Hosted by John Raine and Sir Richard Dearlove
Guest
Peter Bergen
Peter Bergen is an American journalist, documentary producer, think tank executive, and author focused on national security and counterterrorism. Born in Minneapolis and raised in London, he produced the first televised interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997 for CNN, in which bin Laden declared war on the United States to a Western audience.
He is CNN's national security analyst and writes a column for CNN.com. He also serves as vice president for global studies and fellows at New America in Washington, where he directs the Future Security program, and professor of practice at Arizona State University, where he co-directs the Future Security Initiative and directs a center on intelligence and national security. In addition, Bergen is a fellow at Fordham University's Center on National Security and sits on the editorial board of Studies in Conflict & Terrorism.
Bergen has written or edited ten books, three of them New York Times bestsellers and four named among the Washington Post's best nonfiction of the year. His latest book is All the Presidents' Wars: Twenty-Five Years of America's War on Terror. His other books include Holy War, Inc., The Longest War (winner of the Washington Institute's Gold Prize), Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden, United States of Jihad (adapted by HBO as Homegrown), and The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden. Documentaries based on his work have earned two Emmy nominations and one win.
Bergen has testified before Congress eighteen times, previously taught at Harvard's Kennedy School and Johns Hopkins SAIS, was a contributing editor at Foreign Policy and The New Republic, and hosted the Audible podcast In the Room with Peter Bergen from 2023 to 2025, which won a gold Signal Award.
Episode Summary
In 1997, Peter Bergen found himself in the mountains of Afghanistan, face-to-face with al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden. During the ensuing landmark interview, bin Laden foreshadowed the terrorist attacks of September 11.
In Part One of our two-part series commemorating the 25th anniversary of 9/11, journalist and author Peter Bergen sits down with former head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove and co-host John Raine to discuss the legacy of the 9/11 attacks, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bergen talks about why negotiating with Osama bin Laden would have been a nonstarter and why the attacks bin Laden orchestrated generated shock, not surprise, within government intelligence agencies. Bergen and the hosts also discuss decisions after the attacks that Dearlove witnessesed firsthand, the proper relationship between intelligence and policy, how the war on terror reshaped the US view of coalitions and allies, and how the conflict in Ukraine points to the future of warfare.
In this episode:
(00:00) Lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq Wars
(03:23) Would Negotiating with Osama bin Laden Have Worked?
(06:21) Feeling in US Immediately Post-9/11
(11:29) Origins of Iraq War
(15:55) Policy and Intelligence
(17:08) Imperial Power of the Presidency
(21:16) Why Were There No Major Attacks After 9/11?
(25:13) Role of Coalitions and Allies
(34:31) Legacy of Fighting Global War on Terror
(41:10) Importance of Tribalism
(46:54) Scale of Troop Presence and Outcome
(50:41) Ukraine as Laboratory for Modern Warfare
(54:38) One Decision: Why Trump Should Declare Victory in Iran
(56:41) Takeaways and Wrap Up
Hosted by Sir Richard Dearlove (former MI6 Chief) and guest co-host John Raine (International Institute for Strategic Studies)
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Transcript
COULD BIN LADEN HAVE BEEN NEGOTIATED WITH?
[00:06] RAINE: Peter, may we begin with where you began, which was your interview with Bin Laden. And I know you've been interviewed about the interview quite a lot, but we have a particular angle today, I think, looking back 25 years later — is when you recall that interview, was there anything in Osama Bin Laden that makes you think with hindsight that maybe this is someone we could have dealt with through negotiations rather than ended up fighting and being at war with for so long?
[00:46] BERGEN: That's a great question. And I think, you know, Bin Laden's demands were pretty maximalist in the sense that essentially he wanted all US troops out of the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia. He wanted the US to end its support for Israel and Saudi Arabia. I think those are mostly, from an American perspective, non-negotiable. And, you know, he didn't really believe in negotiations per se, I don't think. I mean, I don't think there was ever a real attempt by al-Qaeda to reach out to the American or British government in any meaningful way to negotiate. I think there is some evidence in the Abbottabad papers that were found in his house in Pakistan where he lived the last five years of his life, where he might have tried to put some feelers out to the British government in the kind of 2010 time period. I don't know how serious that was. I don't really know what the expectation was, and I don't think the British government would have been super interested in that discussion at that time.
