Fareed Zakaria GPS: What Will Obama's Afghanistan Policy Be?
Journalist: Fareed Zakaria
Original Post: What Will Obama's Afghanistan Policy Be?
Type: Interview
January 28, 2009 — To read full transcript click here.
FAREED ZAKARIA, HOST: This is GPS, the GLOBAL PUBLIC SQUARE. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria.
We have a great show for you today. But first, a few thoughts on week one of the Obama presidency.
So, you've heard all about Guantanamo, Gaza and government ethics. But the biggest challenge the president faces, and that should occupy most of its attention these days, is still the economy.
Now, I've always thought that those comparisons between 1933 and today were overdone. After all, unemployment during the Great Depression reached 25 percent. There were massive runs on banks, trade wars had shrunk global output.
But the situation that Obama is inheriting is quite scary. Despite the bank bailout, despite the lowest interest rates ever, the economy is teetering on the edge.
The financial system remains fundamentally unsound. Banks are sliding towards insolvency. Credit is not moving through the economy. And companies announce massive layoffs every day.
Barack Obama is going to have to use his enormous political capital to ask the country for another set of dramatic measures -- yes, to rescue the financial system.
There are many proposals out there: a national bank that would buy up the toxic assets, more equity, harder guarantees. Whichever option is chosen, the action needs to be fast, massive, systemic, and has to create a sense of resolve and certainty, not erraticism and uncertainty.
The Obama administration has to send a signal to the market: don't bet against us, we will win.
Anyway, now on to a strategic review of Afghanistan. President Obama is doing his own strategic review. In fact, there are three going on in the government right now.
We're going to try to explore the very same issues that the government is dealing with, to try to figure out what should be U.S. policy toward Afghanistan, Western policy toward Afghanistan, and how do we in some way stabilize this country.
Stay with us.
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ZAKARIA: We've heard of all the problems in Afghanistan, and there are many. The questions are, what is the military situation on the ground, and is there a military solution?
Joining me now are two men who certainly know the answers.
Michael O'Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and he is back from Afghanistan recently.
David Kilcullen is a counterinsurgency expert who has been an important adviser to General David Petraeus. He is currently a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
Gentlemen, welcome.
Michael, when you were in Afghanistan, was it your sense that the military -- and I know you were with both the Canadian and the U.S. military -- are they as pessimistic as the kind of news reporting out of Afghanistan is these days?
MICHAEL O'HANLON, SENIOR FELLOW, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION: Fareed, the short answer is "no." There was a mix of opinions, of course, and different people expected different things in 2009. But what I would say in summary is that everyone feels the glass is sort of half full, plus or minus 5 or 10 percent.
And people expect 2009 will be somewhat more difficult as additional U.S. forces spread out into the country and try to establish some order in places where we haven't been before. But there's a wide disagreement as to whether the increase in casualties will be modest or large as a result.
ZAKARIA: But what is their explanation then for the negative indicators -- the fact that the Taliban controls more territory now, casualties are up, attacks are up, you know -- all those kind of indicators of stability, if you will, are pointing in the wrong direction?
O'HANLON: I think they would say, first of all, that we have not had nearly enough resources. And by that I mean not only the United States and NATO, but also the Afghan security forces, which have been kept deliberately small in the belief that a larger Afghan security force was not fundable, was not sustainable economically over the long term. And that has allowed, of course, the Taliban to resurge and to control much of the southern and eastern parts of the country. That's been the fundamental problem.
So it really boils down to increases in resources, doing counterinsurgency right, the way we finally got around to doing it in Iraq in 2007.
ZAKARIA: Dave, is your sense of Afghanistan similarly kind of qualified optimism?
DAVID KILCULLEN, SENIOR FELLOW, THE CENTER FOR A NEW AMERICAN SECURITY AND AUTHOR, "THE ACCIDENTAL GUERRILLA": I would say qualified pessimism, actually, Fareed. I think my optimism is pretty firmly in check at this point. The trend lines are all bad.
And I think that the injection of additional coalition forces into the country, although it will probably give us better control in the medium term, is going to spike violence in the short term, despite the nature of the fact that we have a lot more troops on the ground engaging the enemy. So I think we need to be pretty cautious about being overly optimistic going into this fighting season.
Having said that, a new strategy which focuses on protecting the population and delivering governance that meets the needs of the Afghan population, provided we can do that effectively, I think the medium- to long-term prospects are much as Mike described them.
