The Rachel Maddow Show: This Way Out?
Journalist: Rachel Maddow
Original Post: This Way Out?
Type: Interview
March 18, 2009 —
March 18, 2009 -
MADDOW: Do you see the "this way out" sign, back there? It`s weird. I never look back there. It`s over there. We keep asking that question on the show, "This way out?" So I thought maybe it should get its own sign, as a question mark, as in, "Dude, we`re entering year seven in Iraq and we`re in year eight in Afghanistan. Are we getting any closer to finding the way out?"
So we made a sign. For Iraq, the president has at least told us when we will get to the way out. We will get to it, not by the end of this year, not by the end of next year but by the end of the year after that. That`s Iraq. For Afghanistan, we`re still waiting to hear.
But through our "this way out" effort, which I`m pretty sure is total cable news suicide, we`re making an ongoing effort to introduce everyone to the people who are driving this effort to figure out what to do, the people leading the decisions about what is going to happen in our nation`s wars. Which President Bush started but which President Obama may finish.
On last night`s show we had one of those influential decision leaders on, John Nagl, who wrote "The Counterinsurgency Field Manual" along with Gen. Petraeus. Check out how Mr. Nagl did not even flinch when I raised the prospect of another eight years in the war in Afghanistan.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MADDOW: Tell me that when the next president is inaugurated, we are not going to be talking about prospects for year 16 of the war in Afghanistan.
JOHN NAGL, CO-AUTHOR, "THE COUNTERINSURGENCY FIELD MANUAL": I`d like to be able to tell you that, Rachel. I`m afraid that American interests in Afghanistan are going to remain. We`ve got an awful lot of work do in front of us. I`m afraid more in front of us than behind us in this war in Afghanistan.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MADDOW: We don`t even get to start looking for the way out of Afghanistan until year 16 of that war? What`s more, the "Field Manual" that John Nagl helped to write says that we need a combined U.S.-Afghan force, security force, of say, 600,000 to 750,000 troops on the ground in Afghanistan. That`s more than triple by what any conceivable counting we`ve got now.
This is really the only way to win in Afghanistan? Meanwhile, the American public seems to be moving on. A new Gallup poll out this week shows 42 percent of Americans think it was a mistake to send U.S. troops to Afghanistan in the first place. That is the highest that number has ever been since they started polling on it in 2001.
Joining us now is Dr. David Kilcullen, a military strategist who has been a senior advisor David Petraeus and the State Department. His latest book is called, "The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One." David Kilcullen, thanks for coming back on the show.
DAVID KILCULLEN, MILITARY STRATEGIST AND ADVISOR TO GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS: Very happy to be here.
MADDOW: All right. 1996, you`re in Indonesia. You are studying a guerilla movement there. It`s midnight. These four young guys walk up to your campsite. Then what happens?
KILCULLEN: Yes. I was hanging out in this very wild part of west Java. There are 22 peaks of about 10,000 feet. And this one, a little bit of jungle, and half of them are volcanoes. So it`s a pretty wild place.
And yes, it`s midnight. I`d been out in the jungle for a week and I`m just trying to take a break and these guys pay me a visit. Two of them were local guys from the valley from where I was staying associated with the movement called Darul Islam, which is a 1950s, 1960s guerilla group which I was saying. The other two were Arabs.
And we spent several hours talking and trying to explore the issues of the local area. The Arabs got pretty bored with that. And one of them said to me, "You know, hang on a second. Forget about this discussion. What about Israel? What about the United States? What about western culture undermining the Muslim world? What do you have to say about that?"
And they started to put me through a fairly rigorous stress test of my views. And for whatever reason, I seemed to have given them acceptable answers because they left peacefully a couple of hours later.
But I got thinking about that and I realized that actually a lot of the people that we`re dealing with now in the war on terrorism are local fighters who don`t really care that much about global issues. They`re all about protecting their local society from what they see as the encroachment of damaging external actors.
But then you`ve got that very small proportion of people who are - like these two Arabs in west Java, not necessarily that interested in local people`s issues. They`re more interested in exploiting those local people to their further their global agenda.
MADDOW: So end up with a sort of global, anti-western, internationally-minded terrorists, like al-Qaeda in a vanguard, sort of, but linking themselves, linking their big fanatical cause with local people, the people who you call accidental gorillas, people who have more understandable grievances. So fighting that means splitting those two people apart, not allowing the vanguard to exploit those local grievances?
KILCULLEN: Primarily, yes. I think it means taking some really substantial and almost entirely nonmilitary steps to deal with local people`s grievances and to bring governance, development, the rule of law and all of those sort of things that we tend to take for granted in the west, to people that need them.
But they have to be done on a local basis and in accordance with the local standards. Because when we turn up and try to lay down the law about how things should be, it tends to make these people more vulnerable to extremists coming in and saying, "What are you siding with these guys for, when you should be standing up for your own rights?"
So I think we have two classes of enemy. A very, very small but a very violent and fanatical group that hates the west and wants to bring us down. And then about 90 to 95 percent of the other people we`re dealing with just don`t like us being in their face.
MADDOW: That makes so much sense to me, and it`s academically and intellectually elegant. It also just resonates with what I understand about what have gone through as a country for past eight years since we`ve all been paying attention to this. But doesn`t that mean that the solution in a place like Afghanistan where we`ve already been for eight years is massively expensive and takes tens if not hundreds of thousands of troops and takes a very long time?
KILCULLEN: Well, there`s a couple of issues there. I think we need to separate doctrine from strategy. Now, what John Nagl was talking about last night is doctrine. And doctrine tells you how to do things. It doesn`t tell you whether to do them.
Strategy is about making decisions. I mean, let`s use the analogy of - let`s say you`re building a pipeline across the desert. You need some kind of guide or handbook that tells you, you know, you need this many pipes and this rivets and so on to build it. That`s the doctrine.
But that doesn`t tell you whether to build this or that particular pipeline, right? So what we did in 2006 in putting together the counterinsurgency handbook and what we did recently in the State Department in putting together one for policymakers, is try to say, "Look, if you decide to do this, these are the sorts of things you need to have in place to make it work."
That is not about whether we should or shouldn`t go into any particular place. And I think if you listen very carefully to the pronouncements that Vice President Biden, Richard Holbrooke and others have made about this administration`s policy in relation to Afghanistan, they are saying and the key phrase is, "We want to have achievable objectives and adequate resources." I think it`s a very, very sensible way to be thinking about it.
MADDOW: I wait with bated breath. David Kilcullen, military strategist, author of "The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One." It`s really nice to meet you. Thanks for coming in. Nice to see you.
KILCULLEN: Thanks, Rachel. Good to see you.
Related:Topic(s): Terrorism, Irregular Warfare and Crime, Development and Diplomacy, U.S. National Security and Defense Policy
Project(s): Afghanistan and Pakistan
People: Dr. David Kilcullen