THE ATMOSPHERE IN WASHINGTON AFTER 9/11
[01:57] RAINE: I suppose he became the wanted man on the poster for so long, and you describe really dramatically how he was finally taken in a very bold operation. Do you think that, given your very close study of not just Osama bin Laden, but those who studied Osama bin Laden — did he at any point obscure the plot? Was it really the effort going after you? Or was there something in the end that became obsessive about getting UBL?
[02:34] BERGEN: Well, you know, I grew up in the UK, but I've lived my entire adult life in the United States, and I've lived in New York and in Washington. And, you know, surprise attacks on the United States tend to go down pretty poorly, as we saw after Pearl Harbor. And, you know, there is a great isolationist streak in the United States that we're seeing now. That changes, you know, with the circumstances. And I think there was a great desire for A, justice, and B, revenge — not necessarily these two very different concepts. But the American public understood that Bin Laden was the intellectual architect of all this. And they wanted to, you know, bring him to justice, and eventually it happened.
[04:27] DEARLOVE: Yeah. Peter, I think you know that I flew into DC within 36 hours of the 9/11 attacks. And if I look back at that period, it's hard for me to characterize or describe the sort of atmosphere that one encountered in CIA headquarters and, you know, other nodal points in Washington, because of the sheer shock of the attack and the implications of what it meant in the medium to longer term. I mean, I think when one's talking about a 25th anniversary, it's very, very hard to encapsulate that feeling. I mean, can you also sort of characterize it? I don't know where you were or what you were doing when it actually happened, the attack, whether you were there or somewhere else.
SURPRISE VS. SHOCK — A CRUCIAL DISTINCTION
[05:27] BERGEN: Well, Sir Richard, yes, you were here in DC very quickly. I think the word shock is a good one because there's a distinction between surprise and shock.
So the CIA had done a pretty good job of strategic warning to the Bush administration that something was brewing in the spring and summer of 2001. We know from the 9/11 Commission that there were multiple highly classified warnings that Bin Laden was planning something big. You know, where and when — as you know, as an intelligence professional, that is often information you don't have. So I mean, there was a lot of shock. I, you know, living in Washington, I was going into CNN, where I work, on the morning of 9/11, to talk about the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was a leader of the Northern Alliance who was leading the anti-Taliban resistance. And this was al-Qaeda's way of mollifying the Taliban for the 9/11 attack they knew they were engaged in, which they hadn't given the Taliban any heads-up about. Because Ahmad Shah Massoud was the one thing that stood in the way of total Taliban victory — a very effective military leader. And not two days before 9/11, he was assassinated in the Panjshir Valley in Afghanistan.
So I was going in, and my father was living with me at the time — he was a pilot, and during the Korean War — and he noticed, he told me a plane had flown into the Trade Center, which seemed a pretty unlikely event on a very clear blue day. And then the second plane came in. And I had just literally a week before handed in my first book about Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. So I knew a lot about these guys. I spent two years traveling to Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, everywhere that Bin Laden had been. And so, obviously, I was able to go back — years later, at 12:30 PM on 9/11, I managed to get on CNN and said, you know, when you look at these kind of attacks, who has the capability and the intent? Some people might have the intent but no capability, and some people might have the capability but not the intent. And the only group that sort of ticked both of those boxes in my mind was al-Qaeda. Now, you were at the CIA, Sir Richard. You know, within two hours the agency knew that two of the hijackers — because they had the passenger manifests — were on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. They'd been tracking these guys for over a year. So they knew almost immediately it was al-Qaeda. But I think there was a great deal of shock. And I want to make the distinction between surprise and shock, because it was shocking. On the other hand, you know, if you've been tracking it, as the CIA had been doing, and the FBI in New York — the field office at the FBI in New York — or myself, it was very shocking, but it wasn't entirely surprising.
[08:13] DEARLOVE: Well, can I endorse the difference that you make between surprise and shock? Because that's exactly the phrase I've used when I've talked about this. Because we had had an intelligence summit with the Americans in Bermuda, I think in July. And the purpose of that meeting was to discuss the possibility of a large-scale attack somewhere, sometime, because we all had strong indications that there was something brewing. I'd be more precise than that — there was a lot of material which pointed to a big attack. Well, you know, we didn't know where, we didn't know when, we didn't know what the target was. So when it actually happened, we all said, my God. It wasn't a surprise at all, but it was a shock.
