Feel free to come forward if you would like. Good afternoon. Im peter bergen and peter bergen and i run into National Security foundation and its my great pleasure to introduce my colleague and friend Michael Waltz who has this wonderful new book out warrior diplomat a green berets battles from washington to afghanistan which really outlines mikes unusual career both being someone who is creating policy in the white house and the south asia adviser to Vice President cheney and carrying out the policies and the field as a special forces officer. Mike is also running a successful business. Hes a fellow here at the new America Foundation so he is going to outline the big ideas and some of the interesting stories in the book and then we will open up to question after session. Thank you. Mike. Thank you peter and thanks everyone for coming out today. I will just take a brief moment and talk about some of the broader Strategic Issues that i have tried to address in the book and really underlined up a lot of what my experiences as peter mentioned in the white house working for Vice President cheney and in the pentagon working for secretary gates and rumsfeld and as a reserve special forces officer out in the field. So bear with me one moment. Lets take a little bit of a History Lesson looking back on the war and in looking back on it as far where i think we have made some critical mistakes that historians decades from now will look back on. The first is that our strategy never really adjusted with the insurgency as it began growing past 2001. So we had a very counterterrorism focus strategy targeting al qaeda and targeting key taliban leaders but as we kind of died down and as the Afghan Government stabilized our strategy did not coalesce with that. What that drove unfortunately was the perennial under resourcing of the war effort. So we found ourselves as violence began to grow in 2003, 2004 in 2005 timeframe we found ourselves chasing the violence rather than putting the resources in necessary to get ahead of it. There were Important Reasons for that one of which which obviously was the iraq war. I was on the ground and saw the sound of resources where there was helicopters or predator drones or what have you getting pulled away from the afghan theater over into iraq where it really came into play was once the insurgency had reconstituted and the taliban surely reconstituted in 2006 and i came back from my tour back to the pentagon and said hey boss this isnt going well that was kind of the depth of the iraq war and there was nothing to commit. So we find ourselves more and more reliant on nato to provide those resources that we inhabit that point. Thats not a moral statement on the iraq war. Its just a statement of fact from my perspective of a country fighting two wars. The other kind of critical mistakes looking back is which i just mentioned is handing the effort over to nato and handing emission over to nato but frankly it wasnt prepared to do. As we transitioned the lead for security over to nato and to isaf coalition they frankly thought they were getting into kind of the a bosnian style keep peace peacekeeping. I was then kandahar when the canadians took over and they came prepared to do what they called the soft parade patrolling and frankly in 2006 they ran into a buzz saw. Their political constituencies were prepared to deal with it so they signed up to do peacekeeping and found themselves by the time they deployed in a folbaum counterinsurgency effort. I write in that quite a bit in the book about being on the ground and special forces that didnt have the equipment, didnt have compatible radios sometimes didnt even have enough ammunition to being with dutch forces and asking them to work with us and had to go all the way to the parliament for approval. It promulgated this kind of under resourcing but then it also really tied her hands to fight an enormous the complex war with the 42 nation coalition. Three is we never got our arms around pakistan then or now and the sanctuary that they afford and seth jones and others have done studies of counterinsurgencies overtime and none that they have found have been successful when the insurgent enjoys unfettered sanctuary. And then four and what i would say is probably the most critical was announcing our withdrawal years in advance of that withdrawal. I was standing in my headquarters in 2009 when president obama gave his speech at west point announcing the surge but then in the same speech announced the end of the surge and my Operations Officer standing next to me and saying can you imagine Franklin Delano roosevelt announcing dday but then announcing to the germans into the world that would only last six months to a year and the effect . Not a perfect analogy but it was one the tea throughout and it had immediate effects on the ground. Two weeks later i was up in the mountains meeting with the tribe elder with the gentleman i had been building a relationship for the better part of the year. Many many cups of tea, many many meetings many hours of getting to know each other and building that relationship and building a level of trust because one that it was the largest and that part of afghanistan and they want to work with the government against the Haqqani Network which was the predominant Insurgent Group in the area and three they had about 1500 tribal militia welltrained wellarmed that i wanted working with us on this new program eventually called building Stability Operations. Two weeks after the speech at west point by president obama this final signing of a statement of commitment and a very cold reception didnt offer tea. Finally after a few minutes kind of got to the bottom of it in the said look we always suspected it. We have seen it in the past that now your president has said that, you are going to abandon us. You are going to leave and the haqqanis are going to have a gun to my