Town Hall With Students Staff and Trainers at Camp Atterbury-Muscatatuck Center for Complex Operations

Jacob J. Lew
Deputy Secretary for Management and Resources 

Camp Atterbury-Muscatatuck Center for Complex Operations, Indiana

November 19, 2009

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: I want to start with a couple of thank you’s, thanking the team here at Muscatatuck and thank you, General Tooley, for arranging this visit. But most importantly, I want to thank the (inaudible) of you who are here in this training program. This is an important step in your preparation for a very important mission. It’s a mission where you’re going to be right there on the front line, working day to day in situations that have all the reality of what you see here and more so. And I’m delighted that we’ve been able to work with the Defense Department to put together a training program that introduces you to what it will look and feel like to engage when you’re at PRTs and forward-operating bases.

These are hard missions. These are time-critical and this is a time that matters. And there’s a danger involved. And I thank each and every one of you for your service. You come from a host of departments. There’s a lot of folks here from USAID and State, but there are also folks here from the Department of Agriculture, from the Treasury Department, and there’s about six other agencies of government where people like you will move through this training program.

The key to this whole mission is that it’s a civilian-military cooperation. Every place where we go, every mission we undertake is worked out together and it’s a team effort. This training is different from training that’s been done in the past because it reflects that team effort. Ruth Whiteside, who runs our Foreign Service Institute to train diplomats, can speak to the history of how different it is for us to be doing it here in this way, working together.

So I am going to kind of stop with those few brief opening remarks, because what I hope we can do over the next 10 minutes or so is have a conversation, talk to you about what you have experienced here at Muscatatuck, what questions you have that I can answer about the mission that you’re all engaged in, and as I sort of close my opening remarks, let me end as I began by thanking you.

This is really important work. It’s really hard work. We have a lot of confidence in all of you as you go out to Afghanistan to be able to make a difference. And here in a week and a day, when it’s a new beginning for the government there, it’s a time of hope for the people there, we can’t lose sight of the challenges. You’re going to be dealing with bureaucratic challenges, political challenges, security challenges, and people who may not always be motivated the way we would want them to be motivated. I have confidence that each of you can make a difference in the work you do, and I hope the training here has helped prepare you to go out and be as effective as we know you can be.

So let me stop there and open it to the kind of conversation that will be brief, but I hope can still give us a chance to have some conversation, and don’t be shy. (Laughter.)

Yeah.

QUESTION: Secretary Lew, I’m interested to hear about the preparation on the other side in Afghanistan for the arrival of the civilian effort. And thank you for coming (inaudible).

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: The preparation is constant. There is – there’s actually a weekly meeting, a “SVTC” (teleconference) meeting, where all of the agencies that are sending folks to Afghanistan meet. I chair the meeting every week. We go through questions, ranging from are people identified, are they in training, do we have transportation, and is there a place for them to go and a job for them to do. It’s very much on our minds that these are – it does not make sense to send people if we can’t get them where they need to be with the tools they need and the mobility they need to get out and do the job.

I have a lot of confidence in the understandings that we have with the military leadership that they value the civilian mission as highly as they do the military mission. They view moving our people around so that civilians can get outside of the wire and have real meetings like the ones that you’re going through the vignettes to get some experience with, because you can’t do that if you stay on the base.

There will be moments when it’s challenging. There are going to be competing demands where we have to work through the normal pressures in a situation where it’s space-constrained, equipment-constrained. But I have confidence that there is the commitment from the top to make it work, and the challenge as you all of you go out will be for that to be working on the ground.

The thing I can guarantee you is you’ll have support if there are issues that arise, that there’s a very deep level of cooperation at the planning level and at the implementation level to make this an effective deployment.

There can’t be only one question. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: I have a question.

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: Yeah.

QUESTION: Well, I understand the value of this mission and it’s really wonderful to go and help the country of Afghanistan and especially the civilians play a great part there. My question is, you know, during this short period -- of course, you can establish a strong bond with the Afghani – Afghanistan people and try to help them initiate a project, write proposal, try to solve some of the problem. But in this short a time, I wouldn’t think it will be effective enough to complete the mission. And I myself hate that I’ll start something and leave it in the middle and then come back and somebody else will come after me, start from the beginning again.

