How did 9/11 shape the world we live in?

Hello, and welcome back to Independent Thinking, the weekly podcast from Chatham House. I'm Laurel Rapp, director of the U.S. and North America program here at Chatham House, sitting in for Bronwyn Maddox this week. Today, we look back on the quarter century that has passed since 9-11, the deadliest terror attack in human history, with 2,977 victims killed in New York, Washington, and aboard the planes hijacked by 19 members of the al-Qaeda terror group led by Osama bin Laden. An immediate response followed with the American-led War on Terror, which saw Western forces occupy Afghanistan and Iraq in major conflicts, and two decades of military operations across the Middle East region and beyond. Research by Brown University's Watson School of International and Public Affairs has estimated over 940,000 people were killed by direct post-9-11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan over the following decades, a further 3.5 million people killed indirectly in post-9-11 war zones. I watched, as the first-year student at Brown University, the first American bombs drop on Baghdad. As we look backwards now and assess the longer-term consequences of September 11th, how has it changed our world? Has 9-11 been a catalyst for an era of fading American dominance, with the U.S. response leading to a change in perceptions of American power around the world? What have been the results of the War on Terror, and how has it affected militaries and modern warfare? And finally, what are the implications for today in a Middle East still riven by conflict and across a world characterized by great power rivalries? With me today in the studio, I'd like to welcome first, General Sir Richard Behrens, who served both in Afghanistan and Iraq during his career with the British Army, before becoming commander of the Joint Forces Command until his retirement in 2016. Sir Richard is a senior consulting fellow with our international security program at Chatham House. Good to see you, Sir Richard. Hello. And with us today is Faria al-Muslimi, research fellow in our Middle East and North Africa program. Hello, Faria. Good to be with you. And we're pleased to also welcome our guest today, Jason Burke, international security correspondent with The Guardian, and the author of books including "The 9/11 Wars" and also "Al Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam," and most recently, "The Revolutionists." Thank you for joining us, Jason. Thank you for inviting me. And today we'll have a slightly expanded episode because we have so much ground to cover over these 25 years. To begin with the personal, I wanted to start by asking you where you were on September 1, 2001. What do you remember and how it affected you personally? I'll say I was at my grandfather's funeral just a bit away from the fields where the United Flight 93 went down. And I watched as helicopters went to that field. And when I returned to my high school just outside New York the day after, we saw the plumes of smoke in the sky and took stock of who in our community we lost as the towers fell. So it was a deeply personal experience. And it was a day that changed my family's life, the life of many Americans, and redefined the role of the U.S. in the world for decades to come in ways that we are really still grappling with today. Jason, you were reporting on the Islamic terror networks as a foreign correspondent. That's right. I had been based in Pakistan and Afghanistan, reporting on both countries since about '98. And I was actually back in London. I was in the offices of the newspaper on Farrington Road in North London, watching it on the big screen that we had up on the newsroom floor. And I remember watching the second plane hit the South Tower. It's early afternoon, UK time. And I watched it go in and the explosion. And I turned to my foreign editor who was standing next to me and I just said, "That's bin Laden. There's nobody else. Nobody else could have done this or would have done this." And I was back in my kind of favorite guest house in Peshawar on the Afghan frontier, on the Pakistani side, within kind of 36 hours and was pretty much on that story for the next 10 years, solidly. So, Richard, you were serving in the British Army. Where were you stationed and did things change quickly? So, I was living in a completely different bubble. I was a lieutenant colonel. I was commanding the Third Regiment Royal Horse Artillery. I was stationed in Bergen-Hohne in Germany. We were just back as a regiment from six months in Kosovo. And I was sitting in my office and one of my battery commanders came and said, "You need to come and see this." So I went to one of the battery bars and the first aircraft had hit the first tower. And we didn't know. We knew nothing about this. We just thought this was a phenomenally tragic accident. And then the second aircraft hit. And then we all knew that it was deliberate, that this was terrorism on a mass scale. But the world was now changing. And we had no idea what that meant. And what that actually meant was, three months later, I was a colonel in Kabul, chief of staff of the headquarters