Zalmay Khalilzad Oral History

This is the Zalmay Khalilzad interview as a part of the George W. Bush project. We appreciate very much your coming to Charlottesville. Before we got on tape we talked about the fundamental ground rules, the most important being the confidentiality of the proceedings. We hope that you'll feel free to speak candidly to history, recognizing that your audience isn't the four of us but people in the future who will want to come to understand your time in history.

As an administrative matter, I need to have us go around the room and say just a few words so the person working on the transcript will know who is talking. I'm Russell Riley, I'm the chair of the oral history program.

I'm Stephen Long, assistant professor of political science at the University of Richmond.

I'm Mel Leffler, professor of history here at the University of Virginia.

I'm Barbara Perry, senior fellow here at the Miller Center.

I'm Zalmay Khalilzad, the subject of this interview.

We like to begin by asking a little bit about your autobiography. One of the things I think history would be particularly interested in would be your formative experiences and how you get from your place of birth to a position in the senior-most reaches of the American government.

I was born in northern Afghanistan near a place called Mazar-i-Sharif and finished elementary school in the northern part of Afghanistan. I went to Kabul when I was in middle school, eighth grade, and spent about a year, a year and a half there before I came to America as a foreign exchange student with the American Field Service [AFS]. I went to a place called Ceres, which is near Modesto in the San Joaquin Valley in California. I think that was one of the most important experiences in shaping the trajectory of my life, the one year that I spent at the Ceres high school. I was living with a very nice family and they became my adopted family. The father was an engineer with the Gallo Wine Company and the mother was a schoolteacher. They had two boys, one was older, went to junior college, and one younger who was a couple of years my junior in school.

Tell us about your own parents.

My father was a civil servant who worked for the government of Afghanistan. He was born in eastern Afghanistan in a place called Laghman. Laghman is an area that is overpopulated, has little resources, land. So he left Laghman after finishing elementary school, and went to Mazar looking for opportunity, to the northern part of Afghanistan, which has vast land and few people. He mostly walked, although sometimes he went on horseback, and made it across the Hindu Kush Mountains in 45 days from his birthplace to the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. He settled there of course. Then he went back and brought some of his other family members with him.

My mother never went to school but was quite enlightened in terms of the importance of education, particularly for her kids. She also was from eastern Afghanistan. We moved around northern Afghanistan when I was a kid. As a civil servant you would be sent to work for different parts of the provincial government and also to serve at the district level of government in various districts.

Two of my siblings had died. Healthcare was not good and a lot of children would die in their first five years if not at birth. I had two brothers and four sisters. It was a big family.

Tell us about Afghanistan at that time.

Afghanistan at that time was a peaceful place. There is an image of Afghanistan now as a place of constant war and conflict. It is an ancient land, with events dating back to the Bronze Age. The area was part of great empires.

In only 1200, for example, Balkh, which is the city where I was born, about 25 km or 15 miles from Mazar-i-Sharif, was the second largest city in the world, very prosperous, and had a great university. Of course the largest city in the world at that time was Merv, which was only a few hundred miles to the north, not in current Afghanistan but Central Asia. It was poor Afghanistan in those days, of course, but it was peaceful. Institutions of the state worked, there were courts, police, civil administration, schools. One lived in reasonable circumstances. There was a king ruling the country, and he had been ruling Afghanistan for, by that time, 30-plus years. He ended up ruling for 40 years before he was overthrown in 1973.

The basic source of income was agriculture. Besides basic trades, there were some industrial activities. There was gas and oil exploration in northern Afghanistan. The presence of the Soviets was quite pronounced in northern Afghanistan because where I was born was just a few kilometers from the border, but now the Soviet Union has disintegrated, replaced in this region by Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and other Central Asian states. So my memory of Afghanistan in those periods was a peaceful country and reasonable set of circumstances, although we were poor.

What prompted you to come to the United States? Was it your idea or your parents'?

Actually it was just the educational process. I was a good student by the standards of the school that I went to in Kabul. The ranking of students was based on the grades they got each semester. If you were one of the top three students in the tenth grade, then you became automatically qualified to go through the application process that was run by a group of Americans associated with the exchange program of the American Field Service.

I went through the process, and I did exams and interviews. The next thing I know they said, "You are going to the United States." I had just come from my little town to Kabul, the capital city. I'd never left the country. To some extent people thought I was a country bumpkin, coming from Mazar to Kabul. Now I was going to America. This was supposed to be just for a year.

What were your impressions when you arrived?

I first thought, Boy, I want to go home. It was surprising because we came to New York. I went to Tehran from Kabul then to Brussels and then to New York. New York was a shocking experience. It was August, and it was extremely hot and very humid. Afghanistan can get hot, but it is very dry. I thought I was going to suffocate, I had never been exposed to this mix of humidity and heat.

Probably pollution too.

I don't remember pollution as an issue, but this heat and humidity was an issue. It felt like I couldn't breathe. I went to somebody in the American Field Service program saying, "I want to go home." He said, "Why?" My English was very poor—God knows what I said actually—but it was something to the effect that the weather was an issue. He looked at my file and said, "But you're going to California." I was in New York just for five days of orientation. I didn't know anything about America other than this was a great country—advanced technology and big buildings and stuff like that—superficial stuff. I thought the weather would be the same everywhere because it is not that different between Kabul and Mazar. He said, "No, it is very different." So I said okay.

Then there was a strike by airline pilots or staff, so we had to be bused from New York to San Francisco over a three-day period with only a one-night break in Denver staying with a local family. Otherwise it was driving all the time. This time in the United States had a tremendous effect on me, the experience, in so many ways: life in the family, relationship between family members, school, how kids related to each other. As time went on, I learned about America more broadly and about American society and even a little bit about politics. Ronald Reagan became the Governor of California the year I was there. I think it is fair to say it had a tremendous effect of opening my eyes, my horizons, giving me a much more expansive view of the possibilities and differences. And it also made me aware of how different Afghanistan was, how undeveloped, how poor it was although it had some positive features as well.

Did you develop a desire at that time to stay here?

No. I liked America, but I knew that I was going back home. This was a one-year deal, and I had done my part. The family had been very kind to me and I developed a good strong relationship with them. I called the mother "Mom." Both of the parents have passed away. They participated in some of the subsequent events of my life, like coming to my swearing-in as Ambassador to Afghanistan. Secretary [Colin] Powell recognized them and talked a lot about them at the ceremony. They couldn't attend later ceremonies because they had gotten too feeble by the time I was going to Iraq. Besides, there was not enough time to do a ceremony between Afghanistan and Iraq, I had to go right away. From Afghanistan I went directly to Iraq.

So you then went back to Afghanistan.

I finished high school in the United States. I got a high school degree from Ceres. Then I finished my baccalaureate in Kabul. Then I applied to go to college. I went to Kabul University. I went to the medical school, which begins in the freshman year. It is called PCB, which is physics, chemistry, biology, which you take during the first year. That is preparatory for the medical school itself. While I was in PCB, there was an announcement of a competition for going to the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. Some friends were looking at this poster. It was clear that the scholarships, which were supported by the United States, were not for medical studies. They were for other disciplines, such as engineering, agriculture, public administration, economics, and stuff like that.

Almost as a prank we said, "Let's take this exam and show them that medical students can outscore the others. We'll see what happens, they don't force you to go." We all ranked at the very top at the end of the process. We said, "What do we do now?" I had actually turned it down. So sometimes things that just happen have such a big influence on your life. Since I had gone to America, there was a Fourth of July celebration at the residence of the American Ambassador, Robert Neumann. He had been at one time a professor at UCLA [University of California Los Angeles]. All the AFS returnees, as we called them, were invited. So I went there, and the head of the education department at the Embassy, a USAID [United States Agency for International Development] officer, introduced me to the Ambassador saying, "This is the guy who turned down the scholarship." [laughter]

He said, "I want to talk to you." He asked me to stay behind after the celebration. Then I met with him, the Afghan Minister of Education, and a few others. They essentially persuaded me to take the scholarship by saying, "Try it." There was a summer holiday at Kabul University. "If you don't like it, you can come back." It was the best scholarship that was available, a comprehensive package that paid tuition, room and board, pocket money, books. It was an American University, a good university.

I talked to my family and they were very supportive of a good education, so I went.

Which program did you choose to study?

I went to the political science and public administration program. I had been interested after the experience in America in different systems of government, their logic, which ones work better. I had become more aware of the differences in performance, why some countries were so developed and some not. The medical degree was more my family's plan for me, that I should become a doctor. I had become personally more interested in exploring ideas. So that worked well. I stayed in Beirut until I finished.

How many years was that?

Four years. I finished a regular college program. It was the American University. I became a great believer in American universities abroad as a result of that experience. There were students from all over the Middle East and even beyond. Afghanistan is at the margin, the borderline of the Middle East. Afghans, Pakistanis, and some Indians even were in the program. You had of course all the Arab countries represented. Iran was very well represented in the student body. I formed great friendships with Iranians and Arabs. I got to know the Middle East a little bit by living it. Lebanon was a microcosm of the region, but was freer than the rest of the countries. All kinds of groups and ideas found a place there. You find Baathists, Nasserists, and communists of all kinds, Maoists in those days as well as different Soviet-style communists. Then you have Arab nationalists of various kinds. Islamists were the weakest at that time, but they were growing—you could see them emerging.

The Palestinian issue was front and center because there were a lot of Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon. You had the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Israeli-Arab conflict. You'd see Israeli planes flying over the university.

You finished in 1972?

I finished college in '72. Then I did a master's degree at the university in Middle Eastern studies. So I stayed there. The U.S. Agency for International Development sponsored me through that master's program. Then I came back to America. That's interesting itself. Afghanistan had by then had a coup in '73, which as I told you had overthrown the King. I had been a relatively good student, and I met with an American education group with a presence in Beirut that placed students in American universities. I talked with them. They thought I should get a Ph.D., and they helped me fill out some forms, and I went to the University of Chicago for my doctorate. Several universities accepted me, but in 1974 I came back and went to the University of Chicago.

So I guess your first visit to Chicago was not in January or February or—

It was quite cold coming from Beirut to Chicago. It was quite an experience. I think I went to Macy's and got some heavy clothes very quickly. The South Side was quite a different experience.

Did you know you were going to study with [Albert] Wohlstetter there?

No, actually I was a student of comparative politics, problems of epistemology and systems. Leonard Binder and Mort Kaplan were more my mentors at first. Kaplan was my advisor. Lennie was also someone I knew a little bit about.

I lived in the International House at the University of Chicago. I arrived a few days before school started. There were various activities, sherry hour, receptions. At one of them I was standing by myself. After a while, some guy rushed over introducing himself. He was from Iran and thought I also was from Iran so he started speaking Farsi with me. Some Afghans speak with a different accent, but it is the same language essentially. I remember that he said, "Where did you learn Iranian?" We started a discussion. "There is no language called Iranian," I told him. "It is Farsi, which is different." But in any case we became friends.

He took a class with Albert Wohlstetter. He had registered for it and I had not. The first or second day of school my class with Mort Kaplan had finished early, and I was heading back to the dorm. I ran into these guys at the break with Albert's class. He said, "You have to come and listen to Albert Wohlstetter. Why don't you come and listen to this?"

I said, "What is it?" He talked about Albert in unusual terms. "He calls President Kennedy ‘Jack.' He talks about Kissinger as ‘Henry.' This is his life story about how wars have changed and so on, you might learn something. It is quite an experience." I didn't have anything to do, so I thought that I might as well step into the class.

I sat in the back of the class. In the course of that class, questions occurred to me and I raised my hand and asked them. The flow of the discussion was about whether war is inevitable. Because at any one time there is a fixed probability of war, and it's additive, this means at the end nuclear war is inevitable. I said to Wohlstetter that it seemed to me that permanent peace has a fixed probability at any one point, too, so why can't we say that it adds up so that ultimately we'll get permanent peace? Anyway, we went back and forth a little bit. He said, "I want to talk with you after class."

He asked me, "Why didn't you take my seminar?" I said, "I'm not even registered in your current class, I'm sort of auditing. I stopped by because my friends are here." We became friends.

What did you write your dissertation on?

On proliferation, with Albert actually, on the problem of nuclear proliferation. Albert and Roberta [Wohlstetter] were both very involved in the dissertation. I also had Gary Becker, a famous economist, on the dissertation committee. Lennie by then had left to go to UCLA, but I had Marvin Zonis, another Middle East scholar at the University of Chicago, as the third person.

You initially grew up speaking Dari, right?

Right.

Then we have English of course. A little bit of Farsi?

No, Farsi is like Dari. You have to change your accent a little bit. I do speak Farsi in a way that Iranians can understand. It was very helpful to me in Iraq, for example. In Afghanistan of course Dari was helpful. Because a lot of Iraqi leaders spend a lot of time in Iran, they spoke Farsi. Some of them didn't know Arabic even well enough.

Did you learn Arabic?

I did when I was in Beirut but not so well that I felt I could negotiate complex matters in Arabic. I would speak with them if it was just chitchat, but when it came to negotiating with them or communicating messages, I preferred to have a translator, an interpreter with me because I didn't want any misunderstandings. I do understand Arabic and I do speak it, but not with the same command as I have Farsi.

I imagine that a little bit goes a long way.

Sure, it was very helpful.

Starting the relationship.

Sometimes, when I felt I knew Arabic better than some of my interpreters, I would correct them, but nevertheless I used the interpreter because that gave me time also to think.

Then you went from Chicago to Columbia [University]?

Yes, I became an assistant professor at Columbia. I taught U.S. foreign policy. Warner Schilling is a good guy. I took his place. He was a professor of American foreign policy at the [Arnold A. Saltzman] Institute of War & Peace Studies. I took his slot and taught technology and foreign policy on nuclear issues, deterrence issues. Bob Jervis and I taught courses together on requirements of deterrence and nuclear revolution and so on. Eventually they also coerced me into teaching one course on Middle East because J. C. Hurewitz was getting on in years, but my real area of teaching was Cold War issues and American foreign policy issues.

Then the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had occurred, and I began to write a little bit about what was happening and what it meant. Initially I wrote some things under a pseudonym because my mother and some of my sisters were still in Afghanistan, so I wanted to make sure that they wouldn't be harmed by what I wrote.

What pseudonym did you use?

I used the pseudonym Hannah Negaran. Negaran in Farsi means an observer. Actually Lennie Binder was suggesting that it would be confusing because Hannah is a woman's name. In any case I did stuff in newspapers like the New York Times and places like that, and also I did a piece for the journal Orbis.

What was the gist of your thinking and/or interpretive approach to such matters?

What made me write my pieces was what I was reading. I wasn't an expert on Afghanistan. I just happened to have been born there and was a kid there. I had never studied Afghanistan in a systematic way, like a course on an Afghan program or Afghan studies or anything like that. But I knew enough growing up that I thought some of the stuff that some of the scholars were writing, experts on the area, was not right. For example, Louis Dupre was a great scholar on Afghanistan, and I respected him a lot. His wife, Nancy, still lives in Afghanistan, though he passed away. He wrote an op-ed describing what had happened in the 1978 Communist coup as agrarian reformers taking over. I thought he was missing the big geopolitical dimension, that this was really a pro-Soviet, Marxist-Leninist party that had taken over. The Soviets had largely trained the Afghan Army. It was the party with strong Soviet connections. We were kids in college and I knew all these guys, who they were and what they were doing when we had grown up.

I felt that this dimension of it was being under described or under explored. The implications of that for me, if you read the Orbis piece that I did under the pseudonym, was that the coup brought to power a pro-Soviet crew, probably assisted by the Soviets. Now we know more about it. The party was linked to the Soviet Union, and the army officers were trained by the Soviets. The Soviets may have brought the two together someplace because it was a military coup, not a popular revolution, that had occurred.

But in any case this wasn't going to work. There was going to be a rebellion against the new regime because there were a lot of social and political forces against it. The Soviets are going to face a very tough choice sooner or later and probably sooner. Either they will have to allow this coup to fail and accept the defeat of their clients and the rise of an anti-Soviet regime on their border, or they will have to come in to defeat the rebellion with their own forces. They are likely to do the latter. This was the era of [Leonid] Brezhnev doctrine, which stated that once a country was controlled by a Marxist/Leninist/Soviet regime the Soviets would defend it. It was kind of a one-way street. Once you came into the Soviet bloc you're not going out.

That is what happened in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and other places in those days. Therefore, I had gotten it right about this Soviet dilemma. It turned out that they did come in to defend their regime. Those who knew I had written this piece were impressed by the fact that my analysis was borne out by reality.

Just to finish the story, I got a fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations. The organization had a program to put young foreign policy types into government experience.

International Affairs Fellowship.

Yes, I got one of those. That is how it started, my government service. I was placed in the Pentagon because my proposal was focused on nuclear issues. Then, because of some of these writings, Mike Armacost, who was the Under Secretary of State running the Afghan policy among others, got in touch. I heard from Fred Ikle, the Under Secretary of Defense at that time, that Armacost told him, "I hear that you have Zal working on nuclear issues. What the hell is he doing working on nuclear issues? We need him here to help on Afghanistan, that problem." So Fred came and said, "I think you're going over to the State Department."

So I left and went to work at State for the rest of the CFR [Council on Foreign Relations] year.

What year was that?

It was 1985.

One question about this. This is about your sense of self-identity within the spectrum of American ideology, conservative versus liberal. By this time have you firmly situated yourself in that—?

I was a Democrat at that time. I became an American citizen in '84 or '85. I had thought I would go back after my doctorate, but when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan that was gone as an option. Everybody had left rather than going back. My family had left Afghanistan by then and had come to the U.S. or gone elsewhere.

So in the mid-'80s you considered yourself a Democrat?

Yes, I had actually voted. The first time that I voted I voted Democrat. But over time I became more of a hard-liner on defense and foreign policy issues. One had to be tough to deal with some of the adversaries that one faces. I became a Republican in the late '80s I would say. Maybe the [Michael] Dukakis campaign. I think Zbig [Zbigniew] Brzezinski and a few others whom I knew quite well sided with [George H. W.] Bush.

I was a junior person. I didn't have the weight of someone like him.

Did you return to Columbia after your year?

I did after my year in government, but then I was immediately hired back. Someone called me on behalf of Secretary [George] Shultz to ask if I would come and see him. Shultz said, "Everybody thinks you're doing such a good job. I want you to come and work for me and be on my Policy Planning Council. There are two wars, the Iran-Iraq War and the Afghan War, and I'd like you to help us think about those and how we conduct ourselves. It is very complicated."

So I accepted. I went to work for his policy planning shop. Columbia had a two-year public service leave policy and I had already done one. So I took leave again but I didn't go back. I stayed until the end of the Reagan administration. Then I got an offer from the University of California in San Diego-La Jolla and RAND [Corporation]. I accepted a joint appointment and went to the West Coast. It didn't last very long because I ended up coming back to government a year and a half later, to the Pentagon to work for Secretary [Richard] Cheney.

You worked on Paul Wolfowitz's staff, right?

At Policy Planning? No.

No, when you went over—

To the Pentagon, yes. I was Assistant Deputy Under Secretary for Policy Planning. They had created a new shop that didn't exist before the Bush administration. It was policy planning office, tasked with strategy work.

International Security Affairs, ISA, right?

No, it was separate. This is the interesting thing. You had ISA, you had ISP [International Security Policy]. ISP dealt with Soviet nuclear issues, ISA regional issues. Then they had a new strategy and resources shop, which was an assistant secretary level job.

So who was your immediate—?

[I. Lewis] Scooter Libby was Deputy Under Secretary. They elevated it to a Senate-confirmed position in 1992. Then he had assistants. You had Steve Hadley doing ISP when I was in the Pentagon. You had Harry Rowen doing ISA, which was regional issues except the Soviet Union and Europe. Then you had strategy and resources and I was in the strategy office in charge of policy and plans.

So you worked on the defense policy guidance?

That was my kind of project. What do we do now that the Iraq War is finished? What should our Gulf strategy be? What is important, what's not, how do we adjust our military posture? What lessons are to be learned from the Gulf War? I say to many people all my gray hair is due to that experience, getting the truth out of the various services about what really happened in this war. What worked, what didn't work in terms of weapons, tactics, strategy? Did the Navy win it all by itself? Did the Air Force win the war all by itself? Or was it the Army? Each said the others were enablers and took the credit for the victory.

So Cheney was saying, "We want to ensure that the truth comes out to the best of our ability." I'm the most senior civilian running the project, so my behind is on the line. He said this a few times: "Write a 25-volume study of the minutiae of how the war was fought, from cases of friendly fire to why they happen, how it happened. Was there a revolution in military affairs with precision intelligence being brought together in a way that changed the nature of how we fight?" I worked with Andy Marshall and others on this set of reports.

You just mentioned that debate. Were you given access to the after-action reviews?

Yes, sure.

What was your sense of the lesson of the Gulf War?

Generally, policy makers learn lessons based on the last war. Sometimes others are also studying the war and they draw lessons, too. These other countries are not going to fight the next war exactly like the last war. I insisted that we study what others were learning from the war. In this way, we would actually prepare for what we're going to face based on what they learned from what we did to this victim, to this actor.

Iran and India, for example, both concluded that they needed to emphasize nuclear weapons as a way to keep America at bay. They wanted to preclude our ability to fight in the way we fought in the Gulf War, simultaneously hitting command control, strategic targets, tactical targets on the battlefield, all without risking a massive retaliation. If nuclear weapons were on the scene, we wouldn't fight like that. They calculated that we would not go to the highest-level important targets from the get-go, fearing that they would retaliate with nuclear weapons. That was their lesson.

From our point of view, of course, there were many lessons to be learned, especially harnessing the advances in technology, particularly precision targeting, was one of the big lessons and advantages that we had.

The conventional wisdom about the lessons that the administration at the time and after took from that war was that it was vindication of the new technology of air power especially and that wars could be fought with fewer ground forces or less involvement of ground forces and more air power.

Sure. There was a lot of debate about that before we went to that war. When I was at RAND, I worked in the Project Air Force division, which works for the Air Force. I got to work with Colonel [John] Warden. He is a great American military strategist about the use of air power. He thought we could win the war with air power alone. He had developed this theory of imposing paralysis on the adversary and doing air occupation rather than ground occupation. I worked on it for the Air Force before joining the administration. It held that you could pursue war termination by saying, "These are the war aims. You accept these, we'll stop. You don't, we'll keep bombing."

He had a very detailed plan of what targets to hit, phases of hitting them, and how to execute the plan. He thought Saddam [Hussein] believed the U.S. would be air-power heavy in its response. First, Saddam thought that we wouldn't come to the defense of Kuwait. Second, if we did, we would do an air-power heavy war. Air power in his view was not decisive. Checkmate, which is the planning part of the Air Force, had Saddam's picture and his quote on the wall: "Air power is not decisive."

I believe that the lesson was that, yes, air power and precision are important but your statement would be overstating the conclusions we reached. We did not conclude that therefore you can be very light in terms of ground forces.

In 1991, '92, how did you feel about the decision to leave Saddam in power and not go on to Baghdad?

I was a believer in a very contingent set of objectives. I thought we had several options. First, if we didn't want to go to war, I had developed a containment option. We contain Saddam in Iraq. I had argued that we could be in Saudi Arabia, which has more oil than Kuwait. He's got Iraq, and he has Kuwait. Now the Saudis need us, and we could be in Saudi Arabia until the containment succeeds and Saddam leaves. Eventually he will go. Since he has done this terrible thing, invading another Arab country, a Muslim country, we could build a huge coalition against him and not go to war. There were pros and cons to that strategy, staying in Saudi Arabia. In my view, it wasn't sustainable over a long period. Second, we could go to a limited kind of war to get him out of Kuwait. Third, we could go all the way to liberate Baghdad.

There were advocates inside the government of various schools of thought. At the end, it was a lot easier to expel Saddam from Kuwait than we thought—many people anticipated 20,000 casualties. Maybe there was an opportunity to do something transformative and go for change in Baghdad, but I think the administration—the President, Secretary of Defense, and others—decided to stick with Kuwait.

How did you feel about that?

I didn't like that decision. I thought we could do more. But that was the decision. I became more unhappy with it personally when we also decided not only to allow Saddam to stay, although we had him on the run, but also to impose draconian sanctions on Iraq. I thought, Poor Iraqis. They got stuck with Saddam and sanctions. That was not morally right. As a participant in these deliberations, I felt a little unhappy about this. I thought we could help the Iraqis get rid of Saddam. If we don't want to do that ourselves, we ought to think of ways they can do it. We could support them by arming them or something like that.

Alternatively, let's go slow on sanctions. Over time, you could see the effect of sanctions. The regime always managed to prosper even under those kinds of systems. They set up their relatives and friends to do their smuggling and cheating. During the sanctions period Saddam built more palaces than ever before. According to a 1999 State Department report, Saddam built 48 palaces since 1991. I was not happy with that. It didn't leave a good taste in my mouth. Also, we urged the Iraqis to take matters into their own hands—that is more or less what President Bush told them—but we did not back them up. They rose against Saddam, and they were mowed down. We were nearby and could have acted, but we didn't. I felt that this wasn't right. We had some interesting debates and fights and discussion.

You were able to voice your opinions?

Absolutely. I have always had the opportunity to express my views. Orally and in writing, my views were given due consideration even when rejected.

After the Bush administration was defeated, the rest of the 1990s, what were you doing?

I went back to RAND. I ran a couple of programs at RAND, programs for strategy and doctrine and force structure. I started work at RAND to create a center of excellence on studying the Chinese military. We got the Air Force to agree to invest in it, to train a young generation of Americans to learn about the Chinese military, how they think, what systems they're acquiring, potential scenarios of how they might use their force, cyberspace, anti-space, anti-satellite systems. Some of the work was classified, some unclassified.

I also established the Center for the Study of the Greater Middle East at RAND, which has really prospered. We need to understand that region. Those are the two regions for which we need to have centers of excellence in place that do classified and unclassified work, that are trusted by the government, and that people have with clearances to do sustained work. Those are the two things I worked on.

I started an annual effort to take one subject and do a volume looking at it from all different angles. It was called the Strategic Appraisal Series. We would take one topic and bring a lot of minds to examine it. One of the good things about a place like RAND is the breadth of expertise, not only depth. RAND has a lot of people who can work from different angles on the same sort of issues. You could bring them together to see what their judgment is on a topic. Sometimes we involved people inside government. I got Andy Marshall to write, for example, for the Strategic Appraisal. John White, who was Deputy Secretary of Defense, and I edited a volume on cyber in the '90s, bringing a lot of work together. What are we heading toward here? What is happening? What does it mean for the future of war?

To create a baseline at the moment, 2000, when you were going to soon thereafter join the Bush administration on the National Security Council, how would you summarize your principal concerns about threat and how would you, as a result of all this sophisticated work you were doing, have defined your personal strategic priorities for the United States? What were you focused on in terms of threat perception, in terms of strategic priorities?