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: One of the challenges in crisis and post-crisis missions is continuity of program. These are not programs where you have decades to do it, so you have to work intensely in a short period of time, but we have deployments that have not traditionally been long enough. One of the things about the mission, and what all of you have signed onto, is a longer assignment than, historically, civilians have been taking. The fact that you have made commitments for a year is a huge improvement in terms of continuity, from a situation where we would send civilians out for three months at a time. People can do a lot of good work in three months, but the number of transitions makes continuity very challenging.

So the fact that we’re in the process of building a civilian force from 320 to almost a thousand, and that will be, for the most part, full-year commitments addresses that issue right off the bat. I don’t think that we’ll get most people to sign up for two and three years, but we are encouraging people to make multi-year commitments.

I think we have to be realistic that these are difficult assignments, and if we make the standard that you can only do this work if you do it for two or three years, that will artificially limit the effectiveness of our ability to get people in the right place at the right time. On the other hand, we are very much going to encourage and support multi-year commitments.

We’re also going to try and stagger the turnover. We’re going to try and not have it be that everyone comes and goes on the same day. Part of the challenge in these transitions and the continuity is that the hand-off – it’s kind of like being in an American hospital on July 4^th weekend. Everybody’s new. You don’t want to be sick in America on July 4^th.

A lot of the turnover in programs like this has tended, because of the schedule of Foreign Service assignments – has been all at once, partially because we’ve been staffing up gradually over an extensive period. People’s years will end at different times. And we’re very conscious of it, and building in with Kabul – with our Embassy in Kabul – a plan to not have the kind of sudden transition that really does create a problem in continuity. The military has been very effective in a lot of places, and Foreign Service has been very effective in a lot of places with these kinds of short-term but very intense assignments.

I think going to a year for the basic assignment is a huge step forward. Having the transitions be smoother is a second one. And I think you put your finger on what is a critical challenge. These are not 12-month projects. The – many of the development projects that we’re going to be undertaking in the traditional development context take many years. We don’t have many years to show progress, because it’s a situation where if we can’t show progress quickly, the political reality on the ground won’t be there where it needs to be to keep moving forward.

But that doesn’t mean you finish the job. Showing progress and finishing the job are different. We need to be able to show progress quickly, and then have a realistic trajectory towards the kinds of objectives, and ultimately the transfer of responsibility, from international and American staff and military, to Afghans.

Each of you will be working closely with Afghans every day. When you go to a PRT or a FOB, you’ll probably be outnumbered 10 to 1 by Afghan civilians. And you will be trying not just to do the direct work that you do, but to be training them and preparing them to take over so that they can then do it, both in that place and in other places. That’s really the key to success and the leverage we get from a civilian program.

QUESTION: Train the trainer?

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: Train the trainer.

QUESTION: I have a question.

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: Yeah.

QUESTION: Yes, sir. In terms of national objectives, I know there’s been some at the national level of where and how we’re going to approach our strategy in Afghanistan. I have been (inaudible) watching the news since training. Just to know where we are on that, how’s that moving forward in terms of where the President wants to go or the Secretary wants to go?

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: Obviously, there’s been a very intense review process underway. For obvious reasons, I’m not at liberty to describe what’s happened in those meetings. And I wouldn’t predict exactly where it’s going to go because the President has not yet made a decision.

I think that the thing that I have found personally very encouraging about the review is – I’ve spent a lot of years in government, I’ve worked on presidents planning military engagements and civilian reconstruction. And I grew up in a decade when my youth was defined by a country at war. I’m very proud of the process that’s been undertaken, the role that each of us has been asked to play, and the way the President has driven it with a real focus on having the best understanding of what the challenges are, the best understanding of what the options are, and taking the time to do it in a thoughtful, considered way, because he’s aware – we’re all aware – that our soldiers are being asked to go into harm’s way, all of you are being asked to go into harm’s way. And we have to have the confidence that we’re doing it with a mission that we think is best designed as it can possibly be.

