The title of Ken Ballen's recently released book, Terrorists in Love: The Real Lives of Islamic Radicals, is misleading. I put off buying it for some time because of the title, which implied it would provide a sympathetic view of terrorism and constitute yet another rant against "failed" U.S. counterterrorism policies since 9/11.

However, I have always been impressed with the nonprofit organization run by Ken Ballen, Terror Free Tomorrow, and its solid polling work in Pakistan and other Muslim-majority countries. This compelled me to take a closer look at the book, which I ended up reading on a flight to South Asia last fall.

Terrorists in Love is more than a captivating read. It provides fresh insight into how al-Qaeda and its jihadist allies have manipulated young Muslim men into following a hateful and destructive ideology that kills countless innocents -- mostly other Muslims. We have heard a great deal about al-Qaeda's recruitment and training process from U.S. experts, but Ballen describes the terrorism phenomenon in the jihadists' own words, bringing deeper understanding to the issue.

Through interviews and extensive research, Ballen profiles six jihadists, some of whom eventually renounced al-Qaeda. It is the stories of those who become disillusioned with al-Qaeda and its aimless violence that are the most interesting and that need to be publicized more widely. Indeed, exposing first-hand personal accounts of the contradictions and corruption within the terrorist movement likely will hasten its demise -- a process already underway thanks to the elimination of Osama bin Laden and an aggressive drone-missile campaign in Pakistan's tribal border areas.

Ballen acknowledges in his introduction that there are many different paths to becoming a jihadist and that the individual stories in the book should not be viewed as representative of all radical Islamists. The first chapter is a telling eyewitness account of al-Qaeda deceiving a young man into taking his own life and others. Ahmad al-Shayea is a Saudi who at the age of 19 goes to Iraq to fight Americans, after seeing photos of tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib. It is a story of disillusionment -- one that many other Muslim men would surely have expressed, had they lived to tell about it.

Ahmad al-Shayea is tricked by two Iraqi fighters into driving a truck loaded with explosives, from which the two Iraqis suddenly jump, just before the bombs go off. Ahmad miraculously survives the explosion, and the rest of the chapter recounts his recuperation at an American hospital in Iraq.

After the ordeal, Ahmad retains his steadfast belief in Islam, but he has awoken to the al-Qaeda lie. He proclaims his desire to go on television to tell other young Saudis that "Al-Qaeda was not for Islam; it was not for humanity." And that, "I am a living example of al-Qaeda's hellfire...I want them to see how al-Qaeda tricked me into killing innocent people."

Terrorists in Love pulls no punches in its depiction of the close relationship of the Pakistan military with jihadist terrorism. In one chapter, Malik -- an Afghan refugee who grows up in Pakistan, joins the Taliban, and has personal encounters with Mullah Omar -- becomes disillusioned with the Afghan Taliban when he discovers its reliance on Pakistan's intelligence agency (run by the Army) for training, weapons and funding. Malik feels ashamed that his organization must rely on an army that also receives support from the Americans. However, instead of abandoning jihad, Malik joins the Pakistani Taliban to attack what he views as the double-dealing Pakistani military.

In the fifth chapter, we become acquainted with a Pakistani jihadist whose father is a colonel in the Pakistan Army. The colonel is disdainful toward Islamist extremists and works for the Strategic Plans Division, which controls Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. His responsibilities include keeping Pakistan's nuclear assets out of the hands of extremists, like his own son. The irony of this complex father-son relationship story brings home the reality of the dangers in Pakistan, where the institution in charge of protecting the country's nuclear weapons also arms and trains the Afghan Taliban.

Ballen concludes from his research and interviews that Muslim communities themselves must develop ways to counter extremism, while also acknowledging that the U.S. cannot afford to be complacent against extremists dedicated to killing Americans. His overall recommendation for the U.S. to simply lead by example is unrealistic, however, especially in light of the democratic revolutions sweeping the Middle East, where U.S. silence could contribute to more bloodshed. America should not retreat from actively promoting democratic ideals in the Middle East, as Ballen suggests, particularly since the principles of liberal democratic governance are a powerful antidote to Islamist extremists' message of intolerance, hatred, and repression.

Ballen's work is well worth a read by anyone seeking to understand more fully the complex and multiple factors that drive terrorism. The reader will have to judge whether Ballen was brave or merely naïve in agreeing to meet with extremists at hotels in Islamabad. But the conversations he recorded from those probably ill-advised meetings are eye-opening, and should help U.S. policymakers develop more finely-tuned messages and policies to fight the ideological battle laid bare in Terrorists in Love.

Lisa Curtis is a Senior Research Fellow on South Asia at the Heritage Foundation. 

For a fallen figure -- one reduced to self-imposed exile in Dubai and London, and dismissed by many as apolitical has-been -- Pervez Musharraf sure is hogging an impressive share of the spotlight.

In late 2010, after announcing (from London) the formation of his new political party, the All Pakistan Muslim League (APML), and revealing his intention to return to Pakistan to contest the 2013 elections, the former president and army chief hit the lecture circuit. In Washington, he spoke to beyond-capacity and often supportive crowds. Watching him glad hand and back slap people outside the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington last July, after having delivered an address to hundreds of people, I was struck by his resemblance to a U.S. political candidate.

Read on

When the U.S. Army and Marine Corps released their FieldManual (FM) 3-24, Counterinsurgency, in2006, key military leaders and civilian advisers promised a different kind ofwarfare. Written as Iraq crumbled, the manual institutionalized key tacticaland operational methods that were geared to fighting against irregular armedfoes, rather than the maneuver warfare most of the U.S. military had preferred.The new theory was based around several key principles, including proportionateand precise use of force to minimize civilian casualties, separating insurgentgroups from local populations, protecting populations from the insurgents, theimportance of intelligence-led operations, civil-military unity of effort, andsecurity under the rule of law.

Some of these methods had already been practiced in Iraq byinnovative commanders, but Gen. David Petraeus, who oversaw the process of writingFM 3-24 and later went on to command U.S. forces in the country, was key to theirinstitutionalization and broad implementation in the context of an overalltheater-level strategy.

As President Barack Obama decided to "surge" forces intoAfghanistan in late 2009, former Joint Special Operations Command head Gen.Stanley McChrystal was tasked to follow the Petraeus playbook in Afghanistan.When he was relieved, Petraeus, the man many saw as having helped bringstability to Iraq, was called upon to do it again in Afghanistan. However,success has eluded the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), whichhas been unableto translate operational progress into strategic success. A number oftriumphant obituaries for counterinsurgency have since emerged, as it becomesclear that the campaign in Afghanistan is failing to deliver on its promises.

There are five inter-related drivers of this cauldron ofdiscontent with COIN: First, the rise of counterinsurgency as a standardpractice in the U.S. military left skeptical American officers and institutionswho preferred emphasizing conventional capabilities (large-scale armoredwarfare, for instance) feeling disenfranchised. Second, the common narrative ofthe war in Iraq viewed (and somestill view) Gen. Petraeus as the hero who brought counterinsurgency (andsubsequently stability) to the country. This narrative alienated some officerswho had already been using some counterinsurgency methods effectively beforethe introduction of FM 3-24. Third, among the commentariat, the caustic domestic political divisions from thefirst phase of the Iraq War, divisions that were aggravated in the lead-up tothe Afghan "surge", remain unhealed. Fourth, the military officers and thinktank scholars who became most closely associated with COIN's rise developed apartially-deserved reputation for cliquishness, self-reference, and conceit.And finally, there has been a dearth of clarity on the goals of the Afghancampaign on the policy and strategy levels.

Col. Gian Gentile (who represents the first, second, andfinal strands of anti-counterinsurgency discontent) presents one of his standardarguments in "COINis Dead: U.S. Army Must Put Strategy Over Tactics." He argues the UnitedStates military has failed in Afghanistan and Iraq because it allowed afascination with the tactical and operational methods of COIN to supersedeimplementation of an actual strategy in those conflicts. In fact, looking atoperations in Iraq and Afghanistan for lessons is a fundamentally misguidedventure, he argues. Rather, we can only view our experiences of the lastdecade as lessons in failure and return to embracing our conventionalcapabilities.