My goal strategically, as a result of the work I did on the DPG, the Defense Planning Guidance during Bush 41, was to take advantage of a unique period of American primacy. With the end of the Cold War, the U.S. had become the world's preeminent power. This had been a monumental struggle. Without war, we had succeeded in overcoming the Cold War. Multipolarity, which had caused two world wars, had been succeeded by bipolarity. With bipolarity, we came several times to the verge of nuclear annihilation. Now, we were in a position to shape the world, to avoid big wars for as long as we could.

The U.S. goal strategically ought to be to work in a way to avoid a return to bipolarity or multipolarity, both of which were in my view extremely dangerous and had not produced peace and stability. There were different philosophical views on this. Of course, other powers would seek to create bipolarity and multipolarity, but we ought to be working to preclude that eventuality. Even if it is inevitable, we should seek to push it as far to the future as we can.

I felt immediately thereafter that there were two big issues that we needed to work out. First, how could bipolarity or multipolarity emerge? It was likely to begin in a region that was critical, as we defined it, meaning that it had great resources, technological, human, and economic. If such a region was dominated by hostile power, it could use its position to pose a global challenge. We needed to think through how to prevent a hostile power from dominating a critical region. If that happened, we would be back to bipolarity, or if there were several such powers to multipolarity. So, we said, in Europe keep our alliance strong, adapt it so that the Europeans remain allies with us. Same thing in northeast Asia. We needed to adapt our alliances. Our systems of alliances have been perhaps our most important achievements, even beyond the Soviet overthrow. I felt that Russia would take a long time to recover and that we ought to engage them and hedge.

The challenges, I felt, that needed particular attention would be the Middle East and Asia with China. Also, we needed to make sure we don't get lazy. Once you're at the top, the great danger is that you get lazy. You think you're fat and happy, you're running the world. Others, who want to come up, are motivated. How do you keep yourself going when you're at the top? It is a big challenge, it is not easy. That has to do with domestic education, the economy, and so forth. Those issues weren't my area of expertise, but that was the kind of priority we needed to set. At the same time, Asia and the Middle East were the two places where the challenges could arise. We needed to be smart and work those two regions.

I actually thought I was going to do something with Asia in my next government experience because I had done so much work and had gotten a lot of attention to my work on China in the '90s. I did lots of briefings to the Secretary of Defense level and beyond. I saw Bill Perry quite a few times, briefing him on things we were doing with China. He was very interested in Asia, North Korea, and so forth. My expectation was that I would go back to Defense and be under or deputy or number two for strategy, deputy under secretary for policy, Paul Wolfowitz's old job. As you know, my first appointment from the Bush-Cheney transition team was to go to Defense and work the handover of the Defense Department from Bill Cohen, the Secretary of Defense. He and I worked very closely together for a few weeks because I was from the incoming administration and he was from the outgoing administration. I was the bridge between the two for those several weeks.

Had you been invited to Texas to brief—?

No, I didn't know Governor Bush. I was not part of the Vulcans. I knew quite a few of them, but I was not a member. And I was at RAND, which is a nonpartisan organization. So whatever I did was to be available for all sides. It is a national institution that serves the public welfare and everything is ultimately available to all sides, like what you're doing. It wasn't going to be a partisan outfit.

You mentioned a number of other familiar names earlier, but I don't think we've heard Condi [Condoleezza] Rice's name. Did you know Condi?

I knew her. In Bush 41 she was on the National Security Council in charge of Russia. But I didn't know her very well. We had communicated, we had seen each other. We would be on some of these speaking circuits and conferences and stuff, but I didn't know her well.

Who selected you to be the head of the transition team?

The head of the transition, if you remember, was Cheney, the Vice President. I got a call from Scooter Libby when the Supreme Court decision became final to come and see him and the Vice President-elect. So I went there, and they said they wanted me to go to the Pentagon and be the head of the Defense transition. Of course, the name of the Secretary-designate would be announced relatively soon. I remember within a few hours of my wedding, I was in my old Jeep going to the Pentagon, not knowing what to expect, and having an honor guard waiting for me. [laughter] I was totally unprepared. I thought somebody would explain to me how I was going to take over the Pentagon.

How do you think you wound up on the NSC [National Security Council] staff?

I think it is fair to say that the designee for Secretary of Defense and I did not get along. Otherwise, I would certainly have stayed in the Pentagon.

How quickly did you find out that you didn't get along?

Remember that it took a while to find a Secretary of Defense. Initially, I think the leading candidate was Senator [Daniel] Coats, who later on became our Ambassador to Germany and is now back in the Senate. He was supposed to be the SecDef [Secretary of Defense]. Everybody in the higher echelons of the incoming administration thought that was the deal, and several other people would go to DoD, including myself. But I think it may be part of the public record that he did not do well in his interview with the President-elect, George W., and therefore didn't get the job.

There was discussion that Rummy, Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld, was going to be the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] Director, possibly, replacing George Tenet.

Do you think Coats was Cheney's choice for SecDef?

I don't know whose choice it was. The expectation that I was given was that the boss would be Coats. It didn't turn out that way because of the interview. Some books that I've read by the principals indicate that Cheney then proposed Rumsfeld. But in one of the volumes, whether it is the Vice President's or President Bush's, there's the idea that it was Condi who then said, "Have you considered Rumsfeld for this?" That led to the interview, particularly because Rumsfeld had worked on several commissions on such issues as ballistic missile proliferation and all the rest.

Did you work with Rumsfeld on the ballistic missile defense treaty?

No. I was not part of it. Wolfowitz was and a few others, but I was not. I had briefed Rumsfeld as part of the RAND board, which he was on, I believe. He was on the RAND Board of Trustees, and I had briefed the RAND board each year on the China analysis. We knew each other, but I never worked with him.

So was it Scooter and Cheney then who asked if you would like to work on the NSC?

No. As I said, Condi was there, Steve Hadley was there, part of the transition team. Our offices were next to each other in the transition headquarters. We would run into each other all the time. It was Steve Hadley who called to ask if I would come over to visit. I stayed in the Pentagon helping Rumsfeld with his testimony and his hearings. He didn't have any people then to help him. His point always was, "I can't do anything without having people, so what are you doing to get me people?" We had started a big process of identifying people to go in for him to consider for senior positions. With our current system of background checks and then the hearings, because the people need confirmation, this takes a long time. He had a lot of people to select from for his deputy. With help from the White House he ultimately chose Paul Wolfowitz, but there were others whom he had met with and interviewed. Then there are under secretaries and then some assistant secretaries. Also, some policy issues were coming up.

But specifically why not you? You're people. You're good enough to help him get his administration.

There was a personal chemistry issue. We assumed we were not going to work well together. So I was helping for the transition. Later on, he tried to talk me into staying as we got to know each other better. Later on our relationship, it is fair to say, became very close. When I was in the field in Afghanistan and Iraq, working with the troops, Rumsfeld was extremely helpful to me with the military.

Steve Hadley says one day he is going to claim he discovered me. Hadley called me to come and see him and Condi. They asked me, "What about coming over to the White House to be a Special Assistant to the President and deal not with Asia but with the Middle East to the west? We think that Afghanistan hasn't been paid attention to, Iraq is a problem, and so forth. We need someone to take a look at this." One thing, they said, is that they needed a review of Iraq policy.

I stayed in the Pentagon until the end of May, so several months of the new administration. There had been an effort to review the Iraq policy and the others. There were too many differences of view inside the administration, and they couldn't agree on anyone among the principals. They thought there would be enough support for me that I could be either arbiter or facilitator of a good discussion as to where we go.

Back to the transition for a moment. I don't know to what extent there would have been briefings in that short period where you were serving as—

We had only four or five people, so there wasn't a lot, but we did some briefings. Issues were coming up that I had to be briefed on, as we were going to do something somewhere or there was an emerging threat we had to deal with. They had to let me know so I could let the incoming people know.

Richard Clarke made some big deal of the fact that the [William] Clinton team had emphasized the importance of al-Qaeda to the new administration and had gotten the cold shoulder.

That is not during the transition. Clarke of course stayed on in his position, although he may have been demoted in some way because he got a lot of press as having the ear of the President directly during the Clinton years. He had a czar title or something. He became, I think, a Senior Director, Special Assistant level staffer, working for Condi and Steve Hadley. But al- Qaeda was not a transition issue. There was nothing imminent going on, but I think there was a review of terrorism strategy, and he was talking more in that domain after the people had come in.

So as I hear you speaking in terms of threat perception during this period, 1999 to 2001, you personally were not very focused on potential terrorist threats like al-Qaeda to the United States, this was not the highest priority.

It was not the highest priority, strategically, that's true. But I did focus on the challenges of the Middle East and southwest Asia, Afghanistan. In that work, there was a lot of attention and focus on terrorism as a threat and how the locus has shifted to south Asia from the Middle East as its center. We manifested some of that thinking in public statements at Brookings [Institution] and conferences on terrorism. Then, with regard to Afghanistan in particular becoming a focal point of the threat, we did some work, including a piece by myself and a colleague, Dan Byman, who is now a professor at Georgetown [University]. It was in the Washington Quarterly about this nexus of terror and the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and Afghanistan, with the terrorism threat having a global reach including attacks on the United States.

But it is fair to say that when I thought about the big strategic challenges, it was paying attention to where Asia is going, where China is going, and the architecture of the Middle East and East Asia. Terrorism was one of the issues, but it wasn't the number one issue that it became after 9/11. No, I certainly hadn't said in the '90s that terrorism was our number one issue.

You went to the NSC as Senior Director for what turns out to be the important part of the world.

Yes.

There are two separate issues percolating at that time. There were many studies that dealt with Iraq, that was one set of issues. Then a separate set of issues on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and al-Qaeda. There were separate meetings that dealt with these two things. Why don't you walk us through and talk to us first about the Iraq issue? Prior to 1991 the concern about no-fly zones, concern about eroding sanctions. Was it your view and was it the view of your colleagues that containment of Saddam was disintegrating in the spring of 2001?

I had dealt with Iran and Iraq in the '80s, at the end of the Reagan administration. I had followed the two wars, the Iran War and the Afghan War, so I was quite familiar with them. Then I came back to the Pentagon. One of the big issues that became front and center was the Iraq War again. In 2001, when I went to the NSC, there was concern, one, that sanctions were eroding, and two, that the no-fly zone was being challenged.

The first issue was important to Secretary Powell. The second issue was of great importance to Secretary Rumsfeld. He thought that Saddam was being very aggressive in challenging the no-fly zone, and we were worried that we were going to lose pilots. We need to think about how to adjust, to adapt to this.

Was that anti-aircraft fire that you were mostly talking about?

Yes. And there was this idea of regime change. It was made the law of the land during the Clinton administration. Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act, which President Clinton had then signed. What do you do about that? What does that mean? What is our strategy of the new administration on that? Paul Wolfowitz, who at this point is the number-two at the Pentagon, and others thought we should look at doing the same thing in southern Iraq as we were doing in Kurdistan or consider arming the Shiites in the south.

Secretary Powell was coming up with ideas on how to make sanctions effective. The principal thought was maybe to narrow the list of sanctions but get broader agreement on them. The idea was to adjust the sanctions regime to focus on a few things rather than on a huge list and thereby increase the likelihood that people would cooperate. There would be a lot of cheating anyway.

Secretary Rumsfeld was thinking of changing the no-fly zone. He wanted to rethink how we conduct ourselves, including how we respond to challenges, to minimize the risk of Iraq shooting down our planes and of our pilots being caught and made prisoners and being displayed on the streets of Baghdad.

There was some review of ideas about challenging Saddam's regime. Some wanted to arm the opposition and so on. Some people had the idea that a coup by some military officers could bring about a change. So there was possibly arming, possibly a coup. But I have to say, until 9/11, in the various papers and reviews, there was hardly any mention of going in ourselves to liberate Iraq. My own judgment is that although the administration had concern about policy toward Iraq—where is it going, why it's not working, whether containment is weakening—it was 9/11 that changed the discussion and sharply focused on the idea that we have to resolve this issue.

There was also continuing concern during this period about what Saddam was up to. He was up to no good. He had reconstituted his chemical weapons capability. He had BW [biological warfare] capability. He was moving to reconstitute his nuclear capability, although he had not yet reconstituted nuclear capability. He was so many months away on the current path, maybe two years, 18 months, but if he got fissile material it could be so many fewer months, maybe less than a year.

This is all part of the atmosphere of that period. Also, he was in violation of the UN [United Nations] Security Council resolutions that ended the war.

Where did you stand in this spectrum of policy options? First, what was your specific thinking about Saddam? Did you think he would have atomic weapons in 18 months? Did you think he currently had chemical or biological weapons?

I actually did not do independent thinking of my own about his capabilities. I relied very much on what I got at the very high level of classification from intelligence people. But I did have an inclination to believe that he was up to no good. That I certainly believed.

What did that mean?

I was inclined to support efforts, if we could find a way, to get rid of him. That's what it meant to me.

Did you yourself have a preference?

I have to say at that time my preference would have been to arm the opposition. I wrote these things before I went into government. I testified on Capitol Hill on Iraq a few times during the time I was out of government, when they were discussing this Iraq Liberation Act. I was one of the witnesses. There were very high-profile hearings because Iraq was hot in those days.

Some people developed a nickname for me because of this policy preference. If there were two sides in conflict in Bosnia, we should arm the victim to enable this side to defend itself. If we can't or don't want to get involved directly, arming one side was the best option.

My focus was on what I regarded to be the big issues—how you prevent multi-polarity and bipolarity and to prevent region hegemonies—but I believed we can't be indifferent to these smaller conflicts. With the leadership of the world, becoming the world's only superpower, the predominant power, came responsibility too.

You can't allow an egregious injustice to continue and not face challenges to your leadership. In order for the system to survive you need to be also fair and just, to be perceived as that. You can't allow a genocide to take place under your watch when you are the world's only superpower. So what do you do?

Direct military intervention runs the risk of protracted entanglement. Your power could be eroded. You could get involved in protracted conflict, which saps your energies. You want to avoid that possibility. That is how Rome and others lost their relative positions, decay from inside or overreach. Yet, while avoiding those threats to your preeminence, you can't be indifferent either, because then you're unjust and that has its own implications.

Actions to level the playing field are the other option. All right, there are two sides, with genocide, let's say, committed by Serbs against Bosnians and Croats. You tell them, "This kind of policy is not tolerable. If you don't accept a reasonable settlement, our options are (1) we come in if we can do it easily and it doesn't have the risk of protracted entanglement, or (2) at least we will support the victim to be able to defend themselves." I had been very heavily involved in supporting the Afghan resistance to entangle the Soviets and to defeat them, sap their energies. I had been very strongly involved in that—

So that was your model.

My model was—

The Mujahidin.

I will come to that, with one difference, because we had a fight on that. My model was that you can do a lot without going in yourself, to level the playing field of war. This meant rejecting the policy of imposing an arms embargo that negatively affects the victim, as we had done in the Balkan wars. I thought we ought to be leveling the playing field by saying we will arm the Croats and the Bosnians. It will make the situation messier, of course. Some Europeans were worried about that risk. They'd rather have one side defeated to have order. I thought the outcome had to be just, too. It can't be order, period, because of who we were as a country.

If I had to say I went in with a prejudice on Iraq, it was to find the right Iraqis and support—

Arm them.

Support them, arm them.

What was your nickname related to that?

Whenever there was a conflict, Zal is the guy who says, "Which side do we arm?" That is his formula: he wants to find the side to arm.

In the spring and summer of 2001, what was the most strongly proposed alternative to this option and who argued the alternative?

I think the question of a coup was a possibility. The CIA folks thought that this could be a way to address war as an issue. Also, some advocated a mixture of actions—arming the opposite and maybe striking occasionally to shape the area. But we were in the midst of all this.

Bush had a structure for the policy process. There was a PCC [Policy Coordinating Committee] that was a kind of interagency at the relatively mid- to senior-level people, assistant secretary level. Then you went to the DC, which was the deputies committee, the number twos or sometimes under secretaries would sit in on those meetings. Then there was the PC [principals committee], where the principals would sit. It was chaired by the National Security Adviser, but the difference in the case of the Bush administration was that the Vice President sat in on the PCs although they were chaired by the National Security Adviser. In the DCs and PCs, I think the President sent in instructions, some kind of guidance that made the Office of the Vice President a principal participant in these sessions, which, I think, was not the case in previous administrations. So Scooter Libby, who was the National Security Adviser as well as Chief of Staff to the Vice President, his office was a principal in these deliberations. The NSC meetings were chaired by the President. That was the process.

So there was a lot of discussion on Iraq prior to 9/11. However, you remember, this isn't a lot of time that we're talking about. I arrive sometime in May 2001 to the NSC, and we're talking about September 11. I'm doing a lot of review of Afghanistan and Pakistan issues also during this period. The deliberations in this period are all about these options at the level of DCs and PCs.

Can I follow up Mel's questions about who is supporting what to get to the Bob Gates question that he says isn't asked enough in Washington. Were people also saying if we follow one of these approaches and it works, then what happens post-Saddam?

Right.

And what about the balance of power vis-a-vis Iran?

Sure. Those are all central questions. In any of these options, you have to have requirements for succeeding. What do you need? Are we in a position to deliver those? What are the implications of success?

By the time of 9/11, no decision has been made on any of this. People are in the realm of deliberation, asking questions about each of these options, exactly of the kind that you are talking about, sending issues back to the drawing board or developing ideas further, answering questions and then scheduling another meeting to go over the revised paper in terms of options to be presented to the principals and maybe to the NSC.

I would say that during this May to September period we are in the phase of analysis and option development and going back and forth. The view was that what we were doing was unsatisfactory and it was falling apart. That is the definition of the problem. What do we do to have a more effective policy toward Iraq? Sanctions are eroding. The no-fly zone is being challenged. Saddam is reconstituting, based on the information that the administration is getting, some of its WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. Some have been reconstituted, and some are in the process of being reconstituted. What do we do?

There are various options in play. But I have to tell you before 9/11 the option of an outright invasion of Iraq is not a serious option in the eyes of the participants. So we're looking at tinkering with how to change the sanctions. How do you shape the no-fly zone? How do you make the current framework more effective? Do you increase the pressure on Saddam by supporting the opposition or encouraging a coup? We are in this kind of a framework at this time. I think with 9/11 and post-9/11 this changes.

We're going to come back. I owe you a break.

[BREAK]

We'll get back to Iraq. You were at the Defense Department when the plane went down in China. Was that at all on your radar?

It was but marginally. It was mostly in military channels, how to get the plane back.

Very good. Back to Iraq.

The other thing going on simultaneously is trying to decide what to do with Afghanistan, Pakistan, al-Qaeda.

Sure.

Can you lay out the parameters of that dialogue as it existed in the spring and summer?

Sure. On al-Qaeda, there was a review going on, run by Clarke. If I were in the country, I would participate. I was a member of that review group. But I was conducting a review of the Afghanistan, Pakistan, but mainly the Afghan strategy. Where is the country going?

There was a perception that we didn't have a good handle on what you do about Afghanistan. It was intrinsically linked with the issue of terrorism and al-Qaeda presence and the Taliban. There was also the issue of human rights. There was a great deal of awareness of the treatment of women and the suffering from the war between the Taliban and the so-called Northern Alliance forces. We had a relationship with many of these Afghan elements in the North dating back to the Soviet era. But at the same time there were Iranians, Russians, Indians, and others working with them. We were also working with some of them against al-Qaeda. Earlier we had been focused on the buyback of Stinger missiles that we had provided to them during the Soviet period. There were also some other Afghans in the south who were not happy with the Taliban, including people like [Hamid] Karzai and others from the same ethnic group as the leadership of the Taliban. We also looked at the relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan, particularly the relationships between Pakistan and the Taliban and Pakistan, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda. There were also wider geopolitical issues. There are the terror groups themselves and what they are doing: What do we do in an almost operational sense? How do we degrade them? How do we eliminate them in a military sense? There were ideas being considered for dealing with it in that way.

We were asking whether there was a more fundamental approach that needed to be considered. If you could do something with Afghanistan and Pakistan, it would open up more lasting solutions to the terror issues. That dimension may have not been focused on as much as it should have been, at least we may not have understood it fully. Given new technologies, new capabilities to deal more effectively operationally against terrorists, such as armed Predators, we discussed this as an option to be used in a more persistent way. During that review, this option was emerging as something we needed to consider. Now it has become a dominant counterterrorism tool, but it was just percolating, emerging at that time.

In that debate George Tenet emphasized in his memoir that you have the CIA, which really wanted to use Predators, to develop it, but the CIA was unwilling to allocate money of its own toward that end.

Yes.

Was anyone willing to bite the bullet—there was a lot of rhetoric about how important this was, and Tenet makes the Agency seem somewhat farsighted about this. Yet when the crunch came they weren't willing to allocate resources. Clarke is very critical of that of course.

The geopolitics of it were an issue. There was the possibility of basing them in Uzbekistan. The discussions were operational: how would you use it? I think it is clear that all of this got quite a jolt with 9/11. Again, you also have to remember that this is a very limited amount of time that we're talking about. I don't know whether more or less resources would have made a difference. We're talking about a timeframe of three, four, or five months. Government doesn't move that rapidly, unless there is an emergency, generally.

But in the literature, one of the interesting things about this period is that in June and July Clarke and Tenet, among others but especially them, were obsessed with the prospect of an al-Qaeda threat. I think there is very good empirical documentation to show that they were, not just that they claim it but that they were. Did you see it that way at the time? Did you see them as obsessed, really hung up on this and that other people were hanging back? How would you describe the configuration of viewpoints on the saliency and imminence of a terrorist threat on the United States?

I did not have responsibility for the terrorism issue. I would have a window into it because of the regional dimension. Was it going to come from Afghanistan? What's the al-Qaeda presence there? What do we do about Afghanistan to deal with this threat? That was my primary responsibility, to think about strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, to come up with an approach.

I was not involved in operationally dealing with the current threats as they materialize or are in the process of materializing that focused on immediate questions. How do we defend ourselves? How do we attack it operationally, militarily? I was not in that, shall we say, cell. While I don't want to speak about things of which I was not aware, I would take issue with the view that this issue was ignored. Strategically, at that level, information about an attack on the United States would not be taken extremely seriously and urgently, given all the other things that I know.

Sure.

Without having been in the cell, I am confident of this point. Suppose someone said, "Here is something that is percolating. We need to do something to deal with it because it is focused on us." I would be very surprised if somebody would have been not focused on the threat. I don't know this debate, whether Clarke went to Condi, as is sometimes claimed, or to the President. If somebody went to say, "Here it is, Mr. President." If someone told the National Security Adviser or the Vice President, "You ought to do something about this." I'd be surprised if they said, "Let's defer a decision on it." I wasn't there, and I don't know how these deliberations unfolded, but I would be surprised.

Did you sit in on the deputies meetings with Steve Hadley?

Yes, but the question is for what subject. Hadley had all responsibility.

On your subject?

Certainly, I would sit in on the deputies and the PCs and the NSCs. I would usually be sitting at the NSCs behind the President, to his right a little bit. I would write the summary and conclusions of the meeting. I would occasionally whisper in the President's ear, which some of the others did not like. I would say, "This is what he meant." Or I would explain, "That's what I think, Mr. President, they were referring to." Sometimes participants would talk in a kind of language that caused me to wonder whether the President of the United States would understand what they were talking about.

So in effect were you the official note taker?

In the meetings focused on my subjects.

For your subject. So you're the NSC person.

I'm the NSC person. I'm the most junior person in the room representing the NSC.

How good were the notes you were taking? Will historians find—?

These are summary conclusions that are negotiated notes to some extent.

So just a summary.

They're very brief. What the operational decisions were, not notes that are pages and pages. No, generally, it would be five points, five sentences. "The President decided in this issue to do this or do that."

On the issues you sat in on during this period of time, pre-9/11, how would you summarize the interactions at these various level discussions, whether it be the deputies or the principals? As you know in the memoir writing, there are a lot of scores being—

Sure, that's why I'm saying that when you read people's memoirs, reflecting on the situation, hindsight is perfect. I just don't know at that time whether somebody would have stated things as categorically, as clearly without the context and nuance of what one knows and does not know and what confidence one has in information and judgments. I found the discussions often in these preliminary periods were tentative and exploratory. We're getting to know each other. Some of us are working together for the first time. You have institutional influences—"where you sit affects where you stand"—that shaped attitudes. The issues are complicated, and you're trying to simplify them. Often confidence in what you're saying in terms of information is not perfect.

This deliberation was a genuine back and forth. Often people would not commit themselves at the lower level to a position because they need to go back and check with their principal. For example, people from the Defense Department were reluctant to share resources or agree to a point without referring back to the Secretary of Defense, especially if it is a new under secretary. What comfort level can he really have in taking his own position? Is he representing the views of the Secretary of Defense, who holds things to himself very closely?

That is why it takes time. People are trying also to figure each other out. What are the views in the entire building? What can the institution as a whole accept? I thought the process was probably as good as possible in the circumstances. I would have perhaps liked, given my own background, a lot more deliberate process for decision making, one with more preparation than is typically done in the government. However, the government is under different timeline pressures than think tanks. I would like to deal with more fundamental issues before we get to operational issues. But under the pressure you tend to come under to deal with the tactical and operational issues, the philosophical, geopolitical underpinnings often get sacrificed.

To bring everybody to the same level in terms of understanding the basics and fundamentals and the strategic issues, there just isn't time. People assume everybody has that understanding already when you come into government. As a result, discussions go immediately to "What do we do?"

Can we talk about that point in relationship to the President himself? You're already whispering in his ear, but we haven't talked about when you first met him. You said you didn't go with the Vulcans, you weren't part of that group to brief him before the election. So when did you first meet him and what was your impression of him? Then can you talk about getting up to these meetings and your impressions of him then.

I didn't get to know the President very well. I would go to some meetings with him at the NSC. Occasionally on phone calls, I would do the pre-brief for the conversation. When he speaks with heads of state, the person in charge of that region goes and pre-briefs the President about what to expect, what the other guy is going to say. Of course, there were no conversations at that time with the Taliban leader or Iraqi leader. Occasionally, I would go on calls to some Gulf leaders, to talk to him.

Because our policy review papers had not been completed during those initial months and did not go to the President for decisions, I would say during the early months my interaction with him was limited. He knew who I was. He knew that I worked for Condi and that I was doing these reviews.

I think it is fair to say that that changed post-9/11 because Afghanistan became so important as we started to talk about military action. I spent some time with him in Camp David. He asked me himself about issues. I was running into him in the hall sometime. We're all working in the same sort of area. Once 9/11 happened, I got to deal with him much more. It is not surprising. The complexity of Afghanistan, and the personalities and all the individuals involved, quite startled the management. I think some of them have written how startled they were by Afghanistan—a land-locked country on the other side of the earth with a reputation for defeating foreign military intervention. This reaction would be normal for most people. So how do we deal with it?