I think that’s what’s going to come out of this. And I think that that’s not to say the mission that is underway now necessarily will be radically changed. But the fact that there’s a kind of serious rechecking of do we have things right, should we change parts of what we’re doing, I think is the right way to undertake this kind of responsibility. There’s been no break in the action in the meantime. I mean, your colleagues who have been deployed over the last several months have taken up positions. We’ve almost doubled the numbers of civilians in Afghanistan since January. By the end of the year, beginning of next year, we will be tripling the number of civilians.

As a result of the review, I don’t think the work that you’ll be doing will change fundamentally. There may be some slight change of strategy about the places where we are and the number of places we are. But I think what will come out of it is a combination of a civilian and military strategy that is really best designed for success and to help the Afghanistan – the people of Afghanistan ultimately take over responsibility for many of the things that we’re doing.

Yeah.

QUESTION: Thank you, sir, for the opportunity. My question is related to the participating agencies in the mission. Are there any plans to expand the number of participating agencies, i.e., Department of Transportation?

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: The Department of Transportation is already helping out with a number of functions, so they’re in the – not a great number, but there’s a handful of people from the Department of Transportation.

The way this interagency effort has been put together – and it’s worth actually dwelling for a moment on the extraordinary nature of this interagency effort. I mean, we all know that when you’re back in Washington, the boundaries between agencies can sometimes require a passport to go back and forth. It’s not always easy to do things across agency lines in Washington. This effort has been truly a whole-of-government interagency. From the very beginning of my involvement in it, the question has been: What is the mission, what are the core competencies we need, who needs to be on the team to get it done? And we’ve worried less about who was going to be in the lead here or there. It’s being co-led in some places. We’re shifting responsibility as appropriate.

We didn’t sit down and say, we need X, Y, and Z agencies involved. We identified – ultimately the 974 positions that we’re now filling are 974 specific position descriptions. Each of you was recruited because you have a core capability to help with one of those, or a number – a set of those missions. And that’s what makes it challenging to recruit civilians, because you don’t – you can’t just ask for a team of a hundred people who do agricultural work or a team of a hundred people who do rule of law work. If there’s more work for the Department of Transportation, my conversations with the Department of Transportation lead me to believe that they are fully prepared to be part of the effort.

I must say I have not encountered a department in the government that wasn’t willing to be part of the effort. Sometimes you have to escalate it to a level where people are authorized to make decisions to do things that are different than the way things have been done in the past. But I think that there is a shared sense that if we can help, we want to be part of it. And I know there’s quite a number of you here from the Department of Agriculture today. Each session there’s a preponderance from one or another agency. This group has gotten more than an even distribution of people from the Department of Agriculture. We’ve had a great partnership with Secretary Vilsack, with the Department, and with each of you.

And the thing I can tell you, when you go over to Afghanistan, is my observation on the ground, is that it is a real team. When you’re talking to someone, you don’t know if they’re from USAID or the Department of Agriculture; they’re on the team, and that’s the way it should be. And I think that what we’re modeling here in terms of civilian-military cooperation is something that is also civilian-civilian cooperation. It’s all too infrequent that we tell people we’re here because we’re with the Government of the United States. I think it matters less to say, I’m from Department X.

QUESTION: Do you have time for one more question?

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: Sure.

QUESTION: (Inaudible.) This has been a great experience. I am really impressed by the spirit of training (inaudible). My question is whether this type of civilian-military (inaudible) training is – how it’s maybe integrated to other programs in (inaudible), non-U.S. forces, like in (inaudible), other (inaudible) NATO allies?

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: Well, we obviously are training the U.S. civilians who are going over, so we’re not training the civilians from the many other countries who are providing them.

QUESTION: Right, but –

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: We are, though, assigning people to provisional team – provincial teams that are at bases that are managed by other countries. So I’m sure many of you will end up being on British bases, Dutch bases, bases for many PRTs and FOBs that are under the authority of other national programs.

There on the ground, when I was in Afghanistan, I saw extraordinary cooperation where the country of origin didn’t matter to the people on the team. It was sharing best practices and getting the job done. Practices do change from – when you move from one to another country control. And we – as you’re assigned to a base, we’ll have to help each of you understand what the rules there are or how you get the mobility you need, how the life support functions are handled. I don’t think we’re quite ready to take on the responsibility to train all the civilians from all the other countries, but we are ready to share best practices, and we have done that on a number of occasions where we’ve had visitors from other countries.

