The FRONTLINE Interviews

Susan Glasser

Columnist, The New Yorker

Susan Glasser is a columnist and staff writer at The New Yorker. She previously served as editor of Politico and editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine. She is the co-author of Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution and The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III.

The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE's Gabrielle Schonder on April 21, 2021. It has been edited for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

America After 9/11

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Susan Glasser

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Reaction to 9/11

I wanted to sort of start with a moment, which is actually the day of 9/11, and a scene in Washington, which is one of unity.It's a collection of members of Congress, a bipartisan group, who assemble on the steps of the Capitol, and in sort of an impromptu way, and extemporaneously they begin singing "God Bless America."And I just wonder if, for a moment, we could stop and just think about the unity of that moment, and how specific it was to that period, if you could help us sort of understand that.

Well, that's right.I think it was—it was instantly comprehensible on that day that this was a breathtaking moment, even potentially a hinge moment, that it might mark a kind of rupture, and something that it just was so outside of our frame of understanding and precedent that it really was going to reshape America and its feelings about the world, and its sense of threat and national security.

So I think that part we could understand right away, although it's a good reminder that getting that something is a hinge point in history is not the same as understanding what kind of a hinge point it was.

And you're absolutely right that the initial feeling was one of unity, both political unity inside the United States, this more quintessential "rally 'round the flag" effect, but also internationally. …

And I wonder, in that first address that President Bush gives on the night, in which he says, "Our freedoms are under attack.This is a war between good versus evil," looking back, what did that language reveal about our understanding of the threat in that moment?

You know, I think that George W. Bush was a classic Republican, and he drew upon, you know, these very elemental themes of good and evil that comes out of the Cold War, certainly.And he's a product of that as much as anything else, right?And his father, in his single term in office, had been, you know, the president who, despite only having one term, was there for the end of the Cold War.And I think that shaped the Bush family profoundly.

So it's not really a surprise, in a way, that he would summon back this most archetypal definition.But of course it also proved to be pretty quickly problematic, because how can you be at war against a tactic?How can you be, you know—terrorism, in the end, is actually not an ideology or an end in and of itself.It's a tactic. It's a means to an end.And by declaring war—ultimately and quickly—on terror, I think that immediately began to muddy the very crisp picture of good versus evil that was immediately painted for the American people.

And the decision to go into Afghanistan less than a month after the attack, looking back, what did it reveal about President Bush's view of the enemy and the threat?

Well, you know, again, I think in the end, almost any American officeholder, Democrat or Republican, would have made that same decision around Afghanistan.And it was really seen as almost inevitable from the moment that it was clear that Al Qaeda had plotted and carried out these attacks, and had done so from its safe harbor inside Afghanistan— when it was immediately, really within a few days, pretty obvious that diplomacy was not going to pry Al Qaeda from the Taliban.The Taliban made a decision that they would continue to recognize and to give safe haven, and that decision was the decision that made that conflict inevitable, truthfully.

The Dark Side

Let me ask you a bit about how we begin to fight these wars, and the specifically changed response to the attack is to work the "dark side," to protect us.This was torture.This was CIA black sites.Looking back on our willingness to fight the war in this way, what did it reveal about us?

Well, I think, you know, first of all, 9/11 was a profound shock.And it's a little bit hard, from the vantage point of now, when really, we've spent the last few years in our national politics on a procession of what was once unthinkable having not only been thinkable, but actually happened.And so in a way, I think a kind of modern narrative around 9/11 is, it's harder to conjure up that moment of shock.And really, you know, the end of the '90s, after the end of the Cold War, was a period of sort of not only relative calm, but this sort of unipolar superpower moment.Americans, who had always been inward-looking and insulated in a way from the overseas conflicts had become even more complacent.It was a time of great economic boom, and, you know, no perceived threats or even peer competitors on the world stage.

And so Americans were pretty ignorant.They had not paid attention to the rise of Al Qaeda, even with the disturbing sort of data points in the '90s.They had basically been totally fine with it when the Americans pulled out of the region after the end of the Soviet Union, right?You know, we had been supporting the mujahideen in Afghanistan.That support ended our interest in Pakistan and Afghanistan, essentially ended at that moment in time, because it was framed as a proxy conflict with the Soviets.

And so, you know, Americans, they just—they didn't—they weren't focused on this threat.And so it was just—it was a shocking blow in a way that it's hard to re-summon that shock as an explanation, not a justification, but at least for an understanding of the environment in which [Vice President Dick] Cheney and other policymakers were operating.

Guantanamo

… I wonder if I can ask you about the early decision about what to do with enemy combatants ….Guantanamo—when those images are broadcasted abroad, what are the results of that?

You know, for decades in the Cold War, even before that, it was a staple of propaganda by the Soviets and others to point out American hypocrisy or that, you know, America's lectures to other countries about human rights or universal rights were not necessarily in keeping with our actions.And, you know, so there was often during the Cold War, the Soviets would show photographs of civil rights protests in the American South or violations and abuses against Black Americans as a way of tweaking the Americans who were so used to lecturing the Soviets about their lack of basic human rights, even though, of course, there was an enormous difference in the degree and magnitude and scope, a kind of abuses in a totalitarian state versus those which occurred in a more free society like the United States.

So I think there was a shock and a revulsion around the world, which tended to, again, to reduce American power in the world, really, an American standing in the world.It was, you know, a beginning, a reacquaintance with the hypocrisies of a superpower.And so it was very damaging, I think.

Failure to Capture Osama bin Laden

… Let me ask you about Tora Bora, which I know you were there for.Specifically I'm interested in the American strategy here compared to bin Laden's, because as he escapes and flees to Pakistan and begins sending out videos, somebody described it to us as “death by a thousand paper cuts for America.” And here was our enemy really still operating with his strategy.Where was ours in this moment, now that he had fled?I'm curious if you can help us there.

Well, you know, it's interesting.You think back on Tora Bora, and obviously those of us on the ground, you know, a few dozen, as many as perhaps 100 but no more international reporters, we far outnumbered the number of American special forces and CIA who were on the ground there.There was a bigger journalistic contingent at Tora Bora than there was American fighting force.