How did these briefing sessions go? Did he ask a lot of questions?

Initially, he would listen a lot. We covered many issues: what the place is like, what the history is like, the forces that have shaped it, what the recent experiences have been, the Soviet period, the post-Soviet period, what happened, what we did, what we didn't do, what is going on now, who supports whom, which groups are there. Then, when we became more operationally involved, I briefed him on what is going on there, letting him know through Condi, sometimes directly.

We started to have very early morning meetings to discuss what was going on, what actions other parts of the government were saying were being taken. Were things being done? I had the advantage or the disadvantage of knowing many of the leaders in Afghanistan. I met them during the earlier phase of our engagement during the Soviet war, when I had been dealing with that issue in the State Department. I could call leaders to check what the heck was going on—to get information independent of the bureaucrats. I knew the Northern Alliance leaders quite well, including the President of Afghanistan, as the Northern Alliance saw it. I didn't know the Taliban leaders, so there was not much interaction with them, but more with the anti-Taliban leadership. I knew Karzai from the 1980s when he had been working with one of the groups that was fighting the Soviets. He was a press spokesman for one of the groups with which I used to meet. I knew some of the commanders fighting the Taliban, so I would call them to get updates as to what was going on and be a kind of additional channel for checking what was happening. Then I would let the President know.

He obviously was very interested post-9/11 in what was going on and was surprised frankly that we had somebody in the NSC who knew some of these people personally. "What?" he said, "Zal, you know this guy?" People didn't know sometimes that I did have these contacts. A lot of people in government were new and didn't know that I worked with these groups before. The Bush 43 administration had a lot of people from Bush 41. But the big fight with the Soviets in Afghanistan was in the Reagan administration, and there weren't very many officials from the Reagan administration who were in the top echelons of the Bush 43 period.

There was an issue one time concerning [Burhanuddin] Rabbini, who had been the President before the Taliban took power. Now, the Taliban were moving out of Kabul and we needed to persuade him to support the formation of a new government rather than taking power himself. I said, "I could call him." Everybody took notice immediately. Their reaction was, "What? You can talk to this guy?" I said, "Actually, I know him quite well. We used to do this or do that during the 1980s." They replied, "Why don't you go ahead and call him then?"

So I got to know the President much better post-9/11.

We want to delve into that, but is it okay for us to get the 9/11 story now? Is there anything from before the period? Can you tell us about your experiences on 9/11 and immediately thereafter?

On 9/11 I was in an NSC staff meeting with Condi in the Situation Room, the morning senior staff meeting. When we started the meeting, the first plane had already hit the tower. During the staff meeting, the second plane hit the tower. Somebody came in to say the second plane had hit the tower. There was an immediate crisis atmosphere, and Condi was rushed out. Clarke said, "This is al-Qaeda, this is terrorism." He went with her.

The rest of us rushed to our offices to see what was going on because we got information through our classified computers, to make phone calls and so on, to see what was going on. Soon there were reports that a plane may be heading toward the White House as well, and we were ordered to evacuate the premises, to go to Lafayette Park across the street.

Your office was in—?

The Old Executive Office Building.

The OEOB.

Yes, I had gone across from the West Wing, from the Situation Room. So everyone left and then it went on for a while. Then the reports came that the Pentagon had been hit. There was a report that a plane was going toward Capitol Hill. It was total chaos, confusion, uncertainty. Phones were useless. There were very few people to call because everybody was out. The people you work for, people at other buildings, the Pentagon, and so forth were not there. Mayhem took place after the Pentagon had been hit.

You have a small staff when you're at the NSC. You don't have a lot of people no matter how complicated your issues may be. I had three people working for me at that time. We were all out of the building. The secretary and the assistants are out. We had no classified connection anymore. You're living in this very difficult circumstance. Something big is going on, but you're totally disconnected. The very place you are supposed to be is under threat, and you can't go back to your office.

This continued until around 4:00 or 4:30 in the afternoon when I went back to the office. The systems started to come up at that point.

Where were you in the interim? You were still in Lafayette Park?

In the park. Then, one of my colleagues said she had an apartment nearby, and we could all group there, watch TV, and so on. Some people went over there. I told them to keep me informed, but I wanted to stay close by in case we went back inside because probably there would be a need for help. After a while, I went home for a brief period.

Then at 3:30 or 4:00, I went into the OEOB and called my colleagues to come in. We started getting reports up. Condi and I talked. The attitude was that we needed to get ready for what was going to be a big thing. She said that I should come in very early the next day, at 6:00. The President is not moving around. We're just gathering all the information we can. The immediate priority is preventing another attack, hardening sites. We need to deal now with this issue. It looks like al-Qaeda perpetrated the attack and therefore Afghanistan is going to be front and center. It is going to be a tough period ahead. Around 10:00 or 10:30 at night, I went home and then came back the next morning.

What was it like the next morning?

The next morning we went to Condi's office, not to the NSC. There was discussion of what had happened, what information was emerging, how we would get ready with regard to what we do next. Hadley would be running a set of deputies meetings to start dealing with the whole range of issues.

Was there a deputies meeting that very day?

Yes. It was a little unusual for a deputies meeting. Everything was a little mixed up because of the nature of the issue. A lot of domestic issues, which was not my domain, were at the fore. We talked about what the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] needs to do, the Justice Department, the law enforcement issues. How many nuclear sites there are? How you rank them? How many chemical facilities there are? How you rank them? What do we know about other cells inside the United States? What do we hear? How do we deal with this? A lot of hardening issues, how do we protect ourselves?

Could one say there was an overriding sense that this was the first of several attacks?

It was how to deal with the threat of follow-on attacks. What is the state of the critical infrastructure of the United States? How vulnerable they are these facilities? How hardened they are? How do we rank them? You can't protect or harden all of them at once so priorities need to be set. How do you prioritize within priorities? Who is responsible for that? Often I would be sitting there for these discussions until we got to the subjects that I normally worked. You could see what the thinking was—that another attack might be imminent.

Are there any individuals whose reactions at that meeting had an impact on you? Was there anything that stood out about who was arguing this or who was afraid of that?

Not really. I think everybody was trying to provide information about what they knew. Obviously, there was a lot of uncertainty at this time, some confusion as to what exactly is the state of play, what is and what is not happening. There were not many clear answers, but there was a sense of crisis and the pressure of time.

I remember that Josh Bolten, at that time Deputy Chief of Staff, attending the meetings, as well as Steve Hadley. I think over time we adapted to having a domestic national security adviser, so to speak. John Gordon, who had been a CIA deputy director, Air Force General, took over. For a while, it was all one process. I was impressed with Steve, as he moved between these two worlds of the domestic side and the external issues.

So when it came to your issues, what was the state of interplay between people, between the agencies?

The big issue was getting to know the situation and developing options. There was a lot of work done before as part of the review of Afghanistan.

There had been interaction with Pakistanis on this issue, their role, ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence], and so forth. The Director of ISI had come to Washington before 9/11. Actually 9/11 happened when he was in town. We wanted to get their perspective and to understand what they were doing and not doing. What we knew they were doing and what they were saying was very inconsistent with each other. I think they were being pressed pretty hard by people like Condi Rice, Secretary Powell, [Richard] Armitage, and others. We were telling them that this was unacceptable and that something had to give.

But the issues on the table were what message you send to Pakistan, what message you send from a diplomatic point of view to the Taliban, what do you do with the UN. Because what had happened was of global significance, it was vital not just for the United States but for the world to be focused on it. Also, once you are thinking about doing military action, much more fine-grain understanding of the forces on the ground was needed. Decisions had to be made with regard to the role that CIA could play. They had their own connections.

Decisions had to be made with regard to the Pentagon and guidance to CENTCOM [Central Command], to the Pentagon, to the military planners. My domain was to work with the State Department and others to develop, as an adjunct to the work that the military people were doing, options for what we would do should it come to military force.

Remember, there was the idea that if the Taliban gave up al-Qaeda there would be no attack on Afghanistan. Can one avoid an attack on Afghanistan? The Pakistanis were given a message to go to talk to the Taliban, to present the Taliban with a demand. The head of ISI went to Mullah [Mohammad] Omar in Kandahar with a message—one that President [Pervez] Musharraf had also approved—to demand that the Taliban turn over al-Qaeda leadership to the United States. Of course, he refused. That set the stage for military action. We had no option but to move militarily.

Then the issue was whom you work with. There was a clear sense that we wanted to avoid the very heavy footprint that the Soviets had employed. You wanted it to be light, to work with the locals to the maximum extent possible. We'd have special forces and intel people working with the locals. This would be supported by dominant air power. This was a light footprint approach.

Because you're working in an area before 9/11 that is one of many areas—I don't know whether you would call it peripheral exactly, but there are a lot of other things going on in the President's agenda. Practically overnight then your area becomes the central focus of the American Government.

Yes.

So I'm curious about your own sense of being swept from the periphery into the center and how you're reading this and reacting to it. Second, your assessment about how quickly the other actors in play at this time are able to get up to speed on what they need to know. Can you give us an assessment about their initial level of preparedness and their flexibility in adapting to this world that you've lived and understood for a long time?

It is tough to say something definitive because you have to go to the interagency meetings with the information and knowledge you have rather than what you should have or could have under the optimal circumstances. Rumsfeld said, "You go with the army that you have, not the army that you wish you had." People reacted negatively to his statement, but that is the reality. The same is true for information in the interagency process.

A crisis occurs. There is a deputies meeting, and there is a PC meeting. You come as you are. You do the best you can. You get your intelligence. State has its own intelligence besides CIA, INR [Bureau of Intelligence and Research]. You overwork your people, and they give you what they know. Sometimes, it is not the most precise information or the information you wish you had.

Did you consider yourself at this moment in time on these matters arguably the most knowledgeable person about the nitty-gritty of what is going on there?

I probably was, but I was careful not to be Mister Know-It-All. That is not a very desirable character to be. I would often hold back intentionally to give everyone an opportunity to say their piece. I would know things maybe at a fundamental level, but I didn't always have the most current intercept that somebody else had gotten of someone's conversation.

What were your feelings about what ought to be done? On September 12? On September 13?

I had already thought that Afghanistan needed a regime change. That was my view. It was needed to put Afghanistan on the right path and to deal with the terrorism issue. I initially had a positive view of the Taliban personally. I felt bad about the anarchy and civil war in Afghanistan after the Soviets had left. The Taliban, at least, had stabilized most of the country. However, once in power, they became tyrannical and allied themselves with al-Qaeda. Therefore, regime change became an imperative.

In policy, we sometimes go into a very big struggle with certain assumptions about the outcome or how things are going to work out. These assumptions about the future can be quite reasonable at the time but could turn out to be extremely wrong. You're talking about the future, and lots of other factors can come in to determine the outcome.

In the 1980s, the assumption was that the Soviets would win the war in Afghanistan. That was a reasonable assumption. It turned out to be wrong, but it was a very reasonable assumption. Afghanistan is a little country on the Soviet border. The Communist Party has taken over. The experience of the world shows at that time that whenever the Soviets go in, they do the job that is necessary to prevail. If they have to kill a million people, they'll kill a million people. That was the kind of mentality they had. They will follow the Manchurian model—they will do what is necessary to win. They won't allow a country on their border to get out once it has come into their orbit. That was the Brezhnev doctrine.

Our strategy was to make it as hard as possible for them to achieve that victory. We would not succeed in defeating them, but we wanted the consumption of Afghanistan to be as painful as possible. We wanted them to learn a lesson, to pay a price in terms of their reputation and image. We wanted them to be more hesitant about invading another country. We didn't think much about post-Soviet Afghanistan, what it would look like. Our policy of supporting the fight against the Soviets was not informed by thinking about the post-Soviet outcome. We are still paying for that mistaken assumption.

The view at the time was that it didn't matter who went in to fight. We would support all groups as long as they fought the Soviets. This determined the way we worked with Pakistan, which controlled the covert assistance program. They preferred the more Islamic types. We said, "As long as they fight hard, who cares? They're Islamists? That's good. It makes it a fight between the Islamic world and the Soviet. That's even better. They're not only against the poor Afghans, which is 30 million or 25 million people. This looks like a war they're fighting against a billion people who are Muslims. If there is an Islamic dimension to the war, it is okay. The Soviets will pay a price in the Islamic world for it."

When they brought me to the State Department I argued very vigorously against this belief, thinking, Why are we making this assumption? How do we know what the future will be like? This has a distorting effect on what we do.

My colleagues said, "Zal, we know you're from Afghanistan. It is hard for you to take this because you were born there. You feel for the people there. But it is finished, Afghanistan is gone." This was the view of really smart people, like Zbig Brzezinski, who is a good friend of mine. He was not in that administration, but I talked with him because we were Columbia colleagues. They were categoric Afghanistan is done with. It is not going to come back from the Soviets.

Let me digress for a moment. You know he now says precisely the opposite. Precisely.

This is the problem.

You convinced him.

James Schlesinger, a brilliant guy who worked at RAND, threw a pen on the floor. He said, "Finished. Why are we wasting our time?" He also said that about Kuwait in a meeting when Cheney invited them to the Pentagon. He said, "Kuwait is finished." Gates is a smart guy. He said, "Regarding predicting the future, we have a perfect record: we have always been wrong."

When the Soviets started talking about leaving, we don't digest this development quickly enough. When we saw these indications, Gates, who was at CIA at the time, said, "The Soviets are lying. They were never going to leave. This is all a trick. They are announcing departure, but they're going to rotate forces." Even when [Mikhail] Gorbachev makes the "bleeding wound" speech or started his reforms, we don't process all kinds of indicators that maybe this is looking different than what we had assumed. Do we shift now that post-Soviet Afghanistan becomes the key? What happens to it rather than the Soviets being the issue? Should we cooperate with the Soviets to have a transition administration during the period that their influence is great? After that, we will both disengage, and we both won't be able to shape things.

It was very hard to make those adjustments in the mindset or the strategy that had brought about their defeat. You want us to change that? It is so hard to adjust. We more or less disengaged from Afghanistan. Without a post-war plan, the Afghans went to war against each other, leading to chaos, civil war, and destruction of Kabul, the capital. This didn't happen during the Soviet occupation. The Afghans with ties to different regional powers destroyed their own capital city. I thought it was one of the more painful experiences of my life.

When President Bush asked me to go to Afghanistan, I was very resistant, saying, "Mr. President, why me?" He said, "Zal, I think you need to go there." In any case, when I went there, I drove around the city and saw all the destruction, including ruins of the school that I used to go to, the home that I used to live. It was all gone, leveled. The Afghan faction in the civil war had just thrown rockets into the capital city. The rockets were old Soviet rockets, very imprecise. They killed thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children.

When the Taliban came in the name of collecting weapons, creating order—talib means student—they were a student movement. They were appalled by what in their view the warlords did after the Soviets. One was hopeful that maybe they were going to bring law and order. They said they would convene the Grand Afghan Assembly, called loya jirga, to select a government. It seemed like this could be promising. Given that we don't want to go in, nobody else wants to go in, this may be a promising alternative. This was their line until they came to Kabul. They changed. One saw that they were another extremist, backward-looking faction. I also then changed attitude toward them. It is on the public record. I wrote about these things as I adjusted my view. That is why I say that attitudes toward the Taliban evolved over time.

To return to the point of how much you know and what you think when a crisis occurs, I'd come into the administration with a view about what we needed to do in Afghanistan. We needed to find a way to encourage a change, not only for Afghanistan but also for our own interests. When I came to the government, I'd known that the Taliban had joined forces with terrorists and that al-Qaeda was based there. The Taliban were working with groups that didn't wish us well and didn't wish our friends in the region well. We were under-focused in the 1990s on this emerging threat, which we had in part helped create and then neglected to fix. My view was that this now was going to metamorphose into something big and that we were not paying adequate attention to this threat, at our own peril. That was the thesis of my last piece publicly on Afghanistan before I joined the administration. It argued that Afghanistan was becoming a big problem and that we were not paying enough attention to it. Byman and I then proposed six steps as to what should be done.

A lot of people after 9/11 said the administration had taken that paper and embraced it. They gave me a lot of credit. People wrote, "That is the plan." You can see the New York Times, NPR [National Public Radio], everyone saying, "Oh, this guy, nobody knows him, he is in the White House. He has written the plan and this is the plan. Bush has said, ‘Okay, let's do all of this.'" This wasn't true.

Did what had happened in Afghanistan cause you to rethink your "arm the victims" policy?

Of course, what's best depends on your alternatives. I always think the best thing is to take actions that make none of this necessary. If you face a situation where your vital interests are at stake, you go fight for it yourself if you have to. If your interests are important but not vital, you can't be indifferent to the outcome. Also, you have a moral issue—you have victims and you have aggressors. Going in yourself, if it is going to be very costly, is too high a price to pay given the level of your interests. You can use diplomatic statements, try diplomacy, but if that doesn't work, you need to do more. Sanctions may or may not work. But in your toolbox you have to have the option of arming of the victim. However, you have to finish it properly. I thought that this is what we didn't do well in Afghanistan.

I was favorable to arming the Mujaheddin because our interests were not great enough to intervene directly and risk a nuclear holocaust. Obviously, this was too high an involvement to risk. But to let the Soviets win was unacceptable. Afghans wanted to fight for themselves, to liberate their country, or to defend themselves. We got help from France to liberate ourselves. Why shouldn't we relate to that? In my view the decision to arm the resistance was not a mistake. It is a question of all the other things that we did and did not do. We made wrong assumptions about what would happen ultimately and then walked away from the end game. We washed one's hands and let chaos reign. That's where we created an opportunity for al-Qaeda as a non-state actor—or even as a quasi state actor. Al-Qaeda gave money to the Taliban. It gave military assistance. It gave technology. It helped the Taliban with rebuilding. Al-Qaeda provided military advisors. Rather than a state sponsor of terror, it was terror group sponsoring a state. It was kind of upside down. The United States didn't focus on this sharply enough, early enough. We didn't adjust that Afghan policy for the post-Soviet period. But that is an academic fight now. People are looking back at these decisions with new perspectives. Sorry if that was a little too long.

No, your words are the important part here. Going back just a little bit to this decision by the administration to rely on your counsel on these matters, to make you the representative and then later the Ambassador.

It happened, in my view, not because of what I had done before. That may have been a factor. More important was my role, and the administration's reliance on me, at the Bonn conference. Bonn was the start of a multilateral process for putting Afghanistan together after the toppling of the Taliban. We didn't want to take responsibility for Afghanistan ourselves alone. This is too big a problem. We wanted quickly to turn over sovereignty to the Afghans themselves and to get the world to help the Afghans.

James Dobbins was U.S. Special Envoy for Afghanistan right after military operations had started. He was given the assignment operationally. I was working at the NSC, and the NSC is supposed to be a nonoperational, advisory staff to the President. I had talked with Jim. He came to see me about Afghanistan because he knew I knew the country, besides my responsibilities at the NSC.

One of his responsibilities was to lead U.S. efforts in Bonn, where interested parties were to put an Afghan Government together now that military operations are proceeding well. At this point, it looks like the Taliban are not going to be around as part of the government. I was asked to help Jim if necessary. I think when he saw me interact with everyone, Afghans and the players globally, he came back from Bonn and said, "I don't want to do this. But your guy should be Zal because he knows these people and he knows how to operate."

That is to have you be the Special Envoy to Afghanistan.

Yes. Jim said, "You guys have to find a way to get Zal to be the Envoy." I said, "Look, I have a job already. I'm running the NSC Iraq review. The President needs daily support. Condi needs daily support." He said, "I'm just telling the management of the country what I think. The rest is up to you guys. I'm leaving." They were trying to get him to become Ambassador to Afghanistan.

Let's just backtrack.

I think that if I hadn't gone to Bonn, I would have just stayed at the NSC and not done any of these others. So that's where the change happened.

Were you surprised? The media reported at the time, in 2002, that you had not visited Afghanistan in almost 30 years.

More than 30 years. The last time I had gone to Afghanistan—

Were you surprised to be chosen for that role? Were there others who you thought, Gosh, why didn't they choose—?

I suppose the characteristics of someone that you want as a Special Envoy would be that the President or the Secretary of State, depending on whose Envoy you are, thinks you know the area and can deal with the problems. You can be helpful. They have to have confidence in you on those points.

Jim Dobbins, for example, had never been to Afghanistan. I had been at least 30 years ago, but he had never been there. Yet, he was regarded as a skillful diplomat internationally because he had dealt with similar problems. He had worked on Haiti. He had worked on Bosnia issues. He had worked on Somalia issues. So he was a guy who was sort of Mister Failed States. He knew how to be creative and work with others, not locally but also internationally. He worked with the UN. He worked with the Europeans. He worked with the Asians. He can think creatively about alternatives based on this experience. He is flexible: "If it doesn't work this way, what about this other way?" He went to Bonn to deal with Afghanistan without having ever thought about Afghanistan seriously. He was our first Envoy.

I would say, some would say, that it was unusual to send somebody to be an Envoy and then Ambassador to a country who was born there and had lived there for a while. Typically, this is not what we do. In fact, my reluctance to accept it was partly based on this fact. When the President asked me to be Ambassador, I said, "No, Mr. President. Afghans would think, They're sending one of our own back. How will they react to this? It may not be the best idea, Mr. President." He said, "No, Zal, I think you have to do it."

Ultimately, I said, "Let's compromise: I can be an Envoy along the lines of the Dobbins arrangement." Because of all the other responsibilities I had, this wasn't really a full-time envoyship. I had a lot of work to do regarding Afghanistan, but I kept my job at the NSC. I was still Senior Director and Special Assistant. Rather than reporting through Secretary Powell, this was to be an Envoy reporting to Condi Rice, I think, through the NSC.

As a result, I had to juggle my day-to-day responsibilities. I was spending a lot of time in Afghanistan helping the Afghans.

But as you said, you were also running the Iraq review after 9/11.

Yes.

What were your own thoughts about the possible linkages between Saddam and the events of 9/11?

There was no evidence of that linkage. We didn't see anything like that. There was speculation as to who would have an interest against the United States in that region that might have supported or helped. Saddam certainly made the cut that would wish us ill, but there was no evidence of that.

The reason in my view for Iraq becoming a focus after 9/11 was, rightly or wrongly, a change in thinking occurred, in the U.S. and in the U.K. This was particularly true in the mind of Prime Minister [Anthony] Blair, who had an impact on U.S. thinking. The view was that unattended and festering problems in this critical region—where there is a lot of extremism—have the potential to produce a bigger problem down the road. The very thing I argued when I was outside government about Afghanistan—that something big was developing and we're not paying enough attention to it—became a more prevalent view. This had turned out to be true in Afghanistan with al-Qaeda and this nexus of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Now, the perception was that Iraq is such a problem. It's a problem to which we're not paying adequate attention. This is a problem that needs to be dealt with. If we don't, it is going to be a bigger problem down the road because of the things we discussed earlier, including the reconstitution of WMD.

That view had a huge impact on the Iraq review. Prior to this review, we were talking about how you make adjustments to the no-fly zone and the sanctions and whether you arm some opposition. The view now as that we have to bring this to a head: either Saddam has to come clean on giving up on WMD, unambiguously and credibly and in a verifiable way, to give us the kind of access that will give people confidence that he has no WMD, or we've got to coerce him to do so, or we even have to get rid of him.

That's how, from all the previous discussions about limited options, the Iraq issue was transformed. The view was that this is the moment to resolve this issue decisively. We can't let it fester the way it has festered for the last ten years. I distinctly remember arguments along these lines in a memo from Blair to the President, which was distributed to everybody working on the Iraq review.

A memo of this sort came from Blair?

A letter, to Bush.

In the days or weeks—

After 9/11. The world is different now after 9/11. We need to think differently about these festering problems. Usually they say, "How do you manage it?" There are some problems we need to—

In the literature that exists, Paul Wolfowitz is seen as the greatest proponent of focusing now on Saddam. Is that the way you remember it?

In the discussion post-9/11, he had raised this issue—that we ought to consider that Saddam may be responsible for it and therefore focus on Iraq. This view did not find any kind of support. The consensus was that Afghanistan should be the focus. The proof existed that the 9/11 terrorists had been there and a lot of information supported the Afghanistan link. I think it is without the evidence of a linkage to Iraq that was convincing—there was this report of this one guy, [Mohamed] Atta, possibly meeting with Iraqis in Europe somewhere—but I don't think these things proved a strong connection.

But very quickly the focus came back to Saddam because by the end of November, once the intervention in Afghanistan appears successful, victory is—by December the President is instructing Tommy Franks and CENTCOM to begin developing plans for Iraq.

Sure.

So why does the focus come back so much to Iraq?

There was a strategic shift in the way one thought about threats after 9/11. Before, the motivation was the Iraq strategy is failing, containment is weakening, the no-fly zone has become more risky, sanctions are falling apart, and Saddam is reconstituting. What do we do to shore things up, to have a more effective strategy toward Iraq, or at least to bolster the current strategy? Rather than a new strategy, how do we make the old strategy effective? The debate was focused on those questions before 9/11.

Now, 9/11 throws that out of the window. What do we do? We can't allow Saddam's defiance to go on. We need a come-to-Jesus moment that demands that he give up the WMD programs, as required by UN Security Council resolutions and as Iraq agreed to do in the Gulf War ceasefire agreement. If he refuses to act, we're not going to play these games anymore—a little tweak here, a tweak there. He needs to not say the right things but rather to do the right things. We need to verify it. If he doesn't, we need to look at the option of using force to make this happen. It is too dangerous to allow this defiance to continue. Maybe the fact that the Afghanistan operation went well further strengthened this view—it seemed not only we should act, we can act. We can maybe move against Saddam within some reasonable cost parameters. That was also part of the debate, how much military action will cost and so forth. It turned out to be a lot more than anyone anticipated, obviously. Again, this shows how consequential are the assumptions that you make about the future. I was of the view, personally, that we ought to space our actions out, to finish Afghanistan in a more stable, skilled way.

Also, I was doing both of these. I was Special Envoy to Afghanistan. Karzai was constantly calling the President, saying, "Send Zal back, send Zal back." There are some conversations that I believe have been released where he said, "Please send Zal back." The President says, "What are we going to say to his wife because he has been out there for so long?" Karzai wanted my help with some of the challenges he was dealing with. I was also made Presidential Envoy to the Free Iraqis in 2002, while keeping my responsibilities for Afghanistan and while keeping the NSC job. I was made Ambassador-at-Large and Presidential Envoy to get the Iraqi opposition together politically. I am therefore thinking, Can we have a little more time for political preparations and planning? But in the administration a sense of urgency existed to clarify the situation in Iraq.

What is your assessment of where the President was in this process? You referred to the Blair letter—

I think the President shared that view. I don't know who came to that voiew first. The President and Blair obviously talked a lot. The U.K. was not part of my portfolio so I didn't listen to their phone calls, so to speak. That was somebody else's portfolio. But I think the President shared that view very strongly. He became a driving force for the clarification of the Iraq issue.

