For those who can't get enough Rummy....here's the whole interview....it's long.
telegraph.co.uk
Full text of the interview
Participating: Donald Rumsfeld, US Defence Secretary; Charles Moore, Editor of The Daily Telegraph; Sir John Keegan, Defence Editor; Toby Harnden, Washington Bureau Chief; David Wastell, Sunday Telegraph Washington Correspondent
CHARLES MOORE: Thank you very much for having us, which is a great honour. I think we're the first British newspaper that you've seen since September 11th, so that's great. Thank you. I just wanted to start by asking what do you think you've won in Afghanistan?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, I think what the coalition forces have accomplished thus far would be number one, the fact that the Taliban no longer are the governing faction in that country.
And in that sense, the people of Afghanistan have, in a significant way, been liberated from the policies and the repressive actions of the Taliban government. Second, the al-Qa'eda are no longer using Afghanistan as an effective worldwide base for training terrorists and for organising and conducting terrorist campaigns around the world.
That is not to say that the Taliban are all gone, which they aren't. A lot of them are still there in the cities and in the mountains and in neighbouring countries. Nor is it to say that the al-Qa'eda is not functioning. It just doesn't have Afghanistan as a haven to the extent it previously did.
Al-Qa'eda is still in the country, in pockets, and they're still in neighbouring countries, in larger numbers than pockets, and they're still very dangerous.
CHARLES MOORE: And I know the United States doesn't want to get bogged down there, but there's an ongoing problem about order there, and dangerous people regrouping, and so on, isn't there? And there's demand from the interim government that Western presence spreads, which, if it did spread, would have to be guaranteed by the United States. Where are you on that?
'One would hope and want for the people of Afghanistan that it be a relatively secure environment'
DONALD RUMSFELD: We clearly have to consider that our first task is to continue to pursue the al-Qa'eda and other terrorist networks, and work to see that nation states are not actively harbouring and encouraging and permitting, or even tolerating, their activities. That has to be our first assignment.
When you say where am I on that issue of security in Afghanistan, I'm not an expert on Afghanistan but my readings of history suggest that it's never been a very secure place in recent memory. It's had tribal conflicts. It's had criminals. It's had significant drug trafficking in recent years.
One would hope and want for the people of Afghanistan that it be a relatively secure environment. It's not. What will ultimately help to make it a more secure environment, it seems to me, is a decision on the part of a lot of people in and out of the country - neighbouring countries, as well as your country and ours - that that's worth having, and that they're willing to invest some time and money and effort to see if that can't be achieved.
And is it possible for outsiders to help to create an environment that's more hospitable to normal living than has been the case in the past? It probably is. Is that desirable on a permanent basis? Probably not.
Foreign forces in that country tend to ultimately be opposed by the people, for whatever reason - or at least by factions of the people. So what is taking place at the present time within the United States government is a discussion about what's the best way to do it.
The United Kingdom, thank goodness, has stepped up and is leading the interim security assistance force, and doing an excellent job. It is helpful in Kabul, where they are. There is a discussion taking place in the UN, and other places, about the possibility of expanding that to the other three, five, or seven power centres in the country.
There are several alternatives to that. One alternative is to get about the task of helping to create an Afghan army, a multi-regional force that would be able to do what an international security assistance force would do: reduce crime, provide some leverage for a central government as a counterweight to the armies that exist in the various regions of the country currently. The advantage of the latter is, clearly, that it is indigenous.
Ultimately, if you went with the former and greatly expanded the international security assistance force, it would leave. I don't know how long: a year, five, 20? We've been in the Sinai now for 22 years. Which is unnatural.
And I think it's always better if people can contribute to their own security than having what becomes a dependency develop where the local people are frightened at the thought of taking out an international force, pulling it away, and allowing an instability to be re-injected into the area.
My personal view is that things need to sort out on the ground at some point, and that while foreign forces can go in and be helpful for a period, they ought to have a strategy to be moved out, and for capabilities, indigenous capabilities develop to take their place in a fairly rapid period of time: months and years, not decades. So.
And in between these two possibilities, there are four or five other variants of it. Kofi Annan at the UN has some ideas that are being circulated. Fahid Khan had some ideas about the army there.
What the United States will ultimately decide, I don't know, but certainly our forces are really trained and equipped and organized for warfare more than for peacekeeping. We do not have, for example, the kinds of capabilities that oh, Spain, with the Guardia Civil, or the Italians, with the Carabinieri, a national police capability.
CHARLES MOORE: Would you like us, the British, to stay on, then? We'll cease being the lead after 90 days.
DONALD RUMSFELD: I can't speak for the President. He obviously talks to the Prime Minister about those things. If you're asking me as a citizen what I think about having British forces in there, I am absolutely delighted. They are first rate. They're well trained and well equipped and well led.
