Defense Writers Group

Transcription

1 TRANSCRIPT Defense Writers Group A Project of the Center for Media & Security New York and Washington, D.C. Joseph J. Collins Deputy ASD (Stability Operations) June 10, 2003 THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT AND MAY CONTAIN ERRORS. USERS ARE ADVISED TO CONSULT THEIR OWN TAPES OR NOTES OF THE SESSION IF ABSOLUTE VERIFICATION OF WORDING IS NEEDED. Q: Welcome to Joseph J. Collins, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Stability Operations. Those of you who may have known this office under a different name--it was peacekeeping and humanitarian affairs--it has changed. We thought it might be useful for a brief explanation for why that change took place and what stability operations means. A: My predecessor Jim Scherr in the Clinton Administration and myself and a number of other people have always felt that the office that I had did a lot more than peacekeeping and humanitarian affairs. There was a search for some time for a broader title. We tried out a few and stability ops, which are generically military operations after the use of force or where force is not being used at all, seemed to be a good place to hang our hats. Since we've changed our name, we probably have spent more time doing things like post-conflict reconstruction than we have on things like humanitarian assistance and peacekeeping. I think it was a good thing. To my mind, it also highlights that the sort of things we are doing--peacekeeping, humanitarian affairs, reconstruction activities, even human rights, war crimes atrocities--the policy end of that, those things are not really separate and distinct from the mainstream policy. We have been going into operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. These things have been sort of meshed very much so into the war planning and the operations, simply because the situations dictate it. We have a tendency and have for a number of years now, not to be engaged in military activities between large states that are in very stable conditions, but to be engaged in activities where we are essentially working with states in a military vein that are already in a humanitarian crisis. I think, living in the media age and being the kind of people that we are in the United States, I think there is sort of an implicit demand that you can't win the war and lose the humanitarian situation. If you win the war by wrecking the country and damaging the people, it won't be considered to be legitimate. So, these things have to be done, almost at the same time. I think in Afghanistan in particular, we were very successful in the beginning in actually increasing humanitarian assistance as the war escalated to the culminating point in December of That is my 1

2 problem--there has been some water under the bridge here. Q: Turn to Iraq for a second here. Before the war, your office, DoD generally, had a plan for what you called relief and reconstruction. Two different things--relief, take care of the humanitarian problems that were immediate and then reconstruction. After that, heavily dependent on the NGOs and non-government types of organizations. Ok, it has been two months since the end of the war. Give us a report card. What kind of grade do you give yourselves on those two aspects. One other thing is you kind of lucked out in that it was a short war, there wasn't a lot of heavy damage to infrastructure, not a tremendous number of refugees, fighting in urban environments, that sort of thing. Given the fact that you had a lot going for you there, how has it turned out? A: Let me say a word about the Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Plan. It was a highly developed plan. The guts of the plan, which was developed before General Garner and company came on the scene, was done in inter-agency group. The inter-agency group was supervised by Elliot Abrams, one of the senior directors at the staff and Robin Cleveland from OMB. I think it was a very good plan. Essentially, it was a plan that, the thrust of the plan was to begin humanitarian assistance as the combat progressed and, in effect, right behind the rear echelons of the combat units you would have your civil affairs and your USAID dart team. All of that worked very well. As you mentioned, we were lucky, on a number of different things--the use of WMD, avoidance of a lot of house-to-house fighting, although of course there has been lots of urban combat along the way--we avoided completely the situation of the refugees. We were correct in our estimates that most of the Iraqi people had enough food to tide them over and also in our estimate that we would very quickly be able to start a food distribution system and to work that through the international system. I think we were lucky from there. The reconstruction has been a more complex situation. There has been a number of problems along the way. I think the plans were flexible enough that we haven't encountered any problems that, you know, people said were new, that were completely out of the question. The percentages and the amounts of resistance that you have to carrying things out, I think, has been a factor. Some of the things that took place in reality that are affecting the plan--the first in Baghdad and many of the other cities, a