Terrorism

"If they give the security responsibilities to the current government at 10:00 a.m., the government will collapse around 12 noon. They cannot live without foreigners." Those are the words of Nazir Amini, a car dealer caught in Kabul's Intercontinental Hotel when it was besieged this week by Taliban fighters. We need to take them to heart.

Success, it is said, has a thousand fathers. Now four years removed from the advent of the 2007 Baghdad “Surge,”[i] the situation in Iraq, while not perfect, has dramatically improved. Violence is down significantly, despite continuing acts of terror against the Iraqi people by Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and some Iranian surrogate forces.[ii]  Admittedly, the formation of the new Iraqi government following the 2010 election has been less-than-efficiently executed.

President Barack Obama's decision to pull 33,000 troops out of Afghanistan by the end of next summer—10,000 of them by the end of this year—reflects a scaling back of U.S. goals and strategy in the war. Either that, or it doesn't make much sense.

This speech is a welcome step toward a sustainable Afghanistan policy, one that realizes that our interests in that country are real, but limited. This speech puts us on a path that aligns our commitment to Afghanistan with these limited interests -- a foreign policy one might almost call "humble."

President Obama's Afghanistan speeches are never really about Afghanistan. George W. Bush wanted his presidency to be about Iraq. From the beginning, President Obama has wanted his presidency not to be about Afghanistan, and so whenever he brings up the subject, he ends up talking about the other things for which he'd rather be remembered.

According to senior administration officials, the planning for President Barack Obama's announcement for the drawdown from Afghanistan began in January of this year when the president summoned top members of his national security team into the Oval Office and tasked them with coming up with a plan for the drawdown.

The calculations that went into the drawdown decision included the fact that "remarkable and "unexpected" progress had been made degrading al Qaeda infrastructure in its bases in the tribal regions of Pakistan over the past 18 months, explained one of those officials.

Terrorism is not a new phenomenon, but since the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks the United States and the United Kingdom have significantly altered their counterterrorism programs or created new programs, laws, and institutions to cope with changing understandings of the threat posed by individuals living in the West attracted to al-Qaeda’s cause.

Executive Summary

Chairman Thornberry, Ranking Member Langevin and other members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today.

My testimony will attempt to answer three questions:

What does today’s threat look like? How has the threat changed? And, what do we do about it?

1. Today’s threat

One hot summer evening in 2009, in a small village in the remote Pakistani tribal agency of South Waziristan, a pair of Hellfire missiles fired from an unmanned Predator drone slammed into a house, killing the chief of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, along with his wife. About a year later, in May 2010, down a dirt road from Miran Shah, the main town in North Waziristan, a missile from another Predator killed Mustafa Abu al-Yazid (known as Saeed al-Masri), a founding member of al Qaeda, along with his wife and several of their children.