President's Forum

Nicholas Platt: On behalf of everyone at the Asia Society, I'm delighted to welcome you all here to the President's Forum. It's the first President’s Forum since we reopened the Asia Society two weeks ago, but it is the 26th President’s Forum since we started this in 1987. This has been an opportunity for me and my predecessor, Bob Oxnam, to have engaging conversations with a whole range of extraordinary people in the diplomatic community, in the arts, and in business. Our guests have included David Rockefeller, Kofi Annan, Yo Yo Ma, and the Dalai Lama. And tonight, we have Richard Holbrooke.

The format tonight, as before, will be an informal conversation. The wonderful thing about this auditorium is that it has excellent acoustics and you feel that you're in the same living room with the people up on the stage, so I want you to think that you're a witness to a conversation with me and Dick Holbrooke, and then, after we've talked for a while, we'll turn up the lights a bit, and then you can join the conversation.

Richard Holbrooke is, in my view, the great foreign policy talent of his generation. I worked for Dick when he was Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the State Department, and then in a number of other jobs in Washington in the White House and in the Defense Department as a member of the interagency team that he put together to coordinate policy towards East Asia.

We got a lot of things done in those days. I think the crowning achievement was the formal recognition of China, and the final normalization of relationships, which was in 1979. I think that was the great achievement of his tenure, but we also were able to maintain the American security posture in Korea and throughout the region. We were able to keep Kim Dae Jung alive. We were able to get the Japanese to spend more money on defense, and a number of other things. I'm proud to have been associated with him during that time.

Subsequently, I have watched in awe as he expanded his expertise and his experience to other fields -- to Europe, first as Ambassador to Germany, and then later as Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, and a historic role as chief architect of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that ended the war in Bosnia, then to the United Nations as U.S. Permanent Representative and membership in the Clinton cabinet, where he shaped U.S. policy towards the UN, the Balkans, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and humanitarian crises issues such as AIDS.

This willingness to take on difficult and risky negotiating tasks has earned him the respect of the entire professional diplomatic community and six Nobel Peace Prize nominations. I think one of the most impressive negotiations he undertook, maybe one of the more impressive in the history of diplomacy, was his negotiation with Jesse Helms to get the U.S. to pay their dues.

Dick has had several successful forays into the business world, as Vice President of Credit Suisse First Boston, and as Managing Director of Lehman Brothers. He's been honored as an author of highly regarded books and articles. He's currently Vice Chairman of Perseus, which is an investment group, and his main task, really, is President and CEO of the Global Business Council on HIV/AIDS.

Dick has just come back from China, and I, of course, am very curious about what the impact of September 11th has been on our major relationships around the world. Dick has just spent some time with Jiang Zemin and had a good trip to the Middle Kingdom. Maybe you could tell us something about it.

Richard C. Holbrooke: Thank you, Nick. First before I do that, let me just say how incredible it is to be back here in the new configuration of this great institution, and my kudos to you and to Hank Greenberg and to Arthur and Janet Ross and all the others who made it possible. It's just a real thrill to watch this institution grow under its various leaders and reach this level of permanence. It makes New York the center of Asian-American relations and culture, and I think it's terribly important.

On China, like Nick, I've been going to China a long time. I got there after him, and then he and I went in together in 1978… and I've been going back pretty steadily since then. This trip came right after President Bush had been in Shanghai, and it was my first trip there in slightly over a year, and we saw a lot of government officials.

Here's the situation in Sino-American relations as I see it -- I think we've reached another one of the historic junctures in Sino-American relations that has presented itself regularly in the last half century. I would call it an opportunity for phase three in the modern Sino-American relationship. Phase one can be very precisely dated from August of 1971, when Henry Kissinger took his secret trip, to June 4th, 1989, Tiananmen Square. [The first phase was] under Nixon, Ford, Carter, even Reagan, after flirting with a disastrous upgrading of the Taiwan-U.S. relationship, and very early George Bush. The relationship, although it had its rocky moments, continually strengthened. It was based on a common strategic view of the world, which was to oppose Soviet expansion, and it was premised on the formula embodied in the Shanghai communiqué to set the Taiwan issue aside and build on our common purpose. It included the point Nick made in his very generous introduction about normalization of relations, which was Jimmy Carter's historic contribution to the relationship. That was 1971 to 1989.

Under phase two, 1989 to roughly September 11th, the relationship was very rocky. The strategic basis of it disappeared, because not only did we have Tiananmen Square, but we had the end of the Soviet empire. The Taiwan factor changed dramatically, because Taiwan went from a dictatorship to a functioning democracy. Human rights considerations rose in importance. The old Taiwan group reformed itself and found a new way to present itself as a political factor. Tibet became a serious issue. In my mind, in fact, the most serious potential risk of the Sino-American relationship to this moment. Religious freedom became an issue. Trade frictions, which are inevitable with the growth of a trade relationship, arrived. And above all, you have the two factors that I began with in this phase -- the legacy of Tiananmen Square and the end of the Cold War, which eliminated the strategic basis for the relationship. That period may have ended on September 11th.