Others are preoccupied with the political battles behind counterinsurgency.Michael Cohen, a vocal critic ofthe war in Afghanistan, refusesto acknowledge that counterinsurgency lessons are worth keeping andinstitutionalizing until advocates of the population-centric approach inAfghanistan "loudly acknowledge - indeed even shout to the hills - that everytime someone recommends fighting a counterinsurgency this is [a] really,really, really bad idea...." This seems akin to arguing that we cannot updateour doctrine on nuclear warfare, expeditionary warfare, and other capabilitiesthat are far more costly until we "shout to the hills" that to use these wouldbe a "really, really, really bad idea." Advocates of maintaining counterinsurgencycapabilities have been happyto acknowledgethese campaigns tendto be long, hard slogs, but Mr. Cohen's criticism does not address the military'sneed to be able to adapt to contingencies as ordered. We cannot wish away theagency of our enemies.

Still others see those who support counterinsurgency's place inthe toolbox of American power as being part of a new "military-industrialcomplex." Major Mike Few, an armor officer (like Colonel Gentile) and editor ofSmall Wars Journal, arguesthat some think tanks and defense contractors have formed a "cottage industry"that champions counterinsurgency for ego and profit at the cost of "trillionsof dollars, thousands of lives and abandoned security projects elsewhere thatcould have benefited our republic exponentially more..."

For one thing, the weaponssystems, equipment, and capabilities necessary for modern "conventional"campaigns are far more costly and more lucrative for defense contractors (the2009 defense industry-subsidized congressional debateabout the F-22 reminded the world that the original military-industrialcomplex is alive, well, and costing the U.S. taxpayer for over-budget,malfunctioning weapons systems of questionable utility). Further, the use ofconventional capabilities against a major power may well take more militarylives than those we have lost in Iraq andAfghanistan. But this aside, our abilities to conduct counterinsurgencyoperations and major combat operations are not mutually exclusive. Moreover, aspeople like Maj. Few understand, John Nagl's Centerfor a New American Security -- the unnamed bogeyman in his critique andothers -- did not decide to go to war in Iraq or Afghanistan. Nagl was merely oneof many in the U.S. Armed Forces who sought to make the campaigns of twoconsecutive Commanders-in-Chief work.

Indeed, the debate surrounding counterinsurgency has becomehighly personal, emotional, and angry. This has been most recently demonstratedby the snideand personalrejoindersto a recent articleteasing out the lessons of Iraq by Dr.David Ucko of the National Defense University. Increasingly for somecritics of counterinsurgency, their opponents are not just wrong, but immoralliars. Yet for all of the heat this debate, it has produced little substantivediscussion of the future of counterinsurgency after the wars in Iraq andAfghanistan, or more broadly the appropriate uses of limited funds andmanpower.

Before declaring the death of counterinsurgency and maligningthose who see value in some of its precepts, analysts should ask if insurgencyis dead. Indeed, the most significant failure of these anti-COIN arguments istheir shared focus on the response to a problem -- counterinsurgency tacticsand strategy -- at the expense of the problem itself. None of these articlesproclaim that "insurgency is dead" because to do so would be absurd. Insurgencylives, and has proven itself throughout history as the best means by which tooppose established political and military power. AsAndrew Exum recently observed, about 80 percent of all conflicts since theend of the Napoleonic Era have been insurgencies or civil wars. Futureinsurgencies are all-but-certain to challenge American interests to the pointthat our civilian political leadership will need to decide if our military willbecome involved in countering them. And if insurgency lives, then so must counterinsurgency.

Critics also make the mistake of particularizing a form of counterinsurgencydesigned during a specific historical period meant to counter a distinctiveform of insurgency known as popularprotracted warfare. If anything, the key failure of counterinsurgency inthe past decade has been the myopic view of the military and key counterinsurgencyproponents that counterinsurgency could only take the form advocated byscholar-practitioners like the French officer David Galula (who developed histheories in Asia before implementing them in Algeria) and the British officerSir Robert Thompson in Malaysia, who were both grappling with different, lessevolved forms of violent struggle than what we have seen in Iraq andAfghanistan. Thus, for critics to proclaim the death of counterinsurgencymakes them guilty of the same error that they often pin on their opponents: relyingon an expired intellectual framework.  

The real question is: what form will American counterinsurgencytake in the future? It seems reasonable to argue that "big footprint," "population-centric"counterinsurgency is dead, but "small footprint" counterinsurgency that focuseson security force assistance, Special Operations, and/or foreign internaldefense lives on (see Yemen,the Philippines,and Somalia).But is it really inconceivable that we will ever again conduct another large-scalepopulation-centric counterinsurgency campaign? Those who think it impossible mightconsider how the United States would respond to violence spilling over theborder from catastrophic state failure and humanitarian crisis in Mexico, forinstance.

As always, our choices will be structured by the agency ofour competitors. Therefore, we would be foolish to avoid learning the tacticaland operational as well as the policyand strategic lessons of the last ten years. We must maintain our capabilities and competencies for counterinsurgency,if only because history has shown that they will come in handy again.

How we do this is what we mustdebate and discuss.

Ryan Evans is anassociate fellow at the International Centre for the Study ofRadicalisation and Political Violence and served in Helmand Province, Afghanistan as a Human Terrain TeamSocial Scientist. The views and opinions expressed here do not represent those of theDepartment of the Army, Training and Doctrine Command, or the Human TerrainSystem.

Relations between the United States and Pakistan continue tospiral downwards following the cross-border incident that resulted in the deathof 24 Pakistani troops along the border with Afghanistan last month. In fact, overthe past several months, Pakistan has, according to some accounts, engaged in aseries of actions that ought to worry U.S. decision makers. Far from shiftingits policy on providing support and sanctuary for externally focused militantgroups, Pakistani officials have potentially sought to strengthen their tieswith militants and have reportedly started negotiations with a key militantcommander Wali ur-Rehman,a Waziristan-based commander on the U.S. State Department's list of foreignterrorists, and MaulviFaqir Mohammad, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban in Bajaur Agency. Apeace deal with Rehman and other Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) would be atroublesome development, and was noted with some concern by White Housespokesperson Caitlin Hayden over the weekend, although TTPspokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan and Pakistan'spolitical leadership have both issued denials.

In November, reporting indicated that militants havedeclared a nation-wide ceasefirewith the Pakistani government while both sides talked, though again, the TTPand government both deniedthese claims. In past peace deals, the Pakistani government has allowedmilitant commanders to control Taliban "mini-states" in exchange forshifting their jihad across the border into Afghanistan. For Pakistan's seniorleadership, turning anti-state or "bad Taliban" into Afghanistan-focused or"good Taliban" would be a major achievement. For U.S. and coalition forces fightingto stabilize Afghanistan and rid the region of al-Qaeda and its affiliates, itcould be a nightmare.

It is widely believed that influential elements within Pakistan'ssecurity apparatus have unsuccessfully tried to convince the TTPto shift their focus to the fight in Afghanistan -- but their fortunes may be changing.These reported peace talks were a product of the All Parties Conference hostedby Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gailani earlier this fall, which wasconvened to address Pakistan's national security situation following recentU.S. allegations of direct, state-sponsored support for Afghan-focusedterrorist groups, such as the Haqqani network. The conference produced adeclaration seeking peace with militants throughout the tribal areas, evenreferring to militants as "ourown people" -- the same people that are largely responsible for over 200suicide attacks, killing at least 3,600 people since the beginningof 2008. Privately, the declaration reflects the military's long-heldbelief that even anti-state militants, such as the TTP, can be turned into proxies,a key component in the military's policy of state-sponsored exportation ofterror in neighboring territories, such as Afghanistan.

The TTP is a loose confederation of militant organizations primarilyfocused on targeting the Pakistani state, with the shared goal of overthrowingthe government and imposing sharialaw. Anti-state activities in Pakistan's Federally-Administered Tribal Areasregion have a long history, and as early as 2004, some militant groups begandescribing themselves as "PakistaniTaliban." In late 2007, several anti-state militant commanders formallyorganized themselves as the TTP under the leadership of South Waziristan-basedBaitullah Mehsud, launching a series of attacks and suicide bombings throughoutthe country. Rather than a single, unified entity, the TTP is a movementcomposed of independent commanders and their allied fighters. Consequently,factions within the TTP sometimes compete for resources and differ in theirprioritization of jihad against the Pakistani state or combating U.S. andcoalition forces in Afghanistan. In the ongoing peace talks, TTP militants aredemanding the cessation of Pakistani military operations against the TTP, therelease of jailed militants and compensation for civilian hardships duringmilitary operations in exchangefor their pledge to cease attacks against the Pakistani state.

