Source: Amanpour CNN Gen. McChrystal and the Mission in Afghanistan: Aired December 13, 2009 - 00:00:00 ET
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CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: This week, the war in Afghanistan and the general who's got to win it. I sat down for a rare interview with General Stanley McChrystal.
Hello, everybody. Welcome to our program. I'm Christiane Amanpour.
U.S. General Stanley McChrystal is about to return to Afghanistan with a new strategy, more troops and orders to turn the tide against the Taliban. General McChrystal has long trained his sights on high-profile targets. He led the forces that finally captured Saddam Hussein in Iraq and those who killed Abu Musab Zarqawi, head of al Qaeda in Iraq. Iraq, of course, is not Afghanistan, but will the surge still work?
Today General McChrystal spells out the steps for success, the consequences of failure -- and what's on a four-star playlist.
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What do you listen to on your iPod? I ask you this because there have been pictures of you running with those -- the iPod ear things hanging down, and everybody wants to know what you're listening to.
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I sat down with him in Washington just after he testified before Congress. He explains what success will look like and defeating the enemy really means, and he has some surprising comments about the current state of the Taliban.
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General McChrystal, thank you for joining us.
GEN. STANLEY MCCHRYSTAL, COMMANDER, U.S. FORCES IN AFGHANISTAN: Thanks, Christiane.
AMANPOUR: I've heard people say that the U.S., the international effort in Afghanistan has been eight one-year wars. What is wrong with the way you've been fighting this war over the last eight years?
MCCHRYSTAL: I think as we go forward, what we really need to do is get consistency and constant focus. I think that what we have to do is focus on the strategic partnership with Afghanistan for the long term -- don't think in terms of six months, eighteen months or a year, but the fact that the president and the other leadership has guaranteed Afghanistan that we are there with them as partners. And it's consistency that's key.
AMANPOUR: The strategy that you were given in March, was it over- ambitious, or did you overly ambitiously interpret it? Because the new strategy is considerably different.
MCCHRYSTAL: I think the strategy that the president laid out to begin to reverse the Taliban momentum and begin to provide additional support for Afghan national security forces is pretty consistent. I think the process that we went through over the last months has been very valuable because it educated everyone to a greater degree and helped us refine our focuses a bit. But I think we are still about helping the Afghans secure themselves, and over time, build their own nation.
AMANPOUR: You said in the summertime that you needed at least 12 months to get this done, otherwise the mission is going to fail. Do you think now that you can achieve this mission?
MCCHRYSTAL: Yes, I do.
AMANPOUR: You have all the resources you need?
MCCHRYSTAL: Well, we have all the resources programmed. They will begin to flow in. But I absolutely do. I'm confident we can.
AMANPOUR: What is the mission? Is it to defeat the Taliban? Is it to degrade them? What actually is the mission?
MCCHRYSTAL: There are really two parts of it. If we think in terms of al Qaeda, it is to prevent the ability of al Qaeda or other international terrorists from coming into Afghanistan and using it for safe havens, because as most people know, many of the 9/11 hijackers, in fact, were trained in camps inside Afghanistan.
The other part of the mission is in support of Afghanistan itself. It is to provide time and space for the government of Afghanistan to develop security capability, governance capability, begin development that allows them to protect their own sovereignty.
AMANPOUR: Right, but in terms of the war fighting, because you've got now 30,000 new troops coming in, there were 21,000 already deployed under President Obama -- you've also said that the south is going to be your initial focus, the heartland of the Taliban. You're going to be in amongst the population. What does that mean in terms of fighting? Are you going to be fighting to get in there, fighting to keep the Taliban out, killing Taliban?
MCCHRYSTAL: At the end of the day, the insurgency needs access to the population to be effective. They need to be able to coerce the population, to tax the population, to recruit from the population, and to prevent the government from extending its governance into those areas. So what we are going to do and what we have already started doing -- and you see in a number of areas, Garmsir, Nawa, and other areas -- where we provide security, we deny the insurgents the ability to operate and threaten the population. That lets them move on with their lives.
AMANPOUR: But how? I mean, are you going to draw in the Taliban? What are we going to see on the ground?
MCCHRYSTAL: What you'll see is areas that become increasingly secure. We will work with Afghan partners to establish security zones, and gradually, those security zones will grow in size. And then as they connect each other, they provide the ability for an Afghan farmer, for example, to raise crops in the central Helmand River valley and then to move with full security up to the markets of his choice -- might be Lashkar Gah, might be Kandahar.
When you push the insurgents out, you deny them their ability. I am much less worried about killing insurgents, Taliban, than I am about securing the people.
AMANPOUR: But are you concerned about defeating the insurgency?
MCCHRYSTAL: That's how you defeat the insurgency. If you take away from them the opportunity to accomplish their mission, which is to get at the population, they are prevented from being successful. Over time, they become irrelevant, and they, in fact, are defeated.
AMANPOUR: What do you -- you spend a lot of time thinking about the inside of the head of the enemy -- the terrorists, the insurgents, however you call them. What do you assess their position right now? Are they getting tired? Is the momentum -- can you change it in a reasonable time? What do you assess their status to be?
MCCHRYSTAL: I think it's an interesting question because I think it is two different schizophrenic ideas. On the one hand, they've been able to rise violence in the last few years. It's steadily gone up, and there's been a crisis in the people of confidence of the government's ability to secure them. So I think that at the senior leadership of the insurgency, there's a tremendous amount of optimism and confidence. And we see that in some of their comments.
On the other hand, we see also a tremendous amount of angst because at the lower levels, they have been forced out of a number of areas. The increasing security that we create shows the Afghan people a better way and that the Taliban can be pushed out. Their fighters are tired. We see a number that have already made extensive overtures to reintegrate back into the government.
So I think we've got an insurgency that is sitting safely in what they consider are safe havens. They are trying to exhort their forces, who are closer to the fight, but the forces are having a tremendous problem right now and tremendous weakening. And so I think that they're finding that a problem.
AMANPOUR: At what point -- because you've said that they have the momentum, Admiral Mullen has said that they have the momentum. At what point do you need to break that momentum to be able to ensure success? Is it three months? Is it four, five, six?
MCCHRYSTAL: I don't think there's a date on the calendar, but I think we're already turning that momentum. I think -- the momentum is in the minds of people. The output -- or the effect of our counterinsurgency campaign must be to change the perceptions of the people, to increase their confidence in the future. When we change the momentum, when the people perceive that things are getting better, that security is increasing, then the insurgency is put in a very difficult position because they are losing that sense of momentum.
AMANPOUR: You've talked about the people. You said it will be the Afghan people who decide who wins and who loses. We'll discuss that right after a break. We'll be back with General McChrystal.
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