And that was an incredible lesson for me.First of all, it's a lesson in ground truth, because back in Washington, the happy talk that, you know, was being fed out at Pentagon briefings to journalists was just wildly inaccurate.And they were saying—and Rumsfeld was saying, “Well, we've got them surrounded,” you know.And I would say—I remember sitting on a rock at Tora Bora in this, like, almost moonscape-type landscape, and an old-fashioned satellite phone back to The Washington Post office, and saying, like, “They're telling me about these briefings,” because these were very old-fashioned satellite phones.I did not have like, high-speed internet access.I could hardly read the wire services.

So my office was telling me, “This is what they're saying at the Pentagon briefing.” And I remember looking up and saying, like, “They've got them surrounded?Huh.Well, I'm looking at the white mountains that separate Afghanistan and Pakistan right now, and basically, folks, it looks like the Rocky Mountains.And nobody here is surrounded, you know.I'm not a military expert.That's not my—you know.But I can tell you that nobody is surrounded here.And, you know, can you surround the Rocky Mountains? Because that's what we're looking at here.”

And it was a very powerful first indicator that there was a big gap, that same kind of credibility gap, frankly, that we saw in Vietnam, that we were going to right away see in Afghanistan.And then it wasn't just a fog of war-type situation.Actually, what we later learned, and I did go back to Tora Bora a few weeks after the battle and was able to understand this in more detail, it wasn't just a fog of war; it was actually a strategic failure by the United States.It was a strategic decision to have this small footprint in Afghanistan.

Donald Rumsfeld, then the secretary of defense, believed that you could essentially use proxies and small special forces to accomplish America's aims, and didn't even actually deploy the military assets that they did have available at the time in Afghanistan.There were forces at the base in southern Afghanistan, near Kandahar, that were never deployed, even though, as I understand after the fact, Jim Mattis, interestingly, was at the time the commander down south in Afghanistan, was—I didn't know this then—was demanding to get his troops, or some way to get into the fight at Tora Bora, in eastern Afghanistan, but they didn't let him.

And I never saw a single U.S. soldier on the ground during the entire battle of Tora Bora.I met one or two British officers who had been assigned to be the liaison with the Afghan forces who were actually on the ground fighting.I did encounter them once, and they were not eager to talk to a journalist from The Washington Post.

But this was a crucial decision, because what we heard right away from the Afghans, and I then confirmed that when I went back a few weeks later, was that Osama bin Laden actually was at Tora Bora, and this was probably the best chance for the United States to capture or kill bin Laden and to end that war, and the strategic reason that we had gotten into Afghanistan in the first place.And, of course, it would take so many years more of fighting and covert operations before ultimately, during the Obama administration, bin Laden was killed.So that was the moment.And we did not have a strategy that was equal to that moment.

Invading Iraq

I wonder if we could now turn to the decision to invade Iraq and expanding the war, and the "axis of evil" as now being a part of our response to 9/11.Looking back—and this is a very big question—but what are the results of that decision?How would that sort of be this turning point in the conversation we're having about the two decades following 9/11?

You know, I think it's actually a really interesting way to have the conversation about Iraq, which is to say that we've sort of been endlessly relitigating that 2003 decision for years.And yet I think, in a way, it's more powerful and fresh to think about it in the context of where we, as a country, have ended up, you know, in Jan.6, and so divided from within, because here is the through line I would draw, thinking about it now, which is, it was something unthinkable, and yet it happened.

You know, even at the time, it wasn't like a secret.It was kind of clear, even at the time, that the Bush administration was actually going to proceed on the pretext, the false pretext, that somehow Iraq had something to do with the 9/11 attacks, and was going to use that sentiment among the American people to go to war against an entirely different country.And by the way, that would have been a pretty shocking decision, even if the false assumption that we all had at the time, that Saddam Hussein was still pursuing weapons of mass destruction, let's just say that that had been correct, right?

People across the political spectrum were certainly willing to believe that our intelligence agencies had, you know, if not definitive information, had, I think, probably some good-faith reasons for making that assumption.It still would have been a breathtaking political decision for the Bush administration to go ahead and push for war, and in a country that it was very clear had not had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks.

And so even at the time, that was a pretty politically shocking decision.It was almost unthinkable that the United States would launch a preemptive war on a country using 9/11.And even then, I thought, well, they're just going to do it.And that was something—it was like a red line.It was like, it was something unthinkable that was happening. In the same way I think Donald Trump, again and again and again, unthinkable things—he was not just doing and talking about it, but he was actually following through on in some ways.And it led us to this catastrophic and extremely unthinkable event that nonetheless happened, which was the storming of the U.S. Capitol for the first time since 1814.

Colin Powell and Weapons of Mass Destruction

I wonder if you could help us sort of understand the significance of putting [Secretary of State] Colin Powell out in front of America and the international community to make the case for the war on the faulty pretense that we described, and the impact of that speech here at home for a lot of Americans looking back?Is this an inflection point on our trust of government officials?

You know, I mean, I think that's, again, something I remember from the Bush era that echoes for me in the Trump era as well is how, you know, the credibility of good men and of well-intentioned men and women ends up being made complicit in decisions like this, that are the wrong decision.And Colin Powell, obviously, inside the Bush administration, was not only not a voice for war, but, you know, was really essentially fighting and losing the internal battles of the Bush administration in the aftermath of 9/11, and certainly in the lead-up to the Iraq War, you know.I think the record is pretty clear that he didn't support it, but the dilemma of what to do when there's an inexorable march towards something you disagree with.

One thing that people may not realize today was how much credibility Colin Powell had at that time.And, you know, Colin Powell was an enormous figure of the late Cold War in Washington.He had been, you know, Ronald Reagan's national security adviser while still in uniform.He had gone on to be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Gulf War.He was often talked about as a potential presidential candidate himself.Then he became the secretary of state for George W. Bush.And he was just—he was, you know, an African American hero in many ways to those, a proof that the American dream could work.And he had this incredible gravitas and authority about him.

And the Bush administration sought to use that gravitas and that credibility and authority in making their case for war, even though, in their internal counsels and debates, Powell had been the voice against it.And, you know—so again, his own credibility was blown up.And I thought of that, actually a lot.

