DAVID KILCULLEN COUNTER-INSURGENCY ADVISOR INTERVIEW - 8th March 2009
David Kilcullen is a former Australian army officer and peacekeeper and
he is also one of the world's foremost experts on guerilla warfare and
counter-insurgency. He's served in every theatre in the war on terror
since 9/11, as a special adviser to Condoleezza Rice, to General David
Petraeus, and the US State Department. In short, when comes to
terrorism and insurgency, he's got cred. Of late he has compared the
deteriorating situation in Afghanistan to the Vietnam war, calling it
"a crisis on the brink of failure". George Negus spoke to him from
Dallas, Texas.
GEORGE NEGUS: David, thanks very much for talking to us.
You're
familiar with the piece we just put to air about the incident, as it's
described, in Afghanistan a few weeks ago, that included, or resulted
in five children being killed. This has been acknowledged by both the
Australian Defence Department and the Minister as actually occurring,
but I guess the question to ask you is how can an elite group of troops
like that get something like that so horribly wrong, whatever the
details are?
DAVID KILCULLEN, COUNTER-INSURGENCY ADVISOR: Let me say I don't know
anything about the incident other than what just went to air and I
think my limited experience of this kind of thing is that the first
reports that emerge from an incident like this are often wrong, so I
think one of the things we need to do is kind of take a deep breath and
let the investigators do their job before we try to delve too much into
the specifics of what may or may not have happened on this particular
occasion, but I do think we have had enough incidents like this in
Afghanistan over the last seven years that we have a pretty good idea
of some of the factors, if you like, that give rise to this sort of
situation. So if you like we could potentially talk about that.
GEORGE NEGUS: Australians have been involved in a few of these
incidents where civilians - innocent bystanders in some cases - have
been killed in the process of skirmishes with the Taliban. Hundreds,
apparently, of civilians in Afghanistan are being killed. Is that
counter-insurgency or counter-productive?
DAVID KILCULLEN: That's a neat phrase. I think there are three basic
factors in Afghanistan that give rise to these kind of situations and
I'll talk through each of them in turn. One of them is the fact that we
just don't have enough troops on the ground at present to be in these
locations on a permanent basis. The second point is that we have
adopted a policy of fighting the bad guys rather than protecting the
population, which has led us to be moving and mobile in Afghan valleys,
which has its own problems. The final point is that we are fighting an
enemy who deliberately hides behind the civilian population and uses
them as political and physical shields.
GEORGE NEGUS: I hear what you're saying, but if what these
people have
told us, if they are legit, and it can be verified, does it make any
sense whatsoever for a bunch of Australians, or anybody else from the
forces there, to charge into a house, allegedly, and gun people down?
DAVID KILCULLEN: Let me get to my first two points because I think that
really gets to the heart of your question. When you move into a village
or a valley in Afghanistan it's extremely difficult when you are moving
to figure out who you are dealing with, and what will happen is, you'll
move into the environment and fire will come at you from a compound -
it might be RPG or small-arms fire - and the compounds usually don't
have windows or doors, they're just blank walls - these types of
incidents you have been describing always become more likely. The
better way to do it, and the way that we would always seek to do it if
we have enough troops is don't be the one moving into the valley, be
living in the valley or the village with the villagers. And in parts in
the east of Afghanistan, for example, in Kunar province, or Nangar
province, we have had a lot of success by having outposts in the
villages and valleys who are living with people, side by side. You do
end up fighting the Taliban, but what happens is it's the Taliban
moving, not you, so they're the ones moving into the environment, you
are in the compound with the villagers and you have a much better
result.
GEORGE NEGUS: There have been suggestions already after that
incident
that maybe there are questions that can be raised about the rules of
engagement, whether Australians are obeying them, there have even been
suggestions of potential war crimes being committed here in incidents
like the one we've just been referring to. Is that a serious
consideration - that maybe our blokes are out of line?
DAVID KILCULLEN: It's a very, very serious consideration. I don't know
the answer to the question though of whether we are in or out of line.
But I think generally, if you look at the pronouncements of the Afghan
Government ever since 2004, 2005, we've had a continual stream of
complaints and raising of concern by President Karzai and people close
to him that the coalition are not taking enough account of the
political damage that's caused by civilian casualties, and there has
been a lot of discussion about air power - bombers and so on inflicting
damage on the population - and I think this is a ground example of the
same kind of dynamic, where we have to ask ourselves - regardless of
whether anybody's followed the letter of the law in terms of their
rules of engagement, we have to ask ourselves if it's politically
productive or politically counter-productive to be in this kind of
situation.