very high degree of looting, to some degree unexpected. Not totally unexpected, but the extent of the looting was there. Certainly, the looting of the houses of senior Baath party officials was something to be expected. The fact that people looted hospitals to take their air conditioners, their office furniture, and even their supplies of bottled water, ws not expected. There has also been, I think, a great deal of sabotage involved in humanitarian assistance field and to some extent, since it is difficult to sort of strip it away and separate it from looting. It is hard to see. But we've had a lot of things that have been taken or damaged that have no economic application. For example, one of the problems we've had has been the electrical system in Baghdad, getting that back up on line. In order to do that, we had to bring in large-scale cable splicing machines. These have no commercial value, outside of the enterprise that we are involved in. And twice they've been stolen--once when it wasn't being guarded and another time when it was being guarded. That suggests to me that this is more than your garden-variety 2

3 thievery. One of the things that a lot of people have not reported on and have not recorded the extent of the effects of, perhaps it is almost impossible, is the fact that right before the war started, Saddam emptied his prisons. Every common criminal, rapist, burglar, mugger, murderer in Iraq is on the streets right now. I think that is a factor. Another factor has been organized and disorganized resistance, much of which is quite professional. It is one thing when a dissatisfied Iraqi throws a half a brick at an armored Humvee. That is one kind of violence. But when you are having your vehicles get in ambushes where people are coming out of culverts with satchel charges and throwing them under the vehicle, that suggests, number one, a lot of training and number two, an organized effort. And part of that comes from the fact that there are die-hard Baathists. There are also people in the city who are in the cities, in particular, but also I'm sure, in the countryside, who are terrorists, who are malcontents and there are also foreigners who were there as sort of guest-worker Jihadists who came in during the war and they are not going to back to where they came from until they are either killed or captured. Where are we now? There was some really strange statements on the reconstruction front that when General Garner went over there, he didn't really have a plan. Which I think was ridiculous because twice before General Garner went, we pulled together all of the sectoral plans and we had briefing marathons, if you will. It happened twice and the one that I went to took the better part of six hours to go through all of the sectoral plans. If you were to stack up all of the briefing slides and point papers, it would have been something about this deep. Those plans were complete with estimates of the pre-war situation was, what the expected levels of combat were in some cases, and what good objectives would be for the future. I think that there were very, very good plans. What we have here is a situation--you know the old statement in the Pentagon is, and this has to do with war plans but I think it also fits here--no plan survives contact with the enemy. I think that is probably true for humanitarian assistance and reconstruction plans. What we've been able to do to re-work these plans, is, we've superimposed a very large organization. Now, many hundreds of people now working for Ambassador Bremmer to bring order out of chaos and to bring the plans in line with the realities of the situation. I can't speak to the details of this, but I can tell you, just give you one brief example of what happened--we have a very good plan for the Iraqi police. The plan was done in conjunction with General Garner's people by attached elements of the Justice Department and State INL. So this was a really professional plan. But, when they got out there, they realized that the plan had a number of problems and now the plan is in the process of being redone. It is being redone not back here in Washington with the ten thousand mile screw driver. It is being done out there by Ambassador Bremmer and his specialists which includes the former police commissioner of New York City, Bernard Carrick. Now, that plan out there is now going to have to come back here and we are going to have to sort of look at the resourcing of it and whatever. But generally speaking, the plans that we did were sort of a combination of policy plus estimate and the plans that are being done out there by 3

