Podcast: Leaving Afghanistan with General Stanley McChrystal

TRANSCRIPT: Leaving Afghanistan with General Stanley McChrystal

Stanley McChrystal:

We have a crisis in leadership in the world today, and it's not a crisis in a single corporation or a single job or any single person, it's a crisis in how we think about leadership, what leaders do.

Ian Bremmer:

Hi, I'm Ian Bremmer, and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast, an audio version of what you can find on public television where I analyze global topics, sit down with big guests, and make use of little puppets. This week I sit down with retired Four-Star General Stanley McChrystal, who held some of the most important positions in the US military, and recently has become a vocal critic of the Trump administration, calling the president dishonest and immoral. Let's get to it.

Announcer:

The GZERO World is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company, places clients' needs first by providing responsive, relevant, and customized solutions. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more.

Ian Bremmer:

General Stanley McChrystal, wonderful to be with you.

Stanley McChrystal:

Thank you very much.It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Ian Bremmer:

So I'll jump into the new book, Leaders, Myth and Reality. Have you decided which one of those two you actually are?

Stanley McChrystal:

Well, I think there's a little of both in all of us, but really to get at it, I think the problem is the myth. We have a crisis in leadership in the world today, and it's not a crisis in a single corporation or a single job or any single person. It's a crisis in how we think about leadership, what leaders do. And that's really brought upon by my research and contemplation on it in the last few years because we look at it mythologically. We put leaders on pedestals. We, for lots of reasons, believe that leaders, if they are thrifty, brave, clean, reverent, and follow a set of attributes or behaviors are going to be good leaders. But in fact, data tells us that's not the case. In many cases, someone with none of those attributes is far more successful. We also follow leaders that in many cases take us exactly where we don't want or need to go.

Ian Bremmer:

Does data tell you something different than your personal experience in terms of what makes a good leader in the world today?

Stanley McChrystal:

Well, data tells me something different from what I was taught, and I think most of us are taught. We have a belief that there are certain things that leaders are, certain things that leaders do, and yet our experience also runs counter to that. I grew up loving history, studied Robert E. Lee, and here he was almost the prototypical perfect leader in many ways. Yet, he lost to Sam Grant, sort of a grubby, much less impressive army officer earlier in his career. And so what happens is and what caused me to be interested in this subject and to take this book on was there was a disconnect. There was all the things that I had thought about leadership, the things I'd been taught, the things I'd tried to be as a leader, and yet they were disconnected from the actual outcome of how leadership actually plays out in the real world.

Ian Bremmer:

Now I want to turn, if I can, to some of your specific life experience.

Stanley McChrystal:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

You commanded our forces in Afghanistan.

Stanley McChrystal:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

Not easy service. What are we doing there?

Stanley McChrystal:

Well, you have to go back to what did we think we were doing? And if you go back to the 1960s and 1970s, Afghanistan was really at play in the Cold War.

Ian Bremmer:

Sure.

Stanley McChrystal:

In the early 1970s, the Soviets got a bigger hand in Afghanistan starting in '73. And of course they intervened in 1979.

Ian Bremmer:

'79.

Stanley McChrystal:

They began a 10-year war. And during that 10 year war, we famously gave money and weapons-

Ian Bremmer:

To the mujahideen.

Stanley McChrystal:

Mostly through the Pakistanis.

Ian Bremmer:

The other side, yeah.

Stanley McChrystal:

To the mujahideen, the seven groups. During that period, we were successful. And I say we so much there's the famous facts at the end of the war that says, we won. We gave the Soviet Union their Vietnam. Well, what really happened is the Afghan people lost 1.2 million people in a bitter war. And at the end of that period where we sort of patted ourselves on the back for what we had done, they had suffered this amazing loss and we turned and looked elsewhere. Now, Afghanistan, in the wreckage of that lurches into a civil war, the seven mujahideen groups, and then in 1994, the rise of the Taliban. And so the tattered country, the society is now sort of turned upside down and inside out. Then we went back in 2001 and people used to come to me and say, we went back because the Afghans asked us to. No, we didn't. We went back because 9/11, and it was in our interest to go back. We went back and in going after Al-Qaeda, we topple the government of the Taliban. Now you've got this broken country and the Taliban-

Ian Bremmer:

It was broken before.

Stanley McChrystal:

That's right. It was broken before. Now it's literally ungoverned. And so now the United States and the West decide, well, what do we do with this? And there seemed to be a moral and a practical need to try to help the Afghans put it together again. But it wasn't as easy because it had now been more than 20 years of chaos and war. Society wasn't what it was. Warlords had become extraordinarily powerful. So as a consequence, I think we sort of backed into saying, well, we got Al-Qaeda out, but we don't want Al-Qaeda to come back in. So we've got to create a nation that can at least survive. And for the first seven or eight years we did it, but we didn't do it very seriously. We didn't put a lot of resources in there. The countries that said that they would do the courts and the police and the military never really belied up to the bar and did that. So by 2008 and nine-

Ian Bremmer:

I mean, there were some stories about infrastructure getting built, about women getting educated, but you wouldn't say it was governed.