Haven’t we had a number of international visitors here, Ruth?

DR. WHITESIDE: Yes.

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: Yeah, a number of international groups have come here to see the training. And as with every other part of the mission, there’s been an effort to share knowledge and share best practices, but each country trains its own civilians.

So I’m – I hate to cut off any – but let me take one more. I’m going to be in trouble because of the schedule here.

QUESTION: And I’ll be very brief. I just wanted to thank you so much for this type of training. It’s been a heck of a week. I’ve gotten mud in places I don’t even – (laughter). But I cannot say enough about the military and our Afghan role players, the skills that they have given us this week, and the opportunity to fail or do good in a safe setting that I feel has set – is setting us up for success to help the Afghan build their capacity. And I really appreciate – just keep – keep up this type of training. It is so invaluable to civilians who are --

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: Well, thank you. And thank you to our team. (Applause.) I wish you all the best of luck and stay safe.

QUESTION: God bless you.

# # #

Press Roundtable at Camp Atterbury-Muscatatuck Center for Complex Operations, Indiana

Jacob J. Lew
Deputy Secretary for Management and Resources 

Camp Atterbury-Muscatatuck Center For Complex Operations, Indiana

November 19, 2009

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: Thank you all for joining us out here today for what, for me at least, has been I think a very – I know a very informative and worthwhile visit here. The training that we are watching today and the people that we’re meeting in a lot of ways tell the story of the civilian program in Afghanistan, coming particularly at a time of the – President Karzai’s inauguration, the commitments that he has made in his inaugural remarks to make the kind of change that are so badly needed in terms of how the governance system there works. It really underscores the importance of having our team, our civilian and military team, working together, going out prepared with the right skills, so that as – we’re fond of saying that we have the right people in the right place at the right time.

The challenges that all of the folks that we’ve been meeting here will undertake are many. There’s not – there’s – I don’t think one of them who thinks there’s a magic wand where they’re going to go and make everything in Afghanistan perfect. So I think you see the kind of determination to go to difficult places, to get outside of the wire and get into the communities where the hard work can be done, and to go with an understanding that, unlike the training sessions that we’ve seen which lasts an hour, that it’s going to take many times going out and having the kinds of meetings and conversations to have things heading in the right direction.

I think it’s important to recognize that this is a new approach to training. The traditional approach to training was the military trained the military and civilians trained civilians. This is truly a joint venture. This is military-civilian cooperation beginning with the training and the preparation so that when our folks go out and when they’re going to be living together and working together, they know what that’s going to look like. They can’t be prepared for every situation, but they can be prepared for many kinds of situations. And there’s really two aspects to it. One is the training to – for civilians to work in a military setting, which many of the PRTs and the forward-operating bases are. And there’s also training to work in an environment that is uniquely challenging, as the Afghan environment is.

I know I’ve talked with many of you about the civilian plan. And I think I’ll only talk for a couple of minutes now to give you a sense of where we are in the civilian buildup. As I think most of you know, we started with 320 civilians on the ground at the beginning of the year, and we’re on track to fill 974 positions. And as important as the number is that there are the right people who are going with – in most cases, almost all cases–commitments to stay for a year. So it won’t be a series of three-month assignments; it will be a year or longer commitments. We will be adding, as we need additional civilian personnel, to these numbers. And we have been working with the Embassy in Kabul to try and work over a – really not just months, but a couple of years, to have a plan for making sure that we have continuity of coverage in all of the places where we need to have civilians.

The question I know is on everyone’s mind with the strategic review, on the military side: What does that mean in terms of civilians? It’s important to remember the civilians don’t deploy in battalions. We deploy civilians one by one. We recruit people to fill specific positions, and the numbers will never be exactly parallel to the kinds of numbers that military deployments involve.

Typically, in a district where we have civilians, we’ll have two to six U.S. civilian full-time personnel surrounded by a number of foreign nationals, Afghans – roughly a 10:1 ratio. And in many of these areas, if you have three U.S. civilians with a total civilian presence of 30, that’s a very large presence in a sometimes pretty remote area. The question isn’t the numbers. It’s: Do you have people with the right skills; can they help with the agricultural work; can they help with the rule of law work; can they help with the local governance work?

