The Lessons of 9/11 & the Global War on Terror (w/ Peter Bergen, who Interviewed Bin Laden)

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We are in an era of great power competition according to both the Biden administration and the Trump administration. That's their official policy. But we're more likely to have a war like Afghanistan or Iraq than we are to have World War III. So hopefully the lessons will be retained. They're not very pretty, the lessons. Hello and welcome to One Decision. This is where we have conversations about intelligence, statecraft, and the forces that drive world politics. And we have those conversations with people who have been in the room and on the ground. I'm your co-host, John Rain, formerly a member of the UK's diplomatic service. And I'm joined today by my friend and former colleague, Sir Richard Dearlove, the former chief of MI6. Good to see you, Richard. Very good to see you again, John. And of course, this is a big week, an important week. The 25th anniversary of 9-11, a real watershed moment in geopolitics. And one of those events which I always describe as a dividing line with a clear before and an afterwards. In the commemoration of the attack, we're going to do two shows. And the second will be with John McLaughlin, who was deputy director of CIA at the time that I was the chief of MI6. And we naturally collaborated closely around those events in the days immediately afterwards. And of course, in the months that followed as well. So as Richard said, this is quite a moment. We're going to look back at a quarter of a century of the post 9-11 foreign policy and foreign wars. And to help us do that, it's a real pleasure to welcome our guest, journalist and terrorism expert, Peter Bergen. You certainly won't want to miss Richard's second episode or indeed any of our upcoming conversations. Please do subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you. If you could like or comment, that will help others find the show. Let's get into it. We go back to 1997 on a cold March day in eastern Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden declares to the world that he's mounting jihad, holy war, against the US. Extraordinarily, he did this on an interview with a CNN crew. Amongst the members of that crew was Peter Bergen himself. Peter Bergen himself. Right across from bin Laden as bin Laden unfolded his plans to attack the US. Since then, Peter has dedicated most of his professional life to following the consequences of that declaration. That makes him almost uniquely qualified to be with us today as we look back at the course and the consequences of the 9-11 wars. Peter's currently. He's the US president at the think tank, New America. And he's joining us now to break down, as he does in his latest book, all the president's wars, the 25 years of US foreign policy, and the war on terror, and to help us both reconstruct those events and to learn from it lessons for the future. Welcome, Peter. Peter, may we begin with where you began, which was your interview with bin Laden. And I know you've been interviewed about the interview quite a lot. But we have a particular angle today, I think, looking back 25 years later. When you recall that interview, was there anything in Osama bin Laden that makes you think with hindsight that maybe this is someone we could have dealt with through negotiations rather than ended up fighting and being at war with for so long? Well, that's a great question. And I think, you know, bin Laden's demands were pretty maximalist in the sense that essentially he wanted all US troops out of the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia. He wanted US to end his support for Israel and Saudi Arabia. I think those are mostly, from an American perspective, non-negotiable. You know, he didn't really believe in negotiations per se, I don't think. I mean, I don't think there was ever an attempt, a real attempt by al-Qaeda to reach out to. American or British government in any meaningful way to negotiate. I think there was some evidence in the Abbottabad Papers that were found in his house in Pakistan where he lived the last five years of his life, where he might have tried to put some feelers out to the British government in the kind of 2010 time period. I don't know how serious that was. I don't really know what the expectation was, and I don't think the British government would have been super interested in that discussion. I suppose he was the wanted man on the poster for so long, and you describe really dramatically how he was finally taken in a very bold operation. Do you think that given your very close study of not just Osama bin Laden, but those who studied Osama bin Laden, did he at any point obscure the plot? Was it really worth the effort going after UBL? Or was there something in the end that became obsessive about getting UBL? I grew up in the UK, but I've lived my entire adult life in the United States, and I've lived in New York and in Washington. And surprise attacks on the United States tend to go down pretty poorly, as we saw after Pearl Harbor. And there is a great isolationist streak in the United States that we're seeing now that changes with the circumstances. And I think there was a great desire for, A, justice, and B, revenge, not necessarily the two very different concepts. But the American public understood that bin Laden was the intellectual architect of all this, and they wanted to bring him to justice, and eventually it happened. Peter, I think you know that I flew into D.C. within 36 hours of the 9/11 attacks. If I look back at that period, it's hard for me to characterize or describe the sort of atmosphere that one encountered in CIA headquarters and other nodal points in Washington because of the sheer shock of the attack and the implications of what it meant in the medium to longer term. I think when one's talking about a 25th anniversary, it's very, very hard to encapsulate. But that feeling, I mean, can you also sort of characterize it? I don't know where you were or what you were doing when it actually happened, the attack, whether you were there or somewhere else. Well, Sir Richard, yes, you were here in D.C. very quickly. I think the word shock is a good one because there's a distinction between surprise and shock. So CIA had done a pretty good job of strategic warning to the Bush administration that something was brewing in the spring and summer of 2001. You know from the 9/11 commission that there were multiple highly classified warnings that bin Laden was planning something big. You know, where and when, as you know, as an intelligence professional, that is often information you don't have. I mean, there was a lot of shock. Living in Washington, I was going into CNN where I work on the morning of 9/11 to talk about the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was a leader of the