Length: 9:31
LARGE (110.3 MB)
-----
SMALL (11.6 MB)
The first two segments of the "Extreme
Challenges" special. The first focuses on the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan; the second on Foreign
Policy. The panel is Christiane Amanpour, Fareed
Zakaria, David Gergen, and Michael.
ANDERSON
COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: We begin outside the country in
once exotic places now painfully familiar to
Americans with loved ones fighting there in
Afghanistan and Iraq.
With us now, CNN's Christiane Amanpour, Michael Ware,
Fareed Zakaria, host of "FAREED ZAKARIA GPS" and
senior political analyst, David Gergen.
Christiane, the U.S. recently replaced the military
commander in charge of Afghanistan, promising new
approaches. What should we expect?
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL
CORRESPONDENT: Well, he clearly wants to rely a
little bit more on commando tactics and as Secretary
of Defense Gates said, new strategy, new president,
new commander. And they've got to get on with the
business of trying to win this war which is not just
about battling the Taliban and al Qaeda, it's about
winning hearts and minds as well.
And I think one of the things that struck me so much
was that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
Admiral Mike Mullen said that as long as American
forces keep killing Afghan civilians, the United
States is not going to win this war. And when I was
there just recently, this is the bulk of the story...
COOPER: You're talking about civilians being killed
because we're relying heavily on air strikes,
Predator drones strikes...
AMANPOUR: Correct, correct.
COOPER: ... and that's causing huge...
AMANPOUR: Huge.
COOPER: ... public relations problems, as well as
civilian deaths.
AMANPOUR: Not just public relations problems,
civilians deaths, turning the people off the
government, off the international forces, and this is
going to present a big problem if it continues.
COOPER: Is that part of the reason, Fareed, that more
U.S. troops are going, because -- so there's not so
much reliance on just strikes from the air?
FAREED ZAKARIA, HOST, CNN'S "FAREED ZAKARIA GPS":
Precisely. What we're trying to do is a version of
the surge in Iraq. The most important part of the
surge militarily was to secure local populations so
they felt as though they had some basic level of
order and didn't have to opt for militia rule and
thugs, things like that, terrorism.
So the attempt here is to see if that it will work in
Afghanistan; secure civilian populations, secure the
cities, security the main supply routes and try to
isolate the bad guys into smaller and smaller areas.
COOPER: That worked militarily in Iraq though,
because with more troops, they were able to actually
not only take but then hold positions where
previously U.S. troops would have to just move on to
another area. Can they do that in Afghanistan?
ZAKARIA: Theoretically, they could. The one big
difference here is that in dealing with Afghanistan,
you can get all of the Afghanistan part of this
right. They have safer havens in Pakistan.
You know, the reason that the Soviets lost in
Afghanistan was because we operated safe havens in
Pakistan which allowed jihadis to cross the border.
The same -- this is a classic case of blowback
because the same tactic is being used against us.
COOPER: Are we losing right now, Michael, in
Afghanistan?
MICHAEL WARE, CNN BAGHDAD CORRESPONDENT: Well, I
think it's too early to say we're losing but we're
not winning. That certainly can be said for sure. And
Fareed is right. You can do whatever you want in
Afghanistan, but the true answer is going to lie in
Pakistan.
So it's time to start looking at cutting serious
deals, perhaps with some people that we don't
particularly like. We saw that...
COOPER: Negotiations with the Taliban, you're saying?
WARE: With the Taliban, with some other elements. And
principally, I think, in some fashion, we need to
find an agreement with the dark heart of the ISI,
that's the Pakistani intelligence agency, their
version of the CIA.
COOPER: Which actually set up the Taliban in the
first place.
WARE: Set up the Taliban. Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, they're
the ones, the hardliners within that organization who
still provide the support and principally the
sanctuary.
So until we can find a way to put it in the ISI's
interests to stop supporting these people, I don't
see an end to this.
COOPER: Do you think the Pakistani government and the
military is taking their own internal problems
seriously enough? I mean, if most of their forces
have been, you know, pointed toward India for these
last several years.
DAVID GERGEN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT:
Well, to go back to that map, one of the issues that
we have is, as Fareed said, look, if you go after
them here in Afghanistan and they're going to come
across the border into Pakistan and find safe havens
and we want to get the Pakistanis to go after them,
and our problem has been the Pakistanis want to pay
attention to India which is over here, and one of the
things that the Bush administration -- Obama
administration is trying to do is to persuade the
Indians, especially with the new government, you
know, lower the temperature here so we can persuade
the Pakistanis to pay more attention to the people
who are coming across and pay more attention to their
other border.
