They can make a guest they can make a recommendation. If an ambassador makes a recommendation like that i have never seen anybody resist that. Where you get more friction will be if you get people who are nervous in washington saying everybody should go home and the ambassador is saying we can handle this. It is too important to leave. That is one of the big dangers of in what has gone on in the discussion of benghazi. To my mind, that will make senior politicians in washington, not in the field, so afraid of having a casualty and their being attacked politically that they will force our diplomats deeper into bunkers where we will not be able to do our jobs and we will be functionally stupid and well will not we will not be given good advice. Host this is one of the issues you brought up at the benghazi hearing. Guest i think it is one of the biggest dangers, that we will treat security as an absolute. That this will happen whether future administration is republican or democrat the danger is that you force, you scare your senior politicians so badly that they dont want to accept any level of risk. At that point, you start saying, the people in the field cannot make decisions. They have to stay behind their walls. But then they will not know who they are dealing with. They will not know what policies make sense. And there are very few Foreign Service officers, spread out all over the world, and they are your best line of defense against ad policy. Bad policuy. Host we want to take our viewers to a live event at the brookings institute. It is the evolution of joints a force Operations Command and the pursuit of al qaeda in iraq. It is a conversation with general Stanley Mcchrystal, also featuring mike ohanlon of brookings. Thanks so much for joining us on the washington journal. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2013] mf good morning, everyone. Welcome to brookings. Thanks for coming out. It is an unusual treat, even at a place where we have such amazing events, to have general Stanley Mcchrystal here today. I am mike ohanlon, one of the members of the 21st century defense initiative. We are hosting this event with bruce riddell, who runs the first readout bruce riddell. Bruce ridedel, general mcchrystal build up an organization into what was the stateoftheart capability that ultimately led not only to our topic of today, the tracking and ultimate killing of the al qaeda terrorist zarqawi, but also many of the procedures that led to the finding and killing of bin laden. The success of joint special Operations Command is one of the most important stories in the broader war on terror. We are honored that roos will be bruce riedel will be interviewing general mcchrystal this morning. This is based on the recent book, which i hope you a purchase, which we are proud to be discussing, my share of the task my share of the task, its describes the role of not only command, but also other military personnel and International Personnel that he worked with. Just a couple more words about our panelists. Bruce was a 30year cia veteran before joining brookings in 2006. At the cia, he did a number of things including working at number of things, including working at nato headquarters. He was an advisor to four president. President s. He led the afghanistanpakistan review. Bruce has written two books in his time here. A third is about to come out. The first two were about al qaeda. The search for al qaeda and the deadly embrace. The new book coming out next month is avoiding armageddon. It is about the us pakistan u. S. Pakistan relationship. General Stanley Mcchrystal spent 34 years in the new oteri. He was in the military. He was the director of the joint staff. In military circles, this five year. Of fiveyear period of joint special Operations Command is what makes them memorable and historic. The reality is that he has done more to carry the fight to al qaeda since 2001 than any other person in this department, possibly in the country. After that, bob gates got up, and the secretary of defense called him one of the finest men at arms this country as ever produced, then continued over the past decade, no single american has inflicted more fear and more loss of life on our country most vicious and violent enemies than Dan Mcchrystal Stan mcchrystal. That makes him sound pretty scary. Well he was certainly scary to our enemies, he is an amazing while he was certainly scary to our enemies, he is an amazing american. I want to share a very brief vignette. His emphasis on reducing civilian casualties was one of the most important aspects of the Strategic Initiatives that he brought to bear when commander there. I had the honor of seeing president karzai in the spring of 2011, a few months afterstan had after stan had come home. President karzai said, please tell general mcchrystal that we appreciate his service, that he is such a friend to the Afghan People, that i always appreciated the concern he had for the Afghan People as he did his job, dealing with a vicious enemy. These join me in welcoming general Stanley Mcchrystal to brookings lease join me in welcoming please join me in welcoming general Stanley Mcchrystal to brookings. [applause] thank you for coming. It is a privilege to be on the platform with you. Thank you for that very generous introduction. We are going to have a conversation for the first half or so of the hour and a half that we have. I will ask the general a bunch of questions. At about 10 45, maybe later, we will open it up to questions from you. It is an honor to have you here today. This is the Maiden Voyage of the brookings intelligence project. The brookings intelligence project is a new effort to try to resolve the riddle of intelligence successes and failures, the it name of why intelligence is sometimes brilliantly the enigma of white intelligence is sometimes brilliantly successful and other times of why intelligence is sometimes brilliantly successful and other times spectacular failures. One of the great successes