Tom Ricks on Meet the Press
Journalist: David Gregory
Original Post: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37943252/ns/meet_the_press
Type: Blog Post
June 27, 2010 —
Read the full transcript on the Meet the Press website here.
MR. GREGORY: Coming up, our special edition devoted to the war in Afghanistan continues. After almost nine years in the fight, what is the way forward? Is there an exit strategy? The discussion continues after this brief commercial break.
MR. GREGORY: We're back to continue our special edition AFGHANISTAN: THE FIGHT AHEAD. And joining us now, author of the new book "War," Sebastian Junger; author and retired U.S. Army Captain Wes Moore; senior fellow for the Center for A New American Security, Tom Ricks; Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee of the Foreign Affairs Committee; and retired general and NBC military analyst Barry McCaffrey.
Welcome to all of you.
REP. BARBARA LEE (D-CA): Thank you. Good to be here.
MR. GREGORY: This is, this is so important at a time when I think America is so grateful, and thankful for our fighting men and women in Afghanistan and the incredible sacrifices that, that they offer day in and day out. The debate about the war still matters, and maybe too few Americans are really engaged in it, and that's why we wanted to dedicate the time here.
Congresswoman Lee, the most important aspect, I think, of this interview that I just did with Senator McCain is about when the troops come home. A year from now they're supposed to start coming out. Now, the president was asked about that July 11 timetable, and this is what he said about it this week.
(Videotape, Thursday)
PRES. OBAMA: We did not say that starting July 2011 suddenly there would be no troops from the United States or allied countries in Afghanistan. We didn't say we'd be switching off the lights and closing the door behind us. What we said is we'd begin a transition phase in which the Afghan government is taking on more and more responsibility.
(End videotape)
MR. GREGORY: Now, you heard Senator McCain say that's too opaque, that's too vague. The president ought to really level with the country and say, "We don't know how it's going to go. We may need more troops." Where do you come down?
REP. LEE: Thank you, David. Nearly a decade ago, the American people were told that we were going into Afghanistan to capture Osama bin Laden and to stop al-Qaeda. At this point, we have to look at what has happened during that last 10 years. Has our goal and mission been accomplished? The reason I could not support giving then President Bush and any subsequent president a blank check to wage endless war was precisely because of what has happened. The American people, had they known that this would be the longest war in history, I think there would have been much more debate and discussion in Congress. And there may have been a three-hour discussion before this authorization was granted. I think we need an exit strategy, we need a plan, we need a, a way to begin to redeploy our young men and women out of harm's way, and we need to look at how to move forward.
MR. GREGORY: Do you think the president's backtracking when you hear him say, "Hey, we never said we were just going to turn the lights out and leave"?
REP. LEE: I think the public expects a review in December. The public respects us to begin to end this in July of next year. I, for one, do not believe that we should have even gone there. Again, we have to remember why we went to Afghanistan.
MR. GREGORY: But, but my question, Congresswoman, do you believe the president was backtracking in those remarks? A lot of people on the left were concerned about it.
REP. LEE: I hope the president is not backtracking. I believe that the longer we stay in Iraq--excuse me, in Afghanistan, we're going to hear generals say, and come to us, say--and say, "It may not be working. We need more money, more time, more troops." Or, if there's progress being made, we're going to hear the generals saying, "We need more money, more troops, and a longer time frame." So I believe that we need to stick with what the president initially said, and that is to begin to end this next July.
MR. GREGORY: General McCaffrey, Joe Klein is--for Time magazine, in his new piece--who's covered the strategy, covered the war extensively, wrote this this week: "Obama is going to have to be less coy with the public about what is really going to happen in July 2011, even if that risks alienated his party's vestigial anti-war base. He is going to have to make it clear that `significant' troop withdrawals--a word bandied around in recent weeks--are not in the cards unless the situation on the ground changes dramatically, for good or for ill."