For me, in the Trump era, when you go to June 1 and Lafayette Square and Donald Trump's decision to hold a photo op in Lafayette Square, and the forcible clearing of nonviolent protesters, Black Lives Matter protesters, that preceded that photo op by Donald Trump, one of the most damaging aspects of that—and it was a very damaging moment for our country in general—was that he had the secretary of defense at that time, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mark Milley, accompanying him as they walked through the park.Both Mark Milley and [then-Secretary of Defense] Mark Esper realized immediately this was a terrible mistake; that their credibility and the credibility of the United States military had been pulled into this kind of a very divisive and racially divisive painful moment for the country, and that they had been pulled into it, and their credibility used.And I immediately thought of that when you asked about Colin Powell and the Iraq War.

And I sort of wonder, again, about the trust that is lost in America during the period of this, right, because again, what you said, the reputation of Colin Powell specifically, but also that government officials don't have our best interests at heart if in fact they're dealing in inaccurate misinformation, and they're sending us abroad to fight these wars in their name.And I'm curious if you think about that.

Yeah.The credibility of the U.S. government was obviously under assault.And I think it was even more than just Saddam Hussein didn't have weapons of mass destruction, although that was very important, because, by the way, that was an important part of their case.And I certainly vividly recall [National Security Adviser] Condoleezza Rice going on television and talking about mushroom clouds, and that, you know, the American people can certainly support taking nuclear weapons or the potential for nuclear weapons against— on taking that capacity away from what was portrayed as a crazy Middle Eastern dictator, you know.

So again, the fact that it didn't turn out to be the case was an enormous credibility-eroding thing.But I think that, even as much as that part of the case, just the mere idea of going to war with Iraq and using 9/11 as the pretext was a credibility-destroying moment for the Bush administration, or any administration.And when I was on the ground in Kuwait with U.S. troops in the buildup, in the desert, to invading Iraq in early 2003, I will never forget spending the night with a group of young, young soldiers, and they were preparing for their mission.And they were writing on the side of one of the missiles that they would soon be firing in combat, essentially, “Remember 9/11.Remember New York City. We love you.”

And I remember talking to this young soldier.I mean, he was probably, I don't know, 18, 19 years old, and saying, like, “You know, don't you, that Saddam Hussein did not carry out 9/11?” And this kid really didn't know that.And, you know, again, that's shocking.And he and others bear responsibility.That was obviously a pretty knowable fact.

But, you know, it shows you the success that conspiracy theories and lies and misinformation can have on an American public that perhaps is overly credulous.And obviously, we've gone down the even more disastrous rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and lies in recent years.But maybe that should have been an even bigger warning signal to me than it was.And by the way, I thought it was pretty alarming at the time.

Yeah, it started with government before it went to the outside.I wonder if I can ask you a little bit about Rumsfeld's plans for postwar Iraq.Looking back, the realities of the situation, once the statues fell, once the statue fell, what it revealed about American power and confidence?

You know, the American invasion of Iraq, it was apparent to those of us who were on the ground, again, there was this incredible gap in reality between Washington truth and ground truth.And again, you know, that's something that becomes apparent in every war, but it was particularly, I think, shocking here in terms of what it meant for America as a global superpower, that it could be, you know, so misinformed, so incompetent, so deceptive in its communications with the American public and the world.

And, you know, I remember this gradual realization as a journalist on the ground there that there was no plan, or to the extent there was a plan, it wasn't a good one.It was being collided with the reality.And a couple of things stick out to me as I was on the ground covering this and waiting in Kuwait for this, which was, you know, in the immediate run-up to the war, there was all this talk about the postwar, the postwar.

And we realized pretty quickly that there was this mysterious group of Americans in the same hotel that we were staying at, on the beach, outside of Kuwait City.And this turned out to be the nucleus of the CPA, the Coalition Provisional Authority.And there were like, a small number of people, and they had no plans, essentially.And so flash-forward to the very first day of the conflict in Iraq, and I drove over the line of control between Kuwait and Iraq, actually, in a convoy of journalists, unembedded journalists.And we were there not with the protection of the U.S. military, as our embedded colleagues were.We literally had rental cars from the Kuwait City airport.

And we drove—we managed to drive across various sand berms and get our way there.It's not that far away.We had an early like, primitive version of GPS in one of our cars.We had walkie-talkies that we bought at the supermarket in Kuwait, and we talked to each other on them.And we ended up in Iraq, right at—there's a traffic circle in Safwan, Iraq, which is really right over the border with Kuwait.That was a famous place where Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf flew to accept the surrender of the Iraqi government in the Persian Gulf War, the first Persian Gulf War.And so it was kind of a famous place.

And we kind of drove into Iraq, and then we were like, “Wait.What are we going to do here?” And straight down the road was Basra, which was, you know, still controlled by Saddam's men.And you know, we'd been led to expect that there was going to be, you know, flowers and parades.That was what Dick Cheney said.And so some of us were like, “Well, let's go to Basra.” And just as we were kind of debating what to do, right, you could go straight down the road to Basra, or you could go left and go up the highway, Highway 8, I believe it's called, up toward Baghdad.

And so we were kind of debating what to do.And we were really close to getting in our cars and going to Basra.And then a call came in on our sat phone, and it turned out, you know, that a bunch of journalists had just been shot at and attacked, and there weren't going to be parades and flowers, at least not for some time.And then, while we're—OK, we can't go to Basra, then another group of journalists headed out, and they immediately got trapped, because someone on the road behind them had placed land mines.So there was resistance right here.

Then there were prisoners that they had taken.They're sitting in the traffic circle.No one knew what to do with them.And it was obvious, again, literally within hours of the start of this conflict, that no one knew what was happening.

Abu Ghraib

Let me jump to Abu Ghraib for a moment. …When the images of Abu Ghraib are broadcast, the impact of those images across the world, the impact of those images at home?