of the embryonic International Security Assistance Force. At that time, the Taliban had left, the Northern Alliance dominated Kabul, and President Karzai was in the wings. And we were tasked with providing enough stability just in Kabul for a new government. And that's what we were doing. We were doing a lot of for a new government to be formed and find its feet. And we knew nothing about the situation. Faria, you were born and raised in Yemen. What are your memories of then and perhaps how things changed in the following years? You're right. I was 11 years old by then, and I was visiting my uncle in the city who always just watches the news. And I walked into the living room, and I walked as the second plane was hitting the second tower. So I walked back to his wife, and I said, well, your husband is watching movies. That's what it felt or what it seemed like, a movie. And I was very shocked. Obviously, a few minutes later, I figured out with the little I know about the world what was happening. But what I remember very well was 30 minutes after that, the Yemeni TV came with a statement by then president Saleh, condemning the attack, announcing his absolute willingness to cooperate with George W. Bush. And there are very few moments that were, I think, as decisive and shaped Yemen's destiny after that, more than that exact stand. Because then counterterrorism became a lot of things. And that's what shaped a lot of the relationship between Saleh's regime and George W. Bush and Obama. But then Yemen also became a country that wasn't necessarily at the front line of the war. It wasn't Afghanistan or Iraq. But it became a country that paid a lot of the price of the boss 9-11 and the different policies that were tried post that. And that it became very consistent by then. Whatever America did in Yemen, it took the country into a very specific shape. But I think that also applies to the entire region. I don't think anything has probably shaped the development, in the Middle East, post 9-11, in the last decades. I think so. And you're reminding me of the solidarity the world offered to the American people and to the U.S. government as well in those first hours and days and weeks after the attacks. The first time Article 5 had ever been invoked by NATO was in defense of the United States. Countries like Yemen, many other countries around the world, offered condolences. and support, material support. And then we quickly turned into questions of how to respond, what to do about it. But first, there was also a need to understand the nature of Islamic extremism, how this plot came to be. You're going to try to dismantle and combat. You need to understand its nature. So, Jason, how did this plot come to be and could or should the U.S. administration, under George W. Bush, have known there was this extremist violence fomenting which could lead to such an act of terrorism? The plot started to become a substantial project in about 1999-2000 when Osama bin Laden was offered a kind of proposed project involving hijacked planes on a vast scale by a Kuwaiti-born Pakistani militant called Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who wasn't part of al-Qaeda, but kind of came with this idea that he wanted kind of resources for. And bin Laden took it and adapted it to something that he thought would be much more likely to succeed. And over the next two years, 18 months, the personnel for the attack were picked as recruits taken from training camps in Afghanistan that al-Qaeda were running and then they got into, you know, the U.S. by a variety of means. And finally were able to go ahead with the attack with, as we know, very kind of low technology but just exploiting the vulnerabilities of American airport security and other. other deficiencies in the counter-terrorist setup at the time. But the roots of it go back far further, obviously. They go back to the foundation of Al-Qaeda in 88. They go back to the development of a radical Islamic militant movement, arguably much earlier, but certainly one that was set on targeting the US in a very direct way from the early 90s. 93, you had an earlier attack on the World Trade Center that only just failed to do really significant damage. Bin Laden himself was literally broadcasting his enmity towards the US and his desire to cause it very significant harm, making this very, very clear that he was going to attack the US and possibly the homeland as it became known itself. And we'd seen a series of massive strikes over the previous three years in East Africa. Against US warship off Aden, other attempts, and it was a credible threat. And there were other people taking it seriously within the US intelligence community, other specialist journalists. But that sense of threat, of imminent danger, was not shared at the highest levels of policymaking in the US or indeed elsewhere. And those various pieces of intelligence and reporting were not always put together. I think there's a real need to come up with a comprehensive threat picture to enable policy makers and militaries to act. Absolutely. And in the short term, there were lots of details that were thrown up. And you're absolutely