In many places, helping provincial governors to reach out into parts of their province, which have never really known any kind of formal exposure to civilian governance. So there is a very big challenge ahead of all the people that we’ve had the chance to meet today. And I thank all of them for their service and for their courage in taking very difficult assignments and going out, as I’ve seen on the ground, performing with great excellence.

So why don’t I stop there and we can go to questions.

Yes.

QUESTION: Deputy Secretary Lew, in The New York Times, in fact, today, there’s a question about – that Ambassador Eikenberry requested more staff to be sent, but he was turned down because of budget constraints and this cap at roughly 1,000. Is that correct?

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: Well, the editorial in today’s New York Times was not actually correct. The request from Kabul for additional personnel is very much under active review. In fact, we have approved quite a number of positions from that list, as they’ve become timely. The request was not for people immediately. The request actually spanned a three-year period, so that it was people over a different period of time with very different skills. We’ve been working with the Embassy to meet the requirements for the 940 – the nearly a thousand people that we’re sending out in the first wave.

We have an understanding with Kabul that as they identify immediate needs from that additional list, we’re not going to wait for some big decision to do it all at once. We’re going to prove in 20s – 10s and 20s – as additional positions are identified. Just over the last several weeks, we’ve done that with 40 additional positions.

So I think that we tend to get locked into numbers that are more rigid than the realities on the ground. If there is a need identified for an additional 20 agricultural specialists, we’re going to recruit 20 additional agricultural specialists. We’re not going to wait until there’s some big strategic decision.

The strategic decision will involve how many places do we need to be. Once we’re in a place, the decision of what we need to do to get the job done is really not at the big strategic decision level. As they deploy people out into these teams, they discover that there may be some additional needs. And that’s kind of the nature of the conversation. So I actually don’t think it is correct to characterize the state of things as it was characterized.

QUESTION: But just one clarification. On the budget issue, is there enough money in the budget to pay for what ultimately you think is necessary?

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: There is enough – we have resources in the budget to cover the full request that we have been discussing with Embassy Kabul. I can’t speak abstractly to a request that I haven’t seen. So obviously, budgets are limited. But there’s roughly 300 positions that we’ve been discussing with them, and we are reserving room in our budgets so that it’s not a budgetary limitation. There are questions of when people are needed and what their positions are. We’re going through the hard work of figuring out exactly – they’re going through the hard work of figuring out exactly when and where they need people and what skills they need. So it’s really more a question of getting it right than whether we have the resources to do it.

QUESTION: You spoke of a 10:1 ratio of Afghan civilians. Looking at how difficult it is on the security side to get Afghans to serve as NCOs and officers and essentially in leadership positions, how difficult is it for you to find people with the right kinds of training to partner with the civilians you’re sending at a ratio of 10:1? And is that something that constrains in any way the speed with which you’re sending people over there?

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: My sense is that there are a sufficient number of Afghans with the skills that are needed to provide the support and the leverage. They’re not always in the same area where they’re needed. So the issues that I’ve been working through are not so much with can we identify the people, but can you get the people to the places they need to be and have the mobility for them to do the work they need to do. Mobility is a real issue in many parts of Afghanistan and in many of the places where we’re deploying people. And it’s very important that when we deploy our civilians and the people who are working with them – the Afghans who are working with them – that they can get out and do the work that they need to do.

So far, we’ve been doing pretty well. I mean, I’m not getting a lot of reports that there are mobility restrictions. But as we fully deploy, obviously, we’re going to see more and more demand for transportation for civilians. And we’re working very closely with the U.S. military to make sure that whenever we are based on U.S. bases, that the mobility will be there. As we assign people to bases that are run by other countries, we have to work those arrangements out with them separately. And we’re working on that. Those conversations are going on as we deploy people. But I’m not aware of it being a real problem identifying the civilian partners there.

QUESTION: If I could just follow up to on something that Jill was asking. You said that the – in terms of the strategy review, that you’re looking more at where we need to be. I mean, we all know that one of the decisions is how many places we need to be and what strength, and that’s the – and in what capacity. Do you foresee a situation where you would be in fewer places and need fewer people, or do you see this as just an upward trajectory, as far as you can tell?