Stanley McChrystal:

I wouldn't say it was governed. I wouldn't say there was all that much built or done. When we actually compare the level of investment during that eight year period and the level of effective investment, it was pretty modest. And the Afghan government, by 2008 and nine, although it had been formed at bond, it was not really representative across the country.

Ian Bremmer:

And this is when you said some 10 years ago that if we didn't significantly up our presence, that we were ultimately going to fail in Afghanistan.

Stanley McChrystal:

Right. If our mission as it was outlined to me was to produce a nation that was capable of protecting its sovereignty and therefore preventing potential safe haven of groups like Al-Qaeda, if that was the mission, if that was the US national interest, then we had to up our game there so that we could give the opportunity for the Afghan security forces to mature and for the Afghan government to be strong enough to do that.

Ian Bremmer:

So here we are in 2019 and we're 18 years in and Trump says he wants these troops out by 2020, the country no closer to that idea of a functional governing nation than it was before while we're negotiating with the Taliban, with the support of the Qatari government. Leaving aside whether that initial mission was a good idea or not, given where we are now, do you support these talks? Do you think Trump is right to want to get out?

Stanley McChrystal:

Well, here's our question. What's our national interest now? What is our national interest? How much of that is practical? How much of that is moral?

Ian Bremmer:

And how much of it is doable?

Stanley McChrystal:

Well, that's exactly right. What do we want or desire Afghanistan can be now? I personally believe that that means ultimately it's got to have Taliban representation in that government. They're part of the society. As long as they're outside, you're going to have a long-term problem.

Ian Bremmer:

So negotiating with them is a critical component of anything.

Stanley McChrystal:

It has to be. The road to an accommodation has to go there. Then the question is, what does that look like? Does it look like Vietnam at the end of the war where we basically have a decent interval and then allow the north to win? Or are we really trying to do a negotiation that hits some kind of balance in which the interests of the different part of the country are represented?

Ian Bremmer:

So how has war fighting changed over the last 18 years? How is it different on the ground? How is it changing the ability of the Americans to have strategic advantage or not?

Stanley McChrystal:

Yeah. First off, the obvious part is technology allows you to use much smaller forces, much greater precision, much greater speed, much greater understanding of not the big picture what's happening, but the micro things. You can find an enemy vehicle, you can do this. What hasn't changed in that regard is the will of the people and the activities of the people still trump all of that. They still are more important than the military forces running around, because at the end of the day, what the people decide is what happens. They don't always understand that, but that's what happens.

Stanley McChrystal:

The other part that has changed, and it's not new, it's just in a different proportion, is the use of information. Al-Qaeda used information from its earliest days to build an initial element, and then 9/11 was a large psychological operation to upset the West and it did that and established their credibility. Al-Qaeda in Iraq was an information technology enabled organization that was rapid. It was constantly adapting. It could learn on a level that I've never seen a corporation be able to do it and apply lessons as they did because they were all extraordinary.

Ian Bremmer:

Really? How so?

Stanley McChrystal:

Well, they could do an operation in Mosul and they could have success or failure, and you'd see the effects of what happened there in the learnings of how they operated across Iraq the next day.

Ian Bremmer:

Example?

Stanley McChrystal:

How car bombs were done, how propaganda was put out. Time and time again, when we develop technology-

Ian Bremmer:

So they had six sigma, the Al-Qaeda. That's pretty impressive.

Stanley McChrystal:

Without knowing that they had it. It was an organic form of that. And so part of that, driven by the fact that as we pressured them, obviously the dumb ones got killed, the smart ones survived, and therefore you're doing a Darwinistic improvement of the organization. But the reality is they got better and better as they went. ISIS took it to a social media level, which Al-Qaeda interacted, and ISIS was an idea that had a military arm to it. And the power of ISIS is the ability to come up with that idea, keep it unified, propagate that idea out and do it over and over again. The things we saw that we mistook as military operations in many cases were really good information operations. So as a consequence, Al-Qaeda is disproportionately healthy now, even after militarily being battered for several years.

Ian Bremmer:

So the fact that there's no caliphate and the fact that their military has been pretty much wiped out in Syria and Iraq, you still think ISIS as an organization is quite capable?

Stanley McChrystal:

I think it is, and I think it has the ability to regenerate those physical things relatively quickly.

Ian Bremmer:

Do we know how to fight that?

Stanley McChrystal:

Well, we have not yet demonstrated the effectiveness of doing it. Wars start for big reasons of national interests. And then when you kill somebody's brother or you kill comrades, people are fighting a lot because of the brother and comrade, not because they want to liberate the straits of x. And so for the force, the force sort of puts its heads down. The force doesn't spend an awful lot of time talking about the geopolitical nuances of whether this is right or that's right. It's too hard to do that. It's asking too much of the force to go through this constant moral quandary over what's right and wrong.

Ian Bremmer:

So when you're on the ground experiencing that, I mean, how much are you just saying this is what's motivating my troops, I can't fight that?

