(upbeat music) - Welcome to "At Issue," I'm H Wayne Wilson.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Afghanistan has made the news for quite a few weeks now.

In fact, it's made the news for 20 years.

The Middle East, Iraq, and Syria, and the U.S. involvement in the Middle East has been on American's minds.

And it's time for us to hear directly from people who are involved with the Middle East.

Let me introduce to you two former ambassadors who served there for years and years.

First, let me introduce to you Ambassador Robert Ford.

Ambassador Ford spent 31 years in the State Department and the Peace Corps in Morocco.

And then you were the ambassador to Algeria, 2006 to 2008, deputy U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, 2008 to '10.

And you were the last ambassador to Syria, at least so far the last ambassador, 2011 to 2014.

- Yes.

- Thank you for being with us.

- My pleasure, nice to be in Peoria.

- And let me welcome to the program Ambassador Ronald Neumann.

Ambassador Neumann was an infantry officer in Vietnam.

Thank you for your service.

- A long time ago.

- And thank you to both of you for your service in the State Department.

You served in Iran and the United Arab Emirates.

You were ambassador to Algeria, common to Ambassador Ford.

- I think we were there together.

- And then ambassador to Bahrain, 2001 to 2004.

You were a part of the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2004, and then ambassador to Afghanistan, 2005 to 2007.

And with that, let me start.

Instead of talking about the Middle East to start with, and we obviously do wanna spend some time on that, but I'd like to hear from both of you about the confirmation process, because you both, and I know that you're nominated and then there can be a delay before you are assigned and that can lead to a vacuum in that particular country.

What is the situation, what's the difficulty with the confirmation process right now for all ambassadors?

- I would just say a couple of things, and I think Ron who's living in Washington, I don't any longer, will have better insights.

To me, the issue has become too politicized, and it's also become encumbered by senators speaking, frankly, who have agendas that often have very little to do with the State Department or maybe nothing to do with the individual who's going to go off to be an ambassador, say in a Middle East country, or is going to be a team leader at the State Department building in Washington.

And we have one American senator who's put a hold, one particular senator on all confirmations.

And we had a second American senator suggest just a couple of days ago that he would do the same thing.

You can't run a diplomatic machine if you don't have your top people in place and if you don't have your team leaders in place.

- And we're talking about individuals who are State Department employees.

We're not talking about the glorified ambassador- - It's a mix of you have some of the non-career appointees, you have some non-career appointees to very senior positions in the administration, like running the Crisis Response Bureau.

You only yesterday got confirmed the new assistant secretary for South Asia.

That includes Afghanistan, India, Bangladesh.

That's been vacant.

Well, that's been vacant for about three years, actually.

So, you pay a price when you have none of your top leadership in place.

- So how does that impact diplomacy?

- Badly.

- Very badly.

- It means you have a lot of people who, first of all, don't have the full authority of the position.

That impedes their effectiveness when dealing with the host government if you're abroad.

It also may will impede the level at which they get seen regularly.

Just the difficulty of doing day-to-day work is a problem.

And it affects in reverse I think the policy process, because you don't have in place the people the president thinks he needs, or she needs someday, to give them advice in the conduct of policy.

- Can a designated ambassador, someone who has been recommended, still serve in some sort of capacity waiting for the Senate?

- No, no.

Oh, you can serve some other capacity, No, there's a federal law that tries to uphold the constitutional authority of the Senate that limits the length of time anybody can be acting in an office.

Now, the Trump administration basically ignored that and so they created new titles.

You found that you had somebody called the senior bureau official in a place where we were supposed to have assistant secretaries.

But when they sent somebody as an acting assistant secretary, they timed out under the law.

So then they'd give them another title and keep them in place.

So basically, they just blew off the Constitution.

- And you said very badly.

- Yes.

The reason I say that is, Ron was just now talking about the confirmation of our assistant secretary for South Asian Affairs.

That includes India, that includes Afghanistan, Pakistan.

What is an assistant secretary?

An assistant secretary is an assistant to the secretary, but it's actually the team leader for all the people that are working on Afghanistan or India or Pakistan in the Washington State Department headquarters.

This is the team leader.

And a baseball team doesn't do very well without its captain.

And likewise in the State Department, if you don't have your team leader in place, if you have a more junior person, you're missing out on both experience, but you're also missing out on access to both foreign officials, because a lot of this is protocol and you have to be at the same level as the foreign officials you are dealing with.