HOW THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION MISSED THE SIGNALS
[09:02] BERGEN: Yeah. And shock produces — and I think for the Bush administration it was both a surprise and a shock — because these were Cold War warriors. You know, Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor, was a Sovietologist. Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, had been Gerald Ford's Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defense. They were steeped in Cold War understandings of the threats that the West faced. And they just couldn't process the idea that a non-state actor, quote-unquote, like al-Qaeda might really pose a threat, even though the US embassies had been attacked in Africa in 1998, killing more than 200 people. Even though al-Qaeda attacked the USS Cole in Yemen killing 17 American sailors. Even though the Trade Center itself had been attacked in February of 1993 by a group of men associated with al-Qaeda, which is how I got into this story. I went to Afghanistan during the civil war in '93, because there were these guys who were training in Afghanistan who clearly seemed to have an intent to attack the West, and that's how in turn I eventually interviewed Bin Laden in '97, because these groups seem to be organized, organizations have leaders — who is the leader? Bin Laden appeared to be the leader.
FROM AFGHANISTAN TO IRAQ — HOW DID WE GET THERE?
[10:14] RAINE: Peter, a response on the part of the UK and US government driven by shock was understandable for Afghanistan, but then of course that mutated into another decision on Iraq. Do you want to give your reflections on how we got from that decision, which people could sort of understand, to one which a lot of people struggled with?
[10:44] BERGEN: Yeah. Well, we know from contemporaneous notes that were taken on 9/11 that the Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was talking about attacking SH — according to notes made by his own aide, on the afternoon of 9/11, at 2:30 PM. So this was front and center of their thinking from the day it happened. And on September 15 they all met at Camp David, the presidential retreat just outside DC. And again Rumsfeld and his number two, Wolfowitz, pushed for a war with Iraq. And as Sir Richard memorably wrote to Tony Blair, you know, at a certain point the policy was being — was already, if done — and the intelligence was being fixed to kind of match the policy. And that was true from the beginning of the war almost. And in my new book, All the President's Wars, I'm able to pin down the exact moment where Bin Laden disappeared — at the Battle of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan, at 11 PM on December 12, 2001. Well, Afghanistan's eight and a half hours ahead of DC. At the very same time, General Tommy Franks, who was the theater commander of the Afghan war, was briefing Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld about the new plan for the Iraq war. Now, bear in mind the old plan was 800 pages long and it took them a week to rewrite it. And, you know, they spent a fair amount of time that afternoon, as Bin Laden's escaping from Tora Bora, talking about the new Iraq war plan.
So that shows where their minds were at. They were seriously planning the Iraq war, unbeknownst to the American public or anybody else really, already three months in — as Bin Laden was escaping from Tora Bora. So, you know, it was one of the most spectacular own goals in American history. We're doing another one right now, of course, in Iran, under a very similar kind of rubric of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, a supposedly imminent threat, etc., etc.
But that's how we got there. And Rumsfeld also said, look, there aren't enough targets in Afghanistan. We need to go and show what big men we are, we need to bomb some other targets. So anyway, unfortunately the Iraq war gave al-Qaeda a huge new lease on life. al-Qaeda in Iraq eventually became ISIS, and yeah, we know how that story developed.
THE CIA'S BRIEFING ON SADDAM'S LINK TO 9/11 — DEARLOVE INTERVENES
[13:06] DEARLOVE: But Peter, can I just add to that? Because after I came over to Washington immediately after 9/11, I flew back and then pretty much within three or four days came back with the Prime Minister, with Tony Blair. And we went to the White House for a briefing conducted by CIA. The CIA briefer stood up and started explaining how the attack was linked with Saddam Hussein. I actually interrupted the whole briefing and said, hang on a minute. Our intelligence — and I'm not going to go into detail as to what it was — tells us that there was absolutely no link to the Iraqis whatsoever, and that this doesn't, as it were, add up. But you know, the irony for all of us is that in the minds of the US leadership at the time there was this causal link, but of course they weren't linked at all.
[14:14] BERGEN: Well, how did your interruption go down?
[14:17] DEARLOVE: Well, it was quite interesting. It sort of stopped the whole process. The CIA people were really angry with me. Bush took Blair aside, and then I joined them and said, look, Prime Minister, we really are confident that we're right about this. So you could see the stress that was already entering into the relationship, because we took a different view. And of course, that famous quote of mine, which appeared on a T-shirt in California eventually, was as a result of a meeting I had with Scooter Libby. And I mean, that was even more outrageous in terms of the stuff that Scooter was saying at the time.