Northern Alliance, who was leading the anti-Taliban resistance. And this was al-Qaeda's kind of way of mollifying the Taliban for the 9/11 attack they knew were up. They were engaged in, which they hadn't given the Taliban any heads up about. Because Ahmad Shah Massoud was the one thing that stood in the way of total Taliban victory, a very effective military leader. And not two days before 9/11, he was assassinated. So I was going in and my father was living with me at the time. He was a pilot and entering Korean War. And he noticed, you know, he told me a plane had flown into the Trade Center, which seemed pretty unlikely. The Vantar, a very clear blue day. And then the second plane came in. And I just, literally a week before, had handed in my first book about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. So I knew a lot about these guys. I spent two years traveling to Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, anywhere that bin Laden had been. I was able to go back years later at 12:30 p.m. on 9/11. I managed to get on CNN and said, you know, when you look at these kind of attacks, who has the capability and the intent? Some people might have the intent but no capability. And some people might have the capability but not the intent. And the only group that sort of marked, you know, ticked both of those boxes in my mind was al-Qaeda. up. Now, you were at the CIA, Sir Richard, you know, within two hours, the agency knew that two of the hijackers were, because they had the passenger manifests, were on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. They'd be tracking these guys for over a year. So they knew almost immediately it was al-Qaeda. But I think there was a great deal of shock. And I want to make the distinction between surprise and shock, because it was shocking. On the other hand, you know, if you've been tracking it, as the CIA had been doing, and the FBI in New York, the field office of the FBI in New York, or myself, it was very shocking, but it wasn't entirely surprising. Well, can I endorse the difference that you make between surprise and shock? Because that's exactly, I think, the phrase I've used when I've talked about this. Because we had had an intelligence summit with the Americans in Bermuda. And the purpose of that meeting was to discuss the possibility, of a large-scale attack somewhere, sometime, because we all had strong indications that there was something brewing. I mean, I'd be more precise than that. There was a lot of material which pointed to a big attack. Well, you know, we didn't know where, we didn't know when, we didn't know what the target was. So when it actually happened, we all said, oh my God, it wasn't a surprise at all, but it was a shock. Yeah. And I think for the Bush administration, it was both a surprise and a shock. Because. Because these were Cold War warriors, you know, Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor, was a Sovietologist. Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, had been General Ford's Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defense. They were steeped in kind of Cold War understandings of the threats that the, you know, that the West faced. And they just couldn't process the idea that a non-state actor, quote unquote, like Al-Qaeda, might really pose a threat. Even though, you know, U.S. embassies had been attacked in Africa in '98, killing more than 200 people. Even though Al-Qaeda attacked the USS Cole in Yemen. Killing 17 American sailors. Even though the Trade Center itself had been attacked in February of 1993 by a group of men associated with Al-Qaeda, which is how I got into this story. I went to Afghanistan during the Civil War in '93 because there were these guys who were training in Afghanistan who clearly seemed to have an intent to attack the West. And that's how, in turn, how I eventually, we interviewed bin Laden in '97 because these groups seemed to be organized. Organizations have leaders. Who was the leader? Bin Laden. Bin Laden appeared to be the leader. Peter, a response on the part of the U.S. government driven by shock was understandable for Afghanistan. But then, of course, that mutated into another decision on Iraq. I mean, do you want to just give your reflections on how we got from that decision, which, yeah, people could sort of understand, to one which a lot of people struggled with? Yeah. Well, we know from contemporary notes that were taken on 9/11, the Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was talking about attacking SH, according to notes made by his own aide, on the afternoon of 9/11. So this was front and center of their kind of thinking from the day it happened. And on September 15th, they all met at Camp David, the presidential retreat just outside D.C. And again, Rumsfeld and his number two wolf always pushed for a war with Iraq. And as Sir Richard memorably wrote, he said, "I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. wrote to Tony Blair at a certain point that the intelligence was being fixed to kind of match the policy. And that was true, you know, from the beginning of the war almost. And I, in my new book, All the President's Wars, I'm able to pin down the exact moment where bin Laden disappeared at the Battle of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan at 11pm on December 12, 2001. At the very same time, General Tommy Franks, who was the theater commander of the Afghan war, was briefing Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld about the new plan for the Iraq war. Now, bear in mind, the old plan was 800 pages long. And it took them a week to rewrite it. And, you know, they spent a fair amount of time that afternoon as bin Laden's escaping from Tora Bora talking about the new Iraq war plan. So that shows where their minds were at. They were, you know, seriously planning the Iraq war, unbeknownst to the American public or anybody else really, already three months into, you know, as bin Laden was escaping from Tora Bora. So, you know, it was one of, you know, the one of the most spectacular own goals in American history. We're doing another one right now, of course, in Iran, with under very similar kind of rubric of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, supposedly imminent threat, etc, etc. But that's how we got there. And I just, you know, Rumsfeld also said, look, there aren't enough targets in Afghanistan, we need to go and like, show what big men we are, we're going to need to bomb some other targets. So anyway, unfortunately, the Iraq war gave al Qaeda a huge, new lease on life, al Qaeda in Iraq eventually became ISIS. And, you know, we know that story, how that story developed. Peter, can I just add to that? Because after I came over to Washington, immediately after 9-11, I flew back and then pretty much within three or four days came back with the Prime Minister with Tony Blair. And