Former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, a William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC and FSI, says in this KQED radio panel that security during the elections in Afghanistan had greatly improved, but the country will still need support from the international community moving forward.

Karl Eikenberry served as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009 to 2011, working to stabilize the country and build a stronger foundation for democracy. In this interview with WUNC North Carolina Public Radion, Eikenberry says the challenge in Afghanistan is great as many question the validity of the intervention of American troops. Eikenberry, a William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC, believes the humanities can provide an innovative approach to modern diplomacy.

What if scientists engineer a virus that could help doctors design vaccines to prevent a global pandemic – but a blueprint of that very virus gets into the hands of terrorists who use it to build a biological weapon?

Should – and can – governments step in to mandate controls on such bioengineering? Or is it more effective to rely on the private sector to police itself and develop potentially life-saving biotechnologies without the shackles and bureaucracy of big government?

It’s a classic dual-use dilemma.

These are among the public policy questions Megan Palmer will tackle as an incoming More information on the Perry Fellowship. She intends to research the complex governance challenges accompanying increased access to biotechnology and how countries are directing their innovation and security strategies to favor centralized or distributed control of access to information and materials.

“Developments in biotechnology have been heralded as fueling an industrial revolution in the life sciences with significant economic potential,” said Palmer, who received her PhD in bioengineering from MIT. “Yet biotechnology can both pose and mitigate key security concerns, such as bioweapons development vs. deterrence and preparedness.”

Megan Palmer

Joining Palmer as Perry Fellows are Karl Eikenberry and Brad Roberts.

Eikenberry is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general and the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan who led the civilian surge directed by President Obama from 2009 to 2011. Roberts, until recently, was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

“Karl, Megan and Brad are an exceptional trio, with expertise ranging from counterinsurgency to nuclear weapons to biosecurity,” said Amy Zegart, co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation. “We are delighted that they will be joining the CISAC community and enhancing our efforts to tackle the world's most important security challenges."

Policy Scholars

Perry fellows reside at CISAC for a year of policy-relevant research on international security issues. They join other distinguished scientists, social scientists and engineers who collaborate on security problems that cannot be solved within any single field of study. The fellowship was established to honor Perry, the 19^th U.S. secretary of defense and former CISAC co-director, and to recognize his leadership in the cause of peace.

Eikenberry will focus on foreign interventions and counterinsurgency doctrine, as well as U.S.-Asia Pacific strategy and the rise of China and the future of NATO. He will also write and talk about the state of the humanities and social sciences in the United States.

Eikenberry, who has master’s degrees from Harvard in East Asian Studies and Stanford in political science, has become a vocal advocate for the humanities, which are on the wane as students turn toward computer science, technology and engineering. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, he also earned an interpreter’s certificate in Mandarin Chinese from the British Foreign Commonwealth Office and has an advanced degree in Chinese history from Nanjing University in China.

Karl Eikenberry

Eikenberry wants students to know that his humanities and social sciences education underpinned a long and meaningful career as an Army officer, diplomat and scholar.

“The humanities and social sciences help us understand the complex historical, geographic, economic, social, cultural and political roots of conflict, and they enable us to better consider the consequences of our policy decisions,” he said.

Roberts intends to explore the question of how to balance efforts to sustain an effective deterrent for the 21^st century with efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether.

“Each U.S. president since the end of the Cold War has emphasized the importance of adapting the U.S. nuclear deterrent away from Cold War requirements and toward the future,” Roberts said. “But what does that mean in practice?”

Perry was a tenacious Cold War proponent of nuclear weapons as deterrence. Today, he is a supporter of Global Zero – the movement for a world without nuclear weapons. But how to get there has been a point of contention fueling CISAC research for years.

“How do we balance the effort to sustain an effective deterrent for 21^st century purposes with the effort to reduce the number and role of nuclear weapons, while encouraging others to join us in taking steps toward the elimination of nuclear weapons?” Roberts said.

Roberts, who first worked with Perry in 2008 when the former secretary of defense chaired the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, said the fellowship would provide him the opportunity to develop his thinking on the issue of nuclear strategy and write a “short book for a broad audience.”

Palmer, who was previously a CISAC affiliate while doing postdoctoral studies in the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford, will assess how public sector investments and government regulations related to genetic engineering are legitimized in terms of their prospective economic benefits and national security tradeoffs.

“It’s the intersection of biology and technology and how one navigates public policy,” she said. “How do you think about the changing landscape of power and politics as it becomes increasingly easier to engineer biology? It poses all sorts of complex governance challenges.”