Stanley McChrystal:

Well, that's where leadership comes in because quite honestly, a commander in most cases can get their organization to do almost anything you want them to do if you're a reasonably competent commander. If I'm convinced that I got in front of my forces and I'd said, no prisoners, no quarter, that for a lot of my force, they would've said, all right, that's what we'll do. It's not because they're bad people. It's not because they lack morals. It's because that's the dynamic of forces. And that's where leadership is so important because leadership has got to raise the force. It's got to put the force on a moral foundation. It's got to tell the force what's important. And usually those values reflect what the soldier has grown up with. It's got to remind you of them.

Stanley McChrystal:

In Iraq, as we were fighting, we would go into these torture chambers. Literally, we would clear a building and go in the basement and there would be a medieval looking torture chamber. I thought I'd seen things in the world, and when you see the first one of these, it just sickens your stomach, but it also makes you angry. And it also says, well, I've got to kill these people. And as you simplify that, you can suddenly think of I think it was Bull Halsey, he had a big sign outside one of the ports in the Southwest Pacific that said, "Kill Japs, kill more Japs." And that was a billboard that every ship going out of the harbor saw. Now, if we saw that today, we'd go, wow, that doesn't feel right. But if we'd seen it on the 10th or 12th or 13th of September 2001, a lot of people would've said, yeah. So you have to understand there's this instinct.

Ian Bremmer:

And Bush responded very differently.

Stanley McChrystal:

He did.

Ian Bremmer:

After 9/11. I mean, this is a president who said, "Islam is love."

Stanley McChrystal:

That's right.

George Bush:

I consider Bin Ladin an evil man, and I don't think there's any religious justification for what he has in mind. Islam is a religion of love, not hate.

Stanley McChrystal:

And that was the right thing to do. It would've been so easy for him to go, we hate those people, let's get them. I mean, that would've been an applause line. And the reality is, what leaders have got to do is make us better than we would otherwise be.

Ian Bremmer:

Okay. Now, you're supposed to be a role model as a four star, but I've been told ever since I was a child that a good day starts with breakfast.

Stanley McChrystal:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

You do not eat breakfast or lunch. Just dinner every day.

Stanley McChrystal:

Right.

Ian Bremmer:

What's wrong with you?

Stanley McChrystal:

Yeah. Lots of things. That's only one.

Ian Bremmer:

No, but specifically, this seems almost obscene.

Stanley McChrystal:

Yeah. When I was a young officer, I thought I was getting pudgy, and I don't have the self-discipline to sit down and eat a small meal. You ever been around people who can sit down and they can eat this very small-

Ian Bremmer:

In Manhattan every evening, yes.

Stanley McChrystal:

I can't do that.

Ian Bremmer:

You can't do that.

Stanley McChrystal:

So I have to eat everything my arms can reach. And so what I found was I can defer gratitude sort of to the end of the day. If I just sort of go through the day, take my head down, work, work, work, at the end of the day, I feel I can eat whatever I want. I weigh right now two pounds less than the day I reported to West Point.

Ian Bremmer:

Which is?

Stanley McChrystal:

176.

Ian Bremmer:

Very nice. Okay. And you're like 5'10"?

Stanley McChrystal:

6'1".

Ian Bremmer:

6'1". Oh, okay. So you look-

Stanley McChrystal:

But I'm shrinking.

Ian Bremmer:

Okay, fair enough. So that's pretty impressive.

Stanley McChrystal:

Well, it doesn't matter except that it's a goal I set for myself.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah.

Stanley McChrystal:

And so the reality is-

Ian Bremmer:

But are you starving by dinner time?

Stanley McChrystal:

Oh, yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah.

Stanley McChrystal:

I'm gnawing on my forearm.

Ian Bremmer:

And you're just okay?

Stanley McChrystal:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

Does that allow you to just put more nervous energy into your work? Because here's the thing, you know Daniel Kahneman, right?

Stanley McChrystal:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

The great psychologist. And he actually, they do these studies in Israel about how prior to lunch, when people are hungry, cases that go to jury, everyone's guilty because they're angry. You can't exactly have courageous restraint when you want to gnaw your arm off, right?

Stanley McChrystal:

Yeah, it's an interesting point. Well, one, I think you can because I think there's a lot of discipline, but I also think that if somebody is sort of comfortable all the time, I don't think you accomplish all that much. If I was just sort of lazed around comfortable, filled belly, I don't think I would have a lot of focused energy. I think there's a certain amount to be said for being a little bit cold, a little bit tired, a little bit hungry. I think that can sharpen you.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, you're certainly that. General Stanley McChrystal, great to see you.

Stanley McChrystal:

My pleasure. Thank you.

Ian Bremmer:

That's our show this week. We'll be right back here next week, same place, same time, unless you're watching on social media, in which case wherever you happen to be, don't miss it. In the meantime, check us out at gzeromedia.com.

Announcer:

The GZERO World is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company, places clients' needs first by providing responsive, relevant, and customized solutions. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more.