right. There were real problems in the US in terms of coordinating intelligence between different, at that stage, siloed agencies. But in a sense, that was the kind of short-term tactical side of it, if you like. The bigger strategic picture was just that, as is always the way with big terrorist attacks, there was just a failure of imagination. That people could not conceive that this was possible. And so it's not a month later when US and allied troops enter Afghanistan to seek out al-Qaeda, but it took a decade until bin Laden was ultimately killed and captured in Pakistan. But you had a decade of growing chaos in Iraq, counterinsurgency, very difficult battlefield environment for those who were there. What did. What did US and allied countries get right in this war on terror? What did they get wrong? What's your assessment looking back all these years? Well, one thing they got right was that they successfully managed to prevent a major subsequent attack in the US. I mean, if that was the primary aim of the war on terror, then in that sense, it was successful. Which is extraordinary. Which is. Just about 100 Americans have been killed in terror-related incidents in the US across these 25 years. That is not a place we. Absolutely not. And that is not to be underestimated as an achievement. The problem was how much it cost to get to that place and how much could have been saved, how many lives could have been saved, how much blood and treasure. And to me, there was just a fundamental attribution error on the night of 9-11, if you like, and a misunderstanding of what terrorism is, or certainly was at that moment, in that. The US largely was drawing on the experiences of the 90s, and particularly the Cold War. They were looking at terrorism as something that was primarily state-sponsored, that was, if it wasn't state-sponsored, was conducted by people who were either mad, bad, or misled, and who could be killed. And by killing them, the problem would be resolved. What they hadn't grasped is that at that point, and now, and probably before too, terrorism is about networks, it's about interpersonal. It's dynamic, it's about ideas, it's much more diffuse, it's rooted in very broad and deep factors, social, economic, political, cultural, etc., etc. And using the military as your primary weapon against it is going to be difficult, possibly, probably counterproductive, unless it's accompanied by much else. And that was the broad issue. So, conceptually, in terms of the response, the more precise answer to the question of what went wrong is quite simple, it's Iraq. If you do that counterfactual, if you do the thought experiment of what might have gone better, and you just think, the US did not invade Iraq, there's so many better outcomes as a result. Let's get into Iraq, because this is a more controversial piece than Afghanistan was in the first instance. So, Richard, you were quickly redeployed to Afghanistan, later to Iraq. In a military sense, were Western forces properly prepared for the objectives in these countries and what they ultimately found? So, the answer to that is a mixed one, because the first act in Iraq was a very conventional military operation. It was about assembling a force predominantly led by the United States and found by the United States. So, the first act in Iraq was to conduct a very orthodox invasion of Iraq to destroy the Iraqi armed forces and remove Saddam Hussein, and as we subsequently know, the Baathist regime. And that was very familiar territory, because that was the use of conventional armed forces to fight like conventional armed forces. And we need to remember that at that time, when that was launched, there was great uncertainty about weapons of mass destruction, and could this work, and would there be casualties? But there was also, by design. There was by design no American plan for what happened afterwards, and no sense that it would convert the military operation into something that we all call counterinsurgency and hang around. And so, the first chapter had its challenges, but quickly and swiftly successful by its own standards. And what then happened was a voyage of discovery into a very difficult counterinsurgency operation. Conditioned by. A profound lack of understanding of the problem, and a profound lack of preparation of the military forces to deal with that problem. But we need to remind ourselves that we know this much better looking back at the time, in a can-do military spirit, you think you'll find a way through this. But the core dynamics of that counterinsurgency challenge, unequivocally understood now, meant that operation was going to fail. And we all remember the mission. The first strike was recorded in Afghanistan in 2001, using a predator drone, operated far away in Virginia. How much did the post-9-11 wars change Western military strategy and even doctrine? So, I think this is generally poorly understood. What happened after the occupation of Iraq was this conversion of the military effort into a counterinsurgency role. And that required converting armed forces that understood how to fight conventionally into something really quite different. It required not just