The 'Foreign Policy' transcript (I): Our basic problem over the last 10 years has been decisionmaking at the top level

Here is the first part
of a transcript of a conversation held at the Washington offices of Foreign
Policy magazine in January of this year. A shorter version, with full IDs of the participants, appears in the current issue of
the magazine. This is the full deal, edited just slightly for clarity and ease
of reading, mainly by deleting repetitions and a couple of digressions into
jokes about the F-35 and such.  

I had asked each
participant to bring one big question about the conduct of our wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq. I began. We began with those. 

Thomas E. Ricks:
One of my favorite singers is Rosanne Cash, a country singer who is Johnny
Cash's daughter, who has a great line in one of her songs: "I‘m not looking for the answers-- just to
know the questions is good enough for me." And I think that is the
beginning of strategic wisdom: Rather than start with trying to figure out the
answers, start with a few good questions.

So what I'd like to start by doing is just go around the
table with a brief statement -- "I'm so-and-so, and here's my
question." So, to give you the example: I'm Tom Ricks, and my question is,
"Are we letting the military get away with the belief that it basically did the
best it could over the last 10 years in Iraq and Afghanistan, but that
civilians in the government screwed things up?"

Philip Mudd: I
guess my question is: "Why do we keep talking about Afghanistan when we went in
12 years ago, we talked about a target, al Qaeda. How did that conversation
separate?"

Maj. Gen. David
Fastabend (U.S. Army, ret.): My name is David Fastabend, and my question
is: "Do what we think, our theory and doctrine, about strategy -- is that
right? Could we not do a lot better?"

Rajiv Chandrasekaran:
Rajiv
Chandrasekaran, got a lot of questions. I suppose one among them would be,
"How did the execution of our civilian-military policies so badly divert on the
ground at a time, at least over the past couple of years, when there was supposed
to be a greater commonality of interests in Washington?"

Lt. Gen. James M.
Dubik (U.S. Army, ret.): I'm Jim Dubik, and my question's related to
Rajiv's and Tom's: "How do we conduct a civil-military discourse in a way that
increases the probability of more effective strategic integration in
decisions?"

Shawn Brimley:
Shawn Brimley. I have a lot of questions, but one that keeps coming to mind,
being halfway through Fred
Kaplan's book, is: "How did we,
collectively, screw up rotation policy so badly that we never provided our
military leaders the chance to fully understand the reality on the ground
before they had to rapidly transition to a new colonel, a new brigadier, a new
four-star?"

Maj. Gen. Najim Abed
al-Jabouri (Iraqi Air Force, ret.): My name is al-Jabouri. As an Iraqi, I
have a different view of 2003. I was a general in the Iraqi Air Force, so I
wanted to shoot down your airplanes. After 2003, I was a police chief and a
mayor, so I wanted your help to build my country. In the last 10 years I have
learned that America has a great military power. It can target and destroy
almost anything.

However, I have also learned that it is very difficult for
America to clean up a mess it makes. Leaving a mess in someone else's country
can cause more problems than you had at the beginning. Military operations in
Muslim countries are like working with glass. If you do it right, it can be
beautiful and great, but if you break it, it is difficult to repair or replace.
My question is: "Do American strategy planners understand the consequences of
breaking the glass, and if so, do they know what it will take to repair or
replace the broken glass?" Thank you.

Col. J.D.  Alford, USMC: My name is Dale
Alford. I too have many questions, I guess, but I'm going to stay a little
bit in my lane and I'm going to talk about the military. My question would be:
"Can a foreign army, particularly with a vastly different culture, be a
successful counterinsurgent? And if not, why haven't we switched and put more
focus on the Afghan security forces?"

David Crist: My
name is David
Crist, and a bunch of people had very similar lines of thought to what I
was going to use, so I'll take a common complaint that James
Mattis says all the time and frame that into a question: "Do our commanders
have time to think? Think about the issues and the information -- in some ways
they have to be their own action officer. Do they have time to sit back and
think about the issues with the op tempo going on and just the information
flow?"

Michèle Flournoy:
I have two, and I can't decide which one.

Ricks: You get
both.

Flournoy: I get a
twofer? So the very broad, strategic question is: "How do we ensure that we
have a political strategy that takes advantage of the security and space that a
military effort in counterinsurgency can create? How do we ensure that the
focus remains primarily there while we resource that aspect?" Kind of a
Clausewitzian question.

Second is a much more narrow question, and we have the right
people in the room to reflect on this, which is: "What have we learned about
how to build indigenous security forces in a way that's effective and
sustainable?" I mean, this is a classic case where we reinvent the wheel, we
pretend like we've never done it before, we pretend like there aren't lessons
learned and good ways -- and less effective ways -- to do this. So: "Can we
capture what we know about how to build indigenous security forces?"

Susan B. Glasser:
I have a question of my own that's particularly for the people with a military
background in this room, which is: "In September 2001, if you had told us that
in 2013 we are going to be in Afghanistan with 65,000 American troops and
debating what we accomplished there and how quickly we can get out, how many
more years and how many billions of dollars we'd have to pay to sustain this
operation, my strong sense is that there would have been an overwhelming view
in the U.S. military -- and among the U.S. people more broadly -- that that was
an unacceptable outcome. So, if we can all agree that 13 years was not what we
wanted when we went into Afghanistan, what did we miss along the way?"

(more to come...)