From our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. I believe that by next summer, you will see significant improvements in security. Forces will begin to flow. By this time one year from now i believe i will be able to tell you that this strategy is clearly working. General mcchrystal is here. He played a key role in iraq and afghanistan. He was instrumental in the capture of Saddam Hussein and the killing of abu mossad said cowie. His memoir has just been released in paperback. It comes at a time when iraq and afghanistan are both facing renewed insurgencies. Want to talk about many things including where you are today and where you are going forward, but also look back at where you have some advantage of experience and insight. Afghanistan. Where are we, in your judgment, on the ground there as they prepare to leave most troops by 2014, and maybe all . I think that militarily or security wise there have been a lot of gains made, and those gains are shown on the ground in the relative life of the people. I think in terms of government, there have been big problems. Internal to the afghan government, there has been a real difficulty in getting local governments adequate, local, competent administration, technocrats down to low levels, which builds the confidence of the people. At the national level, there has been a real problem with them being a credible government. It is not impossible, but it has been a real challenge. I think the Afghan People have moved to a different place. I think particularly young people, not just those in school we talk so much about, but those who maybe have graduated from school, afghan females and a lot of other afghans are not ready to go back in time. They are not ready to go back to pre9 11, pre1990, pre1978. When people talk about afghanistan and what will happen in the future, they immediately pull out a history book and say this is what will happen. I think it is a different afghanistan. It is still fraught with dangers because political weakness could break into violence. I dont think the taliban could take over. I dont think they are strong enough, but i think there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty and the Afghan People are plagued by the what happens next question. What kind of mistakes did the allies make in afghanistan . A number. I am going to include afghans in our allies. If we go back just to 9 11 and say we went in unexpectedly after the al qaeda elements that were there, we suddenly found ourselves having toppled the taliban government without having really thought what next. Now we have a country that had been through about 20 years of war at that point. It was badly damaged and very little infrastructure or personal capital, into Human Capital in terms of government or whatnot, and we thought we could do things more cheaply than we did. We thought the germans would do the police, the italians would do the courts, the americans would do the army and a few other things and we would slide out. That was not realistic. It was going to take a huge effort. In our haste and sometimes our ignorance, we allowed a number of nontraditional leaders, warlords in many cases, to gather economic, political, and sometimes military power. We allowed them to get into places, sometimes where they had been before, and what that signal to the afghan population was that, here we go again. We are going back to the bad old days that really are what preceded the taliban. The Afghan People said if we are just leaving the taliban, we are going to go back to what we hated pretaliban. We lost confidence among many afghans during the 20012004 period. The taliban saw opportunity. They came back in and said look at what is happening. Youre going back to the bad old days and americans are not going to solve the problem. They started to find fertile ground, not in huge places, but slowly. They were able to grow their political power, and some cases, military. We made a mistake of not seeing that soon enough and not reacting to it enough when we did. We were under resourced in many ways. Probably we were most under resourced and understanding. We did learn the language enough. We didnt take a longterm, consistent approach to it. We did not leave a force there. Do you believe if there had been a residual force of perhaps 10,000 people or more soldiers that we would not see the conflict we see today . There is no way to guarantee that, but the chances are we would have a better situation than we have now. I think it couldve been a factor that would have given the sunnis more confidence that they would have the ability to be more fairly and perhaps persuade the Prime Minister of that as well. We certainly lost a tremendous amount of our leverage with the Prime Minister when we were gone. I understand the desire to be gone, but it also signaled to the region that we had touched the stove and it was too hot and we were going to withdraw our hands. While we do not want to stay places with huge numbers of people, we must stay engaged. If we had left a residual force, what would they have done . I think they largely would have done training of iraqi forces, Logistical Support and things, but to a certain degree, they also would have then a demonstrated commitment, a demonstrated partnership. The president prepared to negotiate to keep residual forces there. It wasnt like we did not want to have them. It was that the negotiations, as i understand it, were unsuccessful. That is my understanding as well. And they may be under successful in afghanistan. They may be indeed. And the Iraqi Foreign minister is saying to afghanistan, do not make the mistake we did. Keep some forces there. But they may. Which brings me to this question. You were one of the people who had a relationship with hamid karzai. I dont understand why after all this he still seems either he is just purely political and perhaps corrupt likely corrupt, and yet, after all america has done he would not be in power without america. He seems so resentful. There is a saying, give somebody something in the first somebody something and the first person they hate is you. There was a paper during the vietnam war that said the paradox of counterinsurgency is the client state that you are helping is soon finds itself less committed to it than you. The donor cares more than the