As Cheney's Chief of Staff, you're absolutely right. And I mean, he was completely out of court.
INTELLIGENCE VS. POLICY — THE ENDLESS TENSION
[15:12] BERGEN: Yeah, well they all went bananas. It raises a very interesting question, I think, for intelligence community professionals, which I'll pose to you, Sir Richard — look, you can have the greatest intelligence community in the world, but if the policymakers have already decided whatever their policy is, it doesn't really matter.
[15:33] DEARLOVE: You know, you're absolutely right. I mean, good intelligence is meant to steer policy. That's the whole purpose of collecting it. You're not collecting intelligence in a void. You're collecting it to create policy. But there was this Fixed Day Fix, which was entertained by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Doug Feith — all those people in the DOD. And, you know, they had the bit between their teeth.
[16:03] BERGEN: You know, and of course famously Stalin had vast amounts of information that Hitler was planning to invade, and he just wouldn't accept it. So it must be frustrating as an intelligence professional when you are producing great intelligence that is basically ignored.
[16:24] DEARLOVE: Because the whole secret of a good intelligence organization is to feed into the making of policy. And it depends on the mechanisms that exist constitutionally to achieve that end. And they do fall apart sometimes in a crisis. And this is a very good example of that happening.
IS THERE BETTER GOVERNANCE NOW ON WAR POWERS?
[16:43] RAINE: Peter, just on that theme of the sort of constitutional element of this — you paint a very clear picture of the center quite often giving in to impulse or instinct or even obsession. And the absence of those guardrails that Sir Richard was talking about is quite clear. Do you think that as a legacy of these 25 years, there is any better governance on that decision making? Or do we still have the same problem at the center?
[17:20] BERGEN: It's a great question, John. And so, you know, the American system — the commander-in-chief is the commander-in-chief. He's also the president, or she is the president. And unlike in a parliamentary system where I think there are more checks and balances, you know, George W. Bush probably would not have survived a no-confidence vote in the House of Commons by 2006 when the Iraq war was going so poorly, right? So in our system, the commander-in-chief has tremendous power, and also that power is limited not by parliamentary votes but by, you know, the once-every-four-years presidential election. So our system, I think, is inherently less amenable to public pressure.
And I think if you were going to do a checklist of the things you'd want when you go to war, let me give you five or six of them as an American president, and then sort of the listeners can determine how well the United States has done in our most recent conflict. So you'd want a congressional authorization, which Bush had after 9/11 obviously — there was only one vote against in Congress to go to war in Afghanistan. You'd want a NATO Article 5, which, the first and only time it's been invoked, collective right to self-defense — that happened after 9/11. You'd want a UN resolution — that happened after 9/11, the UN said nations have a right to self-defense. You'd want public buy-in — this was one of, this was like the most popular war that's — since polling began on this question — was the initial war in Afghanistan. You'd also want an imminent threat — well, you know, the Pentagon being attacked and the Trade Center collapsing and 3,000 Americans dying, the threat seemed pretty imminent. So in that case, and also you'd want a plan, at least some basic strategy — well, our strategy, the United States' strategy, was overthrow the Taliban, try and destroy al-Qaeda.
In the case of the Iran war, none of those boxes are being ticked. There was the least popular war that the United States was engaged in since polling has begun on this question — so 41% of Americans were in favor of the war in early March of this year. And that number of course hasn't gone up, because there's always tremendous excitement around the beginning of a war which tends to fade over time. So even the Iraq war that was relatively popular, because the Bush administration had sold a bill of goods about why the war was being conducted.
So, you know, you asked this question, John — yeah, I think the power of the commander-in-chief has increased since 9/11. I think the imperial power of the commander-in-chief — we've declared war, the United States has declared war against narco terrorists. Well, previously, people who are running drug organizations were treated as criminals. Very rarely, I mean, there are narco terrorist organizations like the FARC in Colombia, but it's kind of unusual. Usually drug organizations are just people trying to make money. So we've declared them narco terrorists. We basically took out the de facto head of state in Venezuela, Maduro, in a special operations raid. So that was an indication that the war on terror was actually expanding in scope under Trump's second term. And then of course the Iran war is another great expansion of it, because there was no imminent threat, there was no congressional authorization, there was no public buy-in, there were almost no allies. NATO, of course, is very reluctant to help because it's not their war.
