TONIGHT
E-mail a friendCol. Paul Hughes
original airdate August 10, 2007
(Ret.) Army Col. Paul Hughes is a senior program officer at the U.S. Institute of Peace. While on active duty, he was responsible for U.S. efforts to reorganize the Iraqi Army and is one of the subjects of the documentary, No End in Sight. Before serving in Iraq, he was a senior military fellow at the National Defense University's Institute for National Strategic Studies. He holds two Master of Military Arts & Sciences degrees and was a visiting professor at the Elliot School of International Affairs.
Col. Paul Hughes
Tavis: In 2003, Col. Paul Hughes served as Director of the Strategic Policy Office in the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. In that capacity, he was charged with leading efforts to rebuild the Iraqi Army. He is one of the principal critics of United States efforts in Iraq in the new documentary, "No End in Sight." Here's a look.
[Film Clip]
Tavis: Col. Hughes is now retired from the Army and is a senior official at the U.S. Institute of Peace. He joins us tonight from Washington. Col. Hughes, nice to have you on the program, sir.
Col. Paul Hughes: My pleasure.
Tavis: Let me start with the obvious question, at least for me, given the title of this documentary, "No End in Sight." Is that still accurate? Still apropos?
Hughes: I think that it is apropos not just for the issues of how long the troops stay in Iraq, but more broadly about what this has done to America in terms of its credibility around the world and its ability to react or shape its foreign policy. We have lost a great deal of credibility which has resulted in other nations engaging in activities now that they wouldn't have done had we not become bogged down in Iraq.
Tavis: To that latter point, as a follow-up, why is there at this point no end in sight? Why?
Hughes: Well, the nature of an insurgency is broad and it tends to take a lot of time to sort the thing out. When you're dealing with the insurgent and a host nation government, there are a lot of different variables that get into the mix that will delay a quick solution. We as Americans favor quick solutions. We don't like protracted wars. But most insurgencies, as history has shown, will take between nine to thirteen years to end.
Tavis: Take me back to 2003. Tell me what you were doing in Iraq and how you got there.
Hughes: Well, actually in 2002 was when I began all of this at my job at the Institute for National Strategic Studies. I was tasked to put together a conference on post-Saddam Iraq and what that would mean in terms of humanitarian crises, governance and security. We put that project together.
I wrote a forty-one page report. I sent it up to the Deputy Secretary's office and then basically continued my other work. Then in January of 2003, lo and behold, the president stands up this Office of Post-War Planning and I was detailed to the office. I brought along my paper and gave it to Jay Garner. He looked at that and said, "This will be our model for what we've got to do."
But at the Pentagon, we wound up working in old offices with no equipment, no desks, no computers and daily we had new people joining our team and we really didn't know what to do with them or where we were going to put them. They arrived with little warning. In the case of the team from the Department of State, they arrived and they stayed for four days before they were fired and sent back to the Department of State.
Tavis: I want to go back to what you said a moment ago because I'm curious. We kind of slid right past it and I know you went right past it because it's what you do for a living. But I'm certainly inquisitive and curious about this.
How does one sit down at a computer and go about writing a forty-one page paper post-Saddam? I mean, what do you look at? How do you pull that together? Obviously, you're creating something out of the ether here. How do you create something that is realistic about a post-Saddam Iraq?
Hughes: Actually, what we had, Tavis, was a two-day conference of experts from across the nation that included academics intellectuals, security experts, representatives from the United Nations and from the military. We split them into three working groups; one that focused on the political issues, one that focused on the humanitarian issues and one that focused on the military and security issues.
Over the course of two days, these three groups met separately in intense long sessions to talk about certain aspects that they came up with about their particular topic. Then the last half of the conference, we all came back together, they provided me their notes and then that's what I used as the basis for writing this report.
The report gave a lot of dos and don'ts. It was not a plan in the sense that it assigned responsibility to certain individuals or entities to do certain acts or that it prioritized work like other plans would do, the kind of plan that you would think of. Rather, this was a lot of "Here are the some things you ought to do," "Here are some things you shouldn't do" and "Here are some things you've got to be very cautions about." That's what we provided to the Pentagon.
The organization I was with, the Institute for National Security Studies, was a think tank for both the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, so this was typically the kind of thing that we would do.
