Interview with General Petraeus, Commander ISAF for NATO TV
Q: Last year was all about the troop uplift and about entering areas where we hadn’t previously been. What will be the theme for this year do you think?
Petraeus: Well this year is about not only solidifying the gains that we made last year but expanding them. The surge will continue but it will be much more of an Afghan surge this year as Afghan security forces continue to grow and to develop, not just in quantity but in quality as well and as we continue to push out into areas where the Taliban still have some safe havens or might like to have some safe havens, as they come back for the usual spring offensive.
Q: So are you expecting more violence this year?
Petraeus: We think there will be, indeed that has been the trend to this point, keeping in mind of course that when you have one hundred and ten thousand more of us, than we had a year ago, some seventy thousand more Afghan forces and then another thirty five to forty thousand more NATO/ISAF forces, we’re obviously in many many more places, we have taken away areas that matter to the Taliban and they have to fight back. They’re losing momentum in some very key areas, they’re conscious of that and they know they need to try to regain that momentum.
Q: You mention that an increase in violence is expected this year, is that not going to be seen by many people as a failure in this mission?
Petraeus: I don’t think so. I think again when we lay out the facts, and that’s what we try to present, not optimism or pessimism, but realism, and then we provide a forth right assessment of what we think is going on, people will understand that, again, when you have one hundred and ten thousand more friendly forces Afghan and ISAF, when you’re in many more locations, when you’re on the offensive, taking away areas that matter to the insurgents, the insurgents have to fight back and violence goes up, it’s a necessary part of any counter-insurgency in fact we’ve often noted, and I’ve noted on a number of occasions during the seven months of my command here, that it gets harder before it gets easier in one of these endeavours and we are certainly in the harder before it gets easier phase, still, although there has been considerable progress, in taking away from the Taliban safe havens that were of enormous importance to them in the past .
Q: The magic word for this year seems to be transition, can you tell us a little bit about how it’s going to happen, where and when?
Petraeus: Well I can’t tell you the where and when, I can tell you the how and the how is that at the end of February, the NATO senior civilian representative and I will make a recommendation up the NATO chain of command, on provinces and districts that we believe can be transitioned, or at least can begin the process of transition because remember this is a process not a single event. There are various stages that transition goes through in the course of us doing less and Afghans doing more. Simultaneously, the head of the Afghan Transition Commission, Dr Ashraf Ghani, who also heads the joint Afghan-NATO intercol or transition board, which Ambassador Sedwill and I are co-chairs, he will make a recommendation to president Karzai on areas as well which can be transitioned in our view. This will be again, if you will, a joint agreement between NATO and the Afghan leadership and then it goes up the respective chains of command with the final decision being made by President Karzai and announced probably sometime in the mid to late March time frame.
Q: So once an area is picked for transition, it’s all agreed upon, it’s not an immediate hand over, it’s the start of a process. What’s sort of involved in that process, how long do you think it will take and what will happen to ISAF forces in that area?
Petraeus: Well we have principles that guide transition and among them the principle that it should be conditions based, in other words you don’t start transition until the conditions allow it needless to say and then you proceed at a pace that is permitted by conditions on the ground as well. We talk about thinning out, not just handing off, in other words it’s not just tag you’re ‘it’ Afghans, we’re out of here, rather it is we reduce what we’re doing as they increase what they are doing. And obviously there’s an assessment prior to that that that is possible, in order words the security conditions, the capabilities of Afghan forces, the situation with respect to governance and development, even political factors, all of this has to be considered when one is considering the initiation of transition and then as the process continues, the pace of continued transition. Essentially it is a process that progressively sees ISAF doing less, ISAF and international community, doing less as Afghans do more and again there are various stages that this goes through before we announce that transition is complete.
Q: So an area could see a withdrawal slightly of ISAF troops, ISAF troops coming back into the centre maybe and letting the Afghans get on with it?
Petraeus: Well rather than the word withdrawal, I think you’d use the word reduction, again thinning out not handing off. And indeed one of the principles is that where possible, and of course these are inevitably national decisions at the end of the day we have to conduct discussions with each of the nations effected by transition in any given area or any given function but in most cases what we would like to see at least in the first year or so of transition is that the transition dividends if you will, again, the forces that are freed up as we thin out a bit are reinvested say in continuous areas still within that regional command or that country’s areas of responsibility and then possibly also reinvested in say training or other tasks that are performed by ISAF forces.
Q: Onto reintegration now and there are signs that it is working in certain areas, you do read about clusters of insurgents that have come across and joined the government, but then there are also areas , sites, which have major problems where the financial packages haven’t quite got out to them yet. What’s being done to address that?