Teachers and Mentors

CISAC’s mission is also to teach and mentor the next generation of security scholars and the three fellows meet that mandate.

Eikenberry will co-lead CISAC’s annual undergraduate honors college in Washington, D.C., in which a dozen seniors meet with politicians, journalists, military analysts, lobbyists and experts from the leading private and government agencies in the nation’s capital. The former general will continue as a pre-major advisor for six undergraduates.

Brad Roberts

Roberts is also looking forward to getting back to an academic environment.

“The fellowship also enables me to return to a significant mentoring role with students, for which there was very little time in government,” he said.

Before joining the government in 2009, Roberts worked full-time at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Alexandria, Va., and served for 15 years as an adjunct professor in the graduate school of international studies at George Washington University. He has also mentored young analysts in the United States and abroad under the auspices of the Project on Nuclear Issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“In the nuclear policy community, I am part of a bridging generation – not a founding cold warrior but also not of the generation that has no memory of the Cold War – and I am enthusiastic for the opportunity to work with younger scholars to build expertise needed for the future,” Roberts said 

Palmer directs policy-related activities at Synberc site, a synthetic biology research consortium of UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, Stanford, Harvard and MIT. She is also a judge for the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, where 200 undergraduate teams from around the world design and build living organisms over the course of a summer.

“Because biology is by nature globally distributed, it is critical to train the generation of practitioners to work together to develop best practices that can be diffused across organizations – and borders,” she said.

The counterinsurgency plan in Afghanistan hinged on the assumption that the U.S. military could protect the population, that foreign aid could make the Afghan government more accountable, and that the Karzai administration shared U.S. goals. In an article published by Foreign Affairs, Karl Eikenberry – the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC – explains why all three assumptions were "spectacularly incorrect."

One often forgets the battlefields that CISAC military fellows leave behind.

They come to Stanford to spend an academic year doing research and mentoring students. They throw off their uniforms and put on their jeans to engage with scholars across the campus. One rarely gets a bird’s-eye view of what life is like for them out in the field, much less in actual combat with a hostile, thinking enemy.

But one Afghanistan War documentary gives viewers a rare look at what one CISAC military fellow, U.S.  Army Col. J.B. Vowell, does in his real job: fight Taliban and al-Qaida insurgents while trying to keep his soldiers alive.

A rough cut of the “"The Hornet's Nest"” was recently screened on campus for Stanford faculty and staff, war veterans and military fellows from CISAC and the Hoover Institution. Former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, a CISAC faculty member, introduced the film and called the battle footage “remarkable.”

“The Hornet’s Nest” is about the soldiers – the survivors, their commanders, and those who lost their lives – in Operation Strong Eagle III, a battalion air assault in 2011 to seize insurgent-controlled strongholds along the Pakistan border. Their mission was to open up opportunities for local governance to reach Afghans under Taliban control.

The film is also about a father-and-son broadcast team who would document the assault, as well as the respect and shared risk between the soldiers and the embedded journalists.

Vowell is seen preparing his troops for what would become one of the deadliest confrontations with the Taliban in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province. The region is dubbed the “heart of darkness” as it’s considered the world’s most dangerous terrain for U.S. forces. Its steep mountainsides are dotted with caves used by insurgents for easy ambush.

“They don’t know what’s about to hit them,” Vowell says of the Taliban as he preps his No Slack Battalion of the 101^st Airborne. “That will teach them to shoot at my soldiers.”

It is March 29, 2011, and Vowell is conducting the final rehearsal for Operation Strong Eagle III. The mission is to clear the area of insurgents and lay the groundwork for an incoming platoon that would attempt to assassinate Taliban leader Qari Zia Rahman.

“This is his home. This is his sanctuary,” Vowell tells his men. “No one has ever dared to go in there. You think this is going to cause a ruckus? I think so.”

What follows is the largest battle the battalion has seen since Vietnam. Over nine days, Vowell’s battalion tried to fight their way into these villages – and viewers are taken along for a harrowing, 90-minute ride. The men are pinned down on rugged mountaintops and in abandoned mud-and-brick compounds, exhausted but inching forward to rescue their fallen and keep on fighting.

The footage was taken with hand-held cameras by veteran broadcast correspondent Mike Boettcher and his rookie son, Carlos. Viewers witness the first father-son team embedded with the U.S. military rekindle a relationship that had become strained.

