"Afghanistan: Critical, But Not Yet Hopeless"

Remarks by
Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke
Chairman, Asia Society and Kati Marton

Asia Society, New York
April 12, 2006

JAMIE METZL: Thank you. Good morning. My name is Jamie Metzl and I’m the Executive Vice President of this wonderful institution, the Asia Society. And on behalf of our President, Vishakha Desai, who is out of the country, and all of us here at Asia Society, it’s my great pleasure and honor to be here introducing our beloved Chairman, Richard Holbrooke. All of you are here because you know how wonderful or at least sometimes wonderful he is. And so I’m not going to talk about that in my introduction.

Instead, what I’m going to talk about are three of the pieces of paper that you have on your chair, which are certainly very important to us. First, there is this, announcing a lunch event on May 1 st that we are having with General Karl Eikenberry, the Commanding General of the forces in Afghanistan. And I think Ambassador Holbrooke will talk a little bit more about him. But that is going to be a wonderful program and it’s the kind of great programming that we have here at Asia Society. Which leads me to my second piece of paper I want to discuss, that’s also on your chair – and that’s this yellow flyer, Fifty Reasons to Join Asia Society on Our Fiftieth Anniversary. Half of you here are President Circle members, but for those of you who are here who aren’t members we would really love to have you part of the Asia Society family. So please have a look. And then the third is about the President’s Circle. This is officially a President’s Circle event, and that’s for a group of people who are more closely and more intimately involved with Asia Society. For those of you who aren’t members we’d love to have you part of the President’s Circle. For those of you who are members of the President’s Circle, we’d love for you to help us think of who are others who we might want to bring in to this growing family. So, with that, welcome Richard Holbrooke.

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: Thank you, Jamie. And I want to thank especially all the people I called after midnight last night, asking them to come this morning who showed up. It’s great to see so many friends and so many Asia Society senior members, trustees. And I’ll get right to it because I promised all of you we would be out of here no later than 9:30 a.m.

Kati and I returned from Afghanistan two weeks ago. And we thought it would be useful to have a conversation with you about the situation. The headline here, Critical: But Not Yet Hopeless seems to me to be a fair summation of where we are. And we want to cover five things this morning: the overall situation, specific attention to the border areas, a discussion of the drug program, a discussion of the area in the west where we visited at Herat, the situation with women and then a summation. And Kati will cover the women. And I want to draw your attention to this extraordinarily valuable document that is on all of your chairs by Barnett Rubin, who is here with us today – probably the nation’s leading expert, or certainly one of, on Afghanistan. This was issued by the Council, I believe, yesterday. Is that correct?

MAN: Monday.

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: Monday, two days ago. It’s a superb document, which goes into much greater detail. And I recommend it to all of you. Our situation in Afghanistan today is extraordinary and needs to get much more attention. There are very few journalists left in Kabul. Most of them have gone to Iraq. The drama that’s unfolding in Iraq and is stumbling towards some inexorable, final tragedy -- to be determined, but certainly is going to be a bad outcome – has swamped the fact that we are fighting in Afghanistan which is not going well, either. And I want to preface my remarks because Iraq shadows every other thing we’re doing these days. I want to preface my remarks by saying that Kati and I believe firmly that this commitment is absolutely essential in Afghanistan. We’re in Afghanistan because it is where the 9/11 attacks were planned. And if we lose in Afghanistan – and I’ll get back to what we mean by lose in a minute – if we lose in Afghanistan the Taliban and their close allies, Al Qaeda, will return.

I want to stress that because we’re living in a very ugly political age. And almost everything we’re going to say for the next 55 minutes is going to be negative. And if Secretary Rumsfeld were in the room he would tell us we’re pessimists and losers and we’re trying to talk down the American effort. The exact opposite is true and I cannot stress it too highly. If we don’t confront the nature of our policy, the failures of implementing policies, we’re going to end up just as we did in Vietnam – with an objective that was valid and a strategy that was hopeless. So I want to stress that because there is such a strong wave now that if you’re negative about strategy or tactics you’re somehow unpatriotic or against the goals. This is not Iraq. This is Afghanistan. We cannot afford to lose.

The reason we can’t afford to lose should be clear from this map. And I want to just start with this map and talk about five countries that border on each other – going from west to east – Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan. It is my contention that those five countries hold the key to America’s strategic future in the next cycle of history. They’re all linked. They all border on each other. What happens in each one affects the other and what happens in that area affects all the other countries in the periphery – Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, India, China – which borders on Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Israel, Palestine. But these five countries have seen a dramatic deterioration for the United States in the last three years.

Turkey, which we have been the steadiest ally of since 1945, now looks at us with enormous hostility. When Bill Clinton left office, 65% of the Turkish people thought America was their best friend. Today the positive numbers on the US are in the high teens and low twenties. And the Turks are just palpitating to move into northern Iraq and the only thing holding them back is their hope of joining the European Union. Iraq, we don’t need to dwell on. You all know what’s happening there. Iran, we all know what’s going on there. It’s the lead story in today’s newspapers. And Afghanistan is, however, at the center of this situation – the weakest, poorest country outside of Africa in the entire world, the fifth poorest country in the world according to UN statistics. The other four are all in Africa. And yet this remote, ancient, tribal, romantic to many people, tormented to others and always dramatic country lies at the center of our future. If we fail we will find Al Qaeda back in Afghanistan.