4 Ambassador Bremmer's people are really operational plans. These are plans that are not full of estimates in terms of the imaginative sense of the word. These are being done with estimates that are being made on the ground. They are not postulating the number of police that we think are going to come back to duty in Iraq. They are working off of the real numbers of police that are coming back. So, how did we do by way of planning? I think by way of planning, we did A work. In terms of cooperation, it was excellent. In terms of being comprehensive, it was excellent. The situation has been tougher and more complex than many of these plans were able to do. But in order to sort of make these plans work, we've created a workable organization, first under Jay Garner and then under Ambassador Bremmer, that is really going to make this come to fruition. Q: How many countries have not only promised but committed troops to go into Iraq now for stabilization operations AND noting that American troops are being killed now almost daily. Is that putting a damper on the ability of European Parliaments to approve troops to go in? A: The international effort is a huge one. We meet on it two or three times a week. It involves very heavy commitment, of course, by Central Command at various levels. It involves the State Department. The Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, who are doing absolutely exceptional work. And also a fella by the name of Keith Dunn, who is the senior civilian in OSD policy who is our coalition manager, if coalitions are managed. We think, right now we are in the process of talking to over three dozen countries who are interested in playing in the peacekeeping world. My guess is that we will ultimately come down to a situation where, in the first traunch (?) Of peacekeeping, that will have somewhere between a dozen and 20 countries participating. Some of the participation will be quite small. And other countries are coming in at the division headquarters or brigade level. The size of this operation will depend on the threat and the circumstances. We will have the flexibility to make this as big or as small as we want it to, particularly relying on the coalition forces that are there now. In the end, my guess is that there will be three or four--i am talking steady state now and not for the near term--but in the steady state, I think there will be three, possibly four divisions and those divisions will include forces from up to 20 countries. That is by way of--it is not a SWAG--it is an informed guess. It is a guess at this point in time. There will be great burden sharing. There is great interest in the future of Iraq, in reconstruction and in peace keeping. The allied nations will come up big. I have not heard any of the nations say that--ooh, my word, we are watching and American soldiers are being killed so therefore we are not going to participate in your peacekeeping operation. I haven't heard any of that. As a matter of fact, I think that there is the possibility for a very positive backlash when soldiers are being killed and it has the capacity also for steeling the will of a nation. For example, the death of German peacekeepers in Afghanistan will not cause the Germans to cut and run. If anything, it will cause the Germans to renew their zeal in terms of that particular peace keeping effort that they are now the co-lead of in Afghanistan. Q: How many troops have been promised so far? A: It is actually, to my level, I think somebody could probably sit down and take the units and go through the tables of organization and equipment of the various countries and come up with an 4

5 estimate. But I don't think anyone has. I think people are now looking for formations. For example, an infantry battalion could be 500 or it could be 800. It is difficult to tell from country to country the size of a rifle company or a battalion. I don't know anybody who has reduced that to it. There may be somebody on the Joint Staff who is keeping a running total. But I just don't know about that. Q: I want to get back to this issue of organized resistance. A few weeks ago, Army officials were briefing out of Iraq that resistance was not organized. It was mainly crimes of opportunity. What has happened in the last few weeks that has led you to believe it is organized? Who are these savage hordes? Baathists? Iranian agents? Syrian agents? A: There has been sort of two issues on the organization. One of the questions has been, is this an organized nation-wide effort? I have to be an agnostic on that. I am not enough of an expert to tell you that. I can tell you, it is very clear in the last three or four weeks that some of the violence has all the hallmarks of trained people in organized efforts. Some of the other violence, even the violence that results in the death of soldiers and others in the theater, that clearly could be opportunities or whatever. Violence one basket. Another basket--thievery, looting, sabotage. Most of what you see by way of thievery and looting, I think, is crime and the crime that you see varies from crimes of opportunity to very, very organized efforts. People who know things. They go into a plant and they take a piece of equipment, for example, they go into a massive room full of machinery and they pull out from this massive machinery the thing that is actually a generator. This generator could have many uses. That to my mind suggests that it could be just normal economic crime, but that is organized economic crime as opposed to somebody who is angry or whatever and they go into the home of a Baathist leader and they take his pictures of Elvis on black velvet and bring them to their home or local civic center or whatever. Dogs playing poker pictures. In any case, I think it is pretty clear that some of the violence against our soldiers is organized. Whether or not it is organized on a major, regional or national level, I don't have the information to know