is behind for zarqawi the hunt for zarqawi. Why should we care about a dead jordanian . Legacy remains with us today. The terrorists who this month attacked a natural gas facility in algeria, al qaeda and the islamic they almost worship of worship abu musab al zarqawi. He is a more popular icon even then osama bin laden. The man who carried out and planned the attack in algeria is a selfdescribed devotee of sarkar we. He sees himself as very much of zarqawi. He sees himself as very much an acolyte of the late zarqawi. Al qaeda in iraq has produced an offshoot, the almonds rough the almusra front. He may be dead, but he is still with us. I would like to ask for your impressions of zarqawi, looking back now. How serious and dangerous a figure he was half a decade ago. Why he was at the top of the list of people to go after during the war on iraq. It is a pleasure. I am a devotee of mike ohanlon and a friend for a long time. Thanks for being here. It is great to see you, bruce, one of my heroes in terms of intelligence. To be interrogated by the cia i will try not to break. [laughter] Abu Musab Alzarqawi was from a lower middle class background. He became radicalized while in prison. Then became associated with al qaeda near the end of the mujahedin. In afghanistan mujahedin period in afghanistan. He had been in iraq before, but he appeared on our radar screen at the end of 2003. He had already started to build an al qaeda in iraq infrastructure that leveraged sunni fear. It is pretty important to view how we saw it. I took over in the fall of 2003. I went to iraq. I got there in october. Immediately, it was obvious to me that the situation in iraq was much worse than it appeared from from afar. I was coming out of the pentagon. It was clearly unsettled. It looked much worse than we had thought. The first hope was that if we got Saddam Hussein, that would solve the problem. We made an effort to do that. In december, we picked up saddam. It became obvious that, as one of my guys described, a bunch of former miss regime guys were not really running the beginning of the resistance, the beginning of the insurgency. Zarqawi had started to build a network that took trained people, or iraqi sunnis trained people, iraqi sunnis, who had been dislocated from their position in society, sometimes government, sometimes military might and they were terrified of the shia, which was going to be dominant in the future. You had this combination of factors that was fear of the future, frustration against foreign invaders, and then not as much religious extremism as sometimes is perceived. It was not really an al qaeda religious movement. It was a political movement, but he got leveraged by some very clever work by people like Abu Musab Alzarqawi. We were very sure he was there at the beginning of early 2004. We started to track his work. In the spring of 2004, when falluja became the first spot in the country where they held ground they actually, al qaeda and the sunni, elements working with them at that hope oh point, held at bay the forces for a couple of months. It was pure what they had built was not only thoroughly passionate, but it was also extensive. Zarqawi was an interesting role. To get to the heart of the question, there was a question about an issue about did he really matter. The answer is yes, he did. He mattered in a big way. Zarqawi became an organizational leader eared he also became an iconic leader a leader he also became an iconic leader zarqawi became an organizational leader. He also became an iconic leader. He was very lowkey, very charismatic. He was an effective, inyour face leader, but he would also leverage the ability to use mass media. He would put out these radio or internet talks where he would praise groups around the country. I remember we captured one of he was praising different groups, essentially going Geographic Area to Geographic Area and pumping up the morale of each area. It was pretty powerful. It made him look like he was controlling them all, which he was indirectly doing, but it was also very motivational. It made them feel like they were part of a bigger entity. He latched them to that very effectively. He started to become the actual, operational leader, and the moral leader, and that increased over time. His goal was to create a civil war. His strategy was to get a sunni shiite schism to erupt into a civil war. Arguably, he succeeded before we killed him with the bombing of the mosque in the spring of 2006. That was the fuse that started what looked and felt up close like a civil war. He became hugely powerful. Although we killed him in june, what he had done carried on after that. You just described it as you do in the book, that he created a network of networks. In the book, you lay out how your task force then had to create a network to go after the network. Your network was a classic example of the intelligence cycle at work. Can you give us a sense of how that network worked, how it evolved, what the pieces of it were, and, ultimately, the speed with which you were turning things around from collections exploitation . Sure. I grew up when we thought of terrorist groups as narrowly bounded, with a few people in them. If you are able to decapitate it, you cause the problem to stop. At the beginning of the war against al qaeda, as bruce knows well, we started with a strategy 7. Led 2 that was osama bin laden, zoller he read, the others if you take out as i went he zawahiri, the others, if you have a bounded number of people, you go after them like a deck of cards. You eliminate them, problem solved. That does not apply to a networked enemy. If you think of what a terrorist group has to do, if you see a car bomb go off in baghdad against a target, somebody had to have chosen the target. Somebody had to have built the car bomb. Somebody had to have assembled all of the components to the car bomb. Somebody had to find somebody to place the car bomb. If it was driven, he had to find a suicide bomber. Somebody had to make