The most troubling figure in the reported talks between thePakistani government and the TTP is Wali ur-Rehman -- who is much morecommitted to the ongoingfight against U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan than the fight againstthe Pakistani state. After the death of his cousin and former TTP leaderBaitullah Mehsud by a CIA drone strike in August 2009, Rehman remarked that the TTP and hisfighters in particular werecommitted to helping the fight in Afghanistan and consider U.S. President BarackObama their "No. 1 enemy." Rehman is a Mehsudtribesman leading the TTP in South Waziristan, a role he assumed afterBaitullah was killed. Unlike numerous other TTP commanders in Pakistan's tribalregions, such as current TTP head Hakimullah Mehsud, Rehman is said to have wanted to end the TTP's warwith the Pakistani government, saying it has destroyed the Mehsud tribe in South Waziristan. At onepoint, Rehman was reportedly in secret negotiations with elements ofthe Pakistani government in Peshawar or Khyber. Rehman is reported to be afavorite of the reclusive Afghan Taliban chiefMullahMohammad Omar. For years, both Omar and thesenior leadership of the Afghanistan-focused Haqqaninetwork have urged the TTP to abandon their waragainst the Pakistani state and instead throw their weight behind the AfghanTaliban.

Even more troubling than Rehman's links tothe Afghan Taliban is his relationship with al-Qaeda and his support for theirinternational agenda. In a September 2010 interview, Rehman explained how his TTPis in complete agreement with the ideology and agenda of al-Qaeda, claimingthat the TTP would expand their war effort during the nextdecade, presumably in close partnership with al-Qaeda. The following month, theUnited Nations placed Rehman on aninternational sanctions list, for "participating in the financing, planning,facilitating, preparing, or perpetrating activities of Al-Qaida. According tothe State Department, who has issued a five million dollar reward forinformation leading to Rehman's capture, Rehman is directly linked to the suicide bombing thatkilled seven CIA employees at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost,Afghanistan in December 2009, and Faisal Shahzad's failed bombing of TimesSquare by on May 1, 2010. None of this has discouraged Rehman from his agendaor support for al-Qaeda. After the death of Osama bin Laden on May 1, 2011,Rehman threatened the West, saying, "soon youwill see attacks against America and NATO countries, and our first prioritiesin Europe will be France and Britain."

Should talks move forward, any eventual peace deal and thesubsequent reorientation of TTP fighters towards the fight against U.S. andcoalition forces in Afghanistan could prove problematic. The TTP has manytrained, hardened fighters which the Afghan Taliban would certainly welcome asforce multipliers -- making the campaign to weaken them all the more difficult,especially as U.S. and coalition forces seek to draw down and transition thefight to the Afghans. Perhaps even more troubling than a growing partnershipbetween Afghanistan and Pakistan Taliban would be a newly established sanctuaryfor al-Qaeda and affiliated movements under the protection of Waliur Rehman inSouth Waziristan and other TTP commanders throughout Pakistan's tribal areas. Ifthe Pakistani government continues to pursue peace with international al-Qaedaaffiliated jihadists such as Rehman, it could potentially negate or evenreverse much of the progress the United States has made against al-Qaeda overthe past several years in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Greater sanctuary andthe ability to communicate and transit the tribal areas under the protection oflocal enablers will allow the continued spread of al-Qaeda and its affiliatedmovements that will be difficult to contain.

Jeffrey Dressler is a senior analyst at the Institute forthe Study of War, where he studies security dynamics in Afghanistan andPakistan.

In the winter of 2009, standing on the mud wall of a border outpost manned by our partnered Afghan Border Police, I was chatting with Commander Aziz, a well-known local police chief commander. Aziz pointed east to the locations of Taliban training camps on a mountain just inside Pakistan, and to their usual infiltration routes around the dusty bordertown of Angor Adda. Suddenly, the high-pitched whoosh of rockets launching screamed across the valley from the direction of Pakistan to our left front towards our main coalition base to our rear. "Incoming!" one of my operators yelled as we dove under the nearest vehicles in a flash. I was only visiting, but they knew that typically the rocket attacks on the coalition base were accompanied by mortar fire on the Afghan border posts. As we dusted ourselves off, and my Air Force combat controller jumped on the radio to call for one of the aircraft continually circling over Afghanistan, I looked off in the distance towards the Pakistani military border post known as Post 41. The white trails of smoke from the rocket launches were coming from the base of the outpost on a small hill several kilometers in the distance. I noticed the launch site for the rockets was within spitting distance of the Pakistani post. The Border Police had established ambushes the night before on several of the typical launch sites, but the Taliban had learned to set up their sites very near Pakistani border positions, as the Afghans wouldn't come near them for fear of being attacked by the Pakistanis.

Read on

On December 5, an international conference on Afghanistan will open in Bonn, Germany, 10 years after the first Bonn conference set up the political system that would help govern Afghanistan for the next decade. The AfPak Channel asked a group of experts and practitioners what should have been done at Bonn 10 years ago, what might happen at this conference, and what Afghanistan needs in the future.

-- Peter Bergen and Andrew Lebovich

• Eklil Hakimi, Building on the past, securing the future
• Karl F. Inderfurth and Chinmaya R. Gharekhan, No more proxy wars in Afghanistan
• Omar Samad, The problems and promise of Bonn II
• Scott Worden, The elephants in the room at Bonn
• Francesc Vendrell, A decade of mistakes
• Caroline Wadhams and Brian Katulis, The big loser at Bonn will be Pakistan
• Barbara J. Stapleton, Afghanistan's bleak horizon
• Daud Khattak, Calling Pakistan's boycott bluff
• Khalid Mafton, Much ado about nothing

Prolonged conflicts are particularly difficult to resolve, often depending on the opening of a window of opportunity that must be seized before it closes again. Afghanistan has been mired in conflict for the past 32 years, and warring parties, foreign intervention, and imbalances of power among different groups have made finding a negotiated solution to this series of wars difficult to achieve. One opportunity was missed in 1989 when, following the Soviet withdrawal, the United States and Pakistan did not pursue the possibility of reaching a settlement between then-President Najibullah and the anti-Soviet mujahideen. When in early 2000 I was appointed the U.N. Secretary-General's Personal Representative for Afghanistan, the Taliban regime was in control of over 90 percent of the country and, despite their diplomatic isolation, had little incentive to seek a political accommodation with Ahmad Shah Massoud, whose Northern Alliance (NA) was confined to the country's extreme northeast.

Read on

On Monday, Germany will play host to the second Bonn international conference, chaired by Afghanistan and attended by more than 100 delegations. The conference's opening comes at a time when, once again, tensions are high between Washington, Islamabad and Kabul over a U.S. airstrike along the Mohmand agency's Salala mountain rangelast Saturday, which claimed the lives of 24 Pakistani soldiers. As a result, Pakistan says it is downgrading its presence at Bonn, opting to send its ambassador in Berlin in place of the Foreign Minister.

The tenth anniversary sequel to the first Bonn conference will attempt to chart a new decade-long (2014-2024) roadmap for engagement between Afghanistan and the world community, as many Afghans are gripped by a sense of uncertainty mixed with frustration, baffled that a decade of staggering investment in their country has yielded such precarious results in areas such as security, political cohesiveness, economic sustainability and neighborly relations.

TheGhost of Bonn

Bonn I has undergone waves of revisionism and debate in the 10 years since it was held, especially among those who claim that it was not inclusive enough, and should have incorporated the then-fleeing Taliban and some of its militant fellow-travelers. But what Bonn I actually lacked -- not unlike the recent Istanbul conference on regional cooperation -- was a binding political accord with an enforcement mechanism that would have put an end to regional proxy interferences in Afghanistan, thus ensuring the shutdown of cross-border sanctuaries once and for all. That was probably easier to attain in 2001, when the Taliban were on the run and regional conditions more conducive to a dismantling of militant support structures.