And, you know, the list goes on. And it seems — well, it's a shame. I mean, just — we're talking about how sometimes intelligence community professionals are ignored despite their excellent intelligence. Well, historians seem to also be being ignored, because, you know, we don't even learn from our recent history, and we should, because there's nothing else to learn from.
DID THE WAR ON TERROR WORK?
[21:13] DEARLOVE: Yeah, I was just going to go back, you know, to the war on terror in general, limiting it to let's say al-Qaeda, Iraq, ISIS, that period. I mean, okay, I know maybe that's not finite in that respect. But I think one of the things I would say now, with the benefit of hindsight — when 9/11 happened following the East African attacks, the attack on the USS Cole, we felt that we were on the cusp of something which was going to be really much more serious and that there would be other major attacks globally against symbolic or iconic targets like the World Trade Center. And I think if I look back now, the surprising thing is that didn't happen. Yeah. To an extent, despite all the mistakes, all the problems, I would have a tendency to say professionally that the war on terror actually did broach the problem. It didn't stop it, but it made it much, much less serious. And I mean, maybe it's in my psychology to sort of search now for a positive outcome, but there was to an extent a positive outcome. Which isn't entirely my feeling reflected in your book, or maybe it's there grudgingly. I'd love your comments on that.
[22:46] BERGEN: No, I totally agree. Look, from the four post-9/11 presidents, you know, there was no major lethal terrorist attack by a foreign terrorist organization in the United States after 9/11. That was the goal. And it happened. There was only one attack by a foreign terrorist, which was a Saudi military officer who killed three American sailors in Pensacola, Florida in 2019, but that's the exception. And so, you know, I think that we managed the problem. And manage is not a verb that politicians particularly like, because when you say you've managed something, you open yourself up to, well, there's an attack two weeks down the road. And manage also doesn't have the annihilate, defeat, destroy kind of — I mean, terrorism as a tactic has been around for millennia, so managing it is about as good as it gets. And I think we have managed the problem — we, the United States and our allies.
Obviously, you know, there were the 7/7 attacks in London where 52 commuters were killed on July 7, 2005. al-Qaeda didn't just stop with the United States. And then of course ISIS killed 130 people in Paris in one night, in November 2015. So, you know, the group didn't completely go away, but we did manage the problem relatively well. Jihadism as an ideology, I think, is still around. It's not a very appealing ideology — like 0.01% of Muslims might sign up for it, but that's still a large number given how many Muslims there are in the world. And we saw, you know, ISIS-K kill 140 people in Moscow about a year ago at a concert hall, which is the Afghan offshoot of ISIS. So it hasn't gone away, but I think — okay, I mean look, I agree with you — in the broader picture, the United States and its allies largely managed the problem. That's about as good as it will get. It's not a problem that can be extirpated, because for a variety of reasons, not least that the people who believe in this believe that God is on their side. And you know, abolishing God is not something that's pretty easy to do. And so if you believe God is on your side, that's a pretty powerful form of belief. And we've certainly seen second-generation British Muslims adopt the ideology. I think of Jihadi John, who executed — murdered — American journalist James Foley at the beginning of the height of ISIS, who grew up in London, I think he was from Kuwait originally. So, you know, these ideas are out there and they're accessible on the internet and people can radicalize. So it's not going away, but — I agree with you — just from a big macro point of view, as an issue it's been largely managed.
COALITIONS AND ALLIES — A COMPLICATED LEGACY
[25:37] RAINE: Peter, just — one of the features of the response that made it successful was it was multilateral. The US did take a strongly coalition-based approach, both to military deployments — on your little checklist, those two multilateral bodies, the UN and NATO, they were boxes that they took care of; they worked hard at that. Coalition and allies doesn't feature so much in your book, and I was left feeling whether, in fact, your assessment is that allies were incidental — I mean, occasionally useful because you needed them, but then when it came to the crux, such as with the Pakistanis, you don't deal them in. I don't know, Peter, where are you — did these 25 years change the view of the US institutionally on the value of coalitions and allies, or ultimately is it always just the president's war?
