The Stakes: Reinstating Afghanistan Withdrawal?

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Whether an Afghanistan “peace accord” process that includes negotiations with Taliban agents is resumed, or the United States contemplates a gradual withdrawal without a “deal”, or the status quo ante is maintained until some precipitous event directs policy responses, there is a window of time now to consider important concerns.  The consequences of American decisions will impact, among other issues, regional stability as highlighted by Pakistan; recent and alarming terrorist attacks on familial celebrations by both ISIS and Al Qaeda; and, security of Afghan leaders that have supported district democratic reforms.

Ioannis Koskinas is an avid student of the region, living in Afghanistan for much of the last eight years. He has written that the deal recently pulled by United States from the table was a “death warrant” for Afghanistan and would “undo notable successes” while providing potential for re-establishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

An attorney, who clerked for Judge Silberman on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, Daniel West served in Marjah, Helmand Province, Afghanistan as a Marine infantry company executive officer on his second deployment. His first deployment was as commander of the TRAP (tactical recovery of aircraft/personnel) force on the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit off the coast of Libya during the NATO intervention. 

Featuring:

Ioannis "Gianni" Koskinas, Senior Fellow, International Security Program, New America

Daniel G. West, Associate, SCF Partners

 

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Event Transcript

Operator:  Welcome to The Federalist Society's Practice Group Podcast. The following podcast, hosted by The Federalist Society's International & National Security Law Practice Group, was recorded on Monday, September 30, 2019, during a live teleforum conference call held exclusively for Federalist Society members.  

 

Wesley Hodges:  Welcome to The Federalist Society's teleforum conference call. This afternoon's topic is on “The Stakes: Reinstating Afghanistan Withdrawal?” My name is Wesley Hodges, and I am the Associate Director of Practice Groups at The Federalist Society.

 

      As always, please note that all expressions of opinion are those of the experts on today's call.

 

      Today we are very fortunate to have with us Ioannis Koskinas, who is a Senior Fellow at the International Security Program at New America, as well as Mr. Daniel West, who is an Associate with SCF Partners. After our speakers have their remarks, we will have time for an audience Q&A, so please keep in mind what questions you have for this topic or for one or both of our speakers. Thank you very much for sharing with us today. Dan, I believe the floor is yours to begin.

 

Daniel West:  Thanks, Wes. I appreciate it. Ioannis, thanks very much for making time to be with us here today. We know you were recently over there in Afghanistan and you’re going back soon, and we appreciate you making the time to talk with us.

 

Ioannis Koskinas:  My pleasure. I appreciate you having me.

 

Daniel West:  I’d like to start by just asking you to speak in a bit more depth about your background, so your service in the military, the work that you did as an advisor to senior military leaders, and what your work now consists of.

 

Ioannis Koskinas:  Sure. Yeah, absolutely. I started off my career flying airplanes, actually. I flew AC-130s, MC-130s, and a couple other variants of the Air Force’s Special Operations Command platforms. Most of my time in the military was either in the Air Force Special Operations Command or with a joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg.

 

      Of course, obviously, we all know that pre-9/11, the world was quite different, and we focused on counterterrorism operations that were rather infrequent in terms of our responses, but they were still happening around the world. But after 9/11, we obviously got incredibly involved, and where we would have a few deployments a year outside of the U.S., we became a force that was almost entirely deployed overseas. So I got to experience a rather niche capability prior to 9/11 and a rather robust capability afterwards, and we can obviously talk a little bit about that, but vast differences in terms of priorities. But when we started moving towards Afghanistan and later Iraq with lots of other fun places like Yemen and East Africa and Colombia, I got a chance to experience special operations at a very intense level.

 

      I retired in 2011, but prior to retirement, I had the honor of working with General McChrystal multiple times, and being stationed with him in combat was probably a highlight of my career, along with some other mentors that I still keep in close touch and honored to have some of them on -- work with them on a regular basis. Then I obviously worked in the Air Force staff and special operations and low intensity conflict in the Office of the Secretary of Defense under Mr. Vickers, and that’s where I learned, quite frankly, the art of DOD policy. I say art because Mr. Vickers was both an artist and a scientist when it came to how he approached policy, but I definitely learned tons working underneath him, and very honored to have that experience under my belt.

 

      But about 2011, I decided that while serving in the military and the Department of Defense was an incredible opportunity, I needed a second chapter in my life. And I wanted to try to understand the conflict from a different perspective, initially through capacity development of the economic sector. And I did that in Afghanistan initially.

 

      And then I wanted to do something even more different for an Air Force guy that flew airplanes for a while, and that’s trying to get localized indigenous networks and get involved with them, and lately in U.S. government contracts, in particular, to understand how an area and an environment operates, and understand it in a way that gives you a deep, localized perspective so you can pretty much judge patterns from how they are on the ground rather than how they are in the news or perceived in the States for us, and hopefully in the context of informing better policy and better decisions, and better information for decision makers. That’s what I do now for a living, some of it in Afghanistan, some of it in Pakistan, and to a lesser degree, in Iraq and East Africa. But that’s what I’ve been doing for the last few years since retirement.

