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Rajiv Chandrasekaran
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The FRONTLINE Interviews
Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Journalist and Author, Little America
Rajiv Chandrasekaran served as the national editor of The Washington Post and is the author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone and Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan.
The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE’s Jim Gilmore on May 23 and June 16, 2021. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Reaction to 9/11
We're starting the film with 9/11, the afternoon of 9/11, when the Congress, women and men, are on the steps of the Capitol building, and they start singing “God Bless America.”It's a very bipartisan moment.It's an America that's different than today.So I wanted—if you can help us, what was that America?
9/11—Sept. 11 and the days and weeks that would follow it—were a rally-around-the-flag moment, in some ways typical for a country that has undergone a significant disaster or calamity.But this was at a different level of magnitude.It wasn't just a hurricane or an earthquake.This was the most profound attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor.
And so you had a banding together of this country, the likes of which had not been seen in decades and, sadly, may not be seen for decades to come.It surprised me.I was overseas at the time, and I didn't return to the United States until about six months after Sept. 11 as a foreign correspondent for <i>The Washington Post</i>.I'd spent those months in Afghanistan and Pakistan and parts of southeast Asia.But by February 2002, driving through the residential neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., and the suburbs in Maryland and Virginia, was struck by just how many homes were waving American flags and the sorts of outward displays of patriotism and national unity that maybe you saw in a way, in a trite way, on a Fourth of July morning in America, but nothing like that in my lifetime and, quite frankly, nothing since.
It was also the world that was supporting us at that point.You've got NATO defending us under Article 5 for the first time ever.It seems like a lost opportunity, the way that the world was supporting us, the bipartisan feeling within America.Looking back, was this a lost opportunity due to events to come?
So let's be clear about the world reaction.In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, yes, the entire world rallied to the defense of the United States—the famous headline in <i>Le Monde</i>, "We are all Americans," and even in parts of the Muslim world where I was spending much of my time, a real outward expression of pain and sympathy for the United States.
That began to change several weeks later, as the United States began to commence military operations to topple the Taliban-led regime in Afghanistan that was harboring Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network.And all of a sudden, on the streets in Muslim countries, in Indonesia, in Pakistan and across the Arab world, you start to see outward expressions of opposition to that war, or at least the impending war, and you started to see the first fissures emerge.
But even then, the bulk of the Western world was still with the United States.Europe was solidly with the United States, as was much of East Asia, even the Russians.We had this massive global coalition that was at our back as we were seeking to bring Osama bin Laden, bring Al Qaeda to justice for the attacks.
The Bush Administration
Who was President Bush at this moment?As, you know, 9/11, this is his first year in his administration.Give me a thumbnail of George W. Bush at this moment of 9/11.
So George W. Bush, former two-term governor of Texas, is in the first year of his presidency, a young man from a distinguished political family who came to office labeling himself as a compassionate conservative; somebody who had big ideas for wanting to reform education and other domestic programs; didn't see himself as a foreign policy president and in ways had kept some key members of his father's distinguished foreign policy team at a bit of arm's length.But he did have Dick Cheney close to him as his vice president and Donald Rumsfeld as his Defense secretary, as well as Colin Powell running the State Department, so three veterans in Republican national security circles, all of whom emerged in their own ways as centers of power in the immediate response there.
You could see pretty quickly, however, that while Bush was the president, much of the initial response really involved a very full-throated posture for Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld in particular.They were—they were the graybeards who really stepped forward.Bush was, yes, in charge, but it was unlike a traditional relationship, where the president was the unquestioned boss.
Unlike other administrations, where the president's view was the most influential in the room, and I don't want to suggest that—that Bush was a lapdog to his vice president or defense secretary, but we have to recognize that Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, among others, but those two in particular, and members of their staffs, key lieutenants to Cheney and Rumsfeld, had a disproportionate influence in shaping the American response to 9/11, not just in the immediate weeks that followed, but in the months that would follow, the shape of the war in Afghanistan, the subsequent decision to invade Iraq, other elements of the U.S. response to what would be called the global war on terror—the rendition program, the use of interrogations by the CIA—all of which would be shaped ultimately by Rumsfeld, by Cheney and by their key aides.
[President Bush] gets back to Washington in the evening.He goes on television that night and he gives a speech where he defines this as a war between good and evil.Do you think at that point, watching that president, the message that he was giving, did he have any understanding of who this enemy was, what this enemy was capable of?
When President Bush speaks to the nation on 9/11, we have to remember that this was the culmination of a day in which the president was in part very much in a bubble.He was evacuated from Florida.He was on Air Force One flying around the country; they believed that to be the safest place for him.But in Air Force One, he was cut off from key meetings at the White House.His ability to talk to the nation during the day was—was impossible, given the technology that then existed for the president on Air Force One.
So he gets back to Washington.He's at the White House, and it is still really unclear the extent of the plot against America, whether further plots are still in the works, the degree to which there may have been foreign government support.There are far more unanswered questions than what the intelligence community knows at that point.
And so the president has to be vague, but he has to pass this in terms of a country having to come together to defeat an existential foe.An attack like this really—there was no parallel, perhaps save for Pearl Harbor.And so this was his wartime calling, and completely unprepared for it, unlike, let's say, in the late 1930s, early 1940s, when it was clear that the storm clouds of fascism were building in Europe, and the Nazis were on the march, and the Japanese were on the march in East Asia.Yes, while the intelligence community was warning of Al Qaeda activity and within the secure compartmentalized intelligence facilities of the United States government, lights may have been blinking red in some cases, it wasn't widely known.
So he had to—he had to set context, but, even more than that, he and his administration had to learn about this threat.And they were—they were going to have to build a plane while flying it.
Dick Cheney and the Dark Side
… So Cheney soon after is on the Sunday shows talking about the fact that we're going to have to fight this war on the "dark side," that a lot of it is going to happen in the shadows, in secret.Give me a thumbnail on Cheney and what were his motivations. … What's the thumbnail of Cheney at this point?
Cheney in some ways was a true visionary.He did see that the enemy that the United States was facing in Al Qaeda and its key affiliates was unlike a traditional battlefield foe.You weren't going to be able to deploy a conventional military in the way that we had in other conflicts in our history.He also recognized that in this asymmetric nature that, for instance, domestic courts, he believed, would be difficult venues to bring perpetrators to justice because of the difficulty in acquiring evidence, the need to be able to rely on classified information, like wiretaps and such, as evidence, that you didn't want to then reveal how you got that information in a court of law, in a civilian setting in the United States.
