THE WHITE HOUSE

RECEIVED
Office of the Press Secretary
JUN . V 2003

Internal Transcript A^^^M? 35,'™on

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INTERVIEW OF
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL
BY
BOB WOODWARD

The West Wing

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The period before September 11th, when we were trying to figure a way to enhance the
strategy toward a! Qaeda and trying to figure a way to get more aggressive had revealed exactly
this problem. The nonproliferation policy toward Pakistan meant that we had no relationship
with Pakistan.

Q Sanctions in place.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Sanctions in place. So we could pressure

Pakistan about the Taliban, but we had no incentives for Pakistan to play. Uzbekistan, for very
real reasons of concerns about human rights and the like, we also had no relationship with
Uzbekistan to speak of.

And if you just look at the geography of Afghanistan --1 remember at Camp David
pulling the map out and looking at Afghanistan --

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 Q You talked about — please, some place else.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: - I mean, there's Iran and Pakistan and

Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, a country nobody could spell.

The problem was, we had no relationships. And the work that we did in the lead-up, the
work that was embodied in that September 4th document was to try, in part — some of that work
was to try to address that problem. Because if you were going to have a more robust strategy
toward Afghanistan, you could not do it on the fly. You had to have relationships with Pakistan,
you had to have a relationship with Uzbekistan. You could not arm the Northern Alliance by
dropping weapons on them in the north of the country. You had to have relationships to do that.

And so, fortunately, we knew what to do, but the infrastructure was not yet in place.

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