Countering Terrorism: The Fall of Kabul and its Aftermath

Transcript

JAMES M. LINDSAY: (In progress)—fellow here at the Brookings Institution and coordinator of the Brookings project on terrorism and the American foreign policy.

I want to welcome you to another in our regular series of briefings on America's war against terrorism. Since the last time we gathered in this room, there have been tremendous changes on the ground in Afghanistan. Last week there were mounting complaints that the war was going too slow, there was no evidence of progress, military officials were counseling patience and acknowledging—in the words of Admiral Stufflebeem—the tenaciousness of the Taliban fighters. There was a lot of grumbling, particularly on the right end of the political spectrum about the administration's half-measures in Afghanistan, and even some whispers about—starting to think about trying to find face-saving ways to extract the United States from its involvement in Afghanistan.

This week the problems are entirely different. This week the problems are that the war is going much too fast. Mazar-e Sharif has fallen, Taliban forces have abandoned, in a none-too-orderly fashion, the capital city of Kabul. The Northern Alliance, after initially pledging to stay of Kabul, has rolled in—not only has rolled in, but apparently some of its forces may have pushed as much as 50 miles past Kabul toward Kandahar. Our reports this morning show even greater defections among Taliban forces. There's at least one report that Taliban forces had abandoned the eastern city of Jalalabad; that Pashtun opposition groups were forming and moving on Kandahar; also reports that Taliban forces, rather than—as initially reported—attempting to make a last-ditch stand at Kandahar, are themselves abandoning Kandahar and heading to the mountains to the east and west of the Kabul-Kandahar road.

Now the administration no doubt prefers to have this week's set of problems than to have last week's set of problems, but nonetheless, the rapid military gains do pose problems for the administration. On the military front remains the question of what the U.S. military should do first. General strategy in these situations is to try to exploit the adversary's retreat. How do you do that? What's the most effective way to do it? To what extent should U.S. military forces, as opposed to Northern Alliance or Afghan fighters, do it? And again, keeping in mind that the ultimate objective is not simply to route Taliban forces, but to destroy Al Qaeda, and particularly to capture or kill Mr. bin Laden.

On the humanitarian front, a whole series of issues are raised about what should be done immediately, in the near term, to bring aid to impoverished Afghanis, and particularly given that winter is about to begin in Afghanistan.

Political, security questions: What happens next in Kabul? Is it time to bring in a multi-national—perhaps U.N., perhaps all-Muslim—peacekeeping force—an issue that has been bandied about in the last couple of days. If so, what role would a country like Pakistan have to play in it?

Another set of political issues raised by the Northern Alliance entry into Kabul has to do with its consequences for U.S.-Pakistani relations. Does this pose a threat to General Musharraf's rule in Pakistan? And also, a broader set of considerations in terms of what this means and how the events in Afghanistan will effect the Arab world, and how this will be perceived, and also whether or not rapid military events on the ground in Afghanistan may create some space for the administration to launch political initiatives in the Middle East peace process.

To help us answer these and other questions are my distinguished colleagues here from Brookings. To my far right is Michael O'Hanlon, senior fellow and expert on defense studies here at Brookings, and the author, most recently, of "Defending America: The Case for National Missile Defense," a relevant topic given that Mr. Putin is in the country. To his left is Martin Indyk, senior fellow, again, in foreign policy studies and two-time U.S. ambassador to Israel. And immediately to my right is Stephen Cohen, senior fellow at Brookings and author of, among many other books, "The Pakistan Army."

We're going to begin this morning with Mike O'Hanlon.

MICHAEL E. O'HANLON: Thanks, Jim. I think this is very good news what we've seen in the last couple of days, and as Jim put it, this week's problems, as much as they may be still significant, are much better than last week's. And I personally have been very worried about the ability of a 15,000-strong, rag-tag coalition group to defeat a 40- to 50,000-strong Taliban backed up by several thousand dedicated Arab fighters in the kinds of circumstances and kinds of poverty we see in Afghanistan. So I had great concern about this battle stagnating, getting bogged down. It still may, but clearly what we've seen in the last few weeks or—excuse me, last few days is, to my mind, extremely encouraging.

The military problem here has to be solved for any of the other parts of our strategy to work. There was a real chance that it was going to, and as I say, it still may not in the highland regions or in Kandahar, but I'm extremely encouraged. So mark me down as a happy guy today and as an optimist who would also want to congratulate the Northern Alliance and the U.S. military and the Bush administration for what has been a very good last few days.

But let me focus in my brief remarks on two main things. One is the big question of what's really going on here. Are we seeing a tactical retreat by the Taliban or are we seeing essentially a breakdown of its forces? There's probably some elements of both going on, but it's worth trying to analyze which pieces of evidence we see in support of each possible hypothesis because that will tell us a lot about what may be coming next.

And then, secondly, I want to talk about what I see as the big question, and my colleagues are more expert at assessing it than I am, so I will just begin to develop the question, but it's the basic question of how do you get the Pashtun to start defecting. If they don't, I fear that one way or another this war will still bog down, and therefore, I think we really have to think of all the instruments at our disposal—military, economic, political and otherwise—to try to encourage that kind of process.

In terms of this big question—what's going on on the battlefield? Have the Taliban just turned into chickens, as their fearless leader, Mullah Omar, seems to be calling them in his not-to-friendly encouragement to his own fighters to stop retreating and get serious? Or are they essentially retreating tactically to the south where they have a stronger ethnic base to they can fight more effectively there?

I don't know. I would lean more towards thinking this is a breakdown of the Taliban than I would have guessed even possible a few days ago, but we still don't know how they're going to behave in the south in their own bastion.

In terms of evidence that might suggest this is nothing more than a tactical retreat and we'll still see a very strong Taliban resistance at some future date, we have, of course, the basic ethnic fact that the Taliban would never have expected, in some ways, to be very strong up north. The fact that they could hold on to Mazar-e Sharif for so long was, for a long time, very disquieting and surprising, and it's no huge surprise in the end that they could not sustain that presence. They don't have such overwhelming numerical superiority on the battlefield that they could sustain a force hundreds of miles away from their real bastion of ethnic and political strength indefinitely, especially in the fact of American air power.

So, on the one hand, this would suggest they're simply realizing the north was never their real stronghold, never a place where they could mount a stalwart defense, and they've simply decided, given the evidence that the United States is somewhat serious about this, given the evidence that the Northern Alliance is holding together as a coalition, they've essentially decided that it's not worth the fight up there.

Another argument, suggesting this may be a calculated tactical retreat by the Taliban more than anything else, is the idea that historically air power has a hard time really turning the tide of the battle. Now in the Persian Gulf War it did a great deal in Kosovo; it ultimately did a great deal. But this has been a relatively short bombing campaign, especially in terms of the concentrated part of the campaign with a hundred sorties a day—B-52 and B-1 and B-2 bombers—intensive use of these instruments against Taliban front-line positions. And while I am very respectful of the capabilities of modern American air power, this has been a relatively short campaign, and I would have expected it might have taken a few more weeks, even up north and even—or certainly around Kabul, to dislodge the Northern Alliance—or excuse me, the Taliban forces using air power as a primary instrument.

