Lawfare Daily: A Progress Report on the War on Terrorism with Peter Bergen

The Lawfare Podcast

Peter Bergen reviews his book 'All the Presidents' Wars,' evaluating America's 25-year counterterrorism record by weighing massive financial and human costs against the prevention of another 9/11-style attack. He details critical

Key takeaways

• The US spent $6 trillion and lost thousands of lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet successfully prevented another major homeland attack while inadvertently empowering Iran and fueling sectarian civil wars.
• Bergen identifies the failure to negotiate with a defeated Taliban in late 2001 as a critical missed opportunity that allowed them to regroup and eventually force a flawed US withdrawal under Trump.

Main topics

• Post-9/11 counterterrorism strategy and cost-benefit analysis
• Strategic errors in Iraq and Afghanistan nation-building

Notable quotes

"If you can't answer it, you shouldn't be in the business of invading the country and turning the power... flipping the pyramid by overthrowing Saddam."

Conclusion

The episode underscores that sustainable counterterrorism requires lowering strategic ambitions,

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) you It's a simple question. If you can't answer it, you shouldn't be in the business of invading the country and turning the power, basically turning the pyramid with a minority Sunnis on top and the majority Shia on the bottom and flipping the pyramid by overthrowing Saddam. You effectively started an insurgency which became the civil war and democratization simply amplified it. It's Speaker 1 (0:22) the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Daniel Byman, foreign policy editor of Lawfare, with Peter Bergen, who is the author of a new book, All the President's Wars, 25 Years of America's War on Terror. Speaker 2 (0:38) There's only two ways you can make peace with your enemies. You can either get them to surrender or you can make peace with them. And peace is a, you know, classically is a mutual recognition of the herding stalemate, which is where we are. And then it becomes, you know, what's the least bad deal we can make and what's the least bad deal the Iranians feel they can make. Speaker 1 (0:58) Today, we're talking about America's record in counterterrorism, what has gone well, what has gone poorly, and how the United States should be thinking about counterterrorism in the future. Peter Bergen, let me congratulate you on your new book, All the President's Wars, which certainly has a catchy title. And I will say to our viewers and listeners, it is not only deeply informed, but it's actually wonderfully easy to read. So you have a gift for prose as well as for reporting. Speaker 2 (1:31) Well, you know, I mean, as you've written many books yourself, the hardest thing to do is to write something about a relatively complex subject that is written in such a way that it doesn't complexify something, but tries to make it understandable. Speaker 1 (1:43) I'll say just as an endorsement of the book, you've also done an excellent job being able to write for different audiences. I've, you know, for better or worse, kind of live some of these issues in great detail. Yet, I still learned a lot, but I just recommended it to a younger colleague who is entering this field, as this would be a great primer for someone who wants to learn about really how the United States got to where it is today on counterterrorism, for better or worse. So it's very nicely done. Speaker 2 (2:12) Thank you, Tom. Speaker 1 (2:12) Let me start with kind of a big question. Your book makes clear that the United States spent trillions of dollars, lost thousands of Americans' lives, destabilized parts of the Middle East that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Yet, there not only has been no repeat of 9-11, but there hasn't been anything close to it on U.S. soil. How should we weigh these things against one another when we're evaluating the last 25 years? Speaker 2 (2:43) Well, I think that's a great question. And perhaps I didn't do a good enough job of making that. I mean, it's a hard, if the cost benefit analysis is a hard one, because 200,000 Iraqi civilians dead, 45,000 Afghan civilians dead, 66,000 Afghan police and military dead, $6 trillion of current and projected. US taxpayer money to 7,000 service members. And something I found out in the course of writing this book that I didn't know, 8,000 American contractors, they got almost no media attention, but they were doing all these kind of quasi-military tasks, whether it was base protection or protecting VIPs or intelligence support or whatever. And so, you know, it was quite a cost. I guess, you know, we can easily say. that many of our goals could have been accomplished. at a much lower cost of blood and treasure and also our own political and capital around the world if we had done things smarter and better. So I think that that's the right answer. I don't think if Al Gore had won the pre-9 election. presidential election, I don't think Al Gore would have sort of said, well, we're not going to go to war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. I think that, I mean, the vote for the authorization of the use of military force speaks for itself. There was only one dissenting vote, Barbara Lee of California, a Democrat, who actually saw much further ahead than a lot of us. But, you know, there was, you know, rarely has a war been more legitimate. We had a UN resolution in favor. We had NATO allies for the first and only time, Article 5. We had overwhelming congressional authorization. We had a real and imminent threat. We overthrew the Taliban in three months. The only American fatalities in the first war against the Taliban that overthrew them were caused by our own side, which is astonishing. There was a friendly fire incident near Kandahar on December 5th, 2001. We also had a CIA officer who was killed in a prison uprising in northern Afghanistan. during that time frame. But, I mean, it seemed like we were the hyperpower. You remember this, Dan, that the French would call us a hyper-presence, I think, a hyperpower. Well, all that kind of image blew up in the deserts of Iraq and the cities of Iraq, and we came off as hapless and incompetent, got sucked into a war of choice, which was very damaging in so many different ways. Not least, Dan, you know Joel Rayburn. He was the lead panel on the army history of Iraq. It's the only official history we're ever going to get because unlike the 9-11 Commission, which you served on as a staff member, there was never an Iraq War Commission, which is astonishing. There was a Shilkot inquiry in the United Kingdom, but we'd become so polarized already by the end of the Iraq War that there could be no... a real investigation. So the US official army history is