Q&A with Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution
Tuesday, July 24, 2012 at 6:45AM Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who previously spent 30 years with the CIA, is an expert on counter-terrorism, the Middle East, and South Asia. His books include "The Deadly Embrace."
Q: What role has the Vietnam War's legacy played in the Obama administration's debates on Afghanistan, and how absorbed has President Obama himself been with the lessons of recent history?
A: The Vietnam War and its legacy played an important role in President Obama’s debates on Afghanistan but perhaps less with the president himself than his older advisers. The SRAP [special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan], Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who had served in Vietnam, probably was the most absorbed by the Vietnam legacy. He understood the perils of a land war in Asia. But Holbrooke was also the biggest advocate of a civilian surge of experts to try to build a better Afghan state, what many critics have since labeled a futile exercise in nation building.
Holbrooke was also worried about the comparison of [Afghan President] Hamid Karzai to Vietnam’s corrupt generals, yet he was also unable to find a way to prevent Karzai from engaging in massive vote fraud in the 2009 elections. So the lessons of Vietnam played out in Afghanistan but not always in a straight line. The president, who is younger than most of his senior advisers, I think is less concerned by the Vietnam analogy simply because it resonates less with him. I suspect the one aspect of the Vietnam legacy that most impacted the president was his concern that decisions not go on autopilot, that we constantly reassess our assumptions and progress at every stage. He told me from the beginning days of his administration that he would do periodic second looks and reassessments to ensure truly smart policy, not simply more of the same. And that is what he has done.
Q: In early 2009, President Obama asked you to head a review of U.S. policy in Afghanistan. As the review progressed, how big a factor was the issue of cost, given that the country was in a recession?
A: The cost issue was immensely important. Let’s face facts; we are broke as a nation. Our military expenditures have grown out of control. We have a military that has grown used to constant increases in its budget and to waging war at any price. When I briefed [Obama] on Air Force One in March 2009 on the review I told him it cost a minimum of a quarter million dollars to send one American soldier to Afghanistan for a year (some estimates are much higher), but it cost less than $12,000 to put an Afghan soldier on the battlefield for a year. Even if we doubled the Afghan’s pay, the savings are obvious. It was a light-bulb moment for the president; he got it.
Obama has said it more than once: the country he wants to build is not Afghanistan; it is America. But the president did not inherit a blank slate in 2009. He inherited a war we were losing and an enemy, Al Qaeda, that was getting stronger, not weaker, in Pakistan. He embarked on a policy aimed at a clear goal: disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda. Most of that is done in Pakistan, but to do that we need a base in Afghanistan because Pakistan won’t help us. That is also why he agreed to a 10-year strategic partnership agreement with Karzai last May to give the U.S. access to Afghan bases after 2014 to conduct counter-terrorism missions in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. I suspect Governor Romney will want the same agreement if he is elected.
Q: What would you see as a "good enough" outcome in Afghanistan, and where does Pakistan figure in that outcome?
A: The core of Obama’s policy in Afghanistan is to build an Afghan army strong enough to contain the Taliban insurgency without NATO combat units. We should have started doing that in 2002, but instead we went to Iraq and built their army. When Obama inherited a disaster in 2009 we began for the first time to seriously build an Afghan army and police that can contain the Taliban. We knew it would take five years during which NATO forces would have to do most of the work. It is a big gamble; no one knows if the Afghans will maintain cohesion after we draw down. The president and his generals are betting it will.
Pakistan, the Taliban and al Qaeda are betting it won’t. The Afghan Taliban is Pakistan’s proxy in Afghanistan. The Pakistani army and intelligence service provides the Taliban with a sanctuary and safe haven in Pakistan. They help them raise money. They provide strategic and tactical guidance for their missions. While I was chairing our strategic review in early 2009, we knew the Taliban and the ISI [Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence] were holding their own strategy review in Quetta, Pakistan. [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar and the ISI met directly. The ISI’s bet is we will cut and run sooner rather than later; then their proxy will take over most of Afghanistan. Pakistan is too important to us for many reasons (the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal is one) to ignore, but they are a very difficult and problematic interlocutor as long as the army calls the shots in Islamabad.
Q: You spent many years with the CIA. Has the CIA's relationship with the military changed over the years, and if so, how?
A: The CIA and the military grow closer when we are engaged in major combat operations. In wartime, the CIA rightly supports the war fighters. So our largest stations in history can be found in Saigon, Baghdad and now Kabul. The longer the war, the bigger the station. When the fighting stops, the relationship remains robust but is not so all-consuming. Covert operations in “peacetime” don’t always need a big footprint. The first Afghan war, against the Soviet 40th Red Army, was run by a CIA program that never had more than a hundred people working on it and a station in Islamabad that was fairly small.
Q: Since the end of the Vietnam War, has there been a particular time at which its legacy was especially strong or especially weak when it came to presidential decisions on sending troops to war?
A: I think the Vietnam legacy was almost forgotten in the Bush 43 first term. Or perhaps consciously rejected by [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld. We embarked on a war in Iraq with little or no serious discussion of the consequences, especially for the Afghan mission. We paid a terrible price.
Interview with Deborah Kalb, co-author of Haunting Legacy.
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