that, but I am an old soldier. When somebody surrounds a vehicle and they start popping shells into it and the guy pops out of a ditch with a satchel charge to throw it under the vehicle, that is very demanding commando kind of training at work. That is not five or six people who are ticked off at the "Yankee Imperialists." Q: Who is behind this? A: Iranians, I have not seen any indicators that people committing violence against American soldiers are Iranians per se. Again, the leadership and organization at the highest levels of this is cloudy. Clearly, some of these people are Saddam Fedayeen hard-core Baathists. Perhaps some military folks, disgruntled Republican Guard, hard-core commando types. Those are all possibilities. Q: You didn't mention Al Qaeda. A: Yes, absolutely and thank you very much. Quite possible that there is a big terrorists end to this and also foreign fighters. 5

6 Q: On what do you base the Al Qaeda connection? A: Could they be Al Qaeda? I'd use the generic term terrorists. They may be An Sar El Islam, for example, which is a terrible group that was connected with Al Qaeda but has a life of its own. And actually owned, if you will, a small chunk of Iraq. Q: What are your long term plans for managing all this? A: There is obviously significant stress on the force. A lot of the answer to that stress and the plans and whatever depends on what the steady state emerges. My crystal ball is just not good enough to say. There was a time when James Kitfield and I were working on a project at CSIS and we looked at the stress created not only by overseas deployments, but also by peace keeping operations. The overall stress, if you could quantify it, is higher than it was then, but, then again, since 9/11, we've been engaged in two shooting wars, each of which has resulted in some kind of peace keeping effort. We also have 9 thousand US troops in Afghanistan who are engaged in combat operations on a routine basis as well as a large-scale peacekeeping operation going on. To my mind, this is in some ways a different kind of stress than you had in the Clinton Administration, where the major stressor that was involved was overseas duty compounded by peace keeping commitments. This, I think, is much more a real-world situation. Back then, when I was doing the study for CSIS, there were still, in the military, a number of people who were sort of disgruntled about peace keeping because it was considered to be apart from the purpose that they have. I don't hear that today. I mean, this is peacekeeping in the aftermath of war and I think people are seized with the sense of mission. In terms of rotation, in terms of commitments, all of these things are going to have to be worked out in the future and to the extent that they become a gigantic rock in the collective ruck sack of the Armed Forces is going to depend upon what the steady state is going to be for our operations in Afghanistan and our peace keeping commitments in Iraq and other places. Also important to note, a minor footnote to my answer: our peace keeping commitments in other places are in the process of coming down. Kosovo has been maintained at a level area. Disproportionately in favor of the US, our commitment has been reduced in Bosnia. We are no longer in Macedonia. And we are in the process of working through the Sinai commitment as well. There has been a little bit of relief on the missions which, at least, in light of Iraq and Afghanistan have become more mundane. Q: The Clinton Administration had a plan for US peacekeepers if the Palestinian situation would be resolved. Are you picking up that ball at all, given President Bush's desires to make peace in the Middle East? A: I remember conversations about that during the years of the Clinton Administration. I remember there were pro and con folks in the Clinton Administration. I don't know that any commitments were ever made. I don't hear any talk of that. I am not an expert in that part of the world, though, and you know, if there was some development in the peacekeeping in peacemaking business that required an international peacekeeping force, but I don't find anybody in the Department of Defense talking about it or thinking about it. 6

7 Q: Is that something that is even doable given the extent of your commitments in Afghanistan still? A: Doable, yes it certainly could be doable. Does it make any sense? And is it the sort of thing that folks would want to do? I don't know how many nations there would be who would want to get between the Israelis and the Palestinians. That could be a very uncomfortable place to be. Q: How about the Congo? Some people say there should be a stronger US presence in that region. A: We are dedicated to the proposition that we globally, the developed nations of the world should improve their peacekeeping capacity but as far as where US forces go, and where forces are assigned, the forces of any time--be they airlift, ground forces or whatever, I think they generally follow traditional patterns. They follow interests and any number of other things. I don't know anybody lobbying the United States very hard for contributions of US ground forces for the Congo. We have noted with great satisfaction the fact that a number of our European friends and allies have picked up the ball