new equipment, but a new doctrine, new ways of working. And, as Jason has described, an integration with all the other levers of civil power that make counterinsurgency potentially work. That was really difficult to do. But what it led to were armed forces that, for a while, for about 15 years, became conditioned to thinking that the new normal was Iraq and Afghanistan, which isn't conventional warfighting. And we now see those operations as discretionary. So, if we didn't do them, as Jason said, we wouldn't be able to do them. As Jason has described, the world would have gone on in a different way. And then the bit that you've alluded to when you mentioned the word drone is this was counterinsurgency, wars of a particular type, before the digital age transformed how you think about confrontation and conflict. So, this is pre-data in the cloud, pre-AI, pre-real robotics and autonomy, and all of those things that are now transforming the military. So, you can see tiny signposts in technological terms, and the Predator drone is a very good example. But we should also understand that that era finished, and armed forces are now not set up to do discretionary interventions. There's no desire for them, and they've been proven to be really difficult. The armed forces are resetting for conventional war, but conventional war transformed by the power of the digital age. It's a completely different recipe and a long journey to travel, and it's a global arms race. So, now, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that that rotation of… …conventional armed forces through Iraq and Afghanistan was a bit of a blind alley and led to them being not at all well-conditioned for the job that they now have to face. The arrival of drone warfare is something that has really redefined this modern era that continues today in some fashion. Faria, bring us to Yemen and the early drone warfare that Yemen saw. The message, presumably from the U.S., was they could reach terrorists anywhere. And we saw the numbers of strikes in Yemen and beyond rise over those decades, including under Barack Obama's tenure. Walk us through a bit about how this changed warfighting from your vantage point and having the ability to strike from thousands of miles away. What does that mean for those on the ground who are thinking about countermeasures against those who would seek to kill them? I guess if we build on the idea that Iraq was so consequential, there was also an element to that in which the U.S. no more wanted to send the troops. No more Obama's whole thing was no more dead bodies back home. And what that did is it gave an absolute rise to the drones because it simply meant no more troops on the ground. No matter what it meant, no matter how capable, it just crossed every other policy choice. And what it meant at one point. It went so wrong to the point that during Obama, you had something called the suspicious behavior strikes in which you would conduct the drone strikes in specific areas in Yemen. You could consider them hostile based on a suspicious behavior instead of intelligence on the ground, which technically meant that if I was in this area and I'm going into a wedding, you actually met that behavior. And that literally happened more than one time. The U.S. air strikes, drone strikes. They attacked weddings, funerals, just because it met this criteria of being between the age of 15, 65. It totally dehumanized the entire idea because you don't see the blood in your hand. With the war on terrorism and the entire narrative of either we are with us or with the terrorists, no one was safe anymore anywhere in the Middle East. Any civilians were target of a drone strikes from Pakistan to Yemen to Afghanistan and Iraq and so on. But I think beyond that. At 9-11, obviously, it goverized and the war after that goverized al-Qaeda. But then the whole war on terrorism just became a business and in a business in so many different ways. A business of legitimacy, a business of military, business of regimes. You look to Yemen, Saleh would cooperate everything he wants with the U.S. And that, again, because there was not that level of knowledge as you're talking about in Iraq, in Yemen. You would have Saleh. Saleh here probably kills one al-Qaeda because that's how he remained weapons, legitimacy and support. You look to Abu Barak in Egypt. He was given a pass to do whatever he want as long as he cooperated on the war in terror. You look to Assad in Syria. He absolutely did a brilliant job manipulating the flow of jihadists to Iraq and kind of bullying the U.S. around it. You look to some even allies of the U.S. who would sometimes. And I have done some research about this. On a significant possible attacks in the U.S. In which a regional country would know ahead, if not help, set up a bomb. And then you would call John O'Brien at midnight when he was the head of CIA and tip him off. And that there is this bomb with Omar Farouk, Abdul Muttalib or in disciplines that came from Yemen. While you actually were involved in setting it up. So it became a whole manipulated business from a blackwater to drone strikes to regimes. To allies, to friends. And you could