‘You Have to Rethink War’

In Afghanistan right now—where you mostly had success—has it become a strategic failure?
No, but it could become that. I don't think it will. I think we will learn and adjust, although it's certainly painful and taking a long time. But I hope some of the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan in '02 will be applied. I'll give an example: the poppy crop. Why don't we subsidize wheat and barley at 10 times the price and wean them away from poppies?

I think the reason is that if you heavily subsidize wheat and barley, people start bringing in wheat and barley from elsewhere—Pakistan, Iran—and you really undermine the local farmers.
Well, it would need to be tied to local production somehow. My point is that we don't think of conflict in those terms. Whether it's subsidies or irrigation systems … The Taliban intentionally encourages poppy production, in part because it draws the farmer away from central authority. We need to do the opposite.

What we hear is that the system in Afghanistan is thoroughly corrupt, from ministers and warlords down to police chiefs and judges. The Taliban has been able to essentially buy their way out of prison. How do you change that?
Ashraf Ghani, the former finance minister and a smart guy, estimates that for every dollar in international aid spent, about 10 cents gets to the Afghans. It goes to overhead, salaries, and some gets siphoned off. It's a stunning figure. We talk about a narco-economy and criticize the Afghans, but we're not doing too good a job ourselves, or setting a good example. We're not approaching this with the endgame in mind.

Why is that?
We have an archaic way of thinking about war.

Which is?
Which is armies fighting armies and diplomats doing diplomacy. You don't have an expeditionary foreign service or AID [Agency for International Development] department or department of transportation. Take the example of Justice. One of the best programs we have is to take U.S. attorneys and send them overseas to serve as an ambassador's legal adviser and work with local governments. We only have a handful of these fellows around. We should have a thousand. Think of how smart they [would be] if they came back from two years in Jakarta and went to Phoenix. It's a terrific education for our U.S. attorneys. That should be a robust program.

It sounds a little bit like a colonial service.
But it's more about independence than a colonial mandate. It's about building the partnerships and learning from others. It makes us a lot smarter in Arizona about Jamaa al-Islamiya. That's the benefit for us.

We've heard reports that Al Qaeda is putting more emphasis on Afghanistan these days—more money from the Gulf, more Arab fighters.
I don't have any empirical evidence or intelligence I could share, but I wouldn't doubt it. They're getting their butts kicked in Iraq. In Afghanistan they've got a lot of money they're siphoning off from the opium trade.

Do you think Iraq is going well?
In a tactical sense, an operational sense, I'm really proud of what our people have done: the intelligence service, the military, what the Iraqis have done. But we need to do that [with the] other 80 percent … We need to reform our entire national security structure. The U.S. attorneys program is a part of that, but there are lots of other parts.

One of the points you've made before is the need to give more power to people in the field. You've argued that the government is too bureaucratic, and Washington has too much control.
Yep. You can't get "inside the enemy's turning radius" from Washington. You've got small, flexible enemy cells making decisions at a very rapid pace compared to this process back here. But that means you need to select the right ambassadors and representatives, you've got to train them, hold them accountable. You have to rethink war. It's that big a deal.