in that area as have a number of other nations. Nothing that I would see would be happening there. That said, there are a number of programs that are run jointly by State and Defense that are designed to increase the peace keeping capacity of African nations and those things are proceeding apace. Interestingly enough, paying off quite nicely in places like Sierra Leone and the Congo, where some of these units that we've trained have been employed to great effect. Q: Let me get a clarification on some terms earlier that you used. You said your informed guess that three or four divisions would be conceivable for a steady state stabilization. What does steady state mean to you? Is that six months? Ten years? How long would that process be? And when that transition to steady state begin? A: The short answer to the second part of your question is, it begins right away, really. The steady state, if you will, is going to be adjusted and whatever. I am postulating it in my mind that beyond this period where there is still a significant amount of daily violence and months from now, for example, that you will be in a much more pacific state in Iraq, but international peace keepers hopefully will be there. I don't have an exact schedule for that. But they will be there ahead of time. Q: Do you see that steady state as something akin to the Bosnia stabilization program that went into place in 1995 and it still a very significant commitment even today? A: Bosnia is a good example of what happens to the steady state. In Bosnia, the total number of troops and I wish I had a couple of my guys here who could do this off the top of their head. The total number of troops has gone down. The total number of US troops gone down even more disproportionately so. That is the sort of thing we can expect in Iraq over the long haul. Q: But also on an eight-year time line, perhaps? 7

8 A: I haven't ever heard anybody in any of these planning sessions say, ok, here it is, this is the three-year plan and at the end of the three-year plan we have the victory parade on 42nd St and this is over. One of the most terrible things that we got into in the Clinton Administration was the notion of exit strategies. That is not a bad issue. Every nation should have an exit strategy from a commitment. But it shouldn't be time driven. It should be event driven. In World War I, our exit strategy was, we won't come back until it is over, over there. That is the sort of thinking that you have to have in these--what is the end state that you want and then you work backwards to today. What happened in the Clinton years was exit strategy became synonymous with what date are you coming home? That is, I think, the wrong way to look at it. I think the secretary has been clear and clear thinking as well on this point where he says, you know, we'll be there as long as it takes and not one day longer. I just don't have a good feel for whether that is two years, four years, five years or whatever. Q: Is the three or four division number enough for the Army to begin building a regular rotation for the next year or so? A: I am glad you asked that because I may have given a confusing answer on that. The truth has changed--no. I meant three or four international divisions, one could very well be from the United States. Q: That wasn't the total size. A: Right. One thing I failed to mentioned before when there was a good question on that was, people asked about casualties. What nations were very concerned about, in the beginning there was not the possibility of casualties. It was the necessity for top cover from the UN Security Council resolution. I think one of our great accomplishments in this effort has been to help to shape that UN Security Council resolution, which covers a myriad of things from the oil for food program down to how you are going to spend the oil money and various funds and who is going to sit on the boards and whatever. That was a great piece of work. I didn't say that because I was involved in it; I wasn't. Q: I want to clarify something--when you talk about three or four divisions, can you assign any range of numbers for that steady state? A: I'd have to fall back--and I just can't right now. There may be somebody who can; I just can't. Because you run into situations where someone says, ok, I am going to give you a battalion. And it comes in and it is a battalion like a battalion in our Marine Corps--it is a virtual regiment, you know it comes in, it has got a thousand people in it. And then other people come in and say I'll give you a battalion and it comes in at 475. Q: I would have thought that if you thought three or four divisions was adequate, that you would have a number in your mind of what adequate is as opposed to what somebody else thinks it is. 8