Petraeus: Well there’s been quite a bit of attention to that here in Kabul because again, the financial resources start here and so as an example, the UNDP has been working very hard with the ministry of Finance to resolve those issues and indeed they have overcome the obstacles that previously were stymieing this transfer of funding and then, as importantly, getting it from Kabul out to the provinces, the district and the local areas where it was needed to enable the conduct of various reintegration activities. As a bridging force, we have sort to use the US provided CERP funds, the Commanders Emergency Reconstruction Programme funding, some fifty million dollars of which has been earmarked for the support of reintegration activities and so we have also support with our US Forces Afghanistan, to enable reintegration to go on where they’re still awaiting a flow of funds from the centre but we think now that the processes are working, of course let’s remember that the High Peace Council’s still a relatively new organisation only been in existence for several months, there’s certain bureaucratic actions that are necessary in any such endeavour and indeed those are now starting to be resolved and we’re starting to see this process working and also to see the establishment in the provinces, of the provincial reintegration committees and the actions that they then take to foster reintegration activities.
Q: So what is on the table for Taliban or any sort of insurgent group that turn up and want to join up with the government and cross sides, what’s being offered to them?
Petraeus: Well there’s a variety of programmes that are out there, in some cases it depends on the needs of course. Again, in many cases they want to have basically a safe house, they want to move out of one area, in which they might be threatened if they’re known to be willing to reintegrate with the government, so they go to another location and of course in that location they may need accommodation and they made need food, they may need a stipend of some sort and that is now beginning to be available in these areas thanks to the funding that flowed from international donors to the government of Afghanistan and also through to the UNDP. Then beyond that for the longer term of course, what you’d like to see is the initiation of various programmes that prepare these individuals to do something other than what they were doing which was carrying out violent activity against fellow Afghans and so there are various job training programmes that are in the offing and a variety of other activities that indeed will help them prepare for life after being an insurgent.
Q: July 2011 is a key date for this year, what will it actually look like?
Petraeus: Well again, you’ll have to wait and see because, as President Obama announced all the way back when the final US policy review was complete so this is back in the first of December 2009 at WestPoint, he announced not only a substantial additional commitment of US forces, the so-called surge of the final surge of thirty thousand additional US forces, a substantial number of additional civilians, a considerable further funding to enable the development of one hundred thousand additional Afghan forces and so on, but he also announced that there would be the beginning, in the July 2011 timeframe, of a responsible drawdown of the surge forces, but at a pace determined by conditions on the ground. So we’ll have to get a good bit closer to that needless to say to see what the conditions on the ground maybe and then make recommendations to him and provide courses of action with associated risks with each of those possible courses of action.
Q: So your recommendations might be in terms of sort of how many numbers that you think you could reduce from certain areas because in that area ANSF might be particularly strong.
Petraeus: We’ll have to see, again, depends on the conditions.
Q: Onto corruption now, it seems that things don’t seem to be getting better, if anything they seem to be getting worse and it’s giving the Taliban more strength, some would say it’s a showstopper, do you think?
Petraeus: Well first of all I’m not sure I would share your characterisation. I think that what we’re seeing is identification certainly of a variety of areas in which there needs to be more focus on anti-corruption but indeed there has been more focus. Since taking command here for example, we initiated the establishment of Task Force Shafafiyat or transparency, a military civilian effort that is led by a US army Brigadier General H.R. McMaster, which is then joined with a team that was appointed by President Karzai from members of his national security council staff and we’ve now given three updates to President Karzai, at the end of one of those on the spot he directed the firing of the Afghan Surgeon General and the leadership of the national military hospital, there have been a number of other cases in which leaders have been removed, fired, arrested or what have you and this process does continue. President Karzai very much agrees that what we have agreed to term, agreed between us, Afghan and ISAF, to term criminal patronage networks, think about that now their criminals, they enjoy a degree of political support, patronage, and they’re networks not just individuals, these criminal patronage networks pose a potentially fatal threat to the institutions of Afghan governance, if not dealt with by the time that we begin to transition tasks to those institutions. President Karzai is keenly aware of this. This is, by the way, why he wants to do away with private security contractors because in many cases, these have become armed groups under the control of power brokers, they’re not just the traditional if you will international security contractors that have been used in various places around the world, they’ve actually been hijacked by these different powerful individuals, they’re a source of funding for them and they enable these individuals to maintain, if you will, an alternative to the government forces and that is not a formula for success for the long term. But again, that’s just one area of many, in which there is further attention being given and I can assure you that there’s very clear recognition at the highest levels of the Afghan government that this is a problem that does have to be dealt with.
Q: But President Karzai’s crackdown on these private security companies, doesn’t that impact negatively on ISAF’s mission here because ISAF relies so much on private security companies in order to get supplies to troops, road security that sort of thing. Surely that’s going to affect ISAF’s overall mission if he cracks down and get his way and gets rid of all private security companies working here?