we went to the White House for a briefing conducted by CIA. The CIA briefer stood up. And started explaining how the attack was linked with Saddam Hussein. I actually interrupted the whole briefing and said, hang on a minute, our intelligence, and I'm not going to go into detail as to what it was, tells us that there was absolutely no link to the Iraqis whatsoever. And that this doesn't, as it were, add up. But, you know, the irony for all of us, is that, you know, in the minds of the US leadership at the time, you know, there was this causal link. But of course, they weren't linked at all. Well, how did your interruption go down? Well, it was quite interesting. It sort of stopped the whole process. The CIA people were really angry with me. Bush took Blair aside. And, you know, and then I joined them and said, look, Prime Minister, we really are confident that we're right about this. So, you know, you could see the stress that was already entering into the relationship, because we took a different view. And of course, that famous quote of mine, which appeared on a t-shirt in California eventually, as it happens, was as a result of a meeting I had with Scooter Libby. I mean, that was even more outrageous in terms of the stuff that Scooter was saying at the time. Who was the Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff? He was Cheney's Chief of Staff. You're absolutely right. And I mean, he was completely out of course. Well, they all went bananas. It raises a very interesting question, I think, for intelligence community professionals, which I'll pose to you, Sir Richard, which is, look, you can have the greatest intelligence community in the world. But if the policymakers have already decided whatever their policy is, it doesn't really matter. I, you know, you're absolutely right. I mean, good intelligence is meant to steer policy. That's the whole purpose of collecting it. You know, you're not collecting intelligence in a void. You're collecting it to create policy. But there was this idée fixe, which was, I don't know if it's true or not, but I don't know if it's true. I don't know if it's true or not, but I don't know if it's true or not. I don't know if it's true or not. All those people in the DOD, and, you know, they had the bit between their teeth. You should have interviewed me for your book, but you could have added another chapter. Famously, Stalin had vast amounts of information that Hitler was planning to invade, and he just wouldn't accept it. So, you know, it, I don't know, it must be frustrating as an intelligence professional when you are producing great intelligence that is basically ignored. Yeah, because the whole secret of a good intelligence organization, is to feed into the making of policy. And it depends on the mechanisms that exist constitutionally to achieve that end. They do fall apart sometimes in a crisis. And this is a very good example of that happening. Peter, just on that theme of the sort of constitutional element of this, you paint a very clear picture of the center, quite often giving in to impulse or instinct or even obsession. And the absence of those guards that Sir Richard was talking about, it is quite clear. Do you think that as a legacy of this 25 years, there is any better governance on that decision making? Or do we still have the same problem at the center? It's a great question, John. So, you know, the American system is the Commander-in-Chief is the Commander-in-Chief. He's also the president, or she is the president. And unlike in a parliamentary system, where I think there are more checks and balances, there are a lot of problems. And, you know, there are a lot of problems, there are a lot of consequences. You know, George W. Bush probably would not have survived a no confidence vote in the House of Commons, you know, by 2006, when the Iraq war was going so poorly. So in our system, the Commander-in-Chief has tremendous power. And also that power is limited, not by parliamentary votes, but by, you know, once every four years having a presidential election. So our system, I think, is inherently less amenable to public pressure. And I think if you were going to do a checklist of the things that are going to happen in the next four years, things you'd want when you go to war, let me give you five or six of them as an American president. And then sort of the listeners can determine how well the United States has done in our most recent conflict. So you'd want a congressional authorization, which Bush had after 9/11, obviously. There was only one vote against in Congress to go to war in Afghanistan. You'd want a NATO Article 5, which is the first and only time it's been invoked, collective right to self-defense. That happened after 9/11. You'd want a UN resolution. The UN said nations have a right to self-defense. You'd want public buy-in. This was like, The most popular war since polling began on this question was the war, the initial war in Afghanistan. You'd also want an imminent threat. Well, you know, the Pentagon being attacked and the Trade Center collapsing and 3,000 Americans dying, you know, the threat seemed pretty imminent. So in the case, and also you'd want to plan for at least some basic strategy. Well, our strategy, the United States strategy, was overthrow the Taliban, try and destroy al-Qaeda. In the case of the Iran war, none of those boxes are being ticked. There was the least popular war that the United States was engaged in since polling has begun on this question. So 41% of Americans were in favor of the war, you know, in early March of this year. And that number, of course, hasn't gone up because there's always tremendous excitement around the beginning of a war, which tends to fade over time. So even the Iraq war that was relatively popular because the Bush administration had sold sort of a bill of goods about why the war was being conducted. You asked this question, John. I think the power of the commander-in-chief has increased. Since 9-11, the imperial power of the commander-in-chief, we've declared war, the United States has declared war against narco-terrorists. Well, previously, people who are running drug organizations were treated as criminals. Very rarely, I mean, there are narco-terrorist organizations like the FARC in Colombia, but they're, it's kind of unusual. Usually, drug organizations are just people trying to make money. So we've declared them narco-terrorists. We, you know, basically took out the de facto head of state in Venezuela, Maduro. And, you know, special operations raid. So that was, you know, an indication that the war on terror wasn't, was actually expanding in scope under Trump term two. And then, of course, the Iran war is another great expansion of it because there was no, there was no imminent threat. There was no congressional authorization. There was no public buy-in, almost no allies. NATO, of