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Welcome and Introduction

David Chambers:

Good afternoon. On behalf of our cosponsor, the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies, the Middle East Institute welcomes all of you to this afternoon's conference, entitled Afghanistan: Promise and Fulfillment. My name is David Chambers, Director of Programs.

Before we go any further, I'd like to thank Mr. Bill Reinckens of the State Department's Washington File, as well as Dr. John Calabrese of MEI, for helping to make this conference happen.

Many others wished to speak here today but could not, and MEI is happy to announce that enough have agreed to speak at a later date for us to run yet another of our popular country policy series, following those on Pakistan and Iraq, which should include: Dr. Joseph Collins, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, early next month, with the latest details on his efforts in Afghanistan; Dr. Henry Barkey of Lehigh University in September, on Turkey and its relations with Afghanistan, Iraq and the region; and the ambassadors of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, along with R. Grant Smith, former U.S. ambassador to Tajikistan, in September, on the impact of this month's Bishkek Declaration. We welcome further suggestions for our upcoming Afghanistan Policy Series from all of you in attendance today.

Iraq is on everyone's mind these days. Last night, I reread Seymour Hersh's latest three articles on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and couldn't help but again note that much of the so-called “Black ops” involved there stem from similar operations connected to Afghanistan, whether in Afghanistan, in other countries, or at Guantanamo. While I believe many of the speakers today may wish to focus on silver linings for the future as well as successes over the past 30 months in Afghanistan, I hope that speakers, moderators, and our audience today will ask and answer hard questions about the dark clouds that hang over the region.

This is the service that the Middle East Institute has sought to provide over the past 58 years—gathering and disseminating information about the Middle East region, which for us ranges from Morocco in the West to Kazakhstan and Pakistan in the East. We hope today's conference makes a significant contribution in that tradition.

It is now some 30 months since U.S. and international forces landed in Afghanistan. We are here today to assess what has transpired since then and what the near future is likely to hold. Toward this end, we've assembled a formidable group of speakers and moderators, led by U.S. Ambassador William Taylor and closing with Afghanistan's ambassador, His Excellency Said Tayeb Jawad.

Some of the questions for which we hope to find at least partial answers today include: has the international community achieved its stated objectives in Afghanistan, or how much remains to be accomplished in terms of security, relief-to-development, and state-building? How have the U.S. and other members of the international community, not to mention the Afghans themselves, adapted to the evolving situation there? In this, a U.S. presidential election year, how and when can the U.S. leave, or is that the proper question at this point in time?

With these questions in mind, I turn to my colleague, Dr. John Richards, Professor of History at Duke University and President of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies, who will introduce today's keynote speaker.

John Richards:

I'm really pleased to be here. This is one of the first events that the new, fledging American Institute of Afghanistan Studies has helped to sponsor. It also helps that we're a major donor, which doesn't usually occur to us. We're usually a recipient of largesse but nonetheless this is a great occasion, and I'm very pleased to be here.

I'd like to introduce Ambassador William B. Taylor, Jr., who is currently Afghanistan Coordinator for the U.S. Department of State.

Right after the invasion of Afghanistan, he became Special Representative for Donor Assistance to Afghanistan. During that period, he was involved in the processes of the return of several million Afghan refugees to their homeland; he oversaw dozens of infrastructure projects with U.S. funds, and also various kinds of initiatives in terms of public health, education and other forms of aid to Afghanistan. Before 2001, he was Coordinator of U.S. Assistance to Europe and Eurasia in the U.S. Department of State, where he had a considerable role in the reconstruction of Kosovo and the Balkan area in that period of time. Going back in time, he was Special Deputy Defense Advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to NATO. As far back as I can trace his career, he was head of a Defense Department think tank at Fort McNair for several years.

What I think Bill Taylor's career illustrates very nicely is the intertwined kind of helix of security concerns and reconstruction, and humanitarian concerns and nation-building concerns, that concern the State Department and the Pentagon in the United States today, in a very complex way, a very complex pattern. I think he's had the experience to equip him for what is a very difficult and demanding job – that is, to oversee all of the U.S. efforts in Afghanistan from the home side, and support the ambassador and the embassy there. I look forward to his comments, because I think they'll be very fresh and very interesting to see from someone who's been so intimately involved in this venture. He's going to speak to us more specifically on "Next Steps for Afghanistan: Preparing for Elections."

Keynote Address

Ambassador William Taylor

“Next Steps in Afghanistan: Preparing for Elections”

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure and honor to be here at one of the early sessions of this group. I'm very pleased to be able to start off this afternoon of what sound like very interesting presentations. I know some of the presenters and I look forward to hearing them as well.