I think we're going to have, in the next couple
months -- as I understand it, we're on the verge of
an offensive in Afghanistan. That there's going to be
a three or four week effort to really bomb and go in
heavily and try to get the Taliban on the run and
then come in with a counterinsurgency strategy that
General Petraeus is bringing to the area.
ZAKARIA: If you want to complicate this even further,
Anderson, if you look at this map of Pakistan, we
talk about this as almost ideological categories, the
Taliban versus the Pakistani military. What's really
going on here is the Pashtuns in the tribal areas
view this entire incursion as the Punjabis, that is
the part -- which is the largest part of Pakistan,
trying to take over their part of Pakistan, which has
historically been left alone.
So there is a deep ethnic rivalry there, and we're
going to have to figure out how to deal with that.
AMANPOUR: If you look at all polls right now from
Afghanistan, first of all, almost nobody supports the
Taliban. It's one percent in the latest poll. But the
majority of people say that our key concern is the
economy, is jobs.
COOPER: You're talking about in Pakistan or in
Afghanistan?
AMANPOUR: In Afghanistan and also in Pakistan, they
need...
ZAKARIA: But we have limited ability...
AMANPOUR: Yes I know, I was there.
ZAKARIA: Christiane, I agree with this, but you're
talking about Afghanistan. It's the third poorest
country in the world.
WARE: How can that be done?
AMANPOUR: It doesn't matter. We're not talking about
making it Manhattan in the desert. We're talking
about giving these people a better standard of
living.
GERGEN: And how would you do that?
WARE: Yeah...
GERGEN: How, how?
WARE: I'm not sure.
AMANPOUR: It's easy, it's easy. You build the
schools, you build roads, you bring in electricity.
GERGEN: We've done all that.
AMANPOUR: But you haven't been doing it right.
COOPER: At the same time aren't we also trying to
eliminate a large source of income...
AMANPOUR: This is the key.
COOPER: ... which is the poppy fields, which supplies
95 percent of the world's heroin?
WARE: Again, that's not going to happen. I mean,
especially in the south and through much of the
country, the entire social and political order is
built upon opium poppies. Those crops are what fuel
not just Taliban insurgents, where large sums of
money are being funneled off as they tax the supply,
but it also feeds and supports the warlords, the
warlords who are, in fact, in the government who are
the local police chiefs.
This is a fundamental part of the structure of
Afghanistan.
COOPER: So, how do you define success? What is
success, then?
GERGEN: That's the question.
WARE: The delivery of aid, the infrastructure...
ZAKARIA: The most important thing I think to remember
in this situation, Anderson, is an Afghan government
that has some capacity to build schools but also to
take on the bad guys. That means an Afghan national
army and an Afghan government with some capacity.
COOPER: We've been dealing with the Afghan national
army now for years.
WARE: For a long time.
AMANPOUR: You think you have been, but it's been
unfocused.
ZAKARIA: But then Anderson, it's getting better -- it
is getting better every month. And over the last year
it's actually gotten a lot better.
COOPER: I went in with the Special Forces in 2002.
They were doing that and claiming great success with
it.
AMANPOUR: Well, yes, and then the eye was taken off
the ball, Anderson. The corruption increased after
2002. The insurgency started again after 2002. The
lack of progress towards justice and all the other
civil and human rights that had been made started to
fall off.
Why? Because the U.S. took its eye off the ball;
there was a time when things were going in a good
direction. And now you have to work doubly hard to
get them back.
COOPER: So, you're saying essentially nation-building
is required?
AMANPOUR: Yes, I am. Yes I am.
COOPER: It is that -- hasn't the Obama administration
now scaled back from that?
AMANPOUR: Yes, and that's going to be their problem.
ZAKARIA: It's state-building. You're not trying to
create an Afghan nation. You're trying to say that
the core -- the central government needs some
capacity, but the second part of this is very
important, which is we have to get the Pakistani
military...
WARE: Yeah.
ZAKARIA: ... genuinely on our side because we've got
to align their incentives. We've got to make them
understand that if they want an alliance with the
United States, the terms of reference are they have
to get serious about terrorism.
WARE: But what's the incentive for them? I mean...
ZAKARIA: $10 billion over ten years. What if we say,
you will not get more money from the United States,
if you don't deliver on this?
WARE: Well, the money that's going now and has been
going has always been sent with conditions.
ZAKARIA: Yes.
WARE: Yet that has not limited their ability to
operate against U.S. interests.
GERGEN: I agree with that.
Listen, I think that all of this, all of these
complications, the fact that we've been in
Afghanistan, how many years now we've been trying to
do this? Eight years?
ZAKARIA: Yes.
GERGEN: It's been a long time.
AMANPOUR: But that's eight years with no focus.
