Text of President Obama's speech on Afghan War

December 16

Good morning, everybody. When I announced our new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan last December, I directed my national security team to regularly assess our efforts and to review our progress after one year. That's what we've done consistently over the course of the past 12 months —- in weekly updates from the field, in monthly meetings with my national security team, and in my frequent consultations with our Afghan, Pakistani and coalition partners. And that's what we've done as part of our annual review, which is now complete.

Blah blah blah. Blah. Blah blah blah, blah -- blah blah; blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah (1) blah blah. (2) blah blah. (2.1) Blah, blah, blah. (3) Blahblahblah. Blah. (4) Blah blah: blah blah, blah, blah blah blah.

Finally, we will continue to focus on our relationship with Pakistan. Increasingly, the Pakistani government recognizes that terrorist networks in its border regions are a threat to all our countries, especially Pakistan. We've welcomed major Pakistani offensives in the tribal regions. We will continue to help strengthen Pakistanis' capacity to root out terrorists. Nevertheless, progress has not come fast enough. So we will continue to insist to Pakistani leaders that terrorist safe havens within their borders must be dealt with.

At the same time, we need to support the economic and political development that is critical to Pakistan's future. As part of our strategic dialogue with Pakistan, we will work to deepen trust and cooperation. We'll speed up our investment in civilian institutions and projects that improve the lives of Pakistanis. We'll intensify our efforts to encourage closer cooperation between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Blah blah blah. Blah. Blah blah blah, blah -- blah blah; blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah (5) blah blah. (6) blah blah. (7) Blah, blah, blah. (8) Blahblahblah. Blah. (8.1) Blah blah: blah blah, blah, blah blah blah.

So, with that, Vice President Biden and myself will depart, and I'm going to turn it over to Secretaries Clinton, Gates, as well as Vice Chairman Cartwright, and they will be able to answer your questions and give you a more detailed briefing.

Thank you very much.

[Here is the White House version of what Obama said.]

Helpful New York Times summary of current Afghan War strategy review

Mark Mazzetti and David E. Sanger contributed to the following New York Times report published about three hours ago; both men are highly professional veteran war journalists, and whenever Mazzetti works on a report about the war I find it's worth paying attention to, as I've mentioned before. This is not to take away from the lead reporter on the story, Elisabeth Bumiller, who's also a veteran journalist -- and a great writer and interviewer; consider her 1991 book on India, told from the vantage point of her interviews with Indian women from different walks of life (May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons ...). But while this might be unfair to Bumiller because I don't follow every report she files, I find that her personal views tend to strongly color her war reporting.

However, her report today seems a reasonably objective summary of what has been leaked about two current and still-classified NIEs that President Obama is referencing to help him gain an allover assessment of the war effort, and how informed critics are responding to the scuttlebutt on the NIEs.

So the report is a 'must read' if you want to keep up-to-the-minute on the debates in Washington about the NATO war effort in Afghanistan:

Intelligence Reports Offer Dim Views of Afghan War

By ELISABETH BUMILLER
December 14, 2010
The New York Times

WASHINGTON — As President Obama prepares to release a review of American strategy in Afghanistan that will claim progress in the nine-year-old war there, two new classified intelligence reports offer a more negative assessment and say there is a limited chance of success unless Pakistan hunts down insurgents operating from havens on its Afghan border.

The reports, one on Afghanistan and one on Pakistan, say that although there have been gains for the United States and NATO in the war, the unwillingness of Pakistan to shut down militant sanctuaries in its lawless tribal region remains a serious obstacle. American military commanders say insurgents freely cross from Pakistan into Afghanistan to plant bombs and fight American troops and then return to Pakistan for rest and resupply.

The findings in the reports, called National Intelligence Estimates, represent the consensus view of the United States’ 16 intelligence agencies, as opposed to the military, and were provided last week to some members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. The findings were described by a number of American officials who read the reports’ executive summaries.

American military commanders and senior Pentagon officials have already criticized the reports as out of date and say that the cut-off date for the Afghanistan report, Oct. 1, does not allow it to take into account what the military cites as tactical gains in Kandahar and Helmand Provinces in the south in the six weeks since. Pentagon and military officials also say the reports were written by desk-bound Washington analysts who have spent limited time, if any, in Afghanistan and have no feel for the war.

“They are not on the ground living it day in and day out like our forces are, so they don’t have the proximity and perspective,” said a senior defense official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to be identified while criticizing the intelligence agencies. The official said that the 30,000 additional troops that Mr. Obama ordered to Afghanistan in December 2009 did not all arrive until September, meaning that the intelligence agencies had little time to judge the effects of the escalation. There are now about 100,000 American forces in Afghanistan.