They do a superb job wherever they go, and it just makes everything that much easier with the leadership of the British forces. Not just in the peacekeeping, but also in the other activities that they're engaged in with respect to the war on terrorism.
CHARLES MOORE: I was just going to ask about that. With our special forces, what sort of contributions do you think is being made by the British that added to the American contribution?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Oh, essentially the same contribution that American special forces. Their training is similar, their capabilities is similar, they work very well together, have in many different locations around the world over the years, and it's been terrific having them there.
I tend to not talk a lot about what other countries are doing, because each country likes to characterise what they're doing themselves, and they do it in a way that is comfortable for them politically.
Some countries don't even want it know that they have special forces. Which is fair enough. I begin with, clearly, a just wonderful appreciation for what the coalition forces have done. And not just the UK, but three, four dozen, five dozen, nations that have been participating. And in ways that is comfortable for them, and that they have the capabilities to, that have been terrific.
We've got any number of countries. I looked the other day and in one category - that is to say, ships - we had major activities going on in that part of the world, and the US ships were less than a third of the total ships.
TOBY HARNDEN: On Afghanistan, could the Americans and the British have used their special forces more? If more boots had been put on the ground and maybe more have been risked could more have been achieved in terms of destroying the al-Qa'eda leadership and the Taliban leadership?
DONALD RUMSFELD: We'll never know, will we? Historians will go back and try to answer that question and probably do it imperfectly. Clearly, I don't think so. At no time was the issue that you raised the determining factor, that is to say, risk.
If you're talking about risk of lives. If you're going to put people's lives at risk, you'd better have a darned good reason, and in this instance, we did, and we do. And the risk of putting people putting people's lives on the line was not anything that was inhibiting in terms of the number of people that you put on the ground.
From the very outset, we had enormous pressure to put people on the ground. We did try to put them on the ground, and we did successfully do so, although it didn't happen in 24 hours. It took 48, 72 hours, two days, a week, to whatever, depending on weather, depending on the leadership in some of these tribal groups, whether or not they would accept it immediately, how long it took to persuade them.
We were perfectly prepared to put large numbers of US or coalition forces on the ground. And the fall of Kabul, and then the fall of other cities prior to that Mazar-i-Sharif meant that we didn't have to although we were perfectly ready to do that.
TOBY HARNDEN: Do you think that less use of tribal forces might have enabled you to get bin Laden or other al-Qa'eda leaders?
DONALD RUMSFELD: No. Or we would have done it. The country's borders are porous. You folks live on an island. That's really quite nice. I suspect it's not perfect, however, in terms of stopping things that you'd prefer not to coming across your borders. But we can't monitor the border with Canada, if we had to.
Fortunately, we don't have to, to any great extent. But you know, deer and moose and elk walk back and forth. People walk back and forth. In a lot of places, you don't even know where the border is, and that's the way it is around Afghanistan.
We had, in some cases, countries that were cooperating on the border and in some cases that weren't. And in some cases, the countries that were cooperating that were capable of doing quite a bit, and some cases countries that were cooperative but were not capable of doing a great deal to stop the outflow.
We, in most cases, were able to put special forces or coalition forces and troops in positions so that they could serve as an anvil or a block if we were moving in from the ground with Afghan forces and special forces.
But I don't know how one would have done it. There's a lot of caves. There's a lot of tunnels, hundreds and hundreds of them. Look how long it takes for your country or our country to get the people off the Ten Most Wanted list. It is very hard to do.
DAVID WASTELL: On that point, can I just ask you, how confident are you that Bin Laden will eventually be caught?
DONALD RUMSFELD: I don't know that it matters how confident I am. He either will or he won't. He'll either live or he'll die. He's either in Afghanistan or he's some place else. We intend to find him, if he's findable, and we intend to see that he's brought to justice in one way or another. And I think that that's the feeling of a lot of other countries.
He could walk in tomorrow and surrender and al-Qa'eda would still go on functioning. There are plenty of people who could take over and have knowledge of how that apparatus works and where the bank accounts are, and who the trained cells are, and in what countries, 40, 50, 60 countries they're located in.
It would be delightful if we could find him, but the problem would not end. And I assume we will, but what is that based on? It's based on no more than your assumption, or somebody else's assumption.
TOBY HARNDEN: After the President's State of the Union speech, we're clearly looking beyond Afghanistan. Could I ask you about Iraq and, in particular, how strong you feel Saddam is at the moment compared to the decade ago, and what it might take to oust him?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, just let me set the context for Iraq. I have no interest in discussing Iraq particularly. What the President, or other countries will decide with respect to Iraq is something that's above my pay grade.
