All The Presidents’ Wars: 25 Years of the War on Terror (Future Security Forum 2026)

Our next panel is really a conversation uh with Karen Greenberg and Peter Bergen. So Karen is this is like sort of almost like a family event for all of us. Uh Karen's a research fellow with us uh at ASU and also a key part of the New America team. And then Peter doesn't really need an introduction. That fair to say. Um, and so, so they're going to be talking about Peter's new book, which of course is there for purchase and signing if you want. And so, thanks so much. >> So, hi, Peter. >> Thank you, Karen. >> I heard you have a new book. >> Yes. >> Exciting. Um, I counted and this is your eighth book. That's not counting your edited books. Um, I think it's your best. >> Thank you. >> And they're all really great, but um, the reason I'm saying that is I know you've been introduced with all your titles before and all your organizational work. Um but you really have been the the writer, the thinker that has taken us through this era, you know, sort of year by year, decade by decade, agency by agency. And I just want to thank you for that before we get into that. So um so one of the things that you point to in this book um is the distinction between um an intelligence failure and a policy failure. Yeah. >> And you focus very I mean we've and so there's a couple of questions here. I want to ask you one is um the difference between a failure of intelligence and a failure of imagination which seems to be coming up in the conversation today. But my my deeper question to you is um do you think that um that we've evolved in a way that the kind of intelligence um that we were getting that you say was not a failure. Um it's that we're in the same place today. um or are we more robust, more like what lessons did we learn about that that and and and to to put a finer point on it, the policy failure, right? Um when did that policy failure stop happening as a failure? When did the policy get smarter, wiser? Because that's sort of at the heart of your book, right? >> I think there might be five questions in that. >> Yeah, there is. There's at least five, but you get what I'm saying. >> Okay, I'm get I get get what you're saying. Look, um I'll answer in this way. When October 7th happened, I wrote a piece for CNN on October 8th and said which said because of course they said it's an intelligence failure and I was like I'm pretty sure this was not an intelligence failure. I can't tell you. uh but the you know the easiest thing in the world for policy makers to say is is an intelligence failure because the intelligence uh community works for the policy makers and they can't contradict them uh as a matter of policy and they can't contradict them because as a matter of classification so this is the easiest dodge which is blaming the intelligence community and in fact in the summer and spring of 2001 CIA was doing uh exactly what they're supposed to do um what is the job of the CIA it is to provide strategic warning to policy makers and the policy makers make policy. Um, and there was a tactical failure by the CIA which is they knew that two people associated with al-Qaeda were living in the United States and they didn't communicate that fact to the FBI until August the 25th, 2001. That's a pretty major tactical failure. It is not, however, a strategic failure. You know, the Bush administration fought tooth and nail not to have a 9/11 commission. and they said, "Well, we can't investigate what happened because we're in a war." There were eight separate investigations of Pearl Harbor during World War II, which was, you know, um, and you know, we need to know what and it's very interestingly, no COVID commission in this country and no Iraq war commission. Joel Rabin, who was here earlier, led the, uh, US Army history of the Iraq. We didn't have a chillcot inquiry as they did in Britain which produced two million words of you know it was very thorough investigation of how the British handled the Iraq war. There was never an Iraq war official investigation except by the army and of course by its nature it was limited in to some degree. The conclusion of that uh invest of that investigation is 1500 pages was Iran was the sole winner of the Iraq war. This was not Nam Chosky. This was a group of official army historians. The point is I I have two levels of it. It was certainly not an intelligence failure. Um I mean we had you know it the um you know Condisa Rice uh one of the 9/11 commissioners it was who who worked for Nixon as um anyway I'm forget his name. He he asked Connie Reese Rice to to read the name of of a particular presidential daily brief and when she was testifying and it was uncomfortable moment for her because it said Osama bin Laden determined to strike in the United States. Now we would never have known about that particular PDB and by the way a bunch of them were just released on Friday which I thought were pretty interesting. We would never have known about that without the 911 commission because they be declassified a bunch of material. And then the 911 commission is really two books. There's the narrative