Now, prior to September 11th, the Chinese leadership was extraordinarily angry at the Bush Administration -- far, far angrier than they will ever admit publicly. They had made a fantastic miscalculation, but an understandable one. They had thought that George W. Bush would continue the policies of his father, who they remembered as the ambassador who, along with Barbara Bush, bicycled around Beijing in the 1970s, and whose administration, notwithstanding Tiananmen Square, had been undergirded by people like Brent Scowcroft, George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, people who really believed in the strategic importance of the relationship. It's understandable that Beijing made this judgment, and even during the campaign, when Governor Bush used the phrase "strategic competitor," they said, "Well, that's just campaign rhetoric." They'd seen Ronald Reagan in 1980 do the same thing and back off. And above all, there was President Bush the senior.

So everyone was telling Beijing to relax, and what actually happened, as you all know, is the administration began in on missile defense, which the Chinese thought [this was] was targeted directly at them, and they had some cause for it. They escalated the rhetoric on Taiwan, in my mind, needlessly, because I don't believe there is a crisis over Taiwan. And then there was the dreadful airplane incident. In the 25 years I've been watching and working on Sino-American relations, Beijing handled it the worst way I’ve ever seen. Maybe it was the backlash of the attack, maybe it was the accidental strike on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, maybe it was nationalism, maybe it was anger, but whatever it was, the Chinese needlessly escalated an obvious, open-and-shut case of a reckless Chinese Air Force pilot ramming a plane and a remarkable, truly heroic action by the American crew to save them, and they turned it into an incident…. And then there were the trade frictions.

So the situation was extremely rocky, and then came September 11th. And, as Nick said, I was there just after President Bush. What was striking to me was the effect September 11th had. This is why I began by saying that I think we have an opportunity for a third phase in Sino-American relations. Once again, Beijing and Washington have a common strategic purpose, as we did in phase one, 1971 to 1979. This time, the common enemy is not the Soviet Union or Soviet Expansionism or Soviet hegemonism, as the code words of the 1970s went. This time it's terrorism. The Chinese, who are arguably the most conservative regime in the world, are pathologically afraid of terrorism; it isn't just generic. One of the major groups they're focused on are the Uygurs and other Muslim minorities inside China. The Uygurs, physically look like Afghans and Uzbeks. They lap over the border into Kurdistan, and they're part of this extraordinarily wonderful group of Central Asian tribes which the Asia Society has done so much to show the culture and art of. But they are Muslim, and they are not Chinese, and, most importantly, there is some considerable evidence that some of the Uygurs have been trained in Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda camps. Now, whatever you think of the evidence, the important thing is the Chinese leadership believes that and there have been some terrorist incidents.

When I saw Jiang Zemin, he grabbed me by the lapel in that very aggressive style of his and said, half in English, half in Chinese, "You know we have a 97 kilometer common border with Afghanistan," as though he had just discovered it. And now that border is totally impassable, and for historians, it's interesting to note that that little finger you see on the map of Afghanistan every day in the newspapers, which stretches from Kunduz east, and reaches China, which looks completely inexplicable, has a wonderful historic explanation which is directly relevant to the current crisis in Afghanistan. The borders of modern Afghanistan were drawn by the British Empire in the 1850s and '60s, and the British did not want any part of Czarist Russia to touch British India. So as they drew the map, the British drew this tiny little corridor called the Wakhan Corridor. Look in tomorrow's papers, and you'll notice this long, inexplicable thing jutting out from Afghanistan in the upper right-hand corner of the map. It touches China. That's the 97 kilometer border. And that's because of the British and the Czar, and it's a very good example of hundreds or thousands of other colonial boundaries all over the Mideast, Central Asia, Africa, and, for that matter, the Balkans which created legacies which we live with today. But this particular one has special importance for Nick's question, because even if it's an impassable border-- and it is impassable-- it's a common border.

So the Chinese saw Al Qaeda as training Uygur separatists. There are other Muslim minorities they worry about as well. So there is a common strategic purpose. They were enormously grateful to George W. Bush for making the trip to Shanghai for the APEC Summit. He skipped Beijing, but they understood that. The fact is that it's the only time he's left the States since September 11th. President Bush was completely correct to make that trip, and while Jiang Zemin felt the meetings didn't go on as long as they should have, he was immensely pleased at the act of the meetings, the courtesy and the fact that they wield a common position against terrorism. This does create a new opportunity to reinforce the strategic underpinnings of the relationship. It's not going to solve the list of problems in this phase two that I mentioned earlier-- Tibet, Taiwan, trade, religious freedoms, human rights. But those issues are what we have to work on. If you begin with the premise that one way or the other, the world's largest country and the world's most powerful country have got to work out a relationship with each other, and that relationship is going to be the bilateral challenge for the next half century for American policy makers, then there needs to be a strategic relationship.