9 A: No. I really don't. Then, when you add on top, you say your have that force of three and four divisions, then obviously there is a large headquarters element and a large support element that goes along with that. And part of that depends upon what the nations are bringing with it. Q: Has the resistence picked up in Afghanistan (the way it is in Iraq)? What is the situation with the Taliban returning? A: The president of Afghanistan today has made the statement that there is not a great resurgence of the Taliban as a movement. There is a number of different groups that are involved there. There are still some foreign fighters. There are Taliban remnants and then there is this third element called the HIG, which stands for Hizbi Islami Goobadeen. That is the one led by Goobadeen Hec Matiar who has been a thug and a spoiler whose record goes back over 20 years. These three groups are working--i can't say they are working together. Certainly the effects of their efforts are taking together. My guess is that in March-April and May of this year, there was a significant uptick in the number of conflict related incidents. That would include attacks on the coalition, attacks on internationals and green-on-green violence or attacks on other Afghans. One of the new wrinkles, if you will, in the pattern of this violence has been in attacks on internationals and international efforts. For example, the other day we had a major attack by a suicide bomber, which is not a tactic that has been quite common in that part of the world. It is sort of interesting. Not impossible. But not a common tactic. We had an attack on that. We had clearly the deliberate assassination of a Latin American employee of the ICRC--International Committee of the Red Cross. We've had some deliberate killings of deminers, working on the famous road from Kabul to Khandahar. We've had a number of other smaller incidents--rocket attacks, grenade over the compound wall sort of things that have happened. Targeting people who are engaged in reconstruction. Q: This has been a new phenomenon? A: I think it is a new pattern and essentially it is an effective tactic on their part. We have also had some great successes, both the Afghans and the United States have had some great successes in chasing their terrorists and policing up a few. The more the terrorists come out of the shadow and attempt to transition from being a terrorist movement to being some sort of low-level guerilla warfare, the more they have to mask, the more they have to come together and the more they have to communicate, and they've not really been able to get beyond the incident level. On the one hand, concern about these new tactics. On the other hand, I have to say that there is undoubtedly more stability in many areas of Afghanistan than there has been for years. I am very bullish on Afghanistan. I am a two-and-a-half decade Afghanistan watcher. I was there four times last year and I am going again next week to keep track of what is happening and to talk to the people who are on the ground. I see great things for the future. We've got a constitutional Loya Girga coming up and I think that will come off before the end of the year. And then, elections probably in the summer of In the meantime, still a significant amount of money pouring into Afghanistan. People who compare Afghanistan with other cases find that the amount of money per capita going into Afghanistan is actually quite small, which is sad because the last briefing I gave at the Pentagon on Afghanistan started out with talking about how in 9

10 1996, it was 169 out of 174 on the UN development scale. After 1996, you had four more years of Taliban rule and four years of drought in an agricultural country. So, Afghanistan in December of 2001, when we arrived there on the scene in some numbers, has, development wise, fallen through the bottom of the barrel. We are going to have to do more internationally to fix that. In our day and age, it has become clear that there are no unimportant countries. There is no place on earth that we can afford to let it become a failed state in the hands of terrorist groups, thugs or organized criminals. So we are going to have to work on that. Q: Back to that period right after combat operations and sort of in the stabilization period, knowing what you know now, what things might you have done differently? For Iraq. A: The problem with all that is, is that your military operations are linked forward and the hindsight always gets to be 20/20. When it comes right down to it, if you added up all of the things that you would have wished for the day after the major fighting stopped, you would have had a force of 900 thousand people and many of the things that just wouldn't have seemed prudent to any of the planning. It is tough to say. Certainly more infantry, more MP's, those things would have been nice to have. But, in the real world of resources, you have to ask, well, what would you have given up if you had to give up something? Would you have had a larger period of time building up your forces and then create vulnerabilities along those lines? It is a tough issue. I have a tendency to have great sympathy for the field commanders. Whenever I've been able to communicate with folks as far forward as CENTCOM forward, which is about as far as they let me go, I find people who are working incredibly long hours who are working critical tasks--they are juggling critical tasks along the way. As the answers get better do I get more checks? (Laughter) [END SIDE 1/START SIDE 2] Q: (inaudible) A: Civil Affairs, when they go into a village, you may have somebody who is a city manager in North Carolina who is going in there to talk to people about public utilities. We don't have too many of those folks in the 82nd Airborne