So again, that suggests that perhaps the Taliban have not been soundly defeated so much as they've decided to go to phase two, pull back and fight more in the south. And of course, they still do outnumber Northern Alliance forces in the country, as much as we can tell. They probably still have 35,000 people on their side. Obviously a lot of Taliban are considering the idea of retreating into the landscape, going home to their villages, not fighting, not remaining part of this force, but in terms of the number who have been killed or captured, we don't have a lot of numbers coming out at us yet from the U.S. military or from the press. But again, based on historical norms in combat, it would be very surprising if the Taliban lost more than a few thousand people in the last week. So I would think they still outnumber the Northern Alliance two-to-one countrywide. That suggests, again, they still have the wherewithal to fight. Perhaps they've simply elected to exercise a tactical retreat. That's the evidence on one side of the ledger. And I'm putting it out this way because I don't really have a strong enough argument to defend and come up with a bottom-line conclusion and then try to base my whole presentation around defending that conclusion. I'm thinking this through and just trying to share, for whatever it's worth, my analysis with you up until this point.

However, there is evidence, as I say, suggesting this may be a full-fledged breakdown of the Taliban, or at least that such an event could be in the works. One is, of course, the rapidity with which all of these recent developments have occurred after several weeks of the Taliban looking like it really wanted to hold on. It tried to hold on to the northern cities for many weeks; now it has simply decided—it simply seems to be losing, city by city—not all as part of a single, synchronized movement, but more as a series of battles that suggest sort of a breakdown. It's not as if you saw the Taliban simply retreat from all the these cities in one day. It took them several days to be defeated. It doesn't seem to have been, therefore, a single decision from Kandahar or Kabul to pull out.

It seems more to look like a breakdown where one day the Taliban forces lose in Mazar-e Sharif, the next day they lose in Taliqan or Herat, and finally just—they decide not to fight in Kabul. It's sequential, it has a feeling of a snowballing effect, it has the feeling of being driven by the Northern Alliance and the American air power in the theater as opposed to a single decision by Kandahar or by Omar to pull back his forces. That suggests to me it's breakdown. Also, of course, Omar's own remarks that his troops should stop retreating like chickens and put up a fight. That tends to tell you something right there. Maybe that's partly a ruse for our benefit, but it sounds to me like he really is worried about the fighting power of his own forces.

Now even if he's disappointed in what they've been doing the last couple of days, he may still feel—and he may still be right—that he can rally these forces in the southern part of the country. But clearly, his own comments suggest this is more of a breakdown than a tactical retreat. The fact that Kabul was essentially surrendered without a fight—very surprising to me. I admit to being totally wrong on this. I thought Mazar-e Sharif would fall within a few weeks; I never thought Kabul would fall in the immediate short-order thereafter. I thought it would take many more weeks of intensive air power and perhaps even some American use of transport helicopters to fly Northern Alliance fighters over Taliban lines. I thought we'd have to consider a lot of fairly drastic measures in order to win the victory in Kabul, and I was proven 100 percent wrong on that, and thank God. I'm very glad to be wrong. But I'm surprised, and that suggests, again, that this is more of a breakdown in the Taliban than a decision to retreat tactically.

On balance, what I think we have to assume, however, is that the Taliban can still recover in the south. I think we certainly have two distinct possibilities: one, the Taliban will fight hard in Kandahar and other cities in the south; secondly, even if they don't do that, they'll fight hard up in the mountains, and of course, that's where Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants are more than likely located, and therefore, we haven't really solved this problem definitively unless we can do even better than we've been doing this week.

On balance, therefore, I think we really have to think about this remaining question that I mentioned I would finish with, and I'll just get it on the table: How do you get the Pashtun tribesmen, tribal chiefs in the south to defect from the Taliban? How do you get them to come over to the side of the opposition? Because without their population, without their fighters, without their raw numbers and also their knowledge of the southern part of the country, I don't see how 15,000 Northern Alliance forces can consolidate control over this country, even if they manage to get Kandahar, which would probably be because of a Taliban decision to withdraw rather than a military victory per se. Even if they get Kandahar, they're not going to get bin Laden, they're not going to consolidate control, and you could have essentially a role reversal where the Taliban keeps 20 percent of the country, the Northern Alliance keeps 80 percent, and that's as far as it goes, and it stagnates at that point.

So in order to avoid that very, very probable—or certainly very possible outcome, we really have to get Pashtun to defect. I'm, again, not the best person on this panel to talk in detail about how, but I will simply say I don't think we really know how to get Pashtun to defect, which means we have to try every instrument we can think of—not only bribery, not only sending—or trying to encourage various Pashtun to go into the region and try to be the nucleus of some kind of a defection process, but also we have to offer economic inducements in a future, post-Taliban government. We have to promise the Pashtun that a lot of economic aid will be delivered at the regional level so they won't be essentially excluded from the benefits of a new government by their Northern Alliance would-be partners. We have to give them reason to think they will benefit in a new government, even if the Northern Alliance remains untrustworthy in their eyes, as it almost certainly will.

We need to figure out ways to maintain the military momentum. That's why this week has been very good. The Pashtun are not going to defect, in my judgment, unless they think the Taliban is going to lose, and the only reason that they're going to think the Taliban is going to lose is if the Taliban is losing. Defeat begets defeat in this sense because part of what you're trying to do is encourage defections from people who are watching the tide of battle because they want to be on the side of the winner, and if they think that the resistance is going to win, they're going to be more apt to defect. That's just a broad judgment based on no intimate knowledge of the Pashtun tribes, but simply a broad generalization from military history, and so my colleagues can comment with more expertise on the specifics of this particular country and this situation.

And finally, I think that we obviously do need to think about various kinds of political structures that would involve the Pashtun and provide for their security in a post- Taliban regime. To me the real key here is to maintain a very strong sense of regional government, and not just for economics, not just for the dispersal of economic aid, but even for providing security. I don't think we want to ask the Pashtun to be part of a future government in which their forces will quickly have to be reintegrated into a Northern-Alliance dominated, unified force. If that happens, I don't believe they're going to have enough trust in the Northern Alliance and in the Uzbeks and Tajiks to want to play that game.

We're better off—as silly as this may sound—we're better off, I think, with a Bosnia model where you have a very weak federal structure and you have security essentially provided at the regional level by the local ethnic groups, at least in the short term. You want to work ways—figure out ways to integrate these forces over time, but in the short term, we want to tell the Pashtun the kind of confederal structure we have in mind for the future is one in which Tajiks and Uzbeks will have only a limited role in governing the south. They will have primary responsibility for governing the south and maintaining security in the south themselves. If we do all these different things, I think we have a chance of getting more Pashtun to defect, and that's really going to be the requirement if we're going to succeed with the fight in the highlands from this point on.