You got rather animated while you were discussing this, pounding on the table.

Yes.

Can we interpret that that the President is pounding on the table, "We need to get this done"?

I think it is a fair point.

Or is it Condi?

No, I think the President felt that we needed to deal with this issue.

So he is sort of ahead of the curve.

He is not ahead of the curve in the sense that he says, "I'm going to go tomorrow, God damn it." No, he wants the system to come up with how we do this. He demands—

Why more focus on Iraq than Iran?

There is a review of Iran policy going on, too. This is what any new administration tends to do—look at all the big issues and review them. I looked at the issue as larger than Iran. After 9/11, many took the view that this region was dysfunctional, that 9/11 was a product of these problems, and that we had to engage deeply in the region. I put myself in this analytic group. That is the way I thought about it when I was at RAND: We needed to have a center and think about this region very fundamentally and away from the day-to-day pressures of government work. I viewed the region as similar to the old Europe, so to speak. Not in the sense of Rumsfeld's distinction between "old Europe" and "new Europe" today. By "old Europe" I mean 18th-19th-century Europe, which was a dysfunctional and violent region of the world. Similarly, the Middle East has many problems. It has become the headache of the world. It is too important to be ignored. Therefore it is affecting, negatively, the interests of the world.

The Europeans took several wars—the Hundred Years' War, this war, that war, the world wars—and pressure from the Soviet threat to get them to get their act together. It also took U.S. leadership and commitment. As a result, Europe became a relatively stable region and quite prosperous. The Europeans are doing well. They're more prosperous than they've ever been. They're peaceful, and they're democratic. Meanwhile, the center of gravity of problems has shifted southward to the Middle East. The dysfunctional Europe has been replaced by the dysfunctional Middle East as the source of problems for the world.

Therefore, as the preeminent power, we have to decide what to do. It is our headache in a sense. We have commitments, and we have interests from oil to Israel, to nuclear proliferation, to terrorism, all that. So how do we deal with it? This was a real debate and discussion. Some asked, "Why us?" But the fact was that we are where we are. What do we do about it? There was the notion that we need a big strategy, with the world acting together, to pursue a transformation strategy. In this view, Iraq and Afghanistan are going to be pillars in this shift, to bring fundamental change to the region. Still, you can't eat the elephant all at once, you have to eat it a bite at a time. You don't use the same means everywhere—military invasion—although some outsiders would talk about World War III.

Some people outside of government were writing about doing a big sweep through the region. That was not the internal thing. Inside, the discussion was about changing the U.S. attitudes toward regimes that are not performing and about promoting democratization. The new view was that the dysfunctionality of regimes was leading people to extremism, which is feeding terror. You also need to settle regional conflicts and work on a long-term agenda. To deal with this set of problems, you had to make some choices. Afghanistan was an inevitable first priority. We had to defend ourselves and to respond to what had happened. Iraq is festering. However, if we have to act against Saddam, maybe this could be a catalyst to a broader transformation of the region over time, along with other things that we ought to be doing.

The President spoke a lot about these ideas, personally and passionately about democratization. The second inaugural essentially made this argument.

But there is a huge amount of criticism in the literature.

Right, of course.

Huge amounts of criticism about the decisions that were made in November and December of 2001. Many of the terrorist specialists, Peter Bergen writes with almost vitriol about the failure to finish the job in Afghanistan.

Sure.

So there is a "war against terrorism," but one of the big criticisms is that the focus on terrorism was lost and there began developing an incremental preoccupation with Iraq.

What I said before is I would have liked to have finished Afghanistan before we did—

Did you argue that at the time?

Yes, everyone knows where the argument went because we're all friends by now. We've been spending a lot of time together, and we're arguing in these endless deputies meetings.

Of course, I was in Afghanistan a lot at that time as a Special Presidential Envoy. I was often not even in the meetings because of the limits of technology. As it improved, I used to participate regularly. By the time I got to Iraq, I would participate in all the NSC meetings on Iraq via video. But when we got started in Afghanistan, even a secure phone call was sometimes not easy to do. I wasn't in all the meetings because of my commitment to be in Afghanistan a lot. Then, to be a Special Envoy for Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time, I used to be also on the road even more. I would be in London, in northern Iraq, in the Gulf to develop support for our policy.

However, the key point is that the Iraq agenda in my view was driven by the future potential threats of Iraq and perhaps by prospects of shaping the region strategically. The idea was that Iraq was a festering and dangerous problem that could no longer be ignored, especially after what we experienced on 9/11. We needed to present Saddam with an ultimatum to comply with his obligations. If he refused, we had to act militarily. At the same time we needed to address the dysfunction of the region, which was producing extremism, terrorism, and conflict. This will require a transformational strategy, including democratization. If we have to act against, Iraq, this could be a catalyst in this larger process of change.

Now, from a policy perspective, if you're a terrorist expert or if you're an Afghan expert, you could say, "God damn it, you focus on this and this alone." But you have people who say, "Look, I can't afford to focus on this alone. I have this wider problem to worry about, and I want to deal with this, too."

So who are those people arguing, "No, we don't have time to finish up this situation"?

I don't think people put it that way. There are those who say because we went to Iraq, Afghanistan got shortchanged. I have a mixed view of that myself because—and some of this has been written already—I was Presidential Envoy to both places.

After the U.S. intervention, there is a discussion about what to do with Iraq. Should we form a government quickly, as we had done in Afghanistan? This view was against taking responsibility for it ourselves as such. We are responsible but not in a direct running of the country. We work with the Iraqis, as with Karzai in Afghanistan, and we get others involved to help. Or should we run the country ourselves? This view argued for establishing an occupational authority to run the place, like we did in Japan or in Europe for a while. The debate goes back and forth on this. Some say one, some say the other. Sometimes the policy seems to be we'll do one rather than the other. We get a decision finally to have Ambassador [L. Paul] Bremer go to be the Envoy. For a while, until the Bremer announcement, the plan was for two envoys. I would go as a kind of Presidential representative of equal stature to Bremer to put a government together. Many thought I was more skillful at that. I know the players. I've been the Special Envoy. I've talked with Iraqis all the time. They seem to get along with me. They trust me. meanwhile, Bremer would make the trains run on time. He would ensure that there is electricity and water. He is a good manager. There is sewage in—

Infrastructure.

—the streets of Baghdad. The policy at that point was that we need to transfer power quickly to an Iraqi entity. I had been talking to Iraqis about this and various formulas were being discussed about how we could do this by putting together a good balance between internal and external people. Most of the Iraqis who were in the opposition lived outside the country. How representative were the? Who really knew? We needed to make sure that a truly representative assembly appoints an interim authority.

At the very last moment, a decision is made to go with Bremer alone, although both of our announcements had been cleared throughout the government. It is a last-minute change. It is quite disturbing to many participants in the decision. Colin Powell called me. He was quite surprised. He asked, "What happened?" I said, "Colin, you're the Secretary of State. How come you're calling me? I'm a mere Special Envoy." I knew him from the Pentagon days when he was the chairman. He didn't know. Condi didn't know either.

The President met Bremer before the announcement. In that meeting, Bremer convinced the President that having two Envoys isn't a functional system. It is reasonable to argue that two Presidential Envoys in the same space, working two different issues isn't going to work. He wanted to have the opportunity, if the President would agree, to do everything, including putting the Iraqi Government together himself. This was the Management 101 point of view, clear chain of command, and the President felt the most comfortable with that. He saw himself as a management guy, trained at Harvard Business School. He would emphasize that to us sometimes. I was appointed as Ambassador to Afghanistan, because of the principles of management, so to speak.

The President would—

The President came out of that one-on-one meeting saying, "Let's send Bremer." I think Colin talks about it—many books mention it. But that was a monumental decision in retrospect because it made a big difference in terms of the choice of how we handled Iraq afterward. Bremer's perspective was that we should run Iraq directly for an extended time. If they had sent me with him, my perspective and my mission, which the President supported, was to form a government very quickly. In this view, we didn't want to run Iraq.

My judgment personally, others may have different views, is that some of the problems that arose in Iraq, the level of violence and so on, were not inevitable. Some of the decisions we made early on had a big negative impact on the course of events.

We need to talk at length about some of those decisions but before we get to that, within the intelligence community there were many people, Paul Pillar of course—

Sure, I know Paul.

—has argued that there were very strong and persistent warnings about going to war in Iraq with an understanding that the post-military situation would be extremely difficult. Did you foresee those problems? Did you talk about those problems? Did it lead you or others you knew to give pause to this prospective military operation to get rid of Saddam?

We definitely knew. I reviewed the situation in Iraq in depth, taking lots of briefings, building up situation awareness and analytic perspectives, and listening to outside advice. You know, I'm at heart an academic, too. I like to get my mind engaged with a problem before I make a judgment on it. Sometimes it takes too long for some people. They say, "We don't have that much time." Then, as the Presidential Envoy, I got a chance to meet Iraqis in large numbers in conferences in London and then travel around to talk to them.

These are the exiles.

The exiles. However, besides meeting the exiles, I went into northern Iraq before our invasion to meet Iraqis, several times going into sort of enemy territory and meeting them also in Turkey and other places. I was beginning to get a sense of the place and its complexities. I was also a student of the history of Iraq. I knew how difficult the political terrain of Iraq could be. In Arabic, there is a famous saying about Iraq as the land of nefaq. This means that Iraq is not just the land of disagreement, which is too mild a term, but rather a land of conflict. Bringing people together is very hard, it is a land of conflicts. You could say it is a people of division. It is a land of conflict and struggle. This is Iraq's reputation historically.

A ruler had said, "I see that the only way to rule Iraq was to behead a large number." There is this very bloody and difficult impression. It would be unfair to say one was not aware of the challenge—

But that is not really the question. The question is, did awareness lead you to argue we should not take military action?

No. That did not lead me to say that. It led me to say that, first, we should not lose our focus on Afghanistan. Second, we should seek to induce cooperation from Saddam without military action. But assuming Saddam didn't cooperate—

No one wanted military action even if Saddam would "cooperate"?

I can't speak on behalf of everyone, I'm giving you my impression. I think if Saddam had cooperated—and it depends what time and what cooperation means, of course—then war could be avoided. At the same time, there may be a time that cooperation came a little late. He would have had to leave the country. At one point, the definition of cooperation became that he and his family had to leave and that maybe an interim authority would take over or maybe he would invite some Americans to come and inspect the places. That, I think, came just a few weeks before actually moving in militarily as a possible way out. Some Qataris and others went to talk to Saddam about doing something like that. He could resettle somewhere else. He and his family would be protected, but that could avoid the use of force.

I don't know how seriously he took the prospect of an American invasion. Sometimes, you get the impression he felt that no matter what he did there would be an invasion. Other times, I feel like he thought, America is just bluffing. It is going to be another one of these kinds of several days' worth of rocket and aircraft attacking. I just don't think at the bottom he took the interest seriously.

Going back to your question, I thought the intervention should happen a little later. If it happens, the plan has to be well prepared and involve a political dimension to it to deal with Iraq's difficult internal politics. That's why I felt we shouldn't be running Iraq. I had the clear, pronounced view that we ought to put a representative assembly together quickly and then have a government elected by the assembly.

As I said then, this was what the President supported. I gave speeches to this effect on behalf of the United States before the invasion. After the invasion, as representative of the U.S. in Iraq, there was a conference in Nasiriya, while military action was still going on. I landed in southern Iraq with quite a lot of Iraqis, and I gave a speech that the Wall Street Journal printed as an op-ed piece. I said that we had no desire, no intention, of governing Iraq and that we wanted to have an Iraqi Government formed very quickly to take over. Then, I went to a Baghdad conference, at which I said in a press conference after meeting with all the Iraqis, internal and external, that I was going to come back and work with them to convene a representative assembly to elect a government. I said that I hoped this could be done by the end of June. I even said we all should work to do that.

However, when Ambassador Bremer went, he decided that the United States would govern Iraq. There is a lot of uncertainty as to what happened. I think historians will have to dig into why the decision was made and where the decision was made, when the decision was made to say, "No, we will govern for a period ourselves."

So were you surprised that you weren't asked about that specifically, and after you made these speeches on behalf of the U.S. and the policy went in another direction, did you believe that hurt your credibility with the very parties with whom you were dealing?

But I was no longer responsible for that. As soon as Bremer went, I was not in the picture. I was asked by the President to come and see him alone, and I did go see him. He explained to me what he thought, the reason for his decision. In his view, it was a management issue. Then, he said, "Now I want you to go to Afghanistan as Ambassador." I was doing both countries until then. I would go as Ambassador to Afghanistan. My previous appointment as a Special Presidential Envoy is relatively straightforward. The President makes the decision, and he announces it. There is no role for the Senate. It is his personal privilege to do that. But being Ambassador has a huge process associated with it. You really become part of the State Department. You have to fill out the forms and more forms and then you have to submit yourself to the confirmation process. Maybe we're talking about late May or June when this begins. I shifted to focus exclusively on Afghanistan.

This decision did shock the Iraqis. Iraqis still talk about this. They were quite startled when Bremer arrived. He invites the Iraqis to a meeting and essentially tells them, "I'm going to be running Iraq and all of you are going to be my advisors." They said, "What happened to the promises made that you would form a government?" He said, "Now this is the policy."

This was the first of a number of consequential decisions. Some say there was always some tension inside between those who favored governing versus those who favored quick government formation. Another key question was how the decision was made, at what level, on the issue of dissolving the army? How was it made? Who made the decision? At what level of government? Similarly, how was the de-Ba'athification decision made? When was it made, by whom, and to what level did one have to go? How deep should this de-Ba'athification be? Then, there is the issue of the timing of the first election in Iraq. Should it occur when all parties had not agreed on the election or on what kind of system they would have? Should it be held when it would be boycotted by a significant part of the Iraqi population, the Sunni Arabs? Such decisions fed the insurgency and allowed the Sunni Arab area to become dominated by al-Qaeda for a while. As a result, we had to fight to bring them back into the political process.

All of those are critical decisions, issues that happened subsequent to the decision to appoint Bremer. Those answers are not entirely clear in the various books that people have written. It isn't clear as to how and when these decisions were made. I actually have no first-hand knowledge because I was no longer working on Iraq. The press reported that I was going to resign. Stories stated that I was so angry with the way this had happened that I was going to quit the government. I don't know who was behind those reports. It certainly wasn't me. The President had the right to do what he wanted.

That is certainly a big puzzle. No one seems to want to lay claim to it in the memoirs.

There is some exchange between President Bush and Ambassador Bremer in an indirect way. The President gave an exclusive interview, I think, for a book called Dead Right, in which the President said the policy was to have a government formed very quickly and to keep and reform the army. The President says in effect, "I don't know what happened. That was the policy." After the interviewer asks what happened, the President says, "You should talk to Steve Hadley. Maybe he can explain what happened." Bremer takes that comment as criticism and writes an op-ed in the New York Times, responding to this interview. He says he wrote a letter to the President explaining his plans and decisions and that he has the President's response to his letter. He therefore claims the President approved his actions.

But that's no way to make policy. These letters, I've received many of those, typically say, "You're doing great," or "I'm proud of you." These are not letters of policy, these are letters of appreciation. There was no substance to these letters. Bremer's letter is a little more substantive, but the President's essentially is a form letter that says, "You're doing great."

"Fantastic job."

Yes, "You're doing a great job, keep up the good work, God be with you." That sort of thing.

Before we move on to anything during your official period as Ambassador to Afghanistan, I wonder if you could talk to us a little bit about your interactions with the Kurds or with Ahmed Chalabi. The conventional wisdom is that those people played a pretty large role in our expectations about what would happen in Iraq, especially Chalabi, who has been nailed down as one of the advisors. You met with them at least once in 2003 I think and perhaps—

No, in 2002, I met with them many times. After I was appointed as an Envoy, I went to London and convened the Iraqi opposition to agree on a set of principles and a political roadmap. There were a lot of strong views held in Washington that one couldn't get them to agree to anything. The intelligence community in particular held a negative view but so did the State Department and others who had dealt with them. They said that these people would not agree to anything, that they are too divided. This is the image of Iraq. As I said, even culturally, the Arabs have this image of them, as these people of division and conflict.

And your view was different? Your view was we could really work with these people?

I was agnostic until I met with them. I had not dealt with Iraqis before. I was aware intellectually, academically of their divisions. During a video conference from London with the PC, including the Vice President, Condi quipped to me that if I could get the Iraqis to agree to anything, they would nominate me for a Nobel Peace Prize. You can see what a negative view everyone had. In fact, these are very difficult people to get to agree to anything. They were very divided in the course of the London conference, which went on for several days. In the end, they did agree to a set of principles and forming a structure, forming kind of a roadmap.

The issue in my mind was how representative this group of leaders were of Iraq. The Kurds were representative. I went to Kurdistan, which was governed by these are two big parties that still are dominant in the region. I just didn't know about the others. There were several Arab parties, led by Ahmed Chalabi or some others like Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. They were important individuals and groups, maybe. But how representative were they? Certainly the Sunni Arabs were not represented there.

The issue was how do you get a process that ultimately produces a representative assembly that then can choose an interim government. I thought that this was doable, though it was going to be difficult because we were building an agreement among Iraqis. But if we took the needed time and worked it, I didn't see why it couldn't be done. It would take time. We needed to be patient. The problem with us, if I had to point to a recurring problem, is that we would get very impatient. Our sense of time and their sense of time are very different. We would like something in 24 hours, but getting Iraqis to agree to something in 24 hours is something else. If you had the time and the patience—I'm not talking about an infinite amount of time—then it would be difficult but it was doable. As we demonstrated in London, the Iraqis reached an agreement, and they continued to expand upon it after other meetings they held over time.

Let me stop us here so we can go get some food and get ready for the afternoon.

[BREAK]

Mel, you were going to get us started.

I thought we would just continue with discussing Iraq and maybe divide it into decision making to go to war itself and decision making with regard to planning for the reconstruction or post-invasion situation. In terms of the decision making for the war, you were right there all the time on the National Security Council staff although at times in Afghanistan during parts of this.

And Iraq.

One of the most frequently stated things about decision making for the war in Iraq was that there never were meetings at which the key question, "Should we go to war in Iraq?" was framed and teed up for systematic deliberation. Is that a true statement? Was there ever an open discussion among the key decision makers that you saw, is it a good thing to go to war in Iraq?

I don't know whether the question was framed in those terms: "Is it a good thing to go to war against Iraq?" No one would have said it was a good thing to go to war. The framework, at least to the best of my understanding and recollection, is that the Iraq issue had to be resolved, one way or the other. I think there was agreement on this point, and it was discussed. I didn't see any dissent from it, including from Secretary Powell. There have been reports that he thought his views were not taken into account on the question of where the strategy of bringing this thing to a head was going. Of course, there were questions about the tactics. Should one go for a second resolution or not? Should one go one more time to do X or Y, including at the UN? Should one give an ultimatum to Saddam or not? Should one have Turkey on our side or not? Can one handle the contingency if Turkey doesn't go along, doesn't give access? What about Saudi Arabia? Wouldn't it be good to have Saudis on board? Can we do it if the Saudis are not on board? Can you do it with only small Gulf states supporting you, from a military/political point of view?

There was discussion and debate and differences of views sometimes on tactics. That would be natural. But I don't think, on the fundamental issue, that there was a real question about whether or not it is the right to go to war against Iraq. Maybe it wasn't stated that way, but it would be wrong to draw an implication that there was a difference of view on whether we needed to clarify this issue or to resolve the Iraq problem. It was not frontally focused on in this way, but there was no dissent on this point.

Sometimes, I did hear from people in the State Department that Secretary Powell's views may not have been reflected properly in my summaries. I would say that whatever he said is accurately reflected. You guys may have wanted him to say something else, but he didn't say that, so you have an internal issue that perhaps you need to get him to say it. There was a lot of respect for Secretary Powell. Nobody would have intentionally ignored what he said in the summary conclusions, for example.

I got these reactions sometimes when I circulated drafts of these summaries. I would send them to officials below the senior level i to get clearance. I'd ask, "Is this your understanding too, that this is the decision?" Some of them would say, "Secretary Powell said something like this." I'd say, "He really didn't say something like that. Let me read you the text of what he said." They'd say, "Our talking point to him was something different." But what is going on here is that a principal has chosen not to reflect the views of his bureaucracy.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that both Bill Burns in Near East Division and [Richard] Haass, head of Policy Planning, had some fundamental reservations about whether it was a wise decision to go to war. At one point in Richard Haass's memoir he even says, "I was going to talk to Condi Rice about this in July and she said, ‘Don't waste your breath.'" Did you see—

If you look up and down the government, you will find there are lots of views. This is a very complex society with a lot of smart people. But I am describing the process for decision making and the pinnacle of that is the President, of course, and the National Security Council. Those are really the ones closest to decision making, the President and the NSC. The others are inputs into the process. Richard and Bill are both my friends personally, and we started our careers about the same time so I've known both of them for at least 25 years. Both are very distinguished Americans, smart people. They would have had input, but neither has a seat at the table.

To be brutally frank, neither had a seat at the decision table because when decision making gets serious it is the under secretary level or the deputies who matter. Usually, Armitage attended on behalf of State at the deputies. If the views of others were not reflected, it was because they didn't convince Armitage and they didn't convince Powell to raise their points. That's how these views get to the table. The rest is just personal relations. There's nothing wrong with calling Condi to say, "Look, I would like to come as a friend to see you because we were at one time together at some institution." However, to Condi, that is not the State Department speaking. The State Department speaks when Secretary Powell or Armitage speaks.

So anyone at the State Department who opposed the policy had an internal issue. They should have gotten Secretary Powell or Dick Armitage to say, "State opposes going to war in Iraq for this, this, this reason. We think we should live with whatever the alternative is because of this, this, this." That did not happen. Anyone who says otherwise is just rewriting history, at least from what I saw.

Who did you sense were the most eager proponents to—?

I don't want to characterize this because that sounds like an unfair way of pigeonholing people. I told you of the worldview shift that occurred after 9/11. Before that, there was no desire to go to Iraq. I didn't talk to the President before that on this issue, but I believe that 9/11 brought that strategic change with a view to a need to close this chapter on Iraq. We need to do what we can to make Saddam either honor the commitments he made ten years ago in the agreements that ended the Gulf War. He had not honored those commitments. Therefore, he either has to honor them or we remove him. That was the kind of logic that drove the process. I think everyone—after 9/11—agreed on that view. I didn't see people fundamentally questioning that proposition. The tactics, yes, there were disagreements. I think Colin Powell wanted to go more to the UN, and he got his way often on those because that was his prerogative.

I want to ask a related question. Mel, if I'm interrupting your train on trying to get to Iraq let me know, but I think it is actually relevant. You just mentioned process. We haven't talked about the process as Condi Rice ran it.

Yes.

There has been criticism of that process not functioning terribly well.

Sure.

In fact you have already talked with us a little bit about a specific circumstance. The President is meeting with Paul Bremer about a decision with far-reaching implications that one might have expected in a regularized process the National Security Adviser might have been in the room.

In the meeting.

And either have directed the President one way or another or at a minimum would have communicated the results of that meeting. Can you tell us, from your perspective, how Rice saw herself in the process and was there confidence among the principals that she was serving the President well and their own interests well?

Based on my experience, the President had enormous confidence in her and trusted her and had a special relationship with her. He dealt with her in a very special way. It is true that some principals did not think the process was run the way it ought to be. Secretary Rumsfeld held that view. He would send these "snowflakes" to her, infamous snowflakes complaining that he doesn't think the President is being well served. It was a difference of views: do you present the President with stark options or try to forge a consensus? Perhaps with her understanding of the President, or perhaps without such an understanding, she would try to work out a consensus rather than presenting the President with options. Rumsfeld would have perhaps liked to present the options and fight it out.

There was certainly not complete happiness with the process and the way the NSC process worked. There was always a desire to see if there is a way to bridge differences or push, perhaps knowing what the traffic will bear, how this all should come out rather than presenting alternatives.

This is on the part of Secretary Rice presenting bridging options.

This is a philosophical issue also. Is it better to always leave the views of the alternatives as stark as you can and constantly go to the President? Your Secretary of Defense favors exactly this, narrowly defined. Your Secretary of State exactly that. Or is it the job of the NSC advisors to see if there is a way to narrow differences. You don't go every day to the President. It would look like the principals can't work together, and the President has to always decide things. I just don't know. Obviously, some mix is the best. Sometimes the President has to decide on some issues, but you can't take everything to him every day. There's a logical reason to find some middle ground between the various views that can work.

Sometimes some people don't like that. They see that as not serving the President if you are trying to work out something that dissatisfies both sides. I certainly felt sometimes that my view should go directly to the President and that he needed to decide the question. Why should these other guys have a say about something? It happens that sometimes we feel strongly about something, but yet the system has its own logic. How can you best serve the country and the President? What are his preferences? But there was dissatisfaction with some of the NSC process, yes. I heard it the most from Secretary Rumsfeld's side, although I'm sure there were instances of unhappiness on the part of the State Department as well as others.

But the relevance, back to Mel's line of questioning, is that one might assume that with a decision of this historical gravity, to go to war, there might have been a plainly defined process by which that decision was reached that at least within the inner circle was relatively transparent.

I think it would be, at least from where I sit, although I wasn't senior enough and I wasn't in every decision making process, given my responsibilities. They created a special deputies committee on the side for Iraq contingencies. It was restricted. Not everyone who was a normal member of the deputies committee participated in those to deal with the Iraq contingency. There were lots of PC NSC meetingss. There may have been smaller meetings with the President and a few other senior leaders that I was not involved in. So I'm not really the right person to answer your question comprehensively.

It is the President or somebody at that level that you need to focus on for this answer. From where I sat, there were lots of meetings on Iraq. The government was preoccupied largely with the two issues I dealt with, and sometimes I felt that there were too many meetings. Afghanistan and Iraq were both very busy portfolios after 9/11. My sense is everyone had the opportunity to raise issues because there were so many meetings. Someone could say, "Mr. President, I'd like for a minute to raise the fundamental issue…." If that is how they felt about it, no one would have thrown him out of the room. These are all quite accomplished people. They're not shrinking violets—Powell, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and others. They weren't some timid bunch of folks. If anything, the President was less experienced although he is Commander-in-Chief. By position, he is the most powerful guy in the room, but by experience and knowledge of these areas, these others were more experienced. I give the President credit for surrounding himself with people who were quite accomplished. He didn't feel intimidated by them. They could have raised this issue if they had wished to do so.

