President for foreign policies here at the kato institute. Thank you for being here today and the outstanding conference stuff who do a terrific job organizing our many events. Welcome also to those of you watching at cspan and online at kato. Org. Following the september 11 terrorist attacks in october 2001 the United States issued combat operations inside afghanistan and against the taliban government that had harbored the terrorist there is. The ensuing 16 years, u. S. Goals have changed marginally but they typically include defeating al qaeda and other terrorist groups with global reach, strengthening the Afghan Government and Security Forces to prevent the taliban from retaking political power and denying terrorists a safe haven. Aassessments are mixed at best. In june secretary of state james mattis stated we are not winning in afghanistan right now. Estimates what have we spent prang from 840 billion to over 2 trillion plus over 2300 u. S. Troops killed and another 20,000 wounded. Recent reported by the special Inspector General for afghan reconstruction noted the United States trained afghan Security Forces but concluded the effort had been hampered by corruption and inadequate oversight and the Afghan Government is struggling to defeat the taliban. Several years ago the government controled about 70 of the country. Today that figure is down to about 60 . In late august, of course, President Trump announced a modest u. S. Troop surge and pledgeded to turn things around, in his speech the president acknowledged that americans were weary of war without victory. Hes right. Many americans seem unwilling to walk away but an equal number or so are reluctant to continue the war. Indefinitely u. S. Strategy reflecting the publics mood, remains a work in progress. What better time then to discuss the way forward in afghanistan. Can the United States win as President Trump promised to do, and at what cost . If vikt i have too costly, can a negotiated settlement bring peace to afghanistan . What are the risks of u. S. Withdrawal . Can americans secure our vital interest without a permanent presence in the region or should we be prepared for an openended commitment on the lines of the dekoid deployments in germany, japan and south korea . We have an excellent panel here today to consider these and other questions. U. S. Army major maxwell pappas. 2006 graduate of the u. S. Academy the west point, he served a combat tour in iraq late 2007 to early 2009, followed by three combat tours in afghanistan in 2010, 2011 and 2013. Pappas completed Army Ranger Training in 2007 and was then assigned to the 25th Infantry Division during the iraq surge. He went to Zabul Province in afghanistan as a member of the Reconstruction Team in 2010, returned to the states to complete additional training at ft. Bening georgia and assigned the 10th Mountain Division, he commanded in kandahar province and paktika province. He earned a masters degree in Security Studies from Georgetown University in 2016 and graduated from the armys general Staff College at ft. Lech worth, kansas, earlier this year. Executive officer of the 4th battalion 3rd infantry regiment, also known as the old guard at arlington cemetery. Following major pappas remarks well hear from our three other distinguished panelists. Michael ohanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and director of research at brookings and adjunct professor at columbia, princeton and syracuse universities and the university of denver. Hes a member of the International Institute for strategic studies and external Advisory Board to the Central Intelligence agency from 2011 to 2012. Mike is the author of many books including the future of land warfare published in 2015, healing the wounded giant, maintaining military preimminence while cutting the Defense Budget and toughing it out in afghanistan published in 2010. Hes written three martial papers from brookings Foreign Policy program. Id like to put in a special plug for beyond nato, i new Security Architecture for Eastern Europe published earl quer this year. Hes published several hundred opeds in the major newspapers and appeared on television or radio more than 3,000 times since 2001 if he looks familiar to you, he should. Mike earned a ph. D. In Public International affairs from princeton. Our second speaker today is steven bidle, professor of Political ScienceInternational Affairs at George Washington university. Hes published widely writing mostly about how modern social science can inform defense policy. His book military power, explaining victory and defeat in mod he were battle published by princeton in 2004 won four prizes including harvards huntington prize and the council on Foreign Relations arthur ross award silver medal. He published articles in interNational Security, foreign affairs, survival and the journal of strategic studies and shorter articles in the new york times, washington post, wall street journal and many others. Professor biddle testified many times before congress including on the wars in iraq and afghanistan. In 2007 he served on general David Petraeus joint Strategic Assessment Team in baghdad, on general mccrystals Assessment Team in kabul in 2009 and Senior Adviser to command Assessment Team in washington in 2008 and 2009. He was awarded the u. S. Army superior civilian Service Medal