[♪upbeat music♪] This is A Closer Look.
Gail McCabe talks with General Petraeus about commitment
and winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan.
Sir, I've been told that the real strategy here is one of commitment--
enduring commitment, long-term commitment,
broad commitment. Do you agree?
Carrying out our strategy here certainly requires
a sustained, substantial commitment.
It does require an enduring commitment,
although the character of that commitment can and should change over time
with, as Afghan forces develop greater capacity and capability,
them taking over more tasks and we hand off to them
in a manner similar to that what we were able to do in Iraq, of course.
How do you compare the strategy with Iraq--the similarities and the differences?
There certainly are a number of similarities.
We sought to carry out a comprehensive civil military counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq,
and that's how you would broadly characterize what it is we're doing here.
The differences stem from the differences of the conditions
in which we're carrying out that strategy.
In Afghanistan, by contrast with Iraq, you have much less in the form of human capital.
This country has, after all, suffered over 30 years of war.
And in those three decades, the human capital has been depleted.
And it wasn't an enormous amount to begin with.
Afghanistan has never had the kind of revenues and education systems and all the rest
that Iraq had over the years
until Saddam gradually ground them down.
So you start from a very different base here.
Literacy rates are much lower here than they were in Iraq.
Again, the prospects for national revenue, even with the potential
of literally trillions of dollars of minerals in the ground here,
that's still some way off, needless to say,
because they have to develop the capacity to extract it,
the infrastructure to do that, the value chain to export it, and all the rest.
Beyond that, just the sheer terrain is very, very different, the weather is different,
and the complexities, if you will, of culture, tradition, tribal elements and so forth
are different as well.
But again, I think the broad principles, the general concepts,
are largely the same, and it's how you apply those in specific circumstances,
village by village and valley by valley that really matter.
Does that commitment also carry over to the Afghan government?
Is it village by village, district by district?
Well, it does. All counterinsurgency is local, as they say about politics in the United States.
And so it starts in the village, it continues into the valley, the district, the province,
and, of course, to the national level.
But what affects most people in the rural areas of the country
are those local governmental structures, many of them traditional structures.
There is no desire here nor endeavor nor plan to turn Afghanistan into Switzerland
in five years or less,
to turn Afghanistan into a Western industrialized democracy in short order.
I think there's a very realistic assessment of what's possible,
what should be sought, and that is an Afghanistan that is, in a sense, good enough.
It's Afghan good enough. Again, an Afghanistan that can secure and govern itself
in accordance with its traditions, its cultures, its norms, is adequate.
Can you sustain the commitment
while at the same time you're downsizing the military footprint?
First of all, the question is, how much do you need to maintain?
And, of course, what we're trying to do is, among a variety of other tasks,
enable the growth of the Afghan Security Forces, not just in terms of numbers
but also in terms of quality so it's quality as well as quantity,
it's professionalization of the force in addition to the sheer expansion of it.
These kinds of campaigns are people-intensive, manpower-intensive,
so you do need substantial numbers of host nation security forces.
But as they come online, the plan is, in fact, starting in July 2011,
based on conditions on the ground, to begin a process of transitioning
tasks to Afghan forces and to Afghan officials,
and that should enable some of our forces to go home
at a pace based on the conditions on the ground.
[♪upbeat music♪] That's A Closer Look.