From our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. We turn now to afghanistan. Efforts to complete the first democratic transition continue. A deal brokered by john kerry appears to be in pearl. Peril. Differences are emerging between efforts to complete the first democratic transition continue. A deal brokered by john kerry the two camps. As withdrawal of the u. S. Troops move closer, the taliban are making military gains in the south and near the capital of kabul. My guest bruce riedel has written a new book, what we won americas secret war in afghanistan, 19791989. I am pleased to have him back at this table. Welcome. And i should say that anyone who wants to understand afghanistan and pakistan turns to you, including the president of the United States because you are principal advisor as he was formulating policy. Even bob woodward said the foremost intelligence advisor has produced a vital and concise history of that part of the world. That is still president obamas award today. What is the future of afghanistan . We are at the moment of truth in the future of afghanistan. First, the president ial election. We are on the precipice. One of these two individuals is going to have to admit that he lost. That is not going to be easy. It is not easy for an afghan politician to admit he has lost. He will have to admit he cheated on an industrial scale and tried to steal the election. That is going to be hard. Lets assume we can get over this hurdle, we can get behindai the president ial elections, and one of them is president. Then next year we will see whether the residents gamble that we could build an afghan army good enough, the president of the United States gamble that we could build an army good enough, it has always been a gamble. At this point, indications are it looks like the afghan army is holding by and large but there are troubling individual incidents. Some fights in kandahar this last week in which the afghan army looks like it did fairly poorly. We will be watching this fairly closely for the next two years. It could unravel like iraq unraveled. That is why we need to be careful not to set all of our decisions about what our force posture will be in january 2017 today. The president has backed himself into a corner. Why did he do that . I am not a psychologist. I do not know why he didnt. Did it. Very few people think that was a wise thing to indicate a date. When you would withdraw x number of troops. Well, in any war one of the , most important things you want to do is keep your enemy and doubt in what you are going to do. It has always been a mistake to signal in advance we will be at this date be at this level of force and then at zero. The good news is, i mean, they decided to set this so far in advance the president has time to change his mind. The lesson of iraq ought to influence that. We used kind of an egg timer approach. It turned out afterwards that we have miscalculated whether al qaeda or al qaedaism could have recovered. We also miscalculated in terms of what the government of afghanistan will be like. We need to keep flexibility. You stay there until how long . I would continue on the path we are on moving down to half the number, 3000 or 4000 in 2016. But i would not decide what 2017 is today. I would wait and see. Maybe we need 2000. Maybe we would need nobody. You know everything i know and then everything ellis. There are stories that what happened to all the weapons the u. S. Provided. They do not have the accountability of whose hands they are in. This president inherited a disaster in afghanistan. When i did the Strategic Review in 2009, this country was on the verge of catastrophic failure in afghanistan. Yes, no one did bookkeeping. No one had any idea who the enemy was. No one realized that pakistan was playing both sides of the fence. And still are. And still are. You start from that base, of course youre not going to know how much arms are in the hands of the afghan army at this stage. We did not do our homework for seven years. It is a little hard in a conflict to start to catch up in the eighth and ninth year of the conflict. Why is it so hard to build an army in a country like afghanistan . A good question. The soviets in the 1980s built an afghan air force, which is three or four times larger than what we have built in afghanistan over the last decade. That is amazing to me. Why could the soviet trained train them to fly airplanes and not us . Could we get russian manuals and teach them in russian . It comes down to a question of resources. For a long time, no resources went to and. They went to iraq. When we started the resources in 2009 and 2010, we imposed a timeline on how long it was going to be. We can still pull those out but all along the way the day we went into afghanistan in 2001 we have inflicted damage on ourselves over and over again. Was the biggest damage the invasion of iraq . What absolutely. The best and the brightest, the u. S. Intelligence community have been sent to afghanistan in 2001, early 2002. They were all pulled out. Where are the smart people from the pentagon and National Security counsel when that decision was made . A lot of people protested it but they did it very quietly. Do not do this now because o. Afghanistan. Right. Not about whether they were weapons of mass distraction. Because what happened in afghanistan will be eroded. Right. If you wanted to try to take over country like afghanistan which in 2002 had known 20 years of war, they had been invaded not by one superpower but by two superpowers which had been poor to start with and try to get back on track you needed to put in resources. What did we do, we put in roughly 10,000 troops for the next three years. It was putting a bandaid on a sucking chest wound. Could we have not done anything about corruption . Corruption across asia is a big challenge. We are not going to fix it. What do you leave once you defeat al qaeda . I think one of the things we need to leave is some kind of residual