MR. LINDSAY: Thank you, Mike. I appreciate your mea culpas, but in your defense, let me point out that the Pentagon, certainly in its public pronouncements and also in its private comments reported as late as last Friday, hardly anticipated the fall of Kabul, either. So you are not alone in that.

We will now turn to my colleague, Stephen Cohen, to talk a little bit about Pakistan issues, relations with Afghanistan.

STEPHEN PHILIP COHEN: Let me—let me add a few words on the military side of what's going on now. Let me preface my remarks by a comment that I heard from my friend in the State Department. I had a meeting with him yesterday afternoon, and he said—he works on South Asian affairs—he said that policy papers written in the morning are obsolete by the afternoon. Things are changing so quickly that they are operating in a real-time basis. I mean, it's just telephone calls and actions and policy. There's not much looking ahead, and things are happening faster than they could—they're very delighted at what's going on, but, listen, they've said that—several friends have said that this is a unique experience in terms of their lives in the U.S. government.

There's one aspect of the military side of the war that I think needs to be highlighted, and it's just beginning to emerge now; that is, that the Taliban and al Qaeda have an option other than going to the hills or standing and fighting, and that is they can go to Pakistan. And the Pakistanis are extremely alarmed at the prospect of several thousand Taliban crossing into Pakistan, plus the Arabs as well. Most of them are located across the border in and around Kandahar from the Pakistani city of Quetta. Quetta is—Quetta, in the environs, was where most of the Taliban got their education, also further to the north and the northwest frontier province. Quetta is in Pakistan's Baluchistan province, although that part of Baluchistan is dominated by Pashtuns—by Pashtun tribals.

If they cross over into Pakistan, then they might find—I doubt it, but they might find a population that is reasonably welcoming; that is, these are—these would be fellow tribesmen, many of them related to the Taliban corps themselves, and this presents Pakistan with a dilemma. The notion of American bombers flying over Pakistan and bombing Pakistani territory is out of the question, so we couldn't follow them into what would be a safe haven—Pakistan—yet the notion of the Pakistan army going and fighting these people is also out of the question, so Pakistan is very worried about the Taliban elements coming into their own country and possibly taking—you know, finding places there and hunkering down for the long haul.

I don't think that's going to happen. I think they're dissolving very, very quickly. Before I wrote the Pakistan army book 30 years ago, I wrote a book on the Indian army, about the British Indian army, and one of the interesting things about the British Indian army was that the British picked up different castes and different groups from all over South Asia and turned them into soldiers, creating the Indian army, which was the largest volunteer army in history. Over a million and a half volunteers fought in World War II on the side of the British.

One of the persistent problems that the British had—and this is true of the Pakistanis—is that it's very difficult to get tribal warriors into a regular army. They simply cannot be controlled easily, and in fact, the British gave up on the Baluch, which are closely related to the Pashtuns. The Pathans can be made into soldiers, but it requires a lot of professional competence, expertise, requires a very good officer corps, and even then they tend to break loose and run wild, you know, shooting their officers, shooting civilians. They're not exactly—if you want to have an exciting army, you—an exciting battle, you bring in the Pathans. They're ferocious, very war-like, but often uncontrollable.

That is one reason why Afghanistan has not been a coherent state. It cannot form an army. Afghanistan doesn't need a nation—it is a nation, but it needs a state, and the core of any state in the world is an army, a military organization that can maintain at least a modicum of law and order over the entire territory. And the reason Afghanistan has been invaded, has fallen into civil war time and time again is that it has never been able to produce a professional army of any sort. The Russians tried it, the Taliban tried is using ideology. It doesn't work, and I—you know, it has something to do with the ethnic and tribal qualities of Afghans, and it has a lot to do with the absence of an Afghan middle class that can be professional officers in the Western sense of the word.

So I think that one of the problems that—I'm not worried about the Taliban holding up someplace and fighting to the end. I think that they're going to melt back to their villages, they're going to shave off their beards, they're going to disappear into Afghan society. Some will wind up on the Pakistan side. They could cause a problem if they went to Karachi, and Karachi is a very fragile, explosive city in its own right; it always has been. And the addition of another five or six thousand Afghans, armed to the teeth, looking for vengeance, looking more for material things than anything else—that could further destabilize Karachi, but I think the army can control—Pakistan army can control them. So I see the Taliban as eventually history. They're just going to evaporate and disappear.

Al Qaeda may be something else. You have a group of anywhere between 500 and 1,000 Arabs—it's going to be harder for them to melt away and hide themselves, but I suspect that many of them have plans to escape out of South Asia back to where they came from or try and disappear into the Gulf.

So I think that the military side of this, in terms of an organized opposition in Afghanistan, I think that's pretty much finished, and fortunately, we may not need American ground troops. I thought that we would have to use American ground forces in the south to mop up the remaining Taliban units. We might still see them in some numbers trying to find al Qaeda leadership and Mullah Omar and Taliban leadership, but I—my guess—and it has been from the beginning, is that some day at some—in some village somebody is going to say, you know, we have him, come and get him, and there will be a corpse of Osama bin Laden. That would solve the Pakistani problem. Somebody would get a reward. You don't want him talking and explaining exactly who he got his support from. Also the—you know, so I think his guards and people around him, especially the Afghans are—you know, he has more to fear from them than, perhaps, from American bombing in the next few days.

Turning to the big issues of South—how this impacts on South Asia, I think in our very first presentation I outlined the post-war goals of the United States and what our objectives might be in South Asia, and I was uncertain as to whether we could achieve them, but I thought that there were three major goals that we had in mind if the war went reasonably well, and of course it's going much better than I think any—even the wildest optimist would have predicted.

The first is the reconstruction of Afghanistan. The world is going to be deeply engaged in this rebuilding and reconstruction process. We're going to have a conference here in December on this very subject, and I won't say much more about that, but there does seem to be a genuine international commitment to do what was not done earlier, and that is to rebuild, reconstruct Afghanistan. This means rebuilding the economy, rebuilding the canals on which Afghan agriculture is based, which would allow them to grow normal crops instead of opium. It means a lot of things. It means a bureaucracy of some sort. It probably means encouraging the overseas Afghan community to come back to their homeland and develop and operate many of the institutions that have long since been destroyed in Afghanistan. That's a long, complicated problem of state building, but I think it can be done, and I think the international support will be there for it.

As I've said earlier, the one difficult task—and here Kosovo and the Balkans is probably an important parallel—is how do you develop an army for Afghanistan which is powerful enough to keep law and order, but not so powerful that it threatens the status and the power of the various regional, tribal warlords in Afghanistan, and that's where the political power is based in that country. It's not based in Kabul, it's not based in Kandahar; it's based in the various tribes and sub-tribes of the Afghan people, and there are many, many of them, and even the Pashtuns are divided into many, many different tribes who love to fight each other as much as foreigners.

