Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage recently sat down with Michael Miklaucic of the CCO to discuss the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, whole of government approaches to complex operations, national security challenges facing the United States and his key lessons learned from his involvement in complex operations throughout his career.
MM: What, if anything, surprised you taking on the challenges of Afghanistan and Iraq?
RA: Well, they’re completely different places. I found that Afghanistan was an absolutely necessary war; they struck us, and we had to strike back. What surprised me was how quickly we morphed from a fight against al Qaeda—that is, from foreigners (Uzbeks, Pakistanis, Saudis, even Uighers)—to the Taliban after coexisting with the Taliban for so long. The Taliban wasn’t really fighting us too much; they weren’t helping us, but they weren’t fighting us, either—so again how quickly that morphed was the big surprise.
The second surprise was frankly how successful we were for the first 4 years—almost 5 years—at keeping the ISI (Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence) relatively out of it. They were so shocked with the speed at which we invaded Afghanistan that I think the ISI felt it was only a matter of time till we prevailed. But as we broadened our scope to the Taliban, we both brought out some antipathies that Pashtuns have against foreigners, and we also made it more difficult to be able to accomplish our “objective.” So how do you declare victory when you completely change the target?