GEN. BARRY McCAFFREY (Ret.): Sure. Look, this is a political dilemma, not a military one. There's 7,000 killed and wounded, $5.4 billion a month, the American people don't support the war. We have a goofy, incompetent Afghan government. We're trying to build an Afghan security force and get it largely done in a very short period of time. None of this is going to work the way we're going about it. So, again, back to, I think, the congresswoman's remarks, you either got to pull out in, in a stated time frame with huge negative consequences, potentially, to Pakistan, the Afghans themselves, U.S. foreign policy; or you, you announce that we're in there until we have achieved a stable political system in Afghanistan.
MR. GREGORY: Wes Moore, what is the argument to be made in support of the president sticking--as they are doing. I've spoken to White House officials, military officials; they're sticking to this July 2011 time frame. They emphasize this is not a, you know, a time when everybody comes out, it's the beginning of a process and there will still be significant numbers of U.S. troops on the ground there.
MR. WES MOORE: Well, I think it's important to understand that we are going on close to 10 years. But this war has not been a priority for close to 10 years. I mean, in the time when I was over there, we had around--a little over 19,000 troops on the ground to cover a land mass that is 50 percent larger than Iraq. So this was never a large priority on the side. And I think the problem is when you have second-tier priorities, you get second-tier results. There, there is no one who wants us to redeploy more than me. For every day for the past 10 years I have either been in harm's way or had friends who have been in harm's way. So I want--no one more than me wants this to end. But we also understand the consequences and ramifications for having a pre-emptive pullout without any type of understanding or real comprehension of the conditions on the ground as well.
MR. GREGORY: Do you agree with what Senator McCain said, which is maybe the president needs to say, "Look, we're properly resourcing the war. I can't tell you how it ends by that point. We may need more troops if we're going to get this done right. We're in--we're in for 10 years almost, nine years. We got to do it right."
MR. MOORE: Well, I think the indication that we have right now is that the system that we have in place and the systems that we put in place over the past few years are actually starting to show some results. We have a 30 percent increase in Afghan security force participation. We now are finally seeing complete integration between the civilian side and military side. These are important developments if we're going to see that type of progress in Afghanistan. But I do think the crucial thing to remember throughout all this is that the decisions on the ground and the conditions on the ground need to be the thing to help guide the policy.
MR. GREGORY: I'm not sure we're having complete integration between the civilian and the military side in terms of what's happening on the ground there. But we're going to return to that in just a minute.
MR. MOORE: Yes.
MR. GREGORY: Sebastian, weigh in on that.
MR. JUNGER: I've been reporting from Afghanistan since '96, for the first 10 years of that, from the perspective of the civilian population. It's of incredible concern to me. I mean, human--these are human rights watch figures. Since NATO has been there, 16,000 Afghan civilians have died in combat operations. It's a horrifying number. That ended a period of violence in Afghanistan under the Taliban where 400,000 Afghans were killed. So we really do need to assess the effect of pulling out on the Afghan people, first of all. It's--people back here don't realize that. I think that, you know, the left--and I'm, I'm left wing--when they talk about withdrawal, their concern is the humanitarian impacts of war. But they do not remember the '90s.
MR. GREGORY: And let's remember something. The news of the day today is that the ethnic minorities in Afghanistan are really worried that you've got a Pashtun leader in Hamid Karzai who's going to negotiate with the Taliban, bring them into the government, the same Taliban government that terrorized women, that terrorized the Hazaris and other ethnic minorities, Tajiks and others. There could be a civil war once we pull out.
Tom Ricks, with that as a potential backdrop, I also want you to address the news of this week, McChrystal out, Petraeus in. What does this week mean to where we are?
MR. TOM RICKS: Well, the first thing is you've got to have Pashtun participation in the government in Kabul. I lived in Afghanistan as a kid, and one thing that you take away from that is Afghanistan is only stable when Pashtuns are in Kabul as part of the power.