see that. And it became even Iran, you know. It hosted thousands of Al-Qaeda from Afghanistan. And this was a bit of the inheritance leading into the Arab Spring, too. I think 9-11 kicked off so many different new paths that we wouldn't have otherwise seen. And you mentioned Mubarak. You mentioned Salah. A lot of these Middle Eastern leaders had very close ties to the United States. Whose governments and people had different views. Views on what they wanted the nature of that relationship to look like. That was not the driver of the Arab Spring. But that was a piece of the broader discontent among the Middle East. Would the Arab Spring have happened without 9-11? I guess there was two things. And that's why later on you saw a thrive of ISIS at one point. Because Arab Spring was, in my opinion, the biggest bullet or the most effective bullet against Al-Qaeda. Because it demonstrated. It demonstrated that actually you can change without force, without terrorism, without bombs. But because it was not allowed to happen, then you saw Al-Qaeda trying to come back via ISIS. It's not you young kids in the street. It's not the democracy. And that's because also the West was so obsessed and worried about the arrangement it had with regimes. That it sacrificed justice and the change for the sake of security. Ending up in losing both. But because of the 9-11, I think, and Al-Qaeda, there was so many things that happened. But changes that were even less pleasant than the Arab Spring. When you think about the Houthis, the first war they fought in 2004 was actually because of the Iraq War. When you think of the change and the power of Iran has gained in Iraq and the control, it's because of the 9-11 and then the Iraq War. When you think of so many fundamental things, they became consequential in the era. And then came the Arab Spring. And that was, in a way, also a response to these regimes. Who just. Their biggest legitimacy was they had a fantastic relationship with Washington. And because of that, they were very disattached from the ground. And because, if you look at least in Yemen, sometimes even Kuwait and Bahrain, you look to the whole U.S. framing in the late 90s to the 2000s, was this new democracies, rising democracies, what they called it by that time. And then it became just Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda. And anything beyond that. It changed the entire U.S. Diplomacy. It changed, and I think that made both the U.S. and the region pay a cost for that narrative or that conceptualization. And imagination, I guess, of how to imagine what matters. Jason, I want to bring you in here, too, at this stage, because we've talked a bit about the antecedents to September 11th. We've talked about some of the goals in the war on terror, whether or not they've been achieved internationally. And one of the issues, and Faria has just touched on this, is the. The impact on the U.S. standing in the world, the choices the U.S. government made in its relationships with other countries around the world, including with those with more authoritarian leanings across the Middle East and beyond, the use of drone strikes, the opening of Guantanamo Bay, and the use of torture and interrogations, the Patriot Act and mass surveillance. What is the legacy on matters of values and democracy and human rights? Can I kind of flip the question around a bit? Yeah, yeah. Because it's almost a question about whether the U.S. in its broadest sense over the last 20 years has been able to advance its interests and its soft power as well as its hard power and what costs there were to the former through the application of the latter in a particular way. You know, the costs are really obvious. I mean, I was in Iraq when the Abu Ghraib pictures were published, those of U.S. servicemen and servicewomen as well. Torturing, humiliating young Iraqi prisoners, male prisoners in jail, one of Saddam Hussein's primary jails. And the impact was visceral. But people were shocked, but not necessarily surprised. That has to be said as well. And that was really important because bin Laden had various objectives with 9-11, some of which he achieved and some that he certainly didn't. Plays into that question in quite an important way. Did he get the withdrawal of the U.S. from the region that he wanted? No. Did he get the overthrowing of a whole series of regimes, particularly the Saudis, actually? Yes and no. Largely no. And those that were overthrown, people like Gaddafi or Assad, were overthrown not by Islamic militants, possibly in the case of Assad, by a former, Islamic militant, but one who explicitly repudiated the ideology. But, so that didn't happen. Those were the sort of short-term strategic aims. The broader strategic aim, and that's why 9-11 was such a spectacular event, made for TV, was that he aimed to radicalize existing followers, mobilize new ones, and polarize, to divide, and to create conditions, for what he hoped would be an uprising of Muslims all over the world, against their regimes, and against the U.S., against the near enemy and the far enemy, as he put it. That didn't happen, but the polarization certainly did. And we know from