Petraeus: Well first of all we fully support his desire in this regard, we agree with his recognition that this is a problem. These groups have become part of the problem, no longer part of the solution. Now having said that, it is not just ISAF that depends on them of course, it’s mainly the international development organisations, the embassies, the various NGOs and other international organisations. So there clearly has to be a process again and that’s what we’re working very hard on with the Afghan Ministry of Interior, with Dr Ashraf Ghani and with others, to chart a way ahead to where there can be a progressive reduction of these elements starting with those that have carried out illegal activities and have literally not observed the law of Afghanistan and progressively moving forward trying to do so in way that obviously doesn’t shut down all development activity or all of the logistics convoys or something like that.
Q: Pakistan seems to becoming increasingly unstable and the Taliban have got even more freedom of movement over the border while this is ongoing, what’s being done to address that?
Petraeus: Well first of all again, I’d recognise that Pakistan and Pakistan’s military have done an enormous amount over the course of the last two years and they really need to be given credit for that. Their army, their Frontier scouts and police and other elements have carried out quite impressive counter-insurgency operations in Swat district of what used to be called the North West Frontier Province, it’s now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in the Malakand Division of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and then in a number of the agencies of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas or FATA, Bajaur, Mohmand, where there’s another operation going on, Kyber, south Waziristan, Orakzai and others, but they’re the first to recognise and to announce indeed that there is more work that does need to be done against those elements such as the Pakistani Taliban and it’s affiliates, DNSM and Punjabi Taliban and others that threaten the writ of governance, the very existence actually of Pakistan as its citizens know it and also against other groups that are causing problems in Afghanistan and indeed pose a threat to the rest of the world.
Q: So, are you confident, are you getting the support you need from the government there?
Petraeus: Well again, they have a lot of short sticks in a lot of hornets nests right now and they need to consolidate some these gains, they need to solidify them, just as we need to do in various areas here in Afghanistan and then to move onto others, and again that has been their announced intention and we are working to cooperate and to coordinate, our activities on this side of the Duran line or border if you will, between Afghanistan and Pakistan so that when they are a hammer, we are an anvil and vice versa.
Q: There seems to be a constant fear of abandonment among Afghans, a feeling that we’re just going to leave the country behind in a few years time and leave them to an insurgency, and amongst the international community there seems to be an increasing worry that this war is just unwinnable, what would you say to them to convince them otherwise?
Petraeus: Well first of all I think some of these kinds of emotions are understandable, again, they’ve seen this movie before, at the end of so-called Charlie Wilson’s War, the United States of course left the region and left those who were here, holding the bag of all the different problems and so forth and what ensued was a very violent civil war then the Taliban took advantage of the situation and posed a brutal and oppressive regime and allowed Al Qaeda to use its soil to plan and train individuals for the conduct of attacks like the 9/11 attacks. So again I think, given that history, given thirty years of war, some of these concerns are more than understandable. But I think the people should be, and I think they are really, reassured by what took place at Lisbon. There, all the leaders of the troop contributing nations gathered together with the NATO Secretary General, the UN Secretary General, President Karzai and others and agreed that we’ll keep our shoulder with you all the way through to 2014. So I think that just right off the back that reassured people that there was a long-term commitment, a sustained and substantial commitment, to enable our Afghan partners to develop the capability to secure and to govern themselves and over the course of the next four years, to transition tasks that ISAF is performing to Afghan forces. And then beyond that you’ve heard a number of leaders, the leader of the United States, of many of the troop contributing nations, the German foreign minister who was just here, the Australian Prime Minister, others who have pledged and have recognised that there is a need for continued support for Afghanistan beyond 2014 albeit in a very different character, not the kind of substantial military forces that are being provided now but certainly still continued development assistance, aid and so on.
Q: Speaking of the Germans there, they’ve just renewed their mandate and the Dutch I believe have come out and said that they’re going to send some police trainers back out to the country, overall do you feel that you’re getting enough from NATO as a contribution to the overall mission here?
Petraeus: Well it’s interesting because it’s almost counter-intuitive or counter-perception I guess, that the coalition of nations here, which of course includes not just NATO nations but nearly over twenty further nations, has actually increased in the course of the past year or so and it may actually increase in the year that lies ahead. There are still nations that are adding to their forces even as some nations are starting to look to the point at which, based on conditions on the ground and the process of transition, they might be able to begin to thin some of their forces but again out in some period of time. We’re at forty nine nations now that are actually contributing troops on the ground, there are other nations that are contributing very substantial amounts of funding that don’t have troops on the ground and there are even a couple of other nations that have forces here but are under other countries rather than as an explicit troop contributing nation. So this is a very substantial coalition, a very substantial representation of not just the NATO alliance but indeed of more than twenty additional countries also coming together here and recognising the huge importance of accomplishing the mission here in Afghanistan and ensuring that this country does not once again become a sanctuary for Al Qaeda and recognising that the only way to accomplish that mission is to enable Afghanistan to secure itself and indeed to govern itself.