families head tomorrow night is an issue due. I tried to talk the nuanced know he was only announcing withdrawal of the surge. The nuance was lost. They heard that america was leaving, period. And it is truly detrimental effects in other ways as well. We saw corruption spike after that announcement. It was kind of get the manny out while you can. We saw government officials that we had really been gaining traction with Reform Efforts be less inclined to do so. We really frankly were undermined by that policy statement within days, within weeks of its announcement. Its a fascinating case of how his policies intended to go in this direction immediately on the ground sense that tactical and operational effort in a totally different direction. So you know and this is how i ended the book. The thing that he left me with was as we were leaving that meeting where he withdrew all of his support and pledged not only to not work with us but frankly told me they were going to be hedging their bets with the Haqqani Network e. Said look until you are prepared to have your grandchildren, not your children but your grandchildren standing shouldertoshoulder with my grandchildren we cant work with you and this will never work. Thats really a theme that kind of commitment or lack thereof that runs throughout the book. And the signal but that sounds low to the region to the Afghan Government to the afghan populace into the enemy has really hurt us throughout the war effort. It was whether you are only here for al qaeda or now you are focused on iraq or you are handing us off to nato or you were announcing a search to bring security but now youre announcing your withdrawal and that the morons come up. So where does that leave us . Today we frankly have to be very blunt a policy of hope and a lot of assumptions. Right now we are assuming it was just discussed today at the london conference but we are assuming the Afghan National army and the Afghan National police can stand on its own. I find it difficult to wrap my mind around how the afghan National Security forces are going to do along with better support with 42 nations, 42 western nations in the last two years. And personally i have been hearing that in the pentagon briefings in the white house since about 2005 that the Afghan National army would be able to stand and operate on its own. In 2005, 2007 and 2009 and then by 2011 and now by 2014. The next assumption is we are sending this unity government will hold. As we all know the afghans have a politically peaceful transition and in its entire history. We have a very tenuous situation right now in the same year in and at the same time we are announcing a zero option. Its frankly almost borderline irresponsible from a policy standpoint. We are also is assuming that in a type of reconciliation talks will regress in our interests. We are assuming that ethnic tensions wont continue to rise and i think washington grossly underestimates the amount of tension thats on the ground right now. And most importantly we are summing that al qaeda cant and wont end isnt already were constituting in the wake of our withdrawal. I just did a q a with fox news and the kind of went through all of this and she said mike ive got it. Its always the simplest questions that are hard. She said why should the American People care . We have been at this for 10 years and we have invested billions of dollars. We have lost thousands of lives. That all this scary but i think we see now with isis in iraq what can happen in the wake of our withdrawal, a precipitous withdrawal and if that makes you nervous having isis on the doorsteps of baghdad makes you nervous having a reconstituted al qaeda on the doorsteps of islamabad with the keys to a Nuclear Weapon should petrify you. It certainly does me. And you know we can talk about the nuances of that analogy and there is a lot but i think that they are are some real issues and i have a real issue and i write to that in the book which is turning our backs. So what is the policy Going Forward . And how were we going to get what i think is aptly called long war to a better place . A few years ago i give a talk to a bunch of new congressional staffers there were coming in the wake of the 2012 midterm elections and i talked about a country in asia that one point had a higher Literacy Rate than afghanistan does today no roads, no structure, no real political system and certainly no army because it had been occupied for the better part of 50 years and the country was south korea. And it did indeed have a higher Literacy Rate in the 1940s than afghanistan does today. Its not a perfect analogy analogy. I do think its a great example of what sustained u. S. Engagement can do over the longhaul and i argue at the end of the book despite all of the mistakes we have made we certainly need to learn from that the sooner we stop attacking this in an 18 month, threeyear or for your increment and start wrapping their minds around this is going to be a generational multidecade effort i think the sooner we will be in a better place. And the examples of germany south korea, japan while not perfect i think are examples of Good American engagement can do in the longhaul. So those are the underpinnings of the book from a policy and emblematic standpoint. What i tried to do chapter by chapter is rather than talk about these things i tried to have you experienced them through my time on the ground, my time in the white house, my time in the pentagon and also of course the introduction starts with there we are in the helicopter going after a taliban commander. He was responsible for the deaths of several of our afghans in that tour, really a bad character. We enter the home and a night raid and we an 8yearold little girl. I just skyped with my little girl the night before. The emotional toll that had on us and the impact it had on the Counterinsurgency Campaign in that