107. General David Petraeus: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the US military's role in the world

24:35I said, your policy is killing our troops. We have to pay them stipends. But again, this is serious. This is life and death for our soldiers. And that's why you saw the animation. It was earlier than October, I'm pretty sure. And I suspect it may have been the meeting in which Brever unveiled a new strategy, which had never been circulated with those of us on the actual ground. And it was going to fire all of the government state-owned industries. And I said, you know, you fired the military, you fired the bureaucrats, the government structure, and now you're going to fire the final employment.

25:10Yeah, I got it. They're inefficient. I got it. It's not free market capitalism. But, you know, can we just hold off on that until we address the issues that have resulted from these earlier two catastrophically bad decisions. My vantage point through this period was working alongside Tony Blair, who you mentioned there in relation to Lam, and I'm glad you paid tribute to him. He's a wonderful man. I wanted to get your understanding as to why what you've just described happened. So I agree with you. I felt that the military operation to bring down Saddam was unbelievably effective. And like Rory, I went to saw Bremer, who struck me as being almost in a state of panic at the scale of what he was being asked to look after.

25:50But what became clear was that decisions were being made, not necessarily by George Bush, but certainly by Rumsfeld, certainly by Rumsfeld, certainly by Cheney, and that they were being pushed down into a system which hadn't been prepared to implement those decisions. Is that a fair assessment? It is, and they did not consult those on the ground who actually had been dealing with it actually had learned a bit about how to move forward in the wake of the collapse of all of the government. So, you know, what's interesting is to ask why was there a coalition provisional authority at all instead of just right away establish a U.S.

26:26embassy? And the answer, I think, is that the Pentagon, Rumsfeld, wanted to run the war and didn't want any competition from Secretary of State Colin Powell and so convinced him to have this kind of interim authority. How does that make the military feel when you were there on the ground being expected to make sense of decisions, which you clearly are understanding are being driven by politics rather than military strategy? It was maddening. It was infuriating. It was very, very serious. And we made our views note, but we were not consulted at all, actually, not just inadequately. We were consulted on issues that we would have recognized immediately, as did the CIA station chief, that these are going to be catastrophically bad.

27:12Yes, I understand the need for a DDR policy, say for the military, but it should have been organized and structured and take care of them while you're going through this and try to provide jobs and alternatives as we ultimately did with our reconciliation program. And then the same with the Ba 'ath Party, certainly the top two levels, we're proud to, frankly, to kill Saddam's two sons when they shot back at our soldiers when we tried to attain them. And some of the other major figures that I got the former minister of defense to surrender to me and so on. All that absolutely right. But when you get to level four and tens of thousands of essentially bureaucrats, many of them, again, Western educated, spoke good English.

27:50Some of them drank. I mean, what more could you want in partners to run an Islamic country? And yet we were deprived of this. Now, in the north, I was given the special dispensation, the only one that had it, to do a reconciliation process. And we did this in mass scale, tens of thousands that we brought in and reconciled with and then tried to put to productive work once again, had it interrupted. Sadly, all of the cases that I ultimately took to Baghdad, we took a huge Chinook helicopter and flew them all down and gave them to Dr. Shalabi, who was the head of the debathification committee. And he refused to approve the actions of our reconciliation process, which was a huge setback and why Mosul then went downhill, just like all the others, just about right after I left.

28:35And then they also fired the interim governor that I had, who was really quite an effective guy. Of course, Shalami, a very Shia in Mosul, again, a Sunni majority area. You then came back as the commanding general on the ground and then commanded the search. Brief summary of the surge, and then I'd like to move on to what happened after the surge. But tell us a little bit about what works with the surge. Well, the surge that mattered most was not the surge of forces, as important as they were in enabling us to implement more rapidly the essence of the surge, which was the surge of ideas. So, it's a complete reversal of what we had been doing.

29:10We had been clearing areas and then leaving them or handing off to Iraqi forces that were increasingly unable to deal with the escalating violence of a Sunni-Shia civil war that characterized 2006 in the wake of a bombing of a Shia mosque in a Sunni area that set off a cycle of Sunni-Shia violence that just was escalating out of control. This is a 180-degree shift. We're also going to pursue reconciliation. We needed to sit down with people who had our blood on their hands. That's how you end this. Now, not the irreconcilables. We had a whole intelligence apparatus set up to determine who was irreconcilable, had to be killed or captured, ideally captured because you want to interrogate them in accordance with the Geneva a convention and learn more about the organizations you're trying to take down.

