Pod Save the World - War Policy

Episode Date: September 6, 2017

Tommy talks with former Lieutenant General and Ambassador to NATO Doug Lute about his six years managing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for Presidents Bush and Obama. 

All right. My guest today on Pod Save the World is General Doug Lute. General, you've served in so many senior positions in the U.S. government that I need to truncate your bio. But the gist is that you were a career army officer. In 2010, you retire from active duty as a lieutenant general after 35 years of service. You also serve for a total of six years in the White House as a special assistant and senior coordinator for Afghanistan and Pakistan. and then as an assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush administration, you are one of those great public servants I've talked about many times in this show whose politics I am unaware of but who served in presidents of both parties. And then in 2013, President Obama appointed you to be the U.S. permanent representative to NATO where you served until very, very recently. Thank you so much for doing the show. I really appreciate it. Well, thanks, Tommy. It's really good to be with you.

Thanks, man. I miss going into your office because there was always really cool maps of Afghanistan and like literal lists of Taliban bad guys that had been crossed off. It was out of a movie. So you made this transition from active duty service in the Army to overseeing policy in the White House. There has been a lot of discussion about the number of former generals serving the White House. And I imagine you know a lot of those men. And I'm curious to hear your opinion about that. But I think it would also be interesting for people to hear about what that transition is like and how is it different. How do you go from serving in the military to making an overseeing policy about how the military operates? Right. So I joined the Bush administration in the summer of 2007. So it seems amazing, but 10 years ago.

Yeah. And I was on active duty at the time. I had left the Pentagon literally on a Friday. I started work in the White House on Monday. And I stayed on. active duty through the Bush administration and then for the first 18 months or so of the Obama administration. Then I left active duty, retired as you said, and just moved over into the civilian ranks for the rest of my time there, totaling six years. So I think the key reflection here is that it's actually difficult and a bit unusual for an active duty army officer to be in that political environment.

and it puts an active duty officer in a bit of an unusual and uncomfortable maybe position because, you know, there is a chain of command that runs from the president to the Secretary Defense and then out to combatant commanders. Well, if you have an active duty guy or gal in the West Wing, exactly how does he or she fit in that chain of command? And the answer is, you know, it isn't a good fit. So when you're seeing the president as frequently as we did in the Obama administration, before that with Bush, it just puts you in a bit of an awkward position regarding or relative to the chain of command.

So sometimes when people ask me this, I liken it to, you know, you have your afloat on two adjacent rowboats. And you're standing in these two rowboats with one foot in each boat. and over time what tends to happen, yeah, you've already got the instinct, right? The boats start to drift apart. And so your role as a military officer and your role as a senior advisor to the president sometimes can be at odds. That's a great metaphor. And then you sit in deputies' committees' meetings all day and you wonder when you will ever leave.

So I was hoping to start with Iraq because you had major roles at CENTCOM and then on the joint staff from like 2004 to 2007. and then you went into the White House, as you're saying, to coordinate the war efforts. Those were incredibly difficult times in Iraq. I don't need to tell you that. The amount of sectarian violence was horrific. The security situation was spiraling out of control

with over 50 attacks and three car bombs per day, on average, in Baghdad alone. Can you talk about President Bush's decision to surge more troops to Iraq and what it meant, not just in terms of a troop increase, but in terms of how the war was being waged conducted on the ground, like the different components of the surge? Right.

So by the end of 06, when President Bush took this decision to reverse course, if you will, stop the steady handoff to the Iraqis and surge American troops, which culminated in his speech to the nation, I think, in January of 07. These were the darkest days in Iraq. I mean, as you said, sectarian violence was spiraling out of control. There was just massive violence in the streets in Baghdad. A lot of it driven by sectarian differences and so forth. And we were losing control.

So the president took a decision, and frankly a decision contrary to virtually all the professional military advice of the active duty ranks serving at the time. And he took a decision to move from 15 active duty. brigade combat teams. So that was sort of the coin of the realm, the BCT, the brigade combat team. And here you should think about about 5,000 troops are in a BCT. So there were 15 of those on duty in Iraq and had been for some time on steady one-year rotations. And he added five more. And that was those extra five brigades comprised the surge. He took a number of other steps. He changed commanders, put Dave Petraeus in command in Baghdad. And with Dave came a change in concept as to how the U.S. troops were being used.