Which brings me to my operational thought. There are three documents which undergird this relationship: the Shanghai Communiqué, the Normalization of Relations Communiqué of December of 1978, and the Arms Sales Communiqué on arms sales to Taiwan of August of 1982. Those three communiqués are of immense importance to Beijing. Beijing takes these things very seriously, and the three communiqués have been reaffirmed by every president since, but the most recent of them is 19 years old. The Cold War ended, Taiwan became a democracy, Tiananmen Square happened, we've had several American presidents, and we've had growing misunderstandings over the Taiwan issue, which is the core issue that has to be kept in its box while we work on the other issues.

It's my own view that I would like to see the United States and China write a fourth communiqué, in which they reaffirm the principles of the first three and Taiwan, and then address the new nexus of issues of the last 19 years. They can do common ground on terrorism. They can set aside the hegemony clauses of the first three, because those are no longer relevant. In fact, when the Chinese say hegemonist now, they mean us, not Moscow. And we can make on our side a statement of human rights, Tibet and so on, and we can have it out with them. That would take some very skilled diplomacy with Beijing, and it would take a real determination to see it through, and this administration may not think that's politically desirable, because there are still a lot of people out there who look at China as some kind of potential adversary to us, or as direct a military threat to Taiwan.

Now, I have a lot of problems with China. I want to be clear about this. Tibet is at the top of my own list and of course, human rights. But I don't believe Taiwan is at risk here, and I think an enormous amount of the rhetoric we've heard on China over the last few years has been overheated and very unproductive to a long-term relationship, and I think that a fourth communiqué that laid it out would have a very stabilizing effect.

Nick Platt: There's an election in Taiwan tomorrow that will muddy the political waters. At the same time, the economic imperative for closer relationships between Taiwan and the mainland are moving every day. Investment is going up and up across the strait. We now have a strategic imperative, and we also have an economic imperative. The trade figures, the travel figures, the student figures, all of these things that make for the sinews of a lasting relationship, have just continued to go up and up and up…. Now it's time to kind of put these things together, I think, and the issue is, well, what's the right hook? So I'm not sure where you come out on that, but perhaps there should be an exchange of visits in an effort to put some new language on the table.

Richard C. Holbrooke: Given the value of these first three communiqués, each one of which addressed and solved fundamental problems and gave a long period of productivity in the relationship, I would like to see it. But in a communiqué, we can't give away core principles. The genius of the 1972 communiqué was the creation of the famous "our side/your side" formula. For those of you who have forgotten it or never knew it, it was simply that each side stated it's own view in areas they differed, and they both then signed on to it. It was a way for Nixon to solve the political problem that he was facing making the famous trip. For example, in the Normalization Communiqué we didn't know what to do about selling arms to Taiwan. The Chinese said we couldn't sell arms. We said we were going to. We spent months arguing this, and finally it dawned on us that what the Chinese were saying is, "We'll never agree to your selling arms to Taiwan, but you just go ahead and do it anyway, and we'll keep objecting." On that basis, we normalized.

But then Reagan started to escalate the relationship with Taiwan and sell too much. Then the Chinese freaked out, and then we had to negotiate that third agreement, and each of the agreements enabled a productive period to move, but now in a different world. The only reason I suggest the fourth communiqué, Nick, is because there is finally, for the first time since '89, a common strategic adversary, namely terrorists. The Chinese hate them. That doesn't mean they would support the Bush Administration if we went after Saddam in Iraq. That's a whole different issue. But Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, the southern Philippines, the ring of separatist groups in the area, most of which are involved right on the fringes. It's a big deal to them.

Nicholas Platt: What was your sense from your trip of what the Chinese would be willing to do concretely to help us in the war against terrorism?

Richard C. Holbrooke: I think they're already doing some things. I think there has already been an opening of discussions that are below the radar screen, either because the press hasn't reported them in the face of other, more dramatic events, or because they're secret. The most obvious one was the immediate Chinese decision to let ships come into Hong Kong, which needed to come in on their way to the Gulf. Both you and I worked on the very dramatic, and initially secret military relationships between Beijing and Washington from 1979 to 1981, and I think there's probably a lot more of that going on than we know about, because, and I stress this, it's in the Chinese mutual interest. There are also some subplots here. Those of you who have looked at a list of other possible war on terrorism targets will undoubtedly have noticed that several of them are on China's immediate borders, most notably North Korea, and the Korean issue has always been there. But now it's in a different context. So we'll see.