29:52And so the biggest of the big ideas is live with the people, 77 additional locations for our soldiers just in the Baghdad area alone. And they were all under enormous pressure initially, but then we drove violence down. And then the combination of that plus reconciliation, all of a sudden we're flipping entire areas where the local sheikh says, you know what, if you'll come secure us and help us, we'll help you because we don't want Al Qaeda in our area anymore. And then we do the same with the Shia militia supported by Iran. And ultimately, we drive violence down by nearly 90%. And it actually continues to go down over the subsequent three and a half years of the withdrawal.

30:31And tragically, then the prime minister within 24 hours of our final combat force is being removed. The prime minister takes highly sectarian actions. He tries to take down the vice president of Iraq, The senior Sunni figure prefers charges against him in his security detail. The minister of finance and their prominent parliamentarian from Sunni Arab Anbar province, catastrophically bad, big ideas. And it forces the Iraqi security forces to focus on these massive Sunni demonstrations. They're abusive and they take their eye off Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which is by then the Islamic state. And all of a sudden you have them reconstitute, drift into Syria, gain additional power, come back into Iraq, of course, several years later and establish the first ever Islamist extremist caliphate in northern Iraq and northeastern Syria.

31:17General, then Afghanistan. So looking back at Afghanistan now, looking at Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, looking at President Biden's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, I mean, what do you make of this? One and a half trillion dollars spent 20 years on the ground to get rid of the Taliban, and now the Taliban's running the country again. I mean, first of all, to be accurate, of course, it was the previous administration, and Trump administration that reached this, the worst diplomatic agreement in our modern history, I believe, giving the Taliban what they want, which is our withdrawal, and actually forcing the Afghan government, which is not at the table for the agreement, to release 5 ,500 Taliban detainees to get the Taliban to accept what they want us to do.

31:56Again, it just is mind-boggling. I said that at the time, we will come to regret this decision, and I certainly believe that we have and we should. And then, of course, the conduct of it, obviously, absolutely reprehensible. Now, the challenge in Afghanistan is that it took us nine long years to get the inputs right after, yet again, a brilliant campaign toppling the Taliban when they refused to hand over the Al-Qaeda elements that planned the 9-11 attacks in their sanctuary under Taliban rule in eastern Afghanistan and then conducted the initial training of the attackers there. And so, we had to take down the Taliban regime.

32:35And again, those who say, well, mission was accomplished. We should have gone home. You know, I mean, you walked across Afghanistan. You have lots of literally boots on the ground time there. Had we left at that point in time, country would have gone back into a civil war. So we had to do nation building. That wasn't optional. It wasn't a mistake. It was inescapable. You have to build security forces and institutions that can take over the tasks that we were performing in Afghanistan, but it took us far too long to get the big ideas right. That was about eight years into it, General McChrystal, the comprehensive civil military counterinsurgency campaign, which is, again, inescapable.

33:13Vice President Biden at the time wanted to do a counterterrorism campaign. I pointed out that we weren't actually fighting terrorists in large numbers. Yes, al-Qaeda would try to come back, the extremists. We were fighting insurgents. So we needed a counterinsurgency campaign, which is conducted by large conventional forces, not the special mission units that are conducting maybe at most 10 to 15 highly focused operations every night. Something you said in your PhD thesis that you mentioned, you said time and patience are not American virtues in abundant supply. And that was when you were talking there, I think about Vietnam.

33:50But is that a lesson on which nothing was learned for both Iraq and Afghanistan? No, actually, not entirely, because I was writing about a time when we had a massive commitment, well over 500 ,000 troops and a drafty army. And just on that, I guess if we're talking about the draft, we're talking about this suddenly being a very, very big deal. That brings it home and the size of that commitment. So noted many times that Vietnam literally was unsustainable for the United States. Afghanistan was actually sustainable. We have a professional force. We're rotating. We hadn't lost a soldier in 18 months.

34:32Again, the cost was not that high. So in this case, in the case of Afghanistan, yes, I get it. There's this shibboleth that we must end endless wars. But do we really have to? I mean, look at your own country's experience over the years. Look at our experiences, places like Korea and elsewhere. We had troops on the ground for 70, 80 years or so, or even Europe. Yes, they're not in combat. But in this case, our forces actually in Afghanistan were no longer on the front lines. We were conducting what's termed advise, assist, and enable operations, not fighting on the front lines, with the exception of the occasional special mission unit operation to go after Islamist extremists somewhere.

35:12Alistair General, let's take a quick break. Back in a second.

35:20Give us a sense of where you think the world is going in the next five years and what the US should be doing and what Europe should be doing about it. I think it starts with recognizing that we, now I'm talking from a US Western perspective, we, Europe, other allies in the Indo-Pacific and so forth, we face the greatest number of challenges and the most complex challenges at least since the end of the Cold War and arguably since the end of World War II. If you use the metaphorical image of the guy in the circus that has a bunch of plates spinning simultaneously, the leader of that effort has to be the United States.