And what Dave essentially did was decentralized the fight, putting American troops in small outposts with Iraqi troops alongside them in communities and neighborhoods on the corner, on the block, if you will, in an effort to stem this violence. In Washington, meanwhile, he took a couple steps as well. One of those was to look for someone, and it turned out to be me, look for someone who could keep him up to date, day to day on what was going on in the war, but also with the task of trying to bring to better coordination all the different bits of the U.S. Interagency, the U.S. government effort, so USAID, the diplomatic effort, the effort, the effort with Ryan Crocker on the ground as the ambassador in Baghdad, of the regional effort and so forth.

So there were a lot of bits and pieces. So the idea was let's have one point of contact in the White House who can be positioned to try to do a better job at coordination. So that's what brought me to the White House by July of 2007. Did that give you better visibility into resource allocation and availability across both theaters of war? or is trying to manage Afghanistan and Iraq just too big and too different? Like, how did you feel like that role worked?

Right. So this, you know, six or seven word title included Iraq and Afghanistan. But look, the reality is 95% of my time, 95% of the president's time was committed to Iraq. And Afghanistan was very much a secondary theater. We did what we could there when we had time and resources. to do it, but we weren't really focused on Afghanistan. This was a war effort against our enemies in Iraq. Right. So we talked about the troop increase. You talked about the tactical changes that General Petraeus made. There was also the issue of the Sunni awakening and the reconciliation

effort that really, you know, started to bear fruit in 2007. And I'm asking about that, not because I want to, you know, engage in this debate about whether the surge work or not. But I think it's interesting and instructive to talk about reconciliation as we look forward to Afghanistan. Well, look, by sort of the fall of 2007, so now six months or so into the surge, it was clear that the trends in sectarian violence were beginning to improve. And I think that the additional five brigades of the U.S. surge were one factor. But this is a multi-variable equation. You mentioned a couple things.

First of all, a year before the surge, the Sunni awakening, that is the outreach to the Sunni tribes, especially in Al-Anbar province, had already taken place. So that predates the surge. And that brought many Sunni Arab tribal leaders aligned them with us against al-Qaeda in Iraq. So that was critical. The year before the surge, the Jashal-Madi, so this is the Madi Army, the Army of Mukta al-Sadr, was sidelined. So Soder took his Shia militia essentially out of the fight. The other thing that gets sometimes underplayed is that while all through 06 and into 07,

while the additional brigades were deploying, Stan McChrystal's J-Sach, so the Joint Special Operations Command, These are the high-end counter-terrorist forces. We're hammering away at al-Qaeda and Iraq. So you have all these factors playing apart. I don't think this serious history has yet been written that sort of discerns among these factors and weights them most important, perhaps least important. But it's really, I think, as Americans, we tend to focus on,

you know, we send five more brigades and the next thing we know, things began to get better. Yeah, that was an important part of it, but it wasn't the only factor. Right. Well, I think we just figured out your next book project. Steady, steady, steady, tongue. So over the last several months... Don't go crazy. You promise not to go crazy on this podcast.

You're right, you're right. You're right. So President Trump's team, over the last several months, did a full review of policy and objectives in Afghanistan. And when I heard him talk about this and I read the stories about the process, it sounded like a review President Obama ordered of our Afghan policy in 2009. And you lived every moment of that process. You did hundreds and hundreds of hours of staff work on it. And then you got to a deal with annoying press guys like me begging you for details when the meetings ended, so I knew what that all happened.

Can you talk about why that review was necessary and what kinds of things you discussed? Like, what did President Obama want to know from you guys? And how did you get him answers? Well, I think each of the administrations, the Trump administration, and its two predecessors, have had to contend with an extraordinarily complex policy set in Afghanistan. So the reason these reviews are absolutely essential is that you don't really walk into the West Wing and take a right at the first door and go into the situation room and understand Afghanistan. So there's a real burden here to figure out the demographics.

So who are the Pashtun people? Why are they struggling against one another, the government and the Taliban? who are the regional players? How does the geography, the culture, the history, which now is approaching 40 consecutive years at war in Afghanistan, how does all this play into U.S. policy options? So until you can unpack those facts, until you can kind of begin to understand the outline of the problem, which is what these policy reviews reveal, right? It's very hard to launch into what should our options be.

