Personally, you know, when i think about the friends and the comrades who gave their life in the city of fallujah, i try not to think that they gave their life for anything that we were doing in iraq but they gave their life to the man to the left and right and that does help me and has meaning that we lead our own lives each day and what we do with the rest of our lives but i try not to tie that to anything that is geopolitical in nature or to the future of a country that we really have no control over. Rose our conversation with Stanley Mcchrystal and a look at the battle for fallujah, then and now when we continue. Funding for charlie rose was provided by the following. There is a saying around here, you stand behind what you say. Around here, we dont make excuses. We make commitments. And when you cant live up to them, you own up and make it right. Some people think the kind of accountability that thrives on so many streets in this country has gone missing in the places where it is needed most. But i know you will still find it when you know where to look. Rose additional funding provided by these funders. And by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and Information Services worldwide. 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 continue to flow where for more than over a year until they all arrive, by this time next year, one year from now, i believe i will be able to tell you that the strategy is clearly working and rose general Stanley Mcchrystal a is here, he was commander of the National SecurityAssistance Force and the United States forces in afghanistan from 2008 to 2009. He also played a key r in iraq as commander of the joint special operations command, he was instrumental in the capture of Saddam Hussein and the killing of Abu Massad Sar you which, my share of the task has just been released in paperback and comes at a time when both iraq and afghanistan are facing renewed and violent insurgencies, i am pleased to have Stanley Mcchrystal back at this table. Welcome. Thank you, charlie, i appreciate it. Rose we will 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 lead most troops by 2014 and maybe all . Yes, i think w we are at a sensitive period in afghanistan but then of course in the last 15 years, what hasnt been i think that militarily or security wise, there has been a lot of gains made, and those gains are shown on the ground and in the relative life of the people, i think in terms of government, there has been great problems, internal to the Afghan Government there has been a real difficulty in getting local governance adequate, competent alcohol administration, technocrats down to low levels which builds confidence of the people and then at the national level, there has been a problem with them being able to to be a Credible National government. I dont think they that that is impossible for them but it has been a challenge. And then the third which i think people forget sometimes is i think the Afghan People have moved to a different place. I think that particularly, particularly young people, not just those in school we talk so much about but those who may be, maybe graduated from school and 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, they are not ready to go back to 1990, they are not ready to go back to 1978, so when people talk about afghanistan and what will happen in the future and they immediately pull out a history book and they say this is what will happen, i think it is a different afghanistan, now, there are are still fraught with dangers because that political weakness could break into, it could break into violence in the groups, i dont think the taliban can take over, i just dont think they are Strong Enough but i think there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty and the Afghan People are plagued by what happens next question. Rose what mistakes did the United States and its allies make in afghanistan . A number. I think that i am going to include afghans in our allies. Rose sure. If we go back just to 9 11 and we say that we went in sort of unexpectedly after the al qaeda elements that were there, we suddenly found ourselves having toppled the taliban government without really having thought what next . Now we have a country that had been through about 20 years of war at that point, it was badly damaged, had very littleinfrastructure or personal capital, human balance in terms of putting again governance and what not and we thought that we could do things more cheaply than we did. We thought we could say that the germans would do the police, the italians would do the courts the americans would do the army and a few other things and slide out and that just wasnt realistic it was going to take a much bigger international effort, and in our haste and sometimes our ignorance we allowed a number of what i call nontraditional leaders, warlords, in many cases people to gather economic, political and sometimes military power, we allowed them to get into places sometimes where they had been before, and what that signaled to the afghan population is that here we go again, we are going back to a bad old days that really was what preceded the taliban so the Afghan People said well we just leaving the taliban period, the danger is we are going to go back to what we hated about that pretaliban period. So i think we lost confidence amongst many afghans during that 2001 to 2004 period. The taliban saw opportunity. They came back in and they said, look what is happening, you are going back to the bad old days and the americans are not going to solve your problems, and they started to find fertile ground, not initially in huge places but slowly. And so they were able to grow up their political power and in some cases military, and so we made mistakes in not seeing that happen early enough, not reacting to it strongly enough when we did, we were under resourced in many ways, but probably most we were underresourced in understanding. We didnt study the problem enough, we didnt learn the language enough, we didnt take a longterm truly consistent focussed approach to it. Rose we did not leave a residual force there. Do you believe if there had been a residual force 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 i think the chances are that we would have a better situation there now. I think the demonstration of continued partnership with the government of iraq could have been a factor that would have given the sunnis more confidence that they are they were going to have an ability to be more fairly. Rose and perhaps persuade the Prime Minister of them as well. We lost a tremendous amount of leverage with the Prime Minister when we were gone, now i understand the desire to be gone, but i think that 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, and i think that what we, why we dont want to stay places with huge numbers of people we must stay engaged in parts of the world. Rose if we left a residual force what would they have done . I think that most likely they would have largerly done training, professional station of iraqi forces, Logistic Support and things, but to a certain degree. They also would have been a demonstrated commitment, a demonstrated partnership. Rose but if you look at hiring the president prepared to negotiate to keep a residual force there, it wasnt like we didnt want to have one, it was the negotiations as i understand it, were unsuccessful. That is my understanding as well and of course. And they may be unsuccessful in afghanistan as well. They may be indeed. Rose and then you have the reality that the Iraqi Foreign minister is saying to the afghans, dont make the mistake we did, and not keep some americans there, but they may. Which brings me to this question. Yoyou are one of the people who had a relationship with ahmed karzai, i dont understand him. Rounderstand why after all this he still seems, either he is just purely political and perhaps corrupt or likely corrupt, yet after all that america has done and he wouldnt be in power without america, he seems to resentful. There is a saying that says that give somebody something and the first person they hate is you, and bob comma wrote a paper near the end of the vietnam war that said, the