And so he, early on, realized that there needed to be a very different sort of U.S. response.Now, where that gets very controversial is that there are ways that the United States could have responded differently to this threat that still would have been well within the norms of American values; where the United States, particularly our intelligence services, our special operations forces, knew where the bright lines were when it came to the types of interrogation tactics that violated the Geneva Convention.
But Cheney, and shaped by some of his key advisers, decided to push well beyond that and really forge a new doctrine of a U.S. response, and one that really threw out all of the rule books, and—and let some very, very extreme tactics and measures be employed, all in the name of preventing another attack.And in this case, in this time, Cheney had—well, let's be clear.In this case and in this time, there were two important things to note.
One, all of this was done in utter secrecy.Very, very few people knew about it.And one could argue that even President Bush didn't know all of the details of what was being—what would later go on to be conducted by the CIA and by other elements of the intelligence community.A lot of work was kept very much in the dark.
The other was, there was an incredible fear that there were going to be follow-on attacks and that the United States needed to do everything in its power to prevent another 9/11-type moment.And it was—it wasn't clear whether there were going to be other cells that would pop up in the following weeks and months, where there would be copycat attacks inspired by the 9/11 plotters.
And so Cheney got wide latitude because of this profound fear that had settled upon the country.
Guantanamo
There's a debate over how to handle prisoners at this point in the White House.Talk about Guantanamo Bay and how it becomes to some extent the first test case in throwing out the rule book on how you're going to conduct yourself in regards to enemy prisoners.
So as U.S. forces push into Afghanistan, they start apprehending key Taliban leaders.They start picking up some Al Qaeda operatives.And these are folks that are initially kept in makeshift detention facilities on U.S. bases near Kabul, the capital, and in Kandahar, in the south.But these are facilities that are wholly ill-equipped to hold people for long periods of time.There isn't great infrastructure there to properly interrogate them.
And so, at the highest levels of the U.S. government, a big problem emerges: what to do with all of these folks?We can't let them go.We can't just ship them back.Remember, in Afghanistan and the frontier regions of Pakistan, fighters came from all over the world: from Saudi Arabia, from Yemen, from Kuwait, from Egypt, from Morocco, from Libya.They emerged from all over.These were countries not all of which the United States had good relationships with.The U.S. government simply didn't want to repatriate them, and in many cases these countries didn't want these guys back after they had been committing jihad in Afghanistan.So what to do with them?
Eventually, the Bush administration decides, well, we've got to bring them somewhere.We can't just, like, house them on ships; there's not enough space there.No other U.S. military facility in a third country seems to be the right fit.But, hey, what about Cuba?We've got this military installation at Guantanamo Bay.It's not technically Cuban soil because of this treaty that we've had there for some years.It's not U.S. soil, so you can't just—a lawyer for a detainee can't run to the Supreme Court and file a writ of habeas corpus.And so it emerges as this perfect no-man's land to bring these guys.
And perhaps the first planeload or two of folks that were brought there, there was a pretty high ratio of folks who had been engaged in what were arguably bad acts on the battlefield.But then what began to happen was that the Gitmo economy started to take hold in Pakistan and Afghanistan.The local security forces began to recognize that they could get bounties from the Americans for just handing over people, so lots of low-level folks were picked up, people who might have just been going to religious schools in Pakistan or, you know, lower-level guys who might have wanted to come to Afghanistan to perhaps fight with the Taliban or Al Qaeda but never were really jihadi masterminds or key operatives.
But they all get rounded up and sent over to Guantanamo, and soon the population of Gitmo swells, swells into way more than that facility can handle.And there are these iconic images of orange-robed, shackled detainees behind multiple layers of barbed wire fencing, and it's horrific to the world.
And yet it reflects not just a horror of war and a failing of the American moral conscience, but also just a breakdown of our ability to figure out how to handle people who we've picked up on a battlefield, our inability to properly understand and adjudicate these cases, and, you know, what we—what we are so shocked by in those early images, we become inured to in years to come.And now 20 years later, or almost 20 years later, Guantanamo is still open; we still have people there.
The fact of how we become oblivious to some extent to the codes that we're breaking, it all comes down to leading to enhanced interrogation, to torture in many cases.It becomes acceptable in some way.How does that happen?
The profound fear of a follow-on attack, of potentially an even bigger attack, perhaps involving a depleted uranium warhead or a biological or chemical weapon, led the United States, and particularly led the CIA, with the authority of the White House, to embark on a series of methods called enhanced interrogation with a handful of key Al Qaeda operatives and leaders that were apprehended in the days and weeks and months after 9/11.These were folks who were flown in secret to what were called black site prisons; one was in Thailand, one was in Poland and in other parts of the world.And these secret facilities, where the CIA was intending to interrogate them, those interrogation practices soon crossed a really dark line.
Instead of standard practices that might involve lengthy questioning, maybe questioning past a point where somebody gets tired, maybe some slamming on the table, maybe some threats of lengthy detention and potentially capital punishment, these interrogation tactics entered a whole new realm.Some individuals were waterboarded, where a hood is placed over the face and water is poured onto that person’s face as they are made to lay backwards to simulate drowning.It's a horrific experience.And Khalid Sheik Mohammed was not waterboarded just once but dozens of times, according to records that would later become declassified.And other individuals were subjected to all sorts of conditions: loud music, which on its face sounds innocuous, but when you're subjected to loud noises that go on for 24 hours or longer; prevented from sleeping; being placed in painful and awkward positions.
It was an American response that, if it had been known in those—in that immediate aftermath, there might well have been many Americans who said: "You know what? 9/11 was a horrible, horrible day, but it doesn't justify us responding in this way.You can attack us on our soil, you can bring down two iconic skyscrapers, you can kill more than 3,000 people in our country, but you can't—you can't kill our values."And what the enhanced interrogation program did was, it did more to attack American values than anything that was done on the day of 9/11.
Failure to Capture bin Laden
The inability to catch bin Laden at Tora Bora, what did that say about our plans?It seemed we didn't have really good plans on what we were going to do there.And the fact of when we lost him, we didn't go chasing him.What was the reality of the ability to our forces to have plans so they knew how to run this war?And what did Tora Bora and the escape of bin Laden say about that?
