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KERRY: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
General, thanks. Welcome. Thanks for the job you're doing. And thank you also for the time to visit the other day on the telephone. I appreciate it very, very much -- and I see the five pillars here and it's part of the public testimony.
I've always felt that Afghanistan is the real center of the war on terror, not Iraq. And it's troubling to me that we have seven times the numbers of troops in Iraq that we do in Afghanistan and that suicide attempts I think are up, triple; roadside bombs are up double.
And you yourself have said, General, that narcotics is at the core of everything that can go wrong in Afghanistan if not properly tackled.
But we're not making progress -- we're losing ground.
President Karzai has said that our approach to the narcotics, counternarcotics, have failed. And the U.N.'s top counternarcotics official said yesterday that NATO forces have to somehow help the Afghan army to fight the opium trade.
When I was in Afghanistan and met with President Karzai earlier in the year, I asked him about the narco-situation and whether or not Afghanistan is now a narco-economy.
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KERRY: And he said yes. He agreed.
I think our experts agree, I think you would agree, it is a narco-economy.
At what point does it become a narco-state? And if our efforts have currently failed, and that's the center of everything that could go wrong, what's going to change?
JONES: I don't know what the tip-over point is, but when over 50 percent of your economy is tied to the narco-trafficking portion of it, you're well on your way. I don't know exactly when you become a narco-state by definition, but it's clear that the influence of narcotics on all organs of emerging Afghan society is there.
It fuels the insurgency. It contributes to the corruption. It is omni-present. And it's something that, frankly, the family of nations ought to be worried about.
I think one of the things I mentioned to you in our conversation was that 90 percent of the products are sold in European capitals.
KERRY: Well, with all of the troop level that we have there, what is the problem in engaging in a massive crop destruction effort? Are they afraid of the instability that that will incur on the population, so they're, in a sense, locked?
JONES: It is a vicious circle, because I think what is needed is a comprehensive international plan that everybody signs up to that's multi-faceted.
If we simply focus on crop eradication, then you're affecting the livelihood of a significant portion of the country, and so you have to have crop substitution, you have to have means of getting alternative crops to the markets, which means you have to build roads that may not exist.
There's a whole series of dominoes that line up. But absent a clearly defined, well thought-out, agreed-upon finance and resource plan, you wind up doing a little bit of everything and nothing very well.
KERRY: That's what really concerns me, General. Here we are. President Karzai said, quote, The same enemies that blew up themselves -- that's his quote -- in the Twin Towers in America are still around.
The plot against these airliners that was stopped in London was hatched in Afghanistan. Yet the center of changing this is to have economic success and reform success.
And yet 40 percent of the Afghan population is unemployed right now, before you even do crop destruction. Ninety percent lack regular electricity. And yet this administration has appropriated nearly four times more in reconstruction funds for Iraq than Afghanistan. And, in fact, aid money was cut by 30 percent this year.
So I would assume that greater construction efforts and greater focus in pulling together this comprehensive eradication or substitution plan would significantly bolster your efforts of our troops on the ground.
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JONES: I completely agree. I think that the military aspect of what we're doing is important. But the long-term reconstruction is tied to how well we do in those pillars.
KERRY: So if the stakes are as high as everybody says, if the president says this is a battle for civilization and so forth, why aren't we doing this?
JONES: I think we're doing quite a bit. I mean, just to put a positive spin on this, we have 6 million Afghan children who are going to school today, 2 million of them are girls. We've rebuilt over 3,000 kilometers of roads. Eighty percent of the Afghan people now have access to some form of health care.
There are interesting measures of progress out there.
KERRY: Can I just interrupt one second? I don't mean to cut you off at all, but the time is limited.
I agree -- and I want to pay tribute to that. I think you and efforts on the ground have really been quite remarkable in a lot of respects.
But what you're telling us, what President Karzai is telling us, what experts are telling us on the ground is that all of that -- and it's good -- is at huge risk because of what's happening with the three pillars of the five that are affected by the narcotics, by the criminality, by the lack of judicial reform, the lack of competency within the police force.
And I think you said you have something like, was it 40,000 troops now?
JONES: There's 20,000 NATO troops and 20,000...
KERRY: No, of the Afghan army, trained.
JONES: Oh, I'm sorry. About 30,000.
KERRY: Thirty thousand now.
That's not going to be able to do what's necessary if your economy is lost to this other effort, correct?
JONES: That's correct. I think you do need an Afghan army. I think you need the internal police force. That's got to be fixed. Judicial reform -- you've got to be able to prosecute the people who are causing these difficulties in the narcotics.
But to me I think that talking about this is important. I think it will have the effect in the international community to focus those people whose jobs it is to bring this about.
I appear today as a NATO commander. My NATO responsibilities stop at stability and security and the management of the provincial reconstruction teams.
There is an entire other sector that I talk about, but I don't have an assigned mission in, for instance, judicial reform. But I know that if we don't have judicial reform, the security of the country is going to be jeopardized, so we have to talk about it.
And I think we have to bring more international focus and energy to it. And I must say that if we do that, I'm optimistic that this will be a success story.
So I'm optimistic about where Afghanistan can be in a few years.
KERRY: If we do this, now.
JONES: If we do this. If we do this. And if we're successful at doing this.
KERRY: What about the effort on Osama bin Laden? The Waziristan deal seems really troubling, and a lot of people seem troubled by it, and most believe that while some things are stated about what will happen, the expectations are considerably lower that they will, in fact.
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KERRY: Are you satisfied that you're able to do everything that you want to do, would like to do, believe is necessary to capture or kill Osama bin Laden?
JONES: This is the delicate part of my appearance here. As a NATO commander, my mission from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is to assist the government of Afghanistan in providing a safe and secure environment for reconstruction.
KERRY: I know CENTCOM is doing that.
JONES: And that's why I need to make that distinction that the ISAF mission and the Operation Enduring Freedom mission, led by CENTCOM, that's the one that has the more kinetic counterterrorist mission.
And so I am not involved in the active border participations. NATO's focus is more on security, stability and reconstruction. Which isn't to say that if we ever came across Mr. bin Laden, that we wouldn't apprehend him; we would. If we had indications that he might be in one of our areas, would we go try to get him? We probably would.
KERRY: And you don't want to venture to share with the committee, just from your experience and judgment, whether or not you think we're able to do all that is necessary or we would like to do?
JONES: Well, I can tell you that I know General Abizaid has spent a considerable amount of time working with the Pakistani authorities. We have large numbers of troops up in the border areas. And I think we're doing everything we can to locate him and locate other leaders and to discourage the border from being a sieve through which Taliban fighters come across to Afghanistan and contribute to the problems that we have there.
So I think that, over the next 30 to 60 days, while we give the Pakistani authorities a chance to test their new agreements in the border regions, I think the next 30, 60 days will be interesting to see how effective we're going to be.
KERRY: Thank you, General.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
LUGAR: Thank you, Senator Kerry.
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