It is a myth that Bonn I would have been able to cobble together a near-perfect and fair representation of a war-torn society under prevailing conditions on the ground in December 2001. The objective since then has been to create a political tent inclusive enough to accommodate all political forces, including the armed opposition groups. However, the militants have refused thus far to be part of such a structure.

Hence, the focus of any credible political outreach or reconciliation initiative coming out of Bonn II should be on encouraging the armed opposition to join a participatory and pluralistic peace-building structure leading to democratic governance, tightening the parameters for a just settlement that would leave no wiggle room for forces that adhere to violence.

Furthermore, Bonn I's weakest points were less about its benchmarks (the source of much discussion among Afghans over the years) and more about the short delivery timelines of tangible results and reforms prescribed in an environment void of any coherent studies on damage and needs assessment in postwar Afghanistan. This rushed feeling was compounded by a lack of strategic resolve to provide appropriate funding during the first five years of the mission in order to lay the foundational elements to fix a failed state. In a country where agriculture and water form vital arteries of the economy and communal life, it took both Afghan and foreign decision-makers at least six years to realize that those two sectors required priority attention. It took us even longer to consider indigenous energy generation as an essential element of growth. Add to that list weak governance, outdated management practices, burgeoning parallel governance and economic structures, a wasteful contracting regime, a decaying system of patronage and impunity for powerful figures, and the inability to enforce basic laws. These fault lines of the past 10 years should no longer be tolerated by Afghans and those who invest in their future.

The promise of Bonn II

While the Bonn I accords generated a blueprint for a post-Taliban political process, Bonn II, which is not billed as a pledging conference, will represent a moment of political reckoning as the baton passes from transitional work to "transformational responsibilities" in the words of conference organizers. Bonn II aims to restore Afghan sovereignty by 2014, when international forces are scheduled to withdraw. It is also seen as a reality-check moment for all sides concerned, as major donors are expected to commit to continue to stand by Afghans during the upcomingdecade. In other words, to shift the focus from military to civilian work and agree to incur new costs to keep the country's economy and its nascent institutions afloat, especially by providing training and mentoring in securityand governance fields especially, all at a fraction of the colossal expenditures (estimated on the civilian side alone to be more than $50 billion) borne between 2001-2014. The initial yearly financial outlay for the Afghan government beyond 2014 is estimated by Afghan officials to be approximately $8 billion for security and $5 billion for development work. According to a recent World Bank study, unless the international community steps in, aid-reliant Afghanistan will face a yearly budget deficit of $7 billion from 2014 through 2021.

In light of the 2014 drawdown, separate strategic agreements between Afghanistan and members of the international community can also benefit the Bonn process by creating agreements and mechanisms through which Afghanistan will adhere to principles of democratic governance, institution building, and access to economic opportunity, service delivery and resolving outstanding issues on its peripheral flank. It is becoming urgently necessary for Afghans to agree on a legitimate domestic mechanism to discuss the colonial legacy of the Durand Line, and engage Afghanistan's neighbors on key issues,such as the sharing and management of water resources under international law.

Good news, bad news

In my discussions with officials and participants in the new Bonn process, two majorthemes will emerge that Afghans will view favorably:

• A shared realization that the incomplete rebuilding mission in Afghanistan, begun after the fall of the Taliban, has garnered international support and commitment for the next phase of transformation, with international partners set to focus on governance, reconstruction and institution building.
• A message relayed to the international community that Afghans yearn for stability, prosperity and democratic governance. And a message in turn from the international community to Afghans that the former will not allow a repeat of the 1989-1992 debacle, when a premature Western disengagement followed by Soviet suspension of aid precipitated a power vacuum that led to civil war and the Taliban.

However, there is also bad news:

• The Afghan government is accused of going to Bonn with little regard for parliamentary and democratic opposition, women's groups, and civil society input. All four pillars are eager to be part of more substantive deliberations. But with the exception of a handful of members of Parliament and civil society, most others have been shut out of the process. This type of short-sighted political manipulation will not help create the political cohesiveness that is sorely needed in the years to come.
• Unless Bonn II can address structural and constitutional deficiencies that have gradually eroded trust in government over the last ten years (rising tension between the three branches of government, political polarization, weak transparency and accountability -- mainly with foreign aid -- and deep disenchantment with the justice system), most other efforts and investments may end up going to waste.
• The focus of Bonn II is on the new decade (2014-2024) of engagement. However, we may not reach that stage if the immediate period of 2012-2014 is not managed and prioritized accordingly. Dealing as soon as possible with real security, political, transition, governance and perception pitfalls.
• Following Bonn, the Afghan focus will prematurely turn to politicking and positioning for the 2014 presidential elections, which happens to coincide with the end of the NATO drawdown. This will sap energy and focus from the real work of governance by preoccupying an already weak system with Afghan-style power politics.
• Having neglected for some time the over-arching objectives of nurturing Afghan unity and shared national identity, dented by three decades of conflict, Afghan political and social leaders have a duty and a new opportunity to help instill a belief in common national interest rooted in moderation and equality that transcends tribal, linguistic and sectarian loyalties.

Pakistan's boycott of the Bonn conference will not impact the political commitment to help Afghanistan's transformation phase over the next decade. It will, however, be seen as a missed opportunity for Pakistan -- and all concerned parties -- to not be part of important deliberations on issues concerning regional cooperation, terrorism and radicalism, and to explore peace-building opportunities, as well as a chance for Pakistan to show that it wishes to be a productive regional partner, rather than an instigator. Independent views on the subject were best reflected in a sobering editorial published this week in Pakistan's Daily Times that said:

Whilst braving the ‘war on terror' on the domestic front, we [Pakistanis] have been waging a proxy war in Afghanistan for so-called strategic depth. When taking such risks, incidents such as the one on Saturday are likely. Our shock and response at what is essentially the result of our double game is overcooked. It is time we wage this war in a manner that reduces the fatalities on our side and decreases the potential of having our ‘sovereignty' violated, by abandoning the proxy war in Afghanistan.

Bonn I and Bonn II are obviously quite different conferences, convened for different reasons under different circumstances; history will judge both based on the deliberations and outcomes, and the way we think about them will undoubtedly change and shift over time. But what will not change is that fact that they were convened because there was a dire need to jump-start efforts to stabilize Afghanistan at critical times, and in the case of Monday's conference, to absorb the shock of another withdrawal and provide continuity for the vital mission of trying to bring a semblance of order to South Asia's vital crossroads.

Omar Samad is the former Ambassador of Afghanistan to France (2009-2011), Canada (2004-2009) and Spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2001-2004). He worked as CNN's onsite commentator during Bonn I.

After spending last month in Afghanistan on my fourth trip this year, the situation can best be described as a glass half full. A multifaceted effort in the south, led by a "surge" of U.S. and Afghan troops, has increased security in the southern Pashtun heartland this year. But a steady drumbeat of high-profile attacks, including a brazen assault on the U.S. embassy and assassinations of key Afghan officials, has had an outsized impact on the population by eroding already weak confidence in the Afghan government and the forces supporting it. As I was ending my trip with a few days in Kabul, an SUV packed with 700 kilos of explosives rammed an armored "Rhino" bus, killing a dozen Americans and inflicting horrific burns on others in a targeted, planned attack reminiscent of the worst days in Baghdad. The U.S. military has adopted the line that these "spectacular attacks" are in fact signs of the Taliban's weakness, and points instead to a notable decline in the number of enemy initiated attacks.