And I think it's true across all three of these last administrations that all of them have had to early on wrap their arms around the facts. And I think, you know, that's most likely what was taking place in the situation room over the last couple months in the Trump administration. Yeah. So digging into that review for a minute, can you explain what the Taliban is? How are they different from ISIS or Al-Qaeda or the, you know, many different types of extremist groups? And how many Taliban do you think there are in Afghanistan? Well, okay, so just in reverse sequence. Yeah.

The answer to how many are there has remained amazingly consistent over the last decade or so. And it's about 25,000 or give and take. So no matter what, and this is revealing, because no matter what our success on the battlefield in terms of eliminating, capturing, dissuading Taliban fire, They always seem to end up at about 25 to 28,000 right in there. And that's been a very consistent number. And it's revealing because there has been attrition in the Taliban ranks, but they've been able to fill those spots with local recruiting and so forth.

So this is not an attrition model. So if we're strictly into attrition warfare here where we're going to try to kill our way out of this or fight our way out of this, the experience of the last. decade, it would be pretty revealing that that's not going to be successful. Now, who are they? This gets complicated, and it really begins to address what I call one of the phony arguments of the war in Afghanistan. One of the phony arguments is that it is an argument that equates the Taliban with transnational terrorists. The Taliban do not threaten anybody outside of Afghanistan. They have no agenda, they have no goal, they don't seek a global caliphate.

They are Islamists. They are violent in their tactics. They are fundamentally, however, Afghan insurgents. And their primary goal is to return to power, as they were in the late 1990s, return to power in Kabul. They want to run Afghanistan. They're fundamentally Pashtun in terms of ethnicity. And that's important because when you get into the demographics of this fight, there are about 40 million Pashtuns in the world.

They all live in basically in Afghanistan and Pakistan. About 60% of the 40 million actually live in Pakistan. So when in 2001 the Taliban in Afghanistan were displaced by our military campaign after 9-11, they naturally went to where their cousins and nephews. fuse are. And that's to Pakistan. And that's where the leadership of the Taliban are today. So they are insurgents who use terrorist tactics. But, you know, frankly, in history, most insurgents use terrorist tactics because they don't have conventional tactics at their hand. And they aim to take over Afghanistan. They do not have transnational reach. They do not have transnational aspiration. So we have to be careful here and we have to be precise about who

the enemy is. If, as President Trump said, and frankly as President's Obama and Bush said, that a real fight here is against those who can reach us, those who can do America and her allies harm, then you have to be a little careful and parse exactly how the Taliban may, or I think increasingly do not fit into that category. That is really interesting. interesting point. And I think one of the ways presidents, Bush, Obama, and Trump, I think, kind of could make or have the administrations that made an end run around your argument is to say that the Taliban provided a safe haven in Afghanistan where groups like al-Qaeda could plan and execute attacks. Now, a guy named Mike Azenko wrote a piece in the New York Times

recently said where the notion of a safe haven is actually based in his view on an inexcusable misunderstanding of how 9-11 was planned since attackers ended up in Maryland in San Diego and Oklahoma City. I'm curious what you think of that argument because obviously ISIS has benefited from a security vacuum in Iraq, but it's also spreading its ideology online. So it's sort of, it's hard to know what a safe haven means necessarily in that context. Well, this is another one of my phony arguments that we sometimes hear. And it requires, again, it requires a touch of discipline, in a touch of precision about exactly what we're arguing here. First of all, to the 9-11 case.

It's true that Taliban ruled Afghanistan before and during 9-11. But the plot itself, and it's true that Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan at the time of 9-11. But the plot itself was crafted in Hamburg, Germany. The pilots were trained in the United States. So it's not as though there was some big map. war map in Afghanistan and bin Laden with a pointy stick was sort of crafting the strategy here. These plots were done elsewhere and that's instructive because what it means is that wherever

these, wherever the standard bears, wherever the headquarters of these groups tend to be, they really have reach that's much more dispersed, much more diverse and much harder to get at. And that goes all the way back to 9-11. Now, with regard to the phony argument applied to Afghanistan, I mean, if you look at 2001, September 10th, 2001, the Taliban are in Afghanistan and rural Afghanistan. Bin Laden has camps there. He's there himself, but he has this sort of global movement operating in places like Hamburg and elsewhere. And there's really no other central authority contesting security in Afghanistan. Now, fast forward to today.

