"Interview with Dov Zakheim".

• Author: Kharabi, Johan
• Position: Interview

Dov S. Zakheim is senior vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton, where he leads work for global defense clients. Prior to his current position, Dr. Zakheim served as the under secretary of defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense from 2001 to 2004. Additionally, from 2002 to 2004 he was DOD's coordinator of civilian programs in Afghanistan. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Dr. Zakheim was a senior foreign policy advisor to then-Governor George W. Bush. From 1985 to 1987, he served as deputy under secretary of defense for planning and resources.

Dov Zakheim is a member of the Defense Business Board, chief of the Naval Operations Executive Panel and chairs the National Intelligence Council's International Business Practices Advisory Panel. He has served on Defense Science Board task forces and frequently testifies before the Congress as an expert witness. He is a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and has been an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He received a B.A. summa cum laude from Columbia University and a D. Phil. from St. Antony's College, University of Oxford, where he was a post-doctoral research fellow.

He spoke with Johan Kharabi of the Journal of International Affairs about the continuing conflict in Afghanistan, the current Pakistani military campaign against the Taliban and the future of U.S. foreign policy in the region.

Journal: Dr. Zakheim, let's begin with Afghanistan, where you were Civilian Program Coordinator for the Department of Defense from 2002 to 2004. This year, 2009, has already been the deadliest so far for NATO and U.S. forces in the country. The month of August saw more Americans killed in Afghanistan than any month since the beginning of the war. In your opinion, why is the war there still worth fighting?

Zakheim: The fundamental problem is the same as it was in 2001, which is that you have the possibility not just of the Taliban taking over the country, but of Al Qaeda, or its various sister and branch organizations--its copycat organizations if you will--once again entrenching itself there and using the country as a base for the kind of terrorism that took place on 11 September 2001. I remember when I first went to Afghanistan in 2002, I saw that the Al Qaeda base--which was literally right outside Kabul--was massive. It was clear, not just by speaking to Afghan leaders but to ordinary Afghans that had any command of English, that essentially Al Qaeda had been running the country. There's no reason to assume that this would not happen again were the Taliban to take over once again. I have a recent piece in what is called the Shadow Government blog, in which I make the case that it's not just a matter of sending twenty or forty thousand more troops, nor is it really a matter of trying to create a nation in our image, because that won't work. It's a different culture, and many of the people there are still living in the Middle Ages. That's no insult; it's just the reality--that's what it's like there. And so to expect that we are going to create some kind of extension of Western Europe in Afghanistan is ridiculous. In fact, it was the Afghans, after all, with our help but nevertheless the Afghans, who drove out the Taliban the first time, and so they [the Taliban] aren't loved by the majority of the population. That already creates a certain basis for some degree of optimism that we can still pull this off.

On the subject of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, have you seen any substantive progress in forcing the two to decouple?

Zakheim: There seem to be some indications of that, simply because there has been talk off and on of reaching out to the more moderate elements of the Taliban. I suspect that as long as things were, and have been, going against the Taliban, then the Pashtu that supported the Taliban would also turn on Al Qaeda. We have seen this occur inside the Swat Valley as well in Pakistan. But once things start going well for the Taliban, and if they were to once again take over the country, I would expect that those two would get together again. It's one thing when you are losing and then you are suspicious of those who for whatever reason are not totally seen as identical with you--and of course the Pashtu and Arabs are very, very different--but when you are winning, it's a different story. So, it's very important for the Taliban to be losing and for us to press on.

Regarding your question about the losses: remember that one of the reasons the losses are so high is that we have deployed our troops to areas in which they have not been for many years, and some in which they have never been. So with the Taliban becoming more sophisticated in terms of its own tactics on the one hand, and our people going into places where they haven't been on the other, it isn't really surprising that the losses have mounted.

In terms of non-military solutions that may exist in Afghanistan, there has been some talk of the need for a political surge in the country, whereby reconcilable insurgent commanders and their supporters are realigned with the Afghan government. In fact, the U.S. and Afghan governments have already announced a policy of paying tribal militias to provide security in the country. Do you believe such a strategy of reconciliation with the Taliban to be feasible?

Zakheim: I think it's feasible. I think it's possible to peel off some of the Taliban's support--those who are perhaps less inclined to be as radical as some of the Taliban leadership has been in the past and is still today. I don't think we can win in Afghanistan without recognizing the tribal leaders, the ethnic leaders--they operate in ways that are clearly distasteful to many people in the West, but you know, what we call corruption they call giving gifts. It's a different culture, and we must work with the tribal leaders, the ethnic leaders which by the way is what we did in 2001. What was the Northern Alliance? It was Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Hazara. We worked with the ethnic leaders. I met many of them. Were they all the kind of people I would want to invite to dinner? Not necessarily, but it's not dinner in my home that we are talking about here; it's dinner in their homes. It's a different environment, and I think it's very important to recognize that fact. What we are doing right now is correct in recognizing that we must work in the cultural and ethnic framework of Afghanistan rather than try to impose some kind of ideal that is much more relevant to our own society.

But isn't such a plan--working with tribal leaders and working through them to build support--eerily similar to that of the British colonial government in Pakistan's Pashtun tribal areas in the late 19th century?

Zakheim: The British, as you know, were given a pretty bloody nose in Afghanistan as well. Everybody gets a bloody nose in Afghanistan. I think that people have forgotten that the reason we did not get a bloody nose in 2001 was that we didn't work against them, we worked with them. And so what the British did, not just in the Pashtu areas, but pretty much throughout their empire, was work with local elites. There has been a lot of criticism of this policy, for example, in a recent book titled The Decline and Fall of the British Empire. k essentially says that this policy was a sign of British weakness. I'm not sure of that. It seems to me that what the British did to stay on top--and remember that they were doing it as a colonial power, which is very different from what we are doing--was to work with the locals because there was no other way. We aren't interested in staying on top. We're not interested in colonizing Afghanistan or Pakistan, or any place else for that matter. All we're interested in...