35:55But we also want all of our allies and partners in there helping us keep those plates spinning too. But there's more plates in that tent. And some of them represent more complex issues than ever before. The China plate is obviously more important than all the rest put together. It's larger than all of them. The Russia plate, much more menacing. Still a North Korean nuclear plate. Iran, probably three plates. missile and drone programs, support to nefarious, malign actors in the region, Hamas, Hezbollah, Shia militia, Houthis, et cetera, and also the nuclear program that is closer to the possibility of a nuclear weapon than at any time in their history.

36:31There are cyber threats of various types out there. There are still Islamist extremist organizations that have to be kept an eye on and have pressure on them because we know if we take that off, they can reconstitute the way the Islamic State did in Iraq, and then you have to take greater action against them. There are populist challenges out there. There are manifestations of climate change. The storm of the century now seems to happen every other year. Worse fire than ever before wildfires. The desertification of the Sahel, which results in such enormous migration of humans and so on. So the list can go on and on, and there are others that I could provide.

37:10But that presents a very, very challenging situation. And I think it is absolutely in America's cold, hard national interest and that of our allies and partners to provide the leadership to work with our allies and partners to deal with these challenges, to keep them from getting worse or trying to even make them much better, and to preserve the so-called rules-based international order for all of its flaws, shortcomings, and so on against those that are trying to make the world safe for autocracy rather than the world. than for democracy. With all these plates spinning around, what you've been describing in relation to Afghanistan, in relation to Iraq, and a lot of the experience you've had, seems to me to be a kind of almost chaotic political leadership that you as military leadership have always been struggling to deal with.

38:00And I just wonder what that's like. Because in all of those situations you've described, and plenty more to come, particularly I would worry if Trump came back, there isn't necessarily the reliable political leadership that we need. And you've had experience both in Iraq and Afghanistan, be it American political leadership, Iraqi political leadership, Afghani political leadership, where the lack of clear leadership has led to the sort of chaos that you've been describing. I don't know that it's quite as clear cut as that in all cases, Alistair. I think it was uneven. I would contend that the leadership provided by George W.

38:37Bush in the wake of his firing of Secretary Rumsfeld, where he took over the conduct of the war in Washington, was extraordinary. That's my point in a way, is that he had to take Rumsfeld out in order to provide the leadership. That was the chaos. Example. In fact, I remember he called me in. I thought he was going to give me guidance. She realized it's just a photo op. And that's fine. We didn't need guidance. We knew what we needed to do and he knew it. That's why he had selected me. So after my confirmation, I go to the Oval Office and he's making conversation. He said, well, General, you know, I know our military is doubling down in Iraq.

39:10And I said, Mr. President, your military is going all in Iraq and we need the rest of government to go all in with us. And he said, I will ensure that that is the case. And he starts every week with a 7.30 to 8.30 a.m. National Security Council meeting. He's in the chair directly with the ambassador in me that is totally unprecedented. I mean, just the fact that you do something before 10 a.m. in the morning officially like that is extraordinary. But to do it at 7.30, do it every single week. And by the way, the next day at 7.30, day 30, he does a video teleconference with the prime minister of Iraq.

39:44He's starting to feel Iraq like this at a certain point in time. He was a really extraordinary influence. That kind of leadership was absolutely invaluable and hugely impressive. But it's true, there were two different George W. Bushes on the Iraq war. There was one who decided to invade and largely subcontracted the conduct of the war to his Secretary of Defense, and then the one who took it over, replaced the commander, ambassador, Secretary of Defense, and others, and drove that campaign from Washington as we were trying to drive the campaign in Iraq. Different, obviously, with his successor, nowhere near as committed on Afghanistan, again, stunned us by announcing the drawdown date in the same speech in which he announced the buildup.

40:29We were always doing exit seeking, if you will, it seemed, as opposed to just being committed. Again, you're in a contest of wills with an enemy. At the very least, don't tell them that you're trying to go home or you want to go home. And President Bush empowered me to refuse to tell Congress the pace of the drawdown. And I did. Showed again our commitment. General, following up with Alistair, he often talks about this, and I'd love your thoughts on this. So we often reflect, obviously, on how good China is on building infrastructure. And of course, since 2012, we've had a single leader in China.