The dispute between the military and intelligence agencies reflects how much the debate in Washington over the war is now centered on whether the United States can succeed in Afghanistan without the cooperation of Pakistan, which despite years of American pressure has resisted routing militants on its border.

The dispute also reflects the longstanding cultural differences between intelligence analysts, whose job is to warn of potential bad news, and military commanders, who are trained to promote “can do” optimism.

But in Afghanistan, the intelligence agencies play a strong role, with the largest Central Intelligence Agency station since the Vietnam War located in Kabul. C.I.A. operatives also command an Afghan paramilitary force in the thousands. In Pakistan, the C.I.A. is running a covert war using drone aircraft.

Both sides have found some areas of agreement in the period leading up to Mr. Obama’s review, which will be made public on Thursday. The intelligence reports, which rely heavily on assessments from the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency, conclude that C.I.A. drone strikes on leaders of Al Qaeda in the tribal regions of Pakistan have had an impact and that security has improved in the parts of Helmand and Kandahar Provinces in southern Afghanistan where the United States has built up its troop presence. For their part, American commanders and Pentagon officials say they do not yet know if the war can be won without more cooperation from Pakistan. But after years and billions spent trying to win the support of the Pakistanis, they are now proceeding on the assumption that there will be limited help from them. The American commanders and officials readily describe the havens for insurgents in Pakistan as a major impediment to military operations.

“I’m not going to make any bones about it, they’ve got sanctuaries and they go back and forth across the border,” Maj. Gen. John F. Campbell, the commander of NATO forces in eastern Afghanistan, told reporters last week in the remote Kunar Province of Afghanistan. “They’re financed better, they’re better trained, they’re the ones who bring in the higher-end I.E.D.’s.” General Campbell was referring to improvised explosive devices, the military’s name for the insurgent-made bombs, the leading cause of American military deaths in Afghanistan.

American commanders say their plan in the next few years is to kill large numbers of insurgents in the border region — the military refers to it as “degrading the Taliban” — and at the same time build up the Afghan National Army to the point that the Afghans can at least contain an insurgency still supported by Pakistan. (American officials say Pakistan supports the insurgents as a proxy force in Afghanistan, preparing for the day the Americans leave.)

“That is not the optimal solution, obviously,” said Bruce O. Riedel, a former C.I.A. official and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who led a White House review of Afghan strategy last year that resulted in Mr. Obama sending the additional forces. “But we have to deal with the world we have, not the world we’d like. We can’t make Pakistan stop being naughty.”

Publicly, American officials and military commanders continue to praise Pakistan and its military chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, if only for acknowledging the problem.

“General Kayani and others have been clear in recognizing that they need to do more for their security and indeed to carry out operations against those who threaten other countries’ security,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Afghanistan, said last week.

But many Afghan officials say that the United States, which sends Pakistan about $2 billion in military and civilian aid each year, is coddling Pakistan for no end. “They are capitalizing on your immediate security needs, and they are stuck in this thinking that bad behavior brings cash,” said Amrullah Saleh, the former Afghan intelligence chief, in an interview on Tuesday.

The Pakistan intelligence report also reaffirms past American concerns about Pakistan’s nuclear stockpile, particularly the risk that enriched uranium or plutonium could be smuggled out of a laboratory or storage site.

The White House review comes as some members of Mr. Obama’s party are losing patience with the war. “You’re not going to get to the point where the Taliban are gone and the border is perfectly controlled,” said Representative Adam Smith, a Washington Democrat who serves on the Armed Services Committee and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, in an interview on Tuesday.

Mr. Smith said there would be increasing pressure from the political left on Mr. Obama to end the war, and he predicted that Democrats in Congress would resist continuing to spend $100 billion annually on Afghanistan.

“We’re not going to be hanging out over there fighting these guys like we’re fighting them now for 20 years,” Mr. Smith said.

Mark Mazzetti and David E. Sanger contributed reporting.

Afghan War is not going well. Maybe Judge Judy can help.

On December 3 David Woods, AOL's Chief Military Correspondent, reported:

White House Mulls Grim Picture of 'Deteriorating Stalemate' in Afghanistan'

The assessments now pouring into the White House from Afghanistan run the gamut from discouraging to awful, as the Obama administration finishes up its long-awaited December review of the war strategy the president announced a year ago.

