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Mullen: Focus Shifting to Afghanistan

By Peter Atkinson, Deputy Editor

Noting “these are the most demanding times that I've seen,” Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the U.S. military is “shifting its weight” to Afghanistan, and by extension Pakistan, a region he described as “the most challenging part of the world right now.”

“Shifting our focus is the right thing to do,” he told a Sea Services Luncheon audience at the Sea-Air-Space Exposition May 4 at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, National Harbor, Md.

With Taliban forces gathering strength in the region, especially of late as they advanced to within 60 miles of the Pakistani capitol of Islamabad, and the lingering influence of al-Qaida and the architects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Mullen said "they are not going away by us wishing them away. And that has to be addressed.

That Pakistan boasts a nuclear weapons arsenal only adds to the sense of urgency. However, Mullen, who has made about 10 visits to Pakistan as joint chiefs chairman, said, “I don’t think that Pakistan is going to fall any time soon. That’s not in the cards. That said, over the past year or year-plus that I have been going there, there has been a dramatic increase in the terrorist threat. There are an awful lot of Pakistani citizens who are losing their lives.”

Given what he called the “enormous complexity” of the region, Mullen emphasized that “there are no easy answers there and it takes a considerable amount of study, participation and engagement to get your arms around what the challenges are. Doing it from afar is very difficult.

“I think the best way we [can help build security there] in the future is with regional partnerships,” he added, “not unilaterally at all. It’s the only way I see that we can do it.”

But building those regional partnerships should not come at the expense of the battle being waged in Afghanistan, where U.S. forces are being augmented as troops are shifted from the war in Iraq, Mullen noted. And as the Afghanistan effort expands, he said the onus is on the services to continue to embrace jointness, cooperation and creative thinking to make the mission a success.

“We have to break down the service cultures to make sure that priority No. 1 is this war fight, not the war college, not career paths, not institutional things that impeded us as we look to this war.”

During his wide-ranging luncheon remarks, Mullen also touched upon the $534 billion defense budget request for 2010 and its focus on “taking care of our people,” as well as maritime security around the Pacific Rim and along the Somali coast.

Speaking about the 2010 defense spending request, Mullen said he was “impressed by the very hard decisions that had to be made, or that had to be recommended be made. ... The budget is strategy driven and comprehensive, it is not a cost-cutting drill in any way shape or form.

“We're at a time now that we have to prioritize and I think Secretary [of Defense Robert M.] Gates has sent pretty strong signals. Programs that are spinning out of control don't have much of a future. What I see is balance.

“We must fund the wars we are in,” he said. “We cannot send our young men and women into harm's way without the best training and equipment. They are sacrificing their lives, as we sit here today, for our country, we have got to make sure that we get that right. ... We take care, first and foremost, of our people, need to make sure we get it right by our people.”

Mullen likened the situation along the Pacific Rim, where China is building its Navy and North Korea recently test-fired a long-range rocket, to that in Afghanistan, noting the best interests of security there would be served by a cooperative effort among regional partners – including Japan, Australia and South Korea – “to figure out a way to with them. The U.S. cannot do it alone, those days are gone.”

With regard to the rash of pirate attacks around the Horn of Africa, Mullen, who as chief of naval operations championed the concept of a 1,000-ship navy with the U.S. and other navies joining in regional partnerships to improve maritime security, joked that “I had someone run the numbers of how many ships it would take to cover the area effectively to make sure that these events didn’t occur. And, ironically, that number turned out the a thousand.

“That’s not what I envisioned with the 1,000-ship navy.”

However, during a media briefing that followed the luncheon speech, Mullen offered a more sober appraisal of piracy and what could be done to combat it.

“This is a crime, there are international laws that need to be changed,” he said. “It’s a comprehensive, difficult problem. The simple answer is to put the U.S. military on every ship. In the end it’s a bigger problem than pirates, it’s about Somalia ... and it’s about what the international community is going to do with respect to Somalia.”

Mullen said he was not a proponent of putting armed forces aboard merchant ships, noting “I’ve got other challenges for my people.”