Book Review: Leon Panetta’s ‘Worthy Fights’ (Updated)

There was a part before and after your quote that changes the context. For instance, I suspected before going to your link that Panetta was not answering due to classification. I was right, and BTW, have no idea whether the Chinese got our helicopter parts or not. But it does raise issues about UCLASS and the need for exquisite penetrating RPAs because if they go down, you give up key technology, and they can be shot down by fighters visually as well.

So if you can't risk key tech like that over enemy territory, why not just stand off with Global Hawk, Triton, and Reapers and look across the border and at coasts that way and with satellites? After all 99.9% of the time will be peacetime, not war. We retain stealth fighters and fewer (hopefully) LRS-B for penetration during war but why spend excessively upfront for a stealthy UCLASS with high costs per flight hour when you need to fly naval RPAs a lot. If you can put two or three smaller UCLASS up for the flying hour cost of one exquisite stealth one, it's kind of a no brainer because 360 degree protection is critical for naval assets.

Anyway, here is the rest of the Pakistan and other terror discussion issues that you left out in your smaller quote. This picks up after Secretary Panetta made the comment about "protecting his old hat." But note how quickly he responds with implied issues of Pakistani airspace and ground routes. Like our relationship with other countries, the relationship with Pakistan is complicated:

<blockquote>MR. SESNO: It’s not a no, though.

SECRETARY PANETTA: Well, I’m not going to comment because it does relate to classified intelligence. But –

MR. SESNO: But are you concerned about this?

SECRETARY PANETTA: -- clearly we’re –

MR. SESNO: Are you concerned?

SECRETARY PANETTA: We’re concerned with the relationships that Pakistan has. What makes this complicated is that they have relationships with the Haqqanis, and the Haqqani tribes are going across the border and attacking our forces in Afghanistan, and it’s pretty clear that there’s a relationship there. There’s a relationship with LET, and this is a group that goes into India and threatens attacks there and has conducted attacks there. In addition to that, they don’t provide visas. They – in the relationship there are bumps and grinds to try to work it through.

And yet there is no choice but to maintain a relationship with Pakistan. Why? Because we’re fighting a war there. Because we are fighting al-Qaida there and they do give us some cooperation in that effort, because they do represent an important force in that region, because they do happen to be a nuclear power that has nuclear weapons and we have to be concerned about what happens with those nuclear weapons.

So for all of those reasons, we have got to maintain a relationship with Pakistan. And it’s going to be – it is not – as I said, it is complicated. It’s going to be ups and downs. I mean, the Secretary and I have spent countless hours going to Pakistan, talking with their leaders, trying to get their cooperation.

MR. SESNO: Take us into – let me ask the two of you to take us into a conversation that you might have together in the privacy of several hundred people and cameras. (Laughter.) This war that you talk about is largely conducted with drones. Those drones are deeply resented and complicate your efforts on the diplomatic front. How do you balance that? Isn’t your best asset your worst nightmare?

SECRETARY CLINTON: No, no. Let me take you back to conversations that are not maybe so current but I think relevant. Shortly after I became Secretary of State, we were quite concerned to see the Pakistani Taliban basically taking advantage of what had been an effort by the government in Pakistan to try to create some kind of peace agreement with the Pakistani Taliban and to, in effect, say to them, look, you stay in Swat, which is one of the territories, you stay there and don’t bother us, we won’t bother you. And I was very blunt, both publicly and privately, with my Pakistani interlocutors in saying you can’t make deals with terrorists. I mean, the very people that you think you can either predict or control are, at the end of the day, neither predictable nor controllable.

And I was very pleased when the Pakistanis moved in to Swat and cleaned out a lot of what had become a kind of Pakistani Taliban stronghold. And then they began to take some troops off of their border with India to put more resources into the fight against the Pakistani Taliban.

Now, as Leon says, we have some other targets that we discuss with them – the Haqqanis, for example – and yet it’s been a relatively short period of time, two and a half years, when they have begun to reorient themselves militarily against what is, in our view, an internal threat to them. We were saying this because we think it will undermine the control that the Pakistani Government is able to exercise.