[26:35] BERGEN: Well, good question. I mean Churchill famously said the only thing worse than fighting with allies is fighting without allies. So, and I look — in Afghanistan, I spent a lot of time there. I saw what the British, the French, the Australians, the Germans, the Danes — you know, I mean a thousand Allied forces died from European and other Western countries in Afghanistan, which of course was why there was such a negative reaction to President Trump's sort of denigration of Allied support during the war in Afghanistan. And I think that, you know, Trump just seems to not understand that, you know, a thousand British, French, Australian, German troops died in Afghanistan in a war that wasn't really theirs. You know, it was initially certainly very much an American war because we were attacked.
So, you know, at the end of the day — I mean, look, I'm talking to two Brits, right? I will say something about — I mean, I was in Basra in 2008, and the British retreated. I mean, it was like a scene out of some 19th-century Western where the good guys had retreated to the base and were really hunkered down. The British were dealt quite a — I mean, they did not do well in Basra. They did well sort of initially, but it was not a success.
And then similarly in Helmand, you know, you know the history better than I do. I think the British went into Helmand thinking it was a peacekeeping operation and suddenly it turned into something much more violent. And it was a very strange place for the British to go, because of course Malalai, who's still like a celebrated Afghan war hero — the girl at the Battle of Maiwand in 1886, who summoned the Afghans — you know, that happened all in Helmand. So, you know, the British didn't — I think the British went into the war with a certain amount of, well, we know how to do this because we succeeded in Malaya and we succeeded in Northern Ireland. Well, I don't think that's actually what happened. This maybe is not a popular thing to say, but I think the British didn't have a good experience, you know, in Basra or in Helmand, relatively speaking. So, you know, you ask, is it always the president's war?
You know, the US military, for good or for ill, has a capacity that is just so massive. And in some cases, unnecessarily so. At the end of the day, if there's going to be some conflict — and not to say that — one of the messages of my book is the United States is incredibly good at killing people and breaking things. But, you know, which works at a tactical and operational level, but at a strategic level, we seem to have very, very poor outcomes.
Either we just give away the war as we did in 2021 to the Taliban, or, you know, we pull out of Iraq and ISIS comes back. And, yeah, I will say that we did get something right with the anti-ISIS coalition. That was a coalition of many, many countries — I think there were 60 countries that participated, including of course the British. And that was a success. So it came at a certain price — Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq, was turned into a parking lot — but ISIS was defeated in a way that was politically and financially sustainable, because it was relatively few American troops on the ground in Iraq and Syria, and the fighting was done by Iraqis and Syrians, the liberation was done by Iraqis and Syrians, not Americans in Humvees. But you know, anyway, I'd be curious about your response to that.
WHAT THE WAR ON TERROR LEFT IN THE SYSTEM
[30:11] RAINE: Right. And we had the privilege of working alongside US officials and US Armed Forces when they were deployed in Iraq. I think to say that the US developed the habit of a coalition approach might be overstating it during the 25 years. But I do think — and I'm sure Richard's got a comment on this too — I do think that particularly the work that was done on counterterrorism developed multi-level, high-speed sharing by largely the civilian agencies. I like to think that that left something in the system. We developed parallel structures. We enabled conversations which had been hitherto more difficult because of our different legal parameters. I hope that that is to the system. It felt like a concrete gain from the war on terror. Militarily, historians are going to have a vile time.
[31:27] BERGEN: I'm in violent agreement on the question of intelligence sharing. So Richard, what do you think?
[31:33] DEARLOVE: No, I agree as well. And I think that actually if you look at the whole period of 9/11 and the aftermath, the cooperation, the coordination was extremely close. I think the problem that arose was we had in the UK — and probably most of the European powers who played a lesser role than us — a different sort of legal view of what was the right policy and how it should be executed. And that difference — with the Americans, who did go a bit feral in their behavior — caused a problem in the relationship, because they knew that we would disagree on legal grounds with some of what they were doing. They were therefore very reluctant to involve us or brief us or even tell us. So it wasn't a straightforward relationship. But on the other hand, there was a huge amount of goodwill on both sides to try to make it work, in spite of the differences.
And the other thing I would say about Iraq in particular — and John also has this sort of special experience about Iraq — Iraq had sunk so low, so awfully badly, under Saddam. I mean, it was a dreadful place. And I mean it's taken almost 25 years, but it really is now — even though there is still the problem of Shia militias — a much, much more successful, happier country than it was. And if that intervention hadn't occurred and we'd left Saddam in power with the policy of containment, God knows what the Middle East would be like now. Okay, it's not an entirely happy place now, but the tectonic plates have significantly shifted. And one that's shifted hugely