Otherwise, you see a lower ranking official.

It also means you don't have access to the president and to the secretary of state.

So, the way Washington works and the way diplomacy works is rank matters.

- Understood, and if you don't have rank- - You wouldn't wanna go fight a big war in a place where you're gonna send 150,000 American soldiers and just send colonels.

And that's essentially what the Senate is doing to the State Department.

- I wanna turn to Afghanistan, but before I do that, I wanna say thank you to Angela Weck and to the Peoria Area World Affairs Council.

They are celebrating their 50th anniversary, the two ambassadors here to speak at their 50th anniversary celebration.

This program was taped one week before its airing, so understand that they are actually here prior to the celebration, but thank you both for coming in for PAWAC.

And Afghanistan, not only were you ambassador there, but every year subsequent to leaving the ambassador's post, you went back to Afghanistan.

So, you're current in the process.

- I was there six weeks before Kabul fell.

- Did you feel safe?

- Well, with an armored car and a security detail provided by the governments, with a very secure hotel, and on the basis of not staying any place too long, yes.

- That doesn't sound encouraging to me, but that's your definition of safe.

- Well, they were unlikely to pick my car for one of their little plastic bombs, and I wasn't around long enough for anybody to plan an assassination.

- The reason I mentioned that you've been back often is that you have a handle on the transition of the government into Afghan hands, I shouldn't say that, without American troop support.

What went wrong?

- [Ronald] Oh, Lord, you know what?

- [H Wayne] And we'll just sit here for the next 20 minutes.

- Well, I think one of the problems right now is that we're trying to reduce 20 years of war, not you, but to the commentary to a few bumper sticker learning phrases.

And I think that's going to distort what we can learn and should learn out of this.

For instance, you will hear people say, "We tried to build a democracy."

Well, nobody went to build a democracy.

Starting with the first Bush administration, Bush 43 that is, what you had is a war.

And then you think, how do you get out of this thing?

How can you take your hands off this and let it go, but have something halfway stable?

Well, that sort of means you gotta put some authority in place.

That's the problem we got ourselves into Iraq as well Robert can talk about.

And so you had a whole variety of efforts.

I think you could easily descend into detail, but let me just say a couple of big things.

One is we lacked strategic patience as a country.

We have a great deal of trouble coming to a long range policy and saying, "This is gonna take 10 or 20 years to do," and then committing to it.

We do pieces of it, then we commit to the next year and the next year.

In Afghanistan, by my count in four administrations, we had 10 different policies.

We had an average of every two years, we had a policy change.

We had five under Obama, two under Bush, two under Trump, and then, of course, the final pullout with Biden.

Our problem is we can't stick with it.

We didn't fail to do something for 20 years.

We couldn't stick with anything for than two.

The second problem is that we don't like to acknowledge that some things we can't do.

The level of the quality of the foreign leadership matters.

There is a tremendous American desire to tell people how to do it if we don't think they're doing it right, and then we think we should do it ourselves.

And this is not new.

This was a perennial problem of Vietnam.

There's a book by Bill Colby, the former CIA director, who was there 15 years, talking about how the Americans thought the reason they failed was the Vietnamese didn't implement their brilliant ideas.

This is a larger character defect, and I guess if I'd leave you with one thought is that the failure of Afghanistan, which is a huge strategic defeat, it's not any kind of a success.

The evacuation, that's great, but that's like cracking your ship up on a rock, slamming the waterproof door in the face of a lot of people and then congratulating yourself on how well you handled the lifeboats.

This is not success.

But we need to get it out of the partisan realm.

Right now there's a lot of, "This is all Trump's fault because he had this crap, frankly, lousy peace process."

It's a fault of major errors in four administrations successively, and we need to look at it for the reality of that, but not for the partisanship.

- And you mentioned the Trump administration.

I wanna just briefly talk about, he negotiated an agreement with the Taliban in 2020, which included they had to meet some standards, but May 1st of 2021 would have been that draw-down date.

Instead, he did not include the Taliban government in the negotiation.

- The Afghan government.

- I'm sorry, the Afghan government.

The Taliban he negotiated with, but not the Afghan government.

A mistake?