 

Daniel West:  In the Marines, we always thought you Air Force pilots were allergic to the ground, so we appreciate you coming down and proving that wrong. And thank you, seriously, for your many year of service.

 

      I’d love to hear a bit more about why you’re staying involved with Afghanistan. So what drives are -- you served in the military for a long time, you retired, but you’ve been there, you’re going back. On a personal level, what drives your interest?

 

Ioannis Koskinas:  For the times that question has popped up, I don’t think I’ve mastered the answer, to be honest with you. But emotionally, what I can say is that there’s an attachment that goes far beyond the professional. I think it goes into something that speaks to you at a much deeper level. I also believe that in order to really, truly understand a particular part of the world or function, you have to immerse yourself in it. And the immersion actually requires deep understanding and long-term commitment, particularly in the military, but I would imagine other sectors have the same challenges.

 

      You tend to gravitate towards a particular area for a little while, and then after a while, the military will say, “Well, you’ve had enough in that. You need to not overspecialize, and you need to go somewhere else.” And even those that say, “Oh, I’ve had X amount of deployments in a particular location,” the reality is that that number of deployments and that number of extensive years is not enough because when you see the world through the lens of night vision goggles, it’s all green. And you don’t get to see what’s really happening, or at least get a 360-degree view of a problem.

 

      So in my mind, instead of, quite frankly, like a lot of people just try to perceive it from an academic or from purely a “when you’re there, you’re there, and when you’re not, you’re not” kind of perspective, I thought that the only way I could really, at least when I check the mirror, say that I’ve done enough to understand it is to actually immerse myself in it. While people thought that maybe I should get my head examined or at least go do a couple extra urinalysis exams when I was thinking about doing this, the fact of the matter is that it spoke to me.

 

      And a long time ago we had Orientalists and Arabists and different people that focused on different areas, and that wasn’t that difficult for people to understand. But these days, it seems like when you’re one Google search away to being an expert, it’s what drives a lot people. It didn’t drive me, so that’s why I changed and went all in.

 

Daniel West:  Well, you mentioned putting in the extra time and effort to really understand it as opposed to just through night vision goggles. And I think a lot of people would hear you say that and be relieved that somebody understands it, because we’ve been at war in Afghanistan for a long time. And I think people look over there and they hear the common narrative, but they’re confused as to what it is to think. So I’d like to present a sort of straw man of that narrative, and then ask you to take a look at it.

 

      So I think for most casual observers, the narrative of the Afghan War is something like the following: In 2001, the U.S. led an invasion. They ousted the Taliban, and the reason for that was because the Taliban was harboring Al Qaeda, and they refused to eject them or to turn them over. There was an initial campaign that was rapid. It was successful, and it knocked the Taliban out of power, but it did not cause them to surrender, and unfortunately, it did not cause them to disintegrate, either. And after that point, the U.S. and many of its allies shifted much of their focus to Iraq, and the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan continued to fester.

 

      The next main change there is in 2009. President Obama announces a surge of troops, and it was modeled after the strategy that had had some success in Iraq. And so there was an Afghan surge that did succeed in ejecting the Taliban from many areas where the Taliban had grown back, but it did not end the insurgency, and it did not bring any lasting resolution to the conflict.

 

      From 2012 to 2014, which is when I was over there, the Obama administration ordered a significant drawdown of troops, and so they moved from about 100,000 U.S. troops down to about 10-20,000. And there’s some debate as to whether the drawdown was based on conditions, or whether it was supposed to be based on conditions, or whether it was based on other factors that caused people to want that to be what happened. But then they declared an end to major combat operations. So since 2014, when lead security responsibility shifted over to the Afghan government, the Taliban have been making some gains against the Afghan government, but the insurgency has continued to fester.

 

      So I think most people understand that as the general narrative. Since 2014, the insurgency has been coming back, but the insurgency was there even when the surge was on, and so they’re wondering what to make of all of this. And so I guess I would ask is that narrative correct, do you think that narrative’s fair, and what does that common narrative overlook about the Afghan story since 2001?

 

Ioannis Koskinas:  Actually, Dan, that’s a short description that you put together, concise, and quite frankly, it captures a lot of what’s happened. And unfortunately, each one of those sentences almost, to anybody who’s really paid attention to Afghanistan, is one punch after another because it seems like the way we approach this conflict from the beginning, we were surprised. I mean, let’s face it. Nobody said yesterday, 9/9/01, which is the day that Al Qaeda operatives killed Ahmad Shah Massoud in Afghanistan and two days prior to 9/11 taking place as a gift to the Taliban, effectively. And nobody thought, “Oh my God, what just happened? Let’s start dusting off the invasion plans for Afghanistan.” That wasn’t the case, clearly.

 

      And when we went in there, we went in with a very small footprint, and an unconventional footprint with small teams. But we did not exactly know what was going to come out of it except we knew that we were going to use the locals to bring the most ground force to bear and air power to bring the most ordinance to bear.

 

      Somehow, after that—and you know the story—we started hyper-conventionalizing the adventure there. Day by day, the special operations element of this became less and less important, and the force that was growing more rapidly was rather the conventional footprint in country because we took it, I think, much surprise with the speed that it happened. But then we don’t do so well in -- I know it’s an allergic reaction to use the word occupation, but we don’t do so well in the occupation portion until we stabilize it. We just kind of handed it off to Afghans that were not prepared to handle power.

