MSNBC Hardball with Chris Matthews October 29, 2001

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Brent Scowcroft was national security advisor under the first President Bush. General, thank you for joining us. You know all about...

BRENT SCOWCROFT: My pleasure.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: ...these kinds of fights. We have an ally over there in the field, Pakistan.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: Yes.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Can we trust them?

SCOWCROFT: That's – I don't like to use that word.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: All right. Give me a word. Rely?

BRENT SCOWCROFT: Can we rely – yes. I think we can rely on them. President Musharraf has a very, very narrow line he has to walk. He's on our side. He understands how important it is to support the United States, but he has a lot of people in his country who are Taliban supporters and probably a lot who are Osama bin Laden supporters. So what he has to do is – is support us, at the same time, not get himself overthrown and killed by the people who don't like him.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: We heard this weekend that he betrayed Abdul Haq, one of the people over there freebooting or helping us in a kind of a freelance fashion on behalf of the CIA. And he may have – his own intelligence service – Musharraf's intelligence service, the Pakistani CIA, may have ratted on this guy's position and cost him his life. He was hanged because of treason against our cause. Do we have to face the problem that the secret service, the intelligence service of Pakistan is on the other side? We have to assume that?

BRENT SCOWCROFT: Well, Musharraf, a while back, retired the former head of ISI, for exactly those reasons. ISI has sort of been a rogue elephant in in some sense of the word.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Right.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: I'm not sure how reliable they are. They're are probably some in who are playing their own game. Absolutely.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: What do you make of the stories, the reports that – I'm sure you've got a better view of them than we do – like, for example, Secretary of State Powell had to send in a decoy plane. They had to do what – an abortive landing, various decoy methods to try – diversionary methods to avoid being killed because of secret information that was available to our enemies, not from Musharraf – the president likes us – but some of his intelligence people.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: Well, look, if – if saying – is Musharraf completely in charge so that he knows everything that's going on and everybody supports him? No. He's got – that's a tough neighborhood. And he's atop a pyramid that has a lot of mice in it running around. And so we – you know, we've got to be careful. But we've also got to be careful that we support him. Because if we lose him, we could end up with another terrorist state.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Commenting on what I was talking about, the execution of his friend, Abdul Haq, Former Reagan National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane cites the CIA's $30 billion budget and says, quote, "The CIA has failed miserably. There's an appalling lack of intelligence skills. I haven't yet found one" – one speaker who speaks Dari – that's the local language – -"in the agency or anyone who speaks any other Afghan dialect, for that matter. Or any analyst with real knowledge of Afghanistan's history, its tribal cultures, the networks that exist there." Are we that bad off...

BRENT SCOWCROFT: Well, I don't know...

CHRIS MATTHEWS: ...in fighting this war?

BRENT SCOWCROFT: I – don't – I don't know whether we're that bad.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Are we fighting blind?

BRENT SCOWCROFT: But one – that's one of the reasons that we need a coalition. We need friends.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: We need locals.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: We need allies. We need locals. We need the people in the region who know the region, who speak the language of this sort. We ought to admit what we don't. We shouldn't try to be expert. And that's why we need all of these people with very different perspectives. And people say...

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Can we separate the missions once again? The American people, I have to believe, don't really give a darn about whether we build a popular democratic government in Kabul. What they want to do is bring justice to the people who killed our people.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: Absolutely.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Can we separate those missions?

BRENT SCOWCROFT: Oh, I think we have to. What we need to end up with, first of all, is to get rid of the terrorist networks. And perhaps that requires getting rid of the Taliban. What we need in Kabul is a country with enough government to prevent them moving back in.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Why don't we just – I'm going to be American here. Why don't we just go into the Taliban, find these bozos and offer them more money than – than Bin Laden's giving him for his life? Why don't we just outbid them? We've got the most money in the world. If they're bought by him, why don't we outbid them?

BRENT SCOWCROFT: I hope maybe we're trying that.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: It does make sense, though?

BRENT SCOWCROFT: Of course, it makes sense.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Rather than having to fight a war to kill an entire army, why don't we just buy the generals?

BRENT SCOWCROFT: You could probably do that with some. You may not be able to. One of the reasons that Taliban have been successful in Afghanistan is that they came in and pushed out warlords who were nothing more than thugs, and the Taliban at least had some principles.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: What are you most optimistic about, our ability to catch the people in here that have been involved in this network, to catch the people in Europe and around the world, or to destroy the head of this Al Qaeda network in Afghanistan? Where's our best bet as a security expert?

BRENT SCOWCROFT: I think our best bet is to go after the networks.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Is that where the head and the heart of – of – of al-Qaeda is, over in Afghanistan?

BRENT SCOWCROFT: Well, I think – I think it is. But Osama bin Laden, while he's the head, I don't think if you cut that head off the organization disappears.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: So it's like a worm.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: You need – yes. You need to root...

CHRIS MATTHEWS: It just keeps regrowing.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: You need to root it out. I think we can. I really think we can. It won't be easy. It'll be very hard, but we need help.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Do we need to go back to the black bag jobs...

BRENT SCOWCROFT: Yes.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: ...where we go off an knock off a guy in the night.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: Yes. Yes. We've got to realize this is a tough area, a lot of nasty people. And if you try to play by Marquis of Queensbury rules, we're going to get our clock cleaned.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Is our CIA too spiffy, too white-collared these days to fight the good old Cold War fight they used to fight in the late – when they did with the OSS and the war of World War II and later on in the Cold War? Are they tough enough for this, to do what you said we need to do?

BRENT SCOWCROFT: I hope so, and I think so, but they're out of practice. You know, we have so encrusted them with rules and regulations.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Right.

BRENT SCOWCROFT: You can't deal with anybody who has human rights violations. You can't do this. You can't do that. You've got...

CHRIS MATTHEWS: So you think we may have legislated them out of their potency?

BRENT SCOWCROFT: I think we probably crossed the line.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: How long will it take us if we have a good president – we seem to have a guy committed to this mission – and we have a great cabinet, it looks like – how long does it take us the win this fight against Al Qaeda, to be able to say we won the war?

BRENT SCOWCROFT: I'm just guessing. It's a matter of years, not months.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Thank you very much, Brent Scowcroft, former national security advisor to President Bush Sr.