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MR. SCHIECK: Thank you, Mike. Well, I'd like to welcome all of you here to the meeting this afternoon, and especially General David Barno, who I had the pleasure of meeting once on one of my quick trips to Afghanistan. General Barno was the commander of combined forces for about a year and a half, I believe, in Kabul, leaving last May. The subject we're going to talk about today is provincial reconstruction teams--which, as far as I know, are a new development in post-conflict situations and Afghanistan is the first place that they were set up. There's some talk about doing the same thing in Iraq. I don't know how far that's really gotten at the moment, but certainly the PRTs are up and running for some time now in Afghanistan, so there's a body of experience with them. Other nations have come to take over some as well as to create some on their own. I spent a night in Kunduz on the floor of a shack in a sleeping bag with the Germans because they didn't have any other beds--we were unexpected visitors that night. But we were taken around by the German officers and saw what they were doing up there. And they had a real innovation--they had a gasthaus in the back. Do you know what that is? PARTICIPANTS: Yes. Mm-hm. MR. SCHIECK: Which I don't think we do in the U.S. ones. [Laughter.] MR. SCHIECK: But it was an interesting visit. Also I've been to the one down near Kandahar--I guess that's it. But there are people here today, I'm sure, who've had a lot more experience with them. I think it's very important that we have this discussion because it is, for us in AID, a place where we are linking up with the U.S. military in a post-conflict situation. We have worked with the military over the years, certainly in the disaster situations. I was in Guatemala during a major earthquake in '76, and the U.S. Army responded and the Air Force responded in a tremendous way--25,000 people had been killed--flew a whole field hospital down from Oklahoma. Of course, in those days we had large military assets in Panama. So they were up there. They sent water experts; we went around the country repairing water supply systems. I thought it was a tremendous collaboration between the army and ourselves, and I know that that has been repeated many times over in other similar types of situations. This is the first time, I think, that we've got an operation where we--and of course there's other civilian elements in the PRTs, which you'll hear all about, but which we are out there on a long-term basis working on development issues with local authorities and villagers--which is very important. Well, with that, I will--who am I turning this over to? To Jim Kunder, who's assistant administrator for the Asia/Near East Bureau, where Afghanistan and Iraq reside in terms of AID responsibilities. I might say, we're hearing good news on Iraq, the election process today. It seems like there's been a major turnout. We're really hopeful that this is one further and very important step in getting Iraq up and going as a democratic nation. Thank you, and thank you for coming, General Barno. I'll ask Jim to come up. MR. KUNDER: I'm the third of four USAID warm-up speakers, so I know what that means. Either I'm so compelling that you'll maintain your attention, or else what I have to say is so totally irrelevant that it won't make any difference. I just want to recognize Patrick Fine this year, our former mission director in Afghanistan. When General Barno saw Patrick in the other room, he immediately said, Oh, yeah, I remember you--the guy always causing problems in the back of the room. [Laughter.] MR. SCHIECK: So thank you for keeping the development issues on the front burner, Patrick. Seriously, we're just pleased as can be that General Barno took time from his schedule to be here this afternoon. We are encountering the U.S. military. U.S. military folks and USAID folks, as well as our State Department colleagues and other departments, are just bumping up against each other, working together, are planning together across the Asia-Near East region and I think around the world. This is one--I'm glad this got a big turnout from across AID bureaus here today, because this is one of the compelling issues we face. When we do need--to use the military term--"lash up" somewhere, how do we do it? How do we sort out the military priorities and the development priorities? How do we make sure that the local government role in all of this is reflected? And finally, how do we measure the impact of what we do? Those are some of the issues that General Barno is going to be talking about. But what you're going to hear about today, the provincial reconstruction teams, is really one of the most cutting-edge issues in civil-military relations today. So I'm pleased to be here. I'm glad General Barno's here. And now, for the formal introduction, Steve Gale. MR. GALE: Thank you, Jim. If you're number 4, that means I'm probably number 5 or lower in the pecking order. It is my distinct honor and pleasure to introduce Lt. General David Barno, former commander of all U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan. During his 19-month Afghan tour, General Barno commanded over 20,000 troops in Combined Forces Command Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. General Barno has a long and distinguished military career. He's a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point with various senior command and staff positions around the world. General Barno also holds post-baccalaureate degrees in national security studies from Georgetown University, among many other schools. Many of you already know General Barno. I had the honor of meeting with him at the National Security Council. Now it's your turn to meet General Barno. Again, thank you and your staff for joining us today. [Applause.] GENERAL BARNO: Well, that was quite a warm-up. I'm not sure that my remarks will exceed the total sum time of all the introductions here today. [Laughter.] GENERAL BARNO: So that's good news for all of you out there in the audience. I was beginning to think we were going to have to pay you to stay for the rest of the presentation. But naturally, with military operations, particularly if you've got a military general or an admiral up here for a briefing, you have to live with PowerPoint. We are masters of PowerPoint. We can't communicate without PowerPoint. And so you will sit through some PowerPoint today, absolutely, because it's a mandatory part of any military presentation. As I was listening to some of the opening remarks, though, it kind of made me reflect a bit. I think some