counterterrorism capability. I will be clear what i mean. It drones. That does not mean we have cap drone strikes in pakistan every day or even every month. But i would like to know that the u. S. Has the unilateral counterterrorism capability to deal with the revival of al qaeda and pakistan for the foreseeable future. Because one thing we know for sure, the government will not do anything about the revival. I want to come to that in a moment. With respect to the surge which came out of the Decision Making that you were involved in, was that a good idea . Yes. I did not think we had much choice. Things were so awful. If you look at stanley mcchrystals report which anyone can read on the Washington Post website, he says we were on the verge of catastrophic defeat. He said the prisons we were operating in afghanistan in 2009 and 2010 were incubators for the taliban and al qaeda, they controlled the prisons. In a counterinsurgency if the prisons you are running are an incubator for the enemy, you are in deep, deep trouble. Flip over to pakistan. Isi has always allowed in North Waziristan a safe haven for the people who were fighting in the u. S. And the Afghan Government so they could slide back and forth at will. That is right. Generals i have interviewed at this table said you can never win as long as they can do that. Do you agree . It is awfully hard. Very few countries in one generation fight the same or war twice and we have done that in afghanistan. The biggest take away for me, it is a whole lot easier if you have the pakistanis helping you overthrow the government in kabul than if you were in kabul trying to fight the insurgency. The 1980s war works for us because the pakistanis essentially took all of the risk, all of the casualties, and were strategic masters of the war. It was not Charlie Wilsons war. It was a dictator. But a good friend of Charlie Wilson. A great friend of Charlie Wilson. We have tried to do the opposite in the last 12 years and it is very, very, very hard to do. The only solution that makes any sense is to build up an afghan army that can deal with that sanctuary for the long haul. You just said which is an interesting historical point and it is wonderful reading. It is the idea that we are familiar with the idea that the soviet union came in and essentially occupied and controlled afghanistan. And conventional lore is that the afghanistan tribes kicked them out because they got sidewinder missiles and Charlie Wilson played a role in that. Youre saying who really kicked out the russians was the president of pakistan, a military dictator. That is right. In essence, i will put it this way. Jimmy carter and Ronald Reagan made the same kind of deal with zia that churchill made with joseph stalin. We needed a bad guy on our side, and that was the bad guy that we got. There were consequences, to that, inevitably, there were going to be consequences. Jimmy carter and Ronald Reagan knew that there were be consequences. If you step back and look at the whole thing, the secret war in the 1980s was a global game changer. The cost of 3 billion and not a single american casualty. The soviet union was defeated. Within six months the wall fell. The warsaw pact imploded. The cold war ended. It began with kicking the soviet union out of afghanistan. I think that is right. I think that was the catalyst for it. We will never know if the soviet union had not been defeated what would have happened. We will never know if someone different than gorbachev had been head of the general secretary of the party and resisted more. That is right, but we do know what did happen. What did happen is they lost and the cold war came to an end. And the danger of thermonuclear war between the u. S. And russia. Were there lessons to be learned for the u. S. After it kicked al qaeda out or the taliban . I think the big lesson there is you cannot just walk away from afghanistan. This is very dangerous part of the world. It seems to be a place where important things happen because not only was a global changer in terms of the end of the cold war, we can say 25 years later, it was the start of the global jihad. But at the same time, it was often repeated by the media and her buddy my every analyst would come to this table. If you read your history the afghans are so tough and independent and so trouble that in the end they will kick you out. Look what happened to the russians and before the russians and the u. S. It is the graveyard district. It is bad history. A lot of countries have conquered afghanistan. The arabs and alexander the great and the mongols and the british. The british actually won the second anglo war. History is helpful. When people give you these nice slogans, you should ask you that is right. Exactly, and then, you think of exceptions and you know it is not. So then, the dictator of pakistan get some credit in your judgment, a lot of credit, primary credit with the help of american arms, sidewinder missiles and the rest of them to kick out the russians. Right. And then, what happened to afghanistan . We lost interest. There was a terrible civil war. The city of kabul was not destroyed in the war between the mujahideen and the russians. It was destroyed in a war dean thelush mujahideen. Looking back, we can all see this. Dean now, to be fair to president george bush, senior, he had a pretty full plate. Eastern europe, the reunification of germany, the iraqi invasion of kuwait. Afghanistan which had been number one or number two on president reagans priority list went president reagans priority list when down to maybe number 50. The consequence bush 41, with no attention to afghanistan it disintegrated into civil war and became a broken state. And from that, emerged the taliban. In reading a book, you get the idea that this was an admonishment by Charlie Wilson. If you abandon this place. I think Charlie Wilsons war is a great book, and even a better movie. It puts a little bit too much on a texas congressman, an interesting texas