Now, our dilemma in Afghanistan relates directly to the country to its east, the country which is the fifth country of the five I just listed – Pakistan. Here is essentially what’s happened since we invaded Afghanistan in October, November and December of 2001. It’s as simple as this: We drove the Taliban and Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan and they recreated what they had in Afghanistan in a lesser way in the border areas of Pakistan, shown on this map and on this map.

Now, this map is the border. And I want to draw your attention to Waziristan and the area to the north of it, called Northwest Frontier Province, where Peshawar is. These legendary areas which Rudyard Kipling wrote about, which many of you visited, driving over the Khyber Pass, which are so full of history and drama, have always been historically lawless. In fact, when I talked to Secretary Rice last week about our trip and I started to talk about this she cut me off and said, “Well, they’ve always been historically lawless, out of control.” My answer to her would be, “That’s not the point.” The point is not that the British couldn’t rule them, not that no Pakistani government has ever been able to rule them, but that for the first time the tribal areas, the lawless tribal areas are not simply a law unto themselves. They’re a sanctuary for an active entrenched group of enemy, which is trying to retake Afghanistan and simultaneously planning for future terrorist attacks against Europe and the United States.

According to the General command and General Eikenberry -- who I will return to in a minute, and Jamie already mentioned – he believes that the Taliban are operating in the southern area and Al Qaeda is up in the northern area, that they obviously are two halves of the same coin. The Taliban is the local extreme Muslim organization and Al Qaeda is the international one. And although what the United States military is doing up there is highly secret – they launched a major operation yesterday, according to the news reports – nobody, including the Generals commanding, think we’ve made much progress against them. And I’ll get back in a minute to the drama between Afghanistan and Pakistan over this area.

I want to establish the core point – a mini-Afghanistan now exists in the border areas along the southeastern part of Afghanistan. This confronts us with an enormous problem. We have three choices. Choice one: we invade this area. Now, 35 years ago President Nixon faced an almost identical problem in Cambodia. And he invaded and it was not a success and it was a political upheaval in the United States. None of the US military believe that we could go into this area successfully. The military would fail, just as it did in Cambodia in 1970. And worse than that, it would cause a diplomatic and political earthquake that would be unsustainable in a crisis for President Musharraf in Pakistan.

A huge debate is waging, as you all know, in Washington and around the world as to whether Musharraf could clean this area out himself. President Karzai told Kati and me that he absolutely could. And Karzai, with great bitterness – and he has been very publicly hostile to Musharraf and Barney Rubin’s paper has some astonishing quotes in it of what the two men have said publicly about each other. Musharraf was given by Karzai, in a meeting engineered by the Americans, a list of 150 Taliban and Al Qaeda – their street addresses, their phone numbers, their whole details. The whole list appeared in the newspapers within a few days. And none of the people were, to my knowledge, picked up. That list, of course, was prepared with the support and assistance of American intelligence officers. And since they probably knew it would be compromised they probably didn’t put their best information on it, but Karzai told us this story with great bitterness. So we can’t invade the sanctuary, although the American troops do have the right of hot pursuit. I want to emphasize that. For those of you who remember, we bombed a place and thought we got Al Qaeda’s number two man a few months ago. And that was inside Pakistan and Musharraf said he didn’t know we bombed them and so on and so forth – plausible deniability. But there’s not going to be a full scale invasion. Musharraf either cannot or will not shut the process down. He arrests a few mid-level people from time to time to keep the Americans at bay. So option one, invasion, is out.

Option two is to leave Afghanistan. Every person we’ve talked to – American, UN, Italian military, German military, Afghan officials, foreign ambassadors – everyone agreed that if the United States and its NATO allies leave Afghanistan Taliban will take over again within months – not that they’re popular. Eighty per cent of the people hated them. And they are brutal and they’re ugly and the way they treat women is a story unto itself, which we’ll get to in a minute. But they are organized, they’re tenacious, they have external funding and support. So option two, leaving, is simply not there. And that’s a key point because of the debate now going on about Iraq. And option three is to stay. Obviously, I think we have to stay. But I need to underscore that if we stay with the current strategy the most we can do is deny the country to the Taliban. As long as we stay we can deny the major cities and keep the roads open. The Taliban have no chance of winning militarily. But over time one of two things, or both of two things will happen. The historical xenophobia of Afghans, which has been a great factor in their extraordinary history, will rally them to drive us out no matter how good our original intentions, or B: Americans, in fatigue with an open-ended and increasingly ineffectual commitment, will pull us out prematurely or both. So for me the answer is simple on a policy level. We must stay and we’ve got to have a different strategy and do it better.

This is Lieutenant General Eikenberry, who will be in this room on May 1 st for lunch. I urge all of you who are interested in this issue to come and hear him. He is an extraordinary General – three stars, speaks Mandarin Chinese, very good friend of Nick Platt, our former President, who will run that session, and while he must tow the official line he is under no illusions as to the dilemma. And I think you’ll find it very interesting to talk to a man of this quality. I must also say, since we’re talking about Generals, that it is increasingly clear that General Franks was just as bad in Afghanistan as he was in Iraq and that the legacy he left in both countries is very hard to undo. And he, of course, is famously the man who started stripping the assets in Afghanistan to prepare for Iraq and let Osama bin Laden escape. He contracted capturing bin Laden in this area north of Peshawar to the local warlords. He paid them to capture him. The warlords, in a deal which all the investment bankers in the room would greatly admire, took money from bin Laden to escape. Two of the people in the room were my bosses – Tom Hill and Vincent Mai. They told me that’s the best possible deal you can do, right? Tom is shaking his head and Vincent is nodding.