and then there's the notes. And the notes are as useful as the narrative because they're a road map to a lot of other things that we need, you know, we could investigate. Um, so I don't think it was an intelligence. It was a massive policy failure because the guys in the people who came in, you know, they they they styled themselves the Vulcans because in Birmingham, I've never been to Birmingham, Alabama, but there's a big statue of Vulcan, uh, the god of fire. And that's where Connie's rice hometown. And they called themselves the Vulcans because they thought, well, those Clintonian liberals and they're peacekeepers and they're kind of pinko liberals and they're, you know, we're the real hard guys. And they came into office with that and they the the real hard guys concerned themselves with Iraq and Russia and state threats. Cheney had worked for President Ford as his chief of staff. Rams had worked for for Ford as his chief of staff and secretary of defense. Condisa Rice was a Soviet. So they were sort of like steeped in cold war analyses of what the problems and they'd been out of office for eight years. And so they came in, you know, unconcerned about al-Qaeda at all. And um, you know, they on the this bin Laden determined to strike the United States was briefed to George W. Bush in August the 6th, 2001 at his ranch in Crawford, Texas by Mike Morell, who eventually became the acting director of the CIA. Uh, President Bush chose not to interrupt the longest presidential vacation in three decades. He also and Connie is I include all these all all the people in the war cabinet. They didn't pulse the national security operators to say well yeah we're getting these warnings is and let's ask our informants. Is there anybody from al-Qaeda living here? Is there let's really shake the trees. That didn't happen. So it was a massive policy failure which partly getting to somewhat something that Jame Louise rich Richardson said earlier. It partly accounts for their massive overreaction because they were so they they knew they knew that they had been warned and they started searching for other monsters to destroy literally on the afternoon of of 911. So that's the sort of easy question. And then the 911 commission said it was a failure of imagination. And of course the 911 commission was an amazing piece of work. We can't do it in these in this country anymore because you you could never have a bipartisan serious investigation. Well, we like I'll give you there is an exception. The Afghan war commission that's coming down uh will be published next year is a serious piece of work and I think but this failure of imagination was uh seemed to be right but it's not really right. Um, I think Dame Luis Richardson referred to the planned attack on the Eiffel Tower by GIA, an Algerian terrorist group, using a plane as a weapon. And there we've been attacked at the trade center on February 26, 1993. I mean, it's not the same target. We, a guy called Aman Rasam tried to get across the Canadian US border. He was arrested by a female uh custom border agent called Diana Dean. and she was notice noticing that he he was sweating in December and she thought he was a drug dealer. Well, he wasn't. He had a trunk full of explosives and he was going to blow up LAX airport in the middle of Christmas and luckily that didn't happen. and he trained in an al-Qaeda training camp and anyway so the point is you didn't the failure of imagination is actually it's a less strong I it's more I I quote Thomas Shelling in the book um in his forward to the great Roberto Wolstead book about Pearl Harbor which is I'm paraphrasing it but simply because um it appears improbable doesn't mean it's impossible so um you know uh so it's the failure of The failure of policym is very clear. The failure of imagination seemed like a more reasonable answer, but it's not really entirely correct either. >> Yeah. And you and you thank you for answering five questions. And um and and you um talk about that in very, you know, specific terms in terms of what was known, who knew it, who was saying things in terms of, you know, not just, you know, it's the the lights are blinking red, but even more, you know, um outrage over not being taken seriously about the threat. And so I guess, you know, we heard these panels today talk about is there a threat? Isn't there a threat? And what's happened in this in this 25 year um retrospective is there's been a lot of talk and um journalism about the the growing threat and the the fact that there's there's terrorist threat you know growing in number of parts of the world. Now, do you see that this do you worry about the same disconnect between um intelligence, both open source intelligence and the kind of intelligence we're talking about now? And or or is it something you're not not yet worried about? >> I I I'm I'm I've never been a sky falling guy. I'm sort of basically an optimist and um I mean not an optimist about human nature necessarily. Um but um we're well defended. So on 911 there was no TSA. On 911 there was no Department of Homeland Security. On 911 we quintupled our intelligence budget. We tripled the