So I think getting that balance right between an army which is more than a police force, but not so threatening—it has to be more than a police force, but not so much more than a police force that it does threaten the various regional warlords and tribal leaders in Afghanistan. That's going to be a difficult balance to find, but I think it can be done. I suspect they'll probably bring in some other Islamic countries to train an officer corps for Afghanistan, and ironically, the one country that could do it very well in the world—they're the Turks—the Turks or the Pakistanis may create some political problems—the one country that could do it very well—that has a professional army that's an almost entirely Muslim country, a professional army that's very competent, experienced in peacekeeping—is Bangladesh. We don't think of Bangladesh as a land of martial warriors, but Bangladesh shares in that old British Indian army tradition of a professional officer corps and a large peasant-based army, which is quite effective, and the Bangladeshis could, in fact, be one of those countries that provide technical military training to the Afghans—they'll create in a new Afghanistan. That will be an incredible irony because historically the Bengalis were very much afraid of Pathans, who would come in from the northwest and invade Bengal, and I think, though, that Bangladesh, in that aspect of the country, has a professional, modern outlook and could certainly help in Afghanistan.

Okay, the second post-war objective—although this is something that is going to be going on while the war is being—while the war is winding up, is to restore U.S.-Pakistan relations, and this has gone much further and much faster than anybody would have dreamt in the past. I think I said at the very first session that Musharraf's decision to join the coalition, even though he didn't have much of a choice, was a historic decision in terms of the future of Pakistan.

Pakistan was on a very dangerous and frightening road, and many Pakistanis were frightened as to where they were going. And at least temporarily, that journey has been postponed, and Pakistan is moving in another direction. I think it will require a lot of American assistance and encouragement—not in military support, but in terms of helping Pakistan reconstruct its institutions, as well—its universities, its educational system, doing away with the madrassas or creating madrassas which also teach modern subjects. It's a whole series of items that those of us who have worked on and in Pakistan understand, and I think there is a commitment from the U.S. government now to assist in this process; at least there is a verbal commitment. Whether they'll stick to it or not is another question. I would personally hold them responsible. I mean, I have a lot of friends in this administration, and their friendship—I think my friendship will depend in part on whether they stick to what they said they would do, and I think it's an important American goal, and they should carry through here.

Thirdly, this situation has put us in a unique position historically. We are now exactly between India and Pakistan. We had been developing a strong relationship with the Indians; we've now revived our relationship with Pakistan. We are uniquely placed in the world to be a go-between to help facilitate the process of India-Pakistan normalization. Until this war began, nobody in this administration wanted to touch that with a ten-foot pole. You know, as one senior official said to me before he went in—he said, "We don't have a dog in this fight. Why should we get involved in the India-Pakistan conflict?" He said, "Let's support the Indians. Forget about the Pakistanis."

Well, that's not going to work. We can't abandon the Pakistanis now. We're stuck with them, they're stuck with us at least temporarily, so we are in a unique position to serve as a facilitator for India-Pakistan peace process, to move those two countries down the road to normalization.

The Indians—the Pakistanis would welcome this. The Indians publicly have rejected the notion of American mediation, but I don't think it has to be mediation. It has to be something short of mediation which still moves those two countries down a road of normalization, especially since they are nuclear weapon states, and as of last—as of yesterday, there was firing going on along the line of control. The Pakistani press reported an Indian company attacked a Pakistani unit.

I don't think—I think this is just sound and light effects. I don't think there's anything serious behind it, but clearly this is an accident waiting to happen. And with our new relationship with Pakistan, our recently improved relationship with India, I think we are very well placed to encourage the two—provide inducements as well as possibly sanctions to move them down that road.

Let me say one word about the Indian response to all of this. The Indians are sore winners. The Indians come out very good in this whole process. Afghanistan has been cleaned up as a base for training terrorists, many of whom wound up in India. Pakistan is now on the road to normalization. The Indians feel left out, isolated, unhappy for not getting the headlines that Musharraf got, but I think that they've actually come out way ahead in this whole process. Not only has their relationship with America been preserved, but their relationship with Pakistan has some potential for dramatic improvement.

MR. LINDSAY: Well, thank you very much, Steve. And thank you also for reminding us that while this war in Afghanistan has created problems for U.S. foreign policy, it has also created opportunities.

And now we'll turn it over to Martin Indyk.

MARTIN INDYK: Speaking of opportunities—I have six points, and I'll try to go quickly over them so we can get to questions. What I wanted to focus on was, first of all, the reaction in the Middle East to what is happening in the campaign on terror, in particular what's happening in Afghanistan.

The first point is that Arab leaders in general have been adopting a wait-and-see approach. Whether they are allies or whether they are harborers of terrorists, Middle Eastern leaders are balancing their fear of street reaction against our war in Afghanistan, balancing that with a desire to avoid being on the wrong side of us, especially if we are going to be the winners. So they are, in essence, sitting on the fence, making clear their common position that there should be no attack on an Arab country, no Israel in the coalition against terror, that we should solve the Palestinian problem in order to stop the terrorism, and to the extent that they advance any positive agenda, it's in the form of President Mubarak's call for an international conference on terrorism, something which is gaining no resonance anywhere but it's still repeated as a way of trying to focus on something positive that they would do for the war on terror.

The interesting thing about this, and my second point, is that while they fear the street, in fact it's emerging very clearly that their fear is vastly exaggerated. In fact, one of the most interesting things about this conflict as it has developed is, you remember all of the stories about the rage and the anger in the Arab street; well, ladies and gentlemen, the Arab street has, for all intents and purposes, been quiet. The statistics are quite interesting on this. In the first week, when we began bombing Afghanistan, there were nine demonstrations in the Arab world; in the second week there were three; in the third week there was one; and in the fourth week there were two; and after that there was none—unless, of course, you count 2,000 demonstrators in Nazareth last week—but for those of you not familiar with the geography of the Middle East, Nazareth is actually in Israel.

And this quiet comes at a time when we had, over the last two weeks, a determined effort by Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar to incite the street. Mullah Omar, two weeks ago, called for 72 hours of demonstrations. There were none in response in the Arab world. And it comes also at a time—this quiet over the last few weeks—when we have been bombing daily in Afghanistan. Al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite television, has been broadcasting, non-stop, reports of civilian casualties, bombing of hospitals. And when they're not focused on that, they're showing images of the Israeli army moving into seven West Bank cities—Israeli tanks rolling into those cities. So, it was in a way the most extreme test, and the Arab street was quiet.

Well, we shouldn't be surprised about this. In fact, after the first month of the Intifada, for the last 12 months, the Arab street has been quiet while the violence has been going on between Israel and the Palestinians. And indeed, for the last two years, while we have been bombing in Iraq to respond to Saddam Hussein's challenges to our Air Force in the no-fly zones, the Arab street has also been quiet, all the more so the case when it's Afghanistan, which is not generally regarded in the Middle East as part of the Arab world, and when it's Osama bin Laden and the Taliban that are getting punished here.