- Well, the theory that he and Ambassador Khalilzad pursued was that if we committed to the troop withdrawal, you could get an Afghan to Afghan negotiation started, which in a sense you did, except it never got substantive.

But the theory was that we would also make this conditional.

And in fact, if you look at the statements that former Secretary of State Pompeo, former Secretary of Defense Esper made when we signed the agreement, we said it's condition-based.

It is if the Taliban aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing, we won't complete the withdrawal.

Well, we tore that up, we ignored it.

So, part of the problem was the agreement.

Part of the problem was the pressure we put on the Afghan government to release 5,000 prisoners that they hadn't agreed to release.

But part of the problem was we didn't do what we said we would do.

We just tore up the conditions.

President Trump kept moving the troops out faster, and so the Taliban were reassured by our actions that there were no conditions, that we were just leaving.

And that undermined Afghan morale.

So what you had in the end was a collapse of morale, not a collapse of willingness to fight.

- Ambassador Ford, any similarities between Afghanistan and Iraq in terms of our diplomacy there?

- I think there were some, and I would just pick up on what Ron said, that it's hard for us as Americans to understand that there are just some things we cannot achieve.

I actually think back to Robert McNamara the former American defense secretary during the first part of the Vietnam war, I use his memoirs in my class that I teach at university, where he was looking at Vietnam, and he said, again, "There are just some problems we can't fix, we Americans can't fix, and we will be better off understanding that."

I think that's very true in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

It's also true in Syria now.

It's not to say we don't have any ability to influence things in the world, of course we do.

but to remake a society, to build a stable government in a country which has a history of unstable government, instability, that's probably a reach too far.

It was in Vietnam.

It was in Iraq.

I think it was in Afghanistan.

It would be in Syria.

- Is one of the issues that, and this is from the typical American, that includes me looking at this and saying, "Well, I get my news and I see that militarily we've done X or militarily we've done Y."

And really where we could have more impact would be with aid, with quiet diplomacy.

But we as Americans say, "Oh, we just put this many troops into this country and we're going to have an impact."

- So, I don't think American forces in country translates into you get whatever you want in that country.

Just thinking of my time in Iraq, at one point, we had 150,000 American soldiers there, but the population of Iraq was 30 million.

So, the American soldiers were only 1 out of every 200 people.

The other 199 people, the Iraqis, had a much bigger say on what was gonna happen.

It's just arithmetic.

So, do they have influence?

Of course they do, they're powerfully armed.

But does that mean they can do whatever they want in terms of remaking a country?

Absolutely not.

Can aid help?

It sometimes can, but it doesn't always help.

How much foreign aid did we give to Afghanistan over the years?

So, I think it's important before we launch a major intervention anywhere in the world, whether it's in the Middle East or in Latin America or Asia, we have very realistic goals before we go in of what is a reasonable outcome.

What can we live with?

Not, what is our ideal wishlist, but rather for the national security of the United States and the expenditure of scarce resources, what's an outcome that we can live with?

And once you start looking at it that way, suddenly things that seemed so urgent may in many cases be less so.

- Do you, Ambassador Neumann, feel that when you were out in the field, and both of you, you didn't just go to work at the embassy and sign a few papers, You were out in the field trying to effect change and- - Influence people.

- Influence people.

And do you feel like suggestions you may have offered were sometimes ignored, even though you were on the ground, you were seeing what was going on?

- Sure, I mean, as we were talking earlier and Robert has pointed out here, that Washington has reasons that sometimes are valid also for wanting to do things.

But I think when I was in Afghanistan, this was a period where the violence was just beginning to pick up.

When I left in 2007, the last message I wrote said, "We're not losing yet, but we could be in a year, and we have no margin for surprise."

We were putting all our margin into Iraq.

And so one example, and there were things I wanted to do that I was able to do, but there were others that were very unrealistic.

And one of the things was that I thought that we were very under-resourcing the economic development in areas that were not violent, that we needed to stabilize them before they were contested.

And so I had recommended a $600 million supplemental for fiscal year 2006.

And after much debate, I got 43 out of that 600 million, a little over a nickel on the dollar, and that was because of Iraq.

So, that was one rather poignant example of wanting to do something that I didn't get to do.

- You served in Syria, and we had allies, in particular the Kurds who were in the northern part of Syria, and to a great degree withdrawn our military.

- Yes.

- There's a few left.

- 900 soldiers still.