But numbers matter less than perception in these wars -- and shaping perception is precisely how terrorist groups fight and win. The dominant narrative in Afghanistan is: the Americans are leaving, the government is weak, the Taliban is still strong, and Pakistan is the problem. And though the details of the cross-border NATO bombardment Saturday, which killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, are still murky, it will undoubtedly send U.S.-Pakistan relations into a further downward spiral. Unless the reality underlying these perceptions about the United States in the region are addressed, sustainable momentum on the government side cannot be generated. The U.S. surge may have started to turn around the momentum that is currently favoring the Taliban, but Afghan political and military actions are required to create a perception -- and the reality -- that the Afghan government is capable of surviving and prevailing. Addressing several factors bedeviling the Afghan campaign between now and next summer, when the traditional fighting season resumes and more troops go home, might turn perception and thus momentum in the Afghan government's favor. Six are most critical:

Promptly reaching a strategic partnership agreement in which the United States pledges to continue providing security and economic assistance after 2014 could go a long way toward reducing Afghan fears of abandonment. The U.S. and Afghan governments have been negotiating such an agreement for over a year, and the general idea of a partnership (albeit with a 10-year limit on American forces in Afghanistan after 2014) was approved at President Hamid Karzai's Loya Jirga this week; both sides hope to finalize it before the Bonn summit next month. The sticking points are night raids, which Karzai would like to end, and the transfer of detainees to Afghan control, despite a recent U.N. report cataloguing abusive practices in Afghan intelligence detention centers. The first issue can be postponed or finessed, but the United States is bound by international convention not to turn over detainees if it believes they will be tortured or mistreated. In the run-up to the Bonn Conference, Karzai will hopefully stay focused on the need to reassure Afghans of ongoing U.S. support and assistance as coalition troop levels decline over the coming years.

Forging a common front with his main backer, the United States, would help Karzai repair some of the image of weakness that plagues his government. Veteran U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)'s top commander Gen. John Allen have worked hard to "reset" the relationship with Karzai since they arrived this summer. One of his frequent interlocutors notes that Karzai "is exhausted, and he knows he is irritable and unpredictable." Nader Nadery, a commissioner of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, chides Karzai for his "lack of firmness. There is no clarity on where he stands." And, like many Afghans I spoke to, Nadery sees the president's tolerance of corrupt activity as a major weakness. Yet despite these failings, many Afghans I've talked to still see him as currently the only leader who can balance the myriad rivalries and swirling tensions that beset Afghan national politics, in particular the concern that Tajik leaders may be girding for an all-out civil war once the U.S. departs. The assassination of former president Burhanuddin Rabbani, the Tajik head of Karzai's High Peace Council, significantly ratcheted up those concerns.

Afghan security forces need to move demonstrably into the lead. The U.S. plans to push Afghan forces out front in more and more operations, if only to determine just how ready they are to take the lead and where the weak links are. To get them ready, U.S. forces must make partnering with and mentoring their Afghan partners its top priority, which it is not. By the military's own count in the latest DOD report mandated by Congress, 95 Afghan units in critical areas have no coalition partner whatsoever, and many others are only loosely mentored.

Afghans will have to step up if the three stated objectives of the military campaign are to be accomplished -- namely, to secure the south, the populated corridor along Highway One up to Kabul, and key areas of the east, especially the crucial provinces of Paktia, Paktika, and Khost. The south has been greatly stabilized over the past year, but the job is not yet done. I spent ten days in Kandahar province, where the longtime Taliban strongholds of Zhari, Panjwayi and Maiwand are still heavily contested. Returning from Maiwand, which is mostly still Taliban dominated, I passed through the Panjwayi district center, where a car bomb detonated a short while later. We stopped in Kandahar city for dinner -- one of the few times I have been with a U.S. military unit that felt comfortable dining at night in an Afghan city. The company commander ordered roast chickens, pilaf and delicious nan bread for all his men, and we picnicked amid the city's bustling nightlife, surrounded by curious Afghan men and children. Yet that reality coexisted with a frontal assault, hours earlier, on the Kandahar provincial reconstruction team, located just across from the provincial governor's office.

The current priority is to expand the security bubble beyond Kabul to Wardak, Logar and then Ghazni and Zabul provinces, thus securing the country's major highway all the way down to Kandahar. After that, the campaign plans to shift to the east, but it needs to tightly focus on the key population areas. There is a danger of focusing too much on sparsely populated provinces and neglecting the Khost to Gardez corridor, which has a large population and has been both an insurgent stronghold and transit route from the beginning of the war. Attempting to cut every ratline in the country is a sure fire way to fritter away forces. The only way that the campaign objectives can be achieved is if coalition forces focus on the important areas, and if Afghan security forces take more of the lead.

The expanding self-defense initiative may increase security. Security out in the countryside, where the insurgency is based, is starting to get a lift from the year-old Afghan Local Police program, but it is too early to judge the net effect of the program. It now has 8,500 recruits, mostly farmers who have volunteered and been trained to do checkpoint security and patrols in their villages. I've visited a half dozen of the 57 sites, where Special Operations Forces train and mentor the ALP and work with the district police chief, who is the Afghan official charged with their formal command and control, as well as providing them with salaries, trucks, weapons and ammunition. The program, strongly backed by ISAF, is funded and approved to grow to 30,000 in 100 districts, but the painstaking process of gaining community support and ensuring that the government exercises proper oversight means it will be another year or more before the program is fully implemented.

Thus far, RAND quarterly assessments done for the Special Operations Forces command in Afghanistan say that the program is broadly supported by local residents and that security in the sites has improved. The principal concern expressed by the program's critics is that these small groups (limited to 300 per district) will become militias, which historically have been armies of 30,000 or more under the command of a single warlord. The ALP program aims to prevent that by creating a strong link to district and provincial police chiefs from the outset. A recent Human Rights Watch Report catalogued allegations of abuse, disputes and ethnic tensions in some areas, although U.S. officials dispute some of the claims, which are under official investigation.

The ALP program features greater oversight and vetting mechanisms than earlier similar efforts, but continuing vigilance is necessary, as with all security forces. The Special Forces team in Maiwand told me about an ALP member who went AWOL, and along with his brother, started holding up cars for bribes on Highway One, the highway linking Kandahar to Kabul. The Taliban shot him dead. ALP commanders have fired numerous members they feel are not up to snuff. One of the sites, in Baghlan, is a unique case in that the Afghan government asked SOF to form a local police unit out of former insurgents from the small Hezb-e Islami faction; insurgents are not the recruiting base for ALP, unlike the Sons of Iraq program. The tensions in the area are increased by the fact that the area is a pocket of Pashtuns surrounded by a larger Tajik population. The Afghan interior ministry official who has national oversight of the program, Brig. Gen. Ali Shah Ahmadzai, told me that he has put the ALP commander, who is under investigation, on notice that he will be arrested "if he does not behave."

Promises to rural Afghans should be moderated but honored. The reality is that the dysfunctional Afghan bureaucracy cannot deliver funds to individual provinces, let alone the district level where 76 percent of the Afghan population ekes out a subsistence living. At present, most district governments are fig leafs for the distribution of international aid projects. I sat in the Khas Kunar district governor's office as he talked to the provincial governor's secretary about getting funds for a backhoe to dig out canals damaged in recent floods. A U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) official had suggested he seek to tap the $25,000 "performance based" fund that USAID provides each month to provincial governors. The district governor smiled and nodded as the conversation concluded, then turned to us and said, "It will take a year for the necessary paperwork and to get approval from Kabul." Yet there has been progress - in many areas district governors did not even visit, let alone live in, their districts last year. Many areas have now been pacified sufficiently for them to return. During the week I spent in Maiwand, I saw the governor preside over four meetings, although he still returns to Kandahar city each weekend where his family lives. Prioritizing needs is essential, since USAID funds and staff are slated to decline significantly, and the civilian state-building effort will focus on the provincial level rather than the districts. The district delivery program, for example, will end next year after reaching only 45 of the country's 398 districts. This program, which supports training and salary increases for district officials, is current under way in only 12 districts. A number of civilian officials and nongovernmental organizations believe dispute resolution, primarily through the traditional local mediation practices system, should be the highest priority in conflict-ridden areas where land and other disputes often fuel insurgent violence.

Pakistan is the glaring problem that has dramatically worsened and must be addressed. A senior U.S. official in Kabul declared flatly to me, "We will not succeed unless the Pakistan safe havens are reduced." He does not believe Pakistan will come around, despite countless U.S. pleas for more action. Pakistan balks at getting tough on the Afghan insurgent groups that are the central cards in its hedging strategy -- particularly the deadly Haqqani network, based in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal agency. And U.S. officials recognize that an assault into the agency simply is not going to happen.