What does it mean for McChrystal going to go? McChrystal had to go. It just is a matter of military discipline. You can't let a general get away with stuff you wouldn't let a captain get away with. What struck me this week was political Washington didn't really get it; military Washington totally did. They knew that McChrystal was toast on Tuesday morning. So there's a feeling that Obama did exactly the right thing. But Obama's now got himself a new general, Petraeus, and there are big differences between Iraq and Afghanistan. And there's also big differences between the presidents. Obama has taken no strategic risk in Afghanistan or Iraq. He has held it at arm's length, almost like, "Hey, I inherited these two wars from my idiot predecessors. They're not my problem."
MR. GREGORY: Surging up 30,000 troops is no strategic risk?
MR. RICKS: No. You know, 30,000 troops is nothing in a country that size. A strategic risk would be the sort of things that Petraeus did in Afghanistan that I expect he might do with this president in Iraq. He's going to ask this president to double down in some form--cutting deals with the Taliban; giving Karzai ultimatums, "Fella, either you do this or we withdraw support from you totally tomorrow morning. You want to end up hanging from your heels from a streetlight in Kabul, keep it up, Karzai." I think you're going to see a much tougher attitude taken towards the Afghan government. But I've yet to see in Obama a real willingness to take those sort of risks, do something like, say, get rid of the entire team in Afghanistan and put in a new set of American officials.
MR. GREGORY: Let me ask a member of Congress here. Congresswoman Lee, I mean, your views about the future of the war are clear. You've made them clear here this morning. Nevertheless, the strategy's going to move on with you or without you at this point. My question is let's say we get farther along and General Petraeus says to, to President Obama, "Hey, look, you wanted me in there to clean this up? I need more time. I need more troops. In other words, I can't lose the troops that you want to pull out. We've got to apply more pressure." You think the president steps up, has the political capital to face down members of Congress like you, his liberal base, and say, "You got to stick with me here"?
REP. LEE: Quite frankly, there are many members of Congress now questioning this policy. This debate is just beginning. This is the debate that should have occurred nine years ago, David. This debate is just beginning. I think many of us, not only in the country, the American people, but many of us recognize that our military occupation of Afghanistan really provides for a prime recruiting tool--as a prime recruiting tool for al-Qaeda. And when you look at what our primary mission is there--of course, that's our national security--we have to ask the question: Does remaining in Afghanistan as occupiers in a Muslim country, does that create more terrorists? Does that create more danger for our country or less danger? And remember, again, our primary mission and goal is our own national security. So I question this policy. I think more members of Congress are beginning--and this is not just liberal and progressive members, these are many members who you never would have believed would have begun to question this. The American people are war weary. This is an endless war, and they want it to come to an end.
MR. GREGORY: Yeah.
MR. JUNGER: Let me just jump in. I was in Kabul in '01 after Kabul fell, after the Taliban were toppled. I was getting hugged by Afghans because I was American, because they hated the Taliban so much. Ninety--I don't know who does these surveys, 90 percent of Afghans--after 9/11, in early '02, 90 percent of Afghans supported the U.S. military action that, that destroyed the Taliban. So you really--the word occupation really is not accurate.
GEN. McCAFFREY: You know, I've been in and out of there from...
REP. LEE: But...
MR. GREGORY: Yeah.
GEN. McCAFFREY: ...since the start of the war, and the--again, though, some of those polling numbers are suspect. But, essentially, the Taliban are Pashtun. The Pashtun are trying to regain control as a plurality but not majority of the country. At the end of the day, they're going to have to be part of the solution. But even among the Pashtun there is zero tolerance for return of a Taliban regime. So we shouldn't misunderstand that. These people were brutal, they're a threat, they're--and I think, at the end of the day, our consequences if we withdraw, Sebastian's got it dead right, will be a catastrophe for the Afghan population. That's the dilemma he faces, Obama.
MR. RICKS: You know, Afghanistan's a very hard place. It's the hardest environment I've ever seen in the world. These are people who survive conditions that would kill any of us in a couple of days.
GEN. McCAFFREY: Right.