of my presentation, which is--it really starts a bit bigger than PRTs. It starts with what's the context of Afghanistan, a little bit, and what was our strategy in Afghanistan, at least during the time when I was there. Then, how do PRTs flow from that? As I sat and listened to some of that, I think a very, very important message for all of you to take away today--I think Patrick would reinforce this and all of the other great Americans that we worked with over there--is that that was a single-team effort during our time in Afghanistan. There wasn't a military team and a USAID team and a State Department team--even a United Nations team or a NATO team. There was, really, a single, unified team, particularly within the U.S. government in Afghanistan. And to the degree we had success during the era from late '03 to mid-'05, I attribute that to the amount of teamwork we were able to grow together as an organization--which is not entirely common even in the U.S. government, as all of us who have been around this business for awhile know. What helped us to be able to do that? Well, a couple of things. Number one is that, from the military standpoint--you heard the troop organization I had and what I was responsible for. My boss was General John Abizaid, and I had responsibilities to him for U.S. Central Command not only for Afghanistan but for most of Pakistan, less Kashmir, and for the southern parts of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. So I had some regional responsibilities in addition to my in-country responsibilities. I spent time working with the security leadership in each of those countries, particularly with Pakistan, for obvious reasons. But more importantly, what I did on a daily basis was that I lived at the U.S. embassy, my office was 20 feet from Ambassador Khalilzad's office, and I attended virtually every country team meeting during my 19 months there--which were, for most of that time, five times a week. Those who are either veterans out there of country team meetings know what that means. You should get a film badge that tells you how many of those you get before you get a fatal dose. [Laughter.] GENERAL BARNO: I had over 300 country team meetings under my belt. Sitting right next to the ambassador, though, him at the head of the table and me in the first chair on the left. And I did that not because I really enjoyed hearing about tree plantings in western Kabul, but because there is a very important message there for everybody else in that country team and for everybody else in the military, which was that this was a single organization here, this was a unified country team, and that we were all moving down the playing field in the same direction to the same set of goal posts. That's not common, okay. So one of my self-induced or self-directed charters going in there was to try and fuse this into as much of a single operation as I can--not with me in charge, not with the ambassador in charge, not with us battling over who had the lead or who was giving orders or who was setting the direction, but to have a mutually supportive effort to deliver what our U.S. policy objectives were in Afghanistan. I think that's a very important preface to our comments today as we neck down to the PRTs. If we don't figure out how to do that on a regular basis--and I'm not saying we're not doing that; I think we're doing that marvelously well in Iraq right now, for example. But I think that is an uncommon situation that we have to make the norm, as opposed to making it the exception out there, in terms of how we operate around the world. Next slide. I sketched this particular chart out on the back of a sheet of copier paper in about March of '04, maybe four or five months after I got to Afghanistan, to try and explain a little bit about Afghanistan to our visitors who would come over there frequently to see what we were up to. And it, I think, helps to illustrate the complexity of that environment over there. How many folks here have either been to Afghanistan for a visit or have served there? [Show of hands.] GENERAL BARNO: Lots of folks. Good. So this may strike some chords with you. But I thought, as I looked at the situation over there after having been there five or six months, that there was enough complexity there, it was worth kind of drawing that out. I'm a visual/picture kind of guy, so I sat down and drew some pictures. First of all, I said, hey, there's basically three different wars we're fighting over here. We're fighting a war focused on the very senior terrorist leadership, the so-called high-value targets--the Osama bin Ladens, the Zawahiris, the Mullah Omars, the Hekhmatyars. And we've got a very focused organization and a very focused intelligence effort lined up against those folks. And it's 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, ready to respond immediately to take down, kill or capture those targets. But that's only one of our wars. The second war we're involved with-- And of course, the key part there, the center of gravity there is intelligence. You have to have the right intelligence at the right time to be able to react quickly to those targets. It's very, very difficult to do. The second war that's more prominently portrayed and people see and hear more about is the war against the networks that are associated with those leaders--the overall al Qaeda network, the Mullah Omar Taliban remnant network, the Hizbi Islami-Gulbuddin network of Hekhmatyar, those terrorist organizations out there, their supporters, their sympathizers, and the actual fighters who are in various parts of the country and the border area. We were focused very much with our military operations in trying to roll them back, to reduce their influence--not just to kill or capture them, but to make them ineffective, to make them unsuccessful in their goals in Afghanistan. Interestingly enough, my assessment was the way that we would do that would be to focus on the people of Afghanistan, that ultimately success or failure in that arena, in rolling back this insurgency or this terrorist threat, would be that the people of Afghanistan would choose the side that was aligned with their democratic future, as opposed to either not committing at all or choosing a side aligned with their past, with the Taliban in particular. So I thought that was an important distinction. Then the third war that we were fighting every day that we were engaged with--me personally as well as our forces of all sorts, and the rest of our country team--was the war against those internal forces that were always struggling to pull Afghanistan apart. And these weren't forces that