For all of the reporting of some kind of satisfaction in the Arab street that the United States was getting its comeuppance, reality is that the Arab street does not want to be identified with these terrorist actions. And the Palestinians took the lead in this, despite the celebrations in the first few days, when the Palestinian leadership came out and rebutted Osama bin Laden's claims that he was doing this on behalf of the Palestinians. Indeed, we had Nabil Shaath, the foreign minister of the Palestinian Authority here in Brookings last week saying exactly that: that they do not accept that Osama bin Laden is doing this for the Palestinians.

But beyond that, I think that there is, in the Arab street, a sense that there's really no point, that no change is going to come anyway, that the governments are not going to respond—they haven't for the last three decades—to public concerns in this regard. And finally, it's beginning to sink in and people are beginning to be much more focused on the economic consequences for them; particularly, for example, in Egypt where tourism has been devastated by what has happened and they're beginning to understand that this is going to have dramatic ramifications for the Egyptian economy. The continued low price of oil similarly is beginning to focus their minds on the way in which it will affect their stomachs rather than their hearts and minds.

This in fact leads to my third point, which is that the Arab leaders have much more leeway than they think they have. Since they are out of touch with the Arab street, they fear it. They don't know what the feeling of the people really is. They in fact are operating out of fear when they should be—and we should expect them to be—operating with some kind of courage in this situation. We can in fact demand more from them, and we should do so.

Especially that is the case—and my fourth point—because winning changes everything for them. They have been basically testing the wind to see, much like the Pashtuns, which way the wind's going to blow. When it looked like we were getting bogged down, then they were even more firmly sitting on the fence. Now, we look like winners, and efficacy counts for everything in this part of the world. If we are winners—they certainly don't want to be on the side of the losers, and they will want to be more and more on our side which again increases our leverage.

This raises the question of phase two. I think Mike O'Hanlon and Steve Cohen have made clear that there's a hell of lot more that still needs to be done in phase one, but phase two is going to become of much more interest, particularly in the Middle East, as it looks like we are achieving our objectives in Afghanistan.

Here I think that President Bush has made very clear, in his address to the United Nations on Saturday, what the agenda will be, and his determination in this regard is very important and I think needs to be applauded. What he said very clearly was, there's no such thing as good terror, there is nothing that can justify the killing of innocents, and those regimes that harbor terrorists will pay a price. The debate in Washington over the last—in fact since September 11th —about Iraq, has tended to obscure what I believe really should be the agenda. Absent some more compelling evidence of Iraqi involvement in the events of September 11th or the anthrax attacks, Iraq remains as an issue of weapons of mass destruction much more than an issue of state sponsorship of terrorism, and we need to be very concerned about Iraq's capabilities in that regard.

But the issue of terrorism when it comes to phase two needs to be focused on those that are really sponsoring and harboring terrorists—Iran, Syria, and Syria's client, Lebanon—and they understand very well that they are in the president's sights. The naming of Hezbollah and Hamas as terrorist organizations with global reach; the demand on the Lebanese government to shut down the financing of Hezbollah, a demand that the Lebanese have so far rejected; the listing of the number two man in Hezbollah, Imad Mugniyah, on the list of America's 22 most wanted terrorists all send a very clear signal in that regard, and we need to begin to focus on what it is that we would expect them to do to deny these terrorist groups safe havens. In fact, we could trade off—absent any evidence to the contrary, trade off the threat that they are very concerned about our war on Iraq for greater support in the Arab world, for our insistence that these states stop harboring terrorists and, at the same time, greater support for a tighter containment strategy designed to do more to prevent Saddam Hussein from acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

In other words, in phase two we need to be concentrating on shutting down state sponsorship of terrorism in the Middle East rather than, I would argue, going for a confrontation with Iraq. There's another practical reason for this as well, which is that while we have been hotly debating what we should do about Iraq, we have failed, I think, to notice that all of Iraq's neighbors, whom we would need to be on our side for any kind of military operation there, have made very clear to us that they will not participate; Saudi Arabia and Turkey being the key players here, let alone Egypt, as well. So I think that in the coming phase we do need to think about, talk about and focus on the state sponsorship of terrorism in the Middle East.

Finally, and this is something that I think is already overdue, we should reengage in the effort to stop the violence in the Israeli-Palestinian arena. I say it's overdue because I believe that, unlike the rest of the Middle East, both Israel and the Palestinians have recognized since September the 11th that they need to—they have a greater need now to stop the violence. Yasser Arafat has been taking steps, but in typical Arafat fashion, when he gets to the hard part, which is arresting the terrorists, he hesitates. Ariel Sharon has also been withdrawing the Israeli army from West Bank territories that are supposed to be under Palestinian control, and as a result of the actions that both of them have taken, there has been a notable quieting down of the violence in the last couple of weeks.

The talk of an American initiative has in fact made them both nervous and welcoming. I think that both of them have come to recognize that, left to their own devices, they are unable to break out of this cycle of violence, that they need outside support for this effort, and that only the United States can provide the kind of leadership that would enable them to take the steps that are difficult and unpopular for their own publics and for their own extremists in order to break the cycle of violence, stop the terrorism and get the process back on track. I think it's important that the United States do this, not only because there's an opportunity, not only because it's in our interest to do so, not only because it would take away an excuse from those Arab leaders who are now hesitating, but also because the opportunity exists to get the process back on track and therefore we should seize the moment.

The initiative should not be too ambitious. We cannot, and we should not imagine that we could, jump from a year of the most extreme violence and terrorism to negotiating again the final status issues of such things as Jerusalem and refugees. What we can do is get the parties to fulfill their commitments already made to us, to implement the Tenet plan, which is designed to stop the violence and arrest the terrorists, and implement the Mitchell recommendations, which is designed to build confidence and to set the process on the path back to a resumption of negotiations. Both sides have accepted the Tenet plan and the Mitchell recommendations; we do not need to reinvent the wheel in that regard. What we do need to do is become more energetically engaged on the ground in terms of twisting Yasser Arafat's arm when it comes to arresting the terrorists and then, as he does so, working with Sharon to get him to ease the pressure on the Palestinians to open the closures, the passages, and re-deploy the Israeli army.

Thank you very much.

MR. LINDSAY: Thank you, Martin, for that incisive tour of the issues in the Arab world.

We will now go to the question and answer session. We are going to have a microphone, so if you could wait for the microphone to come. And we will give the first question to Mr. Schorr.

Q: Thank you. Dan Schorr of National Public Radio. There is talk now of assembling, under United Nations auspices, a peacekeeping force of countries like Bangladesh, Morocco, Jordan—apparently all Islamic countries. Is there any precedent for an international peacekeeping force drawn primarily or entirely from countries of one religion?

MR. O'HANLON: NATO—(laughter)—any operation that NATO doesn't do with Turkey.

And as you know, Dan, even apart from those cases which are real, there are situations in which the Jordanians, the Bangladeshis, the Pakistanis and the Malaysians are the primary contributors because they tend to like peacekeeping and they do it well, and we often call on them. So there have been a number of operations I think where they have probably been well over half, but otherwise I think the answer is probably no to your question.