Even I would raise questions with the President. I would sometimes say, "No, Mr. President, I don't think this is right." He would even say to others, "I favor this, but Zal says he doesn't agree with it." It was his style. One didn't feel intimidated. I didn't feel intimidated, though I was a far more junior person. People did not think, You'd better not say something because the President is going to— That is how I would reflect on it. It may not be a satisfactory answer but—

Do you see a difference between your explanation that 9/11 upended the strategic view of the world and therefore this view toward Iraq and what should be done and those who would say that the people who had decided previously that they wanted Saddam removed—and I'm thinking back to the briefing book and the reference to the letter signed I think by you and Donald Rumsfeld during the Clinton administration to remove Saddam. So for people who say there were people like Rumsfeld who wanted Saddam removed, and 9/11 provided that opportunity.

That may be a fair statement, but I just don't know if I can see that connection. I have to tell you that the letter was signed in the context of these discussions about the Iraq Liberation Act, which was passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton. I felt strongly about it. However, we were talking about supporting the opposition, not the invasion of Iraq. This involved using some $25 million or some excess money to support the opposition.

Seventy-five million.

Seventy-five million, I don't know how much. It was in that context. I'd have to say that, as a signer of the letter, when I was asked to take charge of the Iraq review, upon coming to the NSC, invasion was not an option on the table. It wasn't that we had pushed it, those of us who wanted regime change, or put it on the table, and that the President then rejected it. After 9/11, we did not say, "Oh, boy, do we go in now? Now we can push this again, maybe we'll get an open door." That's not how it happened. Before 9/11, no one pushed for an invasion. After 9/11, no one treated this tragedy as the great God-sent opportunity to say, "Let's go and invade Saddam." However, I can see from the outside how it might look.

Rumsfeld signed the letter, but his preoccupation in the review and the NSC and other meetings was the no fly zone. He would say, "We've got a problem with this no-fly zone. He is getting better, he is getting aggressive. He could get lucky if we don't change. Maybe we should do fewer no-fly zone implementation missions, reduce the chance that we could get hit or do it differently, or we should send a message to Saddam to stop doing this, challenging us." From where he sat as Secretary of Defense, that was all he was pushing for. Despite my personal relations with him at that time, I can say that that was his preoccupation. Wolfowitz may have had other views on arming the opposition.

Again, when you have the Secretary and his deputy in the meeting, it is the Secretary who represents the department. In the case of Rumsfeld, that was unambiguous. He didn't want anyone else speaking for him. Powell's preoccupation was the sanctions, that's all, the smart sanctions he was thinking about and pushing for. Others had other options to look at, including possibly arming the group or promoting a coup. Those were the four serious options. The two actions we were going to take—figuring out what to do about the no-fly zone, and what to do about the sanctions—were agreed upon by everyone. These others were still percolating, in discussions about pros and cons, not ready for prime time, too early to take them to the President before 9/11 happened. That is how I would characterize it. But I can see from the outside how it looks.

During 2002 were you yourself focused on coordinating thinking and planning about so-called Phase Four?

That was a divided responsibility. NSPD 24, which the President signed on 20 January 2003, turned everything with regard to Phase Four. However, there was one proviso. It said that with regard to politics and forming the postwar government of Iraq, the Department of Defense could only act in coordination with the President's Envoy for Free Iraq. That was the only thing on which they had to coordinate with me. A shop was set up in the Pentagon, with General [Jay] Garner ultimately coming to do Phase Four.

Prior to that, and even going beyond that, there was a division of labor. I had the lead from my shop on the politics, coming up with an approach to government formation and taking the lead on helping implement that part if we were going to form a government. I held a series of conferences and then developed options for a postliberation council. This was based on the lessons of Afghanistan regarding the role of the UN and the role of others. We consulted with the Arabs, with allies, and so on.

Elliott [Abrams] and Robin Cleveland were given responsibility, if I'm not mistaken, to think about the humanitarian issues. Frank Miller was a Special Assistant and Senior Director coming from the Pentagon to think about security issues. Frank had very good relations with the military, having been a senior person at the Pentagon earlier. From the NSC point of view, this was the division of labor within the staff but with the Pentagon increasingly being the dominant player. State not playing as big a role, although in my portfolio of politics they were heavily involved with me. Ryan Crocker, who has become much better known since then, was my colleague. He went with me on all my trips to the region along with several more junior people from the State Department.

In some of my meetings with the opposition, the Pentagon was very interested to be there, too. We had a number of Pentagon officials participating. Bill Luti was the Deputy Under Secretary who wanted to participate, and CIA would have people participating in the meetings. I had some Agency people on my staff, too. Because of their knowledge and relationship with the opposition, they would be there. We had a team that worked with me on the political track.

Were you worried that planning was not advancing commensurate with the military planning itself? There has been a big inquiry on the British side, you can go to the website.

Yes.

Every single one of the British diplomats says every time they came to the United States and went back, the Ambassador to the UN was constantly saying to the British Government, "The Americans are not planning enough for the post-invasion stage" all through 2002. Were you thinking, Our planning is not advancing effectively? Were you personally worried about this?

Again, I was on the political track. I had thought that there was a bit of schizophrenia about whether we should form a government or rule ourselves for a period and then slowly transfer authority to Iraqis as they become ready to assume responsibilities in a phased way. This had gone back and forth. But I had felt that at the end, before the war, we had come clearly out. There were ideas and plans and concepts for implementing the decision to go for a government formation quickly. This was viewed as the best way to go. The experience of Afghanistan had been seen as very positive. While Afghans are also seen as very difficult to put together, that approach had worked well. The transition from Mullah Omar to the Afghan interim authority was seen as a success. People said, "Wow, this is a lot better than anyone could have expected. This is the way it should go."

I think there were people in the Pentagon and elsewhere who supported the rapid creation of an Iraqi government. The President was very clear, repeatedly saying that this is the policy.

Among the Iraqi exiles with whom you were interacting in 2002, who were the ones who most impressed you, who you thought the U.S. Government should work most closely with?

I was very impressed with Massoud Barzani in the Kurdish region. When one talked with him, one got a clear sense of what he wanted and where he stood, and when he gave his word he was true to it. I regarded him quite highly. I thought [Jalal] Talabani, who became the President of Iraq after Saddam, had a very unusual ability to work with a lot of people with very different views and different connections. He was a good bridge-builder, a networker, a facilitator of good relations. I think the New Yorker once did a profile of him, and it showed him engaging in the Middle Eastern tradition of kissing on both cheeks, starting with me, then Rumsfeld, and so on all the way to [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad. So this is a guy who can work with a lot of people with different views. Those are the two Kurdish big leaders.

With regard to the Shi'a leadership, I had gotten to know Ahmed Chalabi since the '90s, when he used to come to the United States a lot. He's a very smart person, extremely capable intellectually. We were uncertain about his base of power. Did he have any real support? We could not know until we went to Iraq. Access to people inside Iraq was difficult. The Kurds you could weigh—because they had a population that was accessible. Hakim came from a distinguished cleric family, which led one of the major Iraqi movements but which was based in Iran. He was forced to go to Iran, but he also had developed very strong relationships with the Iranians. He had developed a militia that at one time had been a part of the Revolutionary Guards of Iran and had fought against Saddam on the side of Iran. He had nevertheless significant support among the Shi'a exiles in Iran and among the Shi'a inside Iraq. There was Ibrahim al-Jafaari who was the head of the Dawa Party. He was a medical doctor, who lived in London before the intervention. He became the second Prime Minister—and the first elected Prime Minister. Dawa was also a religious Shi'a party. Both Hakim's party and the Dawa Party were religious parties, which limited their appeal to the Shiite community. Neither were national parties because they were based on a religious sect.

Ayad Allawi, who had been a Ba'athist earlier and then moved against Saddam, had cross-sectarian appeal. He is still there now. He won the last election, securing the largest bloc in the parliament. He favored the coup option before the U.S. intervention and wanted to work with the Iraqi military more. He was close to our government, as was Chalabi. Different parts of the government had different kinds of relations with these guys.

There were younger people—the second generation of Iraqis—who were impressive. There were three younger generation people among the Kurds who were particularly impressive. [Nechirvan Idris] Barzani, Hoshar Zebari, and Barham Salih. They were much more educated, more worldly than their more senior leaders in some ways. Similarly, on the Arab side, there were some very impressive younger figures.

Our access to the Sunni Arabs was much more limited initially. Before the intervention, we had access only to a couple senior people, one of whom was the successor to the King of Iraq. The last king was overthrown in '58 and one of his successors was quite worldly, living in London in very beautiful circumstances. He was interested in playing a role and went back to Iraq. He didn't find much resonance in the electoral politics. There was also a former Foreign Minister of the Saddam regime, Adnan Pachachi, who lived in Abu Dhabi and who was a Sunni. They were among the key figures at that point.

There are people who think that we selected Karzai in the case of Afghanistan—that he was the American choice. That's a good story but it is quite wrong. We knew Karzai—I and others knew him personally. But that's not how he rose to prominence. After the overthrow, when our Special Envoy was traveling into Afghanistan, he and Abdullah Abdullah, who later ran against Karzai for President and who was the Foreign Minister of the Northern Alliance, began to talk about the future, about what kind of Afghanistan should come after the Taliban. It was Abdullah Abdullah who said that Afghanistan needed a member of the Pashtun ethnic group, which is the largest ethnic group of Afghanistan, to be the President. His President at that time, Mr. Rabbini, is a Tajik. Abdullah said that putting a Tajik in that vote was not going to work. He stressed that if you want to put Afghanistan on the path toward stability, that is what you need. Dobbins followed up with Abdullah about it. He said, "Which Pashtun, for example? Who?" Abdullah put Karzai at the very top. He said, "This is a guy we can all work with. He is not ethnically prejudiced. He is a Pashtun, and this is the largest ethnic group. But all of us can work with him." Jim took note of Abdullah's view and then started to ask other Afghans and officials from other countries in the neighborhood about Karzai. Everybody said, "Yes, he seems like a good guy, we can work with him."

With regard to Iraq, we didn't have Preferences about particular leaders as a government, although some individuals might have had preferences of their own. Individuals had friendships and relationships, but there was no government decision to install X or Y as leader of Iraq. As in the case of Afghanistan, the plan was to get the Iraqis together, and see who can generate the kind of response and has the background to be accepted broadly across the various groups.

My personal view was that among the exiles, as symbolic President, Talabani probably would have the best shot. I saw in him the ability to work with everyone and anyone. That is a symbolic position. This was a personal judgment, not a position of the government to put him in power. In fact, we hadn't been that enthusiastic about him. The political analysts, seeing the dynamics, the Prime Minister was unclear who to—

So the prevalent notion in a lot of the literature is that Chalabi was our choice, our favorite, that we moved him quickly from Kuwait into Iraq, then physically moved him to Baghdad. So he was there early on. He was our focal point. You're disagreeing.

Totally. I'm not saying that some people in our government did not like him and have a friendship with him. The same was true of some people outside our government. There are distinguished Americans who had good relations with him, like Richard Perle, for example, who is a good friend of his, and others. Chalabi had a few people who were part of a U.S. training program. We had trained very extensively in Hungary. David Barno, who later became my colleague in Afghanistan as the commander of our forces, was in charge of that training. The Pentagon did move him from Kurdistan not to Baghdad but to Nasiriyah, which is to the south. Initially, he was kind of an exile in Nasiriyah. I actually saw him in Nasiriyah when I went to have that conference. He was somewhere in a compound with Iraqis.

But that's just the point. In some of the books this is talked about and then suddenly he moves from Nasiriyah to Baghdad.

So everybody else rushed to Baghdad. If you look at the arrival of people in Baghdad, certainly they all were there before I got there. The Kurds got there. The pro-Iranian forces got there. They were all there, even those who did not wish us well. The Iranians, of course, were perhaps happy about us getting rid of Saddam, but they did not wish us well certainly. They were telling their people to take advantage of it, not to oppose it. The idea was not to support it but take advantage of it. They were telling their people, "How quickly can you get to Baghdad?" That's the seat of the government.

Sure, if you took a poll of the State Department, I think Chalabi would not have ranked high. If you took a poll of the Pentagon, maybe below the Secretary, he would have ranked high among people like Wolfowitz. I don't think Wolfowitz ever made the point to me that we should make sure we get Chalabi. Also, the under secretary, Douglas Feith, maybe, personally knew Chalabi. The Agency would not have favored him. There was a negative view of him in the Agency. But I think he had had a meeting with the Vice President and met with others who were in the briefing. If we were committed to Chalabi, I would have been the guy to be told, "Make sure, Zal, get this guy on top." This never happened.

That's the important point I want to establish for the oral history.

Never.

You are the person.

That they would have had to talk to about this to me.

Right.

Because I had control on the ground of this political process.

That's the key point. You are the key player on the ground.

Right, on politics.

And, for the record, you are saying that you were not favoring Chalabi. Your main goal was to facilitate—

A meeting that was representative. My point was to get a representative meeting and to work to get a reasonable formula for government formation. The exiles would argue they were representative of the Iraqi people. I would say, "I don't know." I needed to find a way that I could have some degree of confidence that we held a representative meeting, and we would let this group choose the leader. I believe my view strongly. I argued this point in the interagency meetings with others who wanted to have a period of occupation. I would say, "Why do we want a period of occupation?"

This is one of those fundamental questions about the war, like the one you asked, is it a good idea or not? Why do we want to have a period of occupation? We are liberators, we are not occupiers. I would say if that's our logic, we should not occupy Iraq. They would say, "We need to be in control because we need total freedom of action and because we may want to go anywhere in Iraq, do anything we want, to make sure we're certain what is going on."

That's coming from the Defense Department?

For example.

Defense wants—?

If you read the writings of those in Defense, they all say, "No, we didn't want to have an occupation, we all wanted the liberation of an Iraqi Government." But I think different views existed at different levels of Defense. My judgment was, and I made the case repeatedly, that the rapid turnover of sovereignty worked in Afghanistan. We are not running Afghanistan. We're not occupying Afghanistan. We're not the Government of Afghanistan. Yet this Afghan Government, which reflects the will of the Afghans and was formed through a legitimate process, needs our help on military matters, financial matters, diplomatic matters. In fact, the President can't travel without our help. Yet, he is the President. His people have to go talk to him, complain to him about water not being there, garbage not being collected. They don't come to me saying, "Zal, God damn it, you Americans, look what you've done. You came to this country. Did we invite you? No, you came on your own and now nobody collects my garbage." I can say, "Go talk to your President. I gave you the chance to have a free government. The rest we'll help with but it is not my responsibility. You have a government."

Yet, on all key matters, the President of Afghanistan does listen to me because he knows he needs me. Why take the responsibility of being the occupier? It makes no sense to me why we would take on that role.

That was my logic. The President said, "I agree with Zal."

And in our discussions previously you find almost nobody who expresses an interest post facto in establishing an occupation.

So how did this happen?

Yes, that's all I want to know.

God didn't send Moses or somebody to say, "Go occupy." We decided to do the occupation. All those who supported it are now saying, "No, I wasn't in favor of it. Remember, Zal, I told you that we were in favor of liberation."

The reasoning of those who favored occupation was the following, I think. First, some people wanted total freedom of action, thinking that if you have an Iraqi Government it will interfere with decision making. Iraqis might tell us, "You can't do this, you can't do that." Second, we want to make sure that the Iraqis are to rule themselves. We don't want to prematurely transfer things to Iraqis. They have critical oil issues, security issues. Third, the Iraqis are in fact not ready to run their own government. I would say, "How did we decide the Afghans were ready? What is the logic of this readiness? Did the Afghans have a Parliament ready to elect a new government and these guys don't?" So we had good arguments. It just went back and forth.

To return to your question, there was certainly no guidance to me from the President, the Vice President, the National Security Adviser, the Secretary of State, or the Secretary of Defense to put any particular individual in power No one said, "Zal, put your finger on the scale and move the process to produce X." I have to say that we could have put our finger on the process and that we could have influenced the outcome. It would be naive to think we couldn't shape and influence things. Of course we could have done so. We were occupying a country with military forces. We have money and all the rest. Certainly, we could have influenced the political outcome. But there was no such guidance. There was no guidance on Karzai either. The idea of Karzai as chairman of the interim government came from the Afghans, and then we helped to make it happen with the UN.

So you were there inside Iraq during these first weeks after the war.

I was. After liberation.

By almost every account that exists there is incredible chaos in the country, incredible insecurity.

Right.

You're there. Are you writing back to National Security Adviser Rice, "This place is chaos, there is huge insecurity here"? Charles Duelfer who is also there—

Duelfer is a little later, I think.

No, not in that capacity, but he is there at the time and he writes in his memoir.

What was he doing at that time?

He is there in May, I forget the exact—

I don't know. But he did go as an official—

He is there in May and he is saying, "We have lost the situation here. It is so incredibly preposterous and insecure." Were you thinking that and writing that at that moment in time?

I wasn't there the whole time. I went there twice. The first time was for the Nasiriyah conference. I went in the morning and left in the evening, and I didn't go to Baghdad. It was just a day in Nasiriyah, flying in from Doha. Then I went in late April to do the Baghdad conference. I went with General Garner and was there a few days. I even reported to the President, who was interested about what was going on in Baghdad now. He wanted to know, "So what's the story?" It even got in the press, in Newsweek. I don't know who told them—I certainly didn't—as to what I had told the President about the situation in Baghdad.

I found security not so bad frankly. I walked on the streets of Baghdad, and I bought ice cream for the kids. I could go around the city with not very heavy protection for me at that time. When I went as Ambassador—

It was totally different.

It was a very different environment.

When I say "chaos" I don't mean that Americans were being shot at. I mean that the internal situation—

Okay, I'll come to that.

There was no safeguarding of munitions depots. There was no safeguarding of Ministry buildings.

Right. Some of that had happened earlier, when we saw the infamous statement by Secretary Rumsfeld saying "Stuff happens" and when there was the looting of the museums. It was on world television. We saw people going inside, bringing things out, looting. That had happened already when I got to Baghdad. My assessment was after that period.

What I saw, and reported to the President and others, was that the situation was very bad in terms of Iraqi complaints. I didn't go everywhere in Baghdad, but I met a lot of Iraqis. I began to get a sense of the domestic dynamics, like the lack of electricity, the sewage not working. You could go on the street and see sewage all over the streets. There were shortages of supplies of goods. Government services had collapsed. Iraqis were saying, "Either you establish a government or, as an occupying power, even if you haven't declared it yet"—we hadn't declared occupation—"you need to own up to this. You need to provide the services. We didn't invite you. You came and now you have the responsibility."

I'm not saying everything I told the President. It may have been more graphic, in detail, as to what I had heard from the Iraqis. My report startled him.

This was a face-to-face meeting?

Yes. After I had come back.

His body language?

His body language. I believe the situation was one of the factors that made him think about replacing Garner, whom I liked. We needed somebody with much stronger management skills to assist the Iraqis in dealing with these material problems that we, as Americans, should be able to help with. Electricity, water, power, sewage, these are things we should be able to deal with. My sense is that he got the impression that Garner was a good gentleman, a nice guy, grandfatherly, but that maybe this is too much for him, that he is not on top of things. Also, he doesn't brief well. That was the sense, he doesn't brief well. He couldn't say, "On day one I do this, on day two…." He has forgotten Management 101. You set priorities, and you have a plan to address them. You're given timelines, and you can then report on them on a weekly or daily basis. You should be able to say, "I achieved this task, Mr. President, now I'm moving on to this other task."

So that's what the President liked?

That was his style. He just wants to know the priorities and the plans. What are the timelines? Are we achieving those? He gave you a lot of leeway. He wasn't after you to second guess you about what you think the situation is or is not. He deferred to you on those things. But on the things you have signed a contract with him about, he wants reports on results. You need to be able to tell him that you will do this and then you'll do that and you'll do it in this way.

So that's that management style you mentioned. We've heard from other people that the President wanted you to get to the point.

Very quickly.

And move on.

Move on, not linger.

Was it the same here?

And he believed that General Garner didn't brief well. He thought that he was a gentleman, a nice guy. But he was kind of too, "Well, we'll do this and then." It was too vague. It was the timeline—the when—that was missing. He thought he needed someone—

Did you ever feel the President was cutting you off before you could explain what was happening?

He did, but I would say, "Mr. President, I'm not finished yet." There was never a problem. "I'd like to go back to what we were talking about, Mr. President, because I think it is very important for you to understand what I'm doing." I would say, "I do need an opportunity to explain. And I don't agree with you." People in Washington sometimes are sitting making judgments about things or events that they know very little about. I'd say, "Mr. President, just wait a minute." I have to tell you he liked that. Sometimes he would tell me, "Zal, I was just checking whether you thought this thing through."

This was in the Oval Office?

No, video conference in Baghdad.

Video conference because you were—

I was in Baghdad or Kabul. I had my own judgment about directions I was given at times. The President was under tremendous pressure. I sometimes thought things needed more time to be cooked, and he didn't have the time because of the pressure of the domestic situation. I appreciated that. To be told, "Look, you know what the situation here is. We need to get something done on this." I would say, "I need more time, Mr. President. We can get something if you want by the deadline that has been set, but that isn't going to be as good as what we need to have. If you want me to proceed, you need to be prepared to accept that." Sometimes when you rush it, you aren't necessarily going to get the best decision or the best outcome.

Sometimes they will say, "Get it done. We don't have time." As long as both sides understand what is going on, that's fine. I had no problem with that, but I wanted to make sure he and other people understand the consequences.

I wonder if we might go to the earlier time period for just a minute. I certainly don't want to cut off further discussion about Iraq from my colleagues. I think it might be helpful for us to get a more concentrated portrait of what you actually were doing in Afghanistan. What did you find on the ground there? What were your biggest problems? What were you reporting to authorities back in the States and were you finding Washington responsive to what you needed?I get the sense that you're reporting back to the White House. Did that ever create problems for you with the State Department?

No, there is no issue once you're Ambassador. I think it would have been an issue more when I was an Envoy. My approach was to have somebody very senior from the State Department, like Ryan, be my deputy to make sure my meetings were reported to the Secretary. As an Ambassador, you have multiple reporting issues. One is that the Embassy does its business mostly by cables. For every meeting that you have with senior officials that is worth reporting on, there is a note taker and they write cables. Wikileaks has made many of them available to the general public. I have written thousands of cables in my period of reporting, of different levels of classification, to "feed the beast" in Washington. Everybody is waiting to get these cables to learn what the meeting was about, how did it go, what did you say, what did they say. The foreign service is essentially trained to read talking points from Washington telling our counterparts that this is what we want, and then to get the other guy or gal to respond and report back what was said.

The task that I was supposed to focus on differed during my time as Envoy because we had an Ambassador in Afghanistan soon after the government was formed. The press usually described me as the first post-Taliban Ambassador. No, I was the second one. The first one was a professional diplomat, Robert Finn, who is at Princeton now. He was the first Ambassador. Crocker was our Charge for a few weeks initially in Afghanistan. It was Crocker who reopened the Embassy officially when he was Charge. I was there in Kabul, but I was the Presidential Envoy, not a State Department person. Colin Powell came to open the Embassy, and I participated in the ceremony. But they had their responsibility, while I had mine. I used to go on special missions to get certain things done. I had the authority and prestige that came from being the President's Envoy.

As Envoy, I was tasked with helping the Afghans make the whole shift from interim government to the transitional government, to get Emergency Loya Jirga to agree on a transitional government. I was tasked with helping Afghans develop strategies and plans to deal with regional leaders and warlords, to start building state institutions, to create more political balance in the cabinet and security ministries, to start building up a national army and national police, and to begin programs for the militias. However, the day-to-day reporting on what is going on, meeting with ministers on various programs, that was the Embassy job.

Once I was asked to go as Ambassador, it was my style to use the few months you have to get confirmed to develop contracts, so to speak, with the President or the leadership. In this process, I would seek to get everyone's agreement on the definition of the problem and the strategy and plan to address it. I would develop a briefing on what the problem is, what the state of play is, what our goals are, and what I am going to do to address those issues. What is my strategy for it? What do I need to get those things done, resources and otherwise? I would ask, "Do you agree with this? If you don't agree, let's go back and forth so we have clarity on it."

Usually, when you are in the process, officials in Washington all agree with you—they want the fool to go out there. Once he is out there, they believe, he is under our control anyway. I learned later on that this is their mindset. At least with my approach, I could always refer to that document—that contract—when you do things and they disagree with you. I would say, "Remember, we agreed on this action. I have it here on page 33. Also, I have a resignation letter ready in case you don't."

When I went to Afghanistan as Ambassador, the first task was to assist with the Constitution of Afghanistan. I helped both Iraq and Afghanistan with their constitutions. In Iraq. too, my first task was to get them to agree among themselves on the draft constitution. I offered bridging formulas when they differed among themselves, options. We're pretty good at that role as Americans. We think very practically. You think this doesn't work? What about this? You don't like that, so what about this other thing? You can facilitate this process because local leaders can get very much tied to their positions. You can see five different ways to cut this thing or multiple ways to make sure human rights issues are dealt with or women's issues. Because these are very important for us, we worked hard to find ways that ensured they were respected and protected in the constitution.

There were so many other issues, because we were heavily involved in both countries during the period of my responsibility. We could take a long time to talk about them. In Afghanistan, the big issue was the Constitution, then the warlord strategy implementation, which was a very tough one for us. There were the elections for President of Afghanistan, the whole strategy for how do you build an infrastructure, security, and Pakistan. There were all the very big issues.

Could I ask about that Constitution-building process? That is immensely important.

You've seen recently some people have written about them. Congressman [Dana] Rohrabacher, the chairman of one of the committees of the House, doesn't like the Afghan Constitution, thinks it should be a more federal system. He believes that we erred in imposing a centralized Presidential system on Afghanistan. We didn't impose it, that's the only problem with that statement.

In your description a moment ago you say on the one hand that your role was to facilitate their discussion and help them see compromises that they might not otherwise be able to find.

And meet deadlines. That was the other thing. The President wanted to meet deadlines. We thought the sooner they deal with some of the issues, the better. That was the other thing.

Then on the other side you mention that there are certain "must haves," like a certain level of respect for women's rights as we define it or human rights in certain terms. Did you ever wonder whether that was a problem for the U.S. to be expecting certain things to be in the Afghan national Constitution?

And particularly the religious, the role of Islam and human rights in the Constitution?

No, I don't feel that way. First of all, some of the things we were talking about are not only American or Western ideas, but rather are universal values or rights. Afghanistan and Iraq are subscribers to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They are signatories, and Afghanistan signed up to it long before we came into the picture.

Second, there are powerful forces, numerically, in these societies who want those rights protected. Our role is to make sure those voices are also heard rather than listening only to those with guns sitting at the table. These civil society groups, some of them are not well organized, are important. I used to be besieged by women in Afghanistan and Iraq who wanted to make their views known to me. In Iraq, at one time, they had a lot of rights. If you look at the 1964 Constitution of Afghanistan under the King, they had a lot of rights. If you look even at Saddam's Constitution, women's rights were quite advanced. I had a lot of support from locals who wanted me to ensure they had a seat at the table. However, I wouldn't say that if you don't do X, Y, and Z, I'm going to use force against you, or I'm going to cut off assistance to you, or I'm going to put you on a blacklist of the United States. No, we'll have a conversation on this as to why yes, why no, how do you explain this. My counterparts had their own tricks and games in these negotiations, too. Some objected to my arguments out of genuine belief, while some were instigators who were trying to disrupt the process. They would give emotional speeches about how "these are not our values" and so forth.