number of joint terrorism task forces. Uh we've we're a pretty hard target. And I mean and also public knowledge is a huge force multiplier to what I've just described. So um you know that said our problem is domestic. I mean we've just heard from Josh Geltzer. Um the whole the travel ban was a a solution to a problem that didn't exist because the problem is Americans who live here already either jihadist or right-wing extremists are getting radicalized by what they read on the internet and they're they don't need to you know go through customs at JFK. So that was a kind of misconception of the actual problem at the time. But there's a limited right now there's a limited um amount that a domestic an American citizen legal permanent resident here whether he's a farright extremist or a jihadist there's a limit to what they can do because typically they're not working in groups and groups are susceptible to are easy to penetrate and they have to communicate and so so what we see are these lone actors and you know they can kill people. We saw Omar Matin, who was born in Queens, New York, just like our present president, you know, killing 47 people at a nightclub in Orlando. A, he had access to semi-automatic weapons, and B, he conducted it, you know, the attack at 2 in the morning in the middle of a very crowded nightclub, so he killed a lot of people. Uh, but we haven't, you know, that's been the largest, most lethal terrorist attack um since 911. Um, and so I'm not I am concerned about some of the things we discussed with Dame Louise, which is, you know, uh, synthetic biology, AI, you know, that's not going to happen tomorrow. I mean, you know, the the barriers to entry to that kind of thing are pretty high right now. But think about Bruce Ivans who was, you know, the the attacker of the the anthrax attacks, which had a huge effect on the Bush team. They happened a few weeks after 9/11. People were getting killed in New York and Washington. The journalists were being targeted. Congress was being targeted. Now imagine if he had access to bio4 bio level 4 labs. Imagine if he was now empowered with AI. He you know Bruce Ivans was a very strange dude. Uh he had very idiosyncratic views. But a Bruce Ivans with access to uh the kind of new technologies we have 10 years from now could kill a lot of people. >> You know, one of the things that didn't sound really optimistic. You said you were optimistic. I'm just saying. >> Um u one of the things that you you lead to in the book and you sort of summarize at the end are the lessons learned and the lessons learned from things that were overlooked, things that were more um clearly mistakes of judgment and things like that. And I'm just curious where you think um what you think our options are today. I mean, one of the things you talk about in the book repeatedly is the lost opportunities with the Taliban to talk about. >> Yeah, I Yeah, I mean, that's really and I I was going to ask De Louise this question. Um you know, we there's a narrative that at the bomb conference we made a mistake. So, the bomb conference started on November 25th, 2001. and um Laksha Brahheime who convened it has publicly said you know we should have had the Taliban at the table I actually think that's wrong because the Taliban were still fighting on November 25th 2001 they hadn't surrendered there's no way the Northern Alliance would have agreed to have them at the table and there was no way the United States but I think in the larger sense he was right by January 20 2012 um the Taliban were utterly defeated uh and I you know I come back to Clauswitz in the book uh a few times because he tends tends to say some pretty smart things that are actually common sense on some levels and you know when you do a peace treaty he I'm quote paraphrasing him the smoldering emble smolding embers of that whatever that conflict are sort of extinguished and we never made peace with the tal by the time we made started having peace agreement with the Taliban that was 17 years later and they' obviously you know had a lot of success so what we should have done January 2002 was make peace with the Taliban at least the ones willing to make peace because there's two ways that that's helpful. one you create fissures in the movement between the hardliners and you know so you you you split the movement and then secondarily you obviously make peace and you don't necessarily make peace with Müller Omar but there were plenty of people in the Taliban who uh were ready to surrender amnesty engage in normal politics and we sent them to Guantanamo and interestingly Bob Gier who's a CIA station chief in Pakistan in at that time was like why are we sending the the foreign minister at the time is a guy muta kill. He was a he hated bin Laden. He thought bin Laden was a huge problem because it was interfering with their ability to get international recognition and we'd put him in Guantanamo and so what he you know we basically and we bracketed the Taliban together as sort of the same and that you know that became a self-fulfilling prophecy on some levels but it was completely unnecessary. Uh and so I think we had