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: Well, obviously, I’m not in a position to kind of – give any kind of a sense of the number of places where we will be after the strategic review. That obviously will be a result of the decisions made very shortly. We are doing contingency planning to be able to respond to a number of different possible scenarios. And any of the options for military deployment also are over a period of time.

So the question then will be: If there is an increase in the number of military troops deployed, if there is an increase in the number of districts where we’re present, when will we be going into those districts, and when will we need civilians to work with them?

So without getting ahead of a decision, one can do the kind of thinking that puts you in a position to respond quickly, should a decision be made.

QUESTION: And that would be to expand or in fact to reconfigure yourself in not being (inaudible)?

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: Right. Right. To the extent that a decision were to be in fewer places, that could theoretically reduce the number of civilians required. To the extent that a decision is to be in a greater number of places, it will increase the number of civilians. It won’t be proportional because if you’re in 10 more places and you need six more civilians in each place, that’s 60 people. If it’s the opposite, it’ll be 60 less people. So it’s not going to be as dramatic on the civilian numbers as it is on the military numbers. It’s significant because if we are in 10 more or 20 more or 30 more places and we need more agricultural specialists, that means we have to recruit more agricultural specialists. But what we’re effectively doing is maintaining a recruiting program where we understand that with the one-year tours that people are taking, as soon as you deploy people, you’re back into the recruiting business. And the question is, as we go through the recruiting for the – what is the next cycle, do we assign some people earlier if need be. And these recruiting pipelines will be staying open. The outreach to U.S. Government direct hires to special employees, who are brought in through the special authorities, will be ongoing. And I’m pretty optimistic that, based on the response we’ve had in this round, that we’re going to continue to get good candidates for these assignments.

QUESTION: How big an element has the civilian surge been in the deliberations on the review? And what about the issue of the Afghan Government and it’s been such a big part of the review and whether you can work with the – with an Afghan Government that doesn’t necessarily have legitimacy, how does that affect your civilian efforts? Are you looking to work, sort of, outside of government and focus more on local officials or how are you planning to get –

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: The strategic review is very much focused on both civilian and military efforts. The – because of the nature of the – what I’ve just described in terms of what the impact on the civilian deployment is, it’s something of a – after a decision is made on what your strategic objectives are in terms of geographical presence, you then make sure you have a civilian plan that ties up to it. I don’t think the civilian deployment will drive the military strategy in that sense. But there’s every sense that the civilian deployment will be a critical part of any place where we deploy militarily. So they have to go together.

In terms of the partnership with various levels of the Afghan Government, I think we’ve made it clear that we don’t believe that we should be choosing to work with one or another aspect, that we need to have a multifaceted approach, working with the ministries of the Afghan Government that have the capacity to deliver the kind of programming that we’re working on. And there are a number of ministries that have developed very significant amounts of capacity and are very good partners. I mean, the agriculture program that we’re working on is very much developed with the agriculture ministry there. I think it’s their program that we’re helping them with. It’s not our program that they’re taking. It’s an Afghan program. And I think there are good working relationships, a high degree of confidence in that. That’s true in a number of other ministries as well.

I think it’s equally true that there are parts of the Afghan national government that is not as adept at getting money to the districts as it should be; that there are problems in the pipeline both in terms of efficiency and corruption. And we can’t just work with the national government. We have to work at the sub-national level with provincial leaders, with local leaders. And it’s not – those are not in conflict with each other. Ultimately, we’re working with the national ministries, the federal ministries, to build their capacities so that they could provide services at the district level. So the capacity building has to go at both ends.

QUESTION: And how many contractors are set for – how many contractors are part of the civilian surge? What’s the –

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: I don’t have an exact number, so I’d have to get back to you.

QUESTION: I mean, all of these 900 and whatever it is –

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: 74.

QUESTION: 74 – 974, they’re all attached to one U.S. Government department or another.

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: Yeah. They’re either existing U.S. Government full-time employees or they’re people who are hired through special authorities that we have to hire people for a shorter period of time in career appointments. And in many cases, that’s how we’re identifying people with the specialty skills. You can hire people with technical skills, with language skills, and with relevant experience. And they’re renewable appointments, so if they are willing to serve for three or four or five years, you can reappoint them. So we’re using every tool that we have in terms of drawing on the standing workforce and also supplementing it.