course, is very reluctant to help because it's not their war. And, you know, the list goes on, it seems. And what is, what's a shame? I mean, just with, we're talking about how sometimes intelligence can be, you know, professionals that are ignored despite their excellent intelligence. Well, historians seem to be also being ignored because, you know, we don't even learn from our recent history. And we should, because there's nothing else to learn from. I hope that's recorded somewhere in the White House, Richard. Yeah, I was just going to go back, you know, to the war on terror in general, limiting it to, let's say, Al-Qaeda, Iraq, ISIS, that period. I mean, okay, I know maybe that's, it's not finite in that respect. But I think one of the things I would say now with the benefit of hindsight, when 9-11 happened, following the East African attacks, the attack on the USS Cole, we, I think, felt that we were on the cusp of something which was going to be really much more serious and that there would be other major attacks globally against. Symbolic or iconic targets like the World Trade Center. I think if I look back now, the surprising thing is that didn't happen. Yeah. To an extent, despite all the mistakes, all the problems, I would have a tendency to say professionally that the war on terror actually did broach the problem. It didn't stop it, but it made it much, much less serious. Maybe it's in my psychology to sort of. Search now for a positive outcome, but there was to an extent a positive outcome, which isn't entirely my feeling reflected in your book, or maybe it's there grudgingly. I mean, I'd love your comments on that. No, I totally agree. Look, I mean, from the four post 9-11 presidents, you know, there was no major lethal terrorist attack by a foreign terrorist organization in the United States after 9-11. That was the goal. And it happened. There was only one attack by a foreign terrorist, which was a Saudi military officer killed three American sailors. It was in Pensacola, Florida in 2019, but that's the exception. And so, you know, I think that we manage the problem. I, you know, manage is not a verb that politicians particularly like, because when you say you've managed something, you're opening yourself up to, well, there's an attack, you know, two weeks down the road and manage also doesn't have the annihilate, defeat, destroy kind of, I mean, terrorism as a tactic has been around for millennia. So, you know, managing is about as good as it gets. And I think we have managed the problem. We, the United States and our allies, obviously, you know, there were the 7-7 attacks in London where 52 commuters were killed on July 7th, 2005. Al-Qaeda didn't just stop with the United States. It also, you know, and then, of course, ISIS killed 130 people in Paris in one night in November 2015, I think it was. So the point is, is that the group hasn't, this group didn't completely go away, but we did manage a problem relatively well. Jihadism as an ideology, I think, is still around. It's not a very appealing ideology, like 0.01% of Muslims might sign up for it, but that's still a large number given how many Muslims there are in the world. And we saw, you know, ISIS-K kill 140 people in Moscow at a concert hall, which is the Afghan offshoot of ISIS. So it hasn't gone away, but I think, I think, you know, I mean, look, I agree with you. If we, in the broader picture, the United States and its allies largely managed the problem, and that's about as good as it will get. It's not a problem that can be extirpated because. For a variety of reasons, not least that the people who believe in this believe that God is on their side and, you know, abolishing God is not something that's pretty easy to do. And so if you believe that God is on your side, that's a pretty powerful form of belief. And, you know, we've certainly seen second generation British Muslims adopt the ideology. You know, I think of Jihadi John, who executed, murdered American journalist James Foley at the beginning of the sort of the height of the ISIS, who. You know, grew up in London. I think he was from Kuwait originally. So, you know, these ideas are out there and they're accessible on the internet and people can radicalize. And so it's not going away, but I agree with you just from a macro point of view, as an issue, it's been largely managed. Peter, I just thought on that, one of the features of the response that made it successful was it was multilateral. Yeah. The U.S. did take a strongly coalition-based approach, both to military deployment. On your little checklist, those two multilateral bodies, the U.N. and the NATO, they were boxers that they ticked and they worked hard at that. Coalition and allies doesn't feature so much in your book. And I was left feeling whether, in fact, in your assessment, allies were incidental. I mean, occasionally useful because you needed them. But then when it came to the such as with the Pakistanis, you don't deal them in. Did these 25 years change the view of the U.S.? Is it just institutionally on the value of coalitions and allies? Or ultimately, is it always just the president's war? Good question. I mean, Churchill famously said the only thing worse than fighting with allies is fighting without allies. So, and I'm looking at, I spent a lot of time in Afghanistan. I saw what the British, the French, the Australians, the Germans, the Danes, you know, I mean, a thousand American allied forces died from European and other Western countries in the war. And I think in Afghanistan, which, of course, was why there was such a negative reaction to President Trump's sort of denigration of allied support during the war in Afghanistan. And I think that Trump just seems to have, he doesn't seem to understand that a thousand British, French, Australian, German troops died in Afghanistan in a war that wasn't really theirs. It was initially certainly very much an American war because we were attacked. So, you know, at the end of the day, you know, I mean, look, I'm talking to two Brits, right? I will say something about, I mean, I was in Basra in 2008 and the British retreated. I mean, they were, it was like a scene out of some 19th century Western where the good guys had retreated to the base and would like, you know, really hunkered down. The British were dealt quite a, I mean, they did not do well in Basra. They did well sort of initially, but it was not a success. And then similarly in Helmand, you know, you know the history better than I do. I mean, I think the British went into Helmand. I think he was a peacekeeping operation and suddenly it turned into something much more violent. And it was a very strange place for the British to go because of course Malala, who's still like a celebrated Afghan war hero, the girl who had the battle of Maywan who summoned the Afghans. So I think the British went into the war with