MR. COHEN: Yeah, in Somalia there was a Pakistani and a Bangladeshi contingent. There were Americans there, also. To me, the big problem is going to be the notion of peacekeeping in Afghanistan. It just doesn't compute. There's just no—and I'm not quite sure if any country would eagerly send their young men to Afghanistan to serve as targets for the Afghans. I mean, it's not a kind of country which is going to welcome outsiders in that role. Historically—now maybe if the peacekeepers come wearing rescue and relief equipment, maybe the psychology will change. But historically the Afghans have loved to see people come into their country; they just shoot at them and kill them. It's an old tradition, beginning with Alexander the Great who crossed through 400 B.C

So I think that there is a—there may be some question as to how eager these countries would be to actually do it, but would a U.N. presence with American military logistics support providing assistance, conceivably American air power on call if necessary, I can see two or three countries—three or four countries actually doing it, Bangladesh in particular.

MR. LINDSAY: This gentleman right here.

Q: Paul de la Garza with the St. Petersburg Times. I was wondering if you could go back to what Michael asked initially to address the issue of how do you get the Pashtun in the South to defect, and wondering if you could shed any light on what we've been doing so far. My understanding is that CIA, for example, has been trying to bribe some individuals. And then yesterday, Secretary Rumsfeld said that we have special forces in the South

And then, the other question that I had, I wanted to go to something that, I think it was Mr. Cohen said, that Osama bin Laden should be more afraid of his own security than American bombs, and I was wondering what you meant by that.

MR. COHEN: As to the lighter point, he's going to be seen, or he may be seen now, as a reward, not as an ally by some of the people around him. I could see them turning him over very quickly. There's an Afghan tradition of hospitality; when somebody comes to your house you take—even when an enemy comes to your house, you take them in, you feed them, then you send them out, and then you start shooting at him only after he gets over the horizon. (Laughter.)

In this case, he may not be seen as a friend or as a guest. He may be seen as a person who brought a lot of damage down on the Afghan people. So I think—and the Pakistanis in particular probably would just as soon him not talk about where he got his assistance for al Qaeda, who his liaison people were and so forth. So I think that a lot of people would find it in their interest to produce a dead Osama bin Laden rather than a live Osama bin Laden.

As to the question of defections for the Afghans, every war the Afghans have fought historically the result of the war has not been through massive infantry charges, through great feats of bravery; it's been through the defection of one side or another side, bits and pieces. And this has already begun in the North and will happen in the South. This is simply—you know, Afghans are great fighters. There's no question that it's a warrior society. But they do not have the kind of systematic, long-term interest in becoming engaged in a struggle. The Communists found that out, the Taliban found that out, that Islam can't unit them. So, they will be defecting all the time. And, in any case, the winter's coming on and that's not the fighting season. Even during the Soviet war, the fighting basically stopped and people went home, sold their rifles on the bazaar, got the money, then they signed up again in the spring and got new rifles, went off and fought the Soviets. And this was a process that went on for nine years. So I suspect that the Taliban will melt away very quickly. There won't be an organized Taliban. There may be a small leadership fleeing for its life, possibly in Pakistan.

MR. LINDSAY: In the back.

Q: Yes, my name is Mary Mullen. I work with the Bosnia Support Committee.

How is what's happening in Afghanistan and trying to solve this problem in Afghanistan—how is that going to affect domestic terrorism and what's happening here in the United States and perhaps in Europe? What is the connection? If the Taliban are defeated in Afghanistan, what is going to be the change in the terrorism that's outside of Afghanistan that may be connected to bin Laden?

MR. LINDSAY: Do you want to take that, Mike?

MR. O'HANLON: I can begin. I think we have to do the struggle against terrorism as comprising three broad elements. One is the military operations now underway in Afghanistan. Martin talked about whether that kind of operation might be applied or extended in some ways to the Middle East. A second element is the so-called hearts and minds struggle to try to reduce the pool of individuals from whom terrorist organizations can recruit, and the third piece is homeland security. And actually, I should add a fourth piece which is the broader law enforcement financial collaboration element of that.

I think you have to do all four pieces, and even if you succeed at one, the military campaign, you have to keep the others up. My assumption is that we will never be in a position to declare al Qaeda thoroughly gone, and certainly even if it is, we'll have to worry about other possible copycat-like organizations arising. Some of the same individuals who are now at second and third echelons in that organization will certainly survive our effort to go after the top people, and they may still be problems for us in the future.

So I think you have to proceed fairly vigorously on a homeland security agenda and assume that you're still vulnerable. And I think, as Mr. Cheney has said on several occasions, certain things changed September 11th that will not change back in our lifetimes. Now, just how far that extends, I don't know. I personally don't find life in America after September 11th all that incredibly inconvenient or all that incredibly difficult. I think a lot of additional areas of vigilance, ranging from increasing the strength of the Coast Guard and the customs agencies and their equipment they can use to monitor trade flows, to all the airline security issues that we're now addressing, to all the biological weapon issues we're addressing—all of those should continue and will continue.

And so, in short, even if the campaign succeeds in going after our nominal objectives, we have to assume that it will not succeed in fundamentally rooting out all sort of catastrophic or apocalyptic terrorism, and we have to pursue this homeland security agenda and spend $20 (billion) or $30 billion a year on it from now into the indefinite future.

MR. LINDSAY: This gentleman over here in the yellow shirt.

Q: John Otis with the Houston Chronicle. I'm wondering if you could elaborate a little bit more on the possibility of a Taliban guerilla campaign from the mountains? And also, if you could get into the issue of trying to put together a power-sharing government?

MR. LINDSAY: Do you want to start, Mike, and then we'll go to Steve?

MR. O'HANLON: I'll start with some of the general considerations. Steve can speak more specifically about Afghanistan and conditions there.

In general broad military terms, if you're trying to occupy a country of 25 million people the size of Texas, you're going to need anywhere from several tens of thousands of forces—and by that I mean considerably more than 15,000, you know, anywhere from say 50,000 to 100,000 at the low end up to 200,000, 300,000, 400,000 at the high end to fully do a counter-insurgency campaign. You want to apply classic rules of military force planning, based on the size of the country, the size of the population and the size of the Taliban.

So what that tells me is if the Taliban does want to fight, whether it's this fall or next spring, and they go out and pick up their arms again after a winter of lying low; if they do want to do that, we need to have an opposition force, which by then we may call a government force—a new government for Afghanistan—that has at least 100,000 military personnel within it. I think Steve's probably going to argue that there are different dynamics in Afghanistan to the classic counterinsurgency dynamics that I've just mentioned. But those are some of the broad numbers to keep in mind, and they're pretty sobering. And so, let's hope that Steve's got a better answer than I do.

MR. LINDSAY: Steve.

MR. COHEN: Yeah, my answer would be that the Taliban will not exist in a month. It will be gone. The Taliban fighters—the Taliban originally were Afghans who were educated in Pakistani-based madrassas, funded by the Saudis that taught an ideological mixture of Deobandism, which is sort of a puritanical and extremist form of Islam, and Wahhabism, and the two are actually very similar in many ways. But that was a core, and then they went back—the Pakistanis used them in Afghanistan as they succeeded. And they had Pakistani officers and leaders, which is one of the reasons for their success.