We went into Afghanistan half-cocked.The Pentagon has plans for invading almost every country on Earth sitting on the shelf somewhere.And yeah, sure, there was a plan for the invasion of Afghanistan.It was old, you know.It wasn't all that sophisticated.Now, early on, it looked like we knew what we were doing.We sent in special ops teams, long distances on helicopters.They rode on horseback and worked with local Afghan forces.We dropped these massive bombs called “daisy cutters” on Taliban in troop positions in the northern part of the country; essentially let Afghan forces and helped pave the way for them to take over the capital of Kabul and push out the Taliban; and then really helped to get other Afghan forces to rise up in different parts of the country and—and push out the Taliban regime.
All that looked good to the outside world; it looked like the Afghans, who so detested the Taliban and the Al Qaeda organization that they were giving aid and comfort to, were rising up and claiming their own autonomy.But if the point of all of this was to really go after the guys who had perpetrated 9/11, we didn't do that great of a job of it.We knew that bin Laden was hiding out in Afghanistan.We knew that many key Al Qaeda leaders were there.Yet we failed to bring on the proper dragnet.And when intelligence reports came through that bin Laden was attempting to flee into the mountainous regions of neighboring Pakistan, through the Tora Bora range in eastern Afghanistan, instead of deploying the full range of American assets—the Army's Delta Force, the Navy's SEAL Team Six, other elite units—we left a lot of the pursuit to Afghan tribal forces with some conventional U.S. units as backup, really allowing and enabling bin Laden to walk away from Afghanistan, scot-free, where he would then get to Pakistan and be able to hide out there for years to come.
Invasion of Iraq
Let's turn to Iraq.In January of '02, Bush makes his famous “axis of evil” speech.How does that define the expanding war to come?How does that worry other nations, some of our allies, as we take a step away from the focus on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and move to make this a larger war?
To this day, the decision to invade Iraq still remains a bit of a mystery, because it still doesn't make sense.There was no credible intelligence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.And even if he did possess more up-to-date chemical or biological weapons, he had no reliable delivery system to hit the United States or Western Europe, or, quite frankly, any target in the broader Middle East.He, yes, was a Sunni Muslim, but was not a guy who was inclined to ally himself with the extremist Salafist philosophy of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
He presided over a multiethnic, multisect country.This is not a guy who was going to be, you know, the aspiring next leader of Al Qaeda.And while you could argue that any number of folks around the world who don't like the United States might be able to cobble together some sort of attack on our interests in some part of the world, the decision to focus on Iraq in such a way was a puzzling one.The Iranians had a nuclear program, they claimed for civilian purposes, but they were making progress in the world of enriching uranium.Iraqis weren't doing that.Their Osirak faciliter—their Osirak facility was bombed by the Israelis in the 1980s.The North Koreans clearly have made progress on a nuclear weapon; they've tested them.We knew all about it.But Iraq?
And so, to some, it looked like unfinished business from his father's administration; to others, it just seemed like a total puzzle.Why would we turn our sights there, when the true enemy at that time was Al Qaeda and its affiliates that were propping [sic] up in other parts of the world: in Southeast Asia, in the northern part of Africa and in other corners of the globe?
Colin Powell and Weapons of Mass Destruction
So an argument during these months, year, is made that Iraq is a really big danger and that they're connected to Al Qaeda.When we get to the U.N. speech of Colin Powell, it becomes very serious, selling it to the world.Talk a little bit about the choice of Colin Powell, who he is, why Colin Powell, how respected and such, and the effect of it.
In trying to make its case for the threat that senior Bush administration officials believed Iraq posed, there was no more convincing person they could have sent onto the world stage than retired four-star general Colin Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had led the U.S. military and the overall international coalition in the first Gulf War, an African American four-star leader who was so widely respected by both Republicans and Democrats and by our allies.Among Bush's national security team, he was the individual that commanded the deepest and broadest respect.
And while that speech was being given, I must say, I found it deeply, deeply concerning.I was in Baghdad at the time, one of about a handful of American journalists who were allowed in under the Saddam Hussein government to report, in part, on the U.N. weapons inspection process.U.N. inspectors were there looking at suspected facilities.They were getting intelligence reports given to them by the U.S. government.They were going to facilities where it was believed the Iraqis could have been making biological and chemical weapons, where Scud missiles could have been held.
And I would follow these inspectors with a translator and a minder from the information ministry, and we'd be followed by agents from the Iraqi intelligence service.It was a big car chase through the streets of Baghdad and on the highways of Iraq.And we'd get to these sites and inevitably would come up empty.It was either a veterinary testing facility or it was a long-ago abandoned site, where everything was rusty and dusty and broken.A suspected Scud missile-launching facility was merely a barn holding chicken coops.
They found nothing.And yet Powell was there, in front of the U.N., alleging that Iraq possessed WMDs.
And they made a case which was pretty believable to the extent that much of Congress, Democrat and Republican, agreed to vote in favor of the invasion.The press, much of the press, a lot of leading press, leading voices, also were in—their writing was supportive.
Remember the world we're in.We're still in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.It's a nation scarred.When your leaders are telling you this country poses an existential threat, people pay attention.And it's so hard to prove a negative.And it is incredibly hard in that real-time environment, when it comes to a country run by a dictator halfway around the world, to prove the negative.
And the consequences when it's found there are no weapons of mass destruction?
I think, in ways much like Watergate, forced a reassessment of the role of Congress vis-à-vis the administration; the role of the press in America; the WMD scandal, let's call it; the false pretenses of the Iraq War; the shading of intelligence that has led to a much deeper skepticism, particularly in the press, with regard to national security matters; in Congress with regard to the latitude given to an administration to pursue military operations overseas.But all of that said, at the end of the day, our intelligence services are as powerful as ever.Our executive branch still retains enormous authority that it claims to conduct military operations without formal congressional approval.
And so while it's led to a lot of outrage, the ultimate consequences?Relatively few.
Over many years though, over the 20 years, that lie or the shading of intelligence has led people to—the fact of the matter is, now the public doesn't trust media as much; it doesn't trust the administration.
When it becomes clear that there are no significant stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, there is a—there is a gut punch to American society.Democrats, who had been skeptical of the war but nonetheless signed up, for fear of looking weak, have an I-told-you-so moment.But for Republicans, for many on the right, this becomes a moment in which they start to question what their leaders are telling them, from their own party.George W. Bush, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, establishment Republicans: these are old-school Republicans, and they've told them all this stuff, and these Americans have sent their sons and daughters off to war.