Today, there are 300,000 Afghan army and police. They're not perfect, but they represent 300,000 government security forces who weren't there on September 10, 2001. You also have the experience of the Taliban in the intervening years. What we know from the Taliban spokesperson on the public sense, but also using other sources, that the Taliban actually appreciate that they made a huge mistake in the wake of 9-11 by continuing to shelter bin Laden. And the result of that is they lost power. I mean, they were kicked out of Afghanistan with our campaign. So it's not clear that the Taliban didn't get the point here about harboring.

harboring terrorists. And finally, even if Afghanistan were, even if we were not there, you have these 300,000 Afghan security forces who are there, clearly the United States would have access to Afghanistan, which we didn't have on September 10th of 2001. Nobody's talking about every last soldier, every last intelligence officer, every last diplomat leaving Afghanistan. So we will have presence there. We have robust partners there.

And I don't think that the security vacuum argument makes much sense. Even if it did, Tommy, there are about 20 or 30 other places around the world that would be equally good candidates to be labeled Safe Haven. And if you look at places like, there's still areas in Western Iraq, in eastern Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and probably places. even in Western Europe, and maybe even isolated spots inside the United States, where there are extremists plotting against us. So the notion that somehow Afghanistan is special in this regard, I think just defies logic. More nerdy foreign policy coming up on POTSave the World. One of the interesting things that emerged in that 09 review is exactly what you're talking about.

Obama decided we needed to destroy every last vestige at al-Qaeda, but that we needed to degrade the Taliban and push them back so the Afghan government could gain some stability, train up their local forces, and then take control. The big debate ended up, well, or at least was summarized over how to do that. It was a question of a major troop increase and a counterinsurgency strategy called COIN or General Biden, Vice President Biden pushed hard for more of a counterterrorism mission. Easy, tell me. easy. Can you talk a little bit about the distinction between the two in that debate at the time? Yeah, it wasn't a full-fledged debate. So, as you remember well, and this is written up pretty well in a number of written accounts. The military, the U.S. military, the U.S. Department of Defense

preferred option was to surge American troops so that American troops could take the lead for a while against the Taliban, sort of beat them down, suppressed them so that the transition from the growing Afghan security forces would be easier because first of all, we would gain some time, time to develop the Afghan security forces, but also when the transitions took place, they'd take place with a depleted Taliban, a suppressed Taliban. So the surge was actually a technique, a method to promote the transition to Afghan authority. And so that was widely accepted as possible, viable. The military obviously advocated that and believed in the potential of counterinsurgency

with the aim of ultimate transition to the Afghan. there was a search for several weeks for alternatives, not to dismiss the counterinsurgency argument, but just to have something to argue it against, to consider it against, to compare it to. And in the course of that conversation, one of the sort of out-of-the-box options was to suggest, well, look, if as President Obama had declared in the spring of, of 2009, if our key objective was against al-Qaeda, and this is, you remember, the three Ds, right? Disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda. If al-Qaeda was our target, then why don't we talk about a troop surge against al-Qaeda,

not against the Taliban? And so there was a discussion about what would a counter-terrorism-based approach feature? And one of the features is, at least one of the modeling constraints, was that it would probably require many fewer U.S. troops, and it wouldn't require this sort of taking the fight to the most remote areas, especially southern and eastern Afghanistan, and maybe we could do this more efficiently. So that was, those were two options that were tossed about, and we had a series of serious debates in the situation room before the president made his decision. Yeah, just a quick aside.

And you were talking earlier about how there's sort of 20 places around the globe. that you could say could sort of credibly fit the description of a safe haven. We could identify as a place where it could be a hotbed for extremism. Do you think we'd be talking about Afghanistan right now if it didn't share a border with Pakistan and if Pakistan didn't have nuclear weapons? So this is really important. For too long, the U.S., and frankly in both administrations, in fact, I think And increasingly, I think the Obama administration tended to look at this as a regional problem.

But there's a tendency by us and by our policy mechanism to sort of try to isolate problems and confine them to the basics and then just deal with that. For a while we did this in Iraq, by the way. We dealt with Iraq as though it was just an internal problem before we began to look at the regional context. Early on, we did the same thing in Afghanistan. We began treating Afghanistan almost as though it were an island in the Pacific, you know, with no, or the Indian Ocean, right, with no neighbors. And, of course, most prominently, the neighborhood includes Pakistan.

