'Meet the Press' transcript for May 10, 2009

MR. DAVID GREGORY:  Our issues this Sunday:  The president calls it the most dangerous place in the world.  The front line in the war on terror is now the rugged frontier lands of Afghanistan and Pakistan.  It's where al-Qaeda terrorists and the Taliban have come back with vengeance in the years after 9/11, and where the White House has decided to surge more than 20,000 additional U.S. troops.  This week, an unprecedented White House summit with the region's leaders and a warning.

(Videotape)

PRES. BARACK OBAMA:  The security of Pakistan, Afghanistan and the United States are linked.

(End videotape)

MR. GREGORY:  Is it America's war or their war?  And is it winnable?  With us exclusively this morning, President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan.

Then, insights and analysis on why these two countries now represent the most pressing national security challenge to the Obama White House.  With us, Steve Coll of The New Yorker magazine, former longtime foreign correspondent and senior editor of The Washington Post and author of the best-selling book "Ghost Wars" about Osama bin Laden and the U.S. engagement with Afghanistan; and Andrea Mitchell, chief foreign affairs correspondent of NBC News.

But first, the presidents of Pakistan and Afghanistan.  I sat down with both leaders earlier this week after their White House meetings.  Pakistan's President Zardari, in office for the last eight months, is the widower of slain Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.  I began by asking about the Taliban and whether he agrees with the Obama administration that the group represents an existential threat to his country.

MR. ASIF ALI ZARDARI:  No, I consider the philosophy of Taliban as threat to the world, not just to Pakistan and your country, but I feel it's a larger threat.

MR. GREGORY:  Existential threat to Pakistan?

MR. ZARDARI:  Pakistan, the whole world.  They start from the Horn of Africa and come down all the way to Pakistan.  They don't evolve from Pakistan and go up, they come down.

MR. GREGORY:  Do you consider the Taliban to be a bigger threat today than India?

MR. ZARDARI:  I consider it a different--they're--India's a country and Pakistan is a, a...(unintelligible)...we're, we're two states which in fact Pakistan stemmed out of the subcontinent out of India.  So it's a different relationship, it's a different context.

MR. GREGORY:  Is there a war with the Taliban inside Pakistan?

MR. ZARDARI:  There is a war, sir.

MR. GREGORY:  And is it America's war or Pakistan's war?

MR. ZARDARI:  It's a war of our existence.  We've been fighting this war much before they attacked 9/11.  They're kind of a cancer created by both of us, Pakistan and America and the world.  We got together, we created this cancer to fight the superpower and then we went away--rather, you went away without finding a cure for it.  And now we've both come together to find a cure for it, and we're looking for one.

MR. GREGORY:  When you speak like that, it doesn't sound as if you consider it Pakistan's war, you consider it America's responsibility.

MR. ZARDARI:  No, I think it's a joint responsibility.  I think it's the joint responsibilities of all the democracies of the world.  That's why we made this Friends of Democratic Pakistan, so we can bring most strength to the situation.  You've got to admit that you all have been trying to battle it for the last eight years.  The--all the...(unintelligible)...world powers have been trying to battle it for the last eight years in Afghanistan and nobody's come out of victorious yet.

MR. GREGORY:  And so you say there is a commitment on the part of Pakistan to fight the Taliban now.  How many troops, how many Pakistani troops do you now have in the western part of your country battling the Taliban?

MR. ZARDARI:  Three times the amount of troops you have battling them in Afghanistan.  That's 125,000 we have on ground.

MR. GREGORY:  And yet the administration--you have a military force of roughly 660--650,000 men.

MR. ZARDARI:  Oh.

MR. GREGORY:  Has the administration said to you there should be more fighting men in the west?

MR. ZARDARI:  There is a point of view that more men might improve the situation, but that's something that's still disputed by our military analysts.  We don't think that more--presence of more troops there--you must remember, 650-personnel strong army doesn't mean they're all infantry.  That's the fighting brigade of the infantry, that's the teeth of the army.  So they're not all infantry.  They're tank drivers, they're truck drivers, they're other--gunners, etc., etc.  So we have an infantry of 250,000, out of which 125,000 happens to be in those mountains.

MR. GREGORY:  So you have a sufficient number of troops fighting the Taliban.

MR. ZARDARI:  We think, we think they're sufficient.

MR. GREGORY:  You appeared on Capitol Hill this week, and the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Representative Howard Berman, said this, speaking of you.  He said, "He did not present a coherent strategy for the defeat of this insurgency.  I had a sense of what they're doing today," he said, "I did not have a sense of what they plan to do tomorrow." What's the strategy?

MR. ZARDARI:  So, well, he didn't even ask me, so that's OK.  But I'll tell you what I've got planned to do.  We, we've been loving...(unintelligible)...in, in America, my wife was loving, and we were of the view and always have been of the view that democracy is the answer to the problem.  Like somebody said, it may be--not be the best form of government, but it's the only form of government.  Now we've got democracy.  Democracy needs help.  It needs a little more help than we've been getting in the past. What the American public and people at large do not understand is for 10 years you have given $10 billion to a dictator, but you've given them for the war in these mountains.  So it's actually reimbursement for the money spent; after all, 125,000 troops moving in logistically, otherwise do cost.  So you've been paying back...(unintelligible)...into Pakistan for the expenses occurred as such.  But we need to support democracy.

MR. GREGORY:  Mm-hmm.

MR. ZARDARI:  We need to support the country, we need support--we need to support the systems.  And we've been involved for the last 30 years.  It's not 10 years.

MR. GREGORY:  But is that a strategy for cracking down on the Taliban insurgency?