a certain amount of, well, we know how to do this because we've succeeded in Malaysia and we succeeded in Northern Ireland. Well, I don't think, I don't think that's actually what happened during, I mean, I think this may be not a popular thing. But I think, I think the British had, didn't have a good experience, you know, in Basra or in Helmand, uh, relatively speaking, you know, you ask, is it always the president's war? You know, the U S military for good or for ill is like the capacity is just so massive. And I mean, in some cases unnecessarily. So, um, at the end of the day, if there's going to be some conflict and which isn't to mean that, I mean, one of the messages of my book is the United States is incredibly good at killing people and breaking people. And so I think that's, I think that's, I think that's a very important thing. And I think that's a very important thing. parking lot uh but isis was defeated in a way that was politically and financially sustainable because it was relatively few american troops on the ground in iraq and syria and the fighting was done by iraqis and syrians the liberation was done by iraqis and syrians not americans on humvees anyway i'd be curious about what you your response to that um having had the privilege of working alongside u.s officials and u.s armed forces when they were deployed in in iraq i mean i i i think to say that the u.s developed the habit of coalition approach might be overstating it during the 25 years but i do think i'm sure richard's got a comment on this too do you think that particularly the work that was done on counter-terrorism developed multilateral high-speed sharing by largely the civilian agencies i like to think that that left something in the system we develop parallel structures we develop parallel structures we develop parallel structures we develop parallel structures we enable conversations which have been hitherto more difficult because of our different legal parameters i hope that that as to the system it felt like a concrete gain from the war on terror militarily uh historians are going to have differing views uh military stories in particular on the contribution that was made but i i think it it maybe highlighted some of the difficulties of working within a u.s system that was as you know occasionally dysfunctional at the center over key things like objectives yeah i'm in violent agreement on the question of you know intelligence sharing so richard what do you think i agree as well um and i think that actually if you look at the whole period of 9 11 and the aftermath the cooperation the coordination was extremely close um i think the problem that arose was we had in the uk and probably most of the european powers who played a lesser role than us had a different sort of legal view of what was the right policy and how it should be executed and that difference with the americans who did go a bit feral in their behavior and i mean that caused a problem in the relationship because they knew that we were going to have a lot of people who would disagree on legal grounds with some of what they were doing they were therefore very reluctant to involve us or brief us or even tell us so it wasn't a straightforward relationship but on the other hand there was a huge amount of goodwill on both sides to try to make it work in spite of the differences and the other thing i would say about iraq in particular and john also has this sort of special experience about iraq iraq had sunk was so low so awfully badly under saddam i mean it was a dreadful place i mean it's taken 25 years almost but it really is now even though there is still the problem of sheer militias a much much more successful happier country than it was and if that intervention hadn't occurred and we had left saddam in power with the policy of containment god knows what the middle east would be like now okay it's not an entirely happy place now but the tectonic plates have significantly shifted and one that's shifted hugely is iraq and i mean some of us regard that okay a cost of huge amount of blood and the tragedy it has come to a reasonably positive outcome in iraq and to an extent now bits of syria as well this is a big shift a big change i don't disagree i mean look counterfactuals are hard so would there have been an arab spring in iraq that might have toppled saddam as uh you know as qaddafi was in libya might that have i mean we don't know i mean and i agree with you iraq today is a sort of semi-functional democratic state which has oil which of course makes all the difference yeah uh but but of course at a tremendous cost at least 200 000 iraqi civilians dead uh forget about the numbers of iraqi police and you know all the other things and so we triggered i mean we the united states and our allies triggered a civil war in iraq which i think you know you know eventually resulted in the rise of isis and all the history that followed but i mean today i don't you know the united states is pulling all its troops out of iraq on september 30th sir richard as i'm sure you know which is an interesting moment because if obama hadn't pulled out in december of 2011 which was a bush negotiated agreement you know even a relatively small presence of u.s troops and i'm not sure if you're aware of that but if obama had pulled out in december of 2011 the u.s troops would have been enough to hold back isis when it came because the you know the iraqi army as we all know folded like a house of cards but if they'd had american air support if they'd had intelligence from the united states and his allies could that have been rolled back that's another big what if we just don't know but i think on the left of the democratic party on the right of the republican party there's kind of a union unanimity now that the absence the absence of american troops equals Liam Panetta and others were really pushing to keep a residual US presence in Iraq in December 2011. Would that have been enough to prevent the rise of ISIS? We don't know. But the point is that there were people advocating a different approach. Peter, I was going to ask you, as it were, raise the hat to the power of 10 and talk about the legacy of these 25 years for those who fought the wars and had the wars fought over them, too. I start with those who fought the wars first. One of the great things you do in your book is you reference the number of occasions on which senior military officials were trying to draw on the lessons of Vietnam. So previous military experience is used in current military conflicts. And the way it was used is always interesting. So the first question really is, how is this enormous reservoir of experience, 25 years, how is that going to be used in future? Is it going to be looked at slightly askance? That is such a great question, because I asked the same question to senior US military officers recently retired. And