Are Americans Ready for the Next 9/11?

[music] Welcome to the last line of defense. I'm Seth Jones, president of the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And I'm joined today by Dan Bman. Dan is a professor at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and director of the warfare, irregular threats, and terrorism program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Dan, great to have you on the program. Welcome. >> Happy to be here, Seth. >> All right, so this is the 911 edition. Where were you on 911 and what do you remember most about that day? So, I was at the Rand Corporation's Washington DC office where I worked. Um, and I was in a their big conference room with these huge glass windows and I along with several other terrorism researchers um including a very young Seth Jones uh was in the same room to discuss >> you know uh our terrorism project and it's amazing Seth that we've we've been colleagues all these years in so many different capacities but as you know the the number of people who worked on terrorism outside the US government could be counted on our boss Bruce Hoffman's fingers, right? It was a tiny number. So, the fact that Rand and we were doing this terrorism work was really unusual at the time. Um, and we're in the room, at least if my memory is correct, we hear this crazy sound. So, yes, it's an airplane going by, but it is a rumble and the building is shaking. And of course, it's the fourth plane hitting the Pentagon. And we had been watching the footage of the World Trade Centers and the first two planes that had struck. Uh but hearing this and then seeing the smoke and the fireball, um you know, that is very much seared into my memory. Um I'll ask you the same question like what do you remember from that day because we were together? >> I remember the same thing. I mean, I I I actually remember seeing the fireball of the airplane hitting the Pentagon and, you know, just trying to process watching the video images of the Twin Towers being hit and now the Pentagon is hit. It's not just the Pentagon was hit, but I we saw we saw that impact of the explosion and then I remember running outside downstairs. I don't think I used the elevator. I went downstairs and into the street into South Hay Street in Pentagon City. Saw the smoke coming up and it was like, what world are we living in? And I do remember another explosion happening. I think it was like a uh some some kind of uh uh storage tank uh right around the Pentagon that may have exploded. But you know at that point there were rumors that the State Department may be hit. So like there was this you know pandemonium fear and then Dan the other thing I remember is just trying to get out of that area. Um I got into a car I couldn't go back. I was living at Georgetown. The metros were closed. I couldn't go back in uh in in the metro. I had to I would have at that point you have had to go by the Pentagon and and I think that metro stop was now closed. So there were so many cars clogging up 395 and those streets and people are just panicked to try to get out of the city. Like I just remember feeling being in the middle of it. And I wasn't in New York, but like you was in Washington. And being in the middle of it was just I I was searing. I I'll never forget I'll I'll never forget that. I'll never forget that day and the this like confusion, fear, all these different emotions that I'm sure you felt as well. I'll note two other things. You know, the the cell phone network was down. >> Yeah. >> And so, you know, it was so overwhelmed uh you couldn't communicate with your loved ones, right? And you know, I don't want to exaggerate any danger I was in. I was in no danger being at rand. But like you, I regularly went to the Pentagon. My wife didn't know, you know, whether I was in the Pentagon that morning. So, of course, I just wanted to call her and tell her I was fine. And, you know, couldn't do that initially. Um, in addition, you know, we now know almost 3,000 people died that day, but I at least thought for that day and days after that it was dramatically worse, right? because tens of thousands of people, you know, had worked in the World Trade Center buildings and as you said, there were reports of other sites being hit. Um, so as horrible as the carnage was on that day, um, I feared it was worse. >> Yeah. Well, you know, the great irony then, Dan, is not only were did you you know, did you did you at least see the impact of that aircraft hit the Pentagon, I mean, you were within the vicinity, but then you went to work on the 9/11 commission. Uh and so so you actually had the ability to take what you saw and I'm sure the emotions even the anger that you must have felt and then turn that into into a meaningful uh help to the nation and what came out of that 911 commission was actually quite impressive. Um what what what were the main takeaways from that report? like h how do you remember feeling as you were on that staff working to try to understand what um what had happened and and then so as as you got through all the classified and unclassified data where did you come away with after being on the 911 commission staff in this question about like how preventable was that attack in the first place >> so the 9/11 investigations I was part of an early congressional one and then the more famous 9/11 commission uh staff um were were personally to me very revoly experiences to be able to kind of do deep dives into a range of classified programs to understand US decision-m over the years and to talk to some of the most important you know policy makers in the country you know the national security adviser um you know the FBI director uh these really accomplished impressive people. Um, and it would have been easy to say, you know, boy, they made stupid mistakes, but these are extremely smart, accomplished professionals with wide numbers of impressive people supporting them. So, of course, it's not a question of, you know, boy, they were