Nicholas Platt: Well, I remember at that time, in late 1979, when the Soviets were invading Afghanistan, the Chinese moved very rapidly to provide rather specific basic humanitarian aid and also some weaponry, which is obviously not something we want right now, but I'm just wondering whether they're willing to put some humanitarian aid into Afghanistan. Let's talk a little bit about Afghanistan.

Richard C. Holbrooke: Well, let me just say one thing. Several Chinese have unofficially informally suggested to me that there might be a willingness on Beijing's part to consider for the first time participating in a UN peacekeeping force at some future date. Now, they sent five policemen to East Timor, which is a tiny number, but anyone who knows China knows that even a number that small could only have been decided at the State Council level. I don't think they'll participate in a multinational force of the sort I've been advocating strongly for Afghanistan, which I believe is needed right now, and I'm rather concerned at the delays. I hope you'll understand the distinction between a multinational force and a UN force: a multinational force is national troops, a coalition of countries that want to participate, approved by the Security Council, but not under UN control, and those are the ones that work (East Timor, Kosovo, Bosnia, for example) while a UN force is an international force wearing blue berets, reporting to the UN. The UN cannot run those forces. They don't know how. Their peacekeeping office here in New York is 400 people; it’s way understaffed, and those things mess up big-time (Bosnia, the first time around, Rwanda, and Somalia, for example). I don't think the Chinese would ever participate in the first, a multinational. But a UN force, given the importance the Chinese attach to the UN, and the high importance to them and their closest friends, the Pakistanis, of stability in Afghanistan, they've hinted to me they might do it.

Nicholas Platt: This is a very key question right now. It's a question in Bonn. It's a question in everybody's mind. The UN approves someone sending some forces. We apparently don't want to play this role. Who should play the role?

Richard C. Holbrooke: Well, it's very unclear what's happening in Bonn. The reporting is almost directly internally contradictory on a day-to-day basis. I have a long-term view that they will achieve something in Bonn, but I am frankly very unhappy watching these people from the Northern Alliance sitting in Bonn. These are low-level people; their leaders never came to Bonn, which to me is shocking. The Northern Alliance is acting as though they liberated Kabul when it was American air power, which they then exploited, and then rebuffing or playing games or negotiating as though they are the sovereign power over the terms of the introduction of Bonn troops. Every day that they pull this off, they're strengthening their hold over Kabul, and the local warlords and Kunduz and Mazar-i-Sharif and Herat and not yet Kandahar, of course, because that's still in Taliban hands, but that, too, will fall fairly soon, in my view. Every day these warlords are strengthening their positions and marginalizing this high-profile international effort in Bonn, and I'm very concerned about that.

Nicholas Platt: There's some idea of developing a multinational force of Islamic military led by Turkey. Do you think that that would work?

Richard C. Holbrooke: I think the best multinational force, the best military force is the multinational force along the East Timor model, which was led by Australia. The Australians got their forces in in 96 hours. Kofi Annan said later that it would have taken at least four to six months to assemble a UN force. The Australians didn't go in alone, though. They had Filipino, Thai, Malaysian, American, British and New Zealand support. So the question is, who plays the Australian role in Afghanistan? I don't care. Anyone. But the most appropriate country to do it would be Turkey, the only Muslim nation in NATO. [Turkey has a] very strong and tough army, as you all know, and it is an area where Turkish influence has been a historic and cultural factor. Jordan, Bangladesh, Morocco, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Norway, Sweden, Nigeria. A lot of other names have come up, and if it isn't the Turks, let it be someone else. The dilemma is that it's being blocked in Bonn by the Northern Alliance, which is trying to delay it, because the minute a multinational force arrives, which, by the way, would bring brief, temporary stability to the region, the Northern Alliance will no longer be the big guns.

And by the way, I know we all read how fiercely the Afghans fight to throw foreigners out. I'll be very bold here, as private citizens can be, and predict that right now the poor, desperate people of Afghanistan, who have been so battered in the last 30 years, would welcome, at least in the short term, a multinational force so that they can regain their footing, and without it, I don't think you're going to get a coherent government or the Afghan diaspora to return. There are hundreds of thousands of Afghans in this country and elsewhere, many of whom could go back and would go back, so that would be my approach.

Now, today's Washington Post had an article that also said that General Franks doesn't want this force yet, so it needs to also be noted that if that article is correct, and I have reason to think it is, that the U.S. military doesn't want any other troops in the country until they finish the job militarily, so there may be an additional reason that this is moving so slowly.

I want to underscore, because I don't want to leave the impression that I'm being critical here, that Nick and I are talking about tactical considerations. The big issue, from an American point of view is: will we finish the military job? To me, the answer is unquestionably yes. The only surprising thing to me about the reaction to the Taliban's quick collapse is that people were surprised. They were never more than a motley group of mullahs and militia. They weren't a real government. They weren't a serious military force, and they had lost whatever initial popularity they had in many areas of the country. I have no doubt that we will succeed in finishing the job militarily in the Kandahar area, and I also believe that one way or another the U.S. military will succeed in neutralizing or eliminating bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network, whether a lucky bomb seals them off in a cave, or whether they're killed or captured. I just don't think you're going to hear much more from Osama bin Laden. His communication systems, both to the outside world through Al Jazeera and through whatever methods he used secretly, have all been shattered already.

