Full Transcript: Martha Raddatz Interviews General John Allen

— -- MARTHA RADDATZ: I-- I actually wanna start with you because it is 9/11 today. And-- and today just your memories of that day and here we are 14 years later.

GENERAL ALLEN: I was a deputy commandant, a midshipman at the Naval Academy. I was in a meeting. Someone walked in the room and said, "We've just learned that an aircraft has crashed into one of the towers-- in-- World Trade Center in New York." A few minutes later, a second crash occurred, and we knew that our lives were gonna be different forever, really gonna be changed. So we watched the towers collapse. We took the reports of the impact at the Pentagon.

We began to mobilize our medical capacity at Annapolis and send it here, sent it to Washington to help. And I knew at that point that-- in the years to come I would not just be trying to educate midshipmen, I will ultimately be leading them-- in the war that would follow. And then ten years to the day after that, I would find myself-- addressing my troops-- as the commander in Afghanistan.

MARTHA RADDATZ: And today, when you look at the world, you see this terrible, terrible refugee crisis, when you look at those streams refugees, when you look at the powerful photo that has gone around the world of the-- of the young boy-- and I know you have a young grandson, what do you think? And what responsibility do we bear?

GENERAL ALLEN: Well, my heart goes out to all of them immediately. My prayers are with all of them that they'll find security and safe haven wherever their travels will take them-- that we as a community of nations will have the compassion to take them in and to care for them and to help them to solve this emergency.

But I also, by virtue of the job that I have today-- recognize that we have a responsibility that we have shouldered to deal with the root causes of much of this humanitarian crisis-- which is the crisis in the Middle East, whether it's the Syrian civil war or the emergence of this organization that we call ISIL or Daash. And that's what goes through my mind.

MARTHA RADDATZ: And yet here we are, and you've been doing this for a long time. I know you have said it's not gonna be easy, it's not gonna be fast. But are we today at a place where you thought we would be?

GENERAL ALLEN: As I said when I took this job, this was gonna be a long term endeavor. It's gonna be a multi year effort. And where we were a year ago today, I wasn't sure how it was gonna unfold, to be quite honest with you. We were facing some-- some real-- uphill battles, some real difficult moments. Mosul had fallen, and we were witness to atrocities the like of which we had never seen before.

The Iraqi security forces were being defeated. Daash had turned on the Kurds, they had scattered and enslaved large segments of the Yazidi population. Much of the border of Syria and Turkey had-- had now disappeared into their control. It was not clear to me even that Iraq would survive this-- a year ago today.