 

      And, quite frankly, that was the time that we should have negotiated with the Taliban, if there was going to be any power sharing or at least a reintegration of some of the fighters back into society. But we didn’t. And that was big mistakes that if I -- in our vernacular, we use the term “lessons learned” should be applied to the years afterwards or the next campaign. But unfortunately, that’s not a good term because we usually don’t learn the lessons, and we relearn them. So I always use what the Brits use for a term, which is “lessons identified,” at a minimum.

 

      So I’ll skip through -- I won’t go year by year, but I will say this, that one of the biggest problems, if you actually identify the big problems, is that one, we didn’t deal with the Taliban when they were at their weakest. We did not take thought to the fact that 95 percent of the country was controlled by the Taliban, and we handed control to the people that had 5 to 10 percent of the country and thought that maybe, just maybe, we should take stock of the fact that they’re not prepared to govern an entire country.

 

      While we think about nation building, again, as something that we don’t do, we actually do that fairly well. We did it in Germany. We did it in Japan. We did it in South Korea. We did it in most of Europe, actually, not just Germany. So I think that we have some allergic reactions to certain things that we shouldn’t have allergic reactions, which is to actually invest and guarantee our investment by taking care of the state. The state is supposed to be taking care of the security of a country, not our troops. And that’s a theme that we can talk about in other questions if you want.

 

      But I will point the second big mistake, and there’s been very many between these and many subsequent, but the biggest mistake since 9/11 and, quite frankly, since 2002 when we took over is the fact that we thought that the surge in Iraq worked and we should do a surge in Afghanistan, and model it, as you said, after the -- under the success of Iraq and try out this petri dish of an idea in Afghanistan.

 

      And quite frankly, I think it strengthened the insurgency. It gave it more -- it fueled it, in no small part because our strategy was to put 100,000 troops and pull them out in 18 months. And that telegraph punch just effectively took every wind out of our sails that we had at that point. So it’s an accurate description that you have, but it’s fraught with mistakes and, quite frankly, short-sighted approaches with basic assumptions that fail in even the most veneer sort of test.

 

Daniel West:  You mentioned nation building and the importance of nation building, and how Americans have done it in the past, and have done it with varying degrees of success over the past, probably, century. But essential to nation building seems to be winning the hearts and minds of the people of the nation, and that’s a phrase that was tossed around repeatedly during what we call the Global War on Terror.

 

      But I’d like to talk about the Taliban, actually, in the context of nation building. So certainly, the Taliban have committed many atrocities, and many of the regions that we say are Taliban controlled are controlled just based on fear-driven compliance. They’re ruthless. They enforce their areas, and they -- it doesn’t pay in Afghanistan to be an enemy of the Taliban. But it must also be said that they have won earnest support in some areas rather than simple compliance. Among some portions of the Afghan populace, people really prefer the Taliban to be in charge of them. What is it that the Taliban’s offering the Afghan people, and why is it that that strategy has been successful, at least in some regions?

 

Ioannis Koskinas:  I will say this, that I don't think that by and large, most Afghans would prefer the Taliban over an alternative. But when you're handed the Taliban as your sole solution because when they control the area, it's total control. It's not they control, let's say, the governance or just the security. They control security, governance, education, dispute resolution, the judicial -- anything that deals with justice, down to contracts and taxation.

 

      They don't just take this light approach to control of an area. They take it actually down to the ground, and although I’m using it figuratively when I say to the ground, in reality, they take it even below ground because they know how to extort the mineral wealth of the areas that they're into, and in certain spots, they cultivate either agriculture products or largely opium and now other drugs in order to enrich themselves.

 

      So they take what we consider the national instruments of power, of diplomacy. They have a Doha office and they deal with external diplomacy. We handed that to them. Military, obviously they have the security. They're great at the information space. I mean, their propaganda is world class. Economics, I mean, they are self-funded at this point. Initially, they probably had a little bit of startup money from the Pakistanis, but Pakistan is probably making money out of the Taliban at this point rather than paying them, in large part because maybe the markets that they sell goods or they purchase goods are in Pakistan, so therefore, there is some monetary gain from that.

 

      So when you look and put all those -- effectively the dime into perspective, they have rather wholistic approaches to it. They're brutal, like you said. Sharia is there at the core. Islamic law is at the core of their perspectives and their approaches, but they have total control of those populations. It's not something light. So I would submit to you that there is probably an element of them that like the stability that perhaps comes under this. There's no fighting, but when somebody walks in and says, “I’m taking over your house and I’m going to make it into a vehicle bombing factory,” you don't exactly have a choice at that point. It's what they do.

 

Daniel West:  So shifting from them to us. In the previous election, President Trump campaigned on a promise. He wanted to end the wars overseas. He's been very critical of the Afghan government, and he's made no secret about his desire to withdraw. And just last month, it was all over the headlines that he planned to invite the Taliban to Camp David for negotiations and actually would have hosted that event if not for a Taliban bombing at the U.S. Embassy that killed one soldier and a number of other civilians.

