The Cipher Brief sat down with General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), for a wide-ranging interview. The general offered his thoughts on the future of Afghanistan.
The Cipher Brief: Can the U.S. really withdraw completely from Afghanistan? Does it concern you?
GEN McChrystal: I am pretty biased towards Afghanistan and I’m emotionally tied to Afghanistan so I admit that up front. I think the U.S. has to keep a presence in Afghanistan, but I don’t know that there is a number of soldiers or there’s a number of fighter planes that defines that. If you think about Afghanistan’s experience, really since 1973 when the turmoil started, and the Soviet entry in 1979, the Afghans haven’t had normal now for a generation and a half. And the new normal is this nontraditional set of leaders who have taken power in places: warlords, or Taliban leaders, and what not. There is not a predictable fabric to life. Farmers plant hoping that they’ll be able to harvest, but other people have a very difficult time seeing if I raise my child this way, this is the outcome. And so I think what Afghanistan needs is some sense of predictability that there’s a linear...
TCB: A linear path?
GEN McChrystal: Yes, that’s right. And you want that linear to be better. It doesn’t have to be a huge incline. Things don’t have to get remarkably better next week, but there has to be a sense it’s going this way. Too many people in Afghanistan are just waiting for the next shoe to fall. It’s going to take some mature leadership, but it is also going to take some mature partnership on our side. When we left in 1989, when the Soviets left, we essentially turned our back {on the Afghans}. The Afghans, they were shocked, because they thought that they had helped us fight our Cold War enemy, which they had, and they had won, and they lost 1.2 million Afghans in that struggle. And then we sort of said ok, you got it, and they needed help and we weren’t there. Most of them have this sense that there’s a great likelihood this will happen again, and they read our papers and they hear our rhetoric. And so what I think we need to do is convince them that what President Obama said was true. He offered them a strategic partnership, and he didn’t put numbers on it, but he says we’ll be strategic partners with you. If we can make that credible, believed by the people, then I think that is the biggest part of this.
TCB: You’ve talked about how important it is to provide them with guidance on infrastructure and assistance. If you had the opportunity to build the team of teams for issues for Afghanistan and for ISIS who would you put on those teams? What kinds of skill sets, and what kinds of minds would you want on those fronts?
GEN McChrystal: Well that’s a great question. I’ve never thought this through in the depth that I should have. I think the first person, or people I’d find are people who can make teams work. I mean I’d literally, regardless of their background, want to find somebody who has this ability to bring teams together, team of rivals kind of creation. And they can be from any walk of life. You could find leaders in business or government who have that, but that’s what I’d be looking for. I wouldn’t care whether they had regional expertise or functional expertise on that problem. They would have organizational expertise. And I’d give them enough people that have a similar connection so that they are not a single person up there trying to run this thing, they’ve got a small network. Then on top of that, you’ve got to understand the situation first. In fact I just recommended a former comrade of mine write a book on Afghanistan. Jason Howk was a young major that worked with me. He had several tours in Afghanistan. He’d been a private for me in the 82nd where he was a paratrooper. He’s a very educated guy. And I’d like him to write a book that said what should we have known? When you say you are going into a country, what was knowable? You should know the history, you should know the culture. What of the history should we have known, reasonably; what of the economic situation; what are the current politics; what are the personalities; what are whatever?
And the idea is if we wrote a book, and we said all of this was available to be known, if everyone who went in or made decisions about Afghanistan had known this body of knowledge – it wouldn’t be exhaustive but it would be enough so that everybody was conversant – everybody was able to have a good frame of reference, contextual understanding. And the reason that I think it would be so valuable is if you produced a book like that and said, we should have known this, the next time we are thinking about going to country x, we say pick that book up and say, do we know this about country x. And if we don’t, stop, figure that out before we do.
We did handbooks and all, but we never really thought that out. And I think that would be really, really important.
When I was in Afghanistan—and I’d been there from 2002-2009, part of every year because I had forces there—I read a lot of history. When I got there in 2009, every time I peeled something away, I found there were things that were just incredibly important that I had no idea.
TCB: That’s frustrating for any leader right?
GEN McChrystal: Absolutely. I commanded there for a year and was very close to a lot of the Afghan leaders. But I went back about 18 months later because President Karzai invited me back. I spent just a few days there and was invited to dinner at a senior official’s house who I’d become close to. I went to his house for dinner, and who he had brought together for this dinner surprised me. It was because they were his close friends. You didn’t pick that up in the cabinet room meetings. Had I understood who was close and who was joking with each other at dinner, that would have been invaluable. That seems so obvious, but how do you know that kind of stuff, how do you find that out fast enough so that you’re not seeing it in the rearview mirror.