were created in the aftermath of 9/11 or they weren't part just of the Taliban during their brief reign in Afghanistan, but they were forces and internal conflicts that went back thousands of years--you know, narcotics, corruption, crime, poverty, lack of education, lack of medical care--all those internal things capped off by warlords and their militias, which were constantly pulling at the fabric of the country to make it not be an effective whole. So we had to take that on as part of our portfolio and look at how we would struggle to roll that trend back, or at least suppress it such that the other things could be successful. We saw extending the reach of the central government as being a critical node there. And the PRTs played perhaps the most central component of that part of our strategy. So that's in part how they flow out of this diagram here. And across the middle there, we have this term "information operations." I would call that basically winning the war of ideas, getting the message of the Afghan government, of the democratic process, of what good the coalition of NATO and of the growing Afghan democracy was doing across the country. So we were in a constant battle in the war of ideas, part of it fought out in the media, part of it fought out in the local villages and in the tribal networks throughout the country. But always in a war for the minds of the people of Afghanistan. So again, I thought this was a kind of a useful construct to sketch out how the situation there was different and complex and not the same that you could parallel with some other part of the world, with some other conflict. You know, I thought that pretty useful. The other thing that's worth noting here is that one great advantage we had militarily and for our overall policy objectives in Afghanistan was that the people there were sick and tired of war. They had been involved in 25 years of continuous conflict, not only the war against the Soviets in the late '70s and in the '80s--which was very bloody and very devastating--but their own internal civil war that went on for many years after that and created more destruction in the country than even the Soviets had. That was capped by the seizure of power or the movement to power of the Taliban, who then put a very oppressive government in place around the country. After all that tremendous experience, the people of Afghanistan simply did not want to fight anymore and were looking for a positive outcome, some ray of hope out there in their future which the coalition, which NATO, which the international community helped bring back in Afghanistan and which helped us have a very favorable operating environment throughout most of the country--not a secure environment, but an operating environment where the Afghan people broadly were very supportive of that international aid that was coming in there, that international support, even if they didn't accept all the politics there. And I think that's an important distinction--25 years of conflict. Unlike in some other parts of the world where continuous fighting is still novel, here it's not novel anymore and people don't want to continue doing it. Very important for us. Next slide. Out of this, in part, we developed--and I won't go into this in great detail. I want to show you a couple of pieces of a much broader counterinsurgency strategy for our aggregate effort there, our country team effort in Afghanistan. And this ultimately was translated into what we in the military would call a campaign plan, or essentially a plan of action, for our organization, writ large, that helped kind of set out some markers and some goals and objectives and milestones for different parts of our organization. Now, this is not to infer that we built this plan and then we went out and did it all. There was a tremendous amount of effort ongoing ever since we arrived there in '01. We tried to box that up in some coherent way and sketch out about a three-year plan to help bring together not just military things, but help enable planning within the embassy, to help the ambassador have some ability to derive some metrics and to lay out some thoughtful future-looking plan. The military's pretty good at that. We're not just necessarily good at it for dropping bombs or driving tanks. One of the first things I did after I got there, starting with a very small staff, is I gave the ambassador five senior planners for him to use any way he wanted to in the embassy. Five military officers who could then, you know, use their planning expertise looking at how to assess missions and come up with steps to look at the road ahead, to take that and apply it to whatever scenario he wanted. And he got a lot of mileage out of that to be able to develop metrics for other programs, to lay out some broad plans of action for those programs, to be able to report back to Washington--even to help develop the Mission Performance Plan for the embassy in Kabul. So again, that was just an enabler that we gave to the ambassador. The things I would note to you here is that, I think in '03 we were--in early '03--especially focused on that first pillar, the counterterrorist-hunt-bad-guys-in-the-mountains pillar. So as we came in and looked at that and thought about what it took to ultimately be successful in fighting a counterinsurgency campaign, in making our policy objectives successful, we said, hey, it's got to be much broader than hunting bad guys in the mountains. Some of that may even be counterproductive. So what are the other positions we have to have? What are some other pillars that we need to take one--not to have the military in the lead, but to help enable the other players and understand what they needed and help them be successful in whatever way we could. You heard up front 20,000--up to 22,000 military, U.S. and coalition, in Afghanistan during my time there. It went from 14,000 low and high of 22,000 about the time I left. We had 10 or 100 times more capacity, if you think about that, to do things around the country than any other organization in the U.S. government, in the United Nations, or in any other entity there in Afghanistan. That's not just 20,000 folks carrying M-16 rifles, ready to shoot people. That's a lot of logistics capacity, it's a lot of movement capacity, it's a lot of ability to get around and talk to people. It has many different facets that it can be used for. And that was the thought behind this, is how do we help enable some of these other things with the existing capacity we had in the country. Number 2 pillar there, how do we help build the military and police in Afghanistan. And as of about three or four months