So I want to underscore, the core goals laid out by President Bush are going to succeed, and the U.S. military has really done a good job. But this political follow-up component is critical. We cannot repeat the mistake that was made in 1989.

Nicholas Platt: I was there. It was actually in 1992. I was Ambassador in Pakistan at the time, and we backed off from our support for our surrogates in Afghanistan, and then the war came to an end. In 1992 the Soviet surrogate finally collapsed and the mujahadeen went back, and then we felt that our job was finished. We just lost interest and pulled out. It wasn't the only contributing factor, but it certainly helped to create this kind of no-man's-land, this place in the neighborhood where the cops don't go. We could have stayed and had a more stabilizing effect.

Now the key is to get some kind of government in there to which we can give aid. I remember so distinctly in 1992, I was advocating that we provide aid through provincial authorities, as we had always been doing, and Washington said, "No, after a while we have to provide aid to a central government," and there was no central government, so we just didn't do it. Now we need a central government of some sort to provide aid, to provide some security so you can get the humanitarian assistance in, and then do the reconstructing. So I think the political and the economic side are vital.

Richard C. Holbrooke: And why wasn't it done in 1992?

Nicholas Platt: It wasn't done because the place just dissolved into civil war, and that created the conditions two years later for the Taliban to get going. What we have to do in Afghanistan, it seems to me, is not drain the swamp, but fill it in. That is the challenge, and the administration, to its credit, has been saying that the military component of this is just a small part. The rest is political and economic, and I think we have to get on with it.

Well, Dick, I think we should open this conversation to the others in our living room.

Question: What is your assessment of the biggest risks in the world now regarding terrorism? Is Saddam really the number one risk and what do you think we might be doing about Saddam in the near future?

Richard C. Holbrooke: I'm not an expert on this issue, and I also don't think there's a single greatest risk. There's a series of different risks, and let us never forget who brought down that building in Oklahoma City. It was an American born terrorist. Does anyone doubt that Timothy McVeigh, had he had the capability to do it, would have taken on a larger target? Of course not. He was as willing to kill women and children as the hijackers of September 11th. So there isn't a single risk. There are also different kinds of risks.

But you asked about Saddam. Saddam is quite different from anyone else in this field, because he is preeminently the national leader who also wants to acquire weapons of terror and of mass destruction. Nick and I have both talked about the mistake in Afghanistan between 1989 and 1992 of letting it become a vacuum. We have to realize that the other colossal mistake in recent American foreign policy was letting Saddam off the mat in 1991. There are many reasons for this. The UN resolution seemed to preclude bringing him down. I disagree with that interpretation. I think the U.S. could have continued the war against Saddam, and I think leaving him in power created a terrible problem. That was 1991.

In the eight years of the Clinton Administration, the Clinton Administration was successful in keeping him geographically inside his box, but they did nothing significant to weaken him internally, and with UN inspectors now out of the country, it is not illogical to assume that with the inspectors out and him recognizing that a lot of people want to eliminate him, that he would be doing everything he can to acquire whatever weapons of mass destruction he could.

Would he use them and risk bringing down on his head the greatest use of air power in world history? That's another issue, and I have no way of judging that, but I think Iraq is in a different situation than any other country in the world right now. There are other problem areas. We mentioned North Korea. There's the Abu Sayyaf group in southern Philippines and there's Iran, as has been pointed out by many people, and there are groups like Hezbollah and Hamas which have shown a ruthlessness and have not hesitated to kill Americans. But I think Iraq is probably the most dangerous state factor in the world today.

One last point on terrorism. President Bush declared a war on terrorism, and I accept the rhetoric, but we have to understand what it is. It's a war like the war on drugs or the war on AIDS or the war on crime. It's not like World War II. There's never going to be a V-T day -- a victory over terrorism day -- at which point we're going to say it's over. All of us who live in this great but damaged city understand that we are now all vulnerable. I've been traveling a lot in the U.S. lately, and Americans understand this throughout the country. So in some intangible way, it will change our lives, although I think that the effort against Al Qaeda is going to produce real results. I really believe that.

Question: You mentioned that you thought it would be a good idea to have Turkey lead the multinational forces. What would that do to Turkey's stability and standing in that part of the world?

Richard C. Holbrooke: Its internal stability I don't think would be affected. Its standing I think would probably be enhanced in most countries, but I do want to underscore that if the Turks or any other like-minded country undertakes an effort like this, the U.S. will have to pick up a good chunk of the bill. Desert Storm, a decade ago, financed itself. Japan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other countries paid for it. This time around, this is a very expensive proposition, and the military phase is costing us well over a billion dollars a month and the multinational phase, assuming it comes, and I deeply hope it comes soon, will be cheaper, but we'll have to help the Turks and others.