 

      What is the Trump administration's strategy in Afghanistan, and how have their actions on the ground matched the strategy that they're articulating? What was the thinking behind the Camp David summit? I think a lot of people were surprised to hear that the Taliban would be coming to Camp David, and some people offended. And what next? Where do we go from here?

 

Ioannis Koskinas:  Sure. In about 2011 when I left the military and I landed in Kabul, I happened to go there with a mentor of mine by the name of Milt Bearden. Milt was the Chief of Station in Pakistan when he actually gave the aid to the Afghan mujahideen. And he showed me a picture of Minister, at the time, Wardak, who was the Afghan Minister of Defense, a younger Minster Wardak, a slimmer Minister Wardak wearing a shalwar kameez, a traditional garb, Minister Wardak. But in the back of him was a picture of the Soviet disposition of forces in Afghanistan. And I clearly, obviously knew that it wasn't the current Minister Wardak, and like me after the military, put a little bit of weight on and you don't look as young and fit as you did in your youth. But at the end of day --

 

Daniel West:  -- That's an absolute lie. I remain in denial on that front.

 

Ioannis Koskinas:  That's okay, Dan. Just keep living it, man, if you can live it.

 

Daniel West:  [Laughter]

 

Ioannis Koskinas:  But the point here is that I was stunned because that map and the disposition of U.S. forces at the time -- because I had just left the military. I mean, I had just literally left the area that focused in the military that was most concentrated on Afghanistan and Pakistan. So I looked at it, and I said, “My God, this is the exact same disposition of forces that the U.S. had.” And the reason why I highlight this is because Afghanistan's terrain, more than anything else, will drive certain solutions. You can't help -- that probably looked like the terrain map for the British disposition of forces at some point in the Afghan War.

 

      So the problem with President Trump, to bring it back to him, is that he started off with what you described as, “I'm leaving.” And his generals and, quite frankly, his national security team in its entirety said, “No, no, you can't just leave just yet.” So they came up with a South Asia strategy of working and securing and training. And eventually, the idea is that the Afghans are going to stand on their own two feet, and we'll be able to leave.

 

      But as it happens with just about everybody, you start thinking, “Oh my God, I'm not getting enough return on the investment,” because we gave them the troops. We gave them the money. We gave them all this stuff, but we're not getting what we want out of it, so therefore, let's look for an alternative, the alternative being a deal with the Taliban. And for the last year, they've been trying to create sets of conditions on the ground by obviously fighting hard still, but really concentrate all the State's efforts, State Department and our diplomatic efforts, on this deal with the Taliban.

 

      The challenge that I've always had with this argument is, look, I’m all about reaching some kind of peaceful solution, and a political solution is the end of any sort of conflict, whether armed or sanctions or anything like that. But in the end, you have to come with the realization of what you're actually facing. And the Taliban are not remotely interested in any sort of power sharing agreement with the Afghan government that we are supporting. They're interested in regime change and, quite frankly, the last thing that they would do is actually support any kind of constitutionally backed government that is not them. When you have that kind of basic appreciation of the environment, it's kind of hard for me to see how you'd think that you're going to get something different other than the abandonment of the negotiation process at one point because, guess what, they haven't changed their tune.

 

      So yes, it was a bombing. Yes, we had a tragic death of an American and twelve others. What amazed me was that for the nine periods that we had, nine negotiation sessions prior to that event that obviously had the cup runneth over for President Trump, for each one of those nine negotiation periods, there was a major attack, high profile attack with high numbers of casualties. And we did not abandon the process at any of those, which much higher even deaths than our one that we had for us and the twelve for the Afghans. I think that it finally hit President Trump that the idea that this opponent, the belligerents on the other side, is not going to allow us an exit that is sufficiently graceful that it doesn't just obliterate any sort of gains that we had over the last 18 years' worth of blood and treasure.

 

      So that's how I look at it. I think moving forward, I’m sure there's some folks that can't wait for the negotiations to restart. However, I would submit to you that that's not the right approach. I think we need to table the negotiations indefinitely and we should concentrate instead on the core strategy that we should have had from day one, which is prepare the state, prepare the government that you're going to leave behind to be able to resist this threat.

 

      And if I may, I'm sorry, I'm going a little bit over, but there's a metaphor that I usually use when it comes to our approaches to Afghanistan. When you have an infection, if you're an immigrant like me, your mom probably has a whole bunch of antibiotics somewhere in the house that are probably out of date and you probably shouldn't use them, and I don't. But when you go to the doctor with an infection, they actually should ask you to get some kind of sample so they can figure out what would work against the bacteria that are going against you.

 

      And instead of developing a specific treatment for Afghanistan, and instead of testing our solution against the petri dish of something, we kind of go all in and give some kind of antibiotic to the patient, regardless of whether or not it works, or we think it's going to work or not. So I think we need to spend quite a bit more time thinking about our next steps. I don't think we should shoot from the hip. I don’t think we should expect any grand solutions in the next 12 months because, don't forget, a month from now, we're having our own elections. And I'm sure that the President and his political opponents are going to be thinking about what are we doing and where we are in Afghanistan.