ago now, we in the military have ownership of both of those programs, which we worked towards for a long time. How do we help the center one there get our organizations to have ownership of certain areas of Afghanistan for their whole time there? Instead of skipping around the country on missions that weren't really connected to any outcome, how do we get them to say this is my province, I'm going to be here for a whole year, I'm going to learn everything there is to know about the elders, the shuras, the tribal leaders, the mullahs in that province and build interpersonal relations with them--much like you do when you go out to areas around the world. So we established that as kind of a principle. The PRTs really fell in number 4 there--how do we enable reconstruction and good governance throughout the country? And we'll talk a good bit more about that. But they were really the action arm of that particular pillar in a lot of different ways. Then kind of my role in part at the end there is engaging those regional states to deal with the transnational issues of terrorism, of border secretary, of counternarcotics across the region. Up at the top there, the Afghan people being the key decider points there--how they made their mind up, how they committed. And then trying to get the collection of many, many, many cats and dogs out there that were everything from hundreds of NGOs to the variety of Western and other international embassies, to the United Nations assistant mission, to NATO--all not necessarily wearing the same uniform, but all on the same playing field going down the field in the same direction playing the same sport. So we had some degree of trying to, not lead from the front but kind of coach people to head for the same set of goal posts, all playing football as opposed to playing four or five different sports. And we had an indirect ability to try and do that. Again, with 20,000 folks out there with this in their mind--because we were able to export this all the way down to the low levels--we could impact a lot of things across the country. And the PRTs are a key way we did that. Next slide. I'll go a little quicker on these and we'll talk specifically about PRTs. Here's where we were with PRTs when I arrived in October '03. Great concept in its early stages, only four in the country at that point in time--this was October of 2003--only two of those were American. What struck me about this as I came in was that we had a kind of a very slow, deliberate expansion plan for the PRTs--it was going to take another year or so. And if you look at where the threat was, the threat and the fighting and the security issues in Afghanistan were primarily in the southern half of the country. If you bisect the country northeast to southwest, all of the fighting was in that bottom half of that cut. And how many PRTs were down there? One. That just didn't make sense. So we made a major effort over the winter of '03-'04 to push out, and get ready to push out, lots of PRTs into that zone of conflict to help seed that area with these islands or these pools of growing security and influence to be able to export some of their capability to the contentious parts of the country. That was a big success. So by the summer of '04, we had upwards of 15 PRTs almost all across the southern half of the country going into the elections in the fall. It had a dramatic impact on our ability to reach out and touch different areas of the country to help extend the reach of the central government and to help establish those pools of security that rippled out around them in many different directions. Next slide. What it looks like today, which is up to 22 PRTs plus one additional satellite. You see the American PRTs there as I observed them in the southern half of the country, where we planted them in the spring of '04 and summer of '04, and now the NATO elements coming around the northern tier as they began to expand and exert their influence and take over, in a number of cases, the U.S. PRTs as they began to march around the country. NATO now is operating in the northern half of Afghanistan and soon, spring of next year, will go into the southern central part of Afghanistan as well--the Canadian PRT being one of the first elements thereof--with the U.S. still the primary force in the east and, today, the south. So huge expansion of the PRTs during this period. Very dramatic impacts out there. Next slide. Let's talk a little about the PRTs themselves. A lot of you are very familiar with these, some of you less so, so we'll kind of sketch through a couple of thoughts about them. The mission there, again--you've heard me say this a couple of times--extending the reach of the national government, the democratically elected central government of Afghanistan. And those elections were facilitated by the PRTs. They now completed not only an internally directed and designed constitution, which was passed in January of '04, their presidential election in October of '04 and then the parliamentary election here this fall of '05. So some major democratic evolutions in Afghanistan that the PRTs played a key role in. Next slide. This slide here is very interesting because it wasn't something that someone in my headquarters sat down and typed out on a computer. But these principles here in the two key areas of PRT--security and reconstruction--were drawn together by the PRT Executive Steering Committee. That body, which I'll talk a bit more about, was the composition of all of the stakeholders and PRTs in Afghanistan. Originally chaired by me and then, before I left, six months or so before I left, we transitioned to having it co-chaired by myself and the NATO commander, with the primary chair being the Afghan minister of interior. But it constituted all of the embassy reps from the countries who contributed to PRTs or were thinking about contributing to PRTs, as well as the NATO senior civilian rep, the senior rep of the secretary general of the U.N., and all the other key most senior players in those organizations in Afghanistan. So the PRTs, even though they were either U.S. or U.K. or New Zealand or Spanish, they were guided by a very broadly based, consensus-based collection of principles. Some of this is a bit lowest common denominator, but it was very important that it had that level of buy-in with all the key stakeholders across the country to support the concept. And so we were able to use this and, as you see, some of the things up there to be able to drive the PRTs in directions where they provided the maximum support to the local governments and helped with great broad international support to be