Anyway, all kidding aside, it was an unbelievable mistake. And then he stripped the resources. And even today, we have 20,000 in Afghanistan and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is cutting those troops back. And I’ll talk more about this in a minute. We’re zeroing out our assistance. Anyway, Eikenberry is a very good guy and he’s doing the best he can. He will become NATO Commander this fall, when the forces are finally unified under NATO. Germany, France and Britain offered to make Afghanistan a NATO operation immediately after 9/11. The Bundestag passed a vote by two votes of no confidence in Schroeder when Schroeder went to get support to go to Afghanistan. He put his whole fate on the line to support us with troops in Afghanistan. And after the Bundestag passed it, after Chirac and Blair offered it to make a NATO operation, Franks and Rumsfeld said no. And so in November of ’06 we will do what we could have done in November of ’01, and made this a NATO operation. It is self evident for the future of NATO as well as Afghanistan as well as for American political support that this is the most obvious case for an international NATO-led effort in the world, and it’s just more evidence of the most extraordinary mismanagement imaginable. I stress all this because Eikenberry is my idea of a really good general. I don’t know if you agree Barney? You do agree? He’s terrific. And others in the room, you must know him also. He’s just a terrific guy.

Now let’s talk about drugs on the border. The biggest program in Afghanistan is drugs. Let me give you some numbers. The Afghan national budget is eight hundred million dollars, of which four hundred million is direct donor assistance. Nobody knows how much more international aid is coming in to Afghanistan, but the best guesses, no one can tell because there are so many NGOs. Kati and I flew in sitting next to two nuns from Mother Theresa’s charity, for example. There’s so much international assistance, it’s such an exciting place for NGO people to work, dangerous but exciting, that all you can get is estimates. But the estimates are $3-4 billion a year overall international assistance. So, the budget is only $800 million. As Barney points out in his study, most of the aid bypasses the budget, and while it’s short term good, it undermines our long term goal of strengthening the government, and that’s a very key point in this Council on Foreign Relation study.

And we spent, the US spent, $900 million last year on drug programs. Ninety percent of all the heroin in the world, and almost all the heroine in Europe comes from Afghanistan. They’ve priced the other markets like the Golden Triangle right out of the market. So, the famous Golden Triangle in Thailand is virtually not a producer anymore. For that $900 million, plus the European Union and UN and Japanese amounts, for $900 million, the United States by its official public statements cut poppy production by 4%. In other words, $900 million, more than the national budget, was spent to do absolutely nothing. There are three reasons: 1) stress was on crop destruction; second reason, they made no significant effort to go after the really bad guys, the people who benefit from it, because the bad guys are, one, the warlords; 2) corrupt government officials, including according to many people Karzai’s brother; and 3) the Taliban. So, we didn't go after the real beneficiaries, we, we went out after the people who need it most, the farmers. They grow poppies for a simple reason, it’s eight times as profitable as the next crop, and the area they grow it in, the most dangerous area here, and this is directly related to the insurgency, is just west of Kandahar in the southeastern area between Kandahar and Farah in the province called Helmand. It’s no accident that an American and Canadian were killed in a planned ambush attack on an installation a week ago in that area. When we put farmers out of work, we’re going to turn some of them into angry members of the Taliban. And their answer is livelihood, alternative livelihoods.

Those of you with long memories may remember that we had exactly the same program in Laos and Thailand during the Vietnam War. In fact, almost everything we’re doing in Afghanistan we did in Vietnam except we’ve changed all the names. We used to have advisors, now we have mentors. We used to have a crop substitution program, now we have alternative livelihoods. The only thing that’s the same is the programs still don’t work. The head of the US drug program in Afghanistan, a very seasoned veteran who was in Thailand and has been in and out of Afghanistan for thirty years admits in private, I can't quote him by name in public, but he admits in private they wasted the money. A 4% reduction is worthless. His argument in favor of what he’s doing was astonishing to me. He said, we have to keep skin in the game, we need to spend the money, because if we don’t they’ll think we don’t care, and this will become a narco-state.

Of course a narco-state controlled by drug lords, corrupt government officials with the Taliban poised to take advantage. I'm not going to argue that we should ignore the drug issue completely, although some people do believe that, because it’s politically impossible to do that. But we are not going to have any success in the drug issue unless we go after the traffickers, the high level government officials and not go out and destroy crops. President Bush, when he was in Kabul and briefed on this program, is alleged to have said, by people who were in the room listening to the discussion of crop destruction, “I'm a crop duster man myself.” In other words, he likes to destroy crops from low lying planes. You remember the plane in North by Northwest, that’s the way he’d deal with the crop problem. It’s not going to work. It’s not only a total waste of money, it’s creating more Taliban.

So, Kati and I went to the west to see what was going on the Iranian border, and we went to the extraordinary town of Herat, and I’ll get to that in a minute. This, what you see in front of you, is a major Afghan border post, after the US has been there four years. Pretty good, huh? A handful of people sit in this post, beyond it in the hills there is Iran, there are one thousand five hundred Afghan police, poorly equipped, no communications, no vehicles, sitting in these posts looking out over the desert with binoculars if they have them, looking for smugglers, drug traders, or in theory, Iranian troops, although the Iranians are not going to invade western Afghanistan, why should they? They control it already. I put this picture in to show you how bleak the landscape is, and also how little our money has done. We are supposed to be building up their internal security, and this is on the Iranian border.