GERGEN: Without focus, that's true. But for the
president, the patience level within his own party
for this may not match the scope of the problem.
AMANPOUR: Right.
COOPER: Is withdrawal an option?
GERGEN: I think lowering the -- what is defined by
success, defining it down, so to speak, is probably
the option we're going to use....
COOPER: Defining down to what, protecting Americans?
GERGEN: To -- absolutely, whatever the minimum is to
keep us safe, so that they can...
WARE: Which we already see them doing. It's about
cutting deals.
GERGEN: That's right.
WARE: And perhaps with some unpalatable interests.
Because militarily -- we all agree it can't be won
that way. And even the delivery of aid and economic
infrastructure isn't going to happen without security
and without sanctions.
GERGEN: I just want to emphasize from the president's
point of view, he does not have unlimited time to do
this.
AMANPOUR: You're right. The Congress has just given
him one year.
WARE: That's the problem.
GERGEN: The Congress is essentially telling him,
you've got a year to show real progress. He can't
make it.
AMANPOUR: It's a joke. This is not mature
policy-making. Of course not.
WARE: It's foreign policy dictated by domestic
interest, and that's the problem because those
interests often run counter.
AMANPOUR: Look, America has gone in with peace
accord, with peace enforcement and with
nation-building in other places and it's worked.
The notion that they're not going to give that the
opportunity to work in Afghanistan, which is one of
the most important places there, given that terrorism
has a fertile bed in which to grow, is beyond the
beyond.
COOPER: We've got to take a break. When we come back,
a lot of other issues to talk about. Success or
failure in the countries we spoke about could
determine in large part America's image abroad. As we
said, there are other global hot spots to deal with.
We'll have more on that when our panel continues on
EXTREME CHALLENGES: THE NEXT 100 DAYS.
Length: 8:07
LARGE (94.1 MB)
-----
SMALL (9.9 MB)
COOPER: We're back talking about the extreme
challenges facing President Obama in his next 100
days. Some of them unique to his administration,
others have troubled American presidents as far back
as Harry Truman. Israel for one.
President Obama entered office firmly committed to a
two-state solution, Israel and Palestine side by
side. His Israeli counterpart, on the other hand,
does not share that commitment nor does Hamas which
controls Gaza.
Then there's Iran's nuclear program which poses a
dire threat to Israel. Listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I have
said from the outset that when it comes to my
policies towards Israel and the Middle East, that
Israel's security is paramount. And I repeated that
to Prime Minister Netanyahu.
It is in U.S. national security interests to assure
that Israel's security as an independent Jewish state
is maintained.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER: President Obama with the new Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House.
Back with our panel: David Gergen, Fareed Zakaria,
Christiane Amanpour and Michael Ware.
Fareed, what is U.S. policy -- how much difference is
there between President Obama's policy and where
Israel is right now?
ZAKARIA: There's a big difference in the sense that
first of all, I don't think President Obama wants the
agenda to be entirely about Iran.
I think he wants to approach the Israeli/Palestinian
issue centrally. He's appointed a very high-level
negotiator. Clearly he hopes to get some movement
there because clearly he believes that that could be
a kind of key that unlocks U.S. relations with the
Islamic world, the Arab world more broadly.
Prime Minister Netanyahu, on the other hand, wants to
speak about Iran, Iran, Iran and the threat from
Iran. So they see things differently.
I also think that there is a broader structural
difference. I think as you put it, Iran does pose a
security threat to Israel. We can debate how extreme
it is.
Iran does not pose an immediate security threat to
American security. It poses a threat to American
interests in the region. Maybe it's making a play for
dominance which would displace the United States.
But it's a second-order problem.
AMANPOUR: It seemed that Prime Minister Netanyahu got
his agenda to be successful at least in the public
iterations of the two leaders because what President
Obama didn't get him to say was the two-state
solution or to stop the settlements.
He, in fact, did say that what we're going to do is
give a limit to our diplomacy on Iran. That's the
first time we've heard President Obama say that.
COOPER: Israel is concerned that too long of a
negotiation with Iran would just allow Iran
essentially to stall while they build up a nuclear
program.
GERGEN: Exactly. Well, Israel feels that they have to
base their security on the worst-case scenario. In
other words, how soon could Iran possibly get nuclear
capability and they think that's sometime next year.
So, for them, this is the looming deadline, and it
puts a lot of pressure on President Obama in terms of
time frame because he does not want Israel to act on
its own against Iran.
AMANPOUR: Do you see this map?
GERGEN: Yes.