we missed we missed that opportunity when we could have done a great deal with the Taliban, the the Afghan government and us. And then we remissed the issue again after the Obama surge in 2010. The Obama surge really put the Taliban back. And I'm not quoting the US military on that. Carlotta Ghoul who I met in uh Afghanistan in the mid '90s when she was an aid worker. She became you know the best correspondent in the New York Times in Afghanistan the most well-informed. So in 2010 she was saying the Taliban had been really defeated in Kandahar. This is not a US military assessment. This is Carlo Goul's assessment a frequent critic uh and realistic critic of American foreign policy. Um and that was also there was a there was a an NGO that worked in Helmond a lot. that was also not a fan of the uh of the US military or its or its policies. But they also said look in Helman they've been you know I I was embedded with the Marines in Helman in 2009 with Anderson Cooper. Now the Marines are well known to have the best PR operation in the US military. The one thing they were not going to have is Anderson Cooper dying in Helmond. And so we went into Helman place called Nawa which we had we thought was going to be super dangerous and great you know and it turned out to be like the Marines had already cleared that area but the point is is there were there 13 districts in in in Helmond at the beginning the Taliban I think controlled most most or all of them and then by the end of that campaign they were down to down to one. So that was really a missed opportunity. You know Richard Hullbrook had been appointed to be the special representative to Afghanistan Pakistan in 2009. that seemed to be a indicator we might do a deal but we did we didn't do a dealbrook a you know died unfortunately you know uh relatively early on and he did reach out to low-level members of the Taliban there was a beginning of a discussion but it wasn't real so the Obama administration missed an opportunity going back to some of the discussion we've had earlier I mean we had this operational success we had a tactical success but it wasn't married to a strategy where we said let's try and make a deal and I talked to Dr. Abdullah at that time who was one of the leaders of the Northern Alliance and I asked him like if there was a peace deal what would you be okay with and he said well provincial governors could you know Taliban provincial governors Taliban district governors if they I mean they represented conservative rural ptoons they would do well uh so anyway that was definitely there were so many whatifs and roads not taken in this book unfortunately or not they're not not this book it's this history and I think those are two of them. Yeah, two other things that you talk about before we get to the questions in terms of just, you know, lessons learned. One is not thinking about the day after, >> you know, and what that means and maybe you could talk a little bit about that. And another one is lack of knowledge. Just this lack of knowledge on a part of Americans that you keep coming back to and I'm a little embarrassed when I was reading it and just I just sort of wonder if you could talk a little bit about about that both those things. Um you know Yanni Koskinas who spoke earlier um spent um he mentioned he so Yanni was in JC then he spent from 2009 to August 13th 2021 one living in Afghanistan then he moved to Bill and basically he was trying to understand the environment but that was that's kind of the exception that proves the rule um you know we Susie Hansen wrote a book about being an American and then one was nominated for Pulitzer for it uh which I think you know we We we don't understand the environment and it's just like and I think there's a number of reasons for that. A the United States is an anti-mpire project and when I say this I'm not trying to defend the previous empires but if you were British official military officer in India you spoke the languages you stayed. Same with the French and Algeria. And we just don't we go in, we think we always think it's going to be over in three months or six months and that's kind of part of our thinking. And then we we understand almost nothing about the environment. And um that's been one of our major problems. And then not planning for the day after. Obama has said that, you know, his biggest mistake was not planning for the day after the overthrow of Muhammad of of Moar Gaddafi. Um you know, you can debate if that was his worst moment or not, but that's certainly his view. And you know, Libya then did have a 10-year civil war and we still have two governments in Libya. So that's an example of not planning and obviously we didn't plan for what happened after the fall of Saddam and uh it just seems to be sort of I I we a group of US naval strategists came actually here relatively recently and they're sort of the le they go to the naval war college and then the top level >> you know become US Navy uh strategists and I says it's kind of a depressing thing because like these are really smart people but it doesn't really matter the com whoever the commander-in-chief is