able to bring delivery capabilities out there in different parts of Afghanistan--not directly, but through the local governments in those provinces. The end state there is essentially that they would work themselves out of business, which is more problematic, perhaps, than actually standing up a PRT and getting it going. To be able to embed that capacity and to grow and mentor and build the ability to do these kinds of functions in the local government is one of the biggest challenges, I think, of the whole PRT program. It's something that now as we move to a more mature program in Afghanistan will, I think, be their toughest challenge to pass through. Next slide. The idea of the PRT, of course--and we'll talk about some of the [inaudible] inside the organization--they're really platforms. I call them frequently catalysts of security and reconstruction. They were the ingredient, when you put it into a province, you could see the ripple effect around the province of increasing security rippling out from the PRTs. We heard the term by the Afghans frequently, "where PRTs go, security follows." That wasn't because they had, you know, 800 paratroopers in the PRT. Usually there were only 80 or so military, only 40 of those were combat or MP types of troops. But the whole idea that they were now out in this province had a tremendous calming effect on the areas around them and sent a message to the Afghan people that the coalition and NATO--in the case of NATO PRTs--was there, was interested, was engaged; that security advice and reconstruction aid would flow by using those PRTs. And it encouraged other people to have confidence in the growth of the international community operating in their province. When you saw that map with no PRTs on it, the only thing operating in those big blank areas of Afghanistan were combat troops at that time. And that sent a very different message than a long-term PRT that was located as part of usually a provincial capital, often on the outskirts of that, that didn't have combat mission. Those were two very different messages to the Afghan people. So they looked at that very favorably. But you can see some of the things that we looked at very closely, but the key driver was to extend the reach of the central government through the PRTs--typically by mentoring and working with the local government--the provincial administrator, normally--and the local police forces there in that province to do that. Next slide. The internal makeup, usually about 80 to 100 soldiers and civilians. These were heavily military, and the reason they were heavily military is because, again, who had 22,000 people under capabilities to move around the country with security in the logistics system in Afghanistan? The military did. And that's going to be the way it is, I think, in many different places of the world. Therefore, you know, my premise was we will work to get the civilian components into these PRTs, but we need to get the capability out there on the ground and will fill in the other parts as quickly as we possibly can. So that meant we would set up a PRT with a commander--normally it would be a lieutenant colonel or sometimes a colonel, in the Army or Marines, most commonly. Then we would have a security element usually of about 40 soldiers, who were primarily designed for force protection and be able to go out on patrols there. We had elements we called enablers, which would provide some of the logistics, some of the command and control aspects. Then we had the other government organizations there. And again, in a 80- or 100-person PRT, we'd normally have one USAID rep--sometimes a couple more, but most commonly one. We might have a U.S. Department of Agriculture rep, and we would often have a Department of State rep. Very importantly, in addition we would also have a representative from the Afghan Ministry of Interior, normally one of their brigadiers or a colonel would be there full-time in that PRT to help be the interface with the local government, who reported back to the Ministry of Interior. Very, very important, very helpful for us. The USAID reps had a tremendous role in different parts of the country. Wherever we had USAID reps, we were very much nested into what was going on, centrally directed from Kabul for the overall development plan on the country, and it gave us the windows and the eyes into the broad national priority programs, which was the Afghan program to develop aid and to develop reconstruction of their own country. So we weren't trying to invent a new program here, but to nest both the military aspect inside of the overall U.S. government aspect inside of the Afghan effort. That was challenging, but it was critical to have these players in the PRTs to get that done. The dollars out there, you can see, typically about $6 million to start these up, about $5 million to keep them going. And that's DOD dollars going out to do that, as it should be, given where the capacity is in this particular construct. QUESTION: Is that for all of them or just the one? GENERAL BARNO: That's just for a PRT, for a PRT from basically a logistics standpoint, to learn it and operate it. Not shown on here is--many of you are familiar with this--is CERP funding, Commanders Emergency Response Program funding, which not only for PRT commanders but for our other military combat commanders around the country. They had the ability in very short order to deliver dollars onto projects that they wanted to get going to help jump-start things with the local government in an area. Those ranged from being able to buy tractors and seed in certain areas to being able to work on wells and other things. This program has good points and bad points to it. It's not always a fully comprehensive multi-year, long-term program, but it had a tremendous ability when complementing the other U.S. government programs, such as ODACA, to have immediate short-term effects that could be seen and felt and that impacted the local structure and impacted the local government. So it had its niche that was very useful for us. We had typically--this is DOD dollars--on an annual basis in Afghanistan anywhere from $10 million to $20 million of CERP funding to be able to apply through both PRTs and unit commanders around the country. And those dollars varied from year to year. We pushed those higher as time went on to get more money than that. So again, that's a considerable amount of capacity to be able to use out there to influence local conditions quickly. Next slide. It's hard to read here, but just to give you a feel for some of the things that those different PRT components did. The enablers out there