recipient. In the case of afghanistan, there are a number of things at work. They are trying to come to grips with imminent abandonment. Theyre trying to steel themselves to be emotionally and physically prepared. Because that happened before. Correct. I think president karzai and i i certainly would not presume to do a psychological study, but he does not want to be portrayed as a puppet. As washingtons man. Thats right. He also thinks that in the future of afghanistan, he is going to have to be very independent and not dance to our fiddle. On the other hand, he has also had enough of a painful relationship over what is now many years. From 2001 that is the long time to operate out of the palace. It is very difficult for him to travel. It is a long time for him to be going through this endless cycle is of state, generals, ambassadors, and to find that in many cases he thinks that he hasnt been listened to or respected. Respect is a big thing. Its a huge thing, and if you look at that and over time he gets increasingly frustrated with that, and he is human. The hamid karzai i knew was a good man. He was a rational man. But he was a human. Anhe h all the frustrations and responses that other people so how did you, as the general who came to see him, give us the secret, or at least your own sense of how you should engage him by showing him respect, by trying to gain his confidence, by trying to disavow him of his worst instincts . I have no secret. It is just dealing with people. The first thing was view him as an elected leader of a nation, not as a client of the United States who was dependent on us. He is the sovereign leader of a nation. When i went to see him the first time, it was not tradition for americans to be in anything but our battle uniform. I wore my dress green uniform to show him respect. I also tried to communicate to him that not only was this his nation, this was his war. I was the commander of american troops, but i supported the afghan fight. He never viewed it as his war. He viewed it as something they were reluctantly allowing the west to fight on their territory. I tried to convince him that this is a war for national survival. This is your war. You have to play a role as commanderinchief in doing that. I made efforts to establish that. There were times that i am sure he would like me to do differently, but i believe that by working as hard as we did on the relationship, there were also times when we each did differently than our instincts might have been to maintain the relationship. The goal was to strengthen that to the point where he trusted me as a person and trusted me as a military commander, and i could be a good support for our ambassador, our secretary of state, our president and whatnot. And there has never been a strong Central Government in afghanistan ever. That makes a Central Governments task that much more challenging. Thats right. If you are president karzai, you dont have a political party. You dont have an automatic base of support. You are trying to triangulate between a number of different interests and foreigners, western interest, and the taliban. You are trying to balance between all of these, not going so far to one that the others become enemies. What are the three or four things you think are essential to communicate to annapolis and the air force academy, and to say the same thing to future military leaders . The first is we tend to think of war, and we tend to think we are going to conquer a piece of ground. War is about people. The army that wins is the one that thinks it has won. The one that is losing is the one that thinks it has lost. And the population decides which one wins. And that is very counterintuitive when you try to take an imperial look at war. So thats the first thing. Its about people. Youre not just moving stuff. Youre influencing people. The second is we say the general must have a great strategy. In reality, i have come to believe you could do strategy pretty quickly. You and i could sit here in an hour and come up with a workable strategy. The genius is implementing it. To implement it, you have to do a number of things. First, you have to articulate it clearly and constantly. And have it understood. People have to believe that you are committed to it and that you will provide the kind of focus if you state your strategy differently every day, they wait until the next day to hear the one they like. They withhold action. They have to believe it is consistent. They have to believe they are part of it. You have to convince people, your soldiers, your civilians and people that this is a strategy that they not only will benefit from but that they must contribute to. They dont want to see general mcchrystals strategy. They want to see our strategy, and they have to accept that. It becomes a people exercise at every level. The last i would say is it is about building trust. If there is anything i have come to believe and i go back and i look at the 2004 dream team. You say i am going to build a great team and so you say go get great talent. That does not equal a great team. A great team does have a component of talent, but the other component is what i call shared consciousness, which is a combination of trust, common purpose, and informed, contextual understanding, so together this entity believes in the same thing and understands is informed enough to do that well. Then you put this together and suddenly you have the necessary ingredients to have a truly effective team. If you build a great team and reinforce that, you can do just about anything. If you dont focus on the team part, no matter how brave the strategy is, youre likely not to do well. As we saw with the first dream team. And they changed to a Second Dream Team because of a different coach. Let me get your take on this, the idea that the president , who supported the surge, and that you had recommended from the field some Different Levels of troops that might be necessary, 70,000, whatever the numbers were, and you know them. And then there had been much debate and the president talked and listened to a lot of people, and then there was the leak of a memo. Some people thought it came from you or people around you because they wanted to make the case publicly for what they felt was needed to do the job. Who leaked the memo, and do you think it