stupid, right? Rather, it's a question to me about systems. And what the 911 commission found were there were lots of disconnects in the system. And part of it was because what the 9/11 commission called a failure of imagination was simply that people didn't see the threat for what it was. That of course there were individuals in the system who warned that the terrorism problem was grave. There was a direct warning um given by the CIA to the president about attacks in the United States. But that vague warning where I should say generic warning is quite different than 3,000 people are going to be dead in the heart of key US cities and there's going to be carnage everywhere. And so the kind of gut clenching nature of what actually happened was not anticipated. Um and I tend to divide the failures if you will into two sets. One are kind of immediate procedural ones. know the FBI not communicating with the CIA and vice versa and at times the FBI not communicating with itself. Um problems with uh radios that the you know really the heroes of the New York Police and Fire departments had in being able to coordinate their rescue activities. So a range of things that are tremendously important but kind of at the tactical level. Uh but the ones I focused more on in my work were the broader policy failures. So, there was this haven in Afghanistan where al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups were really training a mini army with over 10,000 people trained. Um, and the United States really didn't have an effective policy to go after that haven. um you had right I I remember the uh the Clinton administration's sort of what you might call sort of pinp prick strikes after the embassy bombings and then of course then the coal attack as well in Yemen so there were you know there were some attacks against the US before 9/11 elsewhere this is Kenya Tanzania the embassies and then and then in Yemen with the USS Cole but the responses there were were not particularly uh with what with what you've just described in Afghanistan, the the responses were not exactly um deterring uh the the actions in Afghanistan and frankly a few other uh sanctuaries. Uh you can argue even that they were encouraging. Um, the way I tend to describe this in a in a fairly colloquial way is, you know, no one expected al-Qaeda to beat the United States militarily. But if al-Qaeda could stand up to the United States, that was impressive. So, you know, if I go into the ring with, you know, the mixed martial arts uh champion, you know, I'm going to end up in the hospital, right? Like, there's no question about that. But if I could get a few punches in, by the way, I could >> Yeah, exactly. People could see my my frame and my age, right? You know what's happening. Uh but if I could get a few punches in, >> I think everyone would be impressed, right? And if I could get a few punches in and last a couple rounds, I mean, people would be amazed. And that's what al-Qaeda was doing was it was hitting back and enduring. And that gave it a lot of credibility. Um even though the United States did, as you said, these kind of you know um uh pinp prick strikes that really didn't accomplish much. >> Yeah. Well, uh let me fast forward then to uh a lot happens over the next couple of um uh months and then years. uh what is your sense about sort of big US successes including regarding al-Qaeda and then eventually the Islamic State what did the US do well and what were the big successes and then I'll I'll obviously ask you after that sort of where the US was short on uh and what some of the big mistakes and failures were but but let's start with the kind of the more positive side what what happened I mean I I know DHS Department of Homeland Security was created office of the director of national intelligence uh transportation security uh administration going through airports. So, so there are some organizational changes but what do you count as the big successes? So there were huge changes throughout the US government. Uh counterterrorism became the top policy priority for the Bush administration in particular but uh to some degree very important in the Obama administration. Uh so there was a lot going on. Uh but let me single out two things. Um one is intelligence cooperation and before 911 you had al-Qaeda able to operate a global network. If you think of the 911 attack itself, you had individuals traveling from Germany to Afghanistan who became the kind of tip of the spear. You had the sanctuary in Pakistan and Afghanistan. You had key meetings in Malaysia and Spain. Um, and you had funding from the Persian Gulf. And of course, you had the operation in the United States. And in every country, there were opportunities for disruption. And after 9/11, all the security services became much more focused on this threat. And it didn't mean things were perfect. They all made mistakes. But it meant the odds of al-Qaeda operatives being able to recruit, fund raise, issue propaganda, all that became much harder. And as one cell might be wrapped up in, say, Morocco, the police there might find that the person was communicating by phone to a number in Paris. The US would then coordinate with French intelligence which would track that phone and find that individual had five associates and some of them were getting money from a bank account in Kuwait and then the US would coordinate with the Kuwaiti government to track the other payments and as a result the global network over time was rolled up and this method was used also for the Islamic State. The second accomplishment though stems from the weakness of the first which is you can't do intelligence cooperation everywhere in the world. Right? There are parts of the world, let's say Somalia today, where the government doesn't control the entire country. So if there's a problem, the government can't solve it. Then you have to act and it's difficult to know what to do, right? You can work with local militia forces. You can intervene on your own. But