their answer is that, you know, that it's not been used. It's not really remembered or used or thought about. And I will go back to Vietnam since you've mentioned it. So West Point, my wife and I made a film about the degeneration that joined West Point in the 71, 72 period when joining the US military was like the worst thing you could do. And those are the McChrystals, the Betrayers, the Odeanos, the people who really were the key generals in this. And, you know, Vietnam was a verboten subject of West Point, you know, and counterinsurgency was a verboten topic, because the US military wants to fight. It wants to fight and knows how to fight. It doesn't like counterinsurgencies that go on for a long time or messy, inconclusive. There isn't a sort of surrender on the deck of some carrier. The question is, it seems that they may not be. And, you know, we are in an era of great power competition, according to both the Biden administration and the Trump administration. But that doesn't preclude, we're more likely to have a war like Afghanistan or Iran. Iraq by the just by the, you know, then we are to have World War Three. Right. And, you know, they're not they're not very pretty, the lessons. Right. I mean, they, they don't the victory doesn't come. There's, you know, just these, these conflicts go on for a long time. You know, it was, I think it was, was it Sir Templer who was leading the British in Malaysia? And he, you know, how did he win the war in part, you know, by by putting a lot of the population in essentially low grade concentration camps is my understanding. Anyway, that all by way of saying, you know, like, there is no there's no panacea about winning a war, there's going to be, you know, there's least bad approaches to it. I think with the ISIS war, we had a least bad approach. And I'm not saying it was a panacea, but it, it was politically financially sustainable. And it did defeat ISIS. But in terms of the lessons learned, John, I think that my guess is the new crop of America is going to be the new crop of America. I think American military leaders will focus a lot on China and the, you know, the potential war over the Taiwan Strait. And, and that's where the money is. And that's where a lot of the energy would go. And, you know, but by the law of averages, we may get drawn into some other drawn out insurgency somewhere in the world for reasons I can't predict right now. Just how complicated both the political environment was on the ground and the theater itself, and how irreconcilable that scene with the politicians desire for clean cut, easily communicated progress and, and a finality that was just elusive. Yeah, well, Americans want things over, you know, as soon as possible, right? So there's always a tremendous excitement around the beginning of the war. And then of course, that declines when the reality sets in. Yeah, the United States was founded as an anti-empire project. And I don't think, and I say this in the book, I don't think you can discount that as sort of like part of the American DNA. If you're a British civil servant or military officer posted to India, you learn the language, you went there for 20 years, I'm not defending the British Empire, I'm not attacking it. I'm just saying, you know, the French really understood Algeria, the civil servants and military officers. So in America, no one really learned the language of these countries. There was an Afghan hands program, which I discussed in the book, where you learn Dari or local languages. And Afghanistan or Pakistan, it was career suicide to take these to take this two years out of your career and really learn the languages. So I think in my checklist of kind of things that we tended to get wrong is understanding the environment we're going into. I mean, the British had understood Iraq to a degree because you controlled it in the 1920s. But that was a relatively long time ago. We had no understanding of Iraq. The United States didn't know there was Sunni and Shia. I mean, there was a friend of mine, Jeff Stein, a journalist, would often ask something that shouldn't be a trick question to an American politician after the Iraq war was well advanced, which is what's the difference between the Shia and the Sunni? And most of them had no clue. So we didn't know, we didn't understand the environment we were going into. I think, you know, obviously the people like General McChrystal, who spent a lot of time in Iraq and Afghanistan and, you know, certain general, one of the things I try and say in the book, by the way, is part of the issue is when you don't have a draft and when you have a lot of contractors, more American contractors died in Iraq and Afghanistan than American soldiers. And so, you know, the commander in chief, is much less accountable if there's no draft. He or she is much less accountable if it's not a parliamentary democracy where there could be a vote of no confidence. They're much less accountable if there are contractors are doing a lot of things that soldiers used to do. And they're also much less accountable in the following way. When you have an all-volunteer force, which is now becoming something of a hereditary occupation. So the most likely indicator that you might join the armed services is if a close relative is in the armed services. So only one percent of the Americans of Americans serve. We have two million in the active duty reserves, national guards, less than one percent of Americans serve. So it doesn't affect a lot of people. And so it has made the ability for the commander in chief to go to war, I think, much more sort of frictionless and painless. And with, even though obviously it does create pain and, but, you know, it's hard to imagine with a draft that we would have done some of the things that we did. Now, of course, the professional military does not want a draft because they, you know, the draftees, you know, that comes with a whole range of other problems. But at least we should have some form of national service in a country that is so polarized right now, even if it didn't include military service. Can I just, Peter, follow up? I mean, this is an anecdote really about, you know, country knowledge. Yeah. I think it was in 2003, Henry Kissinger organized for me, literally, because they insisted on it, Edie, to be smuggled into the Pentagon. And CIA was not to know about this, to meet with Rumsfeld, to talk to Rumsfeld about Iraq. And to explain to him, not that I'm an expert, but I have plenty of expertise to draw on, you know, how important the tribal system was in Iraq and how, you know, you could have a different policy. I sat down with Rumsfeld and Doug Fyfe and, you know, Rumsfeld had those yellow sheets, you know, those famous pads with yellow sheets. For three hours, he took copious notes and questioned me. That meeting had absolutely zero impact on policy. Nothing changed at