As they succeeded, they acquired allies among Pashtuns, and those allies are now disappearing very quickly. So they're deconstructing into their original component. The only question is, of those original Taliban fighters and ideologues, are they really that committed? My guess is that they're not. They'll all vanish. They'll have to face the consequences in their own home tribes. Some of those tribes will reabsorb them into their community, others will regard them as traitors, some will make adjustment. It would be something like—the analogy would be not so much the de-Nazification process in Germany, but perhaps the absorption of Japanese soldiers into Japanese society where the fighters—the ones that did not surrender were reabsorbed eventually into Japan and we didn't worry about them. They will remain as another faction in the Afghan mosaic. They will persist in that sense. Will they simply be another provincial force? I don't think there will be a serious problem, except for Kabul and Kabul will have to deal with them as a domestic law and order problem.

MR. LINDSAY: Next question, gentleman in the blue shirt and red tie with his hand up.

Q: Ambassador Indyk, John Moore from CNL Resources. Your successor as assistant secretary of State, Ned Walker, said, apparently over the weekend, that the question of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization is a real one in his mind and in the minds of many Lebanese and in the perception of many Arabs. That is that the British have designated an element of Hezbollah, the external security organization, as a terrorist organization while the U.S. government brands the whole Hezbollah movement as a terrorist organization, and this is causing some disquiet. Would you care to comment on is Hezbollah, the entire organization, a terrorist organization, or is it just elements within Hezbollah and the leadership?

MR. INDYK: Well, as you know better than anybody else, John, Hezbollah is a two-part organization; one, concentrated in Southern Lebanon, focused on fighting the Israeli army, first of all when it was in Lebanon and after Israel unilaterally withdrew, then keeping up a kind of sporadic fight against the Israeli army in one area of Israeli-occupied Golan Heights which they claim to be Lebanese territory and is basically used as a way to keep the pressure on Israel by the Syrians to ensure that their issue, the Golan Heights, is not forgotten in the negotiating process.

The other branch of Hezbollah—and I think it simply doesn't work to say, well, there's a good Hezbollah and a bad Hezbollah. There is another branch of Hezbollah that runs a global terrorist network in league with the Iranian MOIS and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. And that operation is alive and well even though it has not been very active outside of the West Bank and Gaza in the last year or so, where Hezbollah has come in and organized terrorist cells and also an arms smuggling operation in the West Bank and Gaza.

But the network exists around the world, and it's there for, I think, a very good reason, which is as a kind of deterrent to our taking any kind of military action against Iraq. And I would have to say that over the last few years it's worked quite well as a deterrent in that regard. But it represents a direct problem and even a possible threat to the United States, and it's something that we need to clean up as part of our campaign against terror.

And I would add that, as I said before, nothing succeeds like success. If in fact Steve is right and the Taliban is just going to dissolve before our very eyes and Osama bin Laden is going to be delivered to us more dead than alive, this will be a resounding victory in the eyes of the Arab world, and the harborers of terrorists will become extremely nervous about the idea that they are next. We will have a moment of opportunity here in which we will be able to make very clear demands, both on our friends, that they stand with us in removing this terrorist specter, which they've also suffered from in the Middle East, and in terms of the demands we level at the Syrian government, at the Lebanese government.

The Lebanese government knows where terrorists who have been responsible for killing Americans—they know where they are in Lebanon, but they don't have the guts, because the Syrians won't back them up, to pick up those guys. They could do it tomorrow if the Syrians were prepared to back them up. We should demand that they do. We should insist that the Lebanese government shut down financing for Hezbollah because it is a terrorist organization of global reach, and we should make sure that the Syrians also wrap up these training bases in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon and shut down the terrorist headquarters which are operating out of Damascus such as the Popular Front and the Palestine Islamic Jihad.

And then there's the whole agenda, which you didn't ask about, vis-à-vis Iran, which we also need to engage them on, not in terms of taking the war to Iran, but making clear to them that they need to get out of this terrorism business too. And that would help those forces inside Iran who now want to see some change but have not yet had the ability to take on Khamenei, the supreme leader, and the people around him who run Iran's terrorist network.

MR. LINDSAY: The gentleman up here in the front with the dark blue shirt.

Q: Yes, my question is—Carl Nolte from the San Francisco Chronicle. My question is, if the Taliban is truly defeated, do they have any military strategy left in the South that they could pursue?

MR. LINDSAY: Mike?

MR. O'HANLON: If they're defeated right now, you mean; already?

Q: Yes.

MR. O'HANLON: Well, I think that the best case scenario of where the Taliban stands from our point of view is that perhaps they're doing what Steve Cohen said. I don't believe that they have been defeated in the sense of 20 to 30 to 40 percent attrition in their ranks. I'd be surprised if we were that fortunate. I hope we continue to hit at them hard as they retreat. We should. Mr. Rumsfeld is right; that's a legitimate military target. But even in the process of doing that, I think they will remain numerous. So, they have plenty of strategies to the extent they can maintain cohesion and command and control, and Omar can get his arms around his own fighters. Steve's made a pretty powerful case this morning that he probably can't and that that fight is already over. But in military terms, based on the materiel capabilities they have and the terrain they have to work with and the adversary they're fighting; yes, they have options.

MR.: And just to follow on what Mike just said, obviously one option Taliban forces would have is what Steve outlined in his talk which is to go south toward Pakistan and see what happens. The other is to retreat to the hills east and west of the Kabul-Kandahar road where there are caves and presumably they have pre-positioned lots of supplies. It's not impossible or even inconceivable that the Taliban leadership may have already taken steps to fortify any hiding places they would have in those mountains. Then the question simply would become whether or not they would be able to maintain operational secrecy and sort of lie low and not have everybody know where they've gone to the mattresses, and I—(audio break)—scenario for the Afghanis. And I think Steve's argument is that what would happen is that people in the neighborhood would rat them out because they don't want them around. And so, that would be the downside from that strategy.

MR. O'HANLON: Could I have one more word? In terms of a broader political hope, what they could hope—if you were a Taliban strategist, you could hope that if Omar somehow can be delivered and his head can be sacrificed and then the rest of the forces can sort of melt away into the population, the northern alliance may not want to come south, below areas where they are in the ethnic majority. They may not have the wherewithal to do so.

We certainly haven't demonstrated any desire to put American forces on the ground in Afghanistan to fight, and so you could essentially imagine a situation where if the top of al Qaeda and the top of the Taliban are eradicated, or delivered up, the rest of the force can essentially survive long enough that we lose interest in the military fight, don't have the instruments to win the military fight, and then they can, as Steve said, either reintegrate into their own tribes or perhaps even so-called moderate Taliban elements, or maybe it's better to call them just Pashtun elements, can then even play some role in future governing bodies. I think that's the scenario that's still very much one to consider as a possibility.

MR. LINDSAY: The woman way in the back.