Division. We like the fact that these guys have civil job skills and that seems to argue for the Reserves. There has been an interesting discussion over the last five to seven years in the Army about whether or not it would be a good idea to have the term of art that was used a few years ago was "constabulary forces." Divisions organized for peace keeping. That would keep you from having to go through the process of taking a combat unit and training it for peace keeping, employing it and then retraining it for combat. You could probably end up saving some time and effort doing that. The problem with that is, if you think you don't have enough soldiers in your Army, you have got to ask yourself, is it easier to go from constabulary to combat or combat to constabulary? Most of the people in the Army are of the mind that it is much easier to take a combat soldier and train them for peace keeping duties than it is go the other way because the other way would also include equipment. One of the unfortunate aspects in our history in the early part of the Korean War was we had units that were called infantry battalions that were in effect in constabulary mode and very poorly supported. When the Korean War started, we committed them to combat just like that. That is a long 10

11 institutional memory. The so-called Task Force Smith. It is one of these lessons critically important about readiness. You always have to be shaped for--no matter what you are doing, you have to keep you eye on the fact that you may have to go to combat in a few days and whatever. I think that would be an interesting argument for the future. I hope that people in the Army reopen this discussion because we are now in an environment where those things may make sense. That one issue, of course, has to be over layed on the Army's transformation plan and whatever and you are going to end up with a lot of people having a lot of different ideas about where that is going. Q: How many more civil affairs do you need? A: It is already in the plan and I don't know the exact number. But it is in the hundreds. They will be assigned to the active unit at Fort Bragg. Q: What is your version of what happened to Garner, and some others on his staff, like Mo Dean, whose tours appears to have been cut short as Bremmer was rushed over? A: I am certainly not privvy to the inner council of the highest levels of people talking about personnel. But I'll tell you what I knew about Jay Garner from the beginning. Jay Garner was going to come in. He was going to set up a peace keeping reconstruction. He was going to staff it. He was going to deploy it. And that he was going to be home by the first week of July. That was the plan to begin with. Q: But he left the first week of June. A: He is still there. I don't think he is home yet. I asked somebody yesterday, did Jay Garner come home yet? They said no, not yet. But, in any case, whether somebody deployed a few weeks before they were supposed, but that was the original plan. Another thing that has been following the original plan is the Iraqi interim authority. I am certainly not an expert in all of that. When that was all laid out, this was back a month or two ago, Jerry Bremmer is still following that script. Q: That script has been re-written a few times. A: I don't think there was anything there that should be taken as any kind of great criticism because I met Jay Garner on the first day he came back to the Pentagon and I don't think he was there a month before he deployed with a huge, what was in effect a joint interagency task force, which is something that has never been done before. We knew that sooner or later there would be a big over-arching civil presence headed by somebody other than Jay Garner. The timing of all that, like I said, I don't know. Q: Now I am confused on this four division steady state. Do you envision a steady state with 11

12 three international divisions and an American division compared to right now where we've got tied up there four or five divisions? A: Yes. That is a fair surmise. Q: The comment I hear from these colonels who are acting as mayor in Baghdad, they keep getting asked and they would like to know themselves--give me the end state you want and I'll work back there to accomplish it. But there seems to be a tentativeness about describing what we are doing. What is the blueprint? A: First off, let me be totally honest. I worked the peacekeeping, reconstruction and some of the stability operations. The overall future of Iraqi politics is considered to be high policy. That stuff is working by another part of the bureaucracy. I am informed as to what they do. I am not in on the secret day-to-day plans. I don't know when they will come forward with that blueprint. My guess is it will be very soon. Q: Is it important for you? A: It is important for everybody to know what the plan is because until you have that, you have nothing upon which to base your expectations. If you are the Iraqi people, the longer you have to wait to see the blueprint, the longer it is. But, again, a very difficult situation, too, in terms of learning what are the facts on the ground. It is one thing for Joe Collins and Jim Scherr to sit over at the Institute for National Strategic Studies and do wiring diagrams and talk about this