The United States and Afghanistan will have to neutralize the threat from Waziristan through their own efforts, and indeed these efforts have stepped up dramatically. Operation Knife Edge rounded up many Haqqani operatives last month. A senior Haqqani facilitator, Mali Khan, was nabbed as he crossed the border, and another, Janbaz Zadran, was killed by a suspected CIA drone attack on October 13. During the week I spent in Paktika, U.S. forces dropped 33,000 pounds of bombs on the border to close mountain passes that the insurgents use. A U.S. commander there pointed out a dozen "POOs" or points of origin, of artillery or rockets fired from Pakistan into Afghanistan. They were all within sight of Pakistani Frontier Corps outposts - leaving little doubt about active or passive support for militants among some Pakistani forces. U.S. and Afghan forces are under direct attack from Pakistani territory, and Lieutenant General Curtis Scaparrotti assured me that when they take "effective" fire, U.S. forces shoot back. The dilemma, however, is that Pakistan holds a critical trump card, as it demonstrated this week by its ability to close major commercial crossings in retaliation for Saturday's cross-border strike. When I visited that part of the border area last month, Special Forces soldiers told me that an insurgent camp near the two border posts was a major source of attacks in the region.

If the Afghan and U.S. governments can agree on a common plan, backed by a lower but sustainable level of U.S. troops, they just might start winning the battle of perceptions. Given the insurgents' lack of popularity -- they rely on intimidation -- the Afghan government should be able to prevail in either defeating the insurgency or forcing them into a political accommodation if the United States remains willing to lend a hand. It might take five or ten years. But the alternative is not a pretty one to contemplate: the U.S. departs, Afghanistan crumbles, and the war fought to avenge the 9/11 attacks is perceived to be a failure. As I wrote in my last book on the Iraq war, Americans need to be prepared for wars to last a decade. The Afghan war, which the United States attempted to fight largely through a counterterrorism approach for the first seven years, has only begun in earnest in the last three. There is a third choice between the current large-scale U.S. counterinsurgency campaign and reverting to a counter-terrorism approach, and that is an Afghan-led counterinsurgency effort that that the United States can support in a sustainable way.

Linda Robinson is Adjunct Senior Fellow for U.S. National Security and Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is writing a book on the war in Afghanistan.

NationalPublic Radio host Steve Inskeep's newwork is not a comprehensive look at the complex history or troubled presentof my city. It is a roving, at times whimsical narrative telling certain storiesthat follow, intersect or run alongside each other. It winds through selectedplaces, events, and people, revisits some of them, keeps going, and comes backfor more. It is ostensibly pegged to one event, but in reality that event issimply a particularly convenient launching pad for talking about some of the violentconflicts, identity crises, power struggles and practical problems that hold hostagethe people of Karachi, Pakistan's largest and most cosmopolitan city.

Withthis approach, Instant City: Life andDeath in Karachi only honors the nature of this megalopolis.

Partof the problem in writing about Karachi is its enormity. There is its population,of course, on which the host of NPR's MorningEdition has based his title. For him an "instant city" is one that hasgrown significantly faster than the country it belongs to since the end ofWorld War II. Karachi, with its 13 million people -- an estimate for 2010 basedon a census carried out in 1998, and one that is considerably lower than othersas high as 18 million -- is at least 30 times as populated as it was in 1945,two years before the partition of British India brought hundreds of thousandsof Muslims pouring into the city and turned Karachi into an enduring magnet forPakistanis from other parts of the country.

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Those who argue about the Afghan war on bumper stickers and in sound bites would do well to pay extended attention to the Asia Foundation's annual survey of Afghan public opinion. The results cut both ways, demonstrating more progress than is admitted by the "Afghanistan is hopeless" crowd, while simultaneously calling into question the more extravagant declarations of those who claim a clear path to success. The survey is one of the most careful periodic studies of Afghan opinion. Conducted annually since 2006, this year's survey interviewed 6348 respondents in all 34 of the country's provinces, with sophisticated oversight and training of the pollsters. No survey can wholly correct for the tendency of some people, especially in countries like Afghanistan where the security situation is tenuous, to give the answers they think an outsider wants. The fact that 95 villages originally chosen (out of 876 villages and urban points originally selected for interviewing with a total of 166 later switched for various reasons) had to be replaced by others because of poor security in sampled areas probably slants the results somewhat more toward positive responses. However, it is fair to note that fewer villages were switched for security reasons in 2011 than in 2010 (95 compared to 138 in 2010). Despite these caveats, though, this survey is brim full of important results.

On the positive side, and at a time when many Americans have an undifferentiated view that everything Afghan is sliding downwards, nearly half the Afghans surveyed believe their country is moving in the right direction, a trend that has held up since 2008. The numbers who are optimistic about the country's economic future has risen since last year's survey. The survey also shows continued high esteem for the Afghan Army, the most highly respected institution in Afghanistan by a sizable margin (though those wanting to replicate the Iraq "awakening" example should note that the least respected institution are local militias). Confidence in local government shows improvement, particularly at provincial and district levels, although in this as in every aspect there are wide ethnic and regional differences that merit close attention. 

There is strong support for a negotiated peace, although the regional differences evident in the survey results suggest great concern that a badly designed peace might bring the Taliban back to power. This fear of civil war if the Taliban returns to power is one I heard much about when I visited Afghanistan in March. The survey indicates that such fears are particularly wide spread among ethnic minorities, so the kind of peace we pursue matters, in order to prevent a move toward armed conflict from populations who are most concerned about a Taliban return. Support for the Taliban has declined, and there is clearly an increased revulsion among Afghans against the civilian casualties caused by the insurgents. Afghan respondents also show increasing awareness of improvements in health and education.  In short, there is progress.  But there is also a great deal about which to be concerned.

Afghan fears about security are growing, and now overshadow complaints about corruption (still a major problem). Afghans in the areas of heavy combat in the southwest, south and east show much lower levels of confidence in security than their counterparts in other parts of the country.  Suicide bombers are increasingly rattling the confidence of city dwellers, who have more negative views of security than do villagers. More than half of the respondents say they fear for the safety of themselves and their families, a statistic that would presumably be higher if some of the excluded sample points had been included. More worrisome still, the number of respondents showing such fear has not declined from 2010 to 2011, and in eastern Afghanistan, where the Haqqani Network is predominant, such fear is rising.

There are also growing concerns about freedom of expression in the country -- a concern that reflects somewhat negatively on the Afghan government and warlords, but is specifically linked by many respondents to poor security and fears of the Taliban. The survey lays bare the great deal of doubt that Afghans see about the Taliban being rolled back, even in the areas where direct confrontations with U.S. and international forces have diminished substantially. Concerns about and resentment of the behavior of foreign troops are also a growing problem. There are wide variations on these views even in different districts within provinces, so it is a mistake to say the survey flatly challenges NATO views of success -- but counterinsurgency is as much about psychology as about statistics. These perceptions are a cause for concern that military analysts need to consider.

Ultimately, for all of the negatives in this survey, there are many areas of optimism as well.  America has twice ignored Afghanistan, after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union and after our initial success in 2001. And twice we have paid substantially in blood for our loss of attention.  Before we give up and declare everything hopeless, we need to look closely at how much has been achieved in the eyes of Afghans, and what that means in terms of the possibilities that still exist to succeed. But we need to look equally clearly at the negatives, the places where Afghans remain or have grown more skeptical, and think of corrective actions, even as international forces redeploy within Afghanistan and eventually withdraw. In doing so, the Asia Foundation survey is an important document, but only if we are willing to think in terms more complicated than slogans.

Ronald Neumann was the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan 2005-07 and is the author of The Other War: winning and losing in Afghanistan. He is president of the American Academy of Diplomacy, but the views expressed here are his own.

Real enemies will whisper about you. The murmursand hisses to discredit Ali Soufan have echoed through the community of opinionmakers and terrorism experts, and have even reached me.  Shortly before Soufan's book, The Black Banners, was published, aproducer from a major media outlet spoke with me.  "Was it true that Soufan had been a low-levelFBI employee, who could not speak with authority about the nature of theterrorist threats to the United States because he lacked the necessarysenior-level perspective? Wasn't he exaggerating his knowledge and role?  Wasn't he a bit of a self-promoter?" theproducer asked. 