in 2003 and 2006, and was presented with the u. S. Army commanders award for Public Service in baghdad in 2007. Steve holds a ph. D. From harv d harvard. Our final speaker is my colleague eric goepner, visiting Research Fellow in catos foreign defense studies department. Retired colonel u. S. Air force, unit commands in afghanistan, iraq and the pacific region. His Research Interests include National Security, civil war, terrorism, and trauma. He has published in the washington post, parameters, newsweek and the national interest, among other outlets. Eric is a doctoral candidate at George Mason University school of policy and government. He meefd m. A. S from George Washington university and the air command and Staff College. He is the coauthor with trevor thrall of two cato papers including step back, lessons for u. S. Foreign policy from the failed war on terror which is available in hard copy for those of you here in attendance, and online for those of you watching from afar. I should also note that weve made available in the foyer recent articles on afghanistan by Mike O Han Lon and steve b biddle. Eric, who organized this event and deserves all the credit would like to begin by telling you about major pappas deployment in afghanistan and major. Lass will take it from there. Major. Pa pappas and i served in afghanistan. 2010, in afghanistan, imagine the banjos playing off in the distance for those fans of deliverance. Were playing the worlds best video game for a combat setting, which is . Call of duty, correct. Major pappas is winning. Its him, me and two other colleagues and in comes the senior nco from our Operations Center and announces theyve detected three insurgents, 1200 meters outside of why you are base implanting an ied, putting a bomb in the road and we go through the checklist of Different Things we could do and none of them make any sense, because theyre not going to get there in time, may cause civilian casualties for villagers that live nearby or otherwise our presence would be announced too early and they would be gone. Max comes up with a completely tactically unsound plan, if it was anybody, except for max, and his plan is this. We know we have three insurgents that weve identified. So im going to take a team of myself and three guys, were going to go out with four against an enemy force that we know has at least three, and we assume of course theres going to be other insurgents out there, kind of screening their position for them, but because max is max, i readily agree and i say thank that sounds great. Why dont do you that. 8 45 at night, pitch black, heart of summer. Max is going to don his 65 pounds of battle rattle. 65 pounds of gear is on him and his three teammates, night vision goggles or on. If you have never worn them, you have zero depth perception. Max is going to traverse more than a mile because you cant go in a Straight Line toward the enemy that, would be unsound, up and down a riverbed, and about twothirds of the way, because i should tell you im where old men go in combat, the Operations Center. Al watching this on our thermal imaging device, watching max cruising along and twothirds of the way to making contact with the enemy force and i see max leave two of his teammates. So now you understand its max and one man, going against three known insurgents. Im not going to bother asking him any questions because i figure his stress level is probably pretty high, hes running with 65 pounds of gear, dead of night, and he knows hes about to have a Lethal Encounter with three other human beings. Shortly thereafter, the stillness of the zabul summer night erupts. When the night concludes, max and his team have wounded one insurgent, theyve detained a second insurgent, third one got away to fight another day. Weve safely detonated the ied so no harm will come to afghans or American Forces, and theres no casualties whatsoever to u. S. Forces that night. So may i introduce the audacious and soon to find out intelligent maxwell pappas, major, u. S. Army. Thanks a lot for the introduction. I hope i can absolutely live up to that hype. So im here first of all as a citizen here to discuss some of my experiences. 18 months total in afghanistan in order to share a tactical perspective, highlight some of the challenges that are in place actually implementing the policies that we discussed in places like this, when it gets down to the person on the ground, its not necessarily as clean and easy to do as we like to think it is sometimes at the higher levels. So first of all, before we begin, anything i discuss here doesnt represent a sort of official line from the u. S. Government, doesnt, not the official views of the army, the department of defense, so i just wanted to start off with just that. So what i would say is, anybody whos pretty well versed in Foreign Policy right now knows about the wars in afghanistan and understands that fm 324 Counter Insurgency published in 2006 by general petraeus serves as a guide for the surge in iraq, the 2010 time line we thought was going fairly well. Also serves as kind of the our guidelines for strategy in afghanistan. It focuses on separating insurgents from the populous, focuses on training host nations, Security Forces a dressing grievances usually through improvement of governance and transitioning that authority back to locals. So