security and their lives that is a much more debatable question we are are the all the things that i just brought up that were good for afghanistan that were benefits is that better than if we had left the taliban had taken over and the taliban would have provided some degree of security because hundreds of thousands of afghans have been wounded or injured in the course of this fighting if the taliban had taken over much earlier would their lives have been saved even if they were living under a more oppressive regime and that's a fundamental question one i can't actually answer but it is one we should be thinking about whenever we're intervening somewhere well we're also going to test that one now too uh with the withdrawal so uh we've got a few minutes left and uh we have a question gina for you which is uh the last administration in its national defense strategy shifted the u.s focus away from counterterrorism as a priority to a focus on interstate competition particularly the chinese the russians and some of the other plus twos that you dealt with when you were at the pentagon north korea iran so the the question is uh what what is what what can we expect the terrorism threat from afghanistan where it may go over the next two to three years and how should we think about compared that uh compared to other threats the u.s has to deal with yeah i think the terrorism threat from afghanistan is it feels like 1992 1996 all over again to me some days i wake up and i think uh how can i i look this old but it's like 1996. um so i don't you know i think we should and can expect that there will be al qaeda isis groups like this will consolidate to some extent that they have every reason to want to continue to plot from afghanistan or at least parts of it whether they will or won't or be successful is a different story but we should expect a threat from afghanistan from the same old adversary we should expect threats from all these other places where al qaeda and isis exist we should expect threats from within the united states you know in domestic terrorism and you know counterparts overseas and other places um i i one of the things i i worry about is that we we have had this 20 now 30 years since the cold war we have a national security apparatus that has forgotten the use of proxies to to poke at each other if what the world doesn't want is a nuclear holocaust which i think we can all agree it doesn't then you're going to want to keep the conflict below that and one of the best ways to do that is to poke at people using proxy proxy groups as we saw during the cold war that's exactly terrorism was a sideshow to the cold war so i'm not saying that we're going back to the cold war clearly so many things have changed but i think we have to expect that kind of competition to happen in cyberspace in you know financial markets and in so many and including through terrorist groups in ways that are going to surprise us because we're not thinking about it in those terms especially over the last 20 years we have this idea oh they only come from the middle east which is completely erroneous but it's still you can see why so many people would after 20 years since 9 11 think that way so i think the the terrorist threat is going to be from afghanistan and elsewhere very diffuse but not that doesn't that doesn't make it it doesn't make it insignificant just because of the diffusion i hope we've learned that after 9 11. but again this is why it goes back to what is our strategy for approaching all of it when you ask the question about the strategy in afghanistan and trying to defeat al qaeda or even the taliban for that matter i think we have had a strategy for the past 30 years that has been defined by what we're against and we need a strategy that is defined by what we're for and i don't know how you actually have a strategy based on what you're against to me that's more at the operational or tactical level but if what we want to see in the world is the kind of stability that only comes from authentic governance where the people consent to how they're being governed then that's what we should be standing for and you can start to see where the risks to that are not terrorist groups terrorist groups are risks to themselves and their greatest competition is something right next door to them within their own local space they don't need to be elevated to the international level what's a threat to everyone having the ability people populations around the world having the ability to be governed in a way that they consent to is that's all about communication and diplomacy and foreign policy and things that we have just not emphasized in this very militarized national security environment over the past 20 years so i think you know after i just i just keep going back to the cold war and when the wall fell and the soviet union crumbled and i feel like we thought we won democracy one it's over we stopped competing that should still be the competition in my in my mind the last question uh carter uh goes to you we're at the end of the end of our time here and and thanks to you both uh we've got a question from the audience which is um what are the future scenarios for afghanistan what are not i'm not asking you to predict and i'm i'm building i'm not actually predict what is going to happen but what are the possible outcomes for afghanistan over the next two to three years and what what are the more what are the key factors that will drive us into some of those directions on so one possibility is the taliban continue with their offensive movements as they've been doing and in short order managed to take places like missouri sharif or kandahar and then they're able to take kabul itself in which case they would be able to control gain control over a lot of the country maybe with pockets of resistance here and there so that that's that that is sort of where the taliban were by 9 11 actually that's right taken over most of it except for except for some valleys valleys here and there that's correct so i think that is a real that is a real possibility afghanistan has a history of when they suffer a large defeat in the field or a major city falls that it causes a collapse of everything else and as thomas barfield talks about in his book it's that the afghans see which way the wind is blowing and they all go and they go in that direction so that that that's one way things to go but that's not necessarily how things will will play out in the next two to three years there's another possibility that yes the taliban will gain ground they'll they'll move into various places and the government will be in a difficult position but either the government or another coalition of afghans who don't care for the taliban so much will be able to survive they might be able to survive if the taliban lose a little of their cohesion with us gone it's possible that's kind of what happened for the famous battle of jalal about in 1989. on i don't put a lot of stock in that but it's a possibility there's also a possibility that the afghans under pressure good leaders stronger leaders or the strong leaders that they have now will emerge into positions of greater authority and be able to do more it's a possibility again one that you may or may not want to put a lot of stock into some things that we might put more stock into on is that the region may become more interested that if the taliban look like they're going to take over kabul russia iran or india maybe not which probably not with troops but maybe through other forms of assistance will stop helping the taliban so much and help the government more and the government will be able to we're sub-state actors militia forces exactly um and and then and then the government survives but it would be a in a civil war environment and a lot more fragile than we see today great well uh lots more questions i think that we have both for me and the audience but we're out of time so i want to thank you carter not just for being here but for writing a book the american war in afghanistan history and thank you gina as well for your thoughts on afghanistan al qaeda 9 11 counter-terrorism and actually bringing us way above just the tactical level to who is the enemy and strategic level question so thanks to both of you thanks to both of you also for the extraordinary time you spent over the last couple of decades on this problem set uh because you spent a significant part of your career uh in the in the government uh dealing with it so thank you thank you for your opinion on that too thanks i need i need one of your crystal balls the future of afghanistan see how it turns out

Channel: Center for Strategic & International Studies

Views: 6,890

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Keywords: Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, bipartisan, policy, foreign relations, national security, think tank, politics

Id: m6hyVHxMX3Q

Length: 58min 16sec (3496 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 08 2021