President Bush last night mentioned—some of you may have heard his speech on Iraq. I don't want to talk about Iraq, but I would like to talk about Afghanistan. He mentioned Afghanistan as a potential success. President Bush focused for at least a short period of time last night on the possibility that Afghanistan could succeed.

I think this is, of course, true, but I also think it's fragile. I think that we're not there yet. I think we have a lot of work yet to do. We have a lot of focus yet to devote to Afghanistan.

Afghanistan needs to succeed. We need to be able to see the development of an Islamic democracy in that part of the world—anywhere in the world, for that matter. We need to be able to see success in terms of the support that the international community can give to an Islamic republic. We need to be able to see the commitment of the United States, of the international community, of NATO, toward a project in that part of the world, in Central Asia, where we don't have a lot of successes to point to.

This is going to be very important for stability in the world. It's very important for the United States. It's crucially important for the people of Afghanistan. That, I think, is the most important thing for us to keep in mind as we move forward. This will take a long-term commitment. This will take a long-term commitment from the international community but in particular from the United States. So that will be what I'll begin with, and I hope I remember to end with that as well.

I was initially asked to address the topic of "Bonn to Berlin," from the political session that established the beginning of the new Afghan state back in the Bonn meeting—the Bonn process—all the way up through the donors conference—that was actually a very successful donors conference just a couple of months ago in Berlin—but I've decided not to do that. In fact, I asked permission not to do that and was granted that permission—and focus instead on moving forward, focus instead on where we are today and how we intend to get to an important milestone, which is the two elections, the presidential and parliamentary elections coming up in September.

The reason I wanted to do this—and I appreciate the flexibility of the Institute—is I think this will give us the opportunity to talk about various pieces of what's going on in Afghanistan, addressing some of the issues that you described, and in more detail we'll talk about some of these issues later in the afternoon. We'll get into both security as well as the politics that are involved, as they are in any election, in moving forward toward that event.

One thing I think it's important to recognize as we're thinking about Afghanistan today and what we're doing today is we're doing three big things at the same time. We are engaged in three major efforts, any one of which would be a challenge but trying to do all three of them at the same time is a major challenge. They are, of course, the expanded emphasis on demilitarization, demobilization and reintegration—the DDR that probably most people in this room are familiar with—of demobilizing, demilitarizing militias and reintegrating those militias back into society. That's a major effort. We'll talk a bit more about that.

The second big thing we're doing right now at the same time is we're going into a phase of eradication of poppy. We're going into a phase where we're actively out in fields in several parts of Afghanistan, knocking down poppy plants. We are actually using tractors to turn over fields so that that poppy, those flowers, those bulbs, cannot be harvested, and that opium cannot move through the system, all the way through the labs and on into Europe and around the world. That itself is a major effort—has potential for conflict, has potential for economic disruption. Trying to do that at the same time as we're demobilizing those militias that I mentioned in the first big thing is a challenge.

The third thing, and what I want to focus on at some length, is elections. Right now we have UN volunteers and many Afghans spread across the country of Afghanistan registering voters. We are now up to—somebody will correct me, but I think about 2.5 million voters have been registered across Afghanistan today. The estimates are anywhere from 8-10 million eligible voters—not entirely clear how many of those eligible voters will actually receive a card, which is what's going on right now. But it needs to be a major part—a large number of those eligible voters need to have that card come September, when they go into the voting booth, to be able to cast their ballot, in order to have a legitimate election. So this itself, we're talking about more than 4,000 places that these UN volunteers have to go, and these Afghan registering teams going out into the country—4,000, maybe 4,600 of these places, in very small villages, in very difficult terrain. Many people in this room have been to Afghanistan and can sympathize with the magnitude of the challenge it will be to get six, seven, eight, nine million people registered. Again, we're about 2.5 million right now.

So those are three big things that are ongoing all at the same time. I think it's useful to think about those election processes that we're now in the middle of, both from a security standpoint and from a political standpoint, and see how they apply to the rest of what we're doing in Afghanistan, on the reconstruction, on building various institutions. I think we can see it, if we just take a look at those elections.

What I'm looking forward to is your questions. I'm looking forward less to my comments and more to your questions.

Let me start off with election security. There is a plan. The Minister of Interior, Minister Jalali, who has made many visits to this city—of course, he worked in this city before he was chosen to be the minister of interior—he is responsible for the planning of the security of these elections coming up in September. This is going to be a major effort. This is no trivial exercise.

We know right now that the Taliban are not interested in seeing these elections take place. They are interested in seeing the efforts to both register and then poll the electorate in Afghanistan to fail. They have made this clear in their statements.