41:02And you're describing a situation where you have an approach from George W. Bush, and then you have an approach to President Obama, and then you have an approach from President Biden, then you have President Trump, then you have an approach to President Biden, and you're going to have a new president yet again, right? How does the United States manage to maintain clear, consistent, strategic direction geopolitically when you're lurching around in this way? Oh, it's a challenge, obviously. I mean, there's no question about that. Although the system, of course, at the end of the day, until this time at least, continues to move forward.

41:34I mean, our economy is doing great. Our universities are the envy of the world. Innovativeness is propelling productivity to all new levels. AI is going to transform everything we do, and it's all right here. So, there's something very, very special here. But yes, there is a degree of noise, chaos, whatever it may be that's associated with our democracy and many others around the world. Your own country has experienced some of that, obviously, as well. At the end of the day, I think, as Churchill said, you can count on the United States to do the right thing after we try all the other things, and I still have faith that that will be the case, it does remain to be seen, and it is difficult.

42:14But I would also caution that centralizing power in the way that China has, yeah, it gives you an opportunity to have a five-year plan and a this and a that and all the rest of that. That hasn't actually turned out all that well. Their economy is really faltering. They pursue policies that have led now to a very significant demographic decline. You don't see the kind of innovation in some areas. Again, don't get me wrong. This is a formidable country with an extraordinary economy. It's become the manufacturing center of the world, et cetera, et cetera. But the policies they're pursuing in many cases are counterproductive.

42:51And you're seeing the effects of that. The EU puts the investment accord on the shelf because of wolf warrior diplomacy. Other countries pushing back the Philippines back into the Western fold, et cetera, et cetera. So, Indians beaten up on the line of actual control and killed in three different encounters that forced Prime Minister Modi, who would like to have a balanced policy in India first, from some understandable reasons from their perspective, and makes it much more difficult for him to do that. So, I think the virtues of authoritarianism And the continuity that it enables can be overemphasized unless you have the kind of incredibly capable and benevolent figures such as a Lee Kuan Yew or Sultan Kaboos in, say, Oman.

43:39And those are very, very rare. General, you mentioned our country, my country, Rory's country there. You were one of a very small number of American figures who made interesting comments in the run-up to Brexit. And you set them in the context of a risk, as you saw it, to the military situation at the time of the war on terror. What was your take on that? And why did you think it was important to say something? I actually do not do domestic politics in the United States. I don't even register to vote, much less support candidates of either party. And I engage with candidates of either party as a result because I'm not, again, political.

44:15But when it comes to international and international security issues, I think it's an area in which I have a degree of expertise and I'm asked about it and I feel that I should answer questions. And I was asked what I thought the prospects were for the UK if Brexit was approved. And I assessed that I thought it would be damaging for the economy. It would be damaging for Britain's influence, obviously, within Europe. I mean, the UK used to be a hugely important player within the EU. In fact, it balanced some of the other major actors that were trying to go in different directions. A very constructive role.

44:51You know, it would still keep its place in the world because of the UN Security Council seat and the tradition, the histories, and all the rest of that and the expertise. But that would be diminished as well. But it really was about the effect in a broadly macroeconomic way that you could just, you know, as the old saying goes, a blind man on a dark night can see that this is, in this case, was not going to turn out well. and tragically, sadly, that assessment has borne out and it's provided that's the source of a number of the challenges that your party has dealt with, Rory, and not particularly well, in part just because they're so difficult as a result of this.

45:35It's handicapped the UK in a way that would not have been the case had they stayed within the EU with its privileges intact, of course, still controlling its own currency and the degree of independence that many of the other countries didn't enjoy and perhaps could have gotten a little bit more of that. Just moving on from Brexit for a second, you could have become Secretary of State. In fact, possibly you may still one day become Secretary of State, but what would you have done over the last four to six years which would have been different in relation to India, China, Russia, Ukraine? Yeah, I met with President-elect Trump and it was actually a very good meeting, He had quite constructive.

46:12He had a list of questions. He read down them. I had questions for him. I said, you get two, I get one. And I was called that night and told I was going to be announced the next day, actually. And I said, no, no, no, hang on here. I need two more sessions. And these are the subjects I need, terms of references and so forth. This is before it was obvious how nonstandard, if you will, that administration was going to be. And that night, the president-elect happened to have dinner with Rex Tillerson, decided on the spur of the moment, much better to get the CEO of the largest corporation in the world than, you know, an old soldier term spymaster in the investment world.

46:48And so that was it. So, you know, what would I have done different? Actually, China, I think, by and large, has evolved in a reasonably good way. The big idea for China is it has to be a comprehensive integrated whole of governments with an S on the end, policy for China, the bedrock of which is to ensure that the elements of deterrence military deterrence are rock solid and there's a lot of initiatives for that to be tough on china when that is necessary and this what is severe competition the description of our national security advisor etc there's one component missing though and it was a huge missed opportunity by the previous administration which controlled not just the white house but the both houses of congress and had fast track authority and that would have been to do the trans-pacific partnership.