This is the general, the Italian general in the west, the deputy UN commander in Kabul, a Canadian diplomat named Christopher Alexander. And this is his office. And I use this just to illustrate that it is a multi-national command. He, however, and this is a classic military command problem, and it goes right back to Rumsfeld and Franks’s positions, the first thing this general, General Herico, did after kissing Kati’s hand many times, was to make clear to us that he had no control over the other international forces in the area, that the entire chain of command didn't exist as a coherent chain of command, and he had no control over anything except his inner squad. That room is in this building, the building that was attacked about four or five days ago by the Taliban with a suicide bomber. Several people were killed in the compound where this was taken.

Herat is the great city in the west, it’s part of the silk route, and those of you who understand Islamic architecture will see immediately that this magnificent mosque, the blue mosque is obviously part of the great cultural sweep that includes Isfahan and Samarkan, and led to its great pinnacle of architecture, the Taj Mahal in India. This distinctive architecture tells you most of what you need to know about Herat culturally, because this doesn’t look like Afghanistan. If you didn't know this was Afghanistan, you’d say it was Iran. And it is Iran economically and politically and culturally in many ways. Some of the people are Shiites. In fact, the province governor is a Heratzi Shiite, and quite a smart man, actually. And some of them are Dari, which means they’re Sunnis who ethnically are like Persians and speak almost an identical language. A person who speaks Farsi can speak Dari and vice/versa. And the Iranians are practicing what the American diplomat in Herat calls creeping economic encroachment. By the way, you’ve all heard about the much vaunted American forward diplomacy in places like this. We have in Herat one mid-level foreign service officer who we’ll show you a photograph of in a minute, with no secretary, no secure communications, absolutely terrifically energetic, but no support at all. And his reports to Kabul, which he sends unclassified, are not acted on. These are small things, but this is the American diplomat in the world closest to Iran, at least those who are not undercover. His name, by the way, is Larry Cohen, and he enjoys the fact that he’s a nice Jewish kid from Brooklyn. He’s very good.

So this is Herat culturally. Herat was once one of the great centers of Islamic learning in the world, and in addition to this mosque it has some of the most wonderful monuments in the world, but they are falling apart. There are the crumbling ruins. These are minarets, and I actually think we’re missing the one of the road. There are five or six minarets left. Is there anyone here from the World Monument Fund? You’re the person we’re talking to right now. These must be saved. You know how extraordinary these are. The road runs through the middle of these minarets, they’re falling down, one fell about ten years ago, they’re a hundred or more years older than the Blue Mosque, they’re much more beautiful, and the road will take them down. When we told Karzai that the road was open, he said to us, and I tell this story not because it’s about the monuments but because it’s about Karzai, when we brought up these minarets, he said, “I’ve closed the road.” We said, Mr. President, “We were on that road yesterday, and it was filled with traffic.” The missing photograph shows the traffic. And he said, “That’s impossible.” He said they swore to me it was closed.

So there are only two possibilities, either Karzai is putting on a performance for us, that’s my own feeling, I think he knew perfectly well that road is open, or he’s been lied to by his ministers. Either way, these minarets are going to fall. This is not just important culturally, although cultural reasons are sufficient to save these, these are among the most extra ancient ruins I’ve ever seen in the world. These are fifteenth century, late fifteenth century, they’re at least a 100 years older than the earlier architecture. And they were the minarets surrounding what was once the world’s largest madrassa. And the road runs right through the madrassa. So saving them is an end in itself; they are important to the culture and identity of Afghanistan and the Islamic world. But in addition, it’s a major project to create jobs, which is desperately important, to create cultural and political identity, and to create tourism. So I'm very grateful that you’ve come, and we can talk more about it. We talked at length to the UN about this. If there’s one project outsiders could do to everyone’s benefit, economic, political, cultural, it would be to save these minarets which are just going to fall over.

An extraordinary aspect of America’s activities in Afghanistan is illustrated by the next two photographs. We are training the national police and the national army, and here’s the way we do it. And by the way, President Bush said during his trip, police training was the most important thing we can do. The man on the left in this picture is, I kid you not, from Dallas, Texas, and his name is Charlie Wilson. And he thinks he’s Tom Cruise. And he’s actually a very nice guy. He’s one of the Dynacorps collection of people in Afghanistan who train the Afghans. Dynacorps has a $600 or $700 million contract. These guys get paid a lot of money to live out there. They mean well, and for five weeks they train the Afghan National Police, 75% of whom are illiterate. Only the officers have to read and write. After the five weeks of training they are released into the national police force with no uniforms, no equipment, no boots, and they haven't been paid since July. He asked us to bring this up with Karzai, and we did, and once again President Karzai said that it was not possible, and we said check it out, and we tried to create a minor stir in this.

This is no small thing. The police they train are the police who are supposed to man the border. I should have mentioned earlier that whereas there are one thousand five hundred Afghan police and soldiers on the Afghan side of the border, on the Iranian side, and this is important, there is a paved road, full all weather paved road, and sixty thousand Iranian troops, and the Iranians are allegedly moving the border post several hundred meters inside Afghanistan. I don’t know whether that’s true or myth, but it certainly is well believed. So, this is Charlie Wilson and his magnificent Dynacorps team. This is Charlie Wilson, and behind him the people he’s advising. Of course there’s no common language between them, and the Americans are paid mind-boggling amounts of money.