research into terrorism and extremism anywhere, that that sense of humiliation, that sense of personal disempowerment and oppression, is really important in triggering radicalization, or certainly, triggering the move from general anger and resentment into something more active and possibly violent. And, you know, nobody won, in a sense, in the war on terror. But what the legacy is, and that is a result both of bin Laden's project and the reaction, is this deep polarization that is with us to this day. And as a U.S. diplomat working on Middle East issues, over these periods, I can say that those images of Abu Ghraib, those images of Guantanamo made the work of U.S. diplomats so much more difficult. I went to Guantanamo. We worked hard to try to close it. Many of the Guantanamo detainees are now resettled in third countries, but that place is not closed. And President Trump is talking about opening it in bigger ways. So there were a lot of choices made from political leadership that made the goals that the United States was trying to achieve in the world. Some of the ones that were kind of more narrowly scoped, focused on dismantling terror networks, soon became so much more difficult as the mission grew to be unachievable, right? Democracy and human rights across the Middle East region. And then the very serious abuses and blunders over that time just made it that much harder. But, and this is really important, we know from some really good opinion polling that there was a surge of support for bin Laden and al-Qaeda immediately after, certainly, some after 2001, but certainly after 2003 and the invasion of Iraq in much of the Middle East. But it disappeared really fast. The tide ebbed. It ebbed really quickly. And it ebbed particularly when the violence came home. It was all very well kind of feeling some kind of sympathy for al-Qaeda's aims, even if you disagreed with the methods, when it was violence a long way off. But the moment there were policemen being killed on the streets of Jordan or a hotel being attacked in Amman, places being attacked in Saudi, in Pakistan, where violence spiked immeasurably across the Maghreb. Kenya, Tanzania. Absolutely. Absolutely. People's support just disappeared. And it may well be that the U.S. made itself much more unpopular than it could have done. But at the same time, that great kind of wave of support and uprising that bin Laden wanted to kind of unleash did not happen. And that is important to remember. Can I elaborate on that? And just to add to your point on the popularity level, I remember very well cases in Yemen, post the Abu Ghraib, the photos, the Guantanamo photos, where young men literally stole their mother's gold and bought a ticket, somehow managed to go to Syria and then cross the border there to fight with al-Qaeda and to join it. And what it did also, the post 9-11, it later on even didn't only change regimes and countries and regions, but it even changed al-Qaeda and the way we understand non-state actors. You know, it was also central at the beginning, al-Qaeda, the controlled, by bin Laden. Then it became this extremely diverse entity. Al-Qaeda of Yemen was different than al-Qaeda of al-Iraq. And there was some sort of a coordination, but bin Laden adopted this policy, which is, you know, centralization of decision-making, decentralization of implementation. And that changed the idea of a non-state actor. And then it took different shapes, even ISIS, even al-Iraq, but it became all the way at one point in which the U.S. was fighting al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Iraq and Yemen, while al-Qaeda have started to become home. That was the face of Anwar al-Awlaqi, where it became even an English-speaking and savvy, you know, English language-inspired magazines telling you how to make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom. It has to resonate, you know. And it built, it transformed it into this like quiet group. And the threat was becoming, as we saw later, even in Belgium, in Europe, in London, it became more from inside the West. And so it transformed the entire idea of al-Qaeda and the way we understood it. And it had so many different layers of that. And I think that's partially because of Iraq also. And it posed a lot of really hard questions about how to counter not just the network, but also the ideology and the messaging, the propaganda. I remember one of the early responses that the State Department had was to make an office dedicated to countering jihadists. Twitter. So my colleagues sitting down the hall from me were actually sitting on their computers tweeting back at terrorists, which quickly ran into a lot of different challenges and decided that this was really not the right way to do it. But this is, you know, even a question today, who is an effective messenger? What is the most effective message? So U.S. and allied militaries were facing an evolving threat here in real time in that post-9-11 period. Sir Richard, how did you. Do you see that evolve so quickly on the ground? And what was most effective? So you're absolutely right that things changed in ways that no one had predicted and no one wanted and