47:31But populist forces scuttled that. You no longer have the fast track authority. You don't have control of all of government with one party. And that's a glaring absence in a comprehensive integrated system. With respect to some of the others, I would not have left Afghanistan. And by the way, I think the withdrawal from Afghanistan was one element. And the way it went was one element that led Putin to think that he could get away with Ukraine much more than was the case. I think the administration in the U.S. very impressively, together with the administration in the U.K. at the time, very impressively responded to that, albeit over time, there have been a number of decisions that have been delayed far too long and have had consequences on the battlefield.

48:13The delay on the M1 tank decision, which led to delay in the German Leopard decision, delay on F-16s, the Army Tactical Missile System, still restrictions on the use of those on Russian soil, the multiple launch rocket, a lot of these just took far too long. They were inevitable and yet still delayed. Otherwise, I think, again, by and large, the current administration and trying to shore up alliances, rejoining the World Health Organization, the Climate Accord, all of this generally, I think, in foreign and defense policy terms, generally fairly sound. Would you consider being Secretary of State for a second term President Trump?

48:52I think not. First of all, I don't think I would be even considered at this point in time. The qualities this time will not just be expertise and experience. I think there will be a loyalty component that I would certainly not satisfy. Again, and frankly, on the other side of the administration, I was pretty forthright at various times, including with Vice President Biden in the National Security Council in the Situation Room. And I think, again, that would ensure that I was not part of the consideration. So, look, I think, you know, I said after President Obama called me into the Oval Office when I was a four-star and sat me down and without any preamble said, I'm asking you as your President and Commander-in-Chief to take command of our forces in Afghanistan, and I hadn't realized that my predecessor had resigned at that time and that had been accepted.

49:48I said that the answer to that kind of question always has to be yes. But I'm in a different position. It's a different time. It's a different context. The actors are different. And I just don't think it's a realistic possibility, frankly. But I think you would have to consider it. But I don't know that the answer would necessarily be yes. Looking back, do you think you dodged a bullet when he went for Tillerson ahead of you? So I've been a partner at KKR now for a decade or so. I've been with KKR for 11 years. It's been an extraordinary period, very, very intellectually stimulating. And again, really quite something to be with a company that goes from 83 billion under management to over 600 billion.

50:27So I'm extraordinarily fortunate to be doing what I'm doing and to have been able to continue to do what I have done, noting that not many of those in that particular administration had particularly happy endings. So that's a yes. General, this is a show which we brand as leading and you have led the US military. You've led the Central Intelligence Agency with the director of the CIA, and you're now in a leading role in business. So can you give us a very kind of crisp description of what the difference is between leading an army, leading an intelligence agency and leading a business? Well, what's interesting is that leadership at the very top requires the performance of four tasks.

51:10And success generally is a result of superb strategic leadership. The first task of which is to get the big ideas right, to get the strategy right, to understand the context. In conflict, it's your forces, the enemy, the area of responsibility, the human terrain, the physical terrain, the neighborhood, all of these dynamics. And that is actually true in the private sector as well. It's true in the nonprofit. It's true in other government organizations. It's that the context is different. You have to understand the differences. You know, one of those is you have almost absolute authority. If all else fails, you can give people an order and they generally will follow it in uniform.

51:50That's not necessarily the case in some of these other endeavors, but it's still about getting the big ideas right, which includes an understanding of the context in which you are actually leading. Then it's, by the way, communicating the big ideas effectively through the breadth and depth of the organization and all stakeholders, anyone who has a stake in the outcome of the endeavor. It's overseeing the implementation of the big ideas, the energy, the example, the inspiration, hiring the Rory Stewards of the world and allowing those not measuring up to move on to something else, the metrics they use, the organizational architecture you design, and then the battle rhythm, how you spend your time is a critical element of this because there's a limited amount of that and you have to really allocate that portion that.

52:32And then there's a fourth task, which is to determine how you need to refine the big ideas as the context changes so that you do it again and again and again. And that is common. And I'd lay that out in the book in conflict with Andrew Roberts, this intellectual construct for strategic leadership. And as we look at these different wars since 1945, the side that typically prevailed is the one that had the best strategic leadership. And you'd think, of course, you'd get the big ideas right after all the years of staff college and war college and all the other stuff. 13 years in Vietnam before we got the big ideas right.