In many ways, the cold facts charting the grim course of the war belie the upbeat views that the perpetually confident Gen. David Petraeus, the war's top commander, has expressed in public.
[...]
Neither battlefield victory nor negotiations are even dimly visible on the horizon, and another troop "surge" is politically and militarily unlikely. The White House, it seems, has no choice but to push on and hope for the best in a bad situation.

A recent Pentagon report, for instance, asserts that U.S. and allied forces and the new strategy announced by Obama a year ago are "beginning to have cumulative effects." But in unusually frank terms, the report concludes that despite combat operations against the Taliban by the 97,000 U.S. troops and 49,000 NATO and allied troops, the insurgents' "capabilities and operational reach have been qualitatively and geographically expanding." In other words, despite the U.S. "surge," enemy forces are getting better and bigger.

The Pentagon assessment said Petraeus' strategic drive to squeeze the insurgents by cutting off their supply lines has failed to produce "measurable results;" that Afghans are losing faith in their government's corrupt judicial system; that promised development projects are languishing because of corruption and other problems, and that the Taliban are recruiting easily from an expanding population of disillusioned Afghan youth.

"A deteriorating stalemate" is the description of the war's current status by U.S. Army Col. Robert M. Cassidy, who holds a doctorate degree from Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and is a member of Petraeus' staff on his third combat tour in the region.

An independent analysis by the International Crisis Group, an independent blue-chip analysis center, looks at the current situation this way: the U.S. strategy "sounds fairly simple: try to pound the Taliban, build support by protecting civilians, lure disillusioned Taliban over to the government, expand access to basic services and create resilient security forces.

"The problem is that none of this is working."

A worse problem, unfortunately, is that the prospects for breaking off and leaving Afghanistan are even more grim. As the International Crisis Group notes, without outside support the government of President Karzai would collapse. The majority Pashtun Taliban would openly seize control of much of the country, reigniting the civil war with non-Pashtun warlords in the north and west that devastated much of Afghanistan in the 1990s, and drawing in money and weapons from its competing neighbors, Iran, Russia and India.

"Even a partial Taliban victory would provide succor and a refuge for Pakistani jihadi groups" including Lashkar-e-Taiba, responsible for the Nov. 2008 Mumbai attacks, the Jaish-e-Mohammad and al-Qaeda, the ICG report says. The resulting regional conflict, it said, "would be well beyond the control of a few drone attacks" that are the main U.S. weapons against Pakistani-based militants.

Afghanistan's most immediate problem is the lack of security against the Taliban, and it is here that the Pentagon assessment is most bleak.

Kabul, the capital and where U.S. and allied headquarters are located, is "relatively secure," the Pentagon said. But across the country, shootings and bombings continue "to exceed historical trends," up 300 percent since 2007 and up an additional 70 percent since last year. The use of homemade bombs, or IEDs, was up 82 percent from 2009, and civilian casualties rose 53 percent over last year, according to the U.N.

Although U.S. officials and senior military officers often attribute the increasing violence to more widespread and aggressive U.S. military operations, the Pentagon report explicitly cites "a greater frequency and wider dispersion of insurgent-initiated attacks." Despite a concerted U.S. effort against IEDs, the main killer of American and allied troops, the Pentagon reported that "homemade explosives are readily available throughout the region." U.S. forces have been unable to break the Taliban's "resilient" logistics and command capabilities, even with a record number of close air support and reconnaissance missions being flown over Afghanistan, the report said.
[...]

An earlier report by Woods on the use of the retrofitted supersonic B1 Cold War bomber in Afghanistan is a window on the 'population-centric' counterinsurgency strategy at the heart of the ISAF war plan. The bomber is an awesome killing machine but since the COIN strategy settled in, only a fraction of its firepower has been deployed:

[I]nstead of blasting the area with high explosives, the commander wants to attempt scaring off the insurgents, to force them to break off the firefight and flee. That's the point of the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, after all: not to try to kill all the Taliban, but to protect the people.
[...]
Ten years ago, the ground commander bought the bomb -- if he said he wanted it dropped on a nearby enemy, he got it. The air crew's job was just delivery. But that's all changed -- the tactics, and the underlying strategy.

"You can't rebuild a country by blowing it up," explains Grasso, who is after all a professional bomber pilot. "We don't want to go in and take out targets unless we have to. We could drop all the bombs we have and not necessarily win this war."

Every effort is made to avoid having to drop a bomb -- including asking the ground commander if he can break contact with the enemy and go home. But sometimes there's no alternative.
[...]