It's a smart question. It's a tough question. But I think that the Turks can make the equation themselves, and they've said publicly they're ready to send 6,000 troops; they know that it's politically in their interest. They've been very shrewd about assessing what's in their own interests here.

Question: You spoke of the Washington Post essay, and you were commenting on the fact that the U.S.A. wants to be the only force in there until the job's done. Why? Why do we want to be the only force?

Richard C. Holbrooke: I can't put myself inside the mind of General Franks and Secretary Rumsfeld with any degree of certainty, and the information is very secondary, because my information comes mainly from the papers. I know most of the commanders involved pretty well, and I know their thinking because I went through the same arguments and discussions with them in Bosnia, where we ended up sending 20,000 troops, and argued ferociously over the terms of engagement, and Kosovo, where the situation was similarly complicated. [I was also involved in] the decision not to send support to Sierra Leone, and the hard-fought decision over whether to send 100 people to East Timor.

So within that framework and with that disclaimer, let me try to answer your question. If you were General Franks, who is a tough combat soldier, and who's got an unspecified number of troops under his command in combat conditions as we speak, you have only two things on your mind -- achieve your military objective, and minimize American casualties. That's all Tommy Franks is thinking about. I can assure you of that. And that's what you would do if you were the commander. I have great respect for General Franks. He's doing his job and he's doing it well, but my view is, we've got to get those multinational troops in. His view is, "If they come in, they're going to get in my way, and I have to find bin Laden. I have to finish off the Taliban.” The place is extremely dangerous. There was an uprising in the old fort in Mazar-i-Sharif the other day. 600 people got killed, and we had the first American fatality, the young CIA man who was in the middle of interrogating people when he got slaughtered. So he doesn't want anything to interfere, and that's exactly what you would expect from the commander on the ground. It is the responsibility of higher ranking people in the civilian chain of command, because we have civilian control over our military, to figure out whether we can let General Franks operate in complete freedom for his two objectives-- Taliban and Al Qaeda -- and simultaneously get the beginning of a stabilizing force in there. I believe it can be done by defining what terrain the multinational force can work in and what terrain they should stay out of. They could come into Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif and Kunduz, but they should go south of Kabul. They shouldn't be in Jalalabad yet. They shouldn't be in any of the area where the fighting is going on. That would be my view, but I think it's very clear why the military would not yet want to see a multinational force.

I'm more disturbed by the fact that the Northern Alliance is taking advantage of the delay to try to consolidate its hold, and the more the Northern Alliance solidifies its hold, the more I assume it will cause problems for our new friends in Pakistan. Is that correct?

Nicholas Platt: Yeah. I mean, there's been a rumble of criticism, a sense of another betrayal by the United States for having allowed the Northern Alliance into Kabul. Now, things collapsed so far as far as the Taliban is concerned, I don't think anybody could have controlled this. There was a vacuum created in Kabul that had to be filled. It was filled. But Musharraf and the people of Pakistan are upset about this, because their strategic imperative is to have a friendly government, or at the very least, a non-hostile government on their western borders.

Richard C. Holbrooke: Let me ask you a question, Nick. I don't understand this. I saw Musharraf when he was in New York, and we talked about this, but I couldn't get a clear sense. Will Pakistan ever allow the Northern Alliance to be the dominant political force in Kabul, or if that's the outcome, will they immediately start looking for a Pashtun force, not the Taliban, but some other Pashtun force which they back covertly, which immediately begins to try to go at the Northern Alliance again?

Nicholas Platt: My answer would be that I don't think the Afghans will allow that, because the Northern Alliance only represents a minority of the people of the country, and the Pashtuns have to be part of the picture. In fact, what Musharraf is now doing is pressing for adequate Pashtun representation in whatever government is coming out of the Bonn talks, and I think it will take several more stages, Bonn, Kabul, etc. And at the same time, he is also softening his attitude towards the Northern Alliance. The sense that a Northern Alliance-influenced Pakistan or Afghan government would be a real danger to Pakistan is something that he's trying to deal with. And he thinks it can be handled. It's got to be handled in both those ways.

In 1992, when the Northern Alliance came in and got a bigger share of the pie than the rest of the body politic for what was warranted, the result was civil war. This cannot happen again. I think everybody understands that. I think people in Afghanistan understand that. And Pakistan is going to have to live with a non-hostile government to the west instead of a relatively friendly one, although I, myself, have severe doubts about the amount of influence that Pakistan had in the later years over the Taliban itself.

