Remarks En route London, England

SECRETARY RICE: There is still a desire to have an international figure who can better coordinate the international effort. This was always because you have multiple efforts in Afghanistan. And indeed, the Afghan Government will tell you without much prodding that they have multiple voices that they're trying to deal with, and so they have always favored and Karzai has always favored having an envoy of this kind. So of course, we'll look at the job description. We'll look at how it's presented. We want to be very clear that this is a sovereign Afghan Government and it has to take its own decisions. But it has a heavy reliance on international support and the entire effort, because it's a counterinsurgency effort, has a heavy reliance on the civilian reconstruction effort being well-coordinated and plugging in when the military effort has achieved security gains. So we'll take a look at all of that, but I would hope that we'd be moving forward on this fairly soon.

QUESTION: Secretary Boucher just -- the Jones-Pickering report last week. Have you had a chance to look at it? And one of the things they recommended was that the U.S. appointed a special envoy to coordinate all of U.S. policy across our government. And they also said that Afghanistan was failing. I'm wondering what your reaction to that is. They said it was faltering and (inaudible) failing.

SECRETARY RICE: I think the Afghan effort is moving forward. There are certainly challenges and I think that the counterinsurgency is just difficult, particularly given the situation in Afghanistan which has characteristics like the Taliban. We're all aware of the problems of the border. We're all aware of the fact that Afghanistan is a very poor country with a not very good network of communications and infrastructure and roads and all of those issues. And it has a significant counternarcotics problem -- a narcotics problem.

But we're addressing all of those issues. We do have excellent integration of our U.S. effort, both through the Ambassador on the ground and through a role that has been played by Deputy Assistant Secretary Gastright, and he will be replaced with a U.S. coordinator. So I think we feel that the U.S. effort is coordinated. The bigger problem in some ways is that if you think about the issue, for instance, of what is going on in the south, we have an effort there but it is only a percentage of the effort that is being carried out by many other multiple actors. And so I think that we think that this -- I'm not saying that the U.S. coordination is perfect -- there can always be room for improvement -- but I think this is principally a problem of getting the multiple efforts better coordinated, which is why it's going to be important to move forward on an envoy as soon as possible.

QUESTION: About two years ago there was the case of the Christian convert in Afghanistan and widespread outrage in the United States. And if recall correctly, you called President Karzai to express your own feelings on that. Now there's the case of this journalist who's been sentenced to death for handing out an article in a journalism class. I wonder if you share the same sense of outrage you did two years ago, if you plan to do anything similar, and why aren't we hearing more about this case when that one was such a big deal?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, I'll certainly raise the case with President Karzai. This is a young democracy and I think it won't surprise you that we are not supportive of everything that comes up through the judicial system in Afghanistan. I do think that the Afghans understand that there are some international norms that need to be respected. Of course, one has national laws and they're national laws that are in accordance with traditions and religious practice and all -- you know, all elements of indigenous development. But there are international norms, and I'll certainly talk to President Karzai about this -- about this case.

QUESTION: Can I go back to the envoy? Do you expect now in the wake of Paddy Ashdown's withdrawal to have the envoy be an American? Are you still open or not be an American?

SECRETARY RICE: I doubt very seriously it would be an American. I think there are -- maybe there's an American who would be the right person, but I think there are good reasons given the way that the international effort has unfolded that it would probably be more likely European. And we will look, but you know, I'm not saying that we rule out anyone but I think more likely it's going to be a European.

QUESTION: You've talked about the assessment in three years for NATO. Where would you like to see Afghanistan in that length of time?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, obviously, in terms of the security situation, I think that we would like to see the Afghans more capable with both their army and their police forces of holding the territory that is being cleared of both Taliban and in some cases foreign fighters like al-Qaida. And frankly, I think one thing that people are taking a look at and have been taking a look at is whether or not the Afghan security forces -- the magnitude, the numbers of Afghan security forces that were once anticipated -- is going to be enough for the task. And so that's the kind of assessment.

Secondly, I would -- and by the way, that they would be being mentored and trained. And one of the problems in not having been able to find enough trainers in the request that SACEUR made is that that program is not moving as rapidly as it should. And so I think we're going to have to solve the problem of training and mentoring the Afghan forces. We're learning that this is an essential part of building strong security forces in a new state.

Secondly, obviously, we'd like the reconstruction to have created an infrastructure that in a sense extends the government's writ of the central government outward. As you know, Afghanistan very decentralized in terms of governance. That's fine. But it's difficult when you don't even have roads out to much of the country. Clearly, the other piece of the reconstruction that needs to move forward very rapidly is in terms of electrification, getting people hooked up to the electricity grid. So provision of those kinds of services.

Finally, I just -- I think that the whole sense of capability and capacity of the government, that there would have been significant improvement there. In 2009, Afghanistan will have a new election, another election. It would be hoped that that will be a free and fair election, much as the last one was. And that will undoubtedly move the Afghan democracy forward again.

So this is a very difficult place to work. It was -- it was a failed state. I mean, we say places were close to being a failed state or they were in danger. Afghanistan was a failed state, and it has been brought back from that. It has a president who's widely respected throughout the country. It has an international commitment that is extraordinary. It continues to have a very strong insurgency that, while I think it is not a strategic threat to the government, is a continuing threat to population security. And undoubtedly, that is something that the Afghan Government is going to want to take care of.