Yeah, I think the broadcasting of the images of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib was really one of the most defining kind of horrific moments.And I think there was a sense, both abroad and inside the United States, by many people, like, have we become that which we are fighting?And again, it was just—it was a geopolitical moment, not just a political moment.It was a shock.And it was, I think, one of repeated blows, over and over again, to the idea that an American-led international system was just going to kind of continue on, unchallenged.And remember, this is at the moment where Russia and China and other sort of rising authoritarian powers are regrouping after the shock of the end of the Cold War, and regaining strength and resolidifying and recentralizing power and central authority in their governments.And, you know, this is—this is the beginning of a hinge moment, really.

Yeah.And I also sort of wonder if it's a moment of which, are we the good guys?Were we ever the good guys?Is there a question of who we are in this moment?What had we become?Or were we always that force?

Yeah.I mean, look, you know, when George W. Bush's “good versus evil” speech—and here we are, just a couple of years later, and who's the good guy in that kind of scenario?And especially because the justification for taking out Saddam Hussein's regime, once it was clear that there was no immediate weapons of mass destruction, it became actually more about democracy building in the Middle East, and in fact, George Bush's second term inaugural was about this Freedom Agenda.

And so it actually became more explicitly a moralistic crusade at the time when it also seemed that America was almost stooping to these brutal methods of the very people that it was fighting against in order to wage this war.And so there was this paradox that the political rhetoric actually leaned even more into freedom and human rights at the time when our very conduct was exposing the fact that, you know, we were violating human rights.

Legacy of the Bush Years

… I also kind of wonder if you could help us a little bit, understand sort of the period that we just covered, the American legacy abroad, especially, or how it was perceived at the end of the Bush years.

You know, I think that, you know, those eight years, that two terms of George W. Bush in office, were really a resetting of America's role in the world.And they were shocking in many ways, in terms of what not only American voters were willing to endorse, but also what American policymakers, how far they were willing to go from the place that they had started out.And certainly, you know, George W. Bush, who campaigned as a pragmatic governor of Texas, who was willing to work across the aisle with Democrats and Republicans, who—his proudest achievement of his first year in office was a bipartisan education reform deal that Ted Kennedy had worked on with him—you know, that George W. Bush, if you had said in the summer of 2001 that George W. Bush would end his two terms in office as one of the most hated figures—you know, I was the editor of The Washington Post Outlook section.I remember publishing a whole debate at the end of the Bush presidency on was he the worst president ever?Or, you know, what about Andrew Johnson?

Now, of course in more recent years, you could say that George W. Bush is, if nothing else, grateful to Donald Trump for reframing that conversation.But the bottom line is that George W. Bush was, by the end of his presidency, a reviled figure among Democrats, disgraced in a certain way, extremely unpopular with Americans across partisan lines actually.His own party was seen as discredited to a certain extent.

And then there was the massive economic crisis of 2008 to boot, in addition to this war on terror.So it was really pretty much a shattering of that sort of global—lone global superpower moment.

And domestically, what had been lost back at home?

I think that Americans' willingness to follow where we never expected leaders to lead was really a politically transformative event of those Bush years.And it was clear, perhaps even more clear in hindsight than it was at the time, that you weren't going to get the American public pushing back on interim decisions by a president of the United States; that a president of the United States had almost unimaginable power if he chose to use it to take the country in places that might have even seemed unthinkable.And that is what happened.

Bush is aware of his legacy in Iraq, specifically, at the end of his term, and makes one last trip.This is the press conference where an Iraqi reporter throws a shoe at him.And I wonder if you are reminded of that, what it reveals about the rage Iraqis have for America.

Yeah.I mean, I think, look, the focus of so much anger and resentment in the Middle East became this—this terrible American decision to go to war there unilaterally.And I should say, having then gone in and covered Iraq in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion, Saddam Hussein's dictatorship was a terrible, terrible place.It was a brutal place of torture and murder.And it was really one of the most reprehensible regimes in the world.And the things that I heard there from Iraqis will haunt me to this day.

And so I don't want people to think that just because George W. Bush made a terrible decision, it can't also be true, right?The world is not zero sum.We're bad, so they're good.And I feel like that can get lost.So I do want to say that.You know, I met the doctor who was the head of the Basra teaching hospital.He broke down in tears and told me how they forced doctors at his hospital to cut off the ears of Iraqi defectors, OK? This was a terrible place.It was one of the most—it was like seeing a live-action version of Stalinism in the desert.

And so, you know, I don't say that in any way to justify what Bush did, because it was obviously a big lie, capital B, capital L, that had enormous consequences for the region, for the world, and for, I think, ultimately, American democracy.But, you know, I think George W. Bush, he left office.He had this determination in the last couple years to both see it through, but also to try to correct, I think, the mistakes.Rumsfeld was fired.Cheney's influence was curbed in the second term.You know, Bush would personally—I think, remember, he'd get on the phone every week and have a teleconference with Hamid Karzai, the American-installed leader of post-Taliban Afghanistan.He would, when it came to Iraq, he made a very big gamble that turned out, you know, in many ways, probably to have been a good decision to surge troops in and to try to push back the Iraq insurgency, to break its back once and for all.And that was a gamble that Bush personally took against the advice of many.

And so I think, you know, the Bush, obviously, of the last couple years of his tenure, was tempered by reality.He would never, ever articulate it as such, but obviously seemed to want to correct mistakes and to make good where he could.And, you know, I don't know how history will judge him for that, but I think it's important to say that that's what occurred at that time.And, you know, he was—even before that Iraqi threw that shoe at George W. Bush, reality had hit him in the face, I think.

The Obama Years

I'm going to jump to [President Barack] Obama.Obama's awarded the Nobel Peace Prize very early in his tenure.Looking back at that moment, what did it reveal about the world's expectations for him following the Bush presidency?

Yeah, we've now had two presidencies in a row in which popular Democrats have followed very unpopular Republican presidents from the point of view of a majority of Americans, and also from the point of view of certainly many of our allies in the world.And certainly, you know, Obama was not universally popular.Neither is Joe Biden.But, you know, when you think about like Western Europe and hundreds of thousands of people turning out to see Barack Obama at the Brandenburg Gate, even during his campaign, you look at the numbers in the Pew Global Attitudes Survey, and you show this dramatic, like, you know, essentially a worldwide referendum and sense of relief that what was perceived as kind of rogue unilateralist American presidents were being replaced by Democrats, who paid much more lip service, at least, to allies.They cared much more about multilateral institutions in the world order and were perceived as much less likely to go off and start a war or to basically to operate on their own.