he or she if they have some sort of terrible policy and make certain assumptions that are wrong, it doesn't matter how great your strategist or how your great your intelligence community is. And it's a sad fact. >> So, what did we get right? >> Well, it's already been discussed >> that that that we haven't had another attack. So, would you say it's the reorganization of government that we got right? >> Well, you know, I I I think we got right by trial and error what I call go long. Uh it was referred to um earlier uh with General Votel and Kane Glimman. I mean look going to war is never that's like not the right thing to do usually as a but if you're going to go to war what is the least bad approach and in life least bad approaches are probably the best approach. So the least bad approach I think during the war on terror was what I call go light go long which is we heard about Ken Glimman was very involved in the Philippines that went well. Abu Sai was an al-Qaeda affiliate. Very few Americans working with the Filipino army. It was a success. It hasn't got the attention it deserved because it was a success. And but you know, the anti-ISIS war was a success. 5,000 American soldiers in Iraq, 2,000 or so in Syria. Obama and Trump basically did the same policy. And that was aligned with the local Iraqi counterterrorism service and the Syrian de Democratic Forces. The big caveat to that is we turned Mosul into a parking lot. Um, a million Mosul residents had to leave the country, the the the the city. We had 35,000 American air 35,000 America American air strikes. So, there was a tremendous amount of of American air power. Now, from American perspective, it was relatively cheap, politically sustainable, financially sustainable, was virtually, it was a non-issue. Most Americans were happy that there was this campaign against ISIS and it worked. The but the you know tens of thousands of Iraqi military forces and and Syrian forces did die. The on the plus side when liberation came it wasn't Americans on Humvees. It was Syrians and Iraqis liberate their liberating their own territory. But I mean this is really a question for the audience and for the future which is could we have got done a go light go long policy that had a more targeted kind of air strike component didn't involve the mass movement of Mosul uh you know a million members of the the Mosul city population out of the city and didn't involve turning Mosul into a parking lot. And I, you know, I'm not a I I don't know have an exact answer to this question, but the even the go like go long approach had significant effects for people in the countries where this happened. Uh but it it it did in the end succeed in liberating um territory from ISIS. >> All right, quick questions right here. >> That's not my fault. Hi, uh my name's Edge Corpensky, unaffiliated. Um I haven't read the book, but I always try to read the last paragraph. So the last paragraph was basically uh to understand the nature of the conflict you're embarking on. And so my question is about um particularly Iran and also Ukraine. I mean Ukraine started before Trump came in so I can't blame him for that. But but what what what is the nature as far as you can understand and why can't we understand why do we not have any interest in understanding? >> Well, I go I mean I I go back to Clam Switz. It's a very famous kind of observation of his which I will paraphrase which is the most important uh role for the policy maker when he or she decides to go to war is what kind of war are we embarking on and not mistaking it for some kind of war that it isn't. And that's an easy thing to say, but I think it's a hard thing to do. Uh, so an example, you know, if we if if if you there have a scene in in the White House, Regina Bennett was actually briefing President Bush along with Bob Gier, who was the Iraq mission manager, and it I think it took place on Veterans Day, maybe 2004. Um and uh so November 11th and they they Gina was saying hey look I've been studying this for a long time we're just this is a all these foreign fighters coming in pouring in they were carrying out all the suicide attacks so they were the people in many senses driving the worst part of the civil war and they were foreigners and bugier said look there's an insurgency happening here this is it probably the first time the word insurgency had been used in the white house And George Bush said after the meeting, "Look, I I don't disagree with you, but we're not going to use the word insurgency when we leave this room." So, this is a classic case. If you can't identify the war as being an insurgency, then you can't use counterinsurgency tactics against it. And so, the real world, I mean, when we elect our commander-in-chief, he or she, if they're going to go to war, really has to think very carefully about what kind of war are we embarking on. Uh and in the case of Iran, I mean, I think everybody in this room knows enough about it and that we have not we we we made false assumptions. There was a supposedly imminent threat that wasn't the case. You know, we didn't have a congressional authorization, which I think is very important. What I mean, you create public buyin by having a debate in Congress. I mean, it's that basic. And so, at at the beginning of the Iraq war, 75% of the Americans were in favor of the Iraq war. Why is that? Because the Bush administration waged one of the most effective propaganda campaigns in history against its own people, which was connecting Saddam to 9/11. 