53:06Iraq, we had them right, then we got them wrong. We We started again, right again, then the situation changed. It took us too long. Then we did the surge and the results prove it. Violence down by nearly 90%. And then again, undermined by some actions of our host nation partner there. So again, I think it doesn't matter what the organization is, what type, if you understand the context in your authorities, responsibilities, and how it all functions, and that's true a founder of a startup, or to 200 ,000 men and women in uniform with hundreds of thousands of host nation partners, as in the surge in Iraq.

53:46Your time at the CIA, General, came to a premature end because of personal scandal. And I just wondered how you look back on that period. I guess particularly in light of the fact that we might have a president elected, reelected, who has done far worse than you ever did on all sorts of fronts. But what was that like for you? Yeah, no, it's very difficult. And look, I felt that I'd exercised bad judgment and that you shouldn't have a CI director who exercised bad judgment, which is why I took responsibility, acknowledged it, sought to make amends, resigned. And then, you know, over a period of time, you get back on your feet, dust yourself off, and pick up the rucksack and start putting one foot in front of the other again.

54:32The truth is, look, I dealt with all kinds of setbacks and mistakes and shortcomings as a commander of forces. You're responsible for everything that everyone in that force does or fails to do. And so, again, intellectually, I knew that what I needed to do is understand what took place, figure that out. Again, take appropriate action, make amends, and then try to learn from it and then move on. And that's true, I think, of any situation where there is a mistake in your organization for which you're responsible or if you are the source of the mistake, as in that case. That's why I think we in Britain and other parts of the world find it so difficult to compute the fact that America is thinking about putting Donald Trump back in power.

55:19The head of the FBI was being quizzed at a congressional inquiry committee the other day, and he was asked a direct question. if somebody applied for a job in the FBI and they had 34 convictions, would you employ them? And he just said straightforwardly, no, they wouldn't get past the checks. So you, as you say, you took responsibility and showed leadership in that way. And yet something has gone wrong, it seems to me, in the moral compass of the United States of America, that people are even thinking that Donald Trump can come back. Look, turbulent times, different times, challenging times, an era of populism to some degree, a lot of grievance out there that can be played on expertly by those that can do that.

56:02Not the only place where we've seen that kind of activity. But yeah, I mean, this is not the political party that was even as recently as, say, the George W. Bush era, much less the Ronald Reagan era. I mean, it has evolved very considerably in terms of positions, actual policy positions as well. But again, all part of life's great adventure. General, can I ask you, what are we not focusing on in the world? So, we spend a lot of time obviously talking about China, Iran, North Korea, Russia. What would you think of as a couple of things that might happen over the next 5, 10 years that people are talking about less and that worry you?

56:40Well, there's a number of dynamics and developments in Africa that I think could be very important, could have ramifications for far more than just the country in which they're located or even the continent. Certainly like to see greater attention to some of the situations there that could escalate further in particular. I mean, I'd like to see them resolved within the boundaries of the country where they're taking place. And in a number of cases, what you need to do is, again, keep an eye and pressure on a particular challenge, noting that if you don't do that, it can metastasize and then you have to require much, much more.

57:15And, you know, again, the Islamic State is very instructive in that regard. I think it's the most instructive. So the challenges there, I think there are issues in some other parts of the world that, again, we don't pay a great deal of attention to and where modest amounts of assistance, involvement, and so forth might keep a situation from getting worse. In some cases, might even be able to resolve it. So those, I think, would be the ones. Beyond that, I think we really have attention to the major issues out there, but whether it's enough attention or the right attention, I think, is the other question and how to keep it all in balance.

57:56You know, we have repeatedly tried to leave the Middle East, the United States, for example. You know, we've had the pivot to Asia, the rebalance. And there are a couple of central command truths that are relevant here. One is, of course, always know who your enemies are and who your friends are and don't confuse them. And Iran is our enemy. Number two is that what happens in the Middle East doesn't stay there. Las Vegas rules do not apply. Rather, that tends to spew violence, extremism, and instability in a tsunami of refugees way beyond Middle Eastern countries. And the third is that for the US to try to leave the Middle East is like Michael Corleone trying to leave the mafia.

58:33You just keep getting sucked back in. So why don't you just recognize it and have an efficient, modest force so that you're not doing these backs and forests that we seem to be involved in. General, last question for me, because you've been very patient with time. Give us a sense of which of the roles that you've done you enjoyed the most. Do you enjoy most commanding at a battalion level, running the CIA, running a big army? What you're doing now really is your most exciting, fulfilling role. Where were you happiest? I actually, I have enjoyed and been challenged and stimulated and been in a way gratified, if you will, by almost all of these.

