Statements by U.S. Officials
U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan
Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Interview with Ivan Watson, CNN
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Cirağan Palace, Istanbul, Turkey
on the margins of the
Ministerial Meeting of the Friends of Democratic Pakistan
WATSON: You have Karzai’s Finance Minister coming out saying he won 68 percent of the vote when five years ago he had less than 55 percent of the vote. How could possibly an incumbent’s, you know, ratings have gone up? What does this say about the credibility of the entire process?
HOLBROOKE: Let me be clear on the American position. Election Day is over. Millions of people voted. The Taliban failed to disrupt the elections sufficiently to say they’re invalid. They disrupted them somewhat but not decisively. And now the counting is underway. And it isn’t official until it’s official. And that process has to play itself out. We haven’t heard any official counts yet. And there are challenges against the Complaint Commission. The American position is simple. We think that the processes of the government ought to be followed and we should respect the results. I would say also, just noting in passing, that in contested elections the supporters of both sides make statements. But those aren’t official statements.
WATSON: But you have candidates charging that there was going to be cheating before the ballots were even cast here.
HOLBROOKE: Well, that may be. It’s politics, Afghan style. You know that, you’ve covered it for years. Does that surprise you? Of course not. And, by the way, that happens in Western democracies as well. We have charges, charges repeatedly by candidates in American elections that the other side is not allowing their people to register. I don’t think we should be too surprised that democracy is imperfect, even in Western countries, and Afghanistan has had unique difficulties in holding this election. So let’s see what happens as we go forward.
WATSON: You said in the beginning of this trip that more money’s coming to the Taliban in Afghanistan from the Gulf than from the heroin trade.
HOLBROOKE: I’ve said that many times, because that’s what the intelligence community has concluded.
WATSON: How is that moving? Where does it happen?
HOLBROOKE: It seems to move with individuals, in suitcases. Sometimes they take advantage of the Pilgrimage. Sometimes it’s moving freely, there’s probably a lot of it moving through the hawala system. Some of it moves through so-called charities. The point is that this is a very important part of the war and it needs more attention. We’ve got to give it that attention.
WATSON: Are there specific figures or charities or countries?
HOLBROOKE: No. No. Figures are really elusive. You can get some from the intelligence community. But they’re pretty soft. The Taliban is not a high-tech, expensive operation. It doesn’t take a lot of money to maintain a terrorist organization.
WATSON: What are the prospects of defeating it then, when you have guys in sandals who can make a bomb for under a hundred dollars that would kill four expensive, highly trained NATO soldiers?
HOLBROOKE: Success comes only when the roots of the insurgency are dried up, and that means the information efforts are critically important.
WATSON: The roots of the insurgency… The brother of the President of Afghanistan has been repeatedly been accused – at every Kabul cocktail party people will talk about how Ahmed Karzai is involved in the drug trade. How can this project take root when the leader of the Afghan government and his family are implicated?
HOLBROOKE: On corruption, I’m not going to comment on individual cases. Corruption is one of the most important problems in the country. It’s a cancer that can destroy the entire system. It is one of the major things we expect the next step to focus on.
WATSON: Last question, Pakistan. What is the Obama Administration doing differently to deal with that very challenging country?
HOLBROOKE: We’re doing pretty much everything differently. We are emphasizing economic development. We’ve got to emphasize energy. We’re moving towards asking the Congress to approve big, big electrical energy projects as used to happen forty years ago, thirty years ago when the United States built great projects –water projects and electricity projects, and then we moved to smaller projects. We’re going to [inaudible], we are working very closely with the government and with the IMF to strengthen the economy. Pakistan’s been upgraded as an American priority, at the very top of our priority list. President Obama’s personally engaged in this. He follows every detail of Pakistan closely. From an experiential base, that proves the fact that his mother lived there, that he visited it often, I don’t know how often, but he visited as a student to visit his mother, and that he has close Pakistani friends.
We are upgrading the embassy. On my last trip there a week ago I called on leaders of Islamist parties who had not previously met with senior Americans from Washington. We are increasing our dialogue. [inaudible] So we’re doing a lot of things. At the end, we can’t solve Pakistan’s problems. We can only help Pakistan solve them with our help. And that’s what this conference here in Istanbul today is about. Its title tells it all: “Friends of Democratic Pakistan.” Friends – so these are the people trying to support. And although this wasn’t a pledging conference, a lot of additional support is indicated during the conference.
Okay?
WATSON: Any interaction with your Iranian colleagues?
HOLBROOKE: I saw them, they were in the room.
WATSON: Is there any kind of commonalities, any common ground?
HOLBROOKE: The Iranians made generally positive statements about supporting democratic Pakistan. So, we take note of those. They didn’t do anything here that was of a polemical nature vis-à-vis the United States as far as I’m aware of. And I was out of the room when the speech was made.
WATSON: Was that intentional?
HOLBROOKE: No, I just had a prior bilateral meeting with the Foreign Minister of the United Arab Emirates and the schedule switched, the meeting was at 11:00, so according to the schedule I would have already finished talking. So we all got all screwed up. They switched the schedule around a lot. There were three or four presentations at the beginning we didn’t know about. So by the time it came around it was all off, it was all different.