Gen. Anthony Zinni Discusses Lessons in Leadership

Gen. Anthony Zinni (left) discusses the crisis in leadership, during a discussion at The Commonwealth Club with President and CEO Dr. Gloria C. Duffy. (Photo by John Zipperer)

With an estimated three-fourths of Americans seeing a widespread leadership crisis, a high-profile veteran of America's foreign wars came to The Commonwealth Club on Tuesday (August 18) to talk about where leadership has succeeded and failed. In conversation with Commonwealth Club president and CEO Dr. Gloria Duffy, General Anthony Zinni, former commander in chief of the United States Central Command, told a lunch hour Commonwealth Club crowd that as of late there has been a leadership crisis in all aspects of society -- both at home and abroad. He underscored how the leadership lessons he learned on the battlefield could actually be applied to help people understand how to succeed in many areas of everyday life.

The surveys Zinni conducted for his new book Leading the Charge: Leadership Lessons from the Battlefield to the Boardroom, indicated that by 2008, 77 percent Americans felt that there was a leadership crisis in every facet of society. “In not one element of society did the leadership rise above 50 percent in approval rating. Not one political leader in the world received an approval rating of over 50 percent,” he said. From the corporate world to the political arena, leaders are failing.

General Zinni argued that in the current technological environment, a new and different type of leader must emerge. Factors and personality traits that contribute to successful leadership citing include “thinking creatively and strategically, knowing how to guide and communicate, being a unique decision maker, understanding the complexity of a new environment, and having a visionary approach,” he said.

Dr. Duffy, a former nuclear arms negotiator and assistant deputy of defense under Bill Clinton, remarked that we have witnessed numerous examples of failure in leadership recently -- from Detroit to the airline industry to Katrina -- and asked Zinni to share examples of good role models. General David Petraeus is a great leader who executed a “different approach to Iraq,” Zinni responded. “He liked to think out of the box.… He was more analytical and invited in contrary views. He operated outside the norm and did things on the ground that went far beyond the military dimension. Patreus saw the scope of what was required.” Zinni also highlighted how Patraeus deployed his troops to assist in all aspects of Iraqi life, from helping rebuild communities to job training. On a recent visit to Iraq, Petraeus told Zinni, “You’re not going to shoot your way to success here.”

Zinni observed that great leaders sometimes have to take great risks and suffer the most, doing their utmost to understand the needs of the people they lead. It was Israeli leader Shimon Perez who told Zinni that great leaders must also ignore “the righteous and the debaters.” Zinni commented that good leaders allow people to fail and show them how to improve saying, “They reach across lines to help others and believe in participatory decision making.” Amongst great world leaders, Zinni cited Jordan’s King Hussein, Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat, and Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. He also said the Bush administration failed to adequately acknowledge the leadership skills of Colin Powell, whom Zinni thinks was a tremendous asset to the country.

In the business world, Zinni attributed the success of Toyota and Honda to “the ability of their leadership to assess consumer desires, needs and expectations.” He also praised the charismatic attributes and skills of airline magnate Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Airways. In an industry of bankruptcy and failed models, Zinni noted, Branson succeeded.

Though he mentioned all of those leaders whose qualities impressed him, Zinni lamented that “we are living in confusing, complex times. The focus and cry now is for leadership. We are going to have to find human solutions.”

Zinni, who currently teaches at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, is a retired four-star general in the United States Marine Corps and former commander in chief of U.S. Central Command. In 2002, he was selected to be a special envoy for the United States to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. While serving as a special envoy, Zinni was also an instructor in the Department of International Studies at the Virginia Military Institute.

--Commonwealth Club Media & Public Relations Department

Central Asian Expert: U.S. Needs to Allow Iran, Others into the Afghan Question

President Barack Obama needs to give Iran assurances that the U.S. will not use Afghanistan to undermine the Iranian government, in exchange for assistance in the region, according to noted author Ahmed Rashid.

“You need Iran on every front, whatever you are talking about. Whether it is military, Taliban, terrorism or economics,” Rashid told a noon-time gathering at the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco today. “I think Iran is looking for that kind of minimum security for itself and Afghanistan. I think this is a big issue. It will obviously be opposed by the conservatives in the United States, but it needs to be done.”

Rashid, the author of the best-selling book, Taliban, which became the leading publication on the subject after 9/11, is promoting his current work, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, which chronicles the missteps and possible ramifications of further instability in the region.

One way the U.S. can begin to soothe the region, according to Rashid, is by reaching out diplomatically to the Iranians. "Obama needs to make private or public assurances to the Iranians that they will not use Afghan soil to undermine Iran like the Bush administration did or to seek regime change in Tehran through Afghanistan," said Rashid, adding that the U.S. must also assure all players in the region that it is not seeking permanent military bases in the future. “I don’t believe the Americans want to stay in Afghanistan just as much as they want to stay in Iraq and that is precisely why Obama was voted in to get out of Iraq,” he said.