Every day his mentors, mentors as I said earlier is the “new-speak” for what we called advisors in Vietnam. Every day he and his mentors, all of whom would like to look like Tom Cruise with the Ray Bans, but they beefed up a bit, every day the mentors get into their $150,000 Ford Explorers, fully armored, and they drive 200 mile round trip to the border to those posts you just saw to mentor the border people. They spend four hours in the cars. I said why do you, “Why do you go in these vehicles?” They said, “Security sir.” I said, “But you’re following a fixed path at a fixed time every single day. That isn't very secure.” “Well yes, sir, you have a point, sir. We’re talking about building something at the border, sir.” And I don’t even, I don’t want to criticize these guys, but they're making pretty close to a $1,000 a day, part of which is tax-free. And we have to do these programs, but I go back to my starting point, we have to do them better. This is the right project, but it’s not serious. But it is expensive. Anyway, we love Charlie Wilson, he’s a great guy, and the rest of the guys, mostly police from all over the country, are out there, I'm sorry we don’t have more pictures of them, because the whole scene was extraordinary. By the way, as they drive the roads they’re degrading the roads, which, as President Bush correctly said, are one of the most important things in the country. So, there’s no integration, no rationale to this program, and these are really expensive programs.

Another project is demobilization. This picture and the one that I'm going to show you in a minute are pictures of one of the places in Afghanistan where the demobilization took place. This picture is really extraordinary. These are Soviet tanks, this is what the Soviet Union left behind when they left. And to climb around this stuff, now disabled, these are not usable, but some of the other places we visited could be rehabilitated, is really to think about one of the many failed attempts of outsiders to deal with Afghanistan. You will see that many of the gun turrets are pointed to the ground, which means the breaches have been removed. It’s just something eerie to be in this area.

The next picture is a brief description of some of our team sitting on one of these tanks. From the left, very quickly, Christopher Alexander, the deputy UN; the guy with the beard is Larry Cohen, our man, your man in the west, that’s the entire United States diplomatic presence in the west; underneath him is our own Taliban, Ashley Bommer, dressed all in black for the whole trip; in between, Ashley, who is the guy sitting in between you and Kati? Was he the commander of the DDR?

ASHLEY: Yes, I think so.

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: He told us no photographs, and then when we took out the cameras asked to pose with us all. Next to him is Kati, and next to her is the real reason we went there, her nephew Matthew Marton, who is working for the UN, is doing a wonderful job, and was the excuse for the trip. And on top, looking very goofy, I apologize, is me. I want to now turn to the issue of women and start with the way most women have to look on the street, and ask Kati to come up and talk about the women’s issue for a few minutes, and then I’ll come back with some closing remarks and we can have a discussion. Kati?

KATI MARTON: Thank you, and good morning. I feel humbled to say anything at all about Afghanistan in the presence of such true experts as Barney Rubin in the room. But Barney, I'm sure you’ll correct me if I make any mistakes. And though it’s true that I was there as a first-time visitor, I was privileged enough to have extraordinary access, and I just want to share with you a couple of snapshots of our visit. And Richard said that if I run over five minutes he brings on the hook, so this is going to be extremely fast.

Well here we are with the concrete positive result of America’s effort in Afghanistan, and that is that a legal framework now exists for the representation of women. Twenty-seven percent of the Afghan parliament is made up of women, which is a lot better than our Congress, and is actually better than anyplace outside of Scandinavia. And there is, in fact, as Richard mentioned, a woman governor. However, that having been said, there is an enormous gap between the formal institutional representation of women and the domestic, or if you will, the street side.

Most women in Afghanistan live in deplorable conditions. This is, we’re still at the provincial council of Herat, and these are some of the brightest women that I’ve ever met in all my travels, and I was, by the way, in Afghanistan representing not only my sister, whose son Matthew is serving there, but also representing the NGO that I’m chair of, the International Women’s Health Coalition. So I was very interested in the condition of women, obviously. These women couldn't be brighter, more forthright, and outspoken. And as you see, they are also champion networkers. We immediately started exchanging emails and cards, and we are now in constant contact. So this is a positive result. In this meeting, however, we were struck by the fact that these women, who you see scarved indoors, sometimes slip on the burka when they're out of doors. And the Taliban is long gone. Why do they do that? They do that, as this woman in the middle, a very vivacious, articulate woman, told us, “The burka is my best weapon.”

The sad fact is that Afghan men simply don’t know how to behave around women, and that’s not just five years of Taliban brutality, but it’s a culture that has segregated the sexes traditionally, and which is now having a very difficult time adjusting to new realities, and this is where we, I think, can play a role, all of us in the civil and governmental sector, in coaxing and urging leadership in Afghanistan in this area. During our meeting with President Karzai I said, Mr. President, there seems to be a gap between the institutional rights of women and the practice on the street.

For example, in Herat, where we just came from, self-immolation of women is at a record high, and particularly among women coming back after being refugees in Iran, believe it or not, those women are crushed by the difference in their freedom between their lives in Iran, another Islamic Republic, and what they encounter in Afghanistan. So, self-immolation is the result of true desperation. This is a visit to a secret shelter for women who have been abused and who have no other recourse, because the law is not on their side if they want to leave abusive marriages. The law, although divorce is enshrined in the beautiful new constitution, the problem is that the judiciary does not reflect that law.