MR. ZARDARI:  Sure it is.  Sure it is.  The stronger my institutions are, the more the youth I employ, the less fodder they have.  The more poverty goes down, the less fodder they have to recruit from.  That's the strategy.  What else can--what--there is no scientific theorem to that.  And if there was one, if you had a strategy, you would've done it in a, in 10 years.

MR. GREGORY:  But there's a military question, which is, is Pakistan capable of dealing with an insurgency, capable of mounting an effective counterinsurgency when the orientation of your military's primarily been to fight a big enemy to the east in India, predicated on the idea of some kind of deterrence?  Are you able to mount a counterinsurgency strategy at this point?

MR. ZARDARI:  Sir, we've been in this war for the last seven years.  But if you see the record of the one year that the democratic government of Pakistan, the PPP government and its allies has been there, we've done more to damage the infrastructure of the Talibans or the--or these miscreants, whatever you need to call them, than ever before.

MR. GREGORY:  And yet there are some who say that the strategy has not borne fruit.  You went in--so people understand, you went into an area north of Islamabad, the Swat Valley, and you essentially made a deal with the Taliban, which is they would put down their arms if Islamic law could be applied, could be implemented there.

MR. ZARDARI:  Incorrect.

MR. GREGORY:  Incorrect.  Tell me what's correct.

MR. ZARDARI:  The correct position is that we came up with the formula which was that there would be speedy justice there known as...(foreign language spoken).  Nothing to do with Sharia law.  It's been interpreted by--as Sharia law by them.  And then that didn't work.  But we had to get the population to be with us.  The population was fed up with them and was fed up with the fighting.  Some--the provincial government came up with this idea that let's go for a peace deal and let's get the people involved.  They tried it.  It hasn't worked.

MR. GREGORY:  But when you made this deal, when you actually signed this deal...

MR. ZARDARI:  The parliament signed on this deal.  The parliament recommended me--to me to sign.

MR. GREGORY:  Were you against it?

MR. ZARDARI:  I was--yes, I had a position against it.

MR. GREGORY:  Right.  Why?  Why did you think it was misguided?

MR. ZARDARI:  I thought that it won't work.

MR. GREGORY:  You think it was abdication to the Taliban?

MR. ZARDARI:  No, it's not abdication.  I thought that the Talibans are not rational people.  I don't think there's any good Talibans.  The world does, so that's a defensive opinion.

MR. GREGORY:  But so you think there's no negotiating with them.

MR. ZARDARI:  I don't think there should be a negotiating with them at the moment.  Maybe one day when there is enough, we've done enough.

MR. GREGORY:  Mm-hmm.

MR. ZARDARI:  Then always--there cannot only, only be war.  There has to be a--the parliament has come up with a strategy where there's the three D's: dialogue, deterrence and development.  So we have to go into dialogue by the will of the people, which we did.  It didn't work.  Now we've got to do the, the deterrence phase where we are fighting.  And then once we've calmed the situation down in--then we'll go to the development stage to give them the ownership, give them schools.

MR. GREGORY:  You have the fighting that's going on in Swat.  You have the Taliban insurgency there.  That insurgency has also spread into Punjab, to the state of Punjab.  I don't have to tell you, that's where half of Pakistan's population is.  And it has lead to some dire assessments by analysts who look at your country with a critical eye, including a former adviser to General David Petraeus who helped him with the insurgency in Iraq, and he said this: "We're now reaching the point where within one to six months we could see the collapse of the Pakistani state," because the Taliban insurgency has so destabilized Pakistan.  Does he have that right?

MR. ZARDARI:  I think you--he's had other positions wrong before, so--and having said that, we have a threat, yes.  Is the state of Pakistan going to collapse?  No.  We are 180 million people.  The population is much, much more than the, the insurgents are.  But we do have a problem.  We have a problem because it's been there.  It was like I said, it was a monster created by all, all of us.  We got together and we didn't--we forgot to make a cure for it.

MR. GREGORY:  Can you survive politically?

MR. ZARDARI:  Of course.

MR. GREGORY:  Is it possible to defeat this insurgency without U.S. soldiers fighting by your side or at least training your soldiers in Pakistan?

MR. ZARDARI:  I think we need to find a strategy where the world gets together against this threat, because it's not Pakistan specific, it's not Afghanistan specific.  Like I said, it's all the way from the Horn of Africa. You've had attacks in Spain, you've had attacks in Britain, you've had attacks in America, you've had attacks in Africa, Saudi Arabia.  So I think the world needs to understand that this is the new challenge of the 21st century and this is the new war, and we've all got together.

MR. GREGORY:  The question a lot of people ask is are you--is Pakistan really committed to that war?  In The New York Times Dexter Filkins, who, who's reported from Afghanistan and Pakistan, writes this:  "Whose side is Pakistan really on?  ...  Little in Pakistan is what it appears.  For years, the survival of Pakistan's military and civilian leaders has depended on a double game:  assuring the United States that they were vigorously repressing Islamic militants--and in some cases actually doing so--while simultaneously tolerating and assisting the same militants.  From the anti-Soviet fighters of the 1980s and the Taliban of the 1990s to the homegrown militants of today, Pakistan's leaders have been both public enemies and private friends.  When the game works, it reaps great rewards:  billions in aid to boost the Pakistani economy and military and Islamist proxies to extend the government's reach into Afghanistan and India."

MR. ZARDARI:  I think it's an old concept, an old theory that he's talking about.  And what billions are you talking about?  Like I said, a billion dollar a year?  That's not even--altogether, this aid package is not even one tenth of what you gave AIG.  So let's face it; we need, in fact, much more help.  We are responsible, a responsible state.  We've brought democracy back, it's a young democracy.  Accept it, it was not me who was aiding the dictators of the past.

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