area but then flash back there i am with president bush Vice President cheney and president karzai talking about the issue of civilian casualties and the effect its going to have or not have on afghan supporting the war. In each chapter goes into that type of back and forth trying to look at these issues from all angles whether its pakistan and there we are what can we do with this arsenal, what do we do with this support of the insurgency but yet we are dependent on it for both air and ground supply in the war but yet there i am literally getting rocketed from the inside Pakistani Military bases along the afghan border. And how do we bridge that and the Afghan National army is not ready and will not be ready for at least a generation or you know the total lack of when i took command i commanded the special forces in southeast afghanistan. I had about nine months of data to deal with. Our lack of continuity in terms of learning from previous lessons in knowing what we have done, i wrote another chapter about a patrol that we conducted in the valley outside of bagram airbase. I went around to every Intelligence Officer could find. This was in 2005 to talk to me about who had been there before the United States, who did we talk to, what Coalition Efforts . We knew there had been Development Projects they are but why why in this village and not in that village and it just didnt exist. All i could find were new target packages to target key taliban leaders in the area. So i titled the chapter patrolling the ambush because thats essentially what we were doing. We went out to the area to figure that stuff out ran into ambushes. I was nearly killed. An afghan sergeant that im very close to his killed and died in my arms and im still taking care of his family today, that sacrificed i would like to think was worth the information that we gathered but im not confident confident that went into some type of repository that others could learn from. In fact i know it didnt because i look forward on my next tour and it was gone. We just didnt do a great job with that. So i talked to a number of those issues in each chapter. I also try to address i think some fundamental issues that the army has yet to deal with. One is the layers of bureaucracy that we have to go through to conduct each Mission Grade in one chapter i write about the 12 approvals that we have to have to go after one taliban commander. I literally had an elder on the phone, a proud old man that i had a great relationship with. His sons were worth thing working with us. In tears because a commander that threatened his life was next door looking for him begging us to come and get him. I couldnt get all of the approvals to go out 10 kilometers down the road. We ended up not only losing the elder but we lost a son to weightloss the village because we couldnt conduct a night raid. So looking at it from a different perspective we have all heard about the negatives of direct action night raids were there a lot of positive than a lot of negatives. I also look at the overall issue of riskaverse this that is involved. One of the issues i dont think we were fully wrap our minds around is that this is the first and longest war in our history that we fought with an allvolunteer force. Not the first is certainly the longest. In previous wars and me to look at what that does to our incentive mechanisms. In previous wars coming out of the draft you were in it to win it. You were pulled out of your lives whether as a lawyer or a plumber or what have you incentive award and had every incentive to take every risk possible so you can come back to your life. Now a tour is a oneyear blip on an otherwise promising military so they incentive off and became dont mess anything up. Dont hit a base and dont take too many casualties, dont lose too many what we call sensitive items would have use of the default reaction in the gray areas became an action. I say that carefully because i never want or intend to disparage anyones motivations or service to their country. Its more of a fundamental issue that we havent i think is a military started to deal with. We felt that risk aversion get permeated in a number of ways. One other quick anecdote was i came across a perfect example of this. I came across a base that we were working with on the Pakistani Border that was manned by an infantry platoon. 18 soldiers in his platoon. If you think back when everybody saw the movie lone survivor of where the four navy s. E. A. L. S were killed and eventually the one was captured a fourman unit out conducting reconnaissance. After that roulan edict came down but no less than six individual soldiers out on patrol. Okay, that makes sense. After the base when not was overrun in 2008 another edict came down no less than 14 u. S. Soldiers guarding the base so you can see now do the math, this platoon had 18 soldiers. They couldnt necessarily leave their base because they would have enough that they couldnt go out because they didnt have enough to patrol said they ended up having reinforcements flown in every time they wanted to go down to the bizarre where the taliban were openly harassing a girl school that was in the village below their base. Think about the signal but that sense. Military platoon part of the top of the hill and you have taliban commanders at the bizarre shutting down shops in harassing a girl schools. Every time they saw a helicopter coming to a new was the americans coming. So with those tactical and operational permissions of the risk aversion that really come from fundamental issues that i try to address. There is a little bit in their four lawyers rules of engagement and law of land warfare. There were a number of instances that anyone who has had to fight in this type of warhead had to deal with. Didnt make it an easier on me. There was a certain one where mortar rounds started coming into our position and we saw them