all. And the idea was to try to push them down a different track. And it just never happened. Just in comparison to that, the other thing that has always puzzled me, I retired in 2001. And four. And when I retired, the general view in London, and to an extent in DC, in Washington, was that Afghanistan should be a special forces operation. And we were going to have professional small groups in each of the provinces, you know, around the local sheikhs, who would, as it were, help them manage locally insurgency. But there was, there was going to be no mass deployment of troops, boots on the ground. And of course, we now know what happened when there was massive deployment of boots on the ground. I just cannot understand, really, how the situation changed. Because the Defense Department and Ministry of Defense people in the UK in 2004, when I retired, were totally against large scale deployment into Afghanistan. And suddenly, you know, we're sending 25,000 soldiers. And we're sending 25,000 soldiers there. Do you have any explanation for that sort of radical change of policy which happened very quickly? I think the Taliban started coming back in 2005, 2006. So that's a partial explanation. Because I think if there's a lesson to be learned, Sir Richard, I think it is that, you know, go light, go long is the right approach. You know, a persistent presence with the permission and acceptance of the local government is the least bad option. And that was the option that we used against ISIS. That was the option that you're indicating probably could have worked in Afghanistan. We needed to do something in Afghanistan, because they had no police and they had no army. And we so we had to build up something. But Rumsfeld was very against the idea of nation building. He didn't want ISAF, the International Assistance Force to go even outside of Kabul. And so, you know, something, something changed. But I mean, the big footprint doesn't really work for a lot of reasons. I, you know, sometimes you might need it in certain kind of conflicts. But I think this, the other thing is the Afghan army, the United States kind of build it up in its own image with American made helicopters, American jets, brigades, divisions, if, if it had had a special forces, a relatively large special forces presence, training up an army that looked a bit more like the Taliban, you know, might that have been more effective, and operated a bit more like the Taliban. The other problem, of course, in the 86% illiteracy in Afghanistan, people couldn't even count, you know, it's like, you know, it was, it was, I'm not saying this is an easy project. But I, I met my wife in Afghanistan, I'm very fond of the country. She's a Cajun from Louisiana, so not Afghan, but she, you know, we are very, we did got quite a lot of things, things right in Afghanistan, there was hundreds of independent media outlets, of course, women could work, girls could go to school. There were some good universities, like, that were founded, there was an imperfect, semi democratic system, you know, it was a country that could have looked a bit like Tajikistan, which are, you know, the Taliban conveniently don't believe in elections, they are, I think, the more radical this time around. It's all very unfortunate. So, you know, hopefully, we will learn from some of these lessons. We're not going to get it right. Because whenever you go to war, there's always, you know, you're always going to get stuff wrong. War, inherently is the most uncertain of human enterprises. But, you know, a quote I returned to often in the book, which I'm paraphrasing is from Clausewitz, which is, it's a classic quote from him, which is, the most important decision for the policymaker, and also his military, his or her military, is to decide what kind of war are we embarking on, and not to mistake it for some other kind of war. It seems like a simple point. But I think it's very easy to mistake the kind of war you're, you're embarking on. We've seen that throughout history, it's very rare for a policymaker to really get it right. And I think that's a very important point. We've seen that throughout history, it's very rare for a policymaker to get it right. And usually there's a bunch of, you know, initial mistakes that are, that people do learn from. I think the United States and its allies did begin to learn from their mistakes over time. We're much less inclined to have a big footprint and giant bases and search and destroy missions and these kinds of things. Peter, that's a great point. You do begin, and I think end the book with the Clausewitz reference to the importance of judging the kind of war, which of course is enormously hard, but equally important. You describe in the book, both the most surgical boutique operations launched by the US, and most graphically is the Caesar, is Operation Neptune Spear, right through to full on large scale, hundreds of thousands of men and women in theatre. One of the impressions you leave the reader with is that the US is inevitably drawn to scale, wherever it has the option of, you know, it goes max. Now, obviously, not the case for the UK, we don't have the option of scale. So maybe there's an argument that makes you more loyal to more tailored operations. But do you think that's just an inherent problem with the US is that when they enter with the use of force, they're drawn to scale, they associate it with a decisive outcome. We saw this time and time again, in Iraq, you know, if you just layer on another 10,000, another 30,000, you'll get the result. Whereas as you rightly say, sometimes the opposite is true. But it's so hard for I think, for the US above all, to internalize that scale doesn't always equal superiority. I agree with you. On the other hand, I also would say that we, we, the United States and our allies did learn from our mistakes. So the anti ISIS war was conducted with relatively small troops on the ground. It was politically sustainable, financially sustainable. And as I mentioned, you know, go light go long, do that with the permission of the host country, which we did in Iraq. And also, you know, the United States has forces in countries around the world, which with the acquiescence acceptance agreement of the host country, and it's not controversial, we're still in South Korea 75 years after the end of the Korean hostilities at scale to Well, yeah, I mean, we have 25,000 American troops. We only had 2500 American troops in Afghanistan, when we pulled out of Afghanistan, we have more NATO troops in Afghanistan, Europeans, than Americans when we did a sort of the spectacular own goal of the Taliban withdrawal. Yeah, I mean, there is a kind of desire for scale. But I think there are also plenty of people in the American military on this scale is not a plus. I mean, the war was being lost in Iraq in 2005, as Sir Richard will remember. I mean, that was