They start to hear that, wait a second, we laddered up for this war, we cheered you on, and now you're telling us that the reason you sent our kids to battle is not really the reason, but we still have to be there because we broke it and we have to put in back together?And we're going to bring democracy to that part of the world, we're going to modernize it and do all of this stuff, and it's going to cost billions and billions more dollars?We're going to have to keep sending my kid's unit back to Iraq every other year?
That's—it starts to erode a faith in the American system, starts to lead people to question: What are our leaders telling us?What's their grand plan?And how does this—how does this square with, you know, what my life, what's going on here?You know, my kids are going there; they're coming back with post-traumatic stress; they're coming back wounded; they're coming back to an economy that's now in the throes of a recession, that's unable to give them the sort of landing and opportunity for growth that, let's say, the greatest generation had when they came back from Europe and the Pacific.
And it becomes, in some ways, incredibly corrosive.It's a seed that gets planted that starts to kind of grow and fester in many people.
Iraq Post-Invasion
Great.Let's hit a couple more points in Iraq.You're there, of course. You're seeing on the ground what's happening, the way people are looking at things.When the Saddam Hussein statue falls—I know you're not there at the site, but you're in Iraq—how is that seen at the time?And how quickly do you understand that the reality is very different, that taking down Saddam is certainly not going to easily lead to a democratic Iraq.What are you seeing, and what is the reality?
What's eminently clear to those of us on the ground in Iraq are those immediate scenes of euphoria, of jubilation, quickly give way to lawlessness.Looting emerges; buildings are ransacked around the town.Gives way to Iraqi military units disbanding and some chaos ensuing.It gives way to the leadership of the Hussein regime just melting away, hiding out, going to ground.
And what becomes very clear is that the business of trying to stabilize this country, trying to forge a new order in a country that is so riven by sect and ethnicity, with longstanding grievances that had been suppressed by brutal force by Saddam Hussein, all now start bubbling to the surface.
It becomes clear that the United States is once again wholly unprepared for what it's going to have to do in Iraq.And this, in some ways, is the second big sin of the WMD debacle.The focus on WMD meant that there was very little attention, no attention paid to what it would take to try to govern and rebuild post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.The plans were never put in place.The people were never selected.The funds were never allocated.Nobody had appropriate roles.
And so the United States just flails at it.And particularly in those early months, when we still had some degree of goodwill with the Iraqi people, when we had an opportunity to try to stabilize things at a lower cost, we, at every turn, seemed to do the opposite of what was right.
How did the invasion, how did the handling of the post-invasion time, how did it all play into bin Laden's hands?
As the United States was getting bogged down in Iraq, I suppose bin Laden could only look from his redoubt in the mountainous parts of Pakistan and smile and express some satisfaction.But what was also happening was that the Iraqi insurgency was metastasizing, and the insurgency was largely dominated by Sunni Muslim Arabs, the same sect of Islam that bin Laden belongs to.And while some in the insurgency were just Iraqi nationalists, not extremists, it played into those with more extreme religious views.
And the most successful of the insurgent leaders began to use religion and began to use a more extremist rhetoric and a promulgation of extremist ideology as a powerful recruitment and motivation tool for the insurgency.And soon you get an Al Qaeda affiliate springing up in Iraq, Al Qaeda in Iraq, led by a Jordanian named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and it becomes the most powerful Al Qaeda affiliate in the world.And its strength grows into the thousands, with ample access to munitions, because Saddam stores munitions all over the country, and funding coming in.And they emerge as the most potent threat to U.S. forces in that country, killing hundreds of U.S. troops.
Abu Ghraib
Let's talk quickly about Abu Ghraib, because it's such a turning point.How did it—what was its effect?How did it fuel the insurgency?How did Iraqis that you talked to, how did U.S. soldiers that you talked to see it?
To many Iraqis, seeing what was happening inside the walls of Abu Ghraib in those leaked photographs—and remember, Abu Ghraib was Saddam's notorious prison and torture chamber, that the Americans had taken this place over, and that the Americans were treating people worse than they could imagine that Saddam did—gave lie to the claims that American officials were making to them on a daily basis; that they were here to make their country better; that they were respecting the Iraqi people; that they were trying to promote peace and security.And perhaps more than anything else in that first year, it fueled the growth of the insurgency.
Of course, the decision early on to disband without honor members of the Iraqi army who had committed no real crimes and essentially tell them they had no part in the future of the country, to dismiss many low-level civil servants who simply happened to be members of the Baath Party, again, relegating them to really no future employment, were potent contributors to what would become the insurgency.
But those pictures, those pictures poured gasoline on what was just a small kindling fire.
The Obama Years
So let's turn to [President Barack] Obama.The first thing we're probably going to be starting with Obama is the Nobel Peace Prize, winning that in Oslo.Talk about how the world viewed this man.Did he understand that he was between a rock and a hard place in some way, that he's getting a prize before he deserves it?He knows what the expectations are, but he makes a speech which describes his war doctrine, actually, as I guess a way to define the fact of who he will be.Talk a little bit about that Nobel Peace Prize and what is important to take away from what he said.
… Obama was clear as a candidate.The U.S. was in the throes of fighting two wars.He had very early on broken ranks from much of his own party by opposing the invasion of Iraq.It gave him great credibility among some Democrats, in his lengthy primary fight in 2008 against Hillary Clinton.But remember, here you have a young Democrat president, no military experience, in his first term.He's already come out and said repeatedly that Iraq was a bad war.He's got two wars on his—on his shoulders.He's got the conflict in Afghanistan and the conflict in Iraq.He can't be against both, so he has to pick.
And so, for him, Afghanistan becomes the good war, the war he's got to salvage and turn around, because that's the war that he argues was connected to 9/11.Iraq was a war that was commenced under a pretext that turns out not to have been accurate.It's a war that's got to end.Despite what the military claims are gains on the battlefield from its troop surge, Obama does not view it as fundamentally altering the dynamics in the country.And he's right.
And so he makes it very clear.And he puts his vice president, Joe Biden, in charge of figuring out the drawdown.But he's going to be pulling American forces out of that country.Now, the speed at which he pulls out, the decision not to leave a follow-on force then becomes the subject of much controversy, because the Syrian civil war starts to spill into neighboring Iraq, and you start to get the growth of ISIS and its essential commingling with the Iraqi insurgency.