So we have conversations like this all the time, Frank, and I do think that there are certain attitudes or beliefs that the Pakistanis have which are rooted in their own experience, just like we have our own set of such convictions. But I also think that there is a debate going on inside Pakistan about the best way to deal with what is an increasing internal threat.

SECRETARY PANETTA: Let me just add to that. I mean, the reason we’re there is we’re protecting our national security. We’re defending our country. The fact was al-Qaida, which attacked this country on 9/11, the leadership of al-Qaida was there. And so we are going after those who continue to plan to attack this country. They’re terrorists. And the operations that we’ve conducted there have been very effective at undermining al-Qaida and their ability to plan those kinds of attacks.

MR. SESNO: What’s left of them?

SECRETARY PANETTA: But let me make this point. Those terrorists that are there are also a threat to Pakistani national security as well. They attack Pakistanis. They go in to Karachi, they go in to Islamabad, and conduct attacks there that kill Pakistanis. So it is in their interest – it’s in their interest – to go after these terrorists as well. They can’t just pick and choose among terrorists.

MR. SESNO: What’s left of the al-Qaida network?

SECRETARY PANETTA: The al-Qaida network has seriously been weakened. We know that. But they’re still there and we still have to keep the pressure on. Those that are suggesting somehow that this is a good time to pull back are wrong. This is a good time to keep putting the pressure on to make sure that we really do undermine their ability to conduct any kind of attacks on this country.

MR. SESNO: Will they ever be defeated, or was Donald Rumsfeld right and this is just the long war?

SECRETARY PANETTA: You know, we can go after the key leadership of al-Qaida that I think has largely led this effort, and we have seriously weakened them. We certainly took out bin Ladin, which I think seriously weakened their leadership as well, and I think there are additional leaders that we can go after. And by weakening their leadership, we will undermine al-Qaida’s ability to ultimately put together that universal jihad that they’ve always tried to put together in order to conduct attacks on this country.

So the answer to your question is that we have made serious inroads in weakening al-Qaida. There’s more to be done. There are these nodes now in Yemen, in Somalia, and other areas that we have to continue to go after. But I think we are on the path to being – seriously weakening al-Qaida as a threat to this country.

MR. SESNO: Let’s talk about Iraq for a few minutes and then we’ll take a question on that topic from the audience. We’ve seen a terrible string of attacks over the last 24 hours that have claimed, at last count, nearly 90 lives, hundreds injured, leading to grave concerns about the ability of the Iraqi Government to look after its own security. What is happening in that country now? What do you read from this wave of violence?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, what I see happening is that there continues to be a terrorist capacity inside Iraq. I don’t know as – at the time I left my office, no one had claimed credit, but we believe that it could very well be al-Qaida in Iraq trying to assert itself.

MR. SESNO: The Sunni extremists.

SECRETARY CLINTON: The Sunni extremists. At the same time, we know that there are Shia extremists who have been also conducting attacks, not quite to the extent of what we saw yesterday, but attacks that have killed Americans and killed Iraqis.

Now, I’m of two minds about this, Frank. I mean, I deplore the loss of life and the ability of these terrorists to continue to operate inside Iraq. I also know that until recently, the trajectory of violence had been going in the right direction, namely down. And we saw that and we were feeling that it was headed in the right direction.

The Iraqis themselves have more capacity than they did have, but they’ve got to exercise it. And we spend a lot of time pushing our friends in the Iraqi Government to make decisions, like naming a defense minister and an interior minister, so that they can be better organized to deal with what are the ongoing threats. And certainly we’re in discussions with them now because they do want to be sure that they have sufficient intelligence and surveillance and reconnaissance capacity, ISR. They want to be sure that they can defend themselves both internally and externally, and that’s a conversation that our ambassador and our commander are having in Baghdad.</blockquote>

Lest you think me excessively illiberal, I applaud Hillary Clinton for "getting it" in Iraq on ISIS before current events in her last few comments above. Same with Leon Panetta in his criticisms of current Obama policies in his book and in interviews. Shoot, even Jimmy Carter said he was screwing up.