But constitutions are national compacts, and forging national compacts means that key groups have to come to an agreement and understanding about values and the rules of the game. This was, for some of them, both in Iraq and, I think I can say, in Afghanistan, perhaps the first time in their histories that they had such a bottom-up discussion about the future of their countries. Under Saddam, politics was a top-down thing. Somebody gave a draft developed by the Central Committee of the Ba'ath Party and then there was a referendum, a rubber stamp. In Afghanistan, although the '64 Constitution was quite enlightened and positive and there was a loya jirga, it wasn't truly a bottom up process. The King had appointed some people to a constitutional committee to draft the document and then present it and ask for a vote.

The effort after the Taliban was toppled was a very deliberate, two-year process, with the UN and others helping. It was a participatory development. There were a few places where they needed our help.

Could either of those assemblies come up with a document that—I guess what I'm asking is did the President give you any veto points? Any points at which the message from the United States was to be "no sale" on the Constitution, or "you must go and continue talking about the Constitution until these points are somehow reflected—"?

No, not even—

Anything could have come out of those assemblies?

I don't know about that. However, I don't think he ever said to me, "They must say X or Y. This paragraph must be there." He never gave me a text or something like that. A lot of our government agencies participated to help in this process.

We have a bureau in the State Department that deals with religious freedom issues, for example. Freedom of religion, if it means you have the right to abandon Islam and convert to another religion, is not an option, according to the basic beliefs of Islam. In Islam, you can't leave Islam. That is apostasy. Yet, religious freedom is very important for us. It is a right, a universal right, not just an American value. It would be a problem if you told a constitutional assembly, "What we'd like to put in this Constitution is that any Afghan has the right to leave Islam and convert to Christianity, Judaism, or whatever other religion he or she chooses." If you put it that way, you would not get it passed, no way. There would be a rebellion right then and there. But if you say that the constitution should protect freedom of speech and freedom of religion—without saying what that is—as described in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and if the constitution states that Afghanistan honors its obligations under international law, you could get it done in another way.

There are some people who would like you to clarify the nature of freedom of religion in detail. If you do it in detail in that way, you wouldn't have gotten it done in Afghanistan or in Iraq. This is such an explosive, serious issue for them.

So the administration's position then was that despite being two regimes removed from the regime that signed the Declaration, Afghanistan was still bound by it?

Yes. First, that's true. Second, the good thing was that this was one thing they all agreed upon, even those who had opposed the King in Afghanistan. I thought that some might argue that Afghanistan was too undeveloped, underdeveloped to have an enlightened constitution and that it was wrong to include these rights. They might argue that the United States and even some of our neighbors were so much more advanced than Afghanistan that only they could have these provisions and that everything in Afghanistan had gone badly wrong under the King's constitution. Why did this happen? These were searching questions. Instead, Afghans became nostalgic about that period in retrospect. After the King, things had gone from bad to worse for them, especially the civil war, especially the Taliban. In retrospect, they looked to that period as a golden era, even though a lot of people were critical of it at that time. When they saw what happened afterward, they wanted to start with that Constitution as a basis for the new Constitution.

The Constitution?

The 1964 Constitution had a monarchy as the basis of the government. Agfhans didn't want monarchy anymore, although the King was there, an old man.

There was some talk of him returning.

Not as a constitutional monarch, but possibly as a kind of titular President. He was by that time 87 or 88 years old so there was a question about whether he could play that role. They found a position for him, called "Father of the Nation." The point is that Afghans essentially removed the King and put an elected President in his place.

Also, there was a strong desire for normalcy, for respectability in the world. Afghans had good feelings toward the United States for what had happened, for the change. They sought our views, and they welcomed our help. We were very popular at that time, not as much anymore.

And the UN was very active. One of the lessons that I learned from Iraq and Afghanistan is that the UN can be effective. Because I'm from the Republican Party side, in which many are very hostile to the UN, this often surprises people. When I went to the UN, my colleagues were all very surprised that I had a more positive attitude toward the UN. This resulted from my work on the ground, where I found the UN can be very helpful in dealing with problems. At my confirmation hearings, some Republicans were wondering, "What the hell is he saying?" I was very positive toward the UN. The Democrats were all praising me. But none of the Republicans challenged me because I had acquired a certain credibility in dealing with tough issues.

Going back to your question, the Afghan Constitution says that about 25 percent of Members of Parliament have to be women. The exact same words are in the Iraqi Constitution. There are more women in the Iraqi and Afghan Parliaments than in the United States Congress. But I see your point about the dilemma. The process for drafting the constitution in Iraq one was much more difficult, while the Afghan one was not as hard.

Could you give us your personal character sketch of Karzai? What you got to know of him and what his personal strengths and weaknesses are? The kinds of things the Mel Lefflers of 30 or 40 years on would come back and want to know who exactly was this person.

Sure. He was from a respected family in Kandahar, the traditional capital of Afghanistan, from the tribal confederation of the Durranis, who generally have been the rulers of Afghanistan, though the monarchs were from a different branch. His father was Deputy Speaker of Parliament and had been also senior official in the executive branch of the Afghan Government.

During the Soviet period, many of his family members came to the United States, opened various businesses, mostly restaurants. There is a restaurant in Baltimore that is owned by one of Karzai's brothers. Another brother worked in a restaurant in Chicago and a third one in Boston. Karzai, the one who became President, and his father stayed in the region, living in exile in Pakistan rather than coming to the United States. The rest emigrated, with some of them acquiring American citizenship.

During the Soviet period, Karzai studied in India;. He did his college studies at the Shimla University. Some books try to make the point that I appointed him as the President of Afghanistan because he was my classmate at the American University in Beirut. Even Steve Coll, who is a very distinguished scholar on Afghanistan, says that in his book. I had to tell Steve that he should at least check Karzai's birth date. He is a lot younger than I am. How could he be my classmate? He didn't go to the American University of Beirut. He went to Shimla University. Don't you see how he speaks so fondly of India? I told Coll that if you listen to Karzai talk about India, how could that come from someone who had gone to an American university?

In any case, he was then involved with one of the moderate Mujaheddin groups as a spokesman. He was one of these young Afghans with some ability in terms of language and other skills to be more a modern spokesman for the Afghans fighting the Soviets. People in the media sought out him and others like him to talk to about what is going on inside of Afghanistan during the Soviet period.

After the Soviet withdrawal, he kept working on the Afghan issue from Pakistan. He, like many Afghans, was troubled by what happened after the Soviet war. He had gone to Kabul with the Mujaheddin when they formed a government, and he became for a while Deputy Foreign Minister of the Mujaheddin Government in 1992. It didn't last very long. As the government fragmented into competing groups, he was arrested by one faction or another and then he escaped and ran away back to Pakistan. He was involved tangentially with the formation of the Taliban. He was always thinking about what he should do about Afghanistan, what should happen in Afghanistan. Whenever he came to the U.S., and he came frequently to see his family members, he would come to see me.

He would visit my office at RAND in Washington. We would have coffee or get together for lunch or dinner. He was always trying to see why the United States is not doing this and why it is doing that. He was interested always in Afghanistan. He told me he was involved with this group that called themselves the Taliban, which sought to end the civil war, collect weapons, and so forth. The Taliban wanted to make him Afghanistan's Ambassador to the UN. He asked what I thought about that. Did I think it was a good idea or not very smart?

I told him frankly I didn't know enough to give him advice about the Taliban, but if they are what you say they are, I'm favorable to the idea. If they can collect weapons, bring peace, hold the loya jirga, and bring the King back—that is what they were talking about in those days—it seemed sensible for Afghanistan.

In any case, he talked to too many people about this prospect. The news of it got to the Taliban leadership that he was consulting with all kinds of people, Americans. He was consulting with some of the Taliban's opposition. He had called Rabbini on the telephone, saying, "The Taliban are offering me to be the Ambassador. Do you think it is a good idea, should I do it?" They must have caught an intercept of his conversation. They said, "Don't ever call us again." But he was always networking.

His father was killed by the Taliban in Quetta. That had a big impact on him and turned him very much against the Taliban. He then wanted to do things against them. I think he got in touch with various parts of our government about helping the anti-Taliban forces. He also became active with the Northern Alliance, developing a relationship. When 9/11 happened, he was in Pakistan. We engaged Karzai because we wanted a very broad outreach. Since we were going to go into Afghanistan not only to kill, fight, or capture the Taliban but also to overthrow the regime and help to build a new government, a new system, we needed to work with all segments of Afghan society. We couldn't be seen as working only with the Northern Alliance, which drew from some ethnic groups but not from others. The Pashtuns were the largest ethnic group, and the Taliban leadership were mostly Pashtun. We needed to make sure we reached out to as many Pashtuns as we could. In the Afghan context, the Northern Alliance is seen as anti-Pashtun or non-Pashtun at a minimum.

Among a lot of other names, Karzai's was on the list of Pashtuns who had some presence and capability in the country. We needed to make sure that as we get involved, the Taliban are not able to cast our effort as an anti-Pashtun war. Rather, the war needs to be seen as an effort by all Afghans to get rid of the tyrannical, backward Taliban regime, to establish a better government for Afghanistan, one that will include and serve all groups. Karzai was given some attention and prominence to show everyone in Afghanistan that it is not a Pashtun versus non-Pashtun war and to demonstrate that there are Pashtuns in the opposition. We helped, through the Agency and Special Forces, to take Karzai inside Afghanistan. He always said that he has people who support his views but that he needs some help to fight the Taliban. He, as well as some other Pashtuns from other parts of Pakistan, crossed into Afghanistan and started to fight.

He was a little lucky in the sense that some of the other Pashtuns who could possibly have been President got killed in the struggle. Also, Karzai himself almost got killed. One time we almost killed him because we accidentally dropped bombs in the wrong place and almost hit him. A CIA guy, Greg [V], jumped on him to save him. He was very grateful to Greg for saving his life. Earlier, we evacuated him once because the Taliban were getting close to getting him. He was very unhappy that Rumsfeld announced Karzai actually was in Pakistan, which seemed to make him look like a coward, running away from the fight. He would complain, "Is your government incapable of thinking through things?" I would answer, "We are a very complicated government."

When the Afghans got together in Bonn, the various factions agreed on Karzai as the head of the interim government. Before that meeting, the conversation between Jim Dobbins and Abdullah Abdullah had occurred. The Northern Alliance thought Karzai was the best choice. I thought so too. First of all, he was a monumental improvement over the leadership Afghanistan had had. Second, he seemed genuinely to be a patriot who loved his country. He really liked his people. He is a great storyteller when he talks about his travels, what the mullahs here said and the tribal chief there said. You get a sense that he is in touch with his people and that he knows where they are politically, what they're thinking, and what are their complaints.

He genuinely wanted Afghanistan to get out of this terrible tragedy of the last 30 years or so. He was grateful to the United States for what we had done, but I think he needed a lot of help. He had gone from being a player in the exile politics, sometimes on the margins, to now having responsibility for both nation building and state building. There were no institutions. They had no working telephones in Afghanistan. We had to take satellite phones to distribute to government offices. There were only a few million dollars in the bank account of the Government of Afghanistan. There was no army, no police. You had this guy thrown in there to deal with all of these challenges. He had to operate in a process and a place where trust was limited, with a history of double-crossing and of people saying one thing and doing another. He had a huge challenge, but no experience in how you do these things.

Did you think we were providing adequate resources to support nation building and state building?

No, I thought we weren't. One of the things I did when I was asked to go as Ambassador, I said, "You know charm can only take you so far, Mr. President. I need resources. I can talk them into some things, but it won't last very long." I got more than a billion dollars more for the reconstruction effort as part of my bargain to go.

I didn't finish the story before about Iraq taking things away from Afghanistan. I went to Afghanistan after Iraq was invaded, and I got a lot more resources for Afghanistan. There was a big debate in the United States about how far to get involved in state and nation building in Afghanistan. The Pentagon generally was not favorable to doing a lot. There were all kinds of reasons given. First, are you going to reward bad behavior? The attack on the United States was undertaken by terrorists who were based in Afghanistan. Now, are you going to go and help Afghans rebuild their country? The counter argument was that it was not the Afghans who carried out the attack. Al-Qaeda were Arabs. The terrorists had a base in Afghanistan because we had neglected Afghans. It had become this no-man's land with all these extremists and terrorists. If we don't fix Afghanistan, what is going to happen there? If we don't help, do they go back to that sort of situation? How long would we keep bombing and going back militarily? There was argument back and forth on that issue.

Second, some people argued that we need to let the Afghans find their own way. We just have to focus on what we need do, which is go after al-Qaeda and the Taliban. We should let the Afghans find their own way. The counter to this view was the Pottery Barn rule: "You break it, you own it." That was Powell's formulation. Whatever now happens there, it is going to reflect on us. It will determine whether we're seen as a responsible power. There was also a great international desire to do something more than just bomb and leave. We had to orchestrate that.

There was the issue of how much do we do. There were big arguments about how large an army the Afghans should have and how big a police force. The Pentagon was in favor of a very small security force. The view was that the Afghans should have a security force that they could afford—and they couldn't afford much. I told you how little money they had in the bank. The argument was that they should deal with issues politically. There were a lot of those challenges, and a lot of my time as Ambassador was spent trying to get us to do more so that the Afghans would have their own capabilities to handle things over time. It was a logical approach. If we did not build Afghan capability, we will be doing things for a very long time.

Who were the people in Washington who agreed with your desire to do more?

I think the White House was more favorable, Condi. Later on, Rumsfeld became favorable, although initially he was the most adamantly against. Sometimes he would tell me, "Zal, let the bike go, get your hands off the bike." I said, "Let's get him a bicycle first and then I'll let go. But I'm not holding on to anything that I can see." [laughter]

I just heard him say that again. He is doing another round of speaking, and he used that same metaphor: "Let go of the bike."

Yes, he would tell me. I'd say, "Okay, let's get a bike here." He didn't want to have a big force. In his view, the Afghans should have what they could afford and Karzai should make deals with his opponents. They should have a force of 40,000 to 50,000 troops. I said to the Secretary, "Let's make a deal. Why don't we start building this damn force? You can't get to what Karzai wants, which is 120,000, without getting to 40,000. We can't get to 100,000 if we're not doing anything. You want this end-point agreement. I promise you we won't get to 100,000 before we get to 40,000. Once we get to 40,000, let's have a discussion then."

There was a great effort not to get involved in inter-Afghan conflicts, green-on-green conflicts as it was called, and to make sure that issues get resolved politically.

Were you worried even at that time about the Taliban—

Resurfacing?

Resurfacing, good word, yes.

I was concerned about it, and that's connected to one of the points of real contention that I still think is a problem for our success. When we went into Afghanistan with broad support of the people, we killed a bunch of al-Qaeda and Taliban but the rest of them disappeared. We captured some. The leadership of al-Qaeda and the Taliban largely went to Pakistan. I was, from the very beginning, constantly raising the issue that we need to do something about their presence in Pakistan. In my view, it is only a matter of time before this problem comes back in a big way. I think this has been one of the big problems of our strategy in Afghanistan. We were not able to, and we still have not been able to, come to an understanding with Pakistan or change Pakistan's policy or strategy. We need to coerce them or incentivize them or make a deal with them or come to an understanding with them. We have not done so. That has really increased the cost to us over time.

Pakistan was one of the three countries, along with the UAE [United Arab Emirates] and Saudi Arabia, that recognized the Taliban regime and was supportive of the Taliban. The Pakistanis for a while were the only foreign Embassy that could deal with the Taliban. We confronted the Pakistanis very harshly after 9/11 and told them that they had to make a choice. They decided to support us in the attack against the Taliban, but they also kept supporting the Taliban after the war. It was a very complex situation. On the one hand, we needed Pakistan's help to do what we were doing in Afghanistan. We needed to overfly their territory for bombing missions when the war started. We needed to send supplies for our forces through Pakistan, since Afghanistan is land-locked. They were also helping to a degree on the al-Qaeda elements, arresting some and helping us arrest some. On the other hand, the Pakistanis were at the same time working against us by tolerating the Taliban and supporting the Taliban and other groups that were fighting us, such as the Haqqani network and Hezbi Islami. For a while, I think, it was not clear to many people that Pakistanis were playing this double game. Was it true that they were supporting the Taliban? We didn't have that perfect information. Musharraf appeared to be was helping us and he seemed to be on our side, particularly after terrorists started targeting him, too. Some of the al-Qaeda people were after him. How could we assume that he is helping the people who were fighting us or attacking him? Yet, there was troubling intelligence. At the same time, he is our friend, too. We are supporting Pakistan in a big way.

This double game of theirs was a major challenge. There were different institutions with different interests in Pakistan. The complexity of Pakistan itself is a challenge. They distrust us. They feel that we had used them during the war against the Soviets and then abandoned them. They complained that this is what is going to happen again. It seemed that the war gave them an incentive perhaps to keep this thing going—if it goes on, the money will keep coming. America's interests will remain only if there is instability and a terrorist threat. We had taught them a bad lesson.

I was on the side of bringing this issue to a head with the Pakistanis. It is part of the public record. I had very serious, sometimes difficult conversations with Washington, with Secretary Powell and others. I was sharply focused on the fact that this was a problem we needed to address. When I was frustrated at an unwillingness to recognize the problem, much less do something about it, sometimes I would speak publicly.

How did you think it could be addressed?

The first thing I wanted to do was to develop a common picture of the problem on the part of those responsible for the country's security here and the well-being of the soldiers and other Americans working in Afghanistan. Is this a problem or not? Is this happening or not? I would say, "They're coming from across the border, this strip or this strip or this." Powell would say, "No, this is all wrong. They are not coming from across the border." I'd say, "We have a serious problem. The same intelligence agencies are working for me as are working for you. I don't have my own intelligence agency. So we need to get the picture right." Steve Hadley got so frustrated with this conflict that he once demanded, "What does the intelligence show on this thing?" I was making life a little difficult by my persistence. In my view, this was a problem we needed to focus on.

When it comes to the strategy, I was open to alternatives. I have a preference about how I think it ought to be dealt with, but I could be persuaded. After all, I am the guy where the rubber meets the road. I'm an implementer at the end of the day. I am not a policy maker. You guys in Washington are the policy makers. I once said, "I could understand if you say, ‘We don't want to deal with this right now, we want to ignore it. But we have an approach, after we do X, Y, then we come to this.' If that is the position, I say, ‘I have the intelligence to appreciate that position. But when you tell me this is not a problem, this is not happening, then I am worried. Then we don't see the world in the same way. All of us work for the same government. That is an issue. We need to come to an understanding on that.'"

The government conducted a review. It concluded, "Oh, there is some stuff going on here." Then, the issue became what you do. I had proposed several steps. The President agreed with some of them, including that we needed to form a joint team between us, Afghans, and Pakistanis to deal with the cross border activity. General Barno, who was my counterpart, and the Afghan National Security Adviser and the Pakistani military started a joint group to develop confidence building measures and to discuss what is going on.

Condi suggested the President use the great influence that he had with President Karzai and Musharraf. I knew that Karzai felt he owed a lot to President Bush, and, of course, he did. Musharraf also owed Bush a lot. Powell liked Musharraf. The President thought Musharraf was his friend, though I would challenge that. It wasn't going to go over too well, when I said, "No, he's not our friend. He is our friend during the day, but at night he is out to get us." In any case, the President convened them in order to be the facilitator of an understanding between them. Issues were raised but not resolved. The meetings between Karzai and Musharraf were often contentious. There was no real follow-up to find out what is bothering Pakistan—to explore why the Pakistanis were trying to destabilize Afghanistan.

One time I complained quite a lot, after seeing today so many U.S. and Afghan people were killed. I received new intelligence from someone in Peshawar. I said, "Mr. President, we need to do something about this." He said, "I'm going to do something for you, Zal." I said, "Yes, Mr. President?" He said, "I'm going to call Musharraf and say you're coming to talk to him. He tells me he is not doing any of this. You always come back with this information and evidence. You need to go and sit with Musharraf and you guys work it out." I said, "I'd be happy to go, Mr. President, but I don't know whether I'm the right instrument for this. I'm Ambassador to Afghanistan, but of course I'll do whatever you say."

Then, I went over to the Presidential palace. President Karzai called Musharraf, as I sat in President Karzai's office. He calls and says, "I heard President Bush called you and said, ‘Ambassador Khalilzad is coming to see you on his behalf.' You know that we really like Ambassador Khalilzad here." In an aside, I remarked, "I think you're not helping me build bridges with Musharraf." And then Karzai said, "Whatever you and Zal can come to an agreement on, I'll accept."

I was shocked by that action. Initially I wasn't happy to have him say, "We had full confidence in America, and we have full confidence in Zal. So it is up to you two. If you make a deal with them on anything—"

Who is saying this?

Karzai to Musharraf. He said, "You guys, it is up to you two." At this point, I'm feeling a big load on my shoulders as to how I manage this thing.

The trip was arranged. The Ambassador from Islamabad joined me, and I took a couple of military and intelligence people with me. I took some pomegranates from Afghanistan as gifts because Afghanistan has such great pomegranates. They're famous in the region.

When I met Musharraf, the first thing he says was, "Thank you for the pomegranates. Mr. Ambassador, I have to tell you, I don't like pomegranates." This was not a good start for the conversation.

I said to him, "Why don't you like pomegranates? They're very good for you, Mr. President, lots of antioxidants." He said, "They have seeds and I hate the seeds." I said, "Do you know that Afghan pomegranates are seedless?" He said, "Really? There are seedless pomegranates?"

I told him, "There is another thing, Mr. President. When I was a kid in Afghanistan, I used to squeeze the pomegranate until it softened, very soft. It would become juicy, and then I used to dig a little hole and put a straw in and suck the juice out of the pomegranate. You don't have to deal with the seeds." He said, "Well, I'll try that."

So you got agreement on something.

In any case, we had a long, maybe two- or three-hour conversation. I had lots of practical suggestions regarding issues of concern to him, such as the Indian presence in Afghanistan. There was a water issue between Afghanistan and Pakistan. I had practical suggestions because I had anticipated what concerns Pakistan might have. I said, "Now, what are you going to do for me, Mr. President?"

He said, "What do you mean?" I said, "I can't sell some of these ideas to the Afghans without your doing something on the Taliban and on the other networks." He said, "They're not here." I was quite startled. "They're not here?" He said, "Give me their phone numbers, give me their addresses."

I said, "Mr. President, are you telling me that the Taliban are not in Pakistan?" He said, "Yes, that's what I'm saying." I said, "Mr. President, the leadership of the Taliban, their council, is called the Quetta Shura. Quetta is one of your major cities, and journalists constantly go to interview the Taliban leaders. They're on Pakistani television. Journalists can find them, but the Pakistani intelligence service doesn't know where they are?" I got a little tough with him.

Musharraf said, "They are not here. I promise you they are not here. If you give me their phone numbers and their locations, I'm willing to act on it." I said, "I'm sorry I've wasted your time, Mr. President."

This has been a persistent problem. We haven't found a way to get a deal with the Pakistanis. We have not been able to get them to articulate what is it that leads them to support the Taliban and other insurgents. We have guesses as to why they're doing it. What we need is for them to say, "Look, we're doing it for one, two, three, four reasons. We want one, two, three things. If you give us something on these issues, then we will do this in exchange for that."

Our choices have been very difficult ones. Pakistan is a nuclear power. We depend on them for many things. We don't want Pakistan to be unstable or destabilized. We have been constrained. But the dynamics of the situation are such that our relations are worse than ever.

You saw Secretary [Leon] Panetta in India talking about Indians coming to Afghanistan. A few years ago people would have said that would worsen the problem—if the Indian presence increased, then Pakistan would have a real reason to keep fighting in Afghanistan to make it difficult. Now the level of frustration is such that U.S. policy makers openly say these guys are double-crossing us, lying to us, saying one thing and doing another. The road to Afghanistan is blocked. We bring supplies now through Russia, paying two or three times as much to do it. But the Pakistanis are continuing to support the insurgents. Some of the attacks, including on our Embassy, have been traced to orders from the Pakistanis. The former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs tried very hard to work out something with Pakistan, but at the end he ot very frustrated and blamed the Pakistani intelligence service for many of the problems in Afghanistan. This is still an issue.

I owe us a break. We'll come back and finish up.

[BREAK]

I don't want to interrupt the Afghan piece if there are other questions, but I'm curious. One of the administration's most important historical legacies is the advancement of the relationship with India. Did that follow from some of these meetings that you're talking about? Was this something that was in the works even earlier? If you have relevant information about this could you enlighten us?

I don't because I did not deal with India a lot, although I did go to India once or twice from Afghanistan to talk with the Indians. They were playing a supportive role in Afghanistan. But the administration's approach was to pursue strategic relations with both countries, India and Pakistan, and not to see it as a zero-sum approach.

The Indians always wanted to get more involved in Afghanistan, maybe in the security domain. They wanted to do training of Afghan military and to get into the police training effort. They also were doing excellent work to build roads, to link Afghanistan to the Iranian port of Bandar-Abbas. This would give Afghans options other than the Pakistani ports of Karachi or Gwadar to bring supplies in and to conduct trade. It would allow India to shop goods to Iran and then truck them into Afghanistan, thereby circumventing the problems Pakistanis created for Indians coming across Pakistan with supplies for Afghanistan.

They were also doing infrastructure work on building an east-west power grid through the Hindu Kush mountains. The idea was to enable energy-rich northern Afghanistan gas to produce electricity that could then be transmitted to Kabul and other major cities, or to enable Central Asian electricity to be brought into Afghanistan. They were very busy in education, too. There were over a thousand Afghans going to a school in India. They had a lot of scholarship programs.

But as far as negotiating with them more broadly, no, I was not involved. Our philosophy at that time was to keep the Indian involvement in the security sector in Afghanistan limited, minimal. They wanted to do more, but we didn't want them to do so. We thought that was a kind of red meat for those in Pakistan who were paranoid about India's presence in Afghanistan.

Of course.

You would be further inciting Pakistani mischief-making in Afghanistan by saying, "We are giving Afghanistan to the Indians."

Did President Bush ever talk to you about the failure to get Osama bin Laden in the fall of 2001?

No, but he was always saying, "We have to get him, bring him to justice." He was saying, "Can the Afghans do something to help?" I would say, "The Afghans say he is across the border. He is likely not in Afghanistan." Then we can think about what one can do with Afghans to collect intelligence, because the ethnic groups are the same across the border. I said, "I thought I could do something, Mr. President, to get the Afghan intelligence service to get in touch with the tribals on the other side to see what is going on."

Where did you think he was?