And so I think that the expectations were just out of control for Barack Obama.And that was true domestically, too.I mean, I think that his campaign rhetoric in 2008, there were many young Americans—and, by the way, some Republicans as well as Democrats—who believed, when Barack Obama said he was going to stop the rise of the seas, and he was going to combat climate change all on his own, and he was going to heal our terrible racial legacy, and—you know, it was really this moment, I think again, where arguably, in a totally different way than in the Bush era, but nonetheless, where it was another moment actually where Americans' expectations were dashed in a way that undermined the credibility of the words coming from our leaders.

And obviously, those expectations included, you know, the members of the academy who selected Barack Obama for the Nobel Prize before he had done anything.And you know, these are very sophisticated people in the Obama White House.Obama himself, I think, understood and has written in his memoir that it was too soon and that he knew that it was like really a tough thing for him, because what was he going to say?And how was he going to explain this?

He calls Afghanistan the "good war."And I wonder if you could help us understand what it reveals about his view.

Yeah.I mean, when Obama, in his campaign in 2008 that brought him to power, he was really identified from the very beginning, he had taken an early stand against the U.S. invasion of Iraq.And he was opposing it even at a time when many Democrats in Congress, including Hillary Clinton, including Joe Biden, had voted for the Iraq War on the assurances of the Bush administration about why they were going to launch it.

And Obama had never done that.And so he was seen as the kind of purist anti-Iraq War candidate.So the context was, the conversation was around Iraq and the idea that, you know, Bush had sort of taken eyes off of the real goal and the real reason that we had gone back overseas, and it was really because of 9/11, and the attacks in Afghanistan, and the unfinished business by the time that Obama came to power was rooting out Al Qaeda, it was Osama bin Laden, who was still at large, and it was what we saw as the kind of metastasizing threat from global Islamist jihadist terrorism.

And so that was the context in which, “Hey, listen, guys, if back in 2002, instead of talking about going to war in Iraq in 2003, you guys had been doing your job”—and, you know, that had actually been an element of the Democratic foreign policy critique of the Bush administration since very early on.I went back to Tora Bora and investigated what had happened there and wrote that, based on my reporting, Osama bin Laden really had been in Tora Bora.That piece came out in The Washington Post in early 2002.

And, you know, John Kerry was citing that on the campaign trail in 2004.That was a big part of John Kerry's campaign.And he almost won.John Kerry came very close, actually, to beating George W. Bush in 2004.And that was a big thing that Kerry said.And so Obama was sort of picking up, I think, this Democratic theme at the time, which was, you know, let's finish the job in Afghanistan.

Obama’s Use of Drones

And let me ask you about, you know, our dependency on drones, targeted assassinations, JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command].What do these programs reveal about Obama's approach to war?

You know, increasingly, in the period of Obama's eight years in office, the global war on terror, they got rid of that name, which was very much associated with the Bush era.But they kept many of the tactics.And in fact, the advent of drone wars really could be said to have occurred largely in this period of time.And a counterterrorism mission, I think, you know, Obama preferred that to “boots on the ground,” and to, you know, the—what he saw as the really terrible optics of Americans invading these foreign countries, and this kind of neo-colonialist image of the United States, that he was desperate to avoid.

And so I think they saw this as a new way of waging counterterrorism campaigns that promised the ability to accomplish American objectives, but to do so without some of the visible human costs, and therefore, the political blowback.

Let me ask you about the human cost.I mean, something that seems to have gotten lost in some of the reporting at the time is the death toll of people on the ground.What does it tell you that the cost of the Afghan and Iraqi lives seem to not be part of the conversation later in 2004?

Well, that's exactly right.You know, I was always really insistent on trying to write about civilian casualties in both Afghanistan and Iraq.There were, I think, a purposeful decision by, I think, probably at the top level, to avoid what they saw as the trap of the Vietnam era: We're not going to do body counts.Remember, they said that.And you know, that was, again, the more that they could make war appear to be antiseptic and sort of drones, and you never saw the consequences, I think that that that was a conscious decision on the part of those who were running the American war.

And it was terrible.I mean, I have to say, like, you know, going to Afghanistan, which had been plagued by decades of war—remember, the war there didn't start with the Americans.It didn't start with Osama bin Laden.It started, you know, when I was just a child.I mean, it started in 1979, with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and had been going on, more or less, with very rare exceptions, ever since.

And so, you know, this was—this was a horrific society.When I got to Afghanistan, the illiteracy rate among Afghan women was over 90 percent, you know.And I would meet women who had been sequestered their whole lives in their family compound, never allowed to leave, never allowed to meet an outsider.I was allowed to meet them because I was a woman.And you know, women my age—I was in my early 30s at this time—who looked like my grandmother, and they couldn't read, and they couldn't comprehend, you know, the world outside of this space in which they were living.

And, you know, this was a place where Americans didn't even stop, I think, at times to consider what the damage was that was being done to a society that was already riven by war.And, by the way, we got into business right away, with the warlords who had been running and ruining Afghanistan for many years.These were brutal killers, and they were up against the Taliban, which were also brutal killers.

And, you know, I remember immediately realizing that the horrific choice that was being made, that we were—you know, if you wanted men with power in Afghanistan, that's who there were, the warlords, who have remained in some cases in power to this day, 20 years later.

I'm curious if you can help us understand the strategy of winning at this stage that we're talking about.Was it about maintaining the status quo?Because someone told us that it's usually a conversation about the war of attrition, but this was sort of a bit of the war of inattention.And I'm just curious what your thoughts are on that.

In the immediate aftermath of the successful initial invasion of Afghanistan and toppling of the Taliban, you know, after that was, I think, a pretty popular—and seen as a justified military engagement on the part of the United States, both in the United States and internationally.But then, when the Bush administration's attention turned to the invasion of Iraq, and all of those things followed, you know, Afghanistan was still there.But there was never the political will, and therefore the ability to invest the amount of money and boots on the ground, and attention that it would have taken to have a more definitive resolution of that conflict.And there was just never a political moment, ever, after that, because of what followed in Iraq, when it was possible to do that.