GEORGE NEGUS: On a broader scale, you've described the
situation in
Afghanistan as dire, you've compared it to Vietnam, you've said it's a
crisis bordering on failure, and you've even suggested that if things
go on the way they are, with the insurgents, we could be looking at
another 9/11. That's a big call. At the same time you are saying that,
Joel Fitzgibbon, the Minister here, is saying our ambitions are too
high in Afghanistan, we're going to lower our expectations. Is he right
or are you? You're saying it's getting worse, it's a calamity, he is
saying, no, we've got to calm ourselves down.
DAVID KILCULLEN: I actually see no contradiction between those two
positions. I think one of the reasons why we have seen such a very
substantial deterioration in the security situation in Afghanistan in
the last four or five years is that we set objectives that were
unrealistically high and we provided resources that were
unrealistically low. President Obama, Richard Holbrooke and
Vice-President Biden have all made a similar series of statements in
the last few weeks, suggesting we need to do really two things. One, we
need to revisit our objectives and think about what's achievable, and
two, we need to revisit the resources we're providing and make sure we
are providing adequate resources for the new objectives. So I think the
two positions aren't in any way contradictory. What both positions are
suggesting are, it's not going well, part of the reason for that is
we're under-resourcing it dramatically, and if you're under-resourcing
something you have two options - change the objective or improve the
resources, and I think what we're trying to do here is to do both.
GEORGE NEGUS: You say we're running out of time?
DAVID KILCULLEN: Yeah, I think we have a real crunch time, a real time
factor issue this year because of the Afghan presidential elections,
which, as you probably know, were originally scheduled for May 23.
There has been some discussion about when they will happen, but they
will happen in any case in the middle of the fighting season.
Regardless of any additional troops we choose to send to Afghanistan it
will be extremely difficult to gain enough security in the environment
to make those elections go ahead effectively, so we have almost a
constitutional crisis in Afghanistan linked to a security crisis.
Blaming the Afghans is not going to help us here. Let me just clarify
why I said it was like Vietnam. I don't suggest it's a quagmire or
whatever like Vietnam. The context of that was my senate testimony and
what I said to Senator Kerry was that a lot of people are blaming the
Afghans, a lot of people are blaming President Karzai, and they're
saying all we have to do here is get a new Afghan leader, we have to
take more control of the situation and we can fix it. And what I said
was this reminds me of Vietnam in 1963, with President Diem, when
people were very unhappy with him and said, he's not doing a good job,
let's overthrow the guy and get our own man in place, and that was a
disastrous decision.
So I think we walk away from supporting the Afghans at our peril, and
blaming them is the easy out. We need to actually focus on working with
them, listening to them, and understanding what the concerns are and
working through the Afghan process. That takes a lot of time, but it's
better than the alternative, which is we own a major crisis in the
middle of the Hindu Kush.
GEORGE NEGUS: David, a final question - the easy one, actually
- is
Afghanistan the real theatre of war in the so-called war on terror? Or
should we be looking across the border? Is it really ultimately all
about Pakistan, which a lot of experts believe is the case? Barack
Obama seems to be on that line as well. Are we fighting the war in the
wrong place?
DAVID KILCULLEN: I have no doubt that Pakistan is the real problem. I
don't suggest the solution is necessarily military, but let me give you
some numbers. Pakistan has 173 million people, 100 nuclear weapons and
an army bigger than the US Army, and it has al-Qaeda headquarters
sitting right there in the middle of the two-thirds of the country that
the government doesn't control.
Afghanistan and Iraq, if you took the population of those two countries
and smashed them together they still don't add up to one-third of the
population of Pakistan. If Pakistan collapses, and what we're looking
at here is potential for state collapse and extremist takeover, that is
a problem that would dwarf any of the problems we have seen in the war
on terror to date. So it's fundamental we grip the situation in
Pakistan and try to stabilise that very, very difficult situation.
But for the very reasons that I've outlined it's not a military problem
- we're not going to invade Pakistan, we're not going to deploy lots of
troops to take over the fight. This is primarily a diplomatic and a
political problem of helping the Pakistani civilian politicians and
legitimate officials gain control of their own national security
establishment, which is essentially operating as a rogue state within a
state and outside their control.
GEORGE NEGUS: David, thanks very much for talking to us. We've
tried to
pack in a lot on a very, very complex subject. Thanks for your
time.
DAVID KILCULLEN: Great to be here.
GEORGE NEGUS: But, will his "good guys, bad guys" strategy for
turning
the worrying situation in Afghanistan around be taken up by the pollies
and the generals?