“I was just a face in a box,” Boettcher says, referring to his more than three decades of combat work overseas, typically missing his son’s milestones as he grew up. “In the bottom of my heart I knew that Carlos was adrift and I felt that I had let Carlos down.”

When Carlos asks his father if he can join him in Afghanistan, Boettcher figures he can teach him how to work a camera under fire. You see Carlos go from a baby-faced young man to an earnest reporter practicing his on-air dispatches during his yearlong embed. He trudges up one hill as bullets whiz by and then you hear him go down and see the camera go still.

“The one thing I could not let happen was to let my son die,” Boettcher says. “I thought I had lost my son; that I had lost my chance to be a father.”

But, he adds: “We had landed in the hornet’s nest; this was command and control for the Taliban right there in that valley. And they were going to make us pay.”

Carlos survives, eventually goes back to ABC News headquarters in New York and becomes a producer for the broadcast network. The two would winner an Emmy for their coverage.

Viewers also get to know the soldiers of Strong Eagle III, making it particularly hard when you learn six of them have been killed. You see one soldier with a beautiful smile joking with his buddies before he is killed; the soldier who had tried to save him laments he should have run faster down the hill toward the fallen man.

The film ends with sorrowful coverage of the memorial devoted to the six that was conducted in Afghanistan days after the battle.  Soldiers kiss the helmets of the fallen; officers kneel, bow their heads and cry.

CISAC military fellow and U.S. Army Col. J.B. Vowell in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, 2011. Photo Credit: Justin Roberts

“Everything has a cost in combat and it’s hard to know that the orders you gave cost some men their lives,” Vowell says when asked by an audience member at the Stanford screening how he deals with the death of his own men.

Regardless of one’s political beliefs about the second-longest war in American history, after Vietnam, the footage reminds viewers that this largely forgotten war has been fought – and covered – with tremendous bravery.

Nearly 3,000 American and allied troops have been killed in the war, launched to avenge the deaths of nearly 3,000 civilians in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As many as 17,500 Afghan civilians have lost their lives; two dozen journalists have been killed covering the conflict.

“We felt like we needed to leave behind some kind of historical document … and great commanders like JB embraced having the cameras there,” Boettcher says, sitting on Stanford’s Cemex Auditorium stage with Vowell and co-director David Salzberg. “They wanted the stories of their men and women told. Americans must know that there is a cost to be paid; it’s being paid every day.”

An audience member asks Vowell if his men resented having to protect the journalists.

He says his troops took no more precautions to protect the father-son team than they did one another. It took time for the soldiers to embrace the Boettchers, but once they realized they had not just parachuted in for one or two stories, they became part of the battalion.

“Folks like me in uniform just have a visceral reaction against the media, as it’s usually a bad story when they show up,” he says. “The journalists who are better are the ones who share the risk with soldiers. It’s not a camaraderie thing; it’s a respect thing. And if they’re willing to be in there, not just be there for a day or two, but to really be there – that gains respect of soldiers and they trusted Mike to tell their story.”

Vowell spent the academic year making recommendations for the strategy, mission and force structure in Afghanistan after combat troops are withdrawn next year. His project was submitted to the U. S. Army War College and Perry served as his faculty adviser.

CISAC’s other military fellows this academic year were U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Mark Pye and U.S. Army Col. Daniel S. Hurlbut.

“It has been a tremendous opportunity for me to spend a year with CISAC and focus on strategic and policy issues relevant to U.S. national security”, says Vowell.  “I had the opportunity to tell the Army’s story of the last 12 years in Afghanistan as well as research the best policy recommendation for our way ahead in the region. Only CISAC could afford me that opportunity to combine my experiences with the best cross-disciplined faculty in the nation to further my research. I know I will be better able to serve my command in the future with the 101^st Airborne Division as a result.”

Vowell assumes command of the 3^rd Brigade Combat Team, 101^st Airborne Division on Aug. 1 and is likely to do another tour in Afghanistan next year.

Co-director Salzberg spends much of his time traveling the country organizing private screenings for Gold Star families – those who have lost service members on the battlefield – and preparing the documentary for a nationwide release on Veteran’s Day.

“I’ve been in this business for a long time and have worked on a lot of different films,” says Salzberg, a veteran documentary and feature film director and producer of such films as “The Perfect Game” and “La Source.”

“Sometimes you have an opportunity to do something that is more important than a film,” Salzberg said. “If you talk to these young men and women who serve, they really just want the public to know what they’re going through. They don’t want a parade or a medal. We wanted to show that – and we are honored that these guys let us into their lives.”