There will be debate for years to come: Could a small U.S. troop presence have kept some of that at bay?But the historical record will also show that the Iraqi government wasn't willing to provide the U.S. with the necessary accommodations and protections that would have been required to have maintained that troop presence, because the Iraqis wanted the Americans out in many ways just as much as the Americans wanted to leave.
In Afghanistan, this is the “good war.”What are his initial hopes, and what does he really find the reality is in Afghanistan?
To Obama, Afghanistan is the good war.And while he's campaigning for president, what he comes to understand is that the U.S. commanders on the ground believe that we need an additional combat brigade of troops or two, perhaps 10,000, 15,000 more troops.That's it.To Obama, who wants to bring home tens of thousands of troops from Iraq, putting a few more thousand in Afghanistan seems like a fine price to pay to be able to fulfill his promise on Iraq, and to try to turn around a conflict that, while—had been looking OK in those first few years under the presidency of Hamid Karzai, had fundamentally gone bad by the time he took office.
The Afghan insurgency was growing in strength.The Afghan government was looking increasingly weak.The international coalition that was there, more than 40 countries, was strained and frayed, and it needed a reassertion of American leadership.But soon after Obama takes office, that American commander, David McKiernan, gets fired, and a new general is sent to Kabul, Gen. Stan McChrystal.And McChrystal's first order of business, ordered up by Defense Secretary Bob Gates and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs—and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, is to conduct his own assessment of the war.
And so McChrystal does.And he comes back with a sobering request of Washington.He describes the Afghan conflict as at a precipice, and we're at real risk of losing the war.But it can be turned around.He believes that the United States needs to do what it did during the surge in Iraq, by using a counterinsurgency strategy.And he comes back with a request: He wants as many as 80,000 to 90,000 more troops in Afghanistan.
Now, this is—this is something the White House wasn't expecting.This was a huge request.
Obama feels boxed in by what the military is asking him for.He—he doesn't want to give them everything they're asking for, but he can't lowball them.So he comes up with a compromise: He's going to send 30,000 additional troops, way more than he wants, but he puts a deadline on it.He says this surge is only going to last for 18 months, at which point they come home.
This is intended by Obama to prevent his surge from turning into a long, drawn-out, additional American troop presence that consumes his first term and perhaps his second term.To the military, by putting a time certain on it, they feel it emboldens their opponents, that the Taliban now know they just have 18 months to wait it out.
What the White House, the Obama White House, believes is that the military now has time to train up Afghan forces: Get your act together, people.Fundamental difference of views.But Obama, in his heart of hearts, doesn't want to be the wartime president that George W. Bush is.He doesn't want to get all of his perceived successes from talking about gains in other countries.He wants to focus on healthcare legislation.He wants to focus on a range of domestic priorities, a recovery from the Great Recession.
And so he will manage the Afghan war, but it's never going to be something that animates him.It's never going to be something that he's going to see as a principal success.His connection to the military is going to be more around caring for veterans than it is making battlefield visits.
The Trump Years
We have Donald Trump, the candidate, and he's running 2016, and he is very good at using the distrust of the government that you've just been talking about. …
And he understood that fear that still existed in America, post-9/11, 15 years later.He understands the power politically of tying into that.He is—we didn't talk about this in our conversation before, on the telephone, but in 2016 he goes to the memorial, the 9/11 memorial in New York City; Hillary Clinton's there as well.I don't know if you remember that, but he presents himself as the man with a different worldview, a post-9/11 worldview, than the other candidates.But he sees it really as a political opportunity.What is he about when it comes to 9/11, and what does he understand about the importance of it politically?
By the time Donald Trump emerges as the Republican front-runner and then becomes president, 9/11's place in our national discussion, or at least how Donald Trump describes it—
For Donald Trump, the candidate and then the president, 9/11 is something very different than it was for George W. Bush or Barack Obama.9/11 is not an event that is used to create unity.It's not an awful, awful moment that calls on us to come together.9/11, for Donald Trump, becomes a wedge issue.It becomes something he can exploit to further division and distrust in our society.
What was Trump's approach to Afghanistan, to the global war on terror?When he comes into office, what's the doctrine that he comes prepared with, on how to deal with the wars?
[President Donald] Trump didn't have a doctrine.There was no—when he came in, he had no clear worldview on what to do about Afghanistan, other than to want to end the war.He wasn't a student of any of this stuff.And in the initial years of the Trump presidency, there was just a continued muddle-along approach with some further reductions of U.S. forces.
But then Trump does something that, quite frankly, you'd never expect a Republican president to do but is perfectly in keeping with Donald Trump, which is to commence negotiations with the Taliban to facilitate a U.S. troop withdrawal.This is something that the George W. Bush White House never would have countenanced.And even Obama, though he had some advisers who favored doing so, never took that explicit step, given the political volatility of it.But for Trump, nothing was off-limits; nothing was sacrosanct.
And while those who follow Afghanistan closely will tell you, and while it is true that the U.S. is never going to, ever, fight its way out of Afghanistan, that there's no way to stabilize that country in any meaningful period of time, with continued military force, that the best-case scenario does involve a negotiated settlement, it was surprising to see Trump move in that direction but also reflective that—of how far our country has come since 9/11, that Trump felt confident he could sell his Republican base on essentially handing over the keys to the Taliban.
And after the election, he claims that he won the election, that the election had been stolen from him, and he has been telling his followers that they have to defend their country.And on Jan. 6, these folks that believe in him, that believe that their country has been taken away from them, that this election was stolen because that's what their president says, they attack the Capitol building.How did we get here?How did this ever happen in the United States of America?And how was—everything that had happened for the 20 years before sort of led us to this point, all the decisions by three presidents—how do we end up with Jan. 6?
In part, the events of Jan. 6, 2021, were a culmination of the many failures by our senior-most leaders and others in the U.S. government in the years since the singing of "God Bless America" on 9/11.How a moment of unity could fray so deeply by a series of fundamental miscalculations, poor judgment, failure to be honest with the American people, the untold cost imposed on American society of those decisions, it all came home to roost.
And perhaps most shocking on that day were the great number of individuals who had served in the U.S. military, who had raised their right hand and pledged to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against enemies foreign and domestic—or let me just put it, who had raised their right hand and pledged to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, and who had served, in many cases, in Iraq and Afghanistan for a Republican president, for a Democratic president, now coming back home, being part of this mob.