And so what happened is that you would then have a new commander each year or so in Afghanistan, a full rotation of troops; different strategies would be tried.And then every few years, we would be, you know, doing on-the-ground operation in the exact same place, in Helmand province, or we'd be trying another counternarcotic strategy to take away the Taliban's funding.

And, you know, it was the same thing.Somebody has observed, I think, it was not a 20-years American war in Afghanistan, it was 21-year wars in Afghanistan.And I think that's—unfortunately, that's the story of what happened there.

And what did Obama tell himself he was doing?What do you think he believed he was doing?

Well, I think that he thought, you know, we're going to give it one last shot and that this temporary surge of American troops into Afghanistan, he saw it perhaps as making good on his own campaign pledge not to ignore it.But I think he also felt boxed in by the choices he was being offered by the U.S. military, and politically unable, especially because his secretary of defense, Bob Gates, and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, were kind of locked arms in supporting an Afghan surge, I think he felt that politically as well, that there was no other alternative.But I think he was always very resentful of feeling that this is a choice that had been thrust upon him.

Killing Osama bin Laden

The killing of Osama bin Laden.We sort of talked about this briefly, but the significance of it this many years after 9/11, did it matter that this was the mastermind of the attack?Or had the enemy grown so large that this wasn't now going to solve our problems?

Well, it's very interesting, because I think at the time, it was, you know, wow.We've been waiting so long for this moment.Talk about justice delayed, right?You know, we've been waiting so long for this moment, nobody was really talking about it.And then boom, you know, here it is, on a Sunday night in Washington.I remember it very vividly.It was just, can this be?Is this what's happening?

And so there was a sense of like, wow.There is this reckoning.And it's taken so long that we forgot about it.But at the same time, we were already deep into this context of a forever war and the idea that the terrorist threat had far expanded beyond the geographical boundary of Afghanistan, and it now existed in the ungoverned spaces of Iraq and soon to be in Syria.And so I think there was this sense that, well, this was an important battle, but that the war would go on.

… And I also sort of wonder what the existence of the surveillance state taught us about whether we could trust government, you know, and sort of this question of many of President Bush's tools had not been put aside.Guantanamo was still open.We were now killing folks with drones.There was something about sort of that darker legacy that's continuing through the Obama years.

Well, I think that one thing was that Obama campaigned as this transformative outsider.And one of the lessons that arguably even many liberals who supported Obama took from this was that he didn't challenge the system enough.Certainly when it came to what they saw as a national security establishment—that Obama would keep in place many of the tools of the Bush era war on terror, I think that wasn't what people expected.And so they were surprised that it happened.

You know, Barack Obama, the thoughtful, constitutional law professor, his Justice Department was undertaking prosecutions, more prosecutions of journalists for refusing to divulge their sources and things like that than the Bush Justice Department.And the Guantanamo, Obama campaigned on a pledge to close it.He never did.He wasn't able to.You know, the gridlock and dysfunction of the American system that kept Obama from fulfilling some of those campaign promises became more and more apparent throughout the eight years of the Obama presidency.

The Election of Donald Trump

… I wonder if you can also help us to understand Trump's critique of the way Bush and especially Obama handled the war on terror.

Well, it's interesting, because first of all, Trump has always lied and equivocated about the fact that he did support Bush's invasion of Iraq, although it seems clear that he did, at one point, say that he supported it.But he's been very critical of it ever since.And in part, that's a sort of political pragmatism reflecting the fact that his all-important base, you know, “the base,” was skeptical of American military engagement overseas.And Trump really, as a politician, when he became one late in life, was eager to be seen as giving his supporters what they wanted, even if that didn't comport with what Trump himself had believed at the time.

I wonder what he says and what the promises are that he's going to deliver on.They're going to be different about it on Afghanistan.

Donald Trump wanted to get out of Afghanistan from the first day that he was in office in 2017.And he, as you know, he said, back before he became a candidate, that we should only go into Iraq to get the oil.And then he said that about Syria, subsequently, when he was in office as president.And he basically viewed the Middle East, I think, as a real estate man.He viewed it as a patch of sand with oil and with valuable assets.

And, you know, he has a highly transactional [view], certainly not clouded by any views of democracy or human rights or any of those things, when it comes to his view of the Middle East, and really of foreign policy generally.And so for Donald Trump, he came into office, and like Barack Obama, you could say, like Joe Biden, he immediately starts pushing on the Pentagon and on the generals to get out of Afghanistan.And that is the scene of some of his early memorable private confrontations, not only with the generals at the Pentagon, but also with his own national security leadership.

H. R. McMaster, who is his second national security adviser, trying very hard to come up with a sustainable way forward for U.S. troops in Afghanistan.Donald Trump fought him tooth and nail on it before very reluctantly agreeing.Jim Mattis, the first defense secretary, who of course had been a general—Trump thought of them as “my generals.” But in reality, his love affair with the generals quickly soured, and he really—he didn't understand what, I think, generals were.

And he didn't realize that they were going to push back on him rather than just saluting and say, “Yes, sir.” And they were committed to this idea of American engagement in the world, and in these places, in part because we had gone there and done so much wrong.And they saw it as an important lesson that we need to maintain this presence overseas in order not to get attacked at home.And they could just never really fully persuade Trump of it.But he spent all the way four years, into his final days in office, he never succeeded in getting those final troops out of Afghanistan.

Trump and the Military

Yeah, let me ask you just briefly about Mattis, because as a general who we talked about already in the region he's deeply steeped in the intervention strategies.Does Mattis understand the post-9/11 world differently than the president he serves?

Absolutely.I mean, you know, Jim Mattis and the others saw the United States in part humbled by the lessons of the Bush years and the Obama years.I mean, they were not like advocates of a swashbuckling, kind of confrontational American presence.But they saw the U.S., after these really challenging experiences of 9/11 and immediate aftermath of it, they saw the United States as the guarantor of a rules-based international global order.