 

Daniel West:  Thank you. It's very informative, and it raises the question in my mind -- I mean, you say you shouldn't take the antibiotic before you diagnose the disease, but in some ways, the treatment here has been promises promised in the last election you mentioned and other elections coming up. So I'm wondering if you could play out for us, realizing that it sounds like it's not something you would support, but if the U.S. were to follow through and fully withdraw rather than having these negotiations, say, “You know what, we made a promise. We're going to keep it. We're going to leave.” What does that look like? What's the result on the ground in Afghanistan? What's the result in the region? What's the result from the perspective of American prestige? Is that just an unambiguous surrender? Should Americans think about that as a defeat? Is there another way that could be framed?

 

Ioannis Koskinas:  Unfortunately, the answer is that I think that there's a false dilemma that we're pushing when it comes to this kind of notion of full withdrawal. The reality is that I think when you dissect President Trump's messages, usually you can't go at 140 characters, or 120, whatever it is for each tweet. But there's more to it than meets the eye. Some would argue differently, but to me, I think he's predictable in the way he approaches things, and I don't think he's wrong that we should actually lower the number of troops in Afghanistan, we should lower the money that we're spending there, and we should get more for whatever we spend there.

 

      So if you go in with the approach that, “Mr. President, I think we should spend at least half then what we're doing right now, we should have at least half less troops there, and we should get more bang for our buck,” I don't think the President of the United States, whether it's President Trump or President Obama or anybody else, would actually say, “No, no, no, no, no. I said we're gone,” because they've seen the movie come out of what happens in Iraq when you're gone.

 

      Now, again, I hate the analogy of Iraq/Afghanistan, but in this particular case, there are festering wounds in Iraq that -- still, to this day, ISIS is not gone. There are some of ISIS that are still there, and it still fights, but it's not the same as it was before. But in Afghanistan, you're guaranteeing that an Islamic fundamentalist group is going to be in charge. There is no Iraqi government that’s going to resist this, especially when you make a deal that part of your resolution of how you leave is to make a deal -- think about this. Your deal would have been signed -- the U.S. deal would have been signed with the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. I mean, that is monumental in the sense that we are signing an agreement that they’re going to somehow guarantee that Al Qaeda’s not going to take over Afghanistan, or whatever other group. We’re doing it with the Islamic fundamentalists that were the guardians of a space that had various terrorist groups, not just Al Qaeda, pre-9/11.

 

      I think that that’s the challenge that we’re dealing with is that the false dilemma suggests that, hey, we’re either withdrawal or not. I think that the South Asia strategy’s success for the President is that if we actually drop the numbers of troops because we’re achieving the goals that we’re achieving on the ground. If we have a higher military and security apparatus capacity within the Afghan system, why would we need 14,400 troops there? If we have a better governance factor there and all the ministries, let’s say not all, but most of the ministries are actually functioning because we’re paying attention to them, and we’re holding them to account when they’re not functioning, and we’re withdrawing money if they’re not functioning, then the price goes down significantly for us being in Afghanistan.

 

      And if you think about it as countering violent extremism and countering the ideology, you have to think in generational terms. You can’t think of it in years or, quite frankly, election cycles for us. So I think what we have to work with is a manageable, palatable solution, and at the heart of it is lower number of troops.

 

Daniel West:  You mentioned better governance, and Afghanistan—some of listeners may not know—just had its national elections yesterday. It’ll take about three weeks to tally up the votes, so we don’t know yet who won or lost, but they voted. I’d like you, if you could, to just talk about who’s the favorite to win. What would be the effect of the different potential outcomes? Are there candidates that you look at and see better or worse prospects for peace, or better or worse prospects for the better governance you mentioned as opposed to maybe more corruption or more dealing with the Taliban? And I guess, even at a higher level, are the elections perceived as legitimate? Is the Afghan national government itself, at this point, perceived as legitimate by most of the people?

 

Ioannis Koskinas:  Wow, you packed a lot in that one. So let me start at the top. So right now, there are two potential winners, or two prominent figures at the lead. One is the incumbent, President Ghani, Ashraf Ghani, who has been the President for the last five years. And the second, and not in order, but the second person that’s involved is Dr. Abdullah, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, who is actually the chief executive officer for a position that’s akin, although not in powers but at least in concept, to a prime ministerial post for the last five years.

 

      And those two were at it in 2014 during the last election. And because they couldn’t figure out who was President, and one would not accept the other, the U.S. government stepped in with the U.N., but mostly Secretary Kerry at the time, and they drew up an agreement between the parties and that was the national unity government that was born at the time. Now, we were, I would argue, signatories. The technical term would probably be that we were observers of that agreement, but at the same time, I would say the guarantors of some sort because at the end of the day, we’re the ones funding the majority of the Afghan government.

 

      And so that’s how we got here. Both President Ghani and Dr. Abdullah have come out within 24 hours or 48 hours of the election, but in the last 24 hours and said, “We’re the winners.” And not just, “Hey, we’re the winners,” but—both parties, both groups—but, “We’ve met the threshold for a first-round election,” because if anybody wins it by a majority but less than 50 percent, you have to go into a runoff. And both of them claimed that they are in excess of the required 50 percent, and we won’t have a runoff.