And that's critically important because it was from Pakistan that the U.S. and others supplied the jihadists who fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. So we actually, in cooperation with Pakistan, sponsored groups to fight the Soviets from 79 to 89 to 89. So Pakistan's important there because it was sort of the original staging base. It's also important, maybe most important, demographically, because as I mentioned earlier, the Pashtun people, these 40 million people without a nation state, are split on either side of the Afghan-Pakistan border. So when you understand the grassroots support for the Taliban, whether it's the Afghan Taliban,

those who want to be in charge of Afghanistan, or frankly, they're Pakistani cousins, the Pakistani Taliban who are focused on an insurgency against the Pakistani government. You can see how that border area really becomes central. And the way to look at this, look, I think it's a 1,500-kilometer border. I mean, this is a very long border, and it's either desert or at very steep mountain passes. It is very, very hard to control, and it's never effectively been controlled in the history of either country. So that's where, that's the nest for these Taliban on both sides, so both the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban, but also others like the IMU, remnants of al-Qaeda, and even today some, one of the branches of this so-called Islamic State. Yeah.

You've written some pieces recently about the need for a diplomatic surge and the need for more diplomacy. I always love it when folks from, you know, senior military leaders talk about the need for more funding and support to the State Department and that mission. Do you think that there's a better opportunity now of getting to some sort of diplomatic negotiated end to this war with the current leadership after we finally got through the, the cost. Karzai era. Was that a huge sticking point that just made progress impossible? Well, let me just back that up a little bit, Tommy. And then I'll get

to your answer. So, the shiny object here, the thing that seems to gather all the attention, right, is the security situation. And it's true that there is roughly a stalemate in the security situation with the Taliban and the

government forces backed by us roughly at stalemate. It's also true that over the last year or so, we've seen some slippage where the Taliban seemed to be somewhat ascendant. But this is very much on the margin. And with only a couple exceptions, the city of Kunduz, for example, most of the Taliban gains have been in very remote mountainous areas of Afghanistan that have very little population. They don't really challenge the security forces, the Afghan government.

and security forces in any of the population centers. So this is not a, there's no challenge here that the city of Kabul or Kandahar or Mazar or Harat, the big population centers of Afghanistan are about to fall to the Taliban. There is roughly a stalemate. But that's not the stalemate in my view that counts. The stalemates that count are the stalemates that strike to the root of the problem. The security situation is the symptom. The cause of the problem, the root of the problem are all political.

And that's because of the stalemate inside Kabul between the different elements of what the United States terms, the national unity government. So there's a problem there. And although we have a very good working partnership with both President Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah, they are often at odds. And this plays out in terms of appointments and policy reforms and so forth. So there's a bit of a stalemate inside Kabul. There's another stalemate between Afghanistan and her neighbors. Most prominently, Afghanistan and Pakistan and the president's speech a week ago addressed a lot of a lot the problem of Pakistan. But he didn't mention any of the other neighbors.

And they're also prominent. He didn't say the word Iran. He didn't say the word Russia. He didn't say the word China. So unless you approach the problem in Afghanistan, accounting for all of the prominent neighbors, then you're probably going to be stalemated in the region. And then the third stalemates, the one your question sparks.

And that's the one between the Afghan government and the Taliban. And this is the question of can you imagine a day when Afghan government officials are talking to, to Taliban officials somewhere. Maybe the U.S. is in the room or just outside the room. And they're talking about the potential for a compromise that brings this 17-year-old war to a close on Afghan terms, not on terms dictated by us and not on terms dictated by any of the neighbors. And so your question was, is that any more likely today? It's not clear to me.

In the Obama administration, when President Obama surged early in, well, actually late in 2009, but early in his eight-year administration, he surged troops so that we ended up with 100,000 American troops in Afghanistan. One of the motives there was to suppress the Taliban enough and convince them that there was no way they were going to ever return to power and to cause them to get to. to the bargaining table. We had some fleeting success in that regard in the Obama years. We did talk to the Taliban. We had relatively senior U.S. government officials, meeting with the Taliban, officials in third sites and safe areas. We had agreements with third parties to try to assist in this, and there was some promise

in that. But quite frankly, it was hit and miss. And it was not sustained progress towards a common end. And so the result is we never really got into serious negotiations with the Taliban. And we were never able to sort of sponsor those kinds of talks, Afghan on Afghan. I don't know that the situation today is dramatically different. I mean, I think we have a more reliable Afghan government partner. today in Ashraf Ghani. I do not think that the Pakistan part of this equation has changed

substantially. And frankly, I don't believe the United States has sufficient leverage on Pakistan to force it to do something that's against its strategic calculus. And most of Pakistan's calculus, of course, centers on India, not on the Afghan Taliban. Finally, the U.S. has interests with Pakistan that in my view exceed the U.S. interests in Afghanistan. So let me just