I could not help but smile to myself as Ilistened; the same character assassination had happened to me when my own bookon interrogation and the War on Terror came out.  I had been kept off a number of programs as aresult.  I also knew that Soufan already hadbeen targeted this way several years earlier when his name first became public.I told the producer that Soufan's career and mine had overlapped on manyoccasions, and although we had never to my knowledge met, in many instances Iknew first-hand that Soufan's description of events and policies were accurate.

Soufan was an FBI special agent for eight years, arare native Arabic speaker in a professional FBI culture that was shaped byformer Marines, often Irish Catholic and working class, and which hadtraditionally viewed counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism work as secondtier specializations. CIA culture, too, although white collar rather than blue,viewed these specializations as adjuncts to the "real" work of espionage, whichwas to steal secrets and recruit spies from our historic enemies in the SovietUnion, North Korea, or Iran.  It wouldprove an ironic twist that the Bush Administration also viewed terroristthreats as small-bore issues.  Until 9/11,that is, after which the Bush Administration subjected us all to eight years oflarge-bore, misguided, and muscular obsessions. But, Soufan, the FBI officerswho had worked the first World Trade Center bombing case, and especially hisoriginal mentor, the head of the FBI's New York office, John O'Neill (killed onSeptember 11, 2001, at the base of the World Trade Center towers,) had long understoodthe seriousness of the jihadist threat from the mid-1990s-as had the ClintonAdministration and many in the CIA. Soufan quickly found himself playing a keyrole in the FBI's counterterrorism efforts, and spent a frantic decade tryingto piece together enough information to stop the Muslim terrorists trying tokill us.

TheBlack Banners at first seems to lose the reader inan endless series of incomprehensible names, unrelated dates, places, andcases.   But what emerges from Soufan's welter ofdetails and minor episodes is his answer to one of the critical questions abouthow the U.S. should protect itself from terrorism.

Should counterterrorism work be approached as acriminal matter, or as a war which considers terrorists neither enemycombatants nor criminals?  The issue, ofcourse, became instantly politicized after 9/11, as the Bush Administrationturned U.S. counterterrorism efforts into the "War on Terror," in so doingjustifying the jettisoning of habeascorpus, the utility of U.S. civilian courts for terrorism cases, and varioushistoric constraints on what American intelligence, military, and lawenforcement officials could do. Soufan's involvement in investigating most ofthe major al-Qaeda attacks and plots that have afflicted us, from the "BlindSheik" of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, to al-Qaeda's attackagainst the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, tothe long struggle to find Osama bin Laden, makes clear that painstakingcriminal and intelligence work-classic FBI investigations, relying on andshaped by the legal requirements of U.S. law-led to the perpetrators in waysthat made prosecution possible and, even more importantly, identified terroristorganizations, individual terrorists, and their plans and intentions.   

Even as a sense of reassurance grows with eachharried, scrambling response Soufan and his colleagues make to new threats andincomprehensible bits of information our anger grows, too, as we become awareof a second critical theme of The BlackBanners.  Certainly before 9/11, andeven after the reforms of the 9/11 Commission to the intelligence andcounterterrorism communities, the FBI and CIA were afflicted by bureaucraticinfighting, pettiness, and parochialism, while political leaders exploitedterrorist threats to serve political objectives not always related to thethreats themselves. Soufan relates what many in the intelligence communityexperienced:  "Prior to the Iraq war,when there was a lot of pressure on the FBI from the White House to produce a"link" between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, the 9/11 Team's assessment, againand again, was that there was no link. The White House didn't like that answer, and told the bureau to lookinto it more and ‘come up with one.'" These vices may well have kept us fromstopping the 9/11 attacks and from far more quickly destroying al-Qaeda than wehave.

We share Soufan's repeated frustration with whatthe FBI and CIA called "the Wall." Neither agency shared information fully with the other, out of acombination of bureaucratic rivalry, mutual disdain, and honest belief thatlegal constraints forbid the sharing of information. I lived this self-harmmyself in the years prior to 9/11 with some of Soufan's New York FBIcolleagues, as one of them told me he would not share information I neededbecause I was a CIA officer, and he could not "compromise the source." I evenresponded, "but we are on the same team!" And so, our counterterrorist operation fizzled.

It is important that one bear first-hand witnessto our failings, as Soufan does.  We shouldsit on the bathroom floor and cry with him after the 9/11 attacks, inheartbreak and anger, believing that we could have stopped the attacks and hadbeen done in by our own failings. "I threw up....my whole body was shaking....I wasstill trying to process the fact that the information I had requested aboutmajor al-Qaeda operatives, information the CIA had claimed they knew nothingabout, had been in the agency's hands since January 2000..."  And what can one feel but the astonishment andcontempt Soufan relates when he was told in June 2001 that the Bushadministration had decided for political reasons to misrepresent the factsabout the Cole investigation, and toclaim the attack had not been the work of al-Qaeda and was, in any event,"stale." "Maybe to them," Soufan writes in understated anger, "but not to us,not to the victims and their families, and certainly not to bin Laden andal-Qaeda." Less than three months later the administration's Cold Warriorswould no longer be able to decide that the president could not "risk[political] capital going after al-Qaeda in Afghanistan."   

The third theme of The Black Banners is the most disturbing, poignant and effectivesection of the book:  Soufan's growingdisgust at how the interrogation methods developed and imposed on theintelligence community by the Bush Administration undermine our principles,break our laws, and do not work-indeed, how they actually hinder ourintelligence work.  Soufan and hiscolleagues in the FBI had been successfully interrogating terrorists for yearsbefore the sudden introduction of "enhanced interrogation techniques"-"torture"is the word a layman would use.  We seeconvincing, devastating proof in his detailed descriptions of how, in caseafter case (e.g., Jamal Al-Fadl, Abu Jandal, Abu Zubaydah, Khaled bin Rasheedand on and on) he and his colleagues successfully interrogated al-Qaeda membersby "establish[ing] rapport" with them, by talking about religion, or family, bysharing a taste for sweets, or by laughing with them, if necessary, rather thanby intimidating and physically abusing a detainee.  He describes his and his colleagues'consternation when confronted with the snake oil salesmen who peddled andimposed "enhanced interrogation techniques"-a pseudo-expert the CIA brought into oversee interrogations, whom Soufan gives the appropriately menacing andfoolish sobriquet "Boris"-who had never conducted an interrogation, knewnothing about terrorism, and who knew nothing about intelligence work.  "Why is this necessary" Soufan asked whenfirst confronted with such measures as sensory deprivation, overload, orhumiliation, "given that Abu Zubydah is cooperating?"  As "Boris" tinkered with ever-increasinglyharsh, and ever-ineffective, ways to break detainees, Soufan and his colleaguestried to oppose them, but as was the case with everyone involved in theinterrogation program (myself included,) failed.  Soufan and the FBI formally ceased anyinvolvement in the case.  "I can nolonger remain here.  Either I leave orI'll arrest [Boris]."  It is tellingthat, to my knowledge, four individuals with first-hand experience ininterrogations during the "War on Terror," have spoken out about enhancedinterrogation methods:  two Air Forceofficers (Steve Kleinman and another officer writing under the pseudonymMatthew Alexander), an FBI officer (Soufan), and a CIA officer (myself). All ofus, independently, make the same points: interrogation must be based on rapport; enhanced interrogation methodsare ineffective, counterproductive, immoral, illegal, and unnecessary, and theyhad nothing to do with obtaining much, if any, information not otherwiseobtainable.  It is only apologists forthe Bush Administration, or Bush Administration policymakers themselves, whoassert that "enhanced interrogation techniques" are legal, or work.  Soufan is devastating about thesemethods:  "The person or persons runningthe program were not sane....the interrogation was stepping over the line fromborderline torture.  Way over the line.""In FBI headquarters, the situation was clear....What Boris was doing wasun-American and ineffective."