STAFF: I think we have time for two quick questions and one follow-up --

QUESTION: (Inaudible). Could you just tell us, very quickly, what made you decide to visit Muscatatuck, and if the training that you witnessed was in line with the President’s strategy?

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: You know, I had been wanting to come to Muscatatuck in Atterbury for some time, because we talk about the training here almost every day. It’s not just an afterthought. It’s an essential part of the program, and it came out of conversations that General Petraeus and Ambassador Holbrooke had early, early on in the conversations. And it very much reflects our approach to working as a whole-of-government, not just civilian-military but across agencies. The reality is, just as you can’t really understand what’s going on in Afghanistan without visiting Afghanistan, you can’t really understand training unless you come out and see it. And I thought it was important to come out and visit and see it, and I’m glad I did.

QUESTION: May I very briefly? I was just wondering how the civilian – you talked about civilian deployment that they did training for affects the broader civilian goals that Ambassador Holbrooke says have been delayed, like cracking down on corruption, like an amnesty for insurgents and so on. And also, if I may, you know, we’d all like civilian – civ-mil cooperation, we could have that on one side. On the other hand, we all heard Ambassador Eikenberry’s cables and we’ve all read (inaudible) reports, and we’ve gotten (inaudible) a clear sense of different priorities between the Embassy and the head of the military in Afghanistan itself. So how close does that civilian-military cooperation go, and how high up?

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: Well, I’m obviously not going to speak to the views that are being expressed privately, particularly in classified communications. I think that the fact that we have the kind of civilian-military plan right now that we have speaks for itself in terms of the quality of the cooperation on the ground. You know, the map of where we have civilians deployed and the map of where the military is either presently or planning to be is entirely consistent and overlapping. The skill sets that we’re filling on the civilian side are performing functions and missions that are part of a jointly developed civilian-military plan. So I think that the work that we’re watching people prepare for here, it’s as good – it’s probably the best level of civilian-military cooperation that’s ever taken place.

The fact that there may be different views on one or another topic, that happens sometimes within our offices in the State Department. We don’t have to go outside of the 7^th floor to have sometimes heated discussions with different views. I think you have to distinguish between people airing views and working through to a policy decision, and then the question of bringing all the resources to bear to effectively implement the strategy as a team. And they’re very different questions.

QUESTION: And how does the deployment here affect those wide goals of --

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: I think that if you look at what people here are training to do, it’s at the core of the mission. The – we went and watched a vignette together of working with the provincial governor. Working with provincial governors, for them to extend the writ of government to people who have not had exposure to a local authority of that kind, that’s a big part of the challenge ahead for Afghanistan. We can’t do it for Afghanistan. Afghanistan will ultimately have to do it for itself. But we can help provide people and resources to give them the ability to do it. And I think the people you saw here training were working on developing exactly the skills you need to go out and do that effectively. No one thinks it’s going to happen overnight.

It’s not – one meeting with a provincial governor is not going to reverse 300 years of history in the vignette we saw of tensions between the local people. That’s not what the purpose of the U.S. presence there is. I mean, it’s not to rewrite history or to build a nation. It’s to help them figure out how to work with each other and take responsibility for finding outcomes, and coming to the table with resources, with people, with funding for projects, with the promise of the tools that can provide a better life and better services for the Afghan people is bringing quite a lot to the table.

QUESTION: How will you know it’s working?

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: That’s a very good question. We’re obviously focused on metrics at many levels. We’ll know it’s working in some areas when we see that Afghans are able to do things that we go there to help them with without us being there to help them. And as we are able to hand off responsibilities at a local level, as we see areas that we’re not in starting to do some of the things that we’re helping to drive in the areas where we are, those are the kinds of indicia of success and programs like this. The broader objectives, the metrics, we’re working through at a strategic level. But I think programs like this, you can see on the ground in a village if – when I was in Helmand, and I met with Governor Mangal in Helmand, you could see that it was working locally there.