Finally, we've got to break this link between terrorism financing and narcotics. There's an image of, you know, the small famer benefitting from the poppy crop, but in fact you're looking at more and more cartels that -- criminal cartels that are linked up with Taliban in some places and that feed on corruption. And all of that has got to be rooted out and I think one of the things that's being looked at is whether there can be a more significant effort toward the law enforcement side of the narcotics piece.

So those are some of the things that I think the alliance will want to do. But that the alliance is looking out several years into the future suggests to me that NATO understands that this is a long-term commitment to Afghanistan and that's a very positive development.

QUESTION: How do you think NATO can better coordinate its efforts? You said the U.S. is doing quite a good job in coordinating, but how can they improve their efforts?

And then secondly, the Canadians have threatened to pull out unless more troops are put into the areas that they're working, which are the more dangerous areas. So have you had any luck in your discussions with your counterparts recently in convincing them to put more troops in there? And there seems to be a lot of bad blood over this discussion among NATO allies. How do you hope to improve the relationship between yourself and other NATO allies who feel that their egos are bruised?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, Sue, obviously, SACEUR and the military committee and the defense ministers are looking to improve the capability in the south and to support the mission in the south with more forces, and I'm sure that that will be a subject of discussion with Bob Gates and his colleagues when he is in Vilnius.

It is true, and we've made no secret about it, that there are certain allies that are in much more dangerous parts of the country, and we believe very strongly that there ought to be a sharing of that burden through the alliance. Now, that said, I think we want not to also dismiss the contributions that are being made by all alliance members. There are contributions that are being made. I continue to think about the extraordinary fact that NATO is fighting this war as NATO because, you know, I'm a veteran of the out-of-area debate within NATO. And I think if -- at the time of 2001, if you said, well, NATO is going to have taken this on as its largest military operation -- actually, its only military operation -- real military, you know, fighting operation -- in its history, that it will have done that with an intention to make it a long-term commitment which is demonstrated by wanting to have a strategic concept that goes out into the future, and that all of the allies are trying to contribute as they can. I think you would have found that, you know, a difficult story to take bets on, and yet that's what's happening with the alliance.

So it's bumpy and there is a lot of maturing that the alliance is having to do to do this. Frankly, counterinsurgency is really hard for any traditional military, let alone military alliance. And while I think U.S. coordination is pretty good, it's better than it has been, it's not perfect either. And it is -- it's not an easy thing to fight not in the way that we tend to think about it, which is war, then peace; then after peace, you reconstruct; but rather, on a kind of continuum where you're fighting and then going in with reconstruction and trying to win the hearts and minds, and perhaps then you're fighting again because you haven't completely cleared.

This is a very complicated business, and so I would hope that the fact that we have to keep pressing and we have to be willing to tell the truth about the alliance and what's going on would not be taken as an unwillingness to recognize how far the alliance has come and any desire to denigrate the contributions of allies.

QUESTION: Madame Secretary, I'd like to ask you about Iran. I understand you met with Ambassador Khalilzad yesterday. Were you troubled by his decision to appear on that panel in Davos with the Iranian Foreign Minister? Should we interpret that as a sort of a mutiny against Administration policy about talking to Iran?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, Zal certainly didn't think it was. I think everyone agrees that these things should be coordinated, and it should have been coordinated. But the fact is Zal's comments, if you read them, could not have been clearer, not just in supporting but in communicating the U.S. policy very clearly. And that's the important point. And I know Zal very well and I know that he's right in there on the U.S. policy, and he's at the UN, maybe not as we speak because it's already -- well, maybe -- that he's at the UN trying to get the Security Council on the paper for the resolution that we are -- that the Europeans are sponsoring. So I don't have any doubts about Zal's loyalty to the policy.

All right. Oh --

QUESTION: Could you give us a sense -- back to Afghanistan. What is your sense of the strength of the Taliban at the moment? You know, we hear a lot of different things. What is the U.S. Government's estimate?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, there's no doubt that the Taliban has been able to continue to wreak havoc on the Afghan people, that it came back a couple of years stronger than I think people expected, but that it had failed when it has tried to take on larger-scale kind of conventional military operations, whether it was trying to take Kandahar or trying to take -- trying to hold Musakala or trying to launch a spring offensive. So we know that there are certain things that it cannot do and we know, too, that it has shifted its tactics to terrorist -- more traditional terrorist tactics -- suicide bombings, kidnapping, et cetera.

Therein lies some of the difficulty in how one describes the Taliban, because you're not looking at a traditional military force that I think is a strategic threat to the government, but it is certainly causing insecurity for the population and that is something that's going to have to be dealt with. And I think that what you're seeing in areas where we've had strong military operations is that a lot of them have been routed, but you have to keep doing it over and over. And what we know about counterinsurgency is that it's not just enough to rout the terrorists; you have to then actually hold the territory and you have to build so that the population has a reason not to support them. And so that's the difficulty that -- in describing the Taliban, but I don't think that there's any doubt that they've by no means been defeated and they remain a challenge.

QUESTION: Thank you.

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