- Okay.

Do those Kurds feel like they were abandoned?

Because they fought ISIS with some of our help, but.

- I think some of them want more from the United States than the United States is prepared to give them.

I think it's really important for viewers to understand that the Syrian Kurdish faction, we worked with one particular faction among several, the Syrian Kurdish faction with whom we fought against ISIS, they were fighting with us against ISIS, not as a favor to you, H, or to me, or to the United States.

They were fighting ISIS because they wanted ISIS as far away as possible from their communities.

Perfectly understandable, perfectly understandable.

But it wasn't as a favor to the United States.

They had something they wanted and we helped them get it.

That doesn't mean that we're gonna be long-time allies forever.

That's a totally different kind of question, and that gets into what I was saying about judging the national security.

What can you live with?

What's worth the expenditure of scarce resources?

We haven't had that debate here in the United States.

We have the prospect of leaving roughly a thousand U.S. soldiers out in Eastern Syria indefinitely.

I think there needs to be a discussion about what is reasonable for them to achieve.

If the answer is, well, we're gonna keep fighting ISIS, my answer would be ISIS is mostly now where the Syrian government and the Russians are operating and in control, and the Syrian Kurdish faction with whom we fight has no influence over those territories and those ISIS operations.

So, we may be fighting ISIS over here, but ISIS is running around over here, and there's nothing we can do about it.

So, does this really make sense?

How useful is this without this?

We're not having that discussion.

- So let me broaden the discussion to the Middle East in general, and what are the prospects in terms of stability in that region and U.S. involvement in that region?

I know that's a pretty broad area to discuss.

- Yeah, we could be here a while on that subject.

I think we do retain enormous interests, and we'll start with the crudest one of all, so to speak, which is oil, but the price of oil is international.

It's not based on whether we pump it in the United States.

And if war comes to the Middle East, your gas price is gonna shoot through the roof.

Part of the economy of the world, the Suez Canal, it affects as we saw when it got blocked recently, the effects of the economy of the United States, probably more so than 50 years ago because of the way we've managed supply chains.

So, I do not believe we can turn our back on the Middle East or disengage without paying an enormous price eventually.

Now, is there much problems of the possibility of stability?

No, right now there are enormous numbers of problems, which are individual countries.

There's some sweeping problems of radical Islam, but actually some of the things that we used to talk about all the time, Arab/Israeli peace, for much of my career, I would have said that if you could get a Palestinian/Israeli peace, you would have made a major difference in the stability of the Middle East.

Today, if you had a Palestinian/Israeli peace, it wouldn't make a tinker's damn in the fighting in Yemen, in the instability in Iraq, in what Iran and Syria and Israel are doing there in the destabilization of Lebanon.

So, we have a whole series of problems, none of which we can fix, all of which as Robert said are societal.

But where we do have influence, where we can be a restraining influence, and where we have different levels of interests, and it's simply, it's too dangerous, it's too complex to just say, I don't wanna play," and it's also too complex to say, "We can go in and fix things."

So, this is actually gonna take policies that are really thoughtful.

- Ambassador Ford, briefly, Ambassador Neumann mentioned Yemen, the Houthis, al-Shabaab in Nigeria, et cetera.

We have so many factions and now we have ISIS-K, every time we turn around.

Is that part of the problem is that we're playing with different rebels, if I may use the term, all the time?

And so for us to come in with an overall plan... - One of the interesting things that's happening in the Middle East and Africa is that the extremist elements are themselves splintering.

And that just makes it harder to control.

It makes it harder to identify.

It makes it harder to figure out who's a real threat and who's less of a threat.

And so we get back to that, what's essential for our national security and what can we set aside for the time being?

- And I do wanna correct myself.

I said al-Shabaab was Nigeria.

That's a Boko Haram, al-Shabaab is in Somalia.

- Somalia, yeah.

- Thank you.

- But you know, you do- - In 15 seconds.

- Okay, wow, well, in that case we won't go there.

Well, we got a lot of problems, we'll leave it there.

- Thank you to Ambassador Ford and thank you to Ambassador Neumann.

Thank you for your service in the State Department, both retired now.

And we thank you for joining us on "At Issue."

Next time on "At Issue," we're going to be talking to some teachers about what they've learned during the pandemic and how that's changed the way they approach teaching.

Next time, right here on "At Issue."

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