I know this sounds what? But the reality as your question suggests is that the principle concern we have in this region is the security of Pakistani nuclear weapons

and suppressing, limiting, minimizing the chance of a nuclear-on-nuclear conflict between Pakistan and India. That surpasses those interests surpass anything that has anything to do with Afghanistan. Beyond the nuclear part of the interest equation, we have an interest in transnational terrorists like al-Qaeda

and the remnants of al-Qaeda, being suppressed to the point where they don't have time and space to plot against us. Most of those transnational terrorists are actually in Pakistan. or immediately on the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. So if you look at this strictly from vital national interests, what we really are concerned about, both the nuclear part of the equation,

the Indo-PAC part of the equation, and transnational terrorists, have your focus, frankly, first on Pakistan and then subsequently on Afghanistan. And that's why I'm a little concerned about, at least what we know about the current administrations, approach, that their approach is simply to apply more and more pressure on Pakistan. Well, eventually, more and more pressure on Pakistan is going to bump into our own interests,

which are fundamentally in Pakistan. You're listening to Potsay of the World. Stick around. There's more great show coming your way. You know, it's funny. People probably hear me talking to an Army General who ran the war efforts out of the White House, and they think you were thinking about rules of engagement and truth. troop levels, the amount of time your team, your incredibly talented team, by the way, spent

trying to facilitate peace talks among the PACs, the Afghans, the Taliban, the United States, was extraordinary. And it was, you know, for a period of time, maybe one of the most secret, you know, pieces of business the U.S. government was doing, right? Until it all leaked out. Well, yeah, it needed to be secret. And, you know, that's also revealing because I suppose there are elements of the current administration's policy, which we only got the outline of this. We got the cliff notes. Do you guys even know what cliff notes are? Anyway, Tom, yeah. All right, it was big in my generation. We call it Google now. Okay, yeah, yeah. We got the Wikipedia version of the strategy last Monday, right? And that's

because, in part, you can only do so much by way of communicating, by way of presidential speeches, right? And you know this well, you know. But also it reveals that, there are parts of strategies like our strategy in Afghanistan, Paxson, that don't deserve to be revealed publicly. And so I don't know. I don't have any insight into what this administration plans with regard to trying to pursue talks with the Taliban or to promote talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban. I don't know there wasn't much detail on Monday about exactly what kind of pressure they intend to assert against Pakistan. And we should give them credit for that. I mean, we don't, I don't know of any big strategy like this that gets completely revealed to the public. Yeah, right.

But I'm skeptical that we have sufficient national leverage on Pakistan to cause it to change its stripes, which fundamentally have to do with what they consider an existential threat, a threat to the survival of their nation. And that's India. That's not Afghanistan. So, I don't know. I am convinced, and I'm going long on this answer, but I am convinced that the way this thing eventually ends is with talks between the Afghan government and the Afghan Taliban and some sort of compromise that ends the violence or dramatically suppresses the violence and frankly finds space for the Taliban inside the body politic of Afghanistan. Now, as we were thinking about this in the Obama years, you know, that's a nasty thought.

Because these guys, I mean, think of what they've done to innocent Afghan civilians. Think of the blood on their hands of the blood of American soldiers, some 2,400 American troops, some thousand troops from our NATO allies. Nobody wants to sit with these guys and compromise. But the harsh reality is that that's how these wars end. So I believe that the military effort, whatever it is, whether it's the 8,400 troops now or 10,000 more than that or 4,000 more than that, that that effort should be in service of the political objectives. And I believe what we really need, and this is the big yawning gap in the discussion or in the president's speech last Monday. the big gap is how is it that we're going to marshal the political capital? How is it that we're going to have a political surge that gets at the situation in Kabul,

the situation in the region, and then the situation with the Taliban? And especially when, as you and your podcast buddies have discussed previously, as I take long walks around Arlington and listening to you guys, this is what I do for entertainment now. But look, as you guys have mentioned before, how is it that we're going to have the political bandwidth to do this when we're cutting the State Department by 30%? And almost on a weekly basis, you see a talent flow out of the State Department of experienced diplomats with 20, 25, 30 years of experience who should be putting their shoulders to this task. So you've got a big announcement about what it is we're going to try to accomplish. but on the diplomatic side, I wonder if we're going to marshal the resources.

