Tom Ricks in The Situation Room
Author(s): Wold Blitzer
Original Post: http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0910/20/sitroom.03.html
Type: Blog Post
Date: 10/21/2009
Read the full transcript online.
BLITZER: The commander in chief is taking his time deciding troop levels for Afghanistan. Are the troops themselves gets antsy waiting for the decision?
Let's bring in our political panel. Joining us, our senior political analyst, Gloria Borger, our CNN correspondent Joe Johns, Republican strategist Kevin Madden, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tom Ricks, and our CNN political contributor the Democratic strategist James Carville. Let me start with you, Tom, and read to you from a story in "The New York Times" today by Elisabeth Bumiller. She writes this: "After nearly a month of deliberations by Mr. Obama over whether to send more American troops to Afghanistan, frustrations and anxiety are on the rise within the military. A number of active duty and retired senior officers say there is concern the president is moving too slowly, is revisiting a war strategy he announced in March, and is unduly influenced by political advisers in the Situation Room."
We're talking about their Situation Room, not our SITUATION ROOM.
(LAUGHTER)
BLITZER: Is that what you're hearing, because you're well plugged in?
TOM RICKS, "THE WASHINGTON POST": Yes.
I'm an Obama fan, and I personally find it demoralizing, how he has handled this. I don't think you're hearing it so much among the troops who are too busy doing other stuff like cleaning weapons and driving trucks. But among the generals, there's a sense of unease that they thought Obama had made the deal back in March and then wanted -- seemed to revisit everything.
And they kept on giving these announcements from the White House: We're reviewing assumptions that might be myths.
This is pretty insulting to people who have been working on this intensely for several years.
GLORIA BORGER, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, I just think, Wolf, there may be a real change in style here from what you're used to with George W. Bush, for example.
And the real problem here is not that the president is deliberating, because I believe that you ought to be flexible and look at changing situations on the ground, but that the deliberations have played out so much in public. And that becomes a problem, not only for the president, but for people who are reading about these deliberations, and see that the president and the vice president may actually be disagreeing.
RICKS: Public is definitely a problem. It makes life much harder, but there's a point at which deliberation becomes dithering. And I think Obama probably passed that point a while ago.
JOE JOHNS, CNN SENIOR CORRESPONDENT: There's also this perception out there that the president is sort of buying time, that when he decided, oh, we're going to wait until we figure out about the politics on the ground, because one Democratic analyst I talked to today said, if you look at it, essentially, what's happening on the ground is going to be there regardless of who's in power. So, is he just buying time?
BLITZER: Let's bring James in. James, that word dithering is a serious word.
JAMES CARVILLE, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes.
And we say that we're going to wait until the election. I don't know if the Karzai before the election is going to be much different than the Karzai after the election. Or why do we think this runoff is going to be any better conducted than the first round of voting?
These things, I do not know. I do have the sense that everybody's pretty dug in here. And it seems to me on everything I have read there are not a lot of good options here, and maybe the president's trying to see if somebody comes up with something better.
But what's on the table now, it all looks pretty tough from this vantage point.
BLITZER: Kevin, they're sending 40,000 additional U.S. troops beyond the 68,000 who are already there. There's another 40,000 NATO troops already there. That's a life-and-death decision for any commander in chief.
KEVIN MADDEN, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: True. But I think Tom makes the most important point, which is whether or not the deliberation here begins to look like hesitation and whether that sends a very troubling message, not only to our allies, but to our enemies, that this is a president who is being driven by timidity when it comes to make this decision.
And I think probably what's most troubling right now is the gap between the information between what Secretary Gates is getting and what the political advisers in the White House are talking about on the Sunday shows.
It's been reported that what Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel talked about on Sunday was not made -- was not information that was made available to Secretary Gates about whether or not there was going to be a cause and effect, A vs. B, when -- about the decision related to the Afghan elections.
BLITZER: Tom, let me get right to the core issue. Is it winnable?
You told us a couple weeks ago when you were here in THE SITUATION ROOM that the situation in Iraq, despite what we're seeing today, the president meeting with Nouri al-Maliki and all that talk of meeting the deadlines, getting combat forces out by the end of August, all U.S. troops out by the end of 2011, you were very gloomy about the long-term success of U.S. strategy in Iraq.
What about Afghanistan?
RICKS: I think the McChrystal plan really does have a chance. It's not a guaranteed success. It's probably better than anything else out there. The important thing about the McChrystal plan is, it's not just more troops. It's using additional troops in a very different way, getting them out, actually living with Afghan units. That changes not just the behavior of the Taliban. It means the Afghan units will be more effective. Afghan police will be less corrupt.
That's really the important change in getting the Afghan government...
(CROSSTALK)
BLITZER: But that's a long-term commitment. We're talking years and years of the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.
RICKS: I think McChrystal has talked publicly about three to five years of an intense plan.
BORGER: How can you make sure that the Karzai government is going to be a credible partner in any way, shape or form?
RICKS: Well, one thing you can do privately -- and I think this should be considered -- is threatening to publicly back the opposition, Abdullah Abdullah, funnel a million bucks to his campaign.
(CROSSTALK)
RICKS: Another thing you can do to improve credibility and legitimacy is to go out with American troops and say, get these checkpoints that are just shaking down truck drivers out of here. We're going to have American troops next to Afghan troops at checkpoints. That makes those checkpoints a lot less corrupt.
BLITZER: All right. I'm going to take a break, but I want James to give me a final thought on this subject, James. Go ahead.
(CROSSTALK)
CARVILLE: OK.
Well, I think that Abdullah is a good guy, but the Pakistanis have, as I understand it, quite a problem with Abdullah. He was -- it's my understanding he was educated in India and they're very sort of skeptical of that. And there are a lot of people that say that actually Pakistan is more of a threat in terms of al Qaeda than Afghanistan.
So, it's a pretty complicated deal. But, you know, who knows? And this is some pretty sticky stuff we're dealing with here.
BLITZER: Yes. But in fairness to the Pakistanis right now, the new government, they are cracking down on the Taliban and al Qaeda in Pakistan...
CAVUTO: They are. That's right.
BLITZER: ... much so than the previous government of Pervez Musharraf.
CARVILLE: Right.
BLITZER: All right, guys, stand by. We're going to continue our analysis of what is going on.
Tom Ricks, as always, thanks very much for coming into THE SITUATION ROOM, our little SITUATION ROOM, as opposed to the other one down the road. Thank you.
Topic(s): Iraq, Terrorism & Irregular Warfare, U.S. Foreign Policy, U.S. Military Forces & Operations, U.S. National Security Strategy, WMD & Nuclear Proliferation
Project(s): Afghanistan, Future of the U.S. Military, Governance in a Time of Political Transition, The Iraq Inheritance, Voices from the Field
People: Thomas E. Ricks