the closest we'll get. And that concluded that the sole winner of the Iraq war was Iran, which I don't think was really the, no one who ordered the war thought that was going to happen. Speaker 1 (5:44) I'll add to your plug of that history. It really is a remarkable document for something that the US government did, which is, it's a pretty unsparing critique of the US military as well as the broader US. government effort in Iraq done by very impressive US military officers. Speaker 2 (6:03) Yeah, I totally agree with that. The co-lead pan was Frank Sobchak, a colonel, special forces, PhD, Tufts. Joel's a totally brilliant guy who was the other lead pan. I mean, so, and they assembled six other military historians serving officers. And it's really a work of history, unlike a lot of these military histories, which is we took. Hill 21 on day X. And, you know, that's really very tactical level. This is really, and they couldn't get at everything. They never spoke to Rumsfeld. He kind of dilly-dallied him on that. And they also couldn't really do much on special operations for classification reasons. And same with CIA. But on the other hand, it is a real history, which meaning, you know, it's not just a military history. There's a political. element to this history that is really good. It is a massive piece of work and a very good one. Speaker 1 (6:57) Your book, understandably, goes in great depth in the US mistakes in Iraq, and also mistakes in Afghanistan, such as, I'll say, misunderstanding the Taliban and missing opportunities to perhaps negotiate from a position of strength. What mistake or mistakes would you highlight that the United States made after 9-11? in these theaters, but also outside them. Speaker 2 (7:20) Letting Bernard go to the Battle of Tarabar, I mean, we knew where he was. The great thing about being a historian as you are, Dan, do you consider yourself a historian or a political scientist? Speaker 1 (7:32) Unfortunately, and with some embarrassment, a political scientist. Speaker 2 (7:35) Okay. Speaker 1 (7:36) The Speaker 2 (7:37) great thing about writing works of history as you've done is we keep learning things we didn't know. We always knew that Jim Mattis, then a one-star general, had 1,500 Marines in Kandahar. But it wasn't really clear why they weren't at the Battle of Taraburra, what happened. And when Jim Mattis published his relatively recent autobiography, he said that he repeatedly requested for his Marines to be deployed from southern Afghanistan to Taraburra in eastern Afghanistan. Now, you can't imagine a more gung-ho commander with a more gung-ho group of troops than 1,500 Marines under Brigadier General, then Brigadier General Jim Mattis. That request was never... disallowed and it was never a you know no one responded so he just died and similarly gary bernson a very gung-ho cia ground commander requested a battalion of rangers that was actually turned down by general tommy franks who will go down as one of the least impressive generals of the modern era in american history he managed to you know turn down a request to get bin laden when he was surrounded for reasons that are you know either He's elucidated publicly to me in an email why he didn't do that. Some of his reasoning is just totally specious. I think we didn't want to replicate the Soviet invasion. Well, 800 rangers in a small part of Afghanistan to get bin Laden is not occupying and invading Afghanistan for a decade as the Soviets did and killing a million Afghans. This is history by analogy that makes no sense. And then later, when it became a political issue in the 2004 election, he actually wrote a piece in the New York Times saying it wasn't clear with the intelligence if he was really there. This is untrue. And the reason I can say that with great authority is if you go back and you look at the public statements of Vice President Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, during that time period, they said, yeah, we think he's in. These are public statements. These are not classified statements. So, you know, that was one of the big what ifs. And I think another big what if is. There was a narrative that grew up, we should have concluded the Taliban at the Bonn Conference that began November 25th, 2001. That was kind of the original sin. Actually, that narrative is not correct. Al-Aqsa al-Bahimi, who was the UN leader of that conference, said that. But I think he's a smart guy. The fact is the Northern Alliance of the United States would never have let the Taliban to attend the Bonn Conference when they were still fighting the war. Now, they surrendered to Karzai, the president-elect of Afghanistan. on December 5th, 2001, that was the time to make peace. I mean, they knew they were utterly defeated and we could have made peace with them. You Speaker 1 (10:08) know, Speaker 2 (10:08) Karzai was willing to give them amnesty, make peace with them. Rumsfeld nixed it. We heard from the White House, from the spokesman at the time, he also nixed it, you know, within a day or two. So that was a road not taken. Bracketing the Taliban and al-Qaeda was the same group. Essentially, A, muddled our thinking during the... between the initial stages of the war because the Taliban became the goal rather than necessarily al-Qaeda. And then it also became a self-fulfilling prophecy because the Taliban began to look a lot more like al-Qaeda as the years went on, using IEDs, using suicide attacks and the like. So that was a big missed opportunity. So, I mean, unfortunately, there were quite a lot of them. And Obama made a version of this mistake. After the Afghan surge, he could have made peace with the Taliban. brought them to the negotiating table when they were really taking a real pounding in southern and eastern Afghanistan when McChrystal was the commander and the surge of troops had gone in. But Holbrooke was appointed as a special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. That seemed to be a signal we were willing to do a deal with the Taliban. He died, unfortunately. And also he began discussions with the Taliban at a pretty low level. So it wasn't the Obama administration missed the opportunity. to make a deal with the Taliban with every passing year. By the time we got to the negotiating table with them in earnest under the Trump term one in 2018, they drove a very hard bargain, a bargain that was a terrible one, which was no Afghan elected government officials at the table, pretending to separate from Al-Qaeda, et cetera, et cetera, and all the things you know that they didn't do. Speaker 1 (11:41) Let me ask you a very different question about mistakes, because when I look at my own analytic record, I certainly made my share of misjudgments. Are there mistakes that the people in senior positions in the policy world made that you're actually sympathetic to? They got