which we were going to struggle to manage. And the first point I would make is, at the time, you don't really know where this ends and you're working it out. But what should become clear very quickly is in the sorts of changes that Jason and others have laid out. There's only a part of this which has a middle ground. And I think that's what's going to happen. And I think it's quite narrow, in fact. So in the case of how you deal with a network like al-Qaeda, you can over time construct a military organization that becomes really good at dealing with a network of very competent terrorists, if we're going to use that word, and can apply force relentlessly and ruthlessly and diminish the military consequences of that opposition. But what you can't do with military force is create widespread consent amongst the population with whom you are operating to your presence if they think that you are aligned with a government that they reject, a government that isn't delivering services to them, that is stealing the money that the international community is delivering. Because in those circumstances, no matter how well you do against the terrorist network, you are seen in the eyes of many as aiding and abetting the people who are in power. You are preying on them. That's not healthy. And there were elements of that in both Iraq and in Afghanistan. And the second challenge, particularly in Iraq, was in this partnering with the new Shia-led government. What it needed to do was to reach out to the Sunnah, who were the net losers of the intervention. And they weren't minded to do that. And not all of the Sunnah was minded to cooperate in any case. And then on top of that, you had the very significant Iranian intervention, which was ill-disciplined. And it was a very significant Iranian intervention. And it was disposed to our presence in any case. And the military solutions to that are extremely thin, unless you are prepared to do one of two things. One is apply total ruthlessness. And that's counterproductive. Because when I say total ruthlessness, that means if you can't convince a community to swing with your presence, you remove it, you make it go away. And that is clearly abhorrent and absurd. And secondly, or you try to outwit the people who are in power. By staying forever, and not talking in terms of five or 10 years, and deploying so much money and so much skilled help that you create a paradise within which the views of your opposition will not get any traction, because everyone is having a fabulous time. That was always out of reach and impossible. So in those circumstances, when you understand the problem in those dimensions, the very best thing you can do is leave. And we're going to come back to the choices that were made both at the start of the intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan was, you had an option to turn up, to destroy the military problem that you know you could deal with, remove the Taliban, remove Saddam Hussein, and whatever you thought you were doing about weapons of mass destruction, and then go home. Because unless you are prepared to do the sorts of things I've talked about, if most of the population rejects your presence, and has state support, and you aren't prepared to devote your entire life and all your wealth to this problem, then the best you're going to do is hold the ring and manage it until you give up. And in the end, that's what happened. And as we bring this conversation to a close today, I wanted to end by asking each of you what you think about the broader picture. What is the inheritance of September 11th today? Jason, what does Islamist terror look like now? What is the threat to Brits, Americans, the world? Jason Brennan That's a really interesting question. I mean, there's no doubt that Islamic militancy is much diminished as a global threat compared to a decade ago, when ISIS was more or less at its peak, the Islamic State, and certainly a decade or so before then, when Al-Qaeda was riding high. I mean, that has changed substantially. There is still a lot of Islamic militancy around. Interestingly, it is largely in areas that could be considered marginal in the Islamic world. A lot of it is in sub-Saharan Africa, which is important, undoubtedly, but certainly not equivalent in strategic terms to Syria or Iraq or Pakistan. It's primarily a local phenomenon with local groups that are very focused on local dynamics. The big question for counter-terrorist analysts and officials at the time was how much of that could go international. And at the moment, it looks like Al-Qaeda has limited intention or indeed capability to strike long range. There are There are a couple of ISIS, Islamic State affiliates, particularly in the AfPak region, that do have apparently intention and some capabilities. The jury's out on others. But there is always that outside risk of something that we haven't thought of yet or imagined yet. That's what happened in the 90s. That's what successive ways of terrorism have shown us does occur. And, Faria, where are we in how the Middle East engages with the United States and with Europe today? I think the big problem, not the big picture, that today