that car bomb worthwhile. What i mean by worthwhile is typically, they would film it and put the film out so they got much greater value out of the explosion. If you start to think of all these you are talking about leadership at the top, command and control, communications, fairly rapid, logistics, sometimes very significant amounts of logistics, when you have 14 car bombs going off a day in baghdad, it is a big logistics chain. Talking about recruiting, assessing, training, and moving people into position. Youve got a Human Resources part of this thing. You are talking about security elements that are doing your counterintelligence to make sure you are not penetrated. It is a Big Organization that has got all the functions of a very comfy lex organism. Very copmlex complex organism. It becomes extraordinary effective because there is a reach everywhere. If you think all you have to do is get mr. Big, you miss the point. You cannot just say, well, im going to stop car bombs or just do this. We went back and looked at the Strategic Bombing survey of germany after world war ii world war ii. There is no single thing. You have to destroy the enemys network. Which meant, for us, you had to go not at the very top, but down to the people who actually do work. Field grade officers and senior cos. You had to carve that out and destroy that and then let the network collapse. To do that, you have to have a network that layers on top of that. We do not naturally do that in u. S. Organizations. We have a tendency to be more stovepiped. There are military organizations, special operations, conventional forces, political parts, Public Affairs we tend to be fairly bounded. The special operations part traditionally never did Public Affairs eared we would never talk about what we did eared unlike al qaeda, who would do an action and then leverage that Public Affairs. We would never talk about what we did. Unlike al qaeda, who would do in action and then leverage that, we do not do that. Similar to the intelligence community, they were loath to share that with other parts of the force. The idea is to protect sources, methods, and whatnot. Instead, we will just give people enough information to go do something. What we found is you cannot do it that way. You cannot have the blind man looking at the elephant we had a network that was not wide enough not only wide enough to have a different type of capabilities. We learned it had to be lightning fast. When we started when i became involved in the fall of 2003, and i write this in the book in a fair amount of detail. I went to visit our elements in the battlefield. We had about 14 or 15 locations. We had a big headquarters at the Baghdad International airport. There would be a team of 15 operators, an intel guy, and a tacsat radio. Their physical pipe, their bandwidth back to us was limited. They could send email and make phone calls. When it came time to send imagery, send large documents, it was painfully slow, so they did not. Similarly, when they tried to draw on those things from our headquarters, you really could not. We might have one intel person for it. They are so busy they dont have time to leverage all the information that the headquarters intelligence is making available, nor do they have time to send it. Have these two elements you have these two elements not joined. An element would do a raid and capture whoever. They would get phone, computer documents, whatnot. Those would be put in a bag, either a sandbag, one of the burlap sandbags, or a plastic garbage bag, and they would be shipped back to headquarters with a tag on them that says here is the stuff we captured. By the time it got back to the headquarters, it would be stacked up. It would be exploited, as we call read. I went in one room. There were stacks of these plastic bags. There might have been a map that says this is where zarqawi is today. We would not have known because we were not reading those things until literally weeks later. A lot probably never got read. Our ability to exploit computers was painfully slow. We had to send them to someone else. As a consequence, everything you got is delayed. Speed became the relevant if you could not do it fast, there was almost no point in doing it. If you could not interrogate someone you captured from a target, there was no point in doing the rate. You were better waiting until you could interrogate the raid. You were better waiting until you could interrogate. A Successful Mission is an operational stroke of genius anything that fails is an intelligence failure stroke of genius. Anything that fails is an intelligence failure. [laughter]operations were something we did to get more intelligence. Intelligence is what i would say that intelligence operatives is what our operators became. People who were traditional shooters by 2005, 2006, they thought of themselves as intelligent people who carried guns. It was an amazing difference. You describe the formula find, fix, finish, exploit, analyze. Can you explain how the cycle works . You have to find a target, know about it, fix it in real time, get it at a certain place. You have to finish, capture, or kill that target. You have to exploit whatever you get from them. You have to analyze what you have gotten. It is sort of like a Progressive Assembly line idea. And it makes sense. You start with it. Whatever you get, the analysis if you draw it in a circle, that takes you back to the find. The problem we found is that is a targeting cycle that has been used. What we found was if you take each of those elements and they are performed by different organizations, if the find element is done by some human intelligence and some signals intelligence, by different agencies, then it is passed to the people who are going to fix it, often done by aerial platforms, predators and things like that, or we sent agents out to see it if they are done by different agencies, by the time this one gets it the way they want it. Everybody wants to give a perfect, finishe