We may have made great progress against the threat of Al Qaeda and transnational terrorism in the 20 years since 9/11.There's certainly, by one measure, since there has been no attack of a similar scale, or even any other significant attack on American soil, we can say, "Well, job well done."To a degree the whole response has protected the United States.
But if we look at Jan. 6 as one measure of where we are as a nation, and we look at it in the context of all the decisions that were made over the past 20 years, are we truly safer today?Did everything we do in response create a more secure environment for American citizens?Did bin Laden succeed in some way in fundamentally dividing us and bringing pain to us in ways that we couldn't see at the time?
I don't want to lay all of it on the hands of the decisions made since 9/11, but if we don't take a proper accounting of what we did in these past 20 years and what the impact has been, not just half a world away, but what the impact has been within our own borders, in our own capital city, but, quite frankly, in communities across our country, in every state capital, then we have fundamentally misunderstood the legacy of 9/11.
The question—real simple; we don't need anything long—is, how hard [is it] to imagine that same scene playing out today?
Twenty years on from 9/11, it is almost impossible to imagine that sort of scene occurring today, with members from both sides of the aisle coming together in song, putting country over party, at a moment of crisis.We're so riven as a country, we can't even agree on a commission to investigate the actions of Jan. 6.
The Escape of bin Laden
… Why didn't the U.S. military put boots on the ground in Tora Bora to assure that bin Laden would be captured when the CIA was specifically asking for that?
When the first intelligence reports came in that senior Al Qaeda members, potentially including Osama bin Laden, were in the Tora Bora mountains seeking to flee to Pakistan, one would have thought that this would have merited a full-scale U.S. military response.Instead, because of miscommunication, some bureaucratic infighting, the most elite of U.S. troops weren't dispatched there; we didn't send in the Navy SEALs or the Army's Delta Force.
We relied on Afghan troops backed up by conventional U.S. forces to mount the pursuit which they were wholly unprepared for, allowing the Al Qaeda leadership, including bin Laden, to flee to safety.
How big a mistake? …Why doesn't the military put boots on the ground when the CIA's asking for them in Tora Bora?
Well, the military was overstretched at the time, and they wanted to let the Afghan forces be at the forefront of this.But it was a catastrophic mistake.Had the U.S. military deployed its most elite units quickly, Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants likely could have been killed or captured there in the waning days of 2001.
Post-Invasion Iraq
… Post-invasion, after the celebrations, the looting soon starts.The looting starts; ministries were attacked.… Describe that moment, as the looting is happening, and the Americans really don't have a plan.
Baghdad very quickly moves from a state of joy and euphoria—the statue of Saddam Hussein pulled down, people cheering in the streets—to one of almost utter bedlam.Looters set upon government buildings, on businesses; fires break out; crime surges; people are taking whatever they can.And there are thousands of U.S. troops in the city at that point, but they don't have orders to stop it.This is considered, at that point, green-on-green violence: The Iraqis, it's among them.
And so U.S. troops stay essentially quartered in their encampments, letting the city burn.And to many Baghdadis, to many Iraqis, this is unconscionable.Here you have U.S. forces with guns, with tanks, with other weapons, who could have put a stop to it, and yet they see their city getting ravaged by this anarchy.It sets the tone for the chaos that would follow in the months and years to come.
What does it say about the U.S. planning for post-invasion?
When the Americans got to Baghdad, there was no plan for what would happen later.They didn't have a plan for postwar governance.They didn't have a plan to provide basic services to the Iraqi people.They didn't have a plan to try to rebuild the country.The plan was to get to Baghdad, and then perhaps everything would sort itself out magically.
If they did have a plan, it was the wishful thinking that a ragtag group of Iraqi exiles would come back to the country, take over and be in charge of putting the country back together.In Washington, it was seen as "not our problem."
Obama and Afghanistan
Let's move to Obama and Afghanistan.And we've got you talking about some of this already, so you don't have to tell us all except for the very specific.The purpose of the 2010 surge as defined by the military and Gen. McChrystal.Why the surge?And the promise they were bringing here was that this would bring Afghanistan under control.
The military believed that it could turn around Afghanistan, like it believes it did in Iraq in 2007 and 2008, with an infusion of thousands more ground troops and a new strategy called counterinsurgency that involved using those troops to protect population centers.So military commanders, led by Gen. Stan McChrystal, argued to President Obama that he needed to send tens of thousands of additional forces to Afghanistan to try to reverse a losing war, get the upper hand and allow the Afghans the time and space to take charge of their own country.
And who is Stan McChrystal, and what's his role?
Stan McChrystal was a career-long special operations officer who led the secretive Joint Special Operations Command during the Iraq War.His troops were responsible for killing the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and mounting scores of operations that went after terrorist leaders in that country.
But he comes from the very secretive black ops world.And he was sent to Afghanistan by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen and Defense Secretary Bob Gates with orders to take a fresh look at Afghanistan and see what needs to be done to turn around the war.
But at the point that the surge has been approved, we've covered that and the debate with Obama and his reluctance, but he was under some strain because he needed to prove that the surge would work, and he had to do it quickly.So just talk about what he was up against and what he needed to do.
When President Obama approved the surge in the fall of 2009, he put an 18-month clock on it.That meant Gen. McChrystal and other military leaders needed to get forces into Afghanistan as quickly as possible.The U.S. Army was slow to start deploying additional forces to Afghanistan.
But the Marine Corps was ready.It pushed its troops into Afghanistan with great alacrity.The problem was, the Marines were responsible for just a tiny part of southwestern Afghanistan.The result was that you had a part of Afghanistan that was very sparsely populated—it was mostly desert—that was flooded with Marine forces, whereas other parts of the country, with far more people and far more strategically important, were still starved of additional coalition forces.
Well, that didn't matter.For McChrystal, he needed to show that these troops were going to do something and start to get the upper hand.So it was decided that this tiny village of Marjah in Helmand province—a farming community with nothing more than a few mud-brick main streets, not even a proper concrete wall building or any real infrastructure, no paved roads, nothing there, a lot of farmland where people used to grow opium poppies—this would be the site of the first decisive battle of President Obama's surge.