ZAKARIA: The counterinsurgency strategy, Mike, sounds an awful lot like what we did in Iraq: protect the local population, provide them with security so they don't have to either resort to militias or accept the reign of militias, a certain amount of talking to formerly irreconcilables, formerly hostile elements.
Everybody keeps saying Afghanistan is not Iraq. But what you're describing sounds to me like the Iraq strategy applied to Afghanistan.
O'HANLON: I totally agree, Fareed.
In fact, just to make sure that they don't sound too much like what they're doing in Iraq, people in Afghanistan like to say we're doing not just a strategy of "clear, hold, build," but they throw in the word "shape" at the beginning so it sounds a little different. But then they say, "clear, hold, build."
And it's as David just mentioned. We don't want to go in and try to seize control of cities any longer until there is a force, NATO or Afghan, that can hold the place after we're gone.
Otherwise what you wind up doing is you develop intelligence, you go in and use that intelligence to try to conduct a mission. And as soon you pull out, your informants are killed by the Taliban or other insurgents when they come back.
It doesn't make any sense. We tried it for a half dozen years. It's time to change that, and thankfully we are. I should clarify, I'm not quite as guardedly optimistic about where things stand at this moment as some of the commanders I spoke with. I thought they were trying to maintain morale, which is understandable.
But as a strategist, I would say things, frankly, at the moment, are not very good. And in the absence of a major increase in U.S. and Afghan military and police resources in 2009, I would be fundamentally pessimistic about our prognosis.
ZAKARIA: Well, you said police resources, or did you mean military? Because many people believe the Afghan police is beyond reform.
O'HANLON: Indeed. And I spoke to one of the Canadian top military officers in Kandahar and asked him, if this mission ultimately doesn't work -- and he was relatively optimistic, I should say -- but I asked, if it doesn't work, what will be the reason. And he said that the police are simply beyond reform. And so, that is indeed a great concern.
But a more positive message -- and one that he himself emphasized as well -- was that in Kandahar City, in the city itself of Kandahar, the police are actually performing reasonably well. They're the ones that have been through the most rigorous training, including pulling them out of Kandahar to a different location for team training, essentially. And then they returned with embedded Canadian advisers, much as we've done in Iraq with the Iraqi security forces.
And just to give you one factoid, Fareed. They are now getting about 80 percent of all explosives turned into them before they go off. Eighty percent of all of the IEDs are being identified by the local population, and information is being conveyed about them before they are detonated, which is a much higher percentage -- meaning much greater civilian population cooperation -- than we ever saw in Iraq.
And so, that makes me guardedly optimistic.
ZAKARIA: Michael, when you look at this problem of holding, in Iraq, the way we dealt with it was we gave the Sunni areas to the Sunni community, to Sunni tribals. There were often fairly coherent tribes with coherent tribal structures. And you could, in effect, hand it over to these tribes, that the only problem with them had been that they were part of the insurgency, they were Baathists, or the Shia government didn't support them.
In other words, there was a structure of authority that you could kind of hand over the politics to.
Does that structure of authority exist in Afghanistan? And if it does, and it's Taliban, can we make the switch? Can we say to the Taliban, you get to run your area as long as you don't attack us anymore?
O'HANLON: Complex questions, Fareed, but I would say the short answers are "no" and "no." The structure in Afghanistan is not as coherent, especially as, let's say, in al-Anbar province in Iraq, where, as you know, there's one major tribal group and that's it. And then, of course, there was a lot of former Baathism in al-Anbar, which had survived the invasion, and which was also something we could gradually build up as well.
And on top of that, I don't believe that there's much optimism that the hardcore Taliban, or the hardcore insurgents -- the Mullah Omar, the Hekmatyar, or some of the other warlords -- that they're really reconcilable in any meaningful way.
The efforts that I saw were at the local level, working with traditional tribal leaders. And they would try -- the NATO forces would try -- to cultivate these jirgas and meetings of the elders. And then they would try to create a sense of community and maybe even encourage these elders to form a security company of some kind involving their young people, and then create a contract with that group.
And so, there was not nearly the same kind of structure. And whatever reconciliation effort is happening, is happening locally in this way.
ZAKARIA: Gentlemen, stay with me. We will be right back after this.
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ZAKARIA: And we are back with David Kilcullen and Michael O'Hanlon.
David, what do you think about this idea of talking to the Taliban? It's something that has been broached a great deal, partly because there's a sense that, you know, maybe this is a deep-rooted force within the Pashtun community in Afghanistan, and partly because a somewhat similar experience seemed to have worked in Iraq; that is, talking to hardcore Sunni militants.
Is it a good idea?