They're also making it clear, unfortunately, in their actions. Just this morning we heard of the Taliban taking over a district in part of Zabol. This is what they used to do, and now they are doing it again. Why? To disrupt the central government and to discredit the central government, and to be sure—they would like to be sure—that the registration and the elections don't go forward. This is a major security challenge for Minister Jalali.

Minister Jalali also has responsibility for the police, and the police will be the first line of defense, if you will, in a range of issues but including election security. So in these 4,600 polling places that we expect to see in September, there needs to be arrangements made so that the local police are able to provide security—point security—for these election booths. And it's not just the booths, of course: it's the security for the boxes as the boxes get moved back and counted. This security issue is a major effort that Minister Jalali has focused on, and his first tool is police. The United States is helping the Germans, who are in the lead on training police. We and the Germans hope to have 20,000 police freshly trained by this summer, so that's a good start. But you can do the math: 4,600 polling places and only 20,000 newly trained police is not enough. We clearly have more to do. Local police will augment those police, I'm sure.

The second line of defense that Minister Jalali has is the Afghan National Army. Here again, the Americans and the Brits and the French in particular are the ones doing the training, as you know—I don't have to go into detail on this, I think there's actually a session on this. But they will be the second line of defense for the election security. They won't be in every one of those 4,600 polling places, but they will be on call. They will be located in areas where they can respond quickly to challenges. If there are problems, if there is disruption, if there are attacks on voting places, then the ANA would presumably be called in. That we can expect, and they will need to have their mobility and their communications and all of the training with our forces that are with them—that will all have to be in place and ready to go.

The third tool that Minister Jalali has is ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force, now run by NATO, as we all know. They have the opportunity to put more troops in. One of the ideas that we've come up is the possibility that the Canadians, who are in the lead for NATO/ISAF now under General Hillier, the Canadian general, head of ISAF—the idea might be that they could stay on. They could stay on a month. They are scheduled to rotate out and hand over the command of ISAF to the Eurocorps, to the Europeans, come August. It would be good, we're suggesting, if the Canadians could stay on an extra month, if the Europeans could get there on time in August, so that in September you'd have an overlap. In September you'd have, therefore, nearly double the number of troops you would otherwise have. That would give Minister Jalali another larger tool that he can use to provide security for these elections.

Finally, standing in the largest ring, in the farthest concentric circle, are the Coalition forces. Coalition forces have played a major role in security of these kinds of events before. Think of the Constitutional Loya Jirga, where the same sets of people, the same rings of the police, the ANA, the ISAF and then finally the Coalition forces, secured successfully the Constitutional Loya Jirga in December and early January of this year. That was a major success, and the Coalition forces, I believe, played a major role in that success. You probably recall there was a Coalition offensive against the Taliban, against Al-Qaeda, against those people who had made explicit threats against the Constitutional Loya Jirga, just like the Taliban have made explicit threats against these elections coming up. So we have that to draw on as well.

All of these elements, all of these security elements, are working together under Minister Jalali. The ISAF planners, the Coalition planners, are working with the ANA and the police. They are putting together a comprehensive security plan for the elections, but it is not simple. Keep in mind those other two things I mentioned going on—DDR and counter-narcotics.

DDR requires forces, certainly in the background. DDR requires the Ministry of Defense to go out and actually provide some of the security for that. DDR requires the ANA to be on call in case there are problems coming from any of the militia commanders resistant to, reluctant to turn over their weapons.

Keep in mind there's also an eradication program going on. The eradication program for the poppy may well run into difficulties. They may well run into farmers or traffickers or landowners who are not so pleased that their farms and their fields are being turned over or being knocked down, being eradicated, their crops being eradicated. There will be challenges of security for those as well. But we're focused on the elections, and so our priority needs to be on that.

Let me say a little bit about the politics of the elections. Of course, elections are about politics. Elections are about deciding who is going to rule in Afghanistan over the next five years. The election law—actually, I just got before I walked out to come over here, by email, a copy of what I'm told is the final election law. Maybe someone else has it in this room, but I doubt it. I bet I'm the first one, but I can't tell you that I've read it, because it was literally as I was walking out the door.

But my message is, there is now an election law.

The election law does describe—at least early versions that several of us have read—does describe the process for selecting both the president, which is fairly straightforward, but also the lower house of parliament, which is less straightforward. The reason it's less straightforward is that the lower house is going to be an elected body, of course. The seats for each province will be allocated by population, as you would expect; however, we don't have a census yet, so we don't really know how many people are in each of these provinces. Therefore we don't really know yet how many delegates will come from Kandahar, just to pick a province, or from Badakhsan, or any other province for that matter.