Rashid also said the other regional powers, Russia and China, must be allowed to join the conversation because of interests in their border security, economic issues and the presence of Islamic extremism in both countries.

The issue of how President Obama will be able to sell the re-introduction of war in Afghanistan to the American people will be a complicated endeavor, yet Rashid believes it to be paramount to the success of any involvement in Central Asia.

“It’s going to be very difficult to sell a commitment to Afghanistan, but I think it is absolutely critical," he said, "It’s critical for your own homeland security. It’s critical for Europe -- for the fact that al Qaeda has spread there. It’s critical also because of the nuclear factor: Pakistan is a nuclear power and no one can afford for Pakistan to meltdown. And, finally, it’s really critical to stop the expansion of al Qaeda before these local jihadi groups become more organized and more of a part of this global jihad."

Rashid found little to argue with in the president's announcement last month of the addition of 17,000 troops into Afghanistan while looking at it in a practical sense. “You cannot talk to the Taliban from a position of weakness, and right now the U.S. is losing the war in Afghanistan," he said. "You have the president, who himself said the U.S. is not winning, which is a polite way of saying that the U.S. is losing.”

Inside the Pakistani Handling of the Swat Valley

The irascible Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate this week, believes the Pakistani truce with the Taliban in the Northwestern region of Swat is just one part of the eventual unraveling of the state.

Instead of purchasing peace, the Pakistani government has surrendered part of its heartland without a fight to those who can and will convert it into a base for further and more exorbitant demands. This is not even a postponement of the coming nightmare, which is the utter disintegration of Pakistan as a state. It is a stage in that disintegration.

Though his stark assessment of a failed state in its infancy is quite candid, the notion that the Pakistani government ceded a modernized former tourist outpost to a Taliban faction that never had any roots in the region has been problematic to many in the Obama administration. They worry that fundamentalist sanctuary was created in one sweep of the pen following the truce.

The seeds of the rise of the Taliban in the Swat Valley did not materialize overnight, but had been brewing since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11 and in part a sidebar to decades-long conflict between Pakistan and India.

Author Ahmed Rashid, whose book on the Taliban stood as the sole text on the then-obscure fundamentalist Muslim sect after 9/11, told Democracy Now! in June that the conflicts between tribal groups and Pakistanis on the border became a religious and family affair fused with an institutional fear by the Pakistanis of Indian dominance.

The tribes are divided by an artificial border created by the British. And the Pashtuns are the main recruiting base for the Taliban, and they’re also the main recruiting base for these paramilitary forces. So you had cousin fighting cousin, cousin on the Taliban side, another cousin on the Pakistan army side.

And their failure to deal with this, largely because of their refusal to retrain and rearm as a counterinsurgency force, because they go in as this army used to fighting on the plains of Punjab against Indian tanks rather than, you know, re-equipping and retraining as counterinsurgency forces, these heavy casualties they’ve taken have led to then these very dubious kinds of peace deals, which are essentially a surrender document by the Pakistan army to say, “Well, as long as you Taliban don’t attack us, the Pakistan army, we’ll let you stay where you are.”

This is what ultimately occurred last month. In addition, Rashid said earlier in the interview, the Pakistani government portrays the specter of India as a "bogey man" to the people. He says, for example, that the government continues to offer up a scenario of a huge Indian presence up north in Afghanistan seemingly ready to pounce on Pakistan. In essence, it illustrates that Pakistan has its eye primarily on India, with which it has fought three wars and still disputes the region of Kashmir.

How does the new American president handle Central Asia? President Obama has already vowed to escalate the war in Afghanistan at the expense of withdrawing troops from Iraq. Rashid believes Obama must look at the region as one giant geopolitical puzzle. "The first thing I would recommend very much for the new president is that you have to look at this region as a whole," said Rashid, "You cannot resolve the crisis in Afghanistan without ending the sanctuaries in Pakistan. You cannot persuade the Pakistan army to end those sanctuaries, unless you persuade the Indians to do something about Kashmir."

Lately, the President has showed a willingness to heed Rashid's advice. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has recently said that the U.S. is open to interacting with the Iranians and their role in the region, and one of President Obama's first executive decisions was to send drones to bomb the tribal regions of Pakistan along with making talks with the Pakistanis a prime campaign talking point.

With special envoy Richard Holbrooke now in the region and the work of Clinton already in the works the days of "either you're with us or against us" have now led to a return of complex diplomatic maneuvering that is hopefully in good hands

Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban and Descent into Chaos, will discuss the multi-faceted problems the United States faces in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India at The Commonwealth Club of California Wednesday at noon. Click here for more information.