I talked about could do things from medical assessments, using some of the medics that were part of every PRT out there, to looking at the justice system to looking at how they can enable the elections structure that was going to be laid out across the country. And again, as you think about it, we're not talking about someone who's been a governor in a major or American state going out and doing this. These are typically military members, oftentimes reservists, some of whom have civil affairs background or work in medical fields, that will be able to be in that PRT and do these functions. They're not people that are, you know, high-end professionals, necessarily, but they're folks that have some skill sets here that, compared to what they were dealing with in the local areas, were the ultimate subject-matter expert. They were--even if they knew nothing, they were a subject-matter expert because they were brought there from America to work in that province. So there's risk with that, but it also is a very powerful capability to assist the local government. The service-support part was primarily logistics. Force protection, again, the perception of security, the thought behind how security felt in that area with a PRT there was dramatically different than before it was there, even if you only had 40 people out there doing that. It had a huge catalytic effect on security across entire provinces. And then the command and control piece, which included a lot of liaison and face-to-face meetings by the PRT commander with all of the key players--typically in that whole province, and certainly in the area around the PRT. Next slide. I talked a bit about this. This was a--it's sounds a bit bureaucratic, a bit administrative, but it was probably the most important--in my view, the most important collective body we had in Afghanistan, that brought together all of the key players, all of the stakeholders, as I term it, in the country who had an interest in the future of Afghanistan, who would sit down at a table once a month for typically about 4 hours and go through not only PRT issues, but other key issues that were on people's minds that were concerning them--and walk out of there with a feeling that, again, they were playing the same sport, going for the same set of goal posts on a playing field. There was no other body in the country, strangely enough, that really did that. So we were able to leverage this body, which was essentially for PRT purposes, to do other things that the PRTs helped contribute to. So it was very, very useful for us. And as we migrated to an Afghan-led function, it became even more powerful. There was a working group that met typically every week to go through the more tactical issues on these things, more administrative type issues, to help feed those steering committee meetings. Next slide. This was being worked as I left, one of the more difficult parts of how we judged how effective this effort was. There was some push-back on having measures of effectiveness from other parts, particularly the NATO community, because of the thought that we might be grading PRTs--my PRT is only a C while yours is an A over here. So there was a little bit of concern out there, quite a bit of concern, that we didn't want to establish grade sheets for PRTs that said some were more effective than others. Well, you know, obviously, there's good and bad of that and helps pressure people to be a big more effective. Because we did find sometimes with other nations' PRTs that the national caveats or the national restrictions that their countries put on the PRT prevented them from doing things that American PRTs and some other Western PRTs did regularly. So you got a, you know, a PRT flavor vanilla over here and you had a PRT flavor Rocky Road that did all kinds of things over here, and they looked very different to the Afghan people. So this was in part designed to try and balance that sheet a bit and get all the PRTs essentially signed up to doing the same things and starting to evaluate them that way. But that's an issue we might want to talk about in Q&A that was problematic for us as we started to bring in other countries, particularly that were not operating under the coalition. The coalition under my command, 21 countries, all signed up to, essentially, the U.S. policy goals and objectives to Afghanistan. Separate Force was NATO, that had anywhere from 27, plus or minus, countries operating, each nation of which had signed up to sometimes dramatically different views of what their goals and objectives were in Afghanistan. So you had significant national restrictions over there, much less so on the coalition side, and that became a challenge for us. Next slide. Okay, last slide up here, just to talk a bit in sum on where this was going and where we thought it had to go. This was a unique effort. It was grown and developed in Afghanistan. The whole idea of a PRT allegedly by, in fact, a British officer in the OQ timeframe, and it has grown and warped and adjusted and now begun to migrate to Iraq here, as we heard briefly up front. That's been announced now as well. So it's a very unique innovation to what's going to be a more common post-conflict environment. I really wouldn't even use that term. One of the things that Jean Arnaud, the senior rep to the secretary general of the U.N., and I talked about, is this was really in-conflict nation building. It wasn't post-conflict nation building. It's in-conflict nation building. And the rules of the game, what works and what doesn't, how we apply USAID's capabilities, how we apply military capabilities when we're in a conflict and building a nation at the same time are dramatically different than what we would have all thought 10 or 15 years ago. So the PRTs, I think, are one of the more innovative solutions, potentially, to that problem, and that was pioneered in Afghanistan, refined over the last two years or so, and now I think it's got a lot of applicability to other post-conflict or in-conflict reconstruction situations as well. All right? Well, thanks very much. I look forward to your questions. [Applause.] MR. HESS: You're on a tight schedule, General. Thanks a lot. We've got about 13 minutes, plus or minus 15 seconds. Don't be bashful. I think you answered all of the questions. GENERAL BARNO: Everybody's worried about that weather outside. They want to run out and get to their cars. QUESTION: My name is Ed Fox. I'm assistant administrator for Legislative and Public Affairs. I was wondering, in the last short period of a couple of weeks here we've had two major advances for the United States in looking at these post-conflict