had a devastating impact or a Significant Impact on the relationship between the president and his generals in the field, especially you . I know that i didnt leak it, and i am almost 100 sure nobody on my staff did. We had started work on that in june. We finished in early august. Then it was back in d. C. For about three weeks. We had no reason to leak it because in fact once it was leaked it made my job and our job much harder. We were much better to have the president and his team with a chance to digest it. I absolutely think the speculation is completely incorrect. I dont know who did it. Would you want to know or not very much . Not very much at this point. These leaks are so damaging because what they do is undercut trust. They changed the debate shouldve been about what was in the assessment. The discussion shouldve been about because i gave the assessment in two pieces. The first piece was here is the assessment of the situation. Here is what we have to do if we want to succeed. I didnt put anything about troops in there. I said you must change the way we fight this war or we will fail. If you accept this assessment, if you accept these conclusions, then look at part two, and part two said these are the resources required, but dont do the resourcing if you dont believe the first part, because it will be good money after bad. So, as we did this, we were very careful to try to make sure that people understood that we were not giving a judgment on the war. I said to my staff, think of us as auto mechanics. We dont own the car, but we know what it will take to get the car in working order. Try to be dispassionate. I think we did an effective job of that. Bob gates has said that the president sent men and women into battle without supporting the mission. It seems the president had questions and was skeptical. Is this working . If it is working, how do you explain this . I would hope the general would say that to his lieutenants, would you not . It really did force the discussion. Not all parts of it were comfortable or done perfectly, but i thought that level of focus on what are we trying to do and what is it going to take to do it was very healthy. Bob gates says he supported all the president s decisions with respect to afghanistan. Did you . Yes. I was asked whether i recommended announcing a july 11 beginning of pulling forces out, but i told him, he asked me pointblank, can you accept that, and i said i could. Everyone is trying to understand the president and leadership on a whole range of foreign and domestic issues. Give me your sense of him as a leader and as a commander in chief. I have a very limited aperture on the president. What i have found was he had thought very analytically about afghanistan from the beginning. I think he was frustrated because as he was trying to understand that he was being given a drumbeat of decisions that had to be made before he had time to completely internalize what the situation was. I think he was being asked to make another commitment almost the day he took over. I think that caused frustration and it caused him to be skeptical that people were trying to push him too fast. The problem was events in the battlefield pushed that. I think he had a natural lack of familiarity with how the military works. Anyone would. That is not a criticism. Anyone who deals with a different culture or group of people, it takes a while to get that. If you are doing that really, sort of for the first time as the president , you are not only trying to feel more comfortable with the culture, but you are doing it as their commander. I think he was trying very hard to balance the fact that he had responsibilities as the commander, his loyalty and leadership, military having a demeanor that has been developed over years we have uniforms that overtly describe where we have been, what we have done, what our rank is and what not. In some ways we benefit from the fact that it looks impressive. You enter a room and in some ways get more respect than you as an individual have earned. We use that persona. We feel comfortable in it. But at the same time it creates a divide between us and other people, and we pay a price for that, and we are partly to blame for the fact that we benefit on the one hand but dont pay as much respect to the negative sides of that as we could. Navy seals. I am going to talk about that later in the hour as well. Tell me how you see the navy seals, what they represent, and what kind of person comes out of that training. Sure, and im going to expand it to the special operations units i have worked with. Theyre pretty unique. The first is, they have decided to volunteer for a more difficult but a more elite type of service, and they think in many cases it is because what they are really looking for is to belong to something that challenges them as individuals but allows them to sit at a table with people they admire and be considered an equal. That is a very addictive feeling if you are suddenly around people that otherwise would be your heroes and they look at you as somebody they respect. It is a draw to be in that. Cs lewis wrote a wonderful article about the inner ring. It is a little bit of a desire to be in the innermost ring. Theyre willing to pay a price in terms of how hard it is, how much time away and whatnot because being part of that very, very elite organization fulfills in them some needs. They are headstrong, often. You cannot lead them the same way you lead conventional troops. You have to engage them. The best way i have found to engage special operators is not to tell them what to do but to describe the problem. Say ive got this problem. Do you think it can be solved . They say, we think we could. How would you do that . They describe it. Would you be willing to do that . Even though it might be a very dangerous mission. And they make the call. What are you training . Is a toughness of mind . Its problemsolving, and it is problem solving not just from a logical sense, but from an emotional sense. I had a boss, back in mogadishu, wonderful guy, we sat in an after action review one time. The communications in an aircraft had not worked. He said listen, whatever equipment you have to buy, i will buy for you. Whatever experts you have to come in and train, do. Whatever other exercises you need to do, i will sched