Dennis Ross' Iranian Challenge

Dennis Ross' recent appointment as special envoy to the Gulf and Southwest Asia got a relatively quiet rollout, certainly compared to the high-profile photo-ops with the president, vice president, and the secretary of state when they rolled out special envoys to the Middle East and Afghanistan. That comparison has reflected a degree of confusion about Ross' mandate and authority, writes Michael Crowley in The New Republic.

Crowley cites critics and supporters of Ross -- a veteran of Republican and Democratic administrations going back to the Reagan administration -- who question his ability to deal with Iran, even his depth of understanding of Iran.

He may not have included Iran in an extensive book on the Middle East peace process, as Crowley notes, but he does have a public track record on Iran, such as this essay he wrote for Newsweek magazine in November 2008, called "Iran: Talk Tough with Tehran."

You can get a more extensive idea of what's driving our envoy to Iran and its neighbors by watching the video below from his June 27, 2007, speech and question-and-answer session at The Commonwealth Club. It's clear that he has a challenging job, but his public track record is worth examining.

Nixon Tapes Show Cautious Defense Secretary Laird

MELVIN LAIRD'S 1971 COMMONWEALTH CLUB SPEECH ADDS TO VIETNAM-ERA THINKING

New tapes and documents from the Nixon presidency were released yesterday revealing his Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird highlighting the public's unrest over the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War.

Laird was Nixon's defense secretary from 1969-73 and was a major proponent of allowing the South Vietnamese to slowly take control of the war on their own. The policy called "Vietnamization" lowered casualties and reduced the number of troops in Southeast Asia.

On January 28, 1971, Laird spoke to The Commonwealth Club of California and touted the success of Vietnamization. "My trip confirmed a continuing conviction that President Nixon's strategy for achieving our goals in Southeast Asia is working." Laird's trip is a reference to meetings he held with commanders and South Vietnamese diplomats.

The seven-page memorandum released yesterday and written in October of 1969 shows Laird's belief that expanded bombings in North Vietnam favored by the military would bloat the already high cost of the conflict and further the tide of discontent among Americans.

With combat activity levels reduced in South Vietnam, but with seemingly rising levels of discontent in the United States, we should review the overall situation and determine the best course of action.... The sum total of the considerations ... casts grave doubt on the validity and efficacy.

The bombings did not take place in 1969, but did result in the "Christmas Bombings" of Hanoi in 1972. Some historians believe the controversial military operation was illegal, while others blamed the North Vietnamese for walking out of the Paris peace talks.

In Laird's Commonwealth Club speech, he touches upon the North Vietnamese attitude toward the negotiations.

President Nixon early made explicit the U.S. interest in pursuing the negotiations route. As it became clearer that other side regarded Paris as an opportunity for propaganda rather than serious negotiation, the prospect of resolving the conflict by diplomacy alone appeared more and more remote.

Laird, 86, stands by his decisions to support Vietnamization during his tenure at the defense department and believes it was a factor in the eventual stabilization of Vietnam today.

In a 2005 article for Foreign Affairs, Laird regards the governments propped up in Vietnam during the conflict to be "puppets." He compares the present government of Iraq today favorably, despite early problems.

"The factious process of writing the Iraqi constitution has been painful to watch, and the varying factions must be kept on track," Laird writes. "But the process is healthy and, more important, homegrown."

People have drawn many parallels between the Vietnam War and the current situation in Iraq, yet there is one important difference. How many people in our government today can be called a supporter of true "Iraqization" – other than the Iraq government?

Steve Fainaru and the Private Warriors of Iraq

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Fainaru speaks tonight about his new book, Big Boy Rules: America's Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq, tonight at the Commonwealth Club of California.

Here's a sample of some of the articles on the use of private security contractors in Iraq written by Fainaru for the Washington Post. The collection led to Fainaru winning the prestigious award in international reporting this year.

• A Chaotic Day On Baghdad's Airport Road (April 15, 2007)
• Iraq Contractors Face Growing Parallel War (June 16, 2007)
• Cutting Costs, Bending Rules, And a Trail of Broken Lives (July 29, 2007)
• For Abducted Guards, Iraq Wasn't Just About Money (July 30, 2007)
• Where Military Rules Don't Apply (Sept. 20, 2007)
• Guards in Iraq Cite Frequent Shootings (Oct. 3, 2007)
• How Blackwater Sniper Fire Felled 3 Iraqi Guards (Nov. 8, 2007)
• Iraqis Detail Shooting by Guard Firm (Nov. 26, 2007)
• Warnings Unheeded On Guards In Iraq (Dec. 24, 2007)

The title of the book is a reference to soldiers behaving however they please or no rules, whatsoever.

Fainaru is also the coauthor of The Duke of Havana: Baseball, Cuba, and the Search for the American Dream. He lives in El Cerrito, California.

Fainaru will speak at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco today at 6 p.m.