KILCULLEN: Well, I'd make two general points on that.
Firstly, to recount what an Afghan tribal leader said to me when I was there a few months ago, 90 percent of the people that we call Taliban are actually tribal fighters or people who are concerned for local tribal interests rather than people who are ideologically committed to the Taliban agenda.
This tribal leader estimated that about 10 percent of people were firmly ideologically committed to the sort of Mullah Omar, Quetta Shura agenda.
He said that 90 percent of the others would be willing under certain circumstances to make a deal, to come in from the cold or to do business with the international community and the Afghan government. But what stopped them was that no one had really approached them in an effective fashion, and also that they were frightened of the other 10 percent, the hardliners.
Now, in Iraq, we didn't actually do much dealing with the very hard-line insurgents. We found that we needed to do two things. We needed to co-opt and deal with and talk to everybody who was willing to reconcile. And we needed to kill and capture the very small number who proved themselves to be irreconcilable.
I think we're going to find a similar thing in Afghanistan, that there are some people who just -- we won't be able to talk to, and there is really no substitute for military and police action against those people. And the more particularly...
ZAKARIA: But what you're describing, Dave, is that we should be talking to 90 percent of them, and we are not.
KILCULLEN: Ninety percent -- well, but I wouldn't call that 90 percent the Taliban. I mean, it depends on what you mean by the term Taliban.
I would say you're not going to get very far talking to members of the Quetta Shura or people who are allied with them.
But there are a lot of people who are local fighters. You know, I think about Mullah Salam, who was a Taliban leader in Musa Qala district, who came in from the cold in February this year. And I spoke with him about 10 days after he had defected to the government side, and said, you know, "Why did you leave the Taliban?"
And he said, "Well, I never really was Taliban, and I'm not really government now. I always cared about my own local district and my own people, and that's what I still care about."
And I think there's a lot of people out there like that, who are willing to negotiate.
ZAKARIA: Michael, do you agree with that?
O'HANLON: I do. But I think I would summarize by saying that we really aren't going to be able to do a deal with the Taliban -- capital T Taliban -- people who want to identify themselves in those terms. The broad, big leaders are not going to be reconcilable.
I was with the Canadian military in the south, in Kandahar, where it is primarily a Taliban movement. The Canadians are fighting very hard in that region. The main issue is they don't have nearly enough resources. The border is wide open. A lot of problems with the Pakistan sanctuary afflict them. These are the kind of challenges.
And they don't really see great opportunity to negotiate with the Taliban, capital T, and nor do they see warlords being people they can splinter off. But they do see a lot of grassroots reconciliation efforts, offering people who might not really be committed to these warlords or ideologies the opportunity to change their stripes and join a local process.
ZAKARIA: Michael, do we need more troops? O'HANLON: Yes, Fareed. And in fact, a nagging doubt I have about the strategy -- even though I'm overall optimistic, as you know -- is that we still don't have enough even in the pipeline, even in the plans.
American forces are one part of the equation. Other NATO forces would be a second part. And I'm quite pessimistic about even President Obama's ability to convince our allies to send more forces.
But the plans for the Afghan army and police -- even the plans are still, in my judgment, far too modest. We still haven't gotten over this notion that we have to somehow leave an affordable-sized force.
Let's face it, the alternatives are worse. The alternatives to a properly-sized Afghanistan security force are: we do all of the fighting, or we lose the war.
ZAKARIA: You would be in favor of an increase in troops.
KILCULLEN: I think that's a done deal. There will be an increase in troops. It won't be anything on the scale or the rapidity of the surge in Iraq. But additional troops are needed to carry out the sorts of counterinsurgency tasks that we want to carry out.
But it's not the numbers of troops that are going to count so much, it's how those programs are carried out on the ground and how effectively we stand up Afghan forces and Afghan structures to do that.
At times in the past we simply asked for whatever troops we thought we could get away with asking for. Whereas, I think with the new administration in Washington and new commanders on the ground, we're looking in a different way to figure out what is actually needed to do the job, and sort of triaging to say, what can we achieve with the forces we have available, and then what extra forces do we need to do the rest.
ZAKARIA: Mike O'Hanlon, Dave Kilcullen, thank you very much. As always, a pleasure.
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Topic(s): Iraq, Regional Security Challenges, Terrorism, Irregular Warfare and Crime, Development and Diplomacy, U.S. Military Forces & Operations, U.S. National Security and Defense Policy, WMD and Nuclear Proliferation
Project(s): Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iraq
People: Dr. David Kilcullen