a live discussion by General McChrystal, who was running Joint Special Operations Command. He took his commanders to Gettysburg to have a retreat and discuss, you know, like, are we losing the war? Have we lost the war? And then, you know, there was a really a sea change where a counterinsurgency tactics got Americans off their big bases into the local population to protect them better. So you have 3,000 civilians dying every month in Iraq at the height of the war. It went down to 300 Iraqi civilians within three, four years. And, you know, so counterinsurgency tactics align with local tribes. Now, Sir Richard raised this question. The Bush administration was very against aligning with tribes people because that was like not the modern Iraq they were trying to create. But they suddenly realized by 2005, 2006, that actually that was a really smart idea because there were a bunch of people who were trying to create a new country. And so they were trying to create a new country. good sort of analytical points that give us a pretty clear interpretation of his position. And I'm impressed by the depth of his knowledge. He really does know an awful lot, having researched all of these events. And you and I probably lived through some of them or quite a lot of them as well. So our views are very much, let's say, tainted or directed by personal experience, some of which is maybe even more direct than his because we were there on the ground and saw things happening on a day-by-day basis. But I don't know what you feel, John, because you certainly have valid experience to make a judgment here too. Well, I too thought that he covered an immensely complicated period with real authority, as he does in his book too. And his book is remarkable. It's incredibly readable, given just how much he covers. There were a few things Peter said that I really endorse and may be at risk of getting lost. One was he stressed how important it is to understand countries and not just, as it were, issues. And you yourself made that point. I think that there is a real risk that war becomes abstracted from its theatre, so its thought, as it were, at a technical level. Without due regard to the people or to the geography or to the culture within which it's being fought. And I was struck by how popular the phrase was, fighting amongst the people, coined by British General Sir Rupert Smith after the Balkan Wars. And yet, how in practice that fell away. The detailed knowledge that was required through contact, but also through study and through expertise, was not properly valued. So I would. I think that was maybe a contributive factor to some of the poor calls that were made. And secondly, I think Peter did in his book, and to a certain extent, the conversation, pay a respectful tribute to US feats of arms, which on many occasions were extraordinary. I mean, the political context was complicated and controversial, but nonetheless, the US did manage to. deliver some extraordinary military accomplishments. And the third thing, which I don't want to clutch at straws, Richard, but I know what you feel. I think in the credit column, if you want to do a balance sheet for the 25 years, is those institutional advances that were made in intelligence sharing to counter terrorism and other targets, and the confidence that was built up and an ease about doing multilateral business, which was not there before. So I think that's a good point. So I think that all of that was driven by 9-11 and what followed. And that has an enduring value. Yeah, I think that's a very, very strong point. The other point I was going to make was, I joined government service, believe it or not, in 1966. When I joined. I wasn't at least alive, Richard, although not aware of you. When I joined, the depth of local knowledge amongst political officers, political officers. Who were posted in the countries where one worked. The linguistic knowledge was extraordinarily sophisticated. And, you know, that capacity, going back to your comment about Rupert Smith fighting amongst the people, which hasn't really, as it were, taken seed. What we seem to have lost, and we've lost it in the UK to an extent, but certainly I don't think the States ever had it. to the same degree, is that aggregation of incredible local expertise. People who were very, very integrated into the local scene. I mean, they hadn't sort of sold out and become locals. They were still very much representatives from London or from British diplomacy. But I think it's a terrible shame that that quality, that tradition, for reasons of. for economy, all sorts of reasons, has been allowed to dissipate. It's gone. I mean, you yourself, John, have huge expertise and knowledge in languages and experience across the Middle East. And you would be a pretty rare commodity these days. I mean, my specialization really was Warsaw Pact, Eastern Europe, and that part of the world. But, you know, I spoke the local language. I was familiar with the literature. I knew a lot about it. I knew a lot about the history. It's a great shame that that sort of specialization has been allowed to dissipate. Well, you're kind, Richard. I'm happy and buoyed by the fact there are so many genuine experts still out there in government service. The thing I always worry about, and I know you and I did at the time, is whether you can flex the expertise into decision-making when, you know, as Peter was reminding us, the emotional temperament, which is often through the roof, the need to get quick results is pressing in on politicians. It can be very difficult to get expertise then weighed as it should be, or even into the room. Well, witness my meeting with Rumsfeld on Iraq, famously. I was wondering how many legal pads he burned through as you were talking. What's he done with them? What happened? Where are those mates? Yes. Are they sitting in some remote file buried in the pentagon, or were they subsequently burned? Well, if we find them, Richard, maybe give them to Peter Bergen for his next book. He can draw on them as primary sources. Excellent. That's great, Richard. Well, thank you very much. That is, I'm afraid, all we have time for in this episode. Please do join us every Thursday for conversations about world events that go beyond the headlines. Please help us. Please help us find this show by subscribing, liking, and commenting on YouTube or wherever you watch or listen. And for additional commentary and explainers, check out OneDecision.com. I'm John Rain. Thank you for listening. So you can get in on the sports action no matter where you are, including these places. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. You get free nights every night all year long. Plus, a 25% bonus toward your daytime use all summer. It's a first-of-its-kind plan created for how Texans actually use energy. TXU Energy. 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