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View Full Version : Q & A with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal


Richard
08-01-2009, 06:13
Q & A with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal
Julian E. Barnes, LATimes, 28 Jul 2009

You have said that in Afghanistan protecting the population is the top priority. What does that mean you stop doing?

It means we put as much of our effort as we can to establish security for the population and we stay there so those other critical parts, governance and development, can happen

Obviously everything comes at a cost. So it means we don't have as many forces to maneuver in the country. So we have to rigorously prioritize and then some things come later.

Is the lonely fire base in the mountains fighting Taliban a thing of the past? Are you pulling out to get . . .

In some cases it might be -- in some cases. Some it might not be. If the population is in the valley, sometimes putting the small fire base in the mountains accomplished the ability to accomplish security for the population.

What I don't think you will see as much of is big unit sweeps or operations where you sweep them, then come out. Historically it doesn't work, but almost every counterinsurgency tries it and relearns the lesson.

Do you think there has been too much focus on counter-terrorism?

I think there hasn't been enough focus on counterinsurgency. I am certainly not in a position to criticize counter-terrorism. But at this point in the war, in Afghanistan, it is most important to focus on almost classic counterinsurgency.

I don't want people to think it is inflexible; it should be uniquely adapted to the conditions in each part of the country.

You are doing a review of how you are using intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft. How do you use them more effectively?

[I]Typically we think of ISR manned or unmanned aircraft providing full motion vehicle or signals intelligence

The biggest secret of using ISR is knowing what you are doing with it, and that is a lesson that needs to be learned by units. If your mission is . . . to go after, counter IED missions, you can do sweeps, but what I find most effective, when you do refined intelligence network, you marry your collection capacity to rigorous analysis. Sometimes you put ISR against a single person or single location for days on end.

It is understanding what you are doing with ISR. There is a tendency to use it less efficiently than you might . . .

If you don't know what you are looking for, you don't have indicators of what you are looking for, then it becomes wasteful.

When you present your assessment of the war in Afghanistan, will you present specific requests for additional troops and resources?

The 60-day assessment was tasked to me by the secretary of Defense and also in parallel by the secretary-general of NATO. So we are doing one assessment that will inform two bosses of the command.

My intent is to provide a paper version of a strategic assessment, what we believe about the situation, what we believe is an appropriate way ahead and some specific recommendations.

We are not going to include specific recommendations on resources, money and things like this because it is a more philosophical analysis.

We are in parallel doing another analysis that we were also tasked by the secretary of Defense to provide and that would inform him about our recommendations on resources that we could either send back from the theater or could ask for in addition.

You have said Helmand needs to be a public success. What did you mean by that?

The Helmand operation was planned some months ago before I came to the command, but I think it is a good plan and it is well timed, in a critical area that is both occupied by the Taliban and has a significant number of people who need to be freed from Taliban control. It also sits astride an awful lot of poppy production. By going in now we are ahead of the planting season. We may be able to convince farmers to go to alternative crops.

The reason I believe we need to be successful is as we have come in and talked about fighting this war with a more coin [counterinsurgency]-focused strategy. . . . I think it is important that everybody's watching. I don't mean just in the United States or Europe -- the Taliban is watching, the people of Afghanistan are watching. If we make a public commitment to effective [counterinsurgency] ops . . . it is important we be true to what we said in the first most visible example of that.

The Afghans will judge you by this mission?

I think they will judge all of us by it. They will judge our commitment to a new strategy, they will judge our resolve to a new strategy, our resolve to success. So I think for the entire ISAF strategy it is important that we, one, be effective and, two, we be true to what we are saying.

Another priority you have outlined is the Afghan security forces. You want to expand their numbers faster. It sounds like the main way to do that is to expand the partnerships between Afghans and alliance forces. Is there a way to improve there?

After analysis, we've determined we could increase the rate of their growth and their target numbers. The results of our analysis are not approved up the chain of command yet. But all of our analysis tells us that is something we need to recommend, so that is my intent.

Whether we grow the Afghan security forces larger or not, partnering closer is to our benefit and we can do it better than we have in the past.

We need a combination of mentoring and partnering. Mentoring is people who stay with a unit all the time and teach and evolve as units. Partnering is where you operate together. Our thought is to bring the concepts much closer together. So a unit is partner, is partnering in a much tighter relationship. Then two things happen. The coalition force gets much better performance on the ground because Afghans are great soldiers and they have huge cultural acuity that a coalition soldier is not going to have. And the other part is as we operate we think we can give them best practices.

Are there safe havens in Afghanistan for insurgents?

It would be how you define a safe haven. If you said a safe haven is a location where you are never under threat, you can't be bombed, you can't be attacked, then you could define that there are no safe havens in Afghanistan.

But I would tell you practically speaking, there are areas that are controlled by Taliban forces. There are places ANSF [Afghan] and coalition forces cannot go routinely, insurgents are free to operate and free to impose a shadow government. While they are not typical safe havens, the insurgency is more comfortable than we want them to be. And so over time those are areas we intend to reduce.

But those areas are not the first priority? If the population is sparse or rural you may wait on that.

Absolutely it is a case of prioritizing. Our intent is to prioritize first on those areas where we have significant population centers; in some cases those are also places with a heavy insurgent presence. But it is to protect the population. If the insurgents are in very remote areas with very little population, they don't have access to what they need for success, which is population. So we will seek to separate them from the population.

Is there a possibility for a Sunni-like awakening with Hizb-I Islami Gulbuddin, or the Haqqani network. Some people have concluded it is not possible with the Taliban. But is there a possibility to get them to lay down arms?

There absolutely is and I don't think it is necessarily not possible with the Taliban. Most of the fighters we see in Afghanistan are Afghans, some with foreign cadre with them. But most we don't see are deeply ideological or even politically motivated; most are operating for pay; some are under a commander's charismatic leadership; some are frustrated with local leaders.

So I believe there is significant potential to go after what I would call mid- and low-level Taliban fighters and leaders and offer them re-integration into Afghanistan under the constitution.

There is an issue with border control centers in Pakistan. Officials want the Pakistanis to open some on their side of the border. How confident are you that you can improve the Afghan-Pakistan relationship?

I am committed to try to do it. All of the steps that you take -- and some of the steps are confidence-building measures, others are practical linkages like border control centers. I think we have to do as many as we can. And keep building, every small step we can. We see fairly regularly positive effects from where we effectively coordinate, but we also see tremendous room for improvement.

My goal is to try, through personal relationships, through organization relationships, through common enemies, in many cases Taliban, to build that.

Are you seeing fewer fighters coming across the border, or has it picked up again now that Pakistan's offensive in Swat has ended?

Sometimes that goes on what part of the border you are looking at. I have not seen a huge rise of fighters come across now that Swat has wound down. . . . We have not seen a flood of fighters into Afghanistan recently.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fgw-qa-mcchrystal28-2009jul28,0,1713296,full.story