Question: President Bush mentioned that we should target the states that harbor terrorism, and right after September 11th, we also saw reports in the Wall Street Journal that China signed an agreement of cooperation with the Taliban, and China also supports rogue states like North Korea and Sudan, and they're using the terrorist event to suppress dissenting voices, including religious groups. How should we deal with a regime that is notoriously known for suppressing dissenting voices? How do we promote a civil society and rule of law when we consider it a partnership?

Richard C. Holbrooke: Very eloquently, you ask the key, underlying question. We all understand that there's an inherent tension between the desire to improve and stabilize Sino-American relations and our abhorrence of certain things that have happened within China in the last half century, including the things you mentioned, and many others. You have to decide whether or not constructive engagement is correct or not. The Clinton Administration believed that you could have a constructive dialogue. The current administration prior to September 11th did not see much value in a constructive dialogue. They thought, in fact, that a constructive dialogue was a nonsense phrase that didn't really mean anything.

What makes the Chinese issue infinitely more complicated than any other in the world is the undeniable improvement in the lives of so many Chinese since 1979, and it is without historic precedent, as far as I can tell. I'm leaving Tibet aside for a minute. I know you mentioned Tibet, and Tibet, as I said in my opening remarks, Tibet is by far the most difficult of all the issues. But it is clear to people who have visited China over the last 25 years that most Chinese are better off today than they were 25 years ago, and that the Chinese Communist regime is unique among Communist regimes in actually doing something for the economic standing of most of its people. That doesn't mean there isn't corruption. There's a lot of corruption. That doesn't mean there aren't all these other problems you mentioned.

So the question is, were we right to open up trade? Were we right to give China most favored nation status and then permanent normal trading relations, and now to bring them into the WTO? I really believe we were. And the “isolate China” approach, I think, wouldn't have helped world stability, and it wouldn't have helped the people in China who have benefitted. But at the same time, we have to keep pounding away on these issues -- the treatment of intellectuals, the treatment of journalists, and many other similar issues that you raise.

Now, one word about Tibet, because I've mentioned it several times, and I would like to comment on it. Tibet presents a dramatically different situation than the rest of China because Tibet is so clearly a different culture and it is very fragile. I view the Tibetan culture as a kind of a fragile ecosystem, which can be damaged by the introduction of too many foreign elements. In this context, the introduction of large numbers of Chinese onto the High Plateau is that foreign element, and the Tibetan people really should be allowed to develop within their own cultural framework, within their own land, within the People's Republic of China. The Dalai Lama said he wants to do this. The Dalai Lama has repeatedly said he will accept the fact that Tibet will remain a part of China.

But the Chinese have higher demands than that, and they've put some extra burdens on the Dalai Lama. They want him to say certain things that he has refused to say, like that Tibet has always been part of China, rather than that it's simply now part of China. He doesn't want to concede that historical point. And there's a tremendous argument between the Dalai Lama and Beijing over what is Tibet. Is it the autonomous region shown on the map, or does it include all the other lands in which Tibetans have historically lived, which covers a quarter of the land of China? So there's this tremendous conflict.

It's rather interesting to me to note that the man who the world assumes will be the next leader of China, Hu Jintao, was governor of Tibet during the crackdown. No north Chinese leader, in fact, no Chinese leader in history has ever lived in Lhasa, but the man most people think will be the next leader has. He was governor of Tibet during the crackdown, as a matter of fact, a few years ago. But he does know Tibet, and my Tibetan friends are hopeful that if he takes over he will have more knowledge on this.

I want to say one more thing about Tibet. In my view, it's Tibet, not Taiwan, that has the capability of doing the greatest damage to the Sino-American relationship, because if this continues, if the Tibetans are denied the chance to have their unquestioned leader, the Dalai Lama, return, sooner or later there will be some kind of radicalized effort, either in the Dalai Lama’s name led by the monks, or a post-Dalai Lama liberation movement, like the one that happened in Kosovo. What happened in Kosovo was, you had a moderate leader, Dr. Rugava, who couldn't get anything out of Milosevic, so the Kosovo militants created a Kosovo liberation front, KLA, and within 13 or 14 months made themselves a factor in the world scene by using guerilla tactics, which their leader, who was a disciple of the Dalai Lama, and of Gandhi and of Martin Luther King, had repudiated. It was the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Front, that pulled the rest of the world into Kosovo and the 77-day bombing, which ended up, in effect, liberating Kosovo, took place. Everybody I've ever talked to about Tibet talks about that analogy, and if it would it be better for Tibet to start a violent movement. In my view it would be disastrous, because the West is not going to do in China and to Beijing what they did to small and already discredited Serbs in Belgrade.

But I'm very concerned, notwithstanding what I've just said, that if the Chinese do not negotiate with the Dalai Lama, they'll look back later and find they're up against a much more radicalized Tibetan leadership which may turn to violence. When I was there two or three weeks ago and we were talking about bin Laden and the Uygars and so on, the interlocutors I had spoken to immediately switched from the common threat of bin Laden training the Uygars to the Tibetans, who of course have nothing to do with bin Laden: Different religion, different culture, different attitudes. In the Chinese mind the Uygars, whose geographic area adjoins the Tibetan lands, and the Tibetans were somehow connected. I didn't see that connection.