I didn't know that he was where he was, although of course there were people who always came saying he was here or there. There was pretty high confidence on our part for a long time that he and Mullah Omar, too, were most likely on the other side of the border. The Pakistanis all absolutely denied that possibility. When this issue was raised, they would get very upset.

Did you feel that the failure to get him was a military failure in that we had inadequate troops and an inadequate focus, as Peter Bergen emphasizes?

There had been discussion, I've heard, about whether the right strategy or plan was followed in Tora Bora. This was within the military counter-terrorism area. I was not involved in it. I read the accounts and the discussions about Tora Bora. We dropped a lot of bombs over that area, including some relatively big bombs. Whether we could have done more to encircle him or move quicker are interesting questions to ask. It was a lost opportunity clearly.

After al-Qaeda fled, our intelligence people went into the camps and gathered a huge amount of information that they left there. Was this something that you were reporting on? Were you getting information on this and then sending it back to Washington?

No. I went to Afghanistan in 2003. The exploitation had been completed earlier.

But you were there earlier.

As Special Envoy.

That's what I'm talking about.

No, the task that I was trying to do in Afghanistan had nothing to do with the war, with the operational issues. You also get overwhelmed after a while with the different pieces of intel that come along. I'm sure you appreciate that they are often contradictory. It depends on your sources. Somebody says he is here; somebody else says he is 200 miles away. In Iraq, I used to get people coming saying, "I know where the WMD is." This is after years of searching and finally giving up. Very senior Iraqis still would come to me in '07, saying, "We know where they are, in this basement, this concrete bunker."

I'd say, "Look, it would make a historic—" They'd say, "No, you have to give money." It all becomes a business. That is the nature of the business unfortunately.

As you conversed with the Iraqi exiles in 2002, were they telling you things about Saddam's links to terrorists?

I have no doubt that they did, and they would, but it didn't become a big focus of my effort or our effort. It didn't even make an impression on me. You know, an exile will say anything for the cause that they believe in in order to get us to do something. We had other people working on collecting intelligence from them. My task was to get them to start preparing for a post-Saddam world in case we intervened militarily. But we were always saying to them, "We haven't decided yet whether we are going to go in. The President hasn't made that decision yet. But it is a scenario that is plausible if X, Y, Z doesn't happen, so I want you to come with your vision of what sort of future Iraq you see, a process to get a government that is inclusive."

As the senior person on the national security staff dealing with these issues during 2002, did you enter the discussions at all about numbers of troops that should be part of an invasion force? When there was the big flap with General [Richard] Shinseki saying we need X number?

No.

Did you offer any opinions on that?

I did not. I would not have felt that I was in a position to offer any. We did Afghanistan with so few forces, to everybody's surprise. At the height of our military operations in Afghanistan, during the overthrow, we didn't even have 3,000 people there.

Yes, but some people were saying that the situation is going to be really worrisome in Iraq following the immediate and we need a lot more troops. In fact some people thought we needed more troops afterward than we—

Of course, these are very respected people who took that position. I think it would have been difficult for me to judge because the requirement depends on the circumstances. Could we have turned most of the military of Iraq to work for us? If we had paid their salaries and had just removed the top command, could we have put them to work? If we hadn't dissolved it, if we had called them back in? What was the scenario? We went into Iraq, in my view, with a view not to dissolve the army. The plan was reforming the military, not dissolving the military, getting rid of some elements that were particularly close to Saddam and with a lot of blood on their hands of killing Iraqis and others.

That's why I mentioned this issue of whether or not we would occupy and govern Iraq. This was a fundamental question. It was related to the question of the Iraqi army. This is perhaps nonlinear to the military planning work that had been done, although it included some strand of this thought. The schizophrenia that I talked about—whether we would rule and govern or turn over sovereignty to the Iraqis—would affect the opposition you might face. Some of this was contingent analysis. If we are going to dissolve the army and the army won't fight, we need a certain number of forces. If the army is going to dissolve and turn into cells of fighters against us, then you need a different number. If the model was to control all of the borders of Iraq, with no army of Iraq, we would need a still different number. Where was the scenario for which the numbers were being generated? Was it that we expected a large insurgency and needed to do population protection as a model, the surge sort of theory? I did not have a judgment on this point because I had not worked the scenarios or done the analysis.

Casey and I organized a Red Cell that examined the insurgency and the military strategy. The Red Cell report advocated a population protection strategy—an oil blot approach that involves establishing security in one place and then expanding it outward. You secure the center of Baghdad and you go out.

When were you doing this?

As soon as I arrived as Ambassador in Iraq in 2005. One of the tasks that I had put in my briefing to the President was to do a review of the military situation and strategy. To return to the question, the issue is what was the model, what were the assumptions, and what was the scenario. Some would have required a lot more than others. Before the intervention, the scenario we thought about—rightly or wrongly—was the following: We go in, decapitate the regime, get the army to work with us, and pursue those elements that keep fighting us. We go after the adversary, but we do not take responsibility for security in a comprehensive way. That task belongs to the Iraqi army. This contingency would give you one number in terms of the required troops. That would change if you alter the scenario. If we're going to govern ourselves, dissolve the army, and secure the entire country, we should expect the most plausible consequence is that a big insurgency will arise. We're going to have a lot of officers joining the insurgency, fighting us, then the numbers we will need would have looked very different.

So of those two different scenarios, and there are many permutations of them, what were you thinking during 2002?

In 2002, I was thinking that we should not govern the country but rather form an Iraqi Government. I was also thinking we should reform, not eliminate, the army. The speeches I gave to the opposition in London appealed to the Iraqi military to do the right thing, to uphold the national interest of Iraq rather than protect Saddam, to work with other Iraqis to liberate the country.

I went to Iraq as Ambassador after the insurgency had been unleashed, and I favored a counter-insurgency, population-protection approach. It was too late for some of the approaches that could have been done earlier. Now you had to defeat the insurgency, and that had a much larger military force requirement. At the same time you have to do political things such as bringing the Sunnis into the political process. An insurgency is a fish that swims in the sea of the people, as Mao Zedong said. Winning the population over deprives the fish of its habitat. This new Iraq we were going to work for should benefit all Iraqis. We didn't come here on a tribal agenda to side with the Shi'a against the Sunni or this side or that side.

Going back to Pakistan a bit. The interesting thing to me is that you were able to observe policy under Musharraf and also you were acquainted with [Asif Ali] Zardari, right?

Right, Zardari is a friend of mine. His wife was a friend of mine, Benazir [Bhutto]. I have known Benazir for a long time. I kept in touch with her when she was in exile as well. I used to see her sometimes when I was on my way in and out of Afghanistan from Dubai. She lived in Dubai. I would go to see her and her kids and hear about her husband, who was in jail in Pakistan at the time. I didn't know Zardari until he had left the prison, and they moved to New York. I met him for the first time when I was the UN Ambassador. He wasn't a friend of long standing like Benazir. She traveled with me, for example, when I was going to Aspen to give a speech. She went with me on the plane. She also did a good job of speech giving. We used to have dinners together. I knew her quite well. She was in touch with me on the way to Pakistan, so I knew her well.

I'm sorry, it is awful what happened to her.

She was always saying that was going to happen to her.

Really.

For example, on this private jet that we took to Aspen, they were serving a lot of cookies and cakes. She said, "I'm so fat, I shouldn't eat any of this. But on the other hand I'm likely to be killed anyway so might as well enjoy life. Bring me one more cookie." With that kind of woman, given the history of her family, it wasn't surprising for her to say something like that.

Did you think that she was right about her fate?

No, it was not fate. Sadly, though, she was right—I have been in very tough situations, where people have been out to kill me. I've had intelligence reports indicating, "People are after you." You take prudent measures, and there is an action/reaction competition between the threat and security measures. You try to keep on doing what you're doing but you take prudent measures. I think she didn't take the prudent measures. That's what I told her: "What the hell are you doing getting out of the car or giving speeches without protection?" She was kind of careless. In that scenario, I suppose the tragedy was obviously plausible. She was a great person, so I'm very sorry for that.

I suppose one of the things that is often mentioned with Pakistani policy in Afghanistan is that many elements of the government over different time periods have seen Afghanistan as the rightful backyard of Pakistan.

Right.

Especially the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence], which is now sometimes described as a state within a state because of its power.

Right.

Did you have any interactions with ISI officials other than the visit that you mentioned where the head of the ISI was in the U.S.?

I met the head of ISI in the U.S. I had met ISI folks during the '80s as part of the strategy to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan. I don't think knowingly I had otherwise met ISI. It could be that people in meetings were the ISI but were not declared ISI people. When I was at the NSC, or course, I met representatives of the ISI on several occasions.

Did you have the sense at the time of the conversations with Musharraf that he and the ISI were on the same page about simply using the Taliban but denying that the Taliban were even impacting—?

I thought at the minimum that was true. I just could not believe that a military man—and Musharraf hadn't given up his uniform yet—would not control a major element of the armed services. He was the chief of the army, and he was the President of Pakistan. The chief of the army is the most powerful figure in the country. He runs the rest of the military, too. You would not believe he was saying that there were no Taliban in Pakistan. I thought that was just an insult to one's intelligence. Whatever one may say about him he was obviously not stupid. He just didn't want to own up to it. Suppose he said, "Yes, I know they are there." I would reply, "Then, Mr. President, when are you going to move to do something?" There were huge implications if he owned up to the obvious facts. So denial was the right thing, from his perspective.

In a speech at CSIS [Center for Strategic and International Studies] with Brzezinski and others in the audience, I said that this policy of denying the reality of the insurgent sanctuaries, when everyone knows it is happening, was hugely dangerous for Pakistan. Imagine if an attack against the United States in the aftermath of 9/11 is traced to Pakistani territory. The United States would have to react to that in this environment. Imagine if the killing of American soldiers in Afghanistan by forces that come across that would continue. How long would we not react to this? Eventually we would have to react. We are a patient people but eventually politics and reality forced us to act. Now we are bombing Pakistan almost every other day with these Predators.

It was a forward-leaning speech, you might say. "Either they deal with it," I said in my speech, "or eventually we will." That was what I said. Brzezinski, to this day, says, "My God, you threatened them." I said, "I'm not in a position to threaten them. I just described to them, as their friend, what the reality is." You can't keep on doing this, thinking others are going to take it forever. Eventually, there will be a reaction. I feel that maybe we could have done better on this issue. I feel that the administration could have done better. Maybe if we, at the highest level, the Secretary of State level, put a lot of energy and effort and maybe orchestrated a multi-track approach to get an Afghan-Pakistani settlement, we could have solved the problem. The Pakistanis have some legitimate concerns about Afghanistan. The border is not recognized. Afghans don't recognize the Pakistani border. There are issues of India playing games in parts of Afghanistan. Some anti-Pakistan insurgents have been there. There are water and other issues.

If we had worked it in a big way, as a key element of a grand strategy for winning the war against terror, we might have made progress toward a settlement. I don't think we put as much effort into it as was necessary to succeed. Maybe we thought it was too much to ask of Musharraf. He is cooperating enough on key issues. If he pushes on this, too, then the military would really get angry at him. Many generals already think that he is too much in our pocket, letting us overfly their territory, bringing supplies in, killing al-Qaeda. If we tell him also to stop the Taliban, that may be too much of a burden on a single person. This might have been the rationalization.

I sometimes felt relatively alone on this issue, partly because of where I was sitting. I was in Kabul, getting the reports every day in my staff meetings about people losing their friends as a result of Pakistan's actions. I was very focused on it, while people in Washington had a broader perspective perhaps and rejected my views. I felt that I needed to be as clear as I could, so the administration and the nation understood what was the source of the problem in Afghanistan. It took me a long time to get that message across in a very clear and loud way. Sometimes, as I said, I was gently reprimanded for being so focused on this issue.

Before you were appointed as Ambassador to Iraq, did you meet with President Bush?

Oh, yes, sure.

What were your marching orders? What did he himself say?

It wasn't just one meeting. It was a few meetings because it wasn't an easy decision for me to go to Iraq. The Afghans were very much against my moving. President Karzai said repeatedly to Dr. Rice, the Secretary of State, that this was a terrible mistake. When the idea came out that I might go, the Supreme Court of Afghanistan issued decrees pleading with the President not to let this happen. Karzai may have thought, They don't listen to me because I am too Western. Maybe this bearded guy, if he says something, the Americans might take him more seriously. The Afghans tried very hard, and they were pressuring me to reject the offer. The whole thing took about six months of back and forth. The idea of me going to Iraq arose almost immediately after the election in 2004. I think John Negroponte had been there only six months as our Ambassador.

I came to Washington after the Vice President had come to Afghanistan during the Karzai inaugural, in December 2004. He was extremely impressed with what he saw. The election had gone extremely well. Seven to eight million Afghans had participated. It was relatively orderly. There was a dispute about one or two districts. When they vote, Afghans get this ink put on them to prevent repeat voting. It had run out and then one of the candidates said that he was asking people not to continue to vote because the election is flawed. There were problems in two areas for a couple of hours where they ran out of ink or something was wrong with the bottle of ink.

Even that worked out very well. I had to talk to these guys. I said, "You think that these two districts, the ink, for those two hours, would have changed the outcome? The difference is about a million and a half votes. I give you all the votes of that district, put it on your side. The number of residents of these two districts was 2,000 and 1,500. This leaves a margin of 1.4 million votes. Are you going to take the country through a crisis over that? Is that worth raising doubts about the legitimacy of the election? Do you believe Karzai won the election fairly and squarely and in a big way, Karzai or not, just tell me, man to man. We can work out the details later."

He said, "Of course he's won." So I said, "Then what are we doing here? Why are you putting a question mark on top of this election?" He said, "I'll go and I'll fix it. I'll talk with the press."

Everything had worked very well. When Cheney came, he said, "Wow, what a difference between here and Iraq." I thought that this was not a good sign. When he returned, I got a message that the President wants me to come to Washington. I flew back. When I entered the Oval Office, the President and Vice President were there, as well as the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, CIA Director, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Chief of Staff, Steve Hadley, and a few others sitting in the back. As soon as I entered I said, "I must be in serious trouble." They put me next to the President in a chair the Vice President had vacated. The President said, "Zal, we've been talking about you. We think you should go to Iraq."

I said, "What? Remember, you didn't let me go to Iraq." We were joking. The President was very kind and positive. I said, "I have small kids, Mr. President. I have been on the road for so long." I mentioned that my younger son was sick. But he said, "You have to do it." I said, "I'll have to talk to them and talk them into it." He said, "I'll give you a few weeks to work it out."

Did you want to come home or did you want to stay—?

I thought that if Afghanistan had succeeded, I should come back because of—

Your son.

The illness. The President had to call my wife.

At this big meeting when the President told you that he would love to give you this opportunity, was there an accompanying discussion of the major issues?

No. It was just lobbying me. We went over what the major players thought about Iraq, the military, CIA, the Vice President, Condi, and so forth. The President emphasized, "You have to do it. Let's see what we can do for your family. If you want to put them in Rome, we'll put them in Rome, but you have to do it."

So when did you decide, "Yes, I'll do it"?

It took a few months.

Were you meeting with other top people? Rice was then Secretary. Hadley—

Oh, yes, all of them were in the room.

I mean in subsequent meetings?

Oh, sure. The thought was that maybe I could have a transition office and staff in Washington for a while. They knew my approach. I wanted to get my head around the problem and come up with my contract proposal, what the problem was, what the solution was.

I started talking to people. One conversation got me in some hot water with the President. I also talked with my friend, the UN Envoy to Afghanistan who had then become a UN Envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, who had been a Foreign Minister of Algeria at one time. We had worked very closely together in Afghanistan on very critical, sensitive issues. So he was there. I called him and said, "There is an idea of me possibly coming to Iraq, though of course the President hasn't made up his mind. I don't know what he is going to decide. What do you think the situation is like?"

Lakhdar said, "One thing is that President Bush is pushing for this election in January. The situation is not ready for an election. The Sunnis are not signed up to a plan, a buy-in. If we hold the election, the Sunnis are not going to participate, but the President is insisting whether they agree to participate or not an election must be held and must be held on the date that it has been announced. This is a bad idea." Brahimi said that the Prime Minister, Ayad Allawi, whom I knew quite well from my Envoy days, is trying to explain this issue to the President. He feels that he doesn't get the chance, that the President doesn't give him the opportunity to explain his point of view.

I said, "I'm very surprised to hear that." I told him to tell Ayad that he needs to tell the President, "Mr. President, please give me a chance to express myself." I added that if he thinks the President is not allowing him to express his view, he should say that it is very important that the President hears from a friend, like Ayad, why he thinks this election at this time is a bad idea. Then I said to him, "Let's be in touch and then we'll see what happens."

Lakhdar immediately calls Kofi [Annan], the Secretary-General of the UN. He says, "I had a talk with Ambassador Khalilzad and he said that Ayad should explain his point of view clearly to President Bush and that he should man up or he shouldn't be afraid when he enters the Oval Office. He should speak up."

Our NSA picks up this conversation between Lakhdar Brahimi and Kofi. They go to the President, and the President and others read what they said to each other. The President says, "Zal is advising a foreign leader to stand up to me. You better get Zal on the phone, I need to talk to him." I'm on the plane going back to Afghanistan from Washington. When I land in Dubai, my security team meets me for the trip to Afghanistan. However, they say, "Before we go to the hotel, we have to go to the consulate because the White House wants to have a secure call with you."

I go as requested, and Steve Hadley comes on the line. He says, "The President has some social event. He can't talk to you right now, but he wanted me to give you a message that he is extremely angry with you." I said, "What the hell are you talking about, Steve?" He said, "NSA has got this piece that they're circulating that you told Lakhdar Brahimi to tell Ayad to tell the President what's what on the election issue."

I said, "Steve, you know me. I did not say Ayad should be disrespectful or stand up to the President. Of course, I wouldn't say that. But I think the President needs to hear what this man is saying, why he believes this is not a good idea. I know that the President would like Iraq to succeed because that is very important for him. But if this man, who is our friend, who has been in this struggle, and who is the Prime Minister of that country, feels that he can't say what he has in mind to our President, that's bad. If the President is cutting him off constantly, not letting him finish, he needs to say to the President, ‘Mr. President, I have something important to tell you. Please let me finish.' That's the idea. I think the President should let him speak if in fact he is not being allowed to speak."

Hadley said, "You should be glad he is not firing you on the spot." I said, "Make my day, fire me." He was joking with me. You asked me whether I had any meetings. After this meeting, I had one that almost caused a serious problem.

Did you also get the sense that there was dissatisfaction with Negroponte?

Not with Negroponte personally, I don't think so. Negroponte was rewarded with a very high-level job, the first DNI [Director of National Intelligence]. My judgment was frankly that they thought the politics of Iraq were not going well.

People thought if Iraqis hold the elections, the politics will work themselves out, regardless of whether all groups participate. The political agreements were not in place so the Sunnis boycotted the election and the result was an unrepresentative parliament. The parliament formed a government, yes, but the government was a sectarian sort of structure. This was a problem. So our leadership thought they needed somebody who could work politically with the Iraqis. I think several Iraqi leaders told me they had told Bush, whether it is true or not, "You need to bring Zal here. He knows how to work with us." President Bush told me that the President of Iraq is calling him a lot saying, "When is he arriving?" This was after my nomination was announced. As always, the White House and confirmation processes took a while.

Were people in Washington saying there were very different sources of the worsening insurgency inside Iraq when you were about to go back?

To Iraq?

Yes, when you were about to go back now as Ambassador, were different parts of the American bureaucracy providing you with very different analyses of the source of the problem?

I came away from all the meetings that I had, before confirmation, with several impressions. I met with a lot of people at all levels, including analysts from intelligence agencies and Defense and many other experts. First, there was no national compact. There was no national agreement in Iraq among the country's major communities. The Sunnis did not have a buy-in to this Iraq. As long as that is the case, there is going to be an insurgency. Second, some Shi'a elements were working with Iran. That was also causing problems. This was the case with Muqtada [al-Sadr]. Some of the militias, like the Badr militia, had come across the border from Iran. They were also a problem. These relationships by Shi'a groups with Iran intensified the fears and opposition of the Sunnis, who thought Iran was taking over Iraq.

Third, there was a difference of views on whether we had the right military strategy. The political problem was clear. We didn't have whole communities, big chunks of the Iraqi population, participating in the political process. The military strategy was a problem. We were pursuing a policy of going after the insurgents, killing terrorists or capturing them. But we were not securing areas. That approach was not sufficient to secure the area. There was a discussion about whether you could do a population-protection approach. There were people outside and inside the government who were advancing these ideas. They argued that what we're doing under the current approach was not working. The military was trying to kill as many insurgents as we can and arrest as many as we can. We had 15,000 or 20,000 young Iraqi men in jail. There were a lot of operations, night and day, to kill the enemy. Yet, the number of enemy attacks on us was only rising. Our efforts were not changing anything decisively.

Fourth, sectarianism was increasing not only because of the lack of Sunni buy-in but also because al-Qaeda and other terrorists wanted to create an Islamic civil war, a kind of Shi'a-Sunni war, as a way to defeat the U.S. this was their deliberate strategy. We needed to create a more secure environment to allow people to cooperate, which would be important to defeat the enemy.

The briefing I did for the President set forth my action plan to address these issues. On the political track, I proposed to seek a national compact through the Constitution and a unity government after ratification of the Constitution. We needed to get the Sunnis to participate in the December 2005 election. We could then get a unity government, with all communities in the government. We could then reach out to the reconcilable insurgents to bring them into the process. Once the communities are in the government and we have reconciled the reconcilables, we go after the terrorists, who will be isolated at this point.

I went with this briefing that set out everything—one, two, three, four, this is what I was going to do on the political strategy. It said that I would review the military strategy with General [George] Casey, to examine whether it needed to be changed.

When I arrived in Baghdad, I pretty much moved along the lines of the briefing. There were successes and failures. It was not always successful. But we worked the Constitution. The Sunni buy-in on the draft was limited, not as broad as I would have liked it but they did come into the process. The Sunnis participated in the elections in December 2005. They hadn't participated in the one before. I spent a lot of time to win them over. This was a success. Some Sunnis even called me the "Father of the Sunnis" because I worked so hard to bring them in. Some Shi'a extremists were not happy about that. After ratification of the Constitution and the December 2005 election, I worked on the unity government in which all communities participated. This was an achievement, and there was a lot of progress. Still, the divisions were deep. Even today, as you can see, they have taken some steps backward. They issued an arrest warrant for the Sunni Vice President. Iraq is a work in progress.

On the military side, we did conduct this Red Cell review, which did recommend a change in military strategy to more of a population-protection approach. However, the military did not really support it or implement it. The focus was largely on killing the enemy and transferring of responsibility to Iraqis.

Some of the people who participated in the Red Cell then went to work for General David Petraeus. He was there building the Iraqi force at the time I came in and, with some of the people who were part of the Red Cell, he later developed the COIN [counterinsurgency] doctrine while he was at Ft. Leavenworth.

One of the process issues is how do you develop the strategy. For example, regarding the Red Cell, should the product have been reviewed by the civilian leadership in Washington? There was a limit to how far out of my jurisdiction I could go in fighting the military about whether we had the right strategy. I sent a copy of the report to Steve Hadley to kind of give the Presidential seal to the idea of reexamining our approach. He asked if I could get the military to approach the President on this issue. I told him it was impossible for the military to do so because it would look like they were second guessing General Casey who was in charge of the military in Iraq. As a result, it took a while until the government took a new look at the fundamental strategy. Ultimately, it required people from outside the government to push for a changed strategy. A group at AEI [American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research] with some military folks—General Jack Keane and others—ultimately caused the change to come a couple of years later.

What are the core issues when you hit the ground in Iraq?

The Constitution was the first. We had a deadline. I flew directly from Kabul to Baghdad, was sworn in at 7:30 or something like that in the morning, presented credentials at 8:00 in the morning, and then left for Brussels to attend an international conference on Iraq. Then I came to Washington with Prime Minister Jafaari, bringing him to Washington. After that, I spent a few days at home. I had a medical procedure that had to be done. So I didn't end up going to Iraq to assume command until July 4.

The Constitution was front and center. We did a lot of other things, but that was the thing on which we wanted to get an agreement. Then we worked on getting it ratified in a referendum. It was very tough going, the Constitution.

Can I ask you to compare what you confronted in Iraq with what you confronted in Afghanistan?

On the Constitution?

On the Constitution but more generally. Were there similarities? There was a sense that okay, Zal did this great job in Afghanistan, let's bring him out, have him do his magic in Baghdad. So the question is, were the similarities sufficient that your experience did indeed help you and was relevant in this, or were the differences so severe that they impaired your ability to transport the lessons?

There were some similarities, but the situations were different. The sectarianism issue was a major difference.

The Afghans had suffered from the absence of government for a long time. They wanted a state to be formed. They had a model to go to, which was the '64 Constitution. There was some opposition to it. There were a very few people who wanted a federal system, but most people wanted a strong center, a strong government, because they had been without a government.

In the case of Iraq, there was less unity of view, though the Shi'a and the Kurds were the overwhelming majority. Their combined numbers could be as high as 75 to 80 percent of the population. They did not want a unitary system. They had suffered under too strong a government, and they were rebelling against it. Sometimes I mentioned this difference between Afghanistan and Iraq because people thought America would impose its own vision on both of them. I said, "We obviously didn't impose the same vision for both because they embraced very different systems." In the case of Iraq, the experience with too strong a central government led the Shi'a and the Kurds, the Kurds in particular but the Shi'a went along, to support a parliamentary system and a federal system with limited powers to the central government. A lot of authority was given to the local level and of course to regional Government of Kurdistan, which had its own government.

The Sunnis had a different view. They felt as if they owned the country, and they wanted a unitary government, strong center. They had concerns about de-Ba'athification having gone too far. They wanted this policy reformed, and they wanted to use a provision in the Constitution to do that. They were worried about federalization of Iraq. They were very much opposed to that. They saw that as a pathway to disintegration of Iraq, which, they thought, was a very dangerous outcome.

There was a huge gap among the three communities. The two Shi'a aligned with each other, together and they largely drove the process. The Sunnis who dominated Iraq under Saddam and for hundreds of years before Saddam, they were opposed to the Shi'a. It took a lot of effort to get the Sunnis to acquiesce to allow a vote on the draft and, at the end, to get a side agreement that addressed some of their remaining concerns. It was not possible to get the Sunnis on board during the drafting process. I then worked to get some additional compromises in the period before the ratification referendum. These side deals called for a front-loaded amendment process and an agreement to make the process of federalization more demanding. This meant that significant support had to exist in a province before it could work toward federalized status and that it had to go through several procedural steps. The Sunnis wanted to prevent a will-nilly rush toward federalization in the Arab part of Iraq.