came out of this was, and especially post-9-11, is the question of a Sunni-Shia thing. I really grew up in Yemen, and that wasn't the question before 2001. That wasn't the question before 2003. And I still think that's the one thing haunting the Middle East, probably, for a while. Globally, what has happened, not just. Not just between the Middle East and Europe and the U.S., but between the people. I think one of also of the things we don't talk enough about is how much this has meant for the increase of Islamophobia, anti-Islam haters in the West, or what are perceived to be Muslims. I think these two things kind of still dominate the relation or the big problem from a Middle Eastern point of view within the region and outside of it. The only good news that I think is. Actually, much better than it was five years ago and ten years ago, is the financial tightening of such a group like Al-Qaeda. I do believe it's much poorer today. And I think with the crackdown inside the Gulf, specifically in Saudi Arabia, financial systems have done a lot of help. It doesn't mean we don't have newcomers like the Houthis and other groups in the world. But I think for Al-Qaeda, it's definitely much poorer than it was. And that's quite important to remember. Because finance. It's actually half of the battle with an armed group, if not probably more than that. So much of the conversation about September 11th focuses on the relationship between the Middle East and the United States, the Middle East and the West. But one set of countries we haven't talked about today is the role of Russia and China, who we're watching from the sidelines, but whose position in the world has changed. A stronger position in some ways. In some ways, as the U.S. was mired in two decades of war across the region. Sir Richard, how do you think about this question of where the U.S. and the West standing has evolved in relation to Russia and China across these 25 years? So my first thought is for 25 years, the headline issue was dealing with terrorism and aligned insurgencies. And that led us through Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya. Syria. And now I think we are coming to terms with the fact that we live in a new era now. This is an era defined, and you've alluded to it, by a confrontation in a multipolar world between the U.S. and the West and with Russia and the rise of China and the Asian century. So it's not the headline issue now. The headline issue is what are the risks of state confrontation and conflict? And there are two supporting elements to that. One is. Confrontation and conflict is now going to manifest in the digital age, in the 21st century. And we're going through this profound transformation of how you think about fighting on the back of it. And secondly, and this is unprecedented in human history, the states are falling out on a tableau set by this combination of population growth, climate change, nuclear weapon proliferation, the digital age. So we're fighting on a fraying planet. And the risks are therefore far, far greater. For the West. The US taxpayer has totally understandably decided not to subsidize European security any longer. And more than that, the U.S. has retreated from being some sort of global police moral force for good to America first. So that's a very different dynamic. And in that setting, the sort of terrorism we were talking about, it still exists. But it's not getting the attention that it did. And that may mean, and I think most security services would endorse this, that we are running huge risks. But we're struggling to give it. Enough attention. And the second aspect of that is, because this is the digital age, the sort of terrorism that we saw manifest on 9-11 can now think about different ways of inflicting terrible harm through the advent of bioscience into weapons of mass destruction, through the sort of autonomy that will take you to drone swarms, which are not the preserve of military organizations. And so I think we acknowledge that we've got a different. Full of problems. That terrorism is now a second-order consideration for many. But the risk, both in terms of is the thought still there and the capability in the ways that it can matter, it's much worse. And in many ways, those challenges offer so much more complexity and challenge to policymakers and to those of us who are trying to find ways to make the world a safer, stable, more secure place. It's been a challenge for the past 25 years, and it's only getting harder. That brings us. That brings us to the end of this week's edition of Independent Thinking from Chatham House. Thank you, Jason Burke. Thank you. Thanks to Faria al-Muslimi. Anytime. And thanks also to General Sir Richard Behrens. A pleasure. Interesting as ever. Listeners, thanks for joining us for today's podcast, Independent Thinking. It's out every Friday, so don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app. And remember to check out the show notes for links to some of our latest work. You can always find our analysis on world affairs, economics, geopolitics, and more. at chathamhouse.org. I'm Laurel Rapp, and we'll be back next week. Goodbye until then.