congressman. There is also this, isi and Osama Bin Laden. Tell me what you know. What i know for sure is that Osama Bin Laden arrived in pakistan within a week after the soviet invasion. The soviet invasion takes place disintegrated into civil war and on christmas eve, 1979. Osama bin laden shows up within a week or so. Before the first cia arms and on Christmas Money even arrived. He starts off as basically a fundraiser and then he becomes a combat engineer. He was building tunnels and underground Storage Facilities for the isi to assist the afghans. He actually built one inside of afghanistan. That was the family business. Construction. He was an expert in construction. He was a real engineer. He knew what he was doing and he had access to his familys huge fortune and their construction gear. The isi had to be intimately involved. There was a relationship between the isi, the Pakistani Secret Service and Osama Bin Laden from the getgo. Right. Absolutely. The second thing we know for sure is it was the isi who introduced Osama Bin Laden to mullah omar when Osama Bin Laden came back to afghanistan. He starts off as basically a in 1998. Remember, he left and goes off to the sudan and the u. S. Gets him chased out and he comes back and it is the isi that connected them. The third thing we know, when president clinton fired tomahawk missiles after the attack on the embassies in east africa, we know who was at that location. 20 isi officers, 10 of whom were and it is the isi that connected them. The third thing we killed. We know that for fact. Now, what were they doing at that location . Obviously, they were getting ready to meet Osama Bin Laden. Did he leave and turn one way rather than another way . There are all kinds of stories. He may have been there, a half hour off, what we do know is who was there and that is the isi. When this connection, when this relationship came to an end or if it ever came to an end is one of the biggest mysteries we still do not know. The relationship came to an end. Between the isi and Osama Bin Laden. If it ever came to an end. If it ever came to an end, it has seals found him and brought justice to him in 2011. Very suspicious. He could not have existed like that. He was hiding in the facility less than a mile from the front door of the pakistani equivalent of west point. A closed military zone. Pakistani generals routinely overflew that facility and helicopters day in and day out. None of them ever saw this tall man Walking Around on the roof, nobody in the Pakistani Intelligence Service ever wondered what is going on in that building . The people in the region referred to the house as the waziristan house. Still do not know. They knew someone who was from waziristan or who had connections. Why would they know that . It must have been clear to people in the neighborhood that somebody important you believe this went up to the chief of staff of the army. I know a lot about the isi, i they knew someone who was from have studied them, have worked with them. The isi is not a rogue institution. You do not get promoted by blowing up embassies and not telling them. If the isi knew, it would be a risky career move. They would not be hiding Osama Bin Laden. I have had one u. S. Official after another sit at this table and say as far as we know they did not know. We have no smoking gun that is true. There is no smoking gun. Would you expect youre going to find, a button inside the hideout that said in trouble, push this button and get the general from isi. That is right. I do not believe youre going to find that. We thought he was our he would know. That is the nature of the beast. And we thought he was our friend. Pakistani generals have a remarkable capacity to persuade americans that they are on our side. And that includes general musharraf. General musharraf to general looking them in the eye and believing they are on our side. To give jimmy carter and Ronald Reagan credit, they looked into those eyes and knew that he was on our side this weekend for this objective. They did not come to the belief that he was eternally on our side. There is that famous story about richard armistice going over there. Armitage, going over there. If you are against us, we will have to do terrible things to you. I am sure when he tells you your with us or against us it is a powerful threat. Your with us or against us it is a powerful threat. And you know what he means, dont you . Exactly. I think general musharraf looked at this and said, ok. I have to make some adjustments. I have to play the game carefully. But in time, i can go back. Exactly. In his book, which is a fantastic book, general musharrafs memoirs which should be in the fiction section, he says he did a wargame and concluded that pakistan and the u. S. Went to war, and it would be the biggest in a fishy area. It would be india that would be the biggest winner. I do not think he really did a wargame. How does this influence our relationship with india . Kashmir has a huge impact. Exactly. Back to afghanistan. You believe that they had to know from the getgo, they had to know when he came there because general musharraf never lies. He sat in this chair and said he was not there for five years. Was it longer but he said shorter. He was not there for five years. Right after Osama Bin Laden was killed, musharraf pointed out, i remember that house, i remember her jogging by it. He had that item pulled off the internet because it was too revealing about what he should have known. Musharrafs motives are hard to understand. This is way off the wall. We know a bit about how to turn people and how to get people for a price to come over to our side. We have done that in our history. Could we find someone at isi to say he is at the military academy . He was threat number one. When we went in and got osama and lot in the reaction of most pakistani generals was not, oh, my god. Where are the Nuclear Weapons . When we went in, the reaction of most of the pakistani generals, most pakistani general