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General Wesley Clark on the Stephanie Miller Show
April 1, 2009
transcript by NYC
Stephanie Miller: It is the Stephanie Miller Show. Welcome to it. Six minutes after the hour 1-800-steph-12 the phone number, toll free from anywhere. stephaniemiller.com the website. Check it out......
May I just, if I do say so myself, a humdinger of a show today....
And filmmaker Robert Greenwald who just returned from Afghanistan who is also going to be up on stephaniemiller.com after the show. You know it was an interesting discussion about Afghanistan. If only I knew somebody else of some sort of expertise, perhaps a former Supreme NATO Commander of all the Allied Forces in-
(phone rings)
-Europe and stuff. Yes, Chris, who is it?
Chris: General Wesley Clark, yeah.
(phone rings again)
Stephanie Miller: Oh, well, there it is.
(trumpets)
You see how that happens.
(more trumpets)
Good morning General Clark.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Good morning, Stephanie. How are you?
Stephanie Miller: (laughs) I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm always missing you. That, that's how I am. It's so hap- so good-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Oh, that's music to my ears.
(laughter all around)
Stephanie Miller: It's so good to have you back.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Thank you.
Stephanie Miller: You know, interesting we have you on. This morning, we just had Robert Greenwald, the documentary filmmaker, just got back from Afghanistan. And he has a, a film called "Rethink Afghanistan". And interesting to have you guys on in the same show, because he is sort of questioning what the strategy is in Afghanistan and where we go from here. What is your take on all that?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, I think, you know, if you made a film and you looked at the results in Afghanistan, you'd have to question the strategy, because the strategy has failed. And that's what Barack Obama and his team including Richard Holbrooke and General Jim Jones are trying to fix right now. You, you have to decide how much is, it's possible to do and how to do it best, and our criticism of the Bush administration, mine for a long time, was it excessively relied on the military. I love the military. They're great, but, but you can't just win one of these conflicts by killing people.
Stephanie Miller: Right.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: You've got to establish an economic hope inside Afghanistan, and you've got to deal diplomatically and politically with Pakistan to keep it from interfering.
Stephanie Miller: Let, let-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: And-
Stephanie Miller: General, let me ask you- Let me g- ask you-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: If you can't do that, you can't succeed.
Stephanie Miller: Let me ask you a pretty basic but dumb question maybe. (laughs) Our original mission in Afghanistan was to get the guys that did 9/11, right, and, and we still haven't done that. H-how do we do that now? I mean, w-where is Osama Bin Laden and, and company?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well apparently, he's still in, in, in Pakistan up near the Afghan border.
Stephanie Miller: Mm hm.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: And the way you do it is you cut off his support. You turn people against him inside his organizations, and eventually you locate him.
Stephanie Miller: Right.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: And it's a process. It's- You may get lucky, but mostly it's a, it's a bottom-up, outside-inward process.
Stephanie Miller: How, General-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: -in which he becomes increasingly isolated, and then-
Stephanie Miller:: Mm hm.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: -you nail him.
Stephanie Miller: General, how- so- but how- so how do more troops, the, you know, the surge of troops in Afghanistan help that exactly?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, you can't be forced off the battlefield by defeat.
Stephanie Miller: Mm hm.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: And the Taliban are being paid, and they're out there, and they're intimidating villagers and so forth. Part of the outside-in strategy is that you have to take away the over- the, the, the, the rings of support and, and, and sustenance that he has on the outside. And that means you've got to take the villagers and persuade them they don't really like the Taliban. Most of them don't.
Stephanie Miller:: Right.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: And you drive the Taliban back, and a lot of them will defect. Maybe 2/3 will defect, and they, they were just there for the money. They never believed in it, and frankly, they don't like, they don't like what's the extremism of it that much. But-
Stephanie Miller: Right.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: -you know you have to get to that point.
Stephanie Miller: General-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: And at the same time, you have to work at Pakistan, and you will eventually isolate him and, and take him in.
Stephanie Miller: Hm mm. General, so- General Clark, what is the, the endgame then? I mean, I know that, you know, o-o-obviously I think it's pretty much common wisdom that we took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan, went into Iraq. So, now we need to- I mean I don't even know. Well, we're not starting over I guess, but I mean, now we're trying to finish the mission. I mean, will this ever be over? And, and, and, and if so, how and when do you think?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I think it will. I think though that you can't simply put troops in there and think you're winning by killing the Taliban, and I think our commanders understand that very well. I'm not sure whether the former incumbent of the, of the White House understood it, but it's clear to the commanders that you can't. We've got to dissuade people from becoming Taliban. You've got to get the ones that are there to defect, and to do that you've got to provide some measure of economic hope. I heard Richard Holbrooke on the radio yesterday from the donors strategy meeting there on Afghanistan in The Hague, and he was talking about one of my favorite themes which is the need to create agriculture in Afghanistan. They were a food exporting country. Now they're not. It's all been destroyed. We've got to give them hope for their lives again.
Stephanie Miller: Mm hm.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: If we do that, we'll get out of there. We'll, we'll get, we'll get Osama Bin Laden, and it won't take ten years.
Stephanie Miller:: Right, What, General talk to us about Iraq, about the President's plan in Iraq and how you think that's going and how- the endgame there.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, what's going on inside Iraq is there's some work being done by the leadership, the Iraqis themselves, to try to weed out people who may not support them. The question is: What's the basis? It's okay to have legitimate political opposition. It's not okay to have people who will resort to violence when the Americans leave. So, there's some consensus building that's going on. There's some elimination that's going on with arrests and so forth. And there's still the threat from the insurgents, from the Al Qeada in Iraq crowd with, with blowing up stuff. But basically, we're going to withdraw our troops there, and with the right emphasis, which this administration will have, I think that Iraq will hold together.
Stephanie Miller: Mm hm, mm hm, yep, I- Boy, it's a- What a couple of military messes to be left, (laughs) you know, to inherit from the last administration.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: It's a real problem. It's a real problem. And you know, I think that-
Stephanie Miller: Well, thank god the economy's on good shape and he has nothing else to do here on in the-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Exactly.
(laughter)
Exactly.
Stephanie Miller: -in the, in the States. General, we always appreciate getting your point of view and your expertise on this. Thanks so much for taking time for us this morning.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Great to be with you, Stephanie.
Stephanie Miller: Alright.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Thank you.
Stephanie Miller: Thank you, Sir.
Chris: Yay!
Stephanie Miller: General Wesley Clark. (singing) Love him.
(applause)
Love. Him.