And this is where President Karzai could make a difference but is being extraordinarily cautious. He put forward a slate of candidates for the Supreme Court, in fact while we were there, and when we asked why no women were on that slate, he said, well, we don’t have any qualified women. Well, we used to hear that several decades ago in this country as well, and in fact I did a little bit of research on judges in Afghan courts, and many of them don’t even have law degrees. So that’s an empty smoke screen for the reality that he doesn’t want to push on women too far. And until women are represented on the judiciary, divorce will not be acceptable in this country; hence the need for secret shelters where women can go to get out of abusive relationships. And of course when women are in shelters, their children are also virtually incarcerated. So you are looking at the next generation of Afghan women who are growing up in a secret shelter. By the way, before Richard brings on the hook, I have to say that we have made tremendous strides in the education of women. Under the Taliban education for women was zero. It’s hard to get precise figures, but literacy is now, correct me Barney if I'm wrong, at about 30%. So women are now going to school for the first time.

Just to return for a second to the institutional versus the domestic, we also spent a day in a prison for women whose crimes were to be so-called runaways. Runaways are women who cannot stay in their marriages and whose own families shun them. Now the interesting thing is that on this dusty street in Kabul where the women’s prison was located, across the street from the women’s prison was a prison for men, for criminals, petty thieves and common criminals. There was a long line of relatives, children, mothers, fathers bearing gifts, waiting to get in to visit the criminals, all men. No one was in line to visit the women who were in prison for running away from abusive marriages, because their own families are so shamed. And by the way, their children are also with them, up till the age of three they’re allowed to have their children with them. So it’s a particularly cruel fate not only for mothers, but for their children as well. Now we return to Richard’s side of the street, which is the male prison where there were a lot of visitors. Thank you. Did I hold to the five minute deadline?

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: No, but that’s all right. I want to conclude, and then have some questions and comments, by discussing a conversation that Matthew and I had with a Taliban while Kati and Ashley were in the women’s shelter. But I want to say one word more about these extraordinary women back here. This woman who’s writing her email address for Kati is the one how said the burka is my weapon. And she was smart. And she said she couldn't let her 15 year-old out on the street without a burka. And the woman next to her, in white, was the woman who wouldn't shake our hands. She was the one who had spent the war years, the black years as they call the Taliban, in Iran. But other than her refusal to shake my hand, she was very articulate. Meanwhile, in the same room were the male provincial council members, one of whom was a mullah. He wouldn't shake Kati’s hand. But the leader of the provincial council was a plastic surgeon who had been educated in Marseille, and he ran the burn center, and he was the one who told us about the increase in self-immolations. That, of course, is girls trying to commit suicide who are unsuccessful, and he tries to save their lives.

I want to conclude by talking about the Taliban again, because we would not be in this country, extraordinary, exotic and alluring as it is, with twenty thousand American troops, and billions of dollars, if it were not for the events that took place here on September 11 th here in New York and in Washington. So, we went to the prison, this is the prison where a few days before we got there there’d been a major riot and the prisoners had seized the prison guards, and they’d negotiated a stalemate to avert a really horrible crack down which would have resembled what happened in Attica, New York except with far more deaths. And uh, the prison commander is a Northern Alliance general, one of Massoud’s associates. And we asked him if we could talk to some prisoners. And he said sure. And he said, “What kind?” I said, “I want to talk to serious Taliban. And I’d rather talk to them alone without other prisoners in the room.” So, we were led into a room where there were two prisoners standing, waiting for us, and picked, obviously. And the prison commander kissed one of the two men on the cheek, a sign of respect, which kind of stunned us. So first we talked to the other prisoner alone, but with the prison commandant in the room listening. And he was the brother of a Taliban defector, and he was kind of a VIP prisoner. He wasn’t very interesting.

So we said, “We want to see the other guy, the one you kissed.” And this guy came back in. He was in his mid-thirties, good looking, dressed all in white. We sat down on the floor, and I could have talked to this guy for twenty-four hours. It was like the dialectic, it was like a conversation in Darkness at Noon or The Brothers Karamazov. This man was not your rural illiterate Taliban that we read about. He had gone to one of the big madrassas in Peshawar. He knew the Koran. He turned out to be a senior mullah, which is why the prison commander had kissed him, a sign of respect. He also was a leader of the prison uprising, and the commander of the prison would have killed him if the UN and the US had not intervened a few days earlier. And he sat there and had an answer to every question. He had a fixed view of the world. And I can only tell you that I felt, and I did not expect this when we went to Afghanistan, I felt that I was back in Vietnam talking to highly indoctrinated communist cadre. He knew his stuff; he had an answer for everything. And we said to him, “Have you ever met an American before?” He said, “Yes, certainly.” He said, “The CIA picked me up and took me to another prison” and he named a very famous interrogation center. And he said, this is all through an interpreter, so I can't vouch for the exact words, he said, “We had a very intense discussion, and I defeated him in the discussion, and then they beat me up.” And he demonstrated how they had hit his face. And he smiled, and he said, “But I defeated them in our discussion.”

He is in for seventeen more years in prison. He didn't mind at all. He was where God had intended him to be, he was in recruiting center heaven. There are 2,000 prisoners in that prison, and as I pointed out to the American commanders, and they hadn't even thought of it, there is no counter-indoctrination. He has all the time he wants all day long to build Taliban as soon as they get out. It isn't unique to Afghanistan that prisons are recruiting cells for extremists. But for this to happen in an American-funded institution was just mind-boggling to me. It’s not that we would devise pretty effective counter-measures. The prison commander said he was the fifth ranking Taliban in the prison, so there were worse ones, or more dangerous ones. And finally I said to him at the end, incredibly polite conversation, I said, “Well, you’ve been very patient with us, is there anything you’d like to ask us?” And he smiled and he said, “Just one thing, when will the Americans leave?” And the full importance of the question didn't hit me at the time, and I gave the wrong answer. I gave absolutely the wrong answer. I said, “We don’t want to be here” kind of echoing what President Bush and the US government always says, we’re only here because the Afghans want us to be here. And I realized afterwards that was exactly what he wanted to hear. He’s going to go back into the prison and say, “I just met an American, and he doesn’t want to be here either.” I just misread the situation. But of course he is serene in his belief that they’ll outlast us. And the question we have to face as a nation is, how do we prevent that from happening? So, thank you very much. We have 15 minutes, I promised we’d be out of here quickly, and I want to ask Barney first if he wants to make any comments or observations.