and other reconstruction efforts, both with the release of the Department of Defense Directive 3000 and yesterday with the president's signing of the NSPD dealing with the office of post-conflict reconstruction. I'm wondering, how do you see the PRT as fitting into those two documents overall and what role you think they will play as a future doctrine. GENERAL BARNO: I guess I'd characterize the PRT as maybe an expression of how to get at the objectives set in those documents. I've not seen the president's signed-out document; I have seen the DOD 3000. And I was very encouraged to see that, quite frankly, because, as we all know, if we run the movie back three, four, five years, the military had a different outlook on their role, if any, in reconstruction, post-conflict or in-conflict reconstruction. So the fact that's now codified in a DOD publication, I think, is encouraging for us to look at the broader issues of what we're trying to do. PRTs are certainly one of the tools potentially in that tool bag. I mean, they're effective, I think, in Afghanistan, they really--and as they continue to evolve, have had a big impact on that country on being able to extend the capabilities of the national government there to be able to extend the reach of the coalition. I think as they stand them up now in Iraq, we'll see what lessons come out of that. There was certainly, obviously, a feeling that there was potential for them to be useful over there, so that's the march we're on right now there. But I do think they're one of the tools in the tool bag. I think, as we look at them, they have to be situationally adjusted--you know, one argument that I made over there often is that there's no single type of PRT that fits all situations they're in, so they really need to be adjusted to the environment in the province, the district that they're operating in because what fit here might not fit over here. And that's an important aspect. But I do think they've got a place out there in the future and I think we'll continue to learn lessons from them as they begin to be employed in Iraq and as we learn more mature lessons from them, perhaps, in Afghanistan. QUESTION: Jim Kunder, USAID. I want to ask two questions for our own internal consumption about USAID resources. Number one, on the money side, when the PRTs identified needs locally, from your perspective did we respond? And then second, I want to ask you about manpower resources. Some wag in my office said that deploying a hundred guys on the military side is the equivalent of deploying one-fifth of a USAID person. But over time, it seems to me, these things have got to evolve with more USAID, or at least civilian-side, folks. How do you see that evolution occurring in terms of civilian-side manpower? GENERAL BARNO: Let me answer that question first and then I'll come back to the funding issue. I think--you know, I talk to military officers quite a bit, and one of the things I tell them--and they're always shocked--is that, Okay, folks, how many people do we have, how many military folks do we have in uniform on active duty today, right now, December 15, 2005? And it's about 1.4 million. And then I say, All right, we all know about the State Department and we all talk about them and we all, you know, lambaste the State Department regularly about not deploying people overseas and not doing their job. I said, Okay, Military Guys, how many Foreign Service officers are there in the U.S. Department of State? Well, you get everything from 20,000 to, you know, 60,000. There's 6,000. You know, depending upon how you count, that's the top-end number. It can be down as low as 4,000 if you count it slightly differently. So you can take all the Department of State Foreign Service officers and put them on one U.S. aircraft carrier and sail around. [Laughter.] GENERAL BARNO: That's this much of the U.S. military. One team. One team here. And the budgets are the next order of magnitude, okay. What's the defense budget ballpark? It's going to hit $450 billion. What's the State Department's budget last year? Again, depending upon how you count, maybe $30 billion, covering all the countries in the world. That's putting everything you can think of into that budget to count it. So there's no understanding--and I criticize myself and us in the military on this. There's no understanding of the orders-of-magnitude difference between the capacities of the different parts of the government. Now, that said, I think we're going to have to look at ways to grow additional capacity in State, in AID, you know, in other parts of the government, because, you know, the military can do these things as kind of a bridging function, but we're--you know, our first mission is the fighting mission or embedding other missions inside of that. One of the things that General Schoomaker, the Army Chief of Staff, talks about is he wants to develop our soldiers and our officers to be pentathletes--to have high skills in a number of different areas. One of those is going to be in this side of the house in what we call stability operations. But even having said that, we've got to have the experts. The experts are going to come out of the other agencies of the U.S. government. They're going to come out of AID, they're going to come out of Agriculture, they're going to come out of State. So I don't think our pre-9/11 structure necessarily is going to be exactly the right fit for a post-9/11 world. On the funding question, I think we had a pretty good system of doing that. There was good communications back and forth between those PRTs and the embassy through the State and AID reps, and up the military channels. In fact, I'd normally find out more reading reports from the State and AID reps than I would from reading the military reports going up the other side of the chain as I sat on my perch there in Kabul. But I think that worked pretty well, and it was something we continued to refine over time. But it's tough. I mean, the whole management of the funds in an environment where there are no people that [inaudible] work for a living. There are no construction management firms in Afghanistan. Anything that's there has been brought in from the outside. So you've got some immense challenges. And all of you who have worked around the world know what this is like. And Afghanistan is probably in the bottom 10 percent of countries in the entire world in terms of any type of capabilities to do infrastructure building with their own assets. So it is a real tough challenge. Patrick lived that every day over there and it was tough sledding. We all tried to help where we could. QUESTION: This is