AMANPOUR: Iran. Every major issue that the United
States has right now involves Iran. There's
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, there's the Persian
Gulf, there's the Arab Sunni neighbors. And it was --
many, many analysts have said, and President Obama
essentially had a referendum on this in his election,
"I am going to reach out and try diplomacy to engage
adversaries."
The American people didn't oppose that. They voted
him into office. And many, many people say that
unless you really do engage with Iran, not just on
one issue, a very important issue, but on a whole new
set of strategic relationships and objectives, it's
going to be very difficult to either secure Israel or
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq.
COOPER: What about Iraq? I mean, is the United States
going to be able to withdraw on the timetable that
they have now put forward?
WARE: Well, in many ways, they have little choice. I
mean, the deal is signed and sealed.
COOPER: But you already hear from some American
commanders on the ground talking about extending it
in some cities.
WARE: Yes, Mosul is something that they're looking at
there. But even there, you're seeing this
ever-increasingly concentrated Iraqi government which
is evolving around the orbit of the prime minister,
Nouri al-Maliki, who day by day is consolidating
further and further power.
He is not budging. Even in Mosul, which is the last
holdout, urban holdout of Al Qaeda, despite at least
two major offenses to wipe them out from that city,
he is saying no. June 30 is the day. There's no room
for negotiation on this.
COOPER: Can they provide for the security themselves?
The Iraqi forces?
WARE: No. No. But there're so many interests afoot
here that there are certain things that the Iraqi
factions are prepared to tolerate on the security
front to make gains in other areas, principally
politically and elsewhere.
COOPER: So, a certain number of deaths, a certain
number of suicide bombings?
WARE: It's a high gamble but don't forget, not only
are there common enemies like, say, al Qaeda, but
there's enemies within the government. Don't forget,
this is a deeply factionalized government.
And we're not just talking about political factions
that you'll see warring in Congress or on the Hill.
We're talking about people with militias; we're
talking about armed forces.
COOPER: So, what happens when U.S. troops leave?
ZAKARIA: I think the likely scenario -- first of all,
Michael is exactly right. We have to be out. There's
an agreement with the government of Iraq. You know,
we have to be down to zero by June. So it's going to
happen, with maybe a few exceptions, Mosul being
perhaps the principal one.
I think what's going to happen is there will be a
resumption of some violence. There will be flare-ups,
but you will not have the resumption of the civil war
between the Sunnis and Shia.
WARE: Yeah.
ZAKARIA: That is the bet that the U.S. government is
making. That is the bet that Prime Minister Maliki is
making, that the Sunnis, while disgruntled, feel
disempowered, will not return to a full-scale civil
war and thus you will be able to get by with some
substantial withdrawal of US troops.
AMANPOUR: Yet there's been the highest number of
Iraqis killed, you know, many, many years just this
year alone.
WARE: There was a spike. However, I think Fareed is
right. There is a delicate scenario in place that
bodes some hope for the future.
However, it is so precarious. The Mehdi army is still
in place. The commanders are in sanctuary in Iran and
in Syria. The foot soldiers are still there. The
weapons are at home, they're not on the streets. The
same with the Sunnis; they have not been integrated
into the Iraqi government as promised. And in some
areas they're not being paid by the Iraqi government.
GERGEN: Look at it from the president's point of view
and what he faces. His ultimate challenge is going to
be can he pull out and not have Iraq fall apart in
some fashion? Because if that happens, he's going to
be the president who lost Iraq and that would be
devastating for him politically.
COOPER: Has America's role, image in the world
changed already?
AMANPOUR: Yes. The page has been turned. The first
100 days especially the first trip overseas did that.
And now the second 100 days, in fact the rest of the
administration is going to be determined by the
policies.
And President Obama was elected with a huge mandate
to take on some very bold new initiatives.
ZAKARIA: What we've been talking about have been the
crises, the failures, the hot spots, the places
you've got to send troops. But there's actually a
much broader agenda in foreign policy. At the end of
the day, some of these areas are peripheral parts of
the world.
A strategic relationship with China; we need China to
continue to buy U.S. debt every day. The strategic
relationship with Russia. How do you integrate India
into this new international order? Those are issues
that are going to require presidential attention.
If the president isn't personally engaged with China,
you are not going to have any breakthroughs on
energy, on environment.
COOPER: You're totally stressing me out. It gets
worse and worse the more we talk.
GERGEN: It's just tough, it's just tough.
COOPER: It's incredible, I mean, the number of things
on his plate is truly extraordinary.
WARE: Yes.
ZAKARIA: And in addition to all the domestic
problems, that's the extraordinary thing.
COOPER: We're going to have more on that. Up next,
two simple words that dwarf all the other extreme
challenges facing President Obama; two words that
will almost certainly define his presidency -- the
economy. We'll be right back.