And so multiple battalions of U.S. Marines were mobilized to invade this community, which was described as a Taliban sanctuary.And in fact, it was a hotbed of some Taliban activity and an awful lot of criminal activity.Well, the Marines flood in, drop a lot of bombs, they fire off a lot of rounds, and—and it was a difficult battle.The roads were littered with improvised explosive devices.There were some Taliban fighters who decided to hold out and mount some resistance.
Before long, the Marines seize control of the area, and military commanders really cast this as an initial great, decisive victory.But truth be told, Marjah was never of any real strategic importance, not to that part of Afghanistan, not the country writ large and certainly not to the United States.And so you had several thousand Marines in this area, trying to then rebuild a government there, when in fact the Afghans never really had much of a government there.
And so a lot of attention was paid to something that, at the end of the day, [was] not all that important.And as we—and today, it's back in the hands of the Taliban.
So Marjah was going to be, I guess, a model, a prelude, to the bigger offensive.So it was important because it was the first real event that everybody was watching.Talk about that specific element of it.
Marjah was going to be the first decisive battle of President Obama's surge.Military commanders wanted to show that they could quickly gain momentum and the upper hand.
It was going to be a test case to show how additional forces deployed by President Obama could turn the tide of the war, to show how U.S. forces could knock back the Taliban and then set up local governments that would take control.
Problem was, the local government never really came to be.The Taliban were knocked back, and then with great fanfare they tried to bring in a set of Afghans to administer the place and set up a police force.Never really worked.No Afghans wanted to live and serve in Marjah, and the police was small and corrupt.
After the initial headlines faded away, Marjah was a mess.
You also mentioned two points in your book, which is the purpose—two other purposes, for it was, No. 1, to push the Taliban out, and No. 2, to prove that the Afghan troops that were fighting with the Americans were ready.So what did they find on that ability to accomplish that?
The battle of Marjah was going to be a big test case, first, to show the power of the additional troops sent through Obama's surge, how they could turn the course of this war.It was also going to be a test case to show how Afghan troops could fight alongside U.S. forces and then take control of territory that had been seized from the Taliban by U.S. forces.
I was there on the ground, and the truth was, those Afghan forces weren't ready.They didn't want to fight.They had really limited ability to secure places.And quite frankly, once the American troops arrived, the Afghans were in no position to take over.
Talk a little bit about the kind of battle they found themselves to be in during those days of trying to take command of the area.
U.S. commanders thought that once they arrived, the residents of Marjah would return; peace would break out; and that, you know, they would start to report Taliban activity, and it would be like a page out of their counterinsurgency playbook.The truth was, most of the Afghans stayed away.And so what would happen at night would be Taliban fighters would sneak in; they would lay more roadside bombs; they'd lay in wait in ambush.And what materialized for U.S. forces was a low-level but pretty grueling, and at times violent and deadly, guerrilla war that would continue on for months, with Taliban fighters sniping at Marines, laying down roadside bombs that would destroy U.S. military vehicles.It wasn't the breakout of peace that was hoped, even though Marines had nominally, you know, taken control of the area and hoisted the Marine flag and the Afghan flag on forward-operating bases in the village.
So a turning point?
… Marjah brings the challenges of Afghanistan into much starker focus in the White House.What was thought to be a war that could be turned around with some additional troops, with additional civilian reconstruction personnel, with more diplomats and more aid dollars, really starts to look like it's fundamentally unwinnable.
Marjah shows just how woefully unprepared, unable the Afghan government is to take the baton from the United States.It becomes this moment where the war starts to fundamentally look unwinnable.
How is it that Obama, like Bush, finds themselves in a quagmire in Afghanistan that they just cannot pull themselves out of?Why is that—about this situation?
It's much easier to get in wars than it is to get out of them.And Obama felt like he had no choice but to double down in Afghanistan after campaigning on Iraq being the “bad war” and the war he was going to end.But when Obama was a candidate, it looked as if the Afghan war could be turned around, and could be turned around with a limited number of troops.
What Obama starts to learn—and he's not learning this through the extensive discussions happening in the Situation Room over the troop surge; he's learning this once those troops arrive.They're starting to see that actually additional forces won't make that much of a difference, because there's simply nobody to hand the baton over to; there's nobody to take over.There are no Afghan troops; there are no Afghan police forces that are competent.There's no Afghan civil administration.But he's already committed all of these troops.
And so the challenge for President Obama is unwinding this war without looking like the United States is surrendering.And so he has to slow-walk this: pull troops out steadily yet not look like he's giving up on the entire experiment.And that requires additional hundreds of billions of dollars of reconstruction and security assistance.It requires a large continued presence of U.S. troops with a mission of trying to build up Afghan security forces.But the private recognition [is] that it's going to be a long-shot mission and a mission that, quite frankly, is going to have very little chance of success.
Trump’s Views on Afghanistan and Iraq
Trump—we'll switch over to a few questions on Trump.What was his view coming in?What did he try to do?Why couldn't he get out of Afghanistan either?
The irony is, in one way, Trump might have been more right on Afghanistan than his predecessors, in his belief that the only way we were going to end the Afghan war was through a negotiated settlement with the Taliban.And so Trump, the master dealmaker, wanted the United States to negotiate with the Taliban and did commence negotiations.The problem was, he was negotiating from a poor position; he was negotiating from a position of already making moves to withdraw U.S. forces, starting to negotiate at a time when American influence was at an all-time low in Afghanistan.
Had we began the negotiations years earlier, we could have struck a much better deal for all involved: for us, for the Afghan people, for the Afghan government, for Afghanistan's neighbors.But by the time Trump got around to wanting to do this, and did so in such a half-hearted, ill-informed way, there was no way this was going to lead to any sort of productive outcome for anybody but the Taliban.
Sum up Trump on Iraq for us as well, his view on Iraq.
For Trump, Iraq was the land between ISIS and Iran.And he looked at ISIS and said, “That was a conflict I won,” even though all the groundwork was laid there by the previous administration.And his precipitous withdrawal has meant that ISIS is still not fully vanquished in disputed territory in Syria.And at the same time, he wanted to take a much tougher line with Iran.For him, Iraq really wasn't a country to which he paid a lot of attention to.
And the result was?
His lack of attention to Iraq meant that Iran, the country he cared the most about, was able to expand its influence steadily in Iraq.Iraq today is nearly a satellite nation of Iran.Tehran has far more influence in Baghdad today than Washington does.