 

      Now, we’ll have to wait and see what happens. I mean, obviously, there was a fairly low voter turnout, and only about 25 percent or maybe less of the registered voters actually went to the polls. Now, in my mind, that’s not bad. If you have huge numbers, then you run into the problems of potential fraud, and how many ballots were stuffed in the bags, and the claims, anyway. So I don’t think it’s terribly bad that we’ve had that kind of a turnout, in no small part because it was a very short fuse election.

 

      Up until a few weeks ago, we didn’t know if there was going to be an election because there were rumors of this peace deal formulating an interim government, and so very short notice. I think it’s a victory for the Afghan people and the security apparatus that they carried it out with very few casualties. And people, very brave people, went out to the polls and actually voted. Some areas, the Taliban had extreme threats over, and I think that part of the low turnout is the fact that there are a lot of areas under threat. That’s what’s going on. That’s what happened.

 

      To answer your latter part of your question, in terms of what are the prospects moving forward, I would say that the prospects of an Afghan government that sort of works -- I’m not saying perfect, but sort of works, and gets conditionally better over time to where in five years we have an even better circumstance, or at least the next person that’s coming up to be voted upon is going to be in a much better place than where we are right now, is if we concentrate on helping them and not just take the hands off the wheel.

 

      When we’re funding this, we should not be spending all our time in Doha focused on dealing with the Taliban rather than spending that energy and, quite frankly, intellectual capital on making the Afghan government work. The deal with the Taliban will be much more advantageous to the United States of America if we actually have a stronger government in Afghanistan rather than somehow thinking that by dealing with the Taliban, we can make them somehow less fundamentalist. I mean, think about this. Instead of spending time and actually go forward with the Afghan government, we’re just trying to get the Taliban to be a little bit less Taliban.

 

Daniel West:  What are the levers that we -- we don’t vote in their elections, and so they pick their leaders, and we get the leaders and we work with them. What are the levers that we as outsiders, whether it’s America, whether it’s the West, whether it’s parties who are interested from outside Afghanistan, what are the levers that we can pull to help get better governance because a skeptic might say, “It’s been years and years, and the governance is still kind of what it is.” What are the levers that you see that give you hope that governance can be improved over time?

 

Ioannis Koskinas:  First of all, I’ll tell you what the biggest source of inspiration and hope to me is to see the youth of Afghanistan rise. The level of intellectual capital in Afghanistan is intense and immense. They are smart. They’re hardworking. The youth that’s obviously the majority of the country is sub 25. They’re educated. The ones that go to college, unbelievable. Even the ones that don’t go to college, they have tons more common sense than you and me. And quite frankly, it’s an incredible array of talent that’s there.

 

      And that’s the thing that makes me understand because all the people, the pundits in the U.S. and particularly in Washington, D.C., treat Afghanistan as, “Well, the Taliban are Taliban, but the rest of them are kind of like the Taliban but not -- a little bit more moderate.” No, man. There is a lot of material to work with in terms of the Afghan population.

 

      Like I said, they’re smart. They’re progressive. They use internet. They have a lot of things going for them. Obviously, mostly the cities are what I’m describing, but even down to smaller cities and smaller villages, there’s still mobile network coverage, there’s TV, there’s radio. And I think that they’re thirsty for something better than what we are conditionally willing to do. So the base of this -- my basis of my ideas are, quite frankly, the fact that there is a human capital to work with.

 

      The second thing is that either -- whether it’s President Ghani or whether it’s President Abdullah, whichever one comes into power, I think that they’re both going to be facing with the same exact problems, which is a broken system that has been left in disarray over the last five years. We signed up for a national unity government that said, “You guys have this many ministries, you guys have this many ministries, and we’ll make it all work.” Well, when you take the “your part” of the two parties, you don’t have -- I mean, this is a lawyer society. It’s like saying you’re going to have no arbitration with an arbitrator.

 

      We should have been the arbitrator of things, and we hold things in our hands. The levers are money. The levers are support so they can survive. The levers are that actually there’s fuel and electricity and everything else that comes around there because they can’t sustain the Afghan government on its GDP, not the way it is now. But there’s hope that there are projects that will bring them to bear. They have natural resources.

 

      It’s just actually for any of that stuff to materialize, you really need to have an arbitrator that says, “Look, right now, today, there are 21 nonfunctioning ministries or associated departments that are functioning like ministries in Afghanistan.” We have not done anything to fix those, or at least to identify is that if they don’t get fixed, they don’t get funded. That’s what we should be doing.

 

Daniel West:  Okay, thanks. That’s very helpful. Wes, at this point, I think we’d like to turn it over to the audience to see if we have any questions from the audience.

 

Wesley Hodges:  Absolutely, Dan. Thank you both so much. Looks like we do have two questions in the queue so far. First caller, you are up.

 

Ken Konop: Hello. My name is Ken Konop. Just by way of background, many years ago I served in the Peace Corps in India, and since then, I have been very interested in what goes on in India, Pakistan, and to some extent, in Afghanistan.