I'll be happy to answer a few questions about it, but I wouldn't want it to be set in a context that suggested that I was flagging the possibility that Iraq is something that is of current interest to the United States, because I'm not in a position to talk about that.
Iraq is a lot weaker than it was ten years ago, in answer to your question. On the other hand, repression works, and Saddam Hussein's regime is a vicious, repressive regime that has been capable, and very likely will be capable, of maintaining control over the people in that country. It is not a nation that one should sit back and hold your breath waiting for it to engage in a massive process of self-reform.
CHARLES MOORE: How can you imagine change coming about?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, it won't, absent some external event. Unlike Iran, which has a different set of circumstances, a different set of pressures. In both cases, the people are not as free as they are in your country or our country, needless to say. But in Iran, at least, one senses that there is pressure from women, pressure from young people, and pressure from external influences.
I have no idea what will happen in Iran, but one would think that Iran is distinctive from North Korea or from Iraq in terms of at least the possibility that there could be some changes, internal, over some period of time.
CHARLES MOORE: Are you attracted by sort of a rough comparison with what happened in Afghanistan - the Northern Alliance and so on - in Iraq, that there might be Iraqi National Congress, or other movements, or Kurds, or a mixture of all of them, that can overthrow Saddam?
DONALD RUMSFELD: To draw a parallel with Afghanistan probably would be a mistake. I think that the parallel one can draw is that if we think of the feeling that in Afghanistan, when music was played, and women took off their burkhas, and kites were flown, and people were welcomed. That was a visible manifestation of the fact that the people were being repressed, and that they wanted the al-Qa'eda gone, and they wanted the Taliban gone.
Now, people have mixed reasons for wanting that. If you're freer than you were, you're also freer to engage in the heroin trade, as well as to fly kites. Or freer to be a criminal than you might be with a repressive regime. But there's no question that the people of Afghanistan were relieved to have that repressive regime gone, and the so-called era of foreign al-Qa'eda invaders that had, in large measure, taken over that country and asserted a great deal of control over it. That would be similar in Iraq.
Whether it would be that way in terms of organised factions as it was in Afghanistan I think is a different question. But in terms of people, I don't know who it was that said it, but there's some truth to it, that there will be no peace in the world until every man is free because to every man he is the world. And when a person feels the absence of that, and then sees the opportunity for freedom.
Look at what happened at the end of the Cold War. All these countries that were repressed and controlled by dictatorial governments suddenly fell. Repression can go on for decades. It can go on from generation to generation. The Politburo. In my lifetime, well our lifetime (points at Sir John Keegan), we've seen it happen both ways. We've seen armies engaged, and we've seen one win and one lose, and surrenders on the battleship Missouri, if you will.
We've also seen a constant state pressure over decades by people who invested and created institutions like Nato and constrained an expansionist Soviet empire. And finally it fell from within.
SIR JOHN KEEGAN: Can you compare the war against terrorism with the Cold War? I mean, there isn't that clear target, is there? There isn't the great mass of the Red Army staring, staring at you. You've got to go and look for it.
DONALD RUMSFELD: Quite so. Exactly right. It's a much more shadowy target and enemy. There are things you can compare, and there are a lot of things you cannot compare, in a way that you would say "Well, that's similar." The big, visible Soviet Union and the pressure it was putting on continent after continent - in Latin America, in Africa, the pressures in Central Asia and elsewhere was, I suppose, easier for people to focus on and be attentive to.
On the other hand, it wasn't easy. It was hard. I had to fly back, when I was Ambassador to Nato, and testify in the United States Senate against the so-called Mansfield Amendment, which was to cut US forces in Europe and stop our support of Nato to the extent we were supporting Nato.
There were always factions within your country, and our country, and other countries in Western Europe that wanted to toss in the towel, and not try to constrain that pressure that was being asserted by the Soviet Union.
SIR JOHN KEEGAN: When you were in Beirut in 1983, I was there at exactly the same time.
DONALD RUMSFELD: A lot of ordnance flying around.
SIR JOHN KEEGAN: There certainly was. You must have learned quite a lot about dealing with Arab, Islamic terrorism then. Does that give you some picture of how the war on terrorism has to be fought?
DONALD RUMSFELD: It does. It does. If you remember Beirut…
SIR JOHN KEEGAN: I remember it so vividly…
DONALD RUMSFELD: So do I. So do I. But if you think about it, there were first trucks that were filled with explosives that went into the US Embassy, and then to the Marine barracks, where 241 Marines were killed.
The next thing you saw was cement barricades being built around all the embassies around the Corniche. Yours was very near to ours. And they put the same barricades around barracks and military installations so trucks couldn't go in. And the next thing that happened, they started lobbing rocket-propelled grenades over the barricades.