Trump also inherits the Obama “kill list” strategy: You take the head off the beast and you kill it.He was very proud, and he boasted about getting al-Baghdadi.Again, in a similar fashion to how that worked for Obama, how successful was that strategy that Trump was pursing?
While in public, Trump was endlessly critical of Obama's foreign policy decisions. In private, there was a quiet continuation of his tactics.Trump kept on with the kill list.
And the success or lack of success of that strategy was?
Trump had a handful of successes: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ISIS leader, was killed under his watch.He went after Qasem Soleimani, the leader of the Iranian [Islamic] Revolutionary Guard Corps, and a very controversial missile attack in Baghdad.In some ways, it was like the Obama administration.
Senior leaders on the kill list did get targeted, and it did degrade many of their networks, particularly ISIS.But in other cases, other figures came in to replace them.It continued the Sisyphean battle that the United States has waged against terrorist organizations since 9/11.
Were these tactics the way to win these wars?
These are tactics you use when you don't want to commit ground forces, when you want to try to show that you're making some headway, but you don't want to do what it truly takes to go all in on a war.
What Biden Inherits
So now we're in the Biden years.Twenty years on, the significance that policy focus right now is on domestic terrorism as a result of the Jan. 6 attacks, what's the significance of that?
The 6th of January was a watershed moment, much like Sept. 11, 20 years earlier, was. The United States [was] caught flatfooted.On 9/11, the intelligence community [was] caught flatfooted by transnational terrorists, by the extent to which Al Qaeda could plan and mount an attack on U.S. soil.On Jan. 6, it was on a domestic capacity, our domestic intelligence apparatus, the FBI and others, local law enforcement caught flatfooted by the ability and the planning and the financing of extremists in the United States to mount a full-on violent siege of the U.S. Capitol. ...
Also, the significance of Biden's decision to pull out of Afghanistan, following through with the agreement that was made by President Trump but by pushing the date.What is the significance of agreeing to move forward with pulling out all troops, and the significance of doing so even with the realization that there's a very good chance the Taliban could take the country over again?
Biden wants it both ways.He wants to be the president who finally ends the Afghan war, having pulled out the last U.S. combat forces before the 20th anniversary of 9/11.Finally, it's over.But it's inevitable that Afghanistan is going to backslide into chaos.The Taliban will retake much of the country.Violence will ensue.The rights of women and girls will be attenuated.Criminal syndicates will reemerge.
The lesson learned from all of this, then, is what?The fact that 20 years on, the Taliban is still here and a powerful force in Afghanistan, what's the lesson here?Where did we go wrong?
The lesson in all of this is that we simply don't understand the world.We didn't understand the country of Afghanistan, the people, the culture, the religion, the tribes, the various warring factions and, significantly, who the Taliban are.We thought we could beat them back, just like foreign powers before us: the Russians, the British.The truth is, if you want to try to remake a country, if you want to try to truly restructure a society, one that was so beaten back like Afghanistan, in some ways so deprived, where illiteracy rates reach 90% in places, where they lack basic healthcare services and basic infrastructure, this would have had to have been a multigenerational effort on the part of the United States, one that would involve thousands and thousands of American troops and civilians and trillions of dollars.
And quite frankly, would that have been in our national interest?We thought we could do this on the cheap.We thought we could go in with a light footprint in 2001.We thought we could keep a few more thousand there in the years that followed.The military thought it could surge in troops and turn things around.The Obama White House thought it could spend hundreds of billions of dollars to reconstruct and train Afghans.Trump thought he could negotiate his way out of it.
But the truth is, none of that really mattered.We just—we couldn't do it because we lack the—we lacked the patience.We lacked the willingness to invest over time.But even if we had the patience, even if we wanted to, the question is, would this have ever been a good use of our resources, of our dollars and of our American lives?And I think, with the perspective of the last 20 years, it pains me to say this, but no.We should have gone in; we should have pursued the leaders of Al Qaeda; and then we should have come home.
Who suffers for our mistakes?
The costs of these 20 years of war have been enormous.Let's put aside the trillions of dollars that have been expended.Let's consider the thousands upon thousands of military personnel, some of whom came home in coffins, others with grievous injuries, physical and mental.Now let's add on the untold scores of Iraqis.Now let's add on the untold scores of Afghans who have lost their lives, their livelihoods destroyed, their ways of life upended.And those who thought, perhaps naively, that we were there for good, that we were going to change things, now only to face yet another uncertain future, not knowing who's going to run the country, not knowing whether their villages and towns are going to be safe and secure, everybody loses in this.
Then lastly, another way to ask it, I guess, is what have we really accomplished in these 20 years?And has anything good come out of this at all?
I'm going to say something else before I get there.
Sure.
Let's imagine Japan in the 1960s or Western Europe in the mid-60s, 20 years on from Pearl Harbor, 20 years from D-Day, thriving societies, engaged with the United States, part of the international community of nations.Twenty years on, how does Afghanistan feel?How does Iraq feel?It's a painful thought to contemplate.
In those 20 years, however, there has been some good.Our military is a more polished, sophisticated fighting force.Our intelligence community is smarter and better organized.There have been people who have managed to find success in Iraq, in Afghanistan.Thousands of girls have had a chance to get educated in Afghanistan.There are people who have been able to build new lives for themselves in relative freedom in Iraq, oppressed members of the Shiite minority, for instance.
But it's come at the cost of a lot of lives, a lot of money, a lot of shattered hopes and of America's place in the world.
What do you mean by America's place in the world?
Do we seem like a stronger country 20 years after 9/11?Iraq, Afghanistan punctured a myth of invincibility of U.S. military might.Villagers with roadside bombs could take down mine-resistant vehicles.
We may still be the largest economy in the world, but we've sunk deeper into debt to fight these conflicts.We've frayed alliances.
We had a moment when the world was at our side, and yet through our actions over two decades, we squandered that capital, and then some.
These past 20 years, the intense focus on pursuing Al Qaeda and transnational terrorist networks, of waging these lengthy, costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, yes, have been costly in terms of lives and dollars, but they've also had another cost for the United States.It's distracted us from other real threats.It's distracted us from being more fully prepared for cyberwarfare.It's distracted us from dealing with the threats of Russia.And most significantly, perhaps, it has fundamentally distracted us from dealing with China.We've allowed our adversaries to gain strength, to outmaneuver us in ways as we've been caught up in these other conflicts.
These are the true threats of the next two decades and ones that we are woefully behind in trying to address.
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