And in part because they understood that we had violated, in some ways, the rules in invading Iraq, and that we sort of had this responsibility going forward, and they spent a lot of time at the beginning of the Trump administration trying to persuade Donald Trump about the rules-based international order.And that actually was the ostensible subject of one of the most famously disastrous and well-chronicled meetings of the early Trump era, in the summer of 2017, in the Pentagon Tank, where they literally had a deck of PowerPoint slides trying to convince Donald Trump that the United States had an important role to play in the world.And of course Donald Trump wasn't buying it.He wasn't having any of it.

Yes.We just talked to somebody who was in that meeting, who describes him as cowering and like a child ready for recess.I mean, just could not wait to get out of that room.But I wonder if you could help us understand Trump's view of our legacy after 9/11, and our intervention in the region at that particular moment, why it's clashing with everyone else.

Donald Trump believed, from the time he was a public figure back in the 1980s, that our allies were ripping us off; that basically it was a bad deal for Americans to be permanently present in the world.And he saw the world in a series of kind of zero-sum transactions, where we were often the loser or taken advantage of; that we were suckers.And he certainly saw our investments in collective defense, you know, that we were being taken advantage of.Like NATO, he didn't see NATO as a group of our best friends in the world, who had actually gone to war on our behalf after 9/11 because we were so close.He never recognized that.

What he saw was somehow that we were paying everything for NATO, and that the others were not holding up their end of the bargain.And he constantly and incorrectly and falsely talked about NATO as if it was kind of a piggy bank or a protection racket, in which the United States was getting paid to provide security for Germany and others.And obviously, that was an untrue and a misleading way of looking at the world.But I think it was very revealing about Donald Trump.

But again, you can't overstate, I think, how misinformed or uninformed Trump also was about the world.And that is something—you know, he was the first American president not only never to have served in the military or in government before, just in any kind of public way, before becoming president.And he did not bring a real understanding of the basic functioning of the international system to that office.And he just—he wasn't interested in it. He didn't care.And he was not able to absorb, I think, a lot of the information that Jim Mattis and others were trying to present him with in the first year of his presidency.

And by the way, it was that famous meeting in the Pentagon "Tank" that led Rex Tillerson, his secretary of state, to call Trump at the end of that meeting, overheard by others, “a bleeping moron.”

Something I wanted to ask you that we skipped over, which is Trump appears in this moment in The Tank, but then just generally on the campaign, to be more interested in sort of the political war at home than the wars that he's being briefed on by the generals.What does it tell us when he transforms the language of 9/11, "radical Islamic terrorism," "Mussalman" and other things, when he brings that language home and uses it as a political weapon?

Yeah.I think that, you know, Donald Trump is a politician.Most politicians seek the center.They seek to bring people along.They seek to add votes to their coalition, not to subtract.Donald Trump was really different as an American politician, because he used division and separating people into warring and irreconcilable groups as the foundation of his political persona, of his rhetoric.He always sought to divide, whatever the issue was.

And I think what was fascinating about candidate Trump of 2016 versus candidate Trump of 2020 was that you could say that Donald Trump took the divisive language that he used against Muslims in 2016, that he used against terrorists in 2016, the threats, and he just transposed that, in 2020.The threats were no longer from dangerous overseas countries as much.The way Donald Trump talked about it, the threat was the enemy within.

And I really noticed that shift in the Trump campaign of 2020.And so, you know, when he saw these national protests after the horrific killing of George Floyd emerging, he immediately seized upon that, not for national healing and reconciliation, but almost the opposite, which was to embrace the other, and the threats from within, and law and order.It meant not—in the past, in 2016, it meant he was going to crack down on people from "bad" countries coming to America.And this time, it meant he was going to crack down on Americans themselves.

Ultimately, Mattis gives up and resigns.And it's right around this period that—let me ask you.The guardrails then seem to be off.The generals are removing themselves from the administration, and in many ways, the president no longer has obstructions to carrying out his views: America alone.What are the results of the generals leaving this administration?

So I think you can see the history of the Trump administration as a series of Trump getting rid of or people quitting in a way that got him closer and closer to being surrounded only by yes-men and sycophants, and those who were willing to carry out his orders, because Trump made loyalty—defined as sort of blindly following Trump, where he wanted to go, you know—as the increasing prerequisite for service, and became a little bit savvier. I think that he didn't understand what he was getting and never would have hired Jim Mattis if he understood who Jim Mattis actually was.He was very uninformed, very ill-prepared, and very ill-served by the staff that he had.

And so it took him a while to get the kind of people surrounding him that he wanted.And I think we saw the disastrous consequences of that in 2020, as a series of those decisions about who was going to surround the president and what kind of staff he was going to have led him to the place where we ended up.But the other thing, though, is that when Jim Mattis left in December of 2018, this was the thing that Washington had been scared of for years.We've been anticipating and bracing for, like, “OK, well, things are bad.But at least, you know, Mattis is there.” And people saw that.

And by the way, Republican members of Congress, as well as Democratic members of Congress, that's what they would say.If you asked them in 2017 and 2018, they would say, like, “Well, you know, the guardrails are there.The adults are in the room.""You know, if Mattis ever leaves,” I remember being told by Republicans, “well, that's a moment when, you know, we would really be worried, and we would take this seriously.” And you know what?It was another red line that was crossed, and it actually in some way benefited Donald Trump, because it was another red line, nobody did anything.It was, I learned then, if Republicans weren't going to stand up to Trump then, they weren't ever going to do so.And it was again and again as what we previously saw as unthinkable barriers were crossed.And yet they didn't stand up, and they didn't stop him.And they didn't perceive that they could.

And that was the experience, I think, of going through this, is understanding that nobody was going to stop Donald Trump, ultimately; that they could delay, and they did delay.And you know, I think that's what history is going to be about, is trying to understand that balance.You know, did the people who were opposed to Donald Trump from within his administration, was it worth it?What did they really stop?Was it, in the end, enough?Or what was the damage done?And did they make the wrong choice?

You know, I think it's the next day after the Mattis resignation, President Trump announces in his video that we beat ISIS, that we won the wars, that we're bringing back the soldiers.And I wonder, how many presidents had sort of made that similar promise, and the significance of now another one making a statement like this?