The book on occasion manifests a characteristictypical of many memoirs: if only they had listened to me, well, we would havedone everything right.  The damning factsin Soufan's book, though, are powerful. Yes, the FBI and CIA did so much right, but got so much wrong.  The Bush Administration was purblind andarrogant, from dismissing terrorism at first, to down-playing the Cole case for political reasons, toinstituting ineffective, and illegal "enhanced interrogation" techniques.  Well, I was there, too. Soufan's and my workoverlapped-we served with the same people, in the same places, dealt with thesame "Wall" imposed by the same people in the CIA and the FBI.  We worked with remarkable men and women, whogave their souls to stopping the terrorist threats facing the UnitedStates.  We reacted precisely the same ways to the same challenges, in almost literallythe same words, to what we experienced about terrorist threats, enhancedinterrogation and bureaucratic infighting. Soufan knows exactly what he is talking about, and does us all a serviceby having set it down in The Black Banner.

Glenn L. Carle is a former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Transnational Threats, and spent 23 years in the Clandestine Servicesof the Central Intelligence Agency. He is also the author of TheInterrogator: An Education.

Assuming for a moment that many of Afghanistan's security problems originate outside the country's borders, the upcoming international conference on Afghanistan to be held in Istanbul on November 2 could be a unique occasion to address the many obstacles inhibiting a just and durable peace in the country. But the possibility of obtaining any tangible result from Istanbul is more remote than some may expect. Under the veneer of diplomatic nicety and rhetoric lies a set of mini-Great Game maneuvers that will put to the test the current efforts to bring about Afghan reconciliation, transition, sovereignty, and a sustainable paradigm shift in regional relations.

The Turkish initiative, backed by Afghanistan and major Western donors, will bring together a core group of leaders from 14 nations that form the "Heart of Asia" consortium, along with observers from the United States, the United Nations, the European Union, Japan and others, to try to improve region-wide security and cooperation prospects through confidence-building measures and economic integration initiatives, such as the "New Silk Road" project.

Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in  testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, explained that the United States and others are working in forums such as the Istanbul meeting to help secure commitments from regional countries "to respect Afghan sovereignty and territorial integrity and to support Afghan reconciliation." Another aim of the gathering is to smooth the way for December's much larger conference to be held in Bonn, Germany, where decisions will be made for the post-2014 international engagement and long-term Afghan aid strategy.

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This is the second installment in a series contributed by researchers from the World Organization for Resource Development and Education (WORDE) as they traveled throughout Pakistan to explore how civil society is countering extremism at the grassroots level.

...

In a pristine, remote valley in Kashmir, far from the theaters of war, some families are abandoning their religious and cultural traditions in favor of extremist ideologies. The trend began after the 2005 earthquake, when several Islamist organizations - notably Jamaat ud-Dawa (JuD) - came to the forefront, providing food, shelter and health supplies to devastated communities. A village elder lamented, "Many of us were impressed by their sophisticated ambulance services, and families willingly joined in their relief efforts." Most of these families had no idea that JuD was in fact a front for the banned militant organization, Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Pakistanis, particularly in such remote areas, require tools to recognize extremist ideologies and terrorist organizations so that they can create counter-movements within their own communities. We travelled throughout Northern Punjab and the Hazara region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to learn how certain grassroots organizations have designed effective awareness campaigns within a religious paradigm that are palatable even to the at-risk population.

We began with the leaders of Pakistan's moderate religious networks. Since 9/11, dozens of religious scholars have issued public statements and fatwas against terrorism.  Dr. Raghib Naeemi -- son of Dr. Sarfraz Naeemi who was killed in 2009 after he publically denounced terrorist activities as un-Islamic -- appears regularly on TV to promote peace and social cohesion.

Traditional Muslim networks have organized nation-wide anti-Taliban public rallies from "Save Pakistan" to "Ulema and Mashaikh" conventions, bringing together religious scholars and community leaders. Last November, a "Long March" was organized from Islamabad to Lahore to protest the increasing number of suicide attacks on Pakistan's cultural and spiritual landmarks. Over 20 major shrines across Pakistan were bombed last year alone. One of the core organizers of the Long March explained, "As we proceeded, the participation grew by the thousands, and in every city, we gave speeches and handed out fliers teaching people how to recognize extremism."

Religious leaders have also developed rapid response mechanisms to denounce terrorism following major suicide attacks. Last year when the soup kitchen at the shrine of Lahore's patron saint was bombed, the imam Mufti Mohammad Sialvi invited the media and mobilized leaders from different mosques to condemn terrorism. When we visited the shrine a year later, we found that students groups had maintained the campaign with freshly painted banners.

To form a stronger unified voice against the Taliban, religious scholars have also created a number of new NGOs. In the rural outskirts of Rawalpindi, Pir Mudassir Shah, a dynamic young leader versed in 14 languages, established the think tank Center for Innovative Research, Collaboration and Learning (CIRCLe). Pir Mudassir was a prominent organizer in a 25,000 man National Flag Day march to demonstrate support for the military counterinsurgency operations in the Swat Valley. The march brought together various elements of civil society, from conservative Muslim groups to the Christian Progressive Movement of Pakistan. CIRCLe will soon launch a poster campaign, for which they are seeking international support. One of the posters features a girl crying with a caption: "The Taliban Took my Father."

Schools are another critical channel through which Pakistanis generate awareness. Our journey took us to Bhera, an ancient village known for its classic Mughal mosques, Hindu temples, and carved wooden balconies. Deep in the heart of Punjab, Bhera's Dar ul-Uloom Muhammadia Ghousia is the hub of a network of educational and social welfare institutions providing free education grounded in the Sufi ethos to over 25,000 women and men. Pir Amin al-Hasanat, who leads the school, explained, "We teach all of our students that it is not their duty to fight jihad, but to look after the wellbeing of their community - regardless of one's faith or ethnicity." Just last year, the school and its affiliate philanthropic and social welfare organizations distributed hundreds of hygiene kits, established medical facilities for over 7,000 people and rebuilt homes for flood victims. They targeted remote areas at risk of falling under the influence of radical groups who use relief as a means to win recruits.

We encountered other successful models. The Pak Turk International School system has campuses throughout Pakistan, including volatile regions like Quetta and Peshawar. Their teachers challenge radical narratives by providing students and their families the necessary tools for interfaith dialogue and mutual understanding, which allow them to deconstruct the tribal, cultural, and religious stereotypes that feed militancy. Successful counter radicalization, we were told, is not taught in a specific class or manual but rather by example. In the Pak Turk schools, teachers are available at all times for guidance, and visit students in their homes. Through these civil society efforts, Pakistanis are becoming aware of the dangers of violent extremism. According to recent public opinion polls, a greater number of Pakistanis have a negative view of al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban than before. "At first people were hesitant to speak out against the Taliban," explained Pir Mudassir Shah, "but now they are becoming more comfortable challenging extremism because the issue is mainstreamed." Today, while barriers and police checkpoints can be seen lining the streets of Pakistan's capital, and the army mobilizes in the tribal belt, a parallel war is being waged in Pakistan's heartland by local communities.

In one instance in rural Abbottabad, not far from the compound in which slain al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was living,  a group of radical mullahs offered to build a mosque on the condition that the clerics could provide their own teachers. Not long after, families were alarmed to see that their children were being radicalized in classes taught at the new mosque. When parents learned that their children were being taught that "J" stands for "jihad" and "K" for "kalashnikov" the community held the mosque under siege until the mullahs were forced out.

150 miles south, in a village near Bhera, a father learned that his son was being brainwashed by a fundamentalist community member to believe that he would enter paradise if he became a suicide bomber. The father, supported by the Dar ul-Uloom community, rescued the children by publically exposing the radical mullah. He challenged the mullah: "After sending my child to paradise, why don't you send your own son to join him so that mine won't be lonely?" 

Even some segments of the population that had been involved in militancy are now condemning extremism. Irfan, a former "toll collector" for a militant outfit along the Pakistan-Afghanistan Durand Line explained, "After the Taliban bombed the shrine of the Rahman Baba, the great Pashtun poet-saint, I realized that militants are destroying our country." Now as a taxi driver, Irfan makes it a point to lambast the Taliban in conversations with all of his passengers.

Waleed Ziad and Mehreen Farooq are leading a project to analyze the role of Pakistan's civil society in countering extremism for the Washington DC-based World Organization for Resource Development and Education (WORDE).