MR. RICKS: I remember reading an interview with an Afghan villager. The reporter said to him, "What did you think of the Taliban vs. what did you think of the police sent by Kabul?" He said, "Well, the Taliban were pretty mean to us; they were pretty rough. We didn't like them. But when the police from Kabul came, the first thing they did was take our little boys and rape them." You've got to deal with this Afghan government. Our biggest single problem in Afghanistan is not the Taliban. They are a consequence of our problem. Our problem in Afghanistan is the Kabul government.
MR. GREGORY: And this gets to this overall point of whether this is mission impossible, Wes Moore. We have a counterinsurgency strategy which says, primarily, you don't just kill bad guys, you protect the good guys, you protect the population. Can you have a counterinsurgency strategy that works if you have a host government that believes, A, corruption is better than a straight arrow, stealing elections is better than winning it the old-fashioned way, and that, "Hey, you know what? The U.S. is not really here for the long haul, so I'm going to make a bunch of side deals with the enemy of America, the Taliban, and the Pakistanis, who in many ways, just want to play two sides against each other, make sure they protect themselves and their concerns about India.
MR. MOORE: Let me tell you, it's incredibly important to work on increased transparency with the Afghan government, but it's also important to recognize the limitations of the Afghan government. Now, this is a country that is very fragmented and is very tribal. And, you know, we--one of the things we did--I was with a team in Afghanistan, you go out and you give out gifts to people. And one of the things that we would, we would give out to some of the tribal leaders were cutout--were maps, which were cutouts of Afghanistan. And literally, the most popular question was, "What is this?" And we'd say, "It's your country." Their understanding of Afghanistan as a whole is a very difficult one for Afghans to understand. So the importance of actually being--to be able to go into rural areas, being able to work with a tribal--you know, with the tribal chieftains becomes extraordinarily important as to how we advance and understand the limitations for--of a national government, who, in many cases, particularly in people that--in places that I was, they don't even understand who President Karzai is, or who the national government or what their job is.
MR. JUNGER: In the field? They don't process it. They process it as little as possible because that increases the risk to themselves. They process it later. There were guys who literally said, I--you know, I asked one guy, "Are you scared out here?" I mean, they--they're--my--the unit I was with was in 500 firefights during their deployment, right? "Are you scared out here?" And he said, "No, not at all. It's actually kind of strange." It came later after they came home. I think that's always been the case in war. It's not particular to this war; that's what combat is.
MR. GREGORY: General, how does it--we just about--we have a little over a minute left. General, how--and then congressman, too, how does this end?
GEN. McCAFFREY: Well, first of all, you know, just to, to remind people, it's 46,000 killed and wounded in one of the smallest armies since 1939. I just gave an award to a dad whose son got the Silver Star. He wasn't there to receive it himself because he was back in Afghanistan on his sixth combat tour. So, at the end of the day--Tom Ricks' superb article this morning in The Washington Post captured a lot of this--our way out is build Afghan security forces. Lieutenant General Bill Caldwell is on the ground, Petraeus is going to go in, he's got to build the police force and an Afghan army that can maintain internal order. We don't have the political will to stay with this much longer.
REP. LEE: I'm the daughter of a military officer, and I know the sacrifices these families are making. Our troops have served brilliantly, they're brave, they've done everything we've asked them to do. Let's face it, Congress--if Congress allows it, we're going to have an endless war, so it's time to begin to look at an exit strategy, a timeline, and to begin to safely redeploy our young men and women out of Afghanistan and begin to look at how we ensure our national security.
MR. GREGORY: Twenty seconds, Tom. How does it end?
MR. RICKS: I don't think it does. I think we have landed in the middle of the Middle East, for better or worse, in a way that none of us expected us to. I think the war in Afghanistan was made much worse by the distracting war in Iraq, which never should have happened. But we are dealing with phenomena in the Middle East that's going to be crucial to this country as long as we're dependent on Middle East oil. So the best exit strategy I can think of is emphasize alternative fuels.