extraordinarily interesting and useful for a lot of conflict and post-conflict situations. But the key to it seems to be that there are U.S. troops on the ground. I work on wars in Africa, where we do not have the U.S. strategic interests to the degree that we do in Afghanistan, and Iraq obviously. But we do have some interests there. I'm wondering if, and if so how, this model can be applied to perhaps DOD and State Department training of indigenous armed forces in countries to provide security and promote development and win the hearts and minds of people in countries where we are facing counterterrorism issues, where there is a lack of security, where there is not state control over all or most of the country, et cetera, et cetera. GENERAL BARNO: That's a great question. One of the ways we addressed a similar question in Afghanistan is we began to think about could we Afghanize, if you will, the PRTs; could we take that U.S. security platoon or NATO security platoon out and put an Afghan national army platoon in? Could we start training up some Afghan army or Afghan police capabilities and some of the other functionalities--the civil affairs function, certainly the medical function? So how could you begin to migrate that over to host nation capabilities but still use the same structure, because there's a lot of confidence in that structure--and it had a reputation, and that's part of it being successful. But starting it from scratch, that would be a little bit more challenging. I think you could potentially design it with as many host nation capabilities built in as long as you had some of the key international expertise to embed within that. But part of our success, and the reason why you could put 100 Americans, typically, out on the ground in some remote area and have them not be overrun by the bad guys at some point in time was there was a reputation that that force was a pretty capable force, which might not always accrue to a local force, and that there was the knowledge that just over the horizon there was a--you know, the 7th Cavalry was ready to respond with, you know, bombers or attack helicopters or reinforcements. Typically we could get airplanes over almost any part of Afghanistan in about 20 minutes. So there was a pretty big deterrent out there to mischief-makers who were going to cause problems. And again, you don't have that in other parts of the Third World. So I think there are possibilities there, depending upon the security threat. If you could manage that part, I think you could design a PRT that was indigenous as its primary basis. MR. HESS: Do you have time for one quick one? GENERAL BARNO: Better. MR. HESS: Patrick. GENERAL BARNO: I told him we were going to wrestle him to the ground if he got up and started shouting and denying this in the middle of the briefing. MR. FINE: First, thank you for coming and sharing this with us. The PRTs have gained some credibility because they have been a successful structure for melding military and civilian assets to achieve specific objectives. I just want to thank you for the role that you played in doing that, because much of that success came from the top and it came from you in creating the environment to say we are one team, we are going to work together. And thank you for that. Now, I want to go back to... [Laughter.] GENERAL BARNO: That was the good part. MR. FINE: Now I want to go back-- GENERAL BARNO: Thanks, Patrick, I think that will wrap the session up. [Laughter.] MR. FINE: Well, I wanted to go back to the point that Sharon was asking about, which is this was very appropriate for the situation that we had in Afghanistan. But in Africa, where we're working now, the idea of a reconstruction team that is a physically located group of people may not be the best structure for--or may not be an appropriate structure for melding U.S. military and U.S. civilian assets together to accomplish specific reconstruction or stabilization activities, especially in the context of counterterrorism. I wonder if you've given thought to other structures that we might use as we look at how we work together in the future. I really can't say I have, particularly with regard to Africa where you've got a--you know, there's a number of unique situations in Africa. Somalia's not like the Darfur, which is not like the other--the east coast of Africa, et cetera, or west coast of Africa. So I don't know without looking at the individual situation there how to really come up with that. My immediate reaction would be to look probably first at the model and see what could be gleaned out of what we learned out of the PRTs. The thing that I find interesting now that PRTs are going to be used in Iraq--perhaps a slightly different model, but a mutation of what's in Afghanistan--is that the PRT idea now means something. And it's beginning to mean something to military people, and I think it's beginning to mean something to other parts of the government that participate in those. So there's a mental model that people begin to associate with that that's very helpful, in my view, because it recognizes that you can blend these together. For military people, especially, who were brought up to be kinetic fighters--you know, putting steel on target somewhere--the idea that you're out there doing things that are non-kinetic, that are security-related but are reconstruction-related and it's blended together with other parts of government, that's a model we don't have anyplace else that I've been able to see. So I kind of like that as the start point, at least, and then to look at what you can bend and tweak from there as you go forward. But I'm encouraged tremendously to see that that model, from the standpoint of how it fits in people's and what--when you say PRT to people in the military now, they know what you're talking about. That's a big deal. And they know it's not a kinetically focused type of thing; it is a way to be able to bring all these players together to create soft-power effects, essentially. So there's a lot to be said for that. So as a start point, at least, I guess I would normally go there and then see what tweaks you could possibly make. You may have to throw it out and start over with a clean sheet of paper, but it's not a bad start point because people understand, or are beginning to understand, what that means, which is great. MR. HESS: Thank you, General Barno. [Applause.] MR. HESS: Thank you very much, General. What we have here for you is a white hat, but it also has-- [Laughter and applause.] GENERAL BARNO: Thank you. Appreciate it. [END OF TAPED RECORDING.] |
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