70% of Americans believe that Saddam was involved in 9/11 2 years after 911 happened. Now, that was after the largest criminal investigation in history. The 9/11 investigation involved 150 thou,000 uh interviews and 165,000 leads, not one of which led to Saddam. Um anyway, so the big the big moral is, you know, don't I mean uh >> as you pointed out in your Guardian article before we went to >> Well, I wrote I wrote a piece for the Guardian two or three months before the war saying like there's no I we we met with Bin Laden. Bin Laden at the end of the interview said, you know, Saddam's not a good Muslim, which is about as bad as it gets. So, I mean, I knew a lot about al-Qaeda. I didn't know much about the WMD. The unfortunate thing about the WND, the only way he could prove or disprove was to go and invade because Saddam himself of course had lied during the 1990s about his web WMD program. Uh a guy called George Piro who's a friend of mine who was spent six or seven his book will be coming out December 1st. So he spent seven months with Saddam 8 hours a day. Saddam thought that George Piro was like, you know, some senior general that and in fact he was an FBI guy who spoke perfect Arabic and Lebanese American and you know Saddam eventually told him hey you know I always thought Bin Laden was a loose miss you know unguided missile. I didn't like him and very importantly I had to signal to Iran that I still had WMD. They just fought an 8-year war. A million people had died. So it was kind of too clever by half by Saddam. uh there were you know so I'm not excusing any of it but I'm sort of saying Saddam himself uh was kind of misleading about the fact that he hadn't that that he'd actually disarmed and at one point he told his senior generals they were surprised that he had disarmed so >> okay let's get one more question >> one more question quickly way in the back >> Abas from the national defense university thank you so much kind of you thank you very much for another wonderful book my question is As regards um the debate about the counterterrorism in the counter narrative realm the soft power we we had so many conversations so much was happening on softpar side ex the religious extremists they can be challenged by the moderate Muslim so-called or or the kind of soft power uh channels how much of that has succeeded because there was this debate earlier this morning between Nelly and Bruce also al-Qaeda is dead or not but how much credit we can give to the Terrorism has gone down in many ways. How much credit goes to that soft power? Some from us from some globally. Any thoughts on that? Thank you. >> Okay. And Hassan has a really interesting background. He was a senior police officer in Pakistan who then became a professor at Colombia, which I don't think there are that many people who've taken that particular route and now he's at the National Defense University. But um so look I mean I um I mean I soft power of you or good ultimately what really did these jihadists in is their own actions. Um you know they they presented themselves as the defender of Islam and yet their victims were mostly Muslims. And Bin Laden himself in his last years of his life was planning to relaunch al-Qaeda as a gentler kindler al-Qaeda um that would really emphasize not killing Muslim civilians. Um and he would write letters to the Pakistani Taliban to Shabb al-Shabaab in Somalia basically saying let's try and avoid killing Muslim civilians. So they understood this as their real ultimately they they defeated themselves to a large degree. the soft power that we implemented, you know, sometimes may be unhelpful, other I mean there was a period when President Bush's like chief communications uh person, I've forgotten her name now, just you know went on a tour around the Middle East just saying how great America is and you know that did not go well. Uh that you know so it wasn't very sophisticated particularly at the beginning. I'm not a I mean so uh you know there are some things that we got right last night we we some of us were talked about the American University in Afghanistan which produced more fullbrite scholars uh than any other institution by by proportion uh in in the world and you know the Taliban are not going to be in power for every forever and so educating the next generation of Afghan leaders whether they take whether the Taliban falls 10 years from now or 20 years from now. I mean that's the right kind of soft power. Um and um so that's it. >> Okay. So the subtitle to the sub subtitle to the book is lessons learned and lessons unlearned >> and then Right. >> Well and I think I think Yanni had another good line which was lessons identified. >> Yeah. >> Did we really learn them? >> Um thank you Peter for >> Thank you. Find it.