The side agreement included some progress on the de-Ba'athification reform. This was need for the Sunnis to say, "Okay, a vote can happen and we will participate in the elections." These agreements gave the Sunnis enough to allow the process to go on. In the end, the Constitution was ratified, but the Sunni support for it was tepid. They thought the document didn't reflect what they wanted. Now, because the Shi'a are more self-assured and assertive, the Sunnis have changed their views. The Sunnis like the Constitution and they would like federalization of their areas. But at that time they were opposed to it.

It was a very tough process. Also, the manner of interaction among Iraqis was not as cordial or as considerate as that of the Afghans, generally speaking. In Afghanistan, even people who were opposed to each other treated each other much better than the Iraqis did. I often had to be the facilitator of a conversation in order for it to be constructive, especially when you're talking big issues.

Could you tell us your observations of the process when Iraq moved from what you're describing when there was some hope and the sense that perhaps you can get the Sunnis into the representative process, and then everything just started to fall apart into this sectarian violence that we saw in 2005, 2006.

Sure. We were working along with some Iraqis to bring Iraqis together. We were making steady progress but not without problems. Al-Qaeda in Iraq, [Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi and his people, were trying to polarize them, to tear them apart. Al-Qaeda's leaders in Iraq were very unhappy that the Sunnis participated in the constitutional process. They were very unhappy that the Sunnis participated in the elections, legitimizing the new system. They were unhappy that the Sunnis were participating in the formation of the unity government. The Sunnis were part of a roundtable process to develop the program of the government, the composition of the new government, and the institutions of the new government. These were the issues that I was using to foster habits of cooperation and to try to forge compromises to defuse the violence.

Al-Qaeda had a big success by blowing up the Askari shrine. That did huge damage. The Shi'a had exercised some degree of restraint in responding to attacks against innocent Shi'a by al-Qaeda. Now, even government leaders felt they couldn't control their people anymore. This attack simply had gone too far. The Shi'a militia were unleashed to take revenge on Sunni communities. The government had failed to protect the Shi'a and their holy shrines. The coalition had failed to protect the Shi'a or their holy shrines. The Shi'a, therefore, were going to look after their own security. The Iraqi government—particularly the Shi'a leaders—did not want to stand in the way of these reprisals. They said the Shi'a had to be allowed to let off some steam, as they described it. They believed that they would lose politically with their community if they deployed the army and the police to fight them to prevent them from exacting revenge. We had some difficult discussions with them at that time. I thought their position was hugely wrong-headed. Ultimately we had to deploy forces and take some strong measures to prevent an all-out sectarian war.

The lesson is that, as you try to do what you are trying to do, you're not the only player—others are also in the game. They're trying to make your efforts as difficult as possible, to cause you problems. Al-Qaeda's strike against Askari was a major blow to our efforts to bring Iraqis together.

Still, our efforts moved the ball forward. The fundamental thing we were working on was a unity government, with all groups participating. Despite more than a few months of intense killing, civilian killing, the structure survived, the unity government held together. This laid the foundation for Iraq's continued evolution. The election that took place in 2009 was a less sectarian election than the one in 2005, in which the parties that won the largest number of seats were based on ethnic or sectarian identity. In 2005, though this was the first election in which the Sunnis also participated, people voted largely along their ethnic and sectarian lines. In 2009, they voted to a greater extent for cross-sectarian parties or blocs. It was a hopeful sign, but I think things are again being polarized.

How important was the foreign role in fueling the insurgency?

Important, but not as big as Pakistan's role has been in Afghanistan. The Iranians and the Syrians and the Arabs played a role, but there wasn't the kind of organized sanctuaries, with large numbers or insurgents being trained, as exist in Pakistan. Some arms were coming across the border to some militias from Iran. There were some units inside these militias, special units, that may have been controlled directly by Iran. Some people came from across the Arab world, through Syria, to fight. Some of these young people were coming on airplanes with a one-way ticket to Damascus. I argued, "What the heck, the airport in Damascus needs to deal with this." The Syrians would say things similar to what we heard from the Pakistanis. They would say these people disappear and so forth and we don't know who they are. It was a factor but not the biggest one. The biggest driver was this political, ethnic, sectarian divide. The sectarian divide in particular was the biggest factor. A lot of military people, who had been part of the Iraqi military before we dissolved it, were the backbone of the insurgency.

So when you talk about al-Qaeda in Iraq, you're saying that the key component was former discontented—

The insurgency. The role of al-Qaeda was catalytic in the sense of these attacks would cause sectarianism to grow, to fuel it and to inflame it, and that would make reconciliation difficult. But they didn't have large armies. It was not equivalent to the Taliban. Al-Qaeda was not a big insurgency itself. No, they did a kind of strategic and calculated strike. They took over some areas, limited areas. Ironically, this was ultimately helpful to us because Iraqis in the Sunni areas are a more developed and secular people who, once they experienced the rule of al-Qaeda, rejected it. In this sense, al-Qaeda overreached in my view. People turned against al-Qaeda as they experienced al-Qaeda's values, their methods of operating in Iraq.

Could we talk a little bit about the Sunni awakening period in some areas? My understanding is that the U.S. supported that especially in terms of cash. Did you have any role in talking about that process or implementing it?

Sure. I was the initiator of that. I worked from the get-go to seek the Sunnis out. I would meet with them. I would say, "What the hell do you guys want? Why are you fighting here? What are you after?" I would be very blunt with them. I met with representatives of these insurgents. I would go to the prison where we held their commanders. I would sit with them and say, "Okay, I want to hear what is bothering you. Why did you join the insurgency? What is your beef?"

I would talk to the intelligence bureaus of the neighboring friendly states, "What the hell is going on? What are you guys doing to assist the insurgents here? Are you all working for Iran?" I would shock them. They were all anti-Iranian, thinking we had helped Iran in Iraq. I said, "Actually you're working for Iran." They would reply, "What do you mean we're working for Iran?" I said, "We're all tied up fighting the Sunni insurgents in western Iraq. Given the size of this country, you can't have enough troops to guard all of the borders. The south of Iraq is open, and your friends, the Iranians, are coming across the border because you are tying me down over here. I could be guarding the Iraqi southern border. You must be against Sunni interests. The more this kind of war continues, the more that region is going to fall back. Where there is this kind of brutal war, nobody would invest. Money runs away from places like that. Educated people run away from places like that. Extremism gains because the circumstances become very extreme. When places are more peaceful they're going to take off." I would say, "You say you're representing Sunni interests? In the democracy that we have in mind for Iraq, communities that are educated, entrepreneurial will do better. If we stabilize Iraq, the Sunnis will do well." The Sunnis, because of the old regime, were largely more educated and better off.

I used to tell the Sunnis, "You complain about Jews in America, saying, ‘I think this must be a Jewish policy, you are against the Arabs and against Muslims.'" I would argue with them, "Don't talk to me like that."

What would they say back to you?

As to the Jewish thing, I would say, "You know why Jews are so successful in America? It is because of the open system. They work hard, they're educated. They compete effectively in the system. Therefore, the system reflects that competitive advantage that they acquired through hard work and education, and they get rewarded." I would tell them that the numbers of Jewish Americans are very small if you look at their proportion of the population of the United States, although they think there are 20, 30 million Jews. I would add, "So if you embrace the democratic competitive system, if you are educated, you participate, you succeed. In democracy, you can be much more influential than your numbers. You don't have to have a dictatorship for a minority to control everything, to do well. In an open system, you could do well, too, by playing by the rules and equipping yourself through education and investment and trade and so on." With several of them, these arguments made an impact. Also, in the end, I did get the Sunnis to join the political process and started to meet with the insurgents.

The Sunni insurgents started negotiations with our troops and leaders even as early as late 205, 2006, and early 2007, in very broad meetings. Initially, they wanted an overall ceasefire agreement all over Iraq. We wanted to start slowly, to go step by step. We said, "Let's start in one area. You show what you can do and we'll respond." It evolved over time to something more fundamental, especially as the Shiite militia started killing more Sunnis. They saw us as not being on one side or the other, trying to be a facilitator of an agreement with which all communities can live. Later, they became even more open to dialogue, ultimately leading to large numbers of militias moving on to our payroll. We had more on our payroll than the government of Iraq did. As they were integrated into Iraq's security forces, the government still was uneven in how much they paid.

That was a big part of what I tried to do, what we tried to do, to bring the Sunnis into a dialogue and get them to participate in the political process. Sometimes it was at the expense of antagonizing some of the Shiites who didn't think we should engage the Sunnis.

I also did something else, which was sometimes not popular even in Washington, to try to counter violent sectarianism and address Sunni concerns. We were investing a lot of money in the army and the police. Unfortunately, after the first election in Iraq when the Sunnis had not participated, we weren't as attentive in my view as we should have been to the way these institutions were built. You had a Minister of Interior from the SCIRI [Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq] party, which had the Badr as its militia. The Minister was under a lot of pressure from his party to get the Badr units to be integrated into the police, to be put on the public payroll. Also, the Ministry developed the reputation of operating in a sectarian way. Sunni prisoners, for example, would be tortured. I would hear this a lot from the Sunnis. I finally convinced General Casey to raid one of these prisons to see whether what the Sunnis were saying was correct. We raided the Ministry of Interior itself, its basement, to see what was going on. We found all kinds of horrible things going on there. I confronted the Shi'a leaders, using some tough language.

It led to some progress. First, we got an investigation by the government. Second, I said, "In the next government, the Minister of Interior and Minister of Defense have to be people who did not have militias." I think I said it to the press. I ensured that the next ministers had no ties to militias, no blood on their hands. They were people who were broadly acceptable to all communities. Also, I had fiduciary responsibility for the taxpayers' money. I wasn't going to put it into building up forces to be used for vengeance or tribal revenge. We haven't come here to put lives at risk and spend money for those purposes.

Maybe this was a little too strong. Some people said, "Oh, we will never do that. Would we really stop?" But in forming the unity government one of the things for which we got some credit across the board was our insistence that the two security ministers be broadly acceptable people. That also gave us some credibility.

[BREAK]

All right, we have a little over half an hour. You have a follow-up?

We were talking about the trouble, the Sunni Awakening as it is called. The way that you went about convincing these leaders to work in their own interest on this. The media at the time reported that the United States not only provided payroll but also weapons.

Not during the time I was there. We did not give weapons to anybody on the insurgency side, no. There was no problem of shortage of weapons in Iraq. But no, we didn't. It also was important to work the neighborhood, particularly in the key Arab states. We worked with UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan to facilitate dialogue and interaction. We also worked with Turkey. Because many of the Arab leaders believed we had intentionally given Iraq to the Iranians—that was the view—we wanted to bring them on board to use their contacts to reach out to the Sunnis.

There is a sectarian dimension to their views, and they are suspicious of Shi'a majority in Iraq. Democracy, especially during the phase in which voting took place along sectarian lines, was empowering the Shiites. The Sunni states saw this benefitting Iran, the biggest Shi'a country in that region. Certainly, it was favorable to Iran in the sense that Iraq wasn't going to be the kind of adversarial power it was previously vis-a-vis Iran. But I had thought that if the Arabs could embrace the Shi'a Arabs of Iraq, it wasn't inevitable that the Shi'a would want to be subordinate to Iran. Iraq is a rich country, with great potential, and was the center of Shiite learning itself. Saddam had sort of degraded Iraq's religious importance, and the center of Shiism shifted to Iran. In my view, Iraq could become a competitive and alternative center of Shi'a power, Shi'a traditions, and Shi'a education vis-a-vis Iran.

Should we move to the UN?

One question and that is about the surge. Are you privy to the discussions leading up to this?

Oh, yes, I was participating in that policy review and had some inputs into it. The surge was as a result of a review that the President initiated. What do we do given the increase in violence? Do we send in more forces, with what mission? Do we cut back? There was kind of a free flow of ideas, with different options presented from different players. There were significant numbers of video conferences from Baghdad, with me and General Casey participating.

Were you an early advocate?

I was not an early advocate of it. I was an advocate of a different military strategy earlier.

What was your strategy?

Population protection, along the lines of classic counterinsurgency doctrine. I thought we could do three political things to support such an approach. One, if we could increase Sunni participation and winning the Sunnis over, we could curb the insurgency. Two, we could help Iraqis form a government that was willing to move against people who behaved in a sectarian way. That would help defuse the violence. Three, if we kept increasing Iraqi capability, they could do more for themselves.

I thought we were making progress on the political front but, as I mentioned before, the terrorist attack against Askari mosque was a setback. I thought that [Nouri al-] Maliki was a stronger leader than the previous leader, Jafaari. He was also anxious to get more capability in his hands. I thought we should help him with that, but building up Iraqi forces was going to take time. In the interim, should we do more to make sure things do not get out of control as we develop the underpinnings for order?

I weighed in in favor of a surge, but I weighed against some other ideas circulating at the same time. Some people were saying, "Let's bandwagon with the 80 percent solution." The Shiite-Kurd community composed 80 percent of the population. The "80 percent solution," as it was called, meant we should just back them to inflict defeat and surrender on the Sunni minority. I thought that this approach was playing into the hands of the insurgency and the terrorists. We're trying to get the Sunnis to not make their areas a hospitable place for the terrorists. We then say, "Let's embrace the prejudices of the others." That would be self defeating and actually would help the terrorists win the allegiance of the Sunnis. So the 80 percent solution was one issue. Other ideas were circulating about what we do about some of the political issues. However, I was supportive of the surge on the narrow military issue.

What was it like talking to Washington from Baghdad in 2006 as the situation worsened dramatically? I'm listening to this conversation here and it seems to be out of whack in some ways with the dramatic deterioration, and one gets a sense of a growing feeling of alarm, and alarm may understate it. When you were talking to Washington, what was it like? Were these people saying, "Zal, what the hell is going on?"

Sure.

"How are we going to do it?" What did you get as a sense of the interaction with the folks in Washington? There was clearly a very bad relationship between Condi Rice and Rumsfeld during these months. Did you get a sense of all this? Did it come out in these discussions? What were the discussions like?

The discussions were obviously very intense. There was a lot of concern, yes. That's fair what you're saying. I think those concerns and worries led ultimately to the review. The big issues of 2006 arose in the initial few months of 2006. First, the new parliament had to choose a Prime Minister. You had a period during which Jafaari was the PM [Prime Minister]. After the election in which everyone participated, the biggest bloc, which according to the Constitution has the first opportunity to get the Prime Minister nominated, renominated him. However, he did not have the support of the other blocs, whose leaders thought he had been ineffective in the previous period. He also had handled the Askari mosque thing very poorly. He was the Prime Minister when the attack happened, in February of 2006. Between February and May, the key political issue was whether Jafaari should leave. He was sitting pretty being the Prime Minister. Why should he quit? How do you galvanize the Iraqis to bring about change, to have a more effective Prime Minister? It took a while for that to take place.

Second, and this was of high interest. . The Iraqis needed to form a unity government. The day-to-day security issues that General Casey deals with are important in the short term but political progress determines the long-term outcome. Government formation and the programs of the unity government took until May to resolve. It took a while, and the Iraqis do not move as urgently as we would have thought they needed to move, given the violence and given what had happened. We would have thought, in our way of thinking, that the serious situation they were in would make it easier for them to pull together. They need to get their act together. They need to come to an agreement at a much faster pace. In fact, what this violence was to increase suspicion, polarization. People are dying, relatives are dying. People say, "The government is not doing what it should be doing. The government is looking the other way or even may be a party to some of this violence." We're trying to overcome that, acting as a bridge builder. We say, "Look, you guys need to continue to work and we need to have a unity government. To not have a unity government or to fall apart is exactly what the terrorists want. That is why they have done this. So you'll be playing the game that they would like you to play."

Third, after Maliki forms a government, there is the issue that Maliki wants more authority for himself. We trained the Iraqi military and then we kept them for some time afterward working for us. He is saying he wants to have control over the military for himself. He is the Iraqi Prime Minister. He would like to use these forces. He probably will use them in some ways that he thought would be better than what we were doing. He would argue sometimes with me as to how deliberate and discriminating we were in our operations. "That is not a way to fight a war," he would argue. That, in turn, made people nervous about turning forces over to him, saying, "What does he mean when he says we're too deliberate and too discriminating, that we need to be much more forceful?" He thought that more forceful action would shape behavior.

The President thought if he wants to step up, take responsibility, we should empower him. That's what we want, Iraqis taking responsibility for their own security. All of this takes time. Which units do you want to turn over first? He wants the best units first, the special forces. He doesn't have a clear sense of the way civilians should play their role, their chain of command issues. The Prime Minister doesn't order units around directly, he has to go through a chain. This is part of the process of state building. He would like to be able to call a commander and order him directly to, "go arrest this guy" or "move that unit to this place." I would say, "No, Mr. Prime Minister, the President doesn't call a division commander to go take this hill or do that."

In any case, this period of government formation lasts until the end of May. Then the President comes in June to Baghdad, a surprise visit to meet with the Prime Minister. We have another meeting with the President in Jordan in November. During this period, we've got issues of benchmarks with the new Prime Minister, things to do with regard to oil law. We think big issues need to be decided regarding de-Ba'athification and government spending money to improve services. Budget execution has been a big problem. Even the budget they had, they weren't spending.

In terms of Sunni outreach, Maliki needs to get out there, talk to the Sunnis, and travel to the Sunni countries. I spend a lot of time convincing the Saudis to receive him on his first foreign visit as the new Prime Minister. We wanted to use this to build a bridge in this Sunni-Shi'a world. To his credit, Maliki agreed.

But the security situation is as bad as you describe. The President in Washington is very impatient as to what is going on. General Casey is briefing one operation and plan, another operation and plan, what we are trying to do here, complaining about Iraqis not cooperating, Iraqis not contributing enough forces.

What were your relations with Casey?

They were quite good. Actually I had known George for a long time because he had been in charge of J-5 on the Joint Staff. He is a great gentleman. He and I had offices next to each other and met every morning. At the personal level, it was quite congenial. It wasn't the same as the civil-military relationship I had had in Afghanistan. There, the military had been a smaller component of our effort. Of course, I wasn't in the chain of command because, as Ambassador, one is not in that position. But my military counterpart in Afghanistan would attend Embassy staff meetings and would coordinate military operations that were under his control in detail with me. Sometimes I would tell him, "No, don't do this, I'll deal with it politically." But in Iraq the military was a huge presence. Barno was a three-star and Casey was a four-star general, with a lot of force and a big machine with him. It was more of a parallel operation than an integrated one. We coordinated, we talked a lot. We had a meeting together every morning, but then I would have my staff meeting and he would have his own staff meeting.

But he attended your staff meeting?

No, Casey did not, Barno did. But Casey was an absolutely outstanding gentleman. His concept, however, was that we can't win this war, the Iraqis will have to win it. We need to transfer responsibility to them as quickly as possible, enable them to deal with it. We want to prevent the situation from getting worse while they become capable of dealing with it. This was his concept. We can't secure population centers, we can't defeat the insurgency, they need to do it themselves.

That was his clear concept versus the idea of undertaking a joint effort to defeat the insurgency together through the protection of the population.

So basically you disagreed.

We disagreed on the fundamental issue, but then the military strategy was in his domain at the end. We would coordinate, go to the Prime Minister. We were both members of the Ministerial Committee for National Security of Iraq, which was chaired by the Prime Minister. We would give our views and guide and argue with the Iraqi leadership as to what they were doing right or wrong.

When you reported back to Washington, who were you reporting to on a daily level?

To Steve Hadley. He was the National Security Adviser.

So you weren't coordinating directly to the State Department?

I was, Condi would call. You would get sometimes a large number of calls, but every day at 2:00 my time, which was 6:00 or 7:00 in Washington, I would get a call from Steve Hadley, who would be going to go see the President. He would say the President would want to know what Zal is saying. That is the first thing he asks, about what is going on.

So are you saying to Hadley things like, "I fundamentally disagree with General Casey's strategy here"?

I didn't go every day to talk to him, that's not my job. He knew.

That you have a fundamental disagreement.

I did send him the Red Cell report. I told him that I think the President needs to know that, in my view, we need to change the military strategy. But my daily reporting to Steve Hadley, when he called, was mostly about what is going on. What did the Prime Minister say to you last night when you had dinner with him? What is going on with the oil law, where is it? How is de-Ba'athification reform coming? What are the Kurds doing? So the discussions were about issues in my track, 90 percent of the time, rather than asking about—

So was this a problem? Most commentators who look at Iraq from 2004 to 2006 say, "My God, this situation dramatically deteriorated for 24 months." It seems like folks were not really reassessing fundamental issues in ways that should have been commensurate with the deterioration of the situation.

So one might say that these sorts of phone calls that you focused on—maybe you didn't want to, but maybe Hadley was asking you to talk about the daily stuff and you were indirectly avoiding the real substantive talk about what is going wrong.

I don't think so because of the following. Different people have different views of this. I think we give too much credit, in terms of what happened later, to the military surge. That is my view personally.

Right.

I think the reason things improved later wasn't only dealing with the surge, although in some pockets it was important. But it had to do with several other things that took time to be built up. If you had done the surge, let's say, in the middle of 2004, it is my view that it wouldn't have had the same effect. It wouldn't have made as much of a difference. What are the things that mattered? First, in my view, al-Qaeda's mistakes were very helpful. By the time we were coming in, they had made themselves very unpopular with the Sunnis. So the overreaching of al-Qaeda was important.

Second, the Sunni shift. A lot of work had to be done to prepare for this change to occur—for the Sunnis to want to be part of the solution rather than be the problem. Even the militia shifting sides, ceasefires here and there, that we had entered into long before the surge started were critical. The surge, and what we continued to build on, were both important.

Third, Maliki was very important. You couldn't do what you did with the forces if Jafaari had been the Prime Minister. He just was not willing to cooperate. The biggest factor was the perception of Maliki when he deployed forces into Basra to fight the Shi'a militia, which was opposed by Petraeus and our people. They said, "What he is doing is reckless." He said, "I'm not coming back. Either I crush Sadr's militia or I'm staying there." Maliki had it in him to do something like that. I don't think Jafaari would have had it in him. And he did the same thing then in Baghdad, moving against Sadr City, which at one time he had been opposed to doing.

Fourth, there is all the work that Casey and Petraeus and I and others did to build up the Iraqi forces, to make them capable, to arm and train them to the point that they could do things that they couldn't do earlier. Our surge, the additional forces, were 20,000 to 30,000—large, but not huge when you have 160,000 total. This 20,000 or 30,000 more is not an immense addition, not to double or triple the force. It made a difference. I don't want to take anything away from our military and the surge. The change in the way the force was used was good, to go for more population protection, securing Baghdad neighborhoods and so on. That was very important. I am a great fan of that, an advocate for it.

I would say all of this was important. Some of this was built up over time. Some of the setbacks also had their own implications. I think the destruction of Askari caused this huge outbreak of sectarian violence that made the situation much worse. At the same time, it was a factor in the alienation of the Sunni Arabs from al-Qaeda Sunnis began thinking, These guys are crazy, look what they're going to do.

I would say all of this is important, unfortunately or fortunately, whatever. Let's not characterize it. What gets a lot of attention is that the surge is what won the war. By implication if we had done the same thing, let's say we had sent 20,000 forces and a change in strategy, I would have said the change in strategy could have made a difference, that's my own prejudice. But I genuinely think we don't give the other real factors, all of which came together to help at the end, enough emphasis.

That was extremely helpful. When you look back now, to what do you assign the key factors for the dramatic failure of the occupation from the spring of 2003 to the time of the surge? If the surge was the beginning of a better trajectory—

No, I don't think the surge was the beginning of the better trajectory.

I mean from this larger constellation of factors.

But that started of course much earlier. I would think, different things, if you look at it. There is a different timeframe associated with them. For example, the buildup of the Iraqi forces. I think that was a very wise decision, and the fact that Iraq was rich was a blessing because unlike Afghanistan, we built them up quickly because we thought they could afford, to support it themselves. They wouldn't be a burden forever on the United States. So I think Petraeus's work under Casey between 2004 and late ‘05, when he was there leading the buildup of Iraqi forces, was crucial. The Sunni outreach, which I intensified, had been part of earlier efforts, too. That was very helpful. It started in 2005. In my case, it continued until I left in April of 2007.

Then I would think the election in which Sunnis participated and replacing Jafaari with Maliki were very important. That happened in 2006. Maliki's transformation into a tough leader was critical. He was pushing for control over his forces, but we were not giving it to him for a while. Finally, the President said, "Give it to him, God damn it." He moved in 2008. So you'll have a different timeline associated with each of these factors.

So those are the reasons why things started to get better.

Right.

But I'm asking you to reflect on why the occupation went so badly.

The occupation, of course, was in place for a year plus.

Why did the situation in Iraq turn so negatively from the spring of 2003 against the expectations of almost everyone in the administration?

We talked about this, the dissolving the army, how important that was. You've read the explanations of Ambassador Bremer, Walt Slocombe, and others who said the army had essentially disintegrated. In their view, what we did was to ratify what had practically happened. There are others who have argued, "No, the army was waiting to be called back in." That certainly has to be a big issue. To what extent this was inevitable or something we did that we could have done differently?

The de-Ba'athification issue alienated a lot of people, firing thousands of people from jobs—even teachers—because they were in the Ba'ath Party. They were losing their livelihood, their employment, and this disproportionately went against Sunnis. Was it necessary to go that deep? Some people say they could have gone deeper. Then the question is, was it the de-Ba'athification order that was the problem or the way it was implemented in a discriminatory and punitive way without due legal process and review?

Then there is the issue of the formation of the Iraqi forces initially. Did we allow militias to infiltrate too much initially, allowing them to take revenge and leading to a cycle of escalating violence. There are the policies of the neighbors, as well as policies on our part. I have not taken a position on all of these issues. I tend to believe that, during the first year, what we did contributed to the problems that took a long time then to overcome. An alternative view held by many people was that these things were inevitable and that therefore we shouldn't have gone in.

Do you believe that?

No, I am not a believer personally that these were inevitable problems. I always believe that these things are contingent issues. They could go this way or that way, depending on a whole range of things. The question was our analyses and policies taking all of that into account and taking the right shaping actions.

Could the planning have been better then?

I actually don't blame the planners so much because, as I told you, I thought a lot of work had gone on. I sat through endless hours of briefings and planning by Casey when he was J-5 on what postliberation Iraq would look like. The question that is surprising to me is, what happened? How come all of that work was put aside? When you send in somebody new, the changes are often made. I have been an Ambassador, and when you go to your post, the President gives you a lot of room to maneuver, gives a lot of respect to your judgments, and gives a lot of weight to what you're saying should be done. Because he believes you are striving for success in the terms he has defined it, he is inclined to trust and go with the judgment of his people in the field.

I always tell people we never exhaust all the possible topics, but we do a pretty good job of exhausting the person in the chair. You have been very patient with us. I want to thank my colleagues too, it has been a long day. It is very difficult for you, but I appreciate your patience and forbearance.

It was a pleasure.

This is a terrific addition to what we're doing here and it will provide an extremely valuable resource for folks coming later.