We don't know because we don't know how many people are there. We do know how many seats there will be. There will be 249 seats in the lower house of parliament. So we have to allocate those 249 seats among 34 provinces – many of you probably recall when there were 32 provinces, now there are 34 provinces. There may be more; there may be other ideas on new provinces. But the point is, there are some decisions yet to be made on how to allocate the seats.

What this law does say is how the voters will choose who will represent Kandahar, just to pick one. Just to explain this a little bit, let's say hypothetically that there will be ten delegates, ten seats allocated to Kandahar. This applies, of course, to any other province. Let's also assume that there are three political parties that are going to be organized in Kandahar. Let's also say that there are several independent candidates who are going to be running. All of that is fine. All of that fits into the election law—that is, political parties, independent candidates.

Then the question is, how does the election work so that you can decide which ten people go to Kabul to sit on the lower house of the parliament? The way they'll do it is fairly straightforward. Every voter with a voter registration card comes in and gets one vote. Some people have suggested that maybe since they're going to get ten delegates from Kandahar, by assumption, that maybe they should have ten votes. No, they decided one vote. Then the authorities, the UN, would count up the number of votes for every one of those people who were on the ballot.

I should say what the ballot looks like. The ballot, by assumption of three parties, ten seats total, each party will have ten candidates. Each party will have ten candidates because they all assume they're going to get all ten. So there's thirty candidates right there. Then let's say there are eight independents. So eight independents will also be on the ballot. So the ballot, if I'm the voter coming into the voter booth, I get a choice of 38 people on this ballot, and I get to choose one.

So they add up all the votes after everybody votes. They see which top ten people across all those thirty-eight get the most votes.

There's one other twist that you have to keep in mind. On average, there need to be two women per province. So now if all ten of the top vote-getters in Kandahar are men, that won't work. So we have to figure out what to do about that. So they've got an idea on that. They will say that the top woman vote-getter, no matter how many she got compared to the number ten candidate, she goes and he doesn't. That way they will try to get up to this average of two women.

While it's not perfectly straightforward, it's at least well thought out. President Karzai has looked at this election law a couple times and has finally decided on this one I've described – I hope it's still in the one that's on my screen when I get back, I'm not entirely sure because I haven't seen it. But that's the way we expect it to happen.

One of the questions that I would be very interested from this group is your analysis of what that means. Ambassador Tomsen probably can figure out what it means in Kandahar under these rules that I just described. Does that mean that the most popular man—presumably it will be the most popular man—in Kandahar will get a whole lot of the votes in that province and thus the second, third and fourth get some, and thus eight, nine and ten could be elected with very few votes? That's one question. And what does that mean for the makeup of the lower house of parliament when they get up to Kabul?

Another question is—with the same assumptions—if the most popular man in Kandahar gets a whole lot of votes and he, let's say, is from Kandahar city, what does that mean about districts in the south, for example, along the Pakistan border, that are less-populated? Will there be any candidates from the south, from the districts in the south of Kandahar? Well, maybe, maybe not. This will be a very interesting question. I would love to get your sense of that kind of analysis of what do we expect the parliament—at least the lower house of parliament—to look like.

I'm going to wind up here in a moment and take questions. I should say the upper house of parliament is more complicated. It will happen later. There will be delegates selected for the upper house from each of the provinces and also each of the districts within provinces. Then there will be a third, the final third, will be designated by the president. But that will come. What we're talking about now in September is the presidential election and the lower house of the parliament.

Last thing on the presidential election, and then I will sum up. We expect—I would imagine in this room most people expect President Karzai, number one, to run, and number two, to win. This is not our call. This is not the U.S. government's call. This is the people of Afghanistan's call obviously. But the expectations are those.

It is also the case, however, that there are maybe a dozen other candidates who may well be on the ballot. This is healthy. This is good.

There had been some discussion that the mujahedin parties might coalesce around one candidate. That's still a possibility, but events indicate that they may be recognizing that President Karzai is pretty strong and that to oppose him might not be in their interest. But that then says that if they cooperate, if the other parties cooperate, what will that mean in terms of the makeup of the government? That is, will they expect to have major roles in the cabinet or in the parliament? These are interesting questions that are going to be played out over the next several months.

Let me go back to what I said at the beginning. We need to stay the course. We need to keep our eye on the long term. I've been talking about between now and September, but that's just the beginning. What we need to keep our eyes focused on is what our goal is, and our goal is to have an Afghanistan that stands on its feet, that is secure, that can defend itself. It can have an army and a police force and other institutions that make it a real state. It needs to be able to have prospects for its people, that they can be educated and that health care is provided. We need to be sure that we as the international community have supported them until they are standing on their feet, and that could be a long time. We need to maintain that focus.

With that, I'll be glad to take your questions.