paradox of counter ininsurgency is that client state that you are helping is soon finds itself less committed to it than you do, the donor cares more than the recipient. I think that in the case of afghanistan, there are a numer of things that work here. First i think the many of the Afghan People are trying to come to grips with what they think is eminent abandonment and i think many of them are trying to steel themselves that we are going to leave so they are emotionally and physically prepared. Rose because it happened before. Correct. I think president karzai, and i certainly wouldnt presume to do a psychological study but i think if you see his relationship with the United States, it is under premised on practical things he doesnt want to be portrayed as a pup competent. Rose as washingtons man. Thats right. He also thinks that in the future, afghanistan he is going to have to be very independent and therefore not have to dance to our fiddle. On the other hand, he is also had enough of a painful relationship where over what is thousand many years, this is from 2001, it is a long tt t to operate out of a palace where it is very difficult for him to travel. It is a long time to be going through this endless cycle of commanders and american enter lock tours from secretaries of state. To generals and ambassadors, and to find that in many cases he thinks that he hasnt been listened to or hasnt been respected,. Rose respect is a big thing. It is, it is a huge thing and i think if you sort of look at that, overtime he gets increasingly frustrated with that and he is human. In my the Mohammed Karzai i knew was a good man and rational man but he was a human, and he had all the frustrations and responses that other people rose 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 the respect, by trying to gain his confidence, by trying to, disavow him of his worst instincts . And i certainly have to secret and i think it is just dealing with people, the first thing i did was view him as an elected leader of a nation, not as a client of the United States that worked for me or was dependent upon us. He was a sovereign leader of a nation. And when i first went to see him the first time, it was not tradition for americans to be in anything but our battle uniform, but i took my dress green uniform for my first meeting with him i dressed in that and went to see him, which was my attempt to show him special respect and to almost lake i was providing, presenting my credentials as i was an arriving person. I also tried to communicate to him that this was not only his nation, this was his war, and that i was the commander of nato troops, but in reality i was supporting the afghan armys fight of the war. Now he never viewed it as his war, he viewed the war in afghanistan as something they were reluctantly allowing the west to fight on their territory, because it benefitted them, but they didnt like that. And what i tried to do is convince him, this is a war for National Survivor and, survival and it is your war and you have to take the role in command never chief in doing that. I dont claim that we got all the way to that, but i made efforts to establish that. There were times that i am sure that he would have liked me to do differently than i did and there were times when i would liked him to do differently than he did but i believe 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. And the goal was to strengthen that to the point where he trusted me as a person, and he trusted me as a military commander, and i could be a good support for the other natural interlocutors, the arizona ambassador our secretary of state, our president as they did, policy level. Rose and you have to overlay this there has never been a strong Central Government in afghanistan ever, i mean tribal areas have their own leadership and that makes a Central Governments task that much stronger much more challenging. Thats right if you are president karzai you dont have a political party. You dont have this automatic the base of support. You are trying to triangulate between a number of different interests and the foreigners, the west being an interest, and the taliban, interestingly enough being an interest, you are trying to balance between all of these, not going so far to one that the others become enemies. Rose what is it that three or four things that you think is essential to communicate to young people of yale or if you are disod come to west point or annapolis or air force academy and say the same thing to future military leaders . Absolutely. First off, and i will keep it fairly focused on things associated with war, the first is we tend to think of war and sometimes we say we are going to conquer a piece of ground or we are going to do something that seems very physical. War is about people. War is won in peoples minds. It is won the army that wins is the one that thinks it won. The one that loses is the one that thinks it is losing or losing or has lost, and the population decides which side wins, and that is very counterintuitive when you try to take an imperial look at war, an empirical look at war. The first thing, it is about people, and so to the degree you are not just moving stuff, you are influencing people. The second is, we say the general must have or military leaders must have a great strategy. In reality i have come to believe you can do strategy pretty quickly, you or i could sit here in an hour and come up with a workable strategy. Rose yes. The genius is implementing it and to implement it, means you have got to do a number of things. First you have to articulate it, clearly, constantly, and have it understood. People have got to believe that you are absolutely mitted to it a and that you will provide the kind of focus, if you state your strategy different every day they wait until the next day, to one they like and they withhold action. They have got to believe it is consistent commitment. They have got to believe that they are a part of it, you have got to convince people, your soldiers, your civilians and the people that this is a strategy that they in the only will benefit from, but they must contribute to. So they dont want to see general mcchrystals strategy, they want to see our strategy, and they have to, they have to step that, so it becomes a people exercise at every level. Then i think the last i would say is, it is about the building trust. If there is anything i have come to believe, and i go back and i look at, you know, the 2004 dream team, you say i am going to build a great team and so you say i am going to go get great tall len and put this talent together. 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 must have to do that well. Then you put those 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 that team part, no matter how brilliant the strategy is, you are likely not to a. Rose like the first dream team. Exactly. Rose and they changed with the Second Dream Team because of a different coach. Exactly. Rose let me talk about bob gates book for a second. And get your take on this, this idea first was 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 to 50, 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 from some people thought it came from you or people around you, because they wanted to, quote, you know, make the case publicly for what they felt they 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 . Yes. I know that i didnt leak it and i am almost 100 percent sure nobody on my staff did. We had had we had started work on that in june, we finished it in early august, we had been told not to submit it until september, which is when we submitted it. And then it was back in dc for about three weeks and then it leaked. And 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, so i absolutely think that the speculation that we leaked it is completely incorrect. I dont know who did leak it and some day somebody rose you want to know or not very much . Not very much at this point. Yeah. These leaks are so damaging because what they do is they undercut trust, they change the debate should have been about what was in the assessment the discussion should have been about, because i gave to the assessment in two pieces. The