59:13And it's really hard to say that, you know, you enjoy this one more than, I mean, being the director of the CIA is the greatest job in government in the world. It's incredible. Commanding two wars is unprecedented, really, in modern time. And I'm not sure it may be ever. But at the end of the day, I think the bigger question is which was the one that was the most important, and that has to be the surge in Iraq. Iraq was in an escalating spiral of Sunni-Shia violence. It was in a civil war. And the great work of the extraordinary men and women of our coalition and of our Iraqi counterparts managed to pull that country out of a civil war, drive violence down by an enormous amount, and give Iraq, the land of the two rivers, an entire new opportunity, which it did really quite well with for the first three and a half years after the end of the surge until the unfortunate decisions by the Iraqi prime minister right after our final combat forces left.

1:00:13But that one was, it was also arguably the most grinding experience of my life. It was as if you're in a boxing ring and you're just getting hit all over the place and all throughout a day. And you're just notes are slid in front of you multiple times. I said, we just lost four soldiers here. The bridge was just blown up by the way the bridge built by the British a century earlier between East and West Baghdad. And again, just every day, there are enormous challenges, setbacks, and mistakes, even as you are making progress, which ultimately turned out to be the case. But that one was really, really important, not just for Iraq, but really for the entire region.

1:00:55And so when asked what was the most significant, it clearly has to be a command of the multinational force in Iraq, and what an extraordinary privilege that was. Well, General Petraeus, thank you for so much of your time. You've come through it all pretty unscathed. I mean, looking at you now, you look young, you look smart. I just hope if the phone call does come from Trump second time around, just say no. Thank you for your wise counsel, Alistair, and great to be with you again. Rory, I'm a huge admirer of both of you, and it's a privilege to be with you on your show. Thank you very much. Thank you again.

1:01:27Thank you, General. Bye-bye.

1:01:31What do you think of my friend General Petraeus? Well, I think he's a very, very impressive guy. He's quite a hard guy to interview because a politician should study his speaking style because what he does is just when you think there's the end of that point coming, he just sort of dips to the end of the sentence. Then he starts the new one almost before he's finished the last one. A lot of it is really, really interesting. And so you kind of feel a bit of a hood when, as you both, we both did from time to time, say, General, can't we just cut in here? But no, listen, he's a very impressive guy.

1:02:07I think his life, if you look at his life experience, massive military career, and he said it was the greatest job in the world. And it was cut short, as we discussed, because he basically had an extramarital affair. And then I was also punished because he gave the woman with whom he had the affair, who was his biographer, giving her kind of classified documents and stuff like that. The reason I mentioned Trump is, of course, Trump has done both of those. He's had way more affairs and he's had issues with the use of classified documents. But then, of course, this sort of third career, what I got the sense of, you know him better than I do.

1:02:43What I got the sense of is somebody who was just permanently, his mind permanently rooted in all this really big stuff happening around the world. And I did think it was interesting that he, I wasn't sort of getting at America so much as every situation he was in. And I saw this, and you'll have seen this as well, in fact, you experienced this, this kind of constant conflict between political leadership and military leadership, and how difficult it is when politics on a different timescale to a military that's much more focused on the long term. And it's the million dollar thing. I think it'll also for younger listeners be interesting to see what they make of the depth on Iraq and Afghanistan.

1:03:21I mean, obviously, that was the kind of center of my life for nearly 20 years. So General Petraeus and I have been kind of round the houses back and forth on the intricacies of counterinsurgencies and the surge and what cars I was up to and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it must feel now to younger people in 2024, like a completely alien world, as though we're kind of talking about the Vietnam War or something. So these things, which were so raw, but to step back, I suppose, for a second. I mean, I disagree with a lot of what he says. I think his analysis of Afghanistan was wrong. Just briefly, where do you think he's wrong?

1:04:00Well, I think basically in the end, the military partly necessarily is so can do, so optimistic that they always believe that they've got a new plan with a new strategy that's going to deliver a decisive year and they're going to sort this out. And structurally, the problems in Afghanistan were not going to be sorted out. Fundamentally, the idea of putting 150 ,000 troops on the ground, spending$150 billion a year was not going to create an effective Afghan government. it wasn't going to eliminate the Taliban, it wasn't going to eliminate corruption. And these are the things that in the end took the situation down.

1:04:36I think that actually Afghanistan was better off with a lighter footprint, actually better off with the situation it had in the last seven years from 2014 onwards, when there were far fewer American troops on the ground, when we were doing far less - You do share his view that the withdrawal was both wrong in principle and wrong in practice. Yeah, I agree violently with him there. But where we disagree very strongly is I think that the surge and the attempts to try to do these big counterinsurgency campaigns actually created far more enemies than they solved. My sense is, you know, I was on the ground in Afghanistan in 2001, 234.