the development of armed drones was to me a substantial advance in counterterrorism. It meant the United States could often usually working with allies um go to previously denied areas and target people and this put pressure on leaders. This put made it much harder for them to do training camps and the result wasn't complete success but it imposed a lot of costs on the terrorists and made it much harder for them to operate. They spent a lot of their time hiding rather than planning attacks >> and flying platforms called uh the predator and reaper. Uh so dark names were what the Americans were flying taking out foreign terrorists. You know, I I I also go back to a couple of big plots, Dan, that were disrupted. um sometimes with a bit of fortune. But Najib Bulazi, for example, I think is an incredible case. Goes over from New York into Pakistan, actually tries to get into Afghanistan to go fight with the Taliban. Uh gets turned back by Pakistani Frontier Corp forces. Ends up getting recruited by al-Qaeda for a plot inside of the US homeland in New York City, which looked a lot like uh the 77 bombings. builds his bomb in the Denver area of Colorado and then drives across the country with his bomb making material to uh to walk in with two of his colleagues to New York City subways in 2009 and blow them up uh like backpack bombings, suicide bombings. Um actually a lot like the 77 bombings in in London. And with some help, frankly, from British intelligence, uh, the US intelligence community led in the arrest by the FBI, uh, actually captures Zazi. But that was an al-Qaeda court plot that was disrupted. I think of sort of David Headedley, Dan, who was arrested at Chicago on his way to a plot, al-Qaeda plot in Copenhagen. Umar Farukq Abdul Mutual had been in al-Qaeda training camps in Yemen. um his bomb failed to detonate landing in Detroit or Faizal Shazad, the Times Square bomber that had been operating in the Afghan Pakistan border areas and had been trained with a Pakistan Taliban. These were all really close calls in some cases of bombs in New York City subways, uh, airplanes, uh, and then with Shazad, it was, you know, I I remember going to Time Square after that to see where he put his, uh, SUV like right by the big Lion King screen. For anybody that's been to Time Square and been to the Lion King or walked by it in in Time Square, think the amount of glass and LED panels that would have come down had that bomb gone off um before he was eventually captured. Like we came really close to some huge attacks that either with some fortune or some you know in some cases some good intelligence we prevented. I think that's right. And and I would I would stress, you know, what you said, right? Um sometimes it was intelligence. Um sometimes it was luck, right? He could have gone the other direction. >> Yeah. Luck. Shazad was luck. That bomb did not go off and he got it into Time Square. >> That was that was not because of good intelligence, >> right? No. And the you know uh uh almost Christmas bombing of the airplane over Detroit, right? Someone got a bomb onto an airplane, right? which you know years and years of uh security measures were designed to prevent. >> Yeah. I remember reading by the way the uh emergency uh the um emergency uh assessment of the of Abdul Mutalab the the the Christmas bomber cuz his bomb only partly went off. The initial detonator went off. He was wearing underwear bomb. I would just it the uh the emergency report because he was taken to the hospital was not good. Uh so I don't think he was he he was not in good shape after that and you can probably imagine but let me ask you about some of the mistakes that the um the US made. I mean what is your sense about what any overreactions or problems that the US had uh in the weeks and months and years after that? And then I I do want to get to like to to to your sense of today and what the threats are and you know how the US stands 25 years after 911. So the United States certainly made mistakes and a fair number. Um one thing I would stress because many of the people watching or listening to this, you know, don't have strong memories of that era. um in the years immediately after 911 uh senior government officials and most outside experts believed the next attack was going to happen tomorrow. So a lot of what people were thinking about was you know I have to look myself in the mirror and say I have done everything I could to stop the next 911 which if I don't do anything it's going to happen very soon. Um and I think that perception was wrong. There certainly were plots, right? And Seth, you just named a list and some such as the uh attempt to bomb a bunch of flights over the Atlantic Ocean. Like that would have been a true mass casualty attack. But in hindsight, I think we often overestimated al-Qaeda. We overestimated the size. We overestimated their lethality. The disruption the United States did after 9/11 was, I think, quite impressive. And in some ways uh it was hard to believe one's own success. And you know for the FBI, for the CIA, for other agencies, it's it's hard for them to be, you know, to be able to say after 9/11 to US leaders, oh this time we got it, right? Like last time we this one slipped through, but but this time it's all okay. So there was a natural tendency to u take threats perhaps more seriously than many of them deserved. and the existence of real plots and real threats of course made that tendency more likely. So that would be one thing. Um, the second of course is the question of know did the United States need to be transforming the Middle East. And there was a perception at the time that the greater Muslim world had problems and the United States needed to transform government and society and how people were thinking. And these expansive ideas largely failed or backfired. and some such as the 2003 US invasion of Iraq uh made the terrorism problem much worse. >> Yeah. >> Um and um you know Seth, you're you're on the Afghan war commission among