SENATE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE STATEMENT OF GENERAL DAVID H. PETRAEUS, U.S. ARMY, COMMANDER, U.S. CENTRAL COMMAND BEFORE THE SENATE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE ON THE AFGHANISTAN-PAKISTAN STRATEGIC REVIEW AND THE POSTURE OF U.S. CENTRAL COMMAND
March 16, 2010

 President Obama observed in announcing his new policy, “It is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan.”  As he noted, these forces will provide “the resources that we need to seize the initiative, while building the Afghan capacity that can allow for a responsible transition of our forces out of Afghanistan.”   Clearly, the challenges in Afghanistan are considerable, but success there is, as General McChrystal has observed, both important and achievable.  Our goals in Afghanistan – and in that region – are clear.  They are to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda and its extremist allies and to set conditions in Afghanistan to prevent reestablishment of trans-national extremist sanctuaries like the ones al-Qaeda enjoyed there prior to 9/11.  To accomplish this task, we are working with our ISAF and Afghan partners to improve security for the Afghan people, to wrest the initiative from the Taliban and other insurgent elements, to develop the Afghan Security Forces, and to support establishment of Afghan governance that is seen as legitimate in the eyes of the people. 

We spent much of the past year working to get the “inputs” right in Afghanistan:

• Establishing the structures and organizations needed to carry out a comprehensive civil-military campaign;

• Putting our best leaders in charge of those organizations; 

• Developing the right concepts to guide our operations –  a comprehensive campaign plan, the ISAF counterinsurgency guidance, and the tactical directive issued by General McChrystal;

• And providing the authorities and deploying the resources needed to achieve unity of effort and to implement the concepts that were developed.  These resources include the forces deployed in 2009 and the 30,000 additional U.S. forces currently deploying, 9,000 more forces from partner nations, additional civilian experts, and funding to enable our operations and the training and equipping of 100,000 additional Afghan Security Force members over the next year-and-a-half.  I should note that the flow of additional forces and associated equipment would not have been possible without your continued support, in general, and your support of our expeditionary military construction program, in particular.

With the “inputs” largely in place, we are now starting to see the first of the “outputs.”  Indeed, the recent offensive in central Helmand Province represented the first operation of the overall civil-military campaign plan developed by ISAF and its civilian partners, together with Afghan civilian and security force leaders. 

Central to progress in Afghanistan will be developing the Afghan National Security Forces, an effort made possible by your sustained support of the Afghan Security Forces Fund.  Expansion of Afghanistan’s security forces is now underway in earnest in the wake of the Afghan and international community decision to authorize an additional 100,000 Afghan security force members between now and the fall of 2011.  This effort is facilitated considerably by the recent establishment of the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan, led by LTG Bill Caldwell.  And ISAF member nations are now working hard to field the additional trainers, mentors, partner elements, and transition teams to enable the considerably augmented partnering, training, and recruiting that are essential to the way ahead in this important area.

The civil-military campaign on which we have embarked in Afghanistan will unfold over the next 18 months.  And, as many of us have observed, the going is likely to get harder before it gets easier.  As we seek to expand security for the people and to take from the Taliban control of key areas, the enemy will fight back.  Moreover, we are not likely to see the kind of dramatic reduction in violence that we saw about 6 months into the surge in Iraq – in part because the levels of violence in Afghanistan are nowhere near those of Iraq at the height of the sectarian violence, though they clearly are at levels that make progress in certain areas very difficult.  In any event, 2010 will be a difficult year, a year that will see progress and a reversal of the Taliban momentum in important areas, but also a year in which there will be tough fighting and periodic setbacks.