 

      And I guess I find -- and I don’t know if this is a question or a speech, but I find in what's going on that we seem—“we” being the United States—seem to have an overlay based on our perception of how governments ought to be run in Afghanistan when, in fact, what we’re talking about is a tribal society which I would guess most of the people have no idea what we’re talking about because they don’t speak English. And I also understand that in these tribal societies that the emphasis is on protecting the tribal society and there's these circular rings about, “My brother and I are together,” and then if there’s somebody -- who you’re against as the circle gets bigger.

 

      I am also not sure that we are aware, and I’m sure you are, of who is William Brydon? And for those of you who don’t know, William Brydon was the only survivor of the British withdrawal from Kabul in 1842. There were 4,500 soldiers and 12,000 followers, and all of them were murdered except one.

 

      My point of the story of this question is aren’t we involved in a country where the rules that we think apply simply do not apply, and we’d be far better off going back to trying to pick and choose who among these various groups that we ought to go after without thinking that somehow we’re going to spend all this time redoing their government. And I’ve talked to a couple of people who were in the green zone. If you don’t speak Arabic, and understand what’s going on, and who you’re talking to, and what tribe they’re with, and who their brothers are, I think you’re sort of clueless. Do you agree?

 

Daniel West:  Ioannis, do you want to take that? And also, I guess I would follow up on Ken’s question there to ask do you see -- Ken raises the point that it might be difficult to just plant a Madisonian democracy in an area that doesn’t have the same intellectual and cultural tradition that we have in the West. Do you see folks over there making modifications and incorporating that understanding or allowing for those differences as they work with the Afghan government?

 

Ioannis Koskinas:  First of all, I get all these “thanks for your service” kind of conversations for being in the military. I have to say thank you for serving in the Peace Corps. It’s so important that we represent, and we help, and we leave this place behind a little bit better than we found it. So I appreciate that, right up front.

 

      But I would say that I don’t speak Dari. I don’t speak Pashto. I can understand a little bit, but I would certainly not do it. Some of it is my own omission. And quite frankly, I enjoy languages. I have the ear for them, but I didn’t spend the necessary time. It’s not like I haven’t had enough time. I haven’t spent enough time to do it, in part because there are a lot of people that speak English, even the ones that if I spoke elementary level Dari or Pashto, my kindergarten Pashto is not going to allow me to agree to or understand detailed subjects.

 

      So what you do is you use trusted people around you for translators, but most of all, these are not translators. They’re people who understand the concepts. They’re intellectuals, and you just use them as a conduit. So the premise that somehow, we all need to speak Dari or Pashto in order to understand this, I think, is probably overstated.

 

      The second thing is you used the term -- you started your point with India. India was a bunch of principalities and small kingdoms, and it’s a kludge of a lot of things. I mean, when they had their elections, it took months for the elections to take place. But somehow, some way, at the end of it when you look at their system, it’s still inspired in good part by the civil system of civil servants that was put in place by the British. And the same with Pakistan, and same with a lot of countries.

 

      Now, I’m not saying this is the imperial conversation, because that could take a bunch more hours. But I would submit to you that rather than blame the governance system, I would say that we don’t apply, and we don’t hold people to account when they don’t actually pay attention to the governance system. And we should pay attention to things that are done often that are in contradictory terms to the actual survival of the system.

 

      And I’ll give you a very specific example. When we started off dealing with warlords in 2001, we handed off suitcases of money, unaccounted for, not traced. I mean, they were accounted in the sense that they went to somebody, but they weren’t traced as to what they did. We just expected them to, roughly, do what they do. Well, that thinking, that mindset continued where for a long time, we just kept on giving money, but we didn’t necessarily expect something beyond just a receipt. So I think that that’s part of the big challenge.  

 

      And the last thing I will say is that I think you’re right that some areas are tribal. I don’t think that a lot of the areas are all tribal. There are elements of it that are ethnic and combination of tribal. But I think the real win is for a long time, and right now, that is starting to fall apart, and it’s actually starting to really worry me, is that a lot of people just treated themselves as Afghan.

 

      I know the narrative is that it’s a Pashtun insurgency, and to a degree, that was the case early on. And perhaps it’s even overwhelmingly still, but there are others than just Pashtuns in the Taliban. There are Uzbeks, there are Hazaras, and there are Tajiks, and you can see that by the deterioration of the North and West. Those are not traditional Pashtun areas. So the fact that the Taliban are so strong up there is, in part, that others besides the Pashtuns are actually joining the thing. So what happens is that when you drive this towards ethnic, the more ethnic it becomes, the more dangerous it becomes.

 

      So the reason why the Afghan government is important to me is not because I want a Madisonian or Jeffersonian or any other -sonian democracy to take place. I want something that works for them. And believe it or not, their system kind of works. And I want them to actually hold into account to make it work rather than the alternative, which is, absent of some kind of arbitration like I said, what we do is we start letting the system gravitate towards those ethnic divides because when you’re in trouble, you’re going to go to your tribe, or when you’re in trouble, you’re going to go to your ethnic group.

 

      But it’s not as simple to say that that’s what they gravitate from the very start. What they want to gravitate towards, they want to be Afghans. They don’t want to be Pashtuns or Tajiks. That’s who they are genetically. They’re humans, and quite frankly, many of them consider themselves Afghans.

 

Wesley Hodges:  Next caller, you are up.

 

Karen Lugo:  Thank you guys for very interesting insights. This is Karen Lugo. I had a real quick question. The American imprimatur is on a peace, quote, “deal” like this, and as it played out and those of us that tried to follow or reading in the press, the question would arise as to what is the backstop? What if all of these arrangements don’t play out? How could Secretary Pompeo be involved in promoting something if there isn’t a backstop?

 

      It seems that America’s prestige, especially with these Islamic conflicts, and those that may come, and those that are still connected to those, if we’re ever going to move into a region and expect trust and credibility from the voters, from the people that stood up for democratic processes, from all of those involved that look to us and expect an outcome different than they way they currently live, where are the backstops? What should be the triggers that would cause us to pull money or support? Or if we are going to renegotiate some kind of withdrawal, isn’t it so important that we are keeping in mind when prestige is mentioned what our credibility is in this kind of a very complicated process?

 

Ioannis Koskinas:  I can take a little bit of this, but I actually want to ask you a question in return, a little reverse engineering here. Karen, first of all, great question, obviously very complicated. I will say this, that the word withdrawal should be stricken from any record. The notion that we’re somehow withdrawing from this by making a deal with our belligerent enemy for the last 18 years is, I think, something that will be first of all, an insult to a lot of people who have spent both blood and treasure there.

 

      And I would also say that that’s probably political suicide for whoever is going to make that deal, whether it’s a signatory by Secretary Pompeo or the President because there is zero chance in my mind that that won’t turn into an absolute mess rather quickly afterwards. When we withdraw, what you’re left with is an Afghan government that does not have some backing from us and, quite frankly, they’re going to have a hard time. But I think they can hold out for a while, as long as we fund them.

 

      But the Taliban are now emboldened, and they’re going to come back with a vengeance. And guess what? Other people around the country, around the world are paying attention. And if that happens to the Taliban, others are going to be emboldened. So I think the withdrawal is an absolutely horrible term. I think there was no backstop because, “Hey, want to go out for a ride?” “Sure, let’s go. Do you have the keys?” I think they ask some very basic questions at the very end like how do we do this if it doesn’t work out? And they want their sound questions answered, so that’s why we backed out.

 

      But what I want to ask Dan is -- Dan, you were at the heart of the beast. You were in Marja in 2012-13. And you guys must have had some deals with the locals. And you must have, at a very micro, localized level, you must have told people that, “Hey, if you trust us, we’re going to protect you.” Otherwise, how do you accomplish anything there? And then what happened when we left? Can you describe that a little bit because I think that plays out at a macro level if you kind of pan out and look at the country after we leave.

 

Daniel West:  Ioannis, it’s interesting. I think everybody who goes over there and has a tour over there, you see snippets of the timeline, but very few people are there long enough to see the full timeline. When I was there, the decision had largely been made to pull back, so we were transferring lead security responsibility to the Afghans, and we were supporting them, so supporting the local Afghan government, meeting with the mayor, meeting with the police force, meeting with the army, supporting them on their operations, some counter-narcotics activities.

 

      But when you’d speak to locals, the local tribal leaders that, Ken, just a second ago when he asked his question mentioned, I mean, you would meet with the important tribal leaders, and you would speak with them. And almost to a person -- but they kind of knew we were leaving because we were either tearing down patrol bases or handing those patrol bases over to the Afghan police and the Afghan army. And they asked us to stay. They were very disappointed. It’s funny. They think you have lieutenant, and then Captain West is over there, and they’re asking me to change the decision on Afghanistan to pull back our assets. It’s above my pay grade.

 

      And I laugh, but I laugh bitterly because a lot of these people risked their lives to work with us. And I’m sure some of them are dead at this point because we did pull back, and that had security consequences. It’s definitely something that a lot of folks who have worked with the locals over there, and especially the locals who stuck their necks out to work with us, I think they take it pretty seriously.

 

Ioannis Koskinas:  And I would submit to you that it’s not just to work with us. They buy into what we’re selling. And that is because it’s a compelling argument. What we offer when we say, “Hey, wouldn’t you like to be in charge of picking your own president? Wouldn’t you want to have a representative government? Wouldn’t you want to have somebody who protects you? Rule of law, protect and serve. All those things. Wouldn’t you?” I mean, that’s an attractive thing. And when you sell that and you abandon it, it just hurts. It hurts for much longer than an election cycle for us. It will hurt.

 

Daniel West:  Well, Ioannis, thank you for that, and thank you for making time to be with us here today. Looks like we’re about out of time, but we really do appreciate it. And good luck and stay safe when you head back over there.

 

Ioannis Koskinas:  I appreciate it very much. Thanks for the questions. I apologize we didn’t get to that last one, but if you reach out to The Federalist team, I’ll be more than happy to answer any questions, even after this, if people have anything else.

 

Wesley Hodges:  Well, thank you so much, Ioannis. And thank you, Dan, for hosting today. Everyone, on behalf of The Federalist Society, I would like to thank our experts for the benefit of their valuable time and expertise. We welcome all listener feedback by email at [email protected]. Thank you all for joining us today. This call is now adjourned.

 

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