If you don't know about the capabilities of the B1 bomber don't assume from the above that it's not doing much; it's been an invaluable asset in Afghanistan, as Woods's report details. I highlighted the above passages to underscore that this war is being run by people who honestly think it's already won and that they are in the reconstruction/nation-building stage while dealing with an insurgency that pretty much has to be waited out.

There's another passage I want to highlight, a quote from the above-mentioned Pentagon report in the section that discusses the insurgents' weaknesses.

"Despite the presence of shadow governors, the insurgency still cannot deliver sustainable development or administer governance beyond the crudest dispensation of justice."

I think the writer meant to convey that despite serving as shadow governors the Taliban couldn't deliver the named services. But the point is that the "crudest dispensation of justice" is just why the Taliban have been able to regain power. In the absence of a functioning legal system in the country the Taliban kangaroo courts are the only way that the vast majority of Afghans have been able to get routine legal disputes settled without having to pay fortunes in bribes and wait years for a ruling!

So the Taliban have been keeping the case loads moving. And THAT, and not physical security, is what Afghans need almost as much as food, water and oxygen! It would be the same in the USA or anywhere. What use is to live behind cement barriers if you can't settle the most simple legal issues?

The Afghans keep asking for law and order. That's not the same as "security." But they must feel as if they're in a glass booth because every time they ask the Western forces to please kindly provide them with a functioning justice system, what do they get in response? A lecture on how government and the justice system works in a democracy and how corruption must be stopped before the country can have a viable justice system.

Meanwhile, Afghans just need stuff adjudicated and arbitrated. So the Taliban zip into a village on a motorcycle with a copy of the Koran in tow, set up court under a tree, and hear cases and make a ruling and carry out the sentence. A portable justice system. That's what the villagers need, which is why they tolerate the Taliban in so many places.

Would they prefer a legal system that's less harsh than the Taliban's version of Shariah? Well sure, but what the populace most wants is to get the legal disputes settled. That calls for consistency in the rulings and the assurance that the rulings will stand.

The kicker is that many of the legal issues are small-claims stuff. You don't have to wait to create the Hague to hear them. Now why can't the Coalition forces in Afghanistan grasp this simple point? Part of it might be the perception or unconscious bias that Afghans are an uncivil people. Yet the opposite is true. Many Afghans are EXTREMELY law-abiding. That's a big part of the problem: they want things done by the book so they need judges. But when they ask for law and order the Coalition hears this as a call for more troops, not more judges.

Another obstacle might be that Europeans and North Americans in the Coalition have a concept of a judicial system that they're always trying recreate wherever they go in the 'developing' world. If the standard can't be met they consider it a failed or "crude" system. So they have set a very high bar for the Afghan legal system then say, 'Oh it'll take at least a generation before they can meet that.'

One way to overcome such a mental block would be to think less in terms of courts and more in terms of arbitration, which is very popular in the USA for many minor disputes. That would be just the ticket for Afghans.

If anyone would like to test this theory, that could be arranged. Afghanistan's Tolo TV station has started airing a drama series that's not exactly propaganda but it's aimed at teaching how a good police force operates and building faith in the Afghan police. I doubt it has a huge audience because Afghans know of the great gap between the good ethics of the fictional Afghan police and the real thing.

However, if you aired an Afghan version of Judge Judy, I predict Afghans would be beating down the TV station's door to get on the program so the judge could hear their cases.

Of course Judge Judy and other TV judges don't have the power of the legal system behind their decisions. But the people who appear before them agree to have their legal disputes arbitrated and to abide by the judge's decisions.

The court TV shows have a perennial audience in the USA. After being on the air since as long ago as 1996 Judge Judy is the top-rated show on daytime TV this year in the USA. Yet in courts-starved Afghanistan, I think you'd have to be airing the show 24/7 and still wouldn't make a dent in the demand for the TV judge's services. I think the shows would be so popular they'd become a target for the Taliban but that would be a demonstration of my point.

And you'd have to focus-group the show before airing it to find the kind of TV judge who would go over best (and it would have to be a male judge of course). Judge Judy is the most popular of the TV judges but she is also controversial; some presiding judges think her abrasive style gives real judges and the court system a bad name. She defends the insults she metes out from the bench by saying it's often part of the punishment. (Would Afghans accept Judge Judy-style tongue lashings as punishments in lieu of real lashings?)

However, an Afghan version of Judge Judy's courtroom -- which could also be aired on radio -- does not solve the problem of how to compete with the portable aspect of the Taliban's justice system. Without that solution the Taliban will continue to run rings around the Coalition for reasons I think Genghis Khan would have immediately understood. That takes me to a conversation I had last week, and which I'll publish later this week as my next post.