General Wesley Clark on Fox's Studio B

November 26, 2006
Transcript by Melange

Trace Gallagher: It's considered the strongest military force in the world - NATO fighting the toughest war in its history in Afghanistan. What happens there seen as a critical turning point maybe, or maybe the barometer of the future of the alliance but the force is already stretched very thin, bogged down in the lawless areas in southern Afghanistan, fending off Taliban attacks almost every day and world leaders are meeting this week to talk about expanding NATO's role. General Wesley Clark is the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander and General, you almost…if NATO is going to become or maintain its dominance, its world force, Afghanistan's a must.


GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Absolutely. NATO must succeed in Afghanistan but this is not a mission that can be won simply by the application of fire power and I think NATO leaders understand this. This is a three-part problem: there's a security problem; there's an economic problem; and there's a cross-border problem. And, all three have to be dealt with by investing the Afghan people in their own defense and their own security. You've got to make them believe in themselves.

Trace Gallagher: Yeah. The President is going to go in there and say, you know the countries that are part of NATO are not doing enough - they're not spending enough money on military and therefore they're being weakened by that. Now is it…should we spend more money on military in these NATO countries or spend more money on things like intelligence and maybe homeland security?


GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well I think that the NATO nations have to have…these countries have to have a pledge to keep, say 2% of their gross domestic product invested in their national security, otherwise they just fall off the radar screen. They've got to be up there and able to participate with us. Of course we're the most powerful part of NATO but in Afghanistan specifically, we've got to find answers for the opium production. We've got to give economic livelihood to the people and one of the things that is encouraging is that for about the past 6 months we've been training some local reserve police units. This is a popular security measure - we did this in Vietnam and it was very effective. If you arm local people, teach them to protect their own villages and community, pay them a little bit of a stipend and get them on your side - this may be our best defense but it won't work unless they also have an economic livelihood.

Trace Gallagher: You know we talk about…the word I hear coming up over and over again is fatigue, whether it's in Afghanistan or Iraq and you know, you talked about the opium problem in Afghanistan and as soon as we pull troops out or pull them back a little it seems like the insurgents or the terrorists just kind of fill up that vacuum again. How do you just keep going and going and going?


GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well I think that we don't. They do - it's their country. What we have to do is we have to give them the opportunities to find the way of life that they want and then to fight to protect it and that means helping them economically, helping them politically, putting in legal systems, doing all the non-military things. There's no fatigue in the United States for helping people on non-military activities but we lack the tools and we lack the know-how. For example, it's very hard to transplant American law somewhere and yet without solid legal systems, businesses can't prosper and therefore people don't have any livelihood. We don't know what crops they should be growing other than opium - we know they shouldn't be doing that, but simply eradicating opium production,
that doesn't help the people come our way or take care of their own government.

Trace Gallagher:What about terrorists hiding out in places like Pakistan, General? I mean, how do we turn the other cheek on one side of the equation and then say 'yep, they're our allies?'


GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, we're not…there's no simple answer on Pakistan. I think you're going to have to work into Pakistan through the broad-based programs, economic development, political development, law enforcement, intelligence activities. The real problem is that Musharraf has to take a stronger grip on Pakistan itself. He's got to reduce his dependency on the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the ISI, which has been behind the Taliban from the beginning and he's got to start removing people from the ISI, he's got to bring that organization more to the West. To do that, he's got to create a rapprochement with India. So there's some diplomatic heavy lifting that's got to come first.
Trace Gallagher: Indeed there is. General, thank you.


GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Thank you.