Iraqi group and that Iraqi group and it is another thing to make things happen on the ground. That is Ambassador Bremmer's problem is not to have just a blueprint; it is to have a blueprint that can be carried out and that is going to be supported both by the coalition and by the Iraqi people and that is going to be something that makes sense. And so, he has got an incredible challenge on his hands. It is certainly not just a question of coming up with a good Power Point slide. Q: This doesn't seem to be following any kind of script. There seems like there have been several different plans and then they've been aborted. We brought in the Iraqi National Congress people. Nothing compares to what we have in Afghanistan. Why are we stumbling over trying to give some kind of local government in Iraq? A: The difference between Afghanistan and Iraq, intriguing point of view. When we entered into combat in Afghanistan, we hit a series of, we in effect took sides in a civil war, if you will. And we had a series of friends who came to power. There was no doubt that when the Bonn process ensued, that there would be an Afghan entity who would come out of the Bonn process and it would be the sovereign power. We had no such set of allies going into Iraq. So the situation in Iraq is a classical case of occupation according to the Geneva Conventions. There certainly is an intent to ultimately form representative Iraqi government. Beyond that--and again, I am probably beyond my expertise and the point I meant and I think James accurately corrected me was, we are back on the original plan for the interim Iraqi authority. I caution also one thing on all reports about the Iraqi government. There has been a lot of filling in the blanks by people who are 12

13 reporters out there. There has been a lot of misreporting and sloppy use of words and frankly there have been some changes back and forth but not as many as you would read in the newspapers. There has been--for example, the notion that the Iraqis and exiles were going to go over there to become some sort of shadow government in the beginning was never a plan. Never a plan. And there has always been the question of, obviously these people are a legitimate part of the Iraqi political scene. Are they a major part or a minor part? Are they going to be accepted by Iraqis who have lived there or are they going to be rejected by Iraqis who live there? I have no idea. I have no idea and nobody else does, either. I could create in my mind a scenario where Mr. Chalabi or someone else who is an exile becomes the first president of the Iraqi Republic. And I can also create in my mind a scenario where he becomes the business man living in the suburbs of Baghdad because politically he wasn't in sync with the people. I don't know the minds of the Iraqi people. Q: Back to Afghanistan, what conditions need to be met for pulling forces out? A: Tough question. What are the sorts of things that you want to be the end state? You want a representative government in Kabul that is in peace with all of the other parts. That it is representative of the country. That it is essentially democratic. That it has a good constitution. That it respects human rights. And that it is not threatened by internal insurgents and it is not threatening to its neighbors or threatened by its neighbors. That overall is the end state you want to see. The Afghan national army, now on its eighth battalion, has its first tank battalion and, as an old Army guy, I have to tell you that warms the cockles of my heart. They are old Russian tanks, but still in all, there is nothing like the smell of diesel smoke in the morning. That is going along well. Lots of issues to be worked out there with the ministry of defense. But the training in the army has gone well. The army has also been deployed in company size and battalion size units out in the field and it has acquitted itself well, according to US advisors who were there with them. And by all observers, it has a tremendous advantage over any like sized unit of militia or insurgents in that it has been trained and it is increasingly well equipped. I have been out to the point and seen them go through battalion level maneuvers, shooting artillery and mortars, and this could have been the army of any developing nation. It was a well trained unit going through it. I am absolutely bullish on the Afghan national army and I think it is critical to developing not only an important armed force but also something that reflects a sense of nationhood as well. Q: Any talk about expanding the footprint in Afghanistan? A: Always talk about that. My guess is that what we are going to see in the year to come is beefing up of the PRTs, provincial reconstruction teams, both in strengthening each of the PRTs and also in multiplying the number of PRTs ultimately down the road so that we have much more of our force covering much more of the country. This will be integrated with coalition efforts. The British have decided to run a provincial reconstruction team of their own in Mazar-i- Sharif. Two other nations are poised to make that decision here in the next few weeks. And so I think that two of the great keys for the future--afghan national army, strengthening of the provincial reconstruction teams. END TEXT 13