I mean, the fact that in the very brief period of time over the summer, after the ISAF military forces cleared the area, civilians came in with the military, proceeded to work with farmers to plant legal crops, to work with the local ministries, to build an airstrip so that farmers could get their crops out of the area without just relying on roads that weren’t always passable. And there was a process underway to extend the writ of government to places that had never seen it. You know that was – I was there in August. They’d been there together for eight weeks.

Now, to say that that was working there locally, you could see that it was having an effect. Now it has to have an effect where that can lead to more indigenous developments and spreading to other places. You can’t see it all in eight weeks. So we have to be realistic about the timeframe that we have in mind. But we do have to look and see, in each of the areas of we go, are there results and is it – and as we stop doing something, is there something that can have lasting impact.

STAFF: Thank you, guys.

DEPUTY SECRETARY LEW: Thanks. Thanks again for coming today. I hope this was as useful to you as it was to me.

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Address to U.S. and International Troops in Afghanistan

Hillary Rodham Clinton
Secretary of State

Kabul, Afghanistan

November 19, 2009

Thanks a lot. Thank you. Well, I am delighted to have this chance to come by and thank you in person for what you’re all doing. I’m very grateful to the leadership that both General McChrystal and General Rodriguez are giving to NATO-ISAF and to our American team. But I know that the work that’s done every single day is done by all of you in every aspect of this mission. I know we’ve got some of our allied partners here, and I want to thank all of them for representing their countries and being part of this extraordinary international effort.

I just want to make three quick points. First, we are here for a purpose, and this is a mission that is important to the United States and to those who have joined us in it. It’s a mission that partners with the people and Government of Afghanistan against a common enemy that poses a threat not only to people here, but people back at home, wherever you may be from. And that’s why I really express on behalf of certainly our country – President Obama and our Administration and the American people – our gratitude for your willingness to serve.

Secondly, we have to do everything we can to create the capacity of the Afghan Government and the Afghan people to protect themselves. And I was very pleased to hear today when President Karzai said that he hopes that within three years, the Afghan security forces will have the lead in important areas, and within five years – which is an ambitious goal, but he stated it – the Afghan security forces would have the lead throughout the country.

Now, there would probably be the necessity for continuing partnering, advising, training, but to take the lead and to take the fight to the enemy is what he said he wanted to see happen. And the only way that could happen is by the work that you do – the training, the mentoring, the support that you give to your Afghan counterparts. And we’re going to be giving you the kind of encouragement that you need to be able to help deliver on this goal that President Karzai set for Afghanistan.

Thirdly, I know that serving here is challenging. There are a lot of sacrifices, most particularly not being able to see your family and friends for long periods of time, and that many of you have been here not just once, but twice, three times, and I met somebody today who is on his fourth tour. So I really appreciate your willingness to serve, but I also know that for everybody who serves, there’s a family that serves as well, that’s trying to take care of everything and hold it together back wherever home is. And I hope if you email or you call or you write, you’ll let them know that I’m grateful for their service as well. Because we couldn’t have, in the United States, the superb, all-volunteer service we have if it wasn’t a family commitment. Parents, spouses, kids, everybody knows that when you sign up, there’s no predictability about where you’re going to be and how often they’re going to get to see you. And I guess as a mom, I’d say be sure you write home and email and all of that. (Laughter.)

But finally, especially for our Americans, we have our national holiday coming up next week. I spent Thanksgiving of 2003 in Afghanistan and I’ve never eaten so much in my life. (Laughter.) I had one meal in Kabul and another meal in Bagram and I had a third meal at Kandahar. So I have no worries that you’re not going to be well-fed come next Thursday. But I do know that that is a special time in a lot of people’s lives and particularly in a lot of people’s families, so it kind of maybe exacerbates a little bit the missing of those rituals and that kind of camaraderie and family time, from the football games that you watch on the couch instead of staying up late to see them.

But I want to especially wish you a Happy Thanksgiving. Now there are a lot of things that I’m grateful for and that the American people are grateful for, and at the top of my list is all of you. I’ve had the great privilege of working with, meeting, supporting our troops for a long time. And I served for six years on the Senate Armed Services Committee and got a firsthand view of a lot of the challenges, but also the extraordinary sense of meeting and purpose that your service provides.

So let me thank you again and let me wish you all a very Happy Thanksgiving, and God bless you and God bless the United States of America. (Applause.)

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