other things including your long background, but the US invasion of Afghanistan 2001 to me was completely necessary. But there was a question I asked with the full benefit of hindsight as when should the United States have left? Right? and was the answer doubling down or even tripling down. But you know now 5 years after the US departure where we haven't seen the Taliban sponsor major attacks there is a question of was it were staying Afghanistan um all these years um in the name of counterterrorism. So I think many of the US successes were impressive but at the same time uh they came at a very heavy cost including US overreach. Yeah, I I mean I think those are legitimate questions and and also if the US was to leave, how it was to leave, I think, you know, it it is hard to call the eventual uh withdrawal from Afghanistan a success with a collapsed government, a Taliban takeover. Um so, you know, for me there are big questions about when and and also how. You know, if you fast forward to today, uh I'm curious where you stand on this. There there are some arguments that the homeland is maybe even more vulnerable today than it was during 9/11 uh or even since World War II from a combination of both state and non-state actors. I mean, one of the things that's been interesting is to see the expansion of cruise missile ballistic missile capabilities, including intercontinental ballistic missile capabilities that the Chinese now have, plus the Russians, plus the North Koreans, uh, including submarine launched. You've got you've got drones uh that we've seen the Ukrainians during Operation Spid get inside of Russia and conduct basically long range strike against airfields that have strategic bombers. Uh you know, lots of other concerns about offensive cyber operations, dis uh disinformation. And I'm thinking like of the Chinese bolt typhoon operations getting malware in US critical infrastructure systems across the US homeland or you know the space some of the space-based weapons that some of US adversaries are are are um uh are doing research and development on. What is your sense about the vulnerability of the homeland today and how does that compare to 9 911? So this is a to me, you know, good news, bad news story. So the good news to me is the US is less vulnerable to transnational terrorist organizations than it was before 9/11. There is a very impressive intelligence and military apparatus built up to stop this. Allies around the world are assisting with this. There is better homeland on defense. The FBI is much more able to detect problems in the US. So that's clearly a good news story. Um, but as you said, there's a range of other threats outside traditional counterterrorism, and we've seen some of these, right? We've seen successful cyber attacks on critical infrastructure in the United States. We've seen countries like Russia um launch extensive disinformation campaigns or use um disinformation to try to exacerbate existing US cleavages. Um, as you said, uh, missile ranges have steadily increased as one would expect, right? You wouldn't expect them to go backwards. Um, drones offer a range of new possibilities, um, for both state and non-state actors. Um and now when we start to talk about artificial intelligence, you have the possibility of democratizing some of this where formerly weak actors now are able to do things um both on the kinetic and the non-kinetic side that were simply much harder for them before. So I do think the vulnerabilities are much greater overall. Um and the broader strategic environment is much um I'll say dangerous, right? And so in 2001, you know, certainly the United States, Russia, and China were not best friends, but it was largely amicable relationships, right? And there were questions at the time, you know, would China inevitably democratize? And the United States seemed to have a decent, you know, counterterrorism partnership with Russia. And the hope was that Russia would continue along a democratic path that it seemed to be on, at least in some ways in the '90s, right? No one's saying that anymore. And it's clearly not a good relationship. But the question is simply how hostile it is. So you have um I'll say technological changes and also changes in the strategic environment and the combination to me is is quite concern. >> So one one question then in response to that Dan um I know you've been to Finland, I know you've been to Ukraine, I know you've been to Israel. Um, based on the way you just described some of the threats to the homeland, very briefly, how do you think about trying to make the American population a bit more resilient to deal with these kinds of threats? What what if anything can we learn from these kinds of countries? Because my guess is, if you ask the average American, they're just not going to feel what you've just described. and and they're not going to feel what I think certainly not going to feel what you described and and I described at the beginning of this uh in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Uh so so so how do you like are are there lessons we can learn from some of those countries? I think there's a lot we can learn about resilience from many countries in the world. Um, the United States has been very fortunate to have two great oceans protecting it from the great powers overseas. And as a result, it's had the luxury of time. So, while World War I and World War II are raging in Europe and World War II in Asia, the United States can take time to start to build up its army, can build up its military industry, can deliberate what it wants to do um in ways that other countries that were on the border of one of these aggressive powers, you know, simply had to respond instantly um and was exceptionally difficult. Um, but because of technological change, a lot of that distance is shrinking and there's less protection. They afford less protection than they used to. Now, it's still very, you know, very useful, right? I think it's hard to for to imagine