Well, again, you want to talk about credibility and the lack thereof in the United States presidency, yet another moment when a president says something and then it doesn't really happen.And so partly, I think, you know, people inside the administration convinced themselves that they could manage Trump.And that was always kind of the fatal choice that many of these people made, the advisers, both in the administration and outside, people on Capitol Hill, like [Sen.] Lindsey Graham.You know, why did Mattis have to quit?Because ultimately, after months of cajoling, they did keep a force there in Syria.

And so it was another untrue statement.Donald Trump made a video.But actually, American troops stayed.It was only the next year, where he once again, over the objections of his advisers, announced very abruptly the pulling out of U.S. forces from Syria, and the violation of trust with our Kurdish allies who had fought alongside U.S. forces on the ground.And so actually, there were two Donald Trump Syria pullouts, for exactly the reason that his advisers were able to buy a certain amount of time, and to get him off of something for a while.But he would always circle back to it.

Trump and America’s Reputation

If you could help us sort of summarize Trump's war and the effects on the world's view of America during this period.

Well, I think that Donald Trump, when it comes to America and the world, Donald Trump was an enormous blow to what remained of American credibility.And the goodwill really evaporated.There was an understanding, even among our shocked allies in Europe, one that resonates and I think haunts the Biden administration to this day—there was a realization that Donald Trump could not just be excused as some crazy outlier, and then we would fix it in four years, even though another president was elected in four years.

And the reason is that America's word was no longer good.What is the point of negotiating a nuclear deal with the United States as Iran did, and as the European powers joined in with us in doing that, and Russia and China, if a few years later, America is just going to change its political leadership and say that the deal with us is no longer good?What's the point, if we're going to pull out of the Paris climate accord one year, but then we're going to get back in it a few years later?

Maybe, you know, they're not so eager to talk to us about climate diplomacy right now, because maybe the new guys will come back in and say, “Actually, we're climate deniers all over again.” And so I think that it's really important that Trump is no longer seen as a one-off outlier in American politics, but a symptom and a sign of a dysfunctional country, a superpower that is gridlocked from within and that therefore is a much less credible and stable actor on the world stage.

And domestically, the effects of the Trump years back here at home?

You know, America was already polarized before Donald Trump ever became a politician.The signs of our gridlock and dysfunction were growing and brewing for quite a number of years, through the Bush presidency and into the Obama presidency.You know, this is the geographic sorting of Americans into blue America and red America.That had been taking place for a long time.And yet, having a president as uniquely divisive as Donald Trump, I think, accelerated and exacerbated and highlighted those divisions, and it made us a different country.

We can't unknow and unsee what has just gone on the last few years.People have been revealed to be different than we thought that they were in terms of what they have tolerated and what they have accommodated.And, you know, the country that saw these wildly varying responses to the global pandemic or the election of 2020, that's not the same country that it was in 2015.And so I think that, you know, we'll be tallying up the costs and reckoning them of the Trump years inside the United States for a long time.But I have no doubt that one legacy of Donald Trump's four-year presidency is going to be the further division and unraveling of the connective tissue of America.

So in the lead-up to Jan. 6, he described the threats here at home as the the radical left, the Squad, antifa, that these are the real sort of enemies of America.And I wonder what lesson he had learned about the language of the war on terror and what it revealed about America at this moment.

You know, Donald Trump is basically an American demagogue.Donald Trump is a modern [Joe] McCarthy, except if McCarthy was the president of the United States, and not just a rogue senator who ultimately, you know, was able to be constrained by the other members of the United States Senate.Donald Trump had unique power.But remember, McCarthyism was about fighting the war overseas with communism and the war within.

And I think for Donald Trump, right, there is a continuity and a through line between the war overseas against enemies and the war within against enemies.And you know, he didn't have the ideological coherence of a Cold War against communism, but he had the sense that rallying people around enemies and the Other was a successful thing that went along with his brand as a politician.His brand is division; it's hatred, and it's about “otherizing” those.

And so I think that, you know, that the mythic Mexican rapists of his campaign announcement, the Islamic terrorists of his 2016 campaign, and the Squad and AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], and radical socialism that's going to destroy our world of 2020, those were all kind of the same for Donald Trump.

I mean, you know, he—he's a very cynical character, right, and so he didn't care that there wasn't a lack of ideological consistency between the array of enemies that he chose.… Donald Trump would choose any enemy that he thought would be effective in rallying his political supporters, and they applauded a lot more when he was spewing hate than when he was—on those rare occasions when he was not spewing hate. …

Twenty Years Later

Bush's war, Obama's war, Trump's war.We've marched through all of these presidencies.And with it, there's a steady beat of a loss of American leadership, a loss of trust, images of competence shattered, moral authority lost.If you look back over the last 20 years, and you think about the U.S. government's response to that, and the failures that followed, how does that help you understand the events of Jan. 6 and the attack on the Capitol?

You know, having a conversation that goes over these 20 years and ranges from Bush's war to Obama's war to Trump's war, you know, if you had asked us 20 years ago, we never could have foreseen that we would go from a new reality of being afraid of external enemies, right, threats that we never imagined coming from places like Kandahar in Afghanistan and remote parts of Syria in more recent years, and that we would go from that conversation to worrying about the threats from inside our own country, and worrying about former cops from small towns in Virginia and former military officers taking up flags that said, “Blue Lives Matter,” and then using the flagpole to attack Capitol Police officers inside the United States Capitol.You literally—I could not and would not have believed you.If that was your forecast in 2001, for, you know, imagine that you were doing like a global futures project, and you were like, “Within 20 years, the United States of America will be so politically polarized by the advent of new technology and divisive new category of political leaders that a group of Americans, supported by the president of the United States, would launch a successful effort to storm the United States Capitol as they tried to stop the counting of votes,” that's just laughable.There's no one who would have predicted that.

And yet it seems like you can see a through line in a country that was too tolerant of politicians who did not tell the truth, and too tolerant of decisions that were questionable, even at the time.Even with what we knew at the time of many of these decisions, there were qualms and uncertainties.There were obvious misdirections or untruths that were associated with those decisions.And the system was never able to push back successfully, and so events took on this ineluctable logic of their own, even though many people were uncertain about them, at each step along the way.

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