So I think your building, or our building, ended up draping some sort of a wire mesh over the buildings so that it would repel rocket-repelled grenades and bounce them off. So they tried to first go in by truck, and we stopped that. Then they go in over the barricades, and they bounce them off.
And what did the terrorists do next? They went after soft targets going to and from the office, and started killing individuals and groups of individuals. The point being, the truth, and the truth is, that terrorists have an enormous advantage.
They can attack at any place, at any time, using any technique, and it's physically not possible to defend at every place and every time against every technique. If someone's willing to give up their life, they can do a heck of a lot of damage before their life is snuffed out.
SIR JOHN KEEGAN: But there are soft points in a terrorist network.
DONALD RUMSFELD: You bet. But only if you go after the terrorist network. You can't defend except by offence. . .
SIR JOHN KEEGAN: I wondered was the lessons were that you learned from Beirut - there's no good negotiating or talking to them. The only thing they really understand is you hitting them as hard as they're trying to hit you.
DONALD RUMSFELD: Absolutely. And finding them where they are, and rooting them out. And that's what the President has understood from day one, and is about. That is what is happening, is some people are using the word "pre-emption" as though it is proactive.
In a sense, someone can say that, but the reality is, the only way to defend yourself is by going after them where they are. Because otherwise, you change your whole way of life. You're no longer a free person. You're living in a cave and hiding, behind barricades, and things over your buildings, and not being able to go out in the morning.
SIR JOHN KEEGAN: Would it be a judgment of yours that, paradoxically, the terrorist leadership is more timorous than the terrorist foot soldier? That if you can threaten the terrorist leader, you may be able to strike a deadly blow at the network?
DONALD RUMSFELD: I think the answer is "probably". The terrorist leadership leads, and they lead by having the foot soldier go out and kill themselves, and get killed. And they hold their coats, and tell them that they're going to go to Heaven.
One would think that they have a certain respect for their own lives and their own importance, and therefore, they're protective of themselves, and that's why people like UBL [Osama bin Laden] and [Mullah] Omar seem to move every six, eight, 10, 12 hours. Not because they like to travel, I don't think, but they're survivalists. They want to live. So we just have to keep after them. What were you doing in Beirut?
SIR JOHN KEEGAN: Curiously, I was writing an article for the Atlantic Monthly, which was then the highest paying magazine in the world. But I have, you're quite right, been in other war zones, but nothing has ever made me as frightened as Beirut.
DONALD RUMSFELD: The fellow who finally got me out of there was Brigadier General Carl Steiner, who was then head of our special forces and was travelling with me for a period.
He is quite well known today as a terrific person. But we ended up, we'd been trapped in there for three or four days where they were shelling the house we were in. And we got in the car and there was all this crazy driving. My wife took some Dramamine. She was in there with me that whole time.
We ended up in your Embassy on those wooden pews that are in the front, where all the people come in to get visas? And she had taken two or three Dramamine and fell completely asleep in a flak jacket. And I can still picture her, just out cold from the Dramamine, waiting for a helicopter to come in, and the only place we could go was your Embassy, before we got out of there.
SIR JOHN KEEGAN: There was an American couple I spent some time with them, he was head of the mission to train the Lebanese National Army, and called Al Shaw. He was making very optimistic noises all the time but he was a very fine officer. I liked him very much indeed. But it all fell apart.
Does that fill you with any sort of lack of optimism about the ability to create effective armed forces in Third World countries? Or do you think that one shouldn't generalise from that?
DONALD RUMSFELD: I have that experience very much in my mind, and recognise how difficult it is to do it. If war stops for a period, there is at least the possibility that you can fashion some sort of a coherent central government, and people have to have a stake in it and people at some point have to desire a relative calm country so that they can go about their business and go to work, go to school, trade or whatever what they want to do.
The only way to get that is to have some sort of a security force. And they have to decide that's what they want.
SIR JOHN KEEGAN: Does that mean that this will work better than Lebanon? We'll not know for a period. But is there at least a possibility it might? I think so.
TOBY HARNDEN: I'd just ask you about Saddam again. What sort of threat does Saddam pose to us, to the West in general, and what's the timescale in this? How quickly does that threat need to be dealt with? And as part of that, how strong do you think the Iraqi National Congress is, and could you see the INC seizing power in Iraq?
DONALD RUMSFELD: The focus on Iraq is something that I find not helpful, from my standpoint. And I'm not in a position to really discuss a lot of it. So I think I'll pass.
CHARLES MOORE: One thing that has come up with this, and it's not just Iraq, but because of the phrase "Axis of Evil" in the State of the Union speech, you've got much stronger European criticism now of the United States' position than you had in the early days. We've had Joschka Fischer, and Hubert Vedrine, and Chris Patten, and they say, "You're unilateralist, you're simplistic. This isn't really the war against terrorism. This is other ideas."
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