China or Russia doing an amphibious assault on US soil, right? There are certain threats that are just um highly unlikely or impossible. But that said, the United States is vulnerable and I don't think the American people are resilient. And going back to terrorism briefly, that is one of the failures um of the post 911 era is the American people I think have not been encouraged to think that it's a dangerous world out there and some degree of risk is inevitable and even though terrorism for example from jihadist groups has been quite low um people are not seeing it for the success it is and there needs to be a recognition that um you're not going to stop every problem and some things will happen. Uh but beyond that uh resilience especially when you're going against a great power like China uh requires a lot of steps and a lot of it is and this this phrase is really a jargon phrase but a lot of it is really a whole of society effort >> and let me be a little more specific here. You very much want industry and government to have the ability to cooperate. A lot of the critical infrastructure, so water and telecommunications, power, um, is not directly run by government and a lot of the expertise is outside government. When we talk about things like AI, cyber threats, um, the vast majority of the expertise is outside government. So, you want the ability for government and industry to quickly come together to be in constant contact when we're talking about national security threats. You also want people to know what to do in a crisis. You don't want people to panic. When the alarm goes off, people um should understand what their role is. Um ideally, you'll involve people, right? People like agency. They like to feel that they're part of the solution. One of the very moving things about the aftermath of 9/11 were people kind of lining up to give blood. People who were um you know doing a bucket brigade in New York against the fires, right? It was it was very meaningful >> and coming together across political parties, right? which is and we and we are we are doing the opposite and so I worry that our industry and government are more separate than they've been in the past. I worry our people are more divided. I worry our government is not providing guidance for things like information operations and not ensuring uh robust defenses against cyber attacks and other countries have done this successfully and I think the United States can too. So last question. Uh for those young people that have no living memory of 9/11, certainly don't have the scarring images that you have, you know, your students at Georgetown, for example, what should they take away from what the what their country went through? So I' I've thought about this a lot and even despite that, I'm not sure I have clear answers. Um, so I'll give you a couple um I'll say general bits of advice that at least I think about. Uh, one is to be as as much as you can thinking about the long term while you're making short-term decisions. A lot of what the United States did after 9/11 kind of got locked into policy for a while. And it's important to recognize that you may want to change things. Uh, a lot of the first information is often bad or limited. and you want to have policies that are robust and that can change. Uh but I would also stress that there's a lot of unpredictability in the world today. So just to kind of take, you know, some assumptions, if um you had said to me in 1999, you know, the next decade of US foreign policy will be dominated by counterterrorism, I would have thought you were crazy, right? Like that was not something I would have ever anticipated. Um, if a student came to me in 2009 and said, I want to work on European security, I would have told her, you know, sure, but you're going to be looking at like NATO protocols, right? You're not nothing terribly, you know, dramatic is going to happen in Europe. Um, and of course, I would have been completely wrong. Um, and if you go back a decade after that in 2019 and someone said there's going to be a pandemic that's going to uh kill millions of people around the world, bring trade to a halt, you know, again, unprecedented. So, there's a really difficult to predict what's going to matter. And obviously, we could look today and we could talk about AI and technology. We could talk about China and, you know, I'm I'm a believer that both of those are tremendously important. But I also think there's a very strong chance that in the next 5 years, say there'll be other things that we're not talking about today that will matter. And we need lots of expertise. We need lots of people thinking not just on the main issues of concern, but also on parts of the world that are not getting the attention they deserve. I'll say Africa is one obvious example. um and also on issues in uh the kind of greater uh defense world that don't get the attention they deserve. One that I know you've worked on SAS but didn't get attention until recently would be the defense industrial base. Right. That's just an example of an issue that only a few people focused on and only now do we realize we really need a lot more capability and knowledge of that. >> Yeah. Well, Dan, thanks uh for taking a few minutes with us uh and walking down that road. I know it's sort of scarring to go back to that period on 9/11 uh when you were standing not far from the Pentagon when that airplane uh hit the uh hit hit the Pentagon and the smoke uh came billowing out of the building. Um, and then but thank you for your work after that on the 911 commission and you were one of the people working on terrorism well before 9/11. So appreciate all of the analysis that you've done since then and thanks for taking the time to talk through a lot of that with us today. Seth, thanks for having me on. Thanks for listening to our episode today. Please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. For more analysis, please visit csis.org. This is [music] the last line of defense.