Tavis: So you end up, fast-forwarding here again, being essentially a liaison between United States reconstruction efforts and the Iraqi military. In that capacity, tell me what you did.
Hughes: Well, that was an interesting event. I was in the Republican Palace in Baghdad handling some daily issues when a battalion commander from the 101st Airborne comes in and goes, "Colonel, I need to talk to somebody. I've got a bunch of Iraqi generals and colonels that want to meet with somebody from ORHA," the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.
At that point in time, we had nobody from the Pentagon in Baghdad with us serving as the liaison to what had been the Iraqi military, so it fell on me to go meet with these fellows. So I went out into certain parts of Baghdad to meet with these generals and colonels and, over the course of several meetings, hammered out a procedure whereby they were going to provide me a great deal of information about soldiers and units and equipment and ammo depots and things of that nature and, in return, we would provide them a twenty dollar payment.
Tavis: One of the things that comes through very clearly, speaking of your role in Iraq, is that the role of Mr. Bremer, L. Paul Bremer, who at the time was in charge over there, for whatever that means, one of the things that's clear in watching the documentary is that he got a number of things wrong, some key things he got wrong. But I'm curious in hindsight how it is that we now see that Bremer miscalculated on so many different fronts. At least, that's the take one gets from the documentary.
Hughes: Well, certainly that's what you get from the documentary. I can only speak to the one that revolved around the disbanding of the Iraqi military. In our time in Washington, D.C. with Jay Garner before we departed for the theater, we had talked about what we would do with the Iraqi military. We understood that they were large. We understood that these men knew how to use weapons. We understood that there were a lot of weapons and ammo dumps across the country.
So the intent for us was to get in there, make contact with the Ministry of Defense and then organized a process where we could pay these men twenty dollars each. That was the equivalent of about six months of pay so that they could take care of their families and hopefully stay off the streets long enough for us to sort out what the military was going to be doing.
We had two processes that we were putting into play. One was to reform these units as work battalions to help clean up rubble and things of that nature. The second one was to establish what we called DDR, which is Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration. It's a process by which you take former combatants and reintegrate them into society so that they become productive members of the economy.
This all had been briefed to the president. The president approved it before we left Washington. But then when we got out there and when Bremer showed up, suddenly there was this snap decision made by these four men in the Pentagon, as the movie portrays, and you know the history. The Iraqi Army was disbanded.
Tavis: And the result of that that you obviously are chagrined by, for lack of a better word, is what essentially?
Hughes: Well, five days after the decision was announced, we took our first attack on the highway between what most people call the Green Zone and Baghdad International Airport. Two soldiers were killed and two Humvees were destroyed. It was the night before Jay Garner was to depart Iraq forever. This came about, without a doubt, as a result of the disbanding of the Iraqi military.
Tavis: I'm fast-forwarding again in the time I have left here right quick. You went on to do some work with the Iraq study group and I'm curious now, given the work you have done all the way through this process and where we are now.
There has to be an end in sight at some point. There's got to be a way out of this. I don't propose to know it and I don't know who does. Obviously, the White House doesn't. But ultimately, what is going to happen? What should happen here? How do we get out of here or does this thing go on ad infinitum?
Hughes: Well, Tavis, you don't fight a war just to fight a war. You have to do it in pursuit of your national interests. What I'm recommending to people right now is that you've got to take a step back and put Iraq in perspective with the rest of what people refer to as this global war on terrorism, which I'm not very comfortable with as a term. But Iraq is one campaign in a much larger war. We've got to understand how this fits together.
Additionally, we have to take a look at what are the United States interests in the Persian Gulf, identify those interests and do what's necessary then to protect and to serve those interests. You know, things like stabilizing the region, stopping Iran from becoming a dominant power, and maintaining the access for the world market, the world economy, to the oil that's out there.
But these require the United States to bring a lot more things to bear than just the military. You've got to bring in your diplomacy. You've got to bring in your public information. You've got to bring in your economic power to make all this come together. This administration, though, has only focused on using its military might to the exclusion of everything else.
Tavis: Col. Paul Hughes can be seen in really the emotional part of this new documentary, "No End in Sight." Col. Hughes, nice to have you on the program. All the best to you.
Hughes: My pleasure. Thank you.
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