Q: But we’re still sort of, on the training side of things for the ANSF we’re still, I think General Caldwell said about seven hundred trainers short and there’s plans underway to increase ANSF levels to nearly four hundred thousand strong by March next year, that’s a forty percent increase on current levels.
Petraeus: I’m not sure those numbers are correct. Actually there is not yet agreement on the number for October of 2012, that’s under discussion by the United States which provides over ninety five percent of the funding, the so-called Afghan Security Forces fund, and the other major troop contributing nations and NATO together with our Afghan partners so that discussion does continue, we’ll see what number is identified and agreed and obviously continue the process of helping our Afghan partners reach those objectives.
Q: I think what I was sort of getting at was whether or not the NATO Training Mission here can cope with such an increased demand on the service that they give and the amount we want to reach in terms of numbers of police and army.
Petraeus: Well you’re right that there is some seven hundred or so specialty trainers that we are still looking for the nations to generate. We do think that there are certain nations that will provide substantial numbers of those. I don’t want to get ahead of those particular countries but those discussions continue and certainly SHAPE headquarters, NATO headquarters, continues the effort with the troop contributing nations to identify and deploy those trainers.
Q: So this year ahead then you’re looking for all these parts to join up, the areas where we haven’t been before, where there’s a pushing out of the security bubble, for reintegration to pick up, and once all these parts start playing alongside each other, then you start to see a turn around and violence might drop?
Petraeus: Well I think you’ll see it in local areas actually, I think we have seen it for example in the greater Kabul area which is hugely significant because of course, this is home to nearly one fifth of the population of the entire country and because Afghan forces really are already in the lead here, which makes this a potential transition candidate but you’ll have to wait and see what the recommendations are of course. But here, although there are occasional attacks, occasionally sensational attacks as we saw tragically a week ago, the first one in about seven months actually of that significance, but by and large Afghan forces again in the lead with the support of some superb ISAF forces, the core of which is here is the Turkish contingent, they have done their job and they have actually reduced violence over the course of the last again six or seven months and that is quite significant. I think we’ll see that as it pushes out in various areas, even as indeed I noted earlier, we expect the Taliban to try to come back in various locations. Again we know they are there, we have as they say in the intelligence business, insights into what the Taliban leadership is discussing and they’re very concerned that some very significant safe havens to them, Mullah Omah’s home town, the districts of Zhari and Panjway to the west of Kandahar for example, are no longer under their control and they’ve lost the infrastructure there, their weapons and explosive caches, the support of the people and so forth. So they have to make an effort to try to take these back and that’s indeed what we expect that they’ll do. Now they’ve also tried to keep their fighters fighting through the winter and this is an interesting order because they give it from the luxury of Quetta and other sanctuaries that they have been able to establish and they lead from the rear, they lead by cell phone or by HF radio and they have said get back into the fight, we know it’s winter, we know it’s gotten cold, but you will all stay at it because we’ve lost a lot this year and we have to get going earlier than the traditional spring offensive. Those orders have not been obeyed in all cases so there’s a degree of friction, there’s a degree of discord that we have seen among the leaders themselves and then also among those to whom they’re giving orders that has not been characteristic of the past.
Q: So you’re seeing that they were badly hurt last year?
Petraeus: Well they sustained significant losses but this is again, this is a resilient organisation, this is a resilient insurgency and we have our eyes very wide open and we clearly recognise the challenges that lie ahead.
Q: General Petraeus, I heard that you have barely had a day off since you started your command here of ISAF, how do you keep going?
Petraeus: Well first of all you remember how important this is, second you go out and see our troopers and of course they always give us far more energy than we give to them. You remember again how our citizens of the troop contributing nations are very supportive of our troopers, even those who had doubts about the mission if you will, are still very much support their young men and women who are out there putting it all on the line and so if you’re a leader in a situation like that, it’s not hard to get out of the bed each day and remember how important your responsibilities are to get after it. Beyond that though I actually did have the first leave that my family and I have had in four years. We recently had a week at Garmisch, Germany and enjoyed the snow and ski slopes and so forth and again it was wonderful to be able to do that, having not been able to do it actually for four years, really since I took command of the surge in Iraq. We’d had a lot of good intentions about taking leave, some of those were obviously derailed by the unexpected orders to come out here last summer.
Q: You must have a very tolerant wife.
Petraeus: She’s a wonderful woman.