BARNEY: Well, first thing, I think it’s just very useful to have a fresh set of eyes on this problem, because those of us who have gotten used to it, or inured to it in a way, perhaps our alarm gets a bit worn down. And I don’t often say this, but I'm even more scared after listening to you talk than I was before. I think the problem that I see, and I don’t know how to solve it, but you gave several instances of this, is that we, and I don’t just mean the United States, but the whole international effort, we have a lot of processes, programs and so on, you didn't mention the Afghanistan Compact, which is the recent international declaration on the next five years in Afghanistan, which is a magnificent document that I helped to draft, and the Afghan National Development Strategy. The people who are working in Afghanistan are very happy to tell you about all these processes and programs, but unfortunately the results are just not there. And that’s what we see on the security side with all these military efforts, which you’ll hear about from General Eikenberry as he’s speaking in public, and the insurgency is growing and becoming more lethal. All these economic development efforts and the people are still saying that they're not seeing any benefit, and Kabul is still sitting in the dark and has not had any increase in electricity in those past few years.

However, I'm glad to hear from someone who has been in a senior decision-making and implementing capacity as you have been also making what we are sometimes criticized for, what those of us on the outside often make criticisms where we just say, this is not working, and it’s a waste of money, even though we’re not sure exactly how to make it work. But I think the first step is recognizing that the standard operating procedures of our organizations in the field are not working, and that the ungrounded optimism of our leadership is disabling us from thinking about it.

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: Thank you, and first of all, on the Afghan Compact, I recognize its potential importance, but here are the figures that made me not mention the compact: The United States Embassy asked for $600 million in a supplemental for reconstruction and economic assistance. $600 million. The State Department cut that request to $300 million and forwarded it to the White House and the Office of Management and Budget. OMB cut the $300 million to $40 million and sent it to the Hill which zeroed it out. In other words, they got out of a request of $600 million, they got $4 million for one electrical generator in Kabul which had broken. Their excuse for it was that the fiscal year 2005 money hadn't been fully disbursed yet, which was true, and ’06 hadn't been fully disbursed yet, which was true.

But the signal it sent to the Afghans and to the Americans working there and to the rest of the international community is far stronger than all that wonderful stuff in London that you worked on in the compact. And that, that distressed me enormously, and anyone who knows funding knows that if the pipeline is full at the front but there’s a gap later, that gap will reach the front. And they’re doing the same thing in Iraq. I don’t understand the administration’s attitude towards this. President Bush apparently believes we’re winning in Afghanistan. The people who briefed him, I know what they feel, and I know what they told him, and any of those of you who have been in a war zone before, in Vietnam, I hate to keep mentioning Vietnam, but the parallels are too damn strong, knows that what filters up in a canned briefing is the positive side. And I go back to where I started, if we aren't honest about what’s going wrong we create a credibility gap. When the press exposes it and then publicity-hungry members of Congress go out there and say we’ve wasted $1 billion on the drug program; that erodes the basic goal. So, it’s better to be honest about the problems, and it’s better to draw attention to them, and above all to differentiate them from Iraq.

WOMAN: Thank you very much for such an incredible presentation. Do you and Kati have a sort of triage, practical blueprint for what you think the American people could step up and participate in the process?

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: Well, I don't have triage for Afghanistan, we have to succeed there. And I should have made this clear at the beginning, we’re going to be in Afghanistan, if we do this right we’re going to have to be ready to be in Afghanistan for another decade. But that’s a long time to stay in a country with historic xenophobia, and with an enemy in a sanctuary. So, we have to be much smarter about what we do. If we’re not smart we’ll have a catastrophe on our hands, and al-Qaeda will return to Afghanistan. As it is, they're sitting in western Pakistan planning whatever they're planning and staging attacks on the Americans. And as Barney just said, as I said, the security situation is deteriorating in about one third of the country. The other two thirds are stable, but if one third of the country is deteriorating, it will eventually spread elsewhere. Jim?

JIM HOGE: Jim Hoge from Foreign Affairs. You mentioned, Richard, three options, and the last one was to stay, but with a change in strategy, and one that I now presume would involve about a decade at least of presence. Is it possible to flesh out what the three or four main components of a more successful strategy would be in your opinion?

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: Well, first of all, if we aren't willing to admit we’re going to stay a decade we have to make sure it’s a NATO mission. Now a decade seems like a long time when you're at the front end of it, but we’ve been in Bosnia for ten years drawing down our troops, it was politically controversial in 1995 at the time of Dayton, it no longer is, and it’s a success. We’ve been in Korea 53 years, and if Eisenhower had said that at the time of the cease fire, people would have said no way. Now it’s accepted. We have 40,000 troops in Korea. We have 20,000 and reducing in Afghanistan. So, I think that an international command under NATO is a major step in the right direction. But Rumsfeld wants to do more, he wants to turn it over to non-American NATO troops. That, Jim, I think would be a mistake.