1:05:11And my sense is the Taliban had largely vanished. And that the worst thing we could do was put huge numbers of troops on the ground, because actually that was simply going to create more support for the Taliban. But I also, I mean, you know, he's been very generous to me throughout my life. He's been with all these disagreements and with all the competitiveness. He was unbelievably good about getting in critics like me again and again to sit down with his staff, have dinner with us, to listen to us, put up with us attacking him in the media. And I think that's something that maybe America's quite good at.

1:05:43I mean, I think in Britain often our civil service, our military, our government can be quite insulated, don't really want outside views, don't really want outside criticism. He was very good at always being open to that. But he's somebody who's absolutely clear and confident in the rightness of his own view. And that's basically quite hard to sort of push back sometimes because it's always like he gives these opinions as fact. But he's an impressive guy, he's an impressive performer. It was interesting, you were obviously seeing Paul Bremer around the same time as I was. He did strike me as being a very decent man, but who was given an utterly impossible task and was surrounded by political chaos, both American chaos and Iraqi chaos.

1:06:30Yes. Yes. It was a completely impossible job. So Bremer was my boss. So he was running the CPA and I was initially his representative and then his deputy representative in Misan in a province in the South. And it was extraordinary. I mean, And we were dealing with a situation in which the army had disappeared, the police force had disappeared, all the electricity had gone, there was no oil at the pumps, the schools had been stripped, the clinics had been stripped, there was civil war breaking out in the streets. And we were plodding around with bags full of cash, trying to sort this out, with the military enraged with us, thinking these civilians have got no idea what they're doing.

1:07:08The Iraqis obviously thinking, what on earth are this bunch of foreigners doing running our country? And in the center of this, I was doing this at a mini level in my province, but the center of this was Bremer. I don't believe that the military would have got it right if they'd been put in charge. I still believe passionately in civilian control of the military. I think the military are very, very good at fighting wars, but I think it's very dangerous to think that with all their confidence, and of course, that's the amazing thing. I mean, the money. When I used to go to briefings with Petraeus, it was extraordinary.

1:07:38I mean, he's like a king. He walked around with, I've never seen anything, much more than a prime minister. There'd be sort of 40 people walking behind him with little notebooks. And machine guns. Yeah, and when he sits down, this incredibly slick PowerPoint presentation, and he's been up since five in the morning running around the base, and we all have to run around the base with him if we want to chat to him. And then by the time we get in, everybody else has been up all night getting the PowerPoint presentations together. And as you say, everything is incredibly confident, slick. They have the answer to absolutely everything.

1:08:07But the reality is that the knowledge is, of course, much thinner than any of us acknowledge. I mean, it would be like, I don't know, you or I as Iraqis being deployed to try to, I don't know, administer Glasgow or something without speaking a word of English, without really having ever watched a British television program, without knowing what Rangers and Celtic were. And we're producing these very confident PowerPoint presentations. You know, we've been there. You know, I really understand Glasgow. I've been here for six months and I can do a PowerPoint presentation. But he was also, I really enjoyed his frankness about Donald Rumsfeld.

1:08:45Now, Donald Rumsfeld is not here to answer back because he is RIP. But that's what I felt. And you and I talked about this when we did that two-hour exchange when you were sort of grilling me about Iraq, I felt that very, very strongly that we kind of assumed that the Americans had a sort of grown up thing going on. And in fact, what was happening there was very much part of this sort of American political struggle going on. You know, I enjoyed his brutal frankness about that. He clearly felt that they were not well treated by him. But he was speaking very, very fondly still of George W. you. And finally, of course, the only person possibly more competitive than you.

1:09:28I thought that was also a record on leading. No, I think he's more competitive. Listen, he's a guy, you know, we talked about him being shot in 1991. He sort of downplayed it. And because he was so hard to interrupt, I wasn't going to correct his own narrative. Three days after having surgery for this gunshot wound in the chest, he apparently ripped out all the tubes and did 50 press-ups in front of the nurses and basically said, let me out of here. I would not do that. But maladaptive competitiveness is where you, for example, if you're in a tiny argument about nothing with somebody that you just happen to bump into on the train and you have to win that argument.

1:10:11I'm a little bit like that, but I'm not as bad as I was. I think he is maladaptively competitive. Roy Keane, the Irish footballer, is famously maladaptively competitive. Anyway, Alison, thank you for that. And it was a pleasure to do it with you. Well done for getting him on. I thoroughly enjoyed it. You know, I feel a little bit of sympathy for the editors, but they will get there. Thank you. Thank you, Alison. Bye-bye.