MR. JUNGER: In the field? They don't process it. They process it as little as possible because that increases the risk to themselves. They process it later. There were guys who literally said, I--you know, I asked one guy, "Are you scared out here?" I mean, they--they're--my--the unit I was with was in 500 firefights during their deployment, right? "Are you scared out here?" And he said, "No, not at all. It's actually kind of strange." It came later after they came home. I think that's always been the case in war. It's not particular to this war; that's what combat is.
MR. GREGORY: General, how does it--we just about--we have a little over a minute left. General, how--and then congressman, too, how does this end?
GEN. McCAFFREY: Well, first of all, you know, just to, to remind people, it's 46,000 killed and wounded in one of the smallest armies since 1939. I just gave an award to a dad whose son got the Silver Star. He wasn't there to receive it himself because he was back in Afghanistan on his sixth combat tour. So, at the end of the day--Tom Ricks' superb article this morning in The Washington Post captured a lot of this--our way out is build Afghan security forces. Lieutenant General Bill Caldwell is on the ground, Petraeus is going to go in, he's got to build the police force and an Afghan army that can maintain internal order. We don't have the political will to stay with this much longer.
REP. LEE: I'm the daughter of a military officer, and I know the sacrifices these families are making. Our troops have served brilliantly, they're brave, they've done everything we've asked them to do. Let's face it, Congress--if Congress allows it, we're going to have an endless war, so it's time to begin to look at an exit strategy, a timeline, and to begin to safely redeploy our young men and women out of Afghanistan and begin to look at how we ensure our national security.
MR. GREGORY: Twenty seconds, Tom. How does it end?
MR. RICKS: I don't think it does. I think we have landed in the middle of the Middle East, for better or worse, in a way that none of us expected us to. I think the war in Afghanistan was made much worse by the distracting war in Iraq, which never should have happened. But we are dealing with phenomena in the Middle East that's going to be crucial to this country as long as we're dependent on Middle East oil. So the best exit strategy I can think of is emphasize alternative fuels.
MR. JUNGER: In the field? They don't process it. They process it as little as possible because that increases the risk to themselves. They process it later. There were guys who literally said, I--you know, I asked one guy, "Are you scared out here?" I mean, they--they're--my--the unit I was with was in 500 firefights during their deployment, right? "Are you scared out here?" And he said, "No, not at all. It's actually kind of strange." It came later after they came home. I think that's always been the case in war. It's not particular to this war; that's what combat is.
MR. GREGORY: General, how does it--we just about--we have a little over a minute left. General, how--and then congressman, too, how does this end?
GEN. McCAFFREY: Well, first of all, you know, just to, to remind people, it's 46,000 killed and wounded in one of the smallest armies since 1939. I just gave an award to a dad whose son got the Silver Star. He wasn't there to receive it himself because he was back in Afghanistan on his sixth combat tour. So, at the end of the day--Tom Ricks' superb article this morning in The Washington Post captured a lot of this--our way out is build Afghan security forces. Lieutenant General Bill Caldwell is on the ground, Petraeus is going to go in, he's got to build the police force and an Afghan army that can maintain internal order. We don't have the political will to stay with this much longer.
REP. LEE: I'm the daughter of a military officer, and I know the sacrifices these families are making. Our troops have served brilliantly, they're brave, they've done everything we've asked them to do. Let's face it, Congress--if Congress allows it, we're going to have an endless war, so it's time to begin to look at an exit strategy, a timeline, and to begin to safely redeploy our young men and women out of Afghanistan and begin to look at how we ensure our national security.
MR. GREGORY: Twenty seconds, Tom. How does it end?
MR. RICKS: I don't think it does. I think we have landed in the middle of the Middle East, for better or worse, in a way that none of us expected us to. I think the war in Afghanistan was made much worse by the distracting war in Iraq, which never should have happened. But we are dealing with phenomena in the Middle East that's going to be crucial to this country as long as we're dependent on Middle East oil. So the best exit strategy I can think of is emphasize alternative fuels.
Related:
Topic(s): Iraq, Terrorism, Irregular Warfare and Crime
Project(s): U.S. Military Forces and Operations, Special Operations Forces, Iraq, Diplomacy and Development
People: Thomas E. Ricks