Nicholas Platt: Well, we have to watch out for that, because they will want to make Tibet part of the war on terrorism.

We have time for one more question, and I'm going to ask it. Tell us what you're doing about AIDS.

Richard C. Holbrooke: When I was Ambassador to the UN, as Nick mentioned, we tried to give more visibility to the AIDS issue with greater success than we expected by bringing in the Security Council. No health issue had ever been discussed in the Security Council before. Indeed, at first, both China and Russia tried to oppose this on that very ground, that there was a separate group, the Economic and Social Council, that was supposed to do this. But we pushed, and we got it in, and some of you in this room may have been there in January of last year when Vice President Gore sat in the President's chair of the Security Council and led the discussion on this. It was a historic day, and we then passed the first resolution in the history of the Security Council concerning a health issue and mandated that the UN peacekeepers had to have a special effort on AIDS. I stress this because one of the terrible ironies of the UN peacekeepers was that they were spreading AIDS. The UN was going in to solve one problem, and was causing another. Wherever UN peacekeepers go, AIDS followed, and they take it home with them. It's been true for over a decade, and no one would admit it. When I said it publicly on the floor of the Security Council, the press spokesman for the peacekeeping office immediately denounced me and said I had no proof, but everybody knew it was true.

Now, when I left the UN, Secretary-General Annan and I talked about what I might do in the private sector and in the NGO area, and I talked to my wife about it, and we all thought AIDS was the area to keep focusing on. Kofi suggested that I focus on the corporate sector, because I'd been on Wall Street, because I knew how the government worked, and I had a certain credential in AIDS work. There was an existing organization called the Global Business Council on HIV/AIDS, but it was sort of moribund and it had only 17 members, and to make a long story short, the Council asked me to become its Chief Executive Officer. He left this evening. We raised a million dollars of seed money from the usual suspects-- Bill Gates, Ted Turner and George Soros.

But really, foundations should not support this. Corporations should. This is the business part of the war on AIDS. Now, why businesses? First of all, businesses in Africa have done nothing on this, even though it's becoming increasingly apparent that you have to hire three workers for every two jobs, in some cases, two workers for every job, in Africa. It's spreading like wildfire in South Asia, as you know from your tenure in Pakistan and the Philippines. The Caribbean is a highly affected area. It is the worst health crisis in 600 years. I want to stress to you the single most extraordinary of all statistics about this horrible disease; 95% of the people who are HIV-positive in the world don't know it, which means they are spreading it, wittingly or unwittingly, on a constant basis.

Now, corporations can do more. Earlier this year, Coca-Cola decided that it would start using its trucks to distribute condoms and information. Coca-Cola is the largest outside employer in Africa. Coca-Cola India is also doing something. It was a difficult decision for Coke. Many of the people said, "Don't associate the world's most popular soft drink with a fatal disease.” But when the CEO of Coca-Cola finally just weighed into this internal controversy and said, "No, we're going to do it," they got enormous positive publicity. It didn't hurt them at all, and it actually helped them.

If we're going after businesses, and I know a lot of you in this room are involved in business, we're trying to get members to join the Global Business Council. It's only $25,000 a year to be a member, and so companies that refuse to join are not doing it to save the money. They're doing it because they still just don't get it. So there are three or four different varieties. There's the Coca-Colas of the world, which really can do something in their own workplace. We want them to help counsel, to help destigmatize. Remember, businesses are less encumbered than religious groups, and by the way, a lot of the religious leaders in Africa, Muslim and Catholic alike, have been very damaging to this effort. Some of the Roman Catholics in one of the southern African countries had a public burning of condoms the other day. That's not going to help slow down the spread of AIDS.

But you have companies like Coke, which, with a huge workforce, can begin there. You have companies which can make a contribution through educational efforts. We need all the help we can get. I don't want to pretend that the corporate front of this war is going to change history. It's only a small part of the most important long-range social and health crisis in our lifetimes, and as I said earlier, over the last many centuries. But I think those of us who are in a position to work on an issue and don't work on preventing the spread of AIDS now will look back on our public careers later and say, "We really missed the single biggest issue, the most dangerous one." Obviously, terrorism is much on our minds now, and it is the number one priority right now, but the number of deaths from AIDS is, by a factor of thousands, going to exceed the deaths from terrorism, and it will destroy countries, and it will not be contained on the African continent or in South Asia…. We’re taking about an issue that cannot be ignored.

Nicholas Platt: And we won't. Thank you for coming. Thank you for being in our living room. It's been a great evening.

Richard C. Holbrooke: Thank you.