Q: I'm Lorraine Woellert with Business Week. Can you elaborate a little bit more on the difficulty of this—of the coalition building that we're going to need to do to create a government in Afghanistan?

And a second question would be it sounds to me like none of you seem to hold any concern or—that there might be a serious risk of a political uprising in Pakistan. Is that correct?

MR. LINDSAY: Steve, do you want to take that question?

MR. COHEN: Yes. I think Pakistan has gotten over its moment of crisis. Pakistan is always in crisis, but this particular crisis seems to have passed, and I don't think that—I think that from the beginning, when the Musharraf consulted with the army and the army consulted with itself—that's how democracy works in Pakistan—they concluded that they would hang together—they would stay together—pardon me, that's an inappropriate metaphor—(laughter)—they would stay together and that they would—they would use force if necessary to contain any street protests or demonstrations. What they did was they preemptively arrested several of the right-wing, so-called-moderate extremists, Muslim political figures in Pakistan. Almost all the political parties in Pakistan—the centrists and some liberal political parties—supported Musharraf. So I don't think that the problem—I think that problem in Pakistan was there for maybe 24 hours and then it passed.

In the case of a new government in Afghanistan, that's like herding chickens. It's very difficult, and Afghans do not make concessions, that this is a question of cultural pride, cultural dignity. It's not going to be easy.

But nobody has ever really tried to put together this kind of coalition before except the British, I guess, in the 19th century or even earlier. And that worked for a long time, and I think with the incentive of international assistance in large quantities, the realization that America is there to sanction any group that really breaks away again and turns Afghanistan again into a rogue state—I think that there's a better-than-even change that you will see some kind of government emerge in Kabul. The kind will come back, at last, after 30 years. In 30 years he's never been in his own country. He will come back, he will be a temporary figurehead, maybe a postage-stamp picture, and that's about it. There's a lot of distrust of him, although he is the one Afghan that all Afghans are familiar with.

And I think that Lakdar Brahimi, the U.N. official who is dealing with this, has assembled a very, very skilled group of advisers, including some remarkably talented Afghans themselves, and I think that they best understand what kind of groups could be put together, what kind of coalition, what kind of temporary government there might be until a larger constitutional assembly of some sort or another is held in Afghanistan. So I'm fairly optimistic that Afghan—the Afghans themselves, plus with the guidance of the U.N. with American power behind it, can pull this off

The crucial variable, the one thing that has changed dramatically is Pakistan. Until recently, Pakistan was dead set against any change in any government in Afghanistan, and the six-plus-two, which is the neighbors plus the U.S. and Russia—the U.S. and others really couldn't do anything because the Pakistanis vetoed any change. They were totally behind the Taliban.

Now the Pakistanis are on board, and the most significant visit I've seen was the visit of Musharraf to Tehran, where he consulted with the Iranians, and they both agree that a government in Afghanistan, which represented all the major Afghan groups, was in their interest. The Russians have agreed to this, the Tajiks, the Uzbeks have agreed to this, the Indians have agreed to this, the Chinese have agreed to it. It's U.N. policy, it's American policy. I think, for the first time in history, everybody agrees on the kind of government Afghanistan should have. The only question is whether the Afghans agree to this—(laughter)—but I think that the essentials are there for them to come around to some—at least to come around to some government.

There's a huge Afghan diaspora. They are very quarrelsome, they disagree among each other, there are supporters of the monarchs, supporters of the communists, supporters of a republic. They won't get along with each other, but I think that they do have the skills and the interest in rebuilding a state, and at least temporarily, I see Afghanistan moving down that path.

MR. LINDSAY: Next question? The woman way on the far side.

Q: Deborah Orin with the New York Post. I wanted to go back to Ambassador Indyk, if I could, and ask you if you could elaborate a little bit on precisely—let's say we ask the Lebanese to turn over these terrorists—and I'm wondering who you are thinking of specifically in terms of who the terrorists are -

MR. INDYK: I can't hear you. Could you speak—

Q: I'm sorry. Is this not working? I'm sorry.

I was asking Ambassador Indyk if he could continue a little down the line he went before in terms of phase two. If we ask the Lebanese to turn over terrorists who have killed Americans—and I'm wondering who you—which terrorists you are specifically thinking of—and they say no, what do we do then? If the Syrians say no, what do we do then? And also, what do you think we should do about Iraq in phase two?

MR. INDYK: The three Lebanese are listed in the list of the 22 most wanted, and they're responsible for the murder of Robert Stethem on the hijacked TWA flight 847, I believe it was. The Lebanese government has already said no to us on the question of financial controls on Hezbollah. We have a considerable amount of leverage on the Lebanese government, and we have declined to use it up till now because of our belief that in fact the Syrians were calling the shots in Lebanon, and therefore we should focus our attention on them. And that's got to be part of the answer, is to put the pressure on the Syrians

But we should not hesitate to make it clear to the Lebanese, because they, too, will then make it clear to the Syrians that if they don't take these steps, which are mandated by Security Council and General Assembly resolutions, then they will be treated as harborers of terrorists, and they will be treated accordingly by us. We don't have Lebanon on our state sponsors of terrorism list, but we could put Lebanon on that list, with all that that would mean for our assistance for our assistance to Lebanon.

Lebanon is not the key actor that, say, the Syrians are, but when they start going off to Damascus and saying you'd better do something about this to help us on this, otherwise we're going to get into trouble, I think the Syrians are more likely to listen.

The Syrians are members of the U.N. Security Council these days, and they have offered to help. The president of Syria, Bashar Assad, has sent a very forthcoming letter of condolence to President Bush, and we should hold them to those commitments, as should their fellow members of the Security Council. We cannot continue to abide a situation where terrorists are committing terrorist acts and then claiming responsibility for them from Damascus, where their headquarters are. No good Syrian interest is served by continuing to harbor these groups, and if we make it absolutely clear to them that their interests will be damaged, they will, I believe, make the correct calculation.

The Syrians are not like the Taliban. They don't have any tradition of hospitality to guests. (Laughter.) When the Turkish army mobilized on the Syrian border after being fed up with the Syrian hosting of the PKK headquarters and Abdullah Ocalan, the Syrians found a way to evict Ocalan in—I think it was two or three days. It's simply a straight-up decision of the government, and they will have the explanation for doing so in the context that now exists. But we have to make it clear to them, and we need our Arab friends, who do also have influence in Syria, such as the Saudis and the Egyptians, to go to the Syrians and say, gentlemen, the time has come for a change. And I believe that, together with the influence that will arise, as I've already said from our victory—hopefully, our victory in Afghanistan—can really make a difference in this regard.

Q: Well, Martin, thank you for explaining differences in Syrian and Afghani cultural traditions on guests.

I want to thank my colleagues, Mike O'Hanlon, Ambassador Martin Indyk, Professor Steve Cohen for coming here today. Thank you for showing up.

We will have a copy of the transcript of today's press briefing on the web in several days. Check us out—www.brookings.edu.

Thank you all for coming.

(END)