Yeah. My final question for you, you've served 35 years in the Army. You've served in the White House managing two wars. You've overseen multiple surges. You've worked at NATO as an ambassador. You've seen the full field in a way, I think very few people who aren't the President of the United States do. Are there lessons we should learn about when, why? how to conduct wars that you think we could apply going forward and maybe not make some of the

mistakes you've talked about on this show today or I don't know. Like what how do we do this better? So let me offer three. And by the way, so I'm still unpacking my last decade. And it, you know, it takes a while because as you leave government as I did in January, it takes a while to sort of decompress, to get your ideas together, to get your thoughts together. And so here are three that are in my short, early list, right, of sort of personal lessons. One is what I call no shortcuts on strategy. What I mean by this is that in the military doctrine, in the military profession, the word strategy is special.

It holds a special place. And it has a very precise meaning. Strategy must have three components. must have ends, ways, and means, as we say. What does that actually mean in plain English? It means that strategy's got to start with what it is you want to accomplish, your goals, your objectives. Those are the ends, right? It's got to include how are you going to do that. Those are the ways, the methods, the techniques. And then finally, it's got to have the third component resources, the means. And when I say no shortcut on strategy, what I am reflecting is

that too often in Washington, the word strategy, the word strategy is that, you know, the word strategy, is used, but all we really have is the first bit. All we really have is a declaration of what we want to achieve. And when we take a shortcut and we don't figure out how we're going to do that, and we take further a shortcut, and we don't assemble the resources, we're setting ourselves up for failure every single time. So my, as I talk to active duty military professionals now and do some speaking out on the outside in the civilian realm,

No shortcuts on strategy is one of my lessons. The other thing, Tommy, lesson number two I'd offer today is these problems defy understanding. They are as foreign to us as Americans as anything conceivable. So the second lesson is you've really got to go to school on this. I mean, these are not problems that you sort of dip into and then depart and come back, you know, a couple months later, you've got to have dedicated, focused attention on this across the government. So forming the intra-government teams of intelligence professionals, and by the way, the intelligence community tends to do this mastery of the subject best because they stay with a topic.

They stay with a problem for a long time, sometimes a career, right? The military does it less well, frankly. The military officers rotate in and out of problem sets. all over the world. So an officer can be assigned to Afghanistan for a 12-month tour, go home for a 12-month tour, and his next tour will be in Korea. Well, you know, does that really make sense today when we need to master our topics? Now, I must, as a footnote, mentioned that General Mick Nicholson, our four-star U.S. and NATO commander today in Afghanistan, is an exception. He is there on his fourth tour in Afghanistan.

So that's what I'm talking about. That's the kind of repeat tours that will lead to mastery of the subject. So the second lesson is you've got to really go to school. You've kind of mastered this subject. And then the last lesson is simply that even when you've got four tours in Afghanistan or you've been doing this for 10 years or you're an intelligence profession, and you've been doing this for 20 years and you speak the language, you better have a little humility.

Because in my experience, when you begin to think you know everything about a problem set, you're about to be ambushed. You're about to be ambushed with circumstances, facts, conditions, changing situations that you didn't expect. And only if you're humble enough to appreciate that you're never going to know at all, are you really on safe ground? And if you look back over the last, certainly since World War II, I think, and you ask, where have the biggest American foreign policy mistakes taken place? Each of those examples, I believe, features a heavy dose of lack of humility

and sort of a certainty that we knew what we were doing. That's very dangerous. General Lute, I'm filled with humility here. your experience and knowledge of these subjects. That's unusual, Tommy. The best part about working at this, whatever crooked media is, is that I get to have these conversations that used to be part of my day-to-day life at the NSC. So thank you so much for doing this.

Thank you for all you did. For the country, for President Obama, for all of us, you know, it's truly, it's an honor. Thanks to you and your teammates here on the podcast, because you're performing an important service, too. So keep it up. We just bullshit for a living. You guys do the hard stuff. And I appreciate that you pretty much saved any foul language. I was preparing some foul language here.

But I was advised against it. I cleaned it up for the nerdyer show. Oh, thanks for that. Yeah, thanks for that credential. All right. Thank you, General Lood. Appreciate it. All right, Tommy.