Secondly, the drug program. I don’t have a solution to the drug program, Barney doesn’t, no one does, and even if we wanted we could discuss it all day, but we cannot fix the country if one third of all the GDP of the country is in the drug sector. And that estimate ranges from 35-50%. But it is the most valuable crop, and it undermines the country.

Third, Barney has suggested in this council paper that the international aid be funneled through the government to strengthen the government. That’s a very sophisticated and good idea. I'm not sure that people will agree to it. Congress wants end user checks to guard against corruption, NGOs and charities like to see their names on billboards, but it should be done.

Fourth, the women’s program, and I want to amplify a key point in what Kati said, promoting women in Afghanistan, which I think is the best thing that Bush administration has done, and kudos to Laura Bush for making it her signature, is a terrific thing for many reasons, not just because it’s morally and ethically right, but because the woman are not part of the corrupted system by and large, and they can press for progress. But here’s the key point, women cannot seize power simply by mobilizing, the men must be educated to give them power, and there’s no effort being made to do that. So while the efforts that Barney and others did put 69 women into the 249 person legislature, as Kati pointed out a higher percentage than we have in Congress, and they’re trying to form a caucus under the sponsorship of the National Democratic Institute, and nobody is trying to talk to the men about the rights of women. And there are two times in modern Afghan history when women had made an attempt to get advances, and each time there was a ferocious backlash for specific historical reasons which aren't replicated now. And there will be a backlash.

KATI MARTON: Can I just make a point that there is, in fact, a very strong connection between women’s rights and the security situation, and that is that until there is a secure environment, neither progressive mullahs, and believe it or not there are progressive mullahs, nor people in positions of power will speak out for women, because the Taliban targets progressive mullahs and teachers. Therefore everything comes together with the security, which is the foundation of any progress in Afghanistan. And one other quick thing, when I mentioned to President Karzai that there does seem to be a gap between the law and practice when it comes to women, he said yes, we must empower women. And of course women can't empower themselves, it has to come from a higher place than that, which is frankly the reform of men, which can only come from the leadership.

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: Time for one last question. Warren? Oh no, I'm sorry, why don’t we hear from the World Monument Fund first. I hate to put her on the spot, but here you are.

WOMAN: Well, I just wanted to ask you to elaborate on a point that you made that restoring the monuments in Herat would attract tourism and generate some economic growth. Do you see the country as being ready, and is there foreign investment of any kind, and especially in this sector?

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: There is some foreign investment, there is a security problem; a lot of tourists are going to wait until it’s safer. But Herat is the safest part of the country, because ironically the Iranians are keeping it safe. The supreme irony of Afghanistan, I should stress, is that the friend of our friend is our enemy, that is Iran is a friend of stability in Afghanistan, but for its own purpose, which is to create a Shiite empire from the Mediterranean as far east as they can go, and we’ve handed them the Hamas, we’ve handed them Iraq, after four hundred years of Sunni rule Iraq is now Shiite, and they’ve got western Afghanistan. So they’re a stabilizing force.

So Herat could be a small tourist attraction, short term, and who knows, long term more. It’s on the silk route, lots of people want to travel the silk route, its got a lovely set of interesting things. It’s safe. But it would take some infrastructure. The Aga Khan Trust built a wonderful hotel in Kabul, they would be willing to do something in Herat. They could upgrade. It would create jobs, and it would create cultural pride, and it should be saved for its own sake. Warren, and then I want to close.

WARREN HOGE: Warren Hoge, New York Times. Dick, can you, without violating confidence, at least characterize the response you got from Secretary Rice and other American officials to whom you delivered this report, was it your impression that she and the others were hearing this kind of thing for the first time?

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: I don’t think it’s the first time they’ve heard it, because it’s out there. And I think Barney’s report is going to get a lot of attention, I sure hope so; it’s a very, very important report. But her reaction was a combination of two things, either I know it already, or you're wrong. That wasn’t very encouraging. On the other hand, that’s what you kind of expect, and I didn't call her with any great idea that I'm going to change American policy, but out of a sense of both obligation and gratitude, because the embassy and the United Nations and the NATO command supported our trip. We could not have gotten around given the security situation, especially the helicopter lift and the armored cars, I was in a real bubble. Kati and Ashley managed to get out into the market place without any protection, but I couldn't do that. So I wanted to just thank her for the support. But for example, when I talked about Waziristan, Warren, her response was what I already said, it’s always been out of control. Well of course, we’ve all read Kipling, we know that. But it isn't Kim anymore, this is a sanctuary for Taliban and al-Qaeda now, and it has to be dealt with. The biggest problem Washington must deal with is Musharraf, Karzai.

I’ll conclude with this: Ambassador Vendrell, the former UN, now EU, negotiator who is the senior diplomat in the country said, the great game lives on. And he meant, of course, that Afghanistan had always been the cockpit for great ambitions and battles from Alexander the Great on. And for a while it was the British Empire and the Czar, and then it was the US and the Soviet Union. Now the players in the great game are the United States, Pakistan, Iran, and India. I haven't mentioned India yet, but I should note that India is playing with Iran to box Pakistan in, and that’s a very big strategic factor. For the United States Pakistan is the explosion next time. If Pakistan blows up, and Musharraf survived by the skin of his teeth three assassination attempts, if Pakistan blows up, if Pakistan’s ambivalence, to put it mildly, about Afghanistan is converted into more active support of the Taliban again as it was in the 1990s when Pakistan was one of only three countries in the world that recognized the Taliban regime, the US strategic position in the whole region will blow up.