what im going to talk about just a little bit my experience is 2010, 11 and 13, is mostly on the tactical side, support to governance, improving that governance while i was deployed on the provincial Reconstruction Team to Zabul Province and when i was deployed to paktika province as Company Commander two years later. Perspecti perspective, this is in may of 2010, im sitting, going to a small village, pasani, 500 to 1,000 people live there. Four or five miles out of the District Capital and we were just ambushed and im outside trying to direct fire, trying to convince afghans they want to shoot in this direction, as opposed to that direction in order to make sure we are able to survive the day and i see my counterpart at the time, person i was assigned to, abdul kayum, he was 50 years old. He had fought the russians allegedly and then he had continued to survive in afghanistan, which on its own is an accomplishment to the ripe old age of 50, so he was the district leader, sorry, the district chief for the sadjwe district in Zabul Province. He comes over to me while were getting shot at and yells me at something in pashti. I have no idea what he says because i dont speak the langua language. My interpreter comes up and he says it again and he laughs. He thinks its funny. He goes sir, he says he doesnt think that were welcome here. [ laughter ] i said that is the story of most of my time in afghanistan. So we were trying to accomplish right there is the implementation of this policy, the support to governance. As we began to deploy in february that year, into afghanistan, on this prove dinnial Reconstruction Team what, we determined was probably the place that we could make the most money, was in terms of connecting the lowest part of the government of afghanistan at the district level to those cultural and tribal leaders that existed throughout afghanistan, had existed as the way it had been governed for probably millennia. So as part of that connection thi thing we talked about touch points. Making sure that when we interacted with afghans or as advisers we interacted with our afghan counterparts we maximized that time, built that personal relationship which made our opinion matter, gave us additional chances to impart any sort of information we had onto these people so we could be successful in afghanistan. The other part of that was improving the touch time between that lowest level of the government and the senior tribal leaders, so there i was, in pasani, just outside of shajoi attempting to bring the district chief the embodiment of the government of afghanistan, for all intents and purposes, to the most of the people in his district, trying to bring him to the village, so that we could have ashura, a collection of elders to discuss and try to determine some of tgrievances these had and in order to deal with the problems. Prospecti prospective, colonel referred to the banjos playing in the background. Zabul is the alabama of afgh afghanist afghanistan. Its an economically depressed area, socially conservative, by afghan standards, very socially conservative group, so theyre very uninterested when outsiders come into their area. So when we bring the government of afghanistan, which is seen as an outsidner a lot of ways into these places of course theres some resistance. So that day, we fight through that ambush, just a few people, just trying to harass us. We get to the village and inside the village we say all right, this is ashura. The person empowered as the leader of that district nobody shows up to ashura. Thats not okay. That doesnt really give you a lot of confidence in the ability of the government to govern. We go around and round up all the houses, knocking on doors, the Afghan Police are going out and just talking to people, not mean like in this case, but bringing them in, in order to have the ashura. They sit there and theyre quiet for a while, so kayum being who kayum was, an illiterate 45yearold afghanistan who understood not necessarily bureaucracy and governance but understood how to build a personal relationship taunts them. Hey your ambush, that didnt stop me. Im here. The government of afghanistan is here, and that broke the ice, because thats how that works there. And these individuals, they began to talk to him a little bit, wasnt super successful, and so after about 30 or 40 minutes of that discussion, we decided to break down. That was the first time kayum had been able to make it to the village in his ten tour as district chief. We break down and we leave, we get ambushed again because thats again how that works. We get back to the District Center and say all right in a week were going to go back. Kayum says why, we were just there. Touch points. The idea of integrating ourselves into there. We didnt have a lot of money to throw at them. If we did, what would we build, afghan who survived in the desert in these places . They needed faith in their government. If their primary concern which is what they discussed during that ashura, you guys arent ever here, the government is not here. Why should we trust the government . Why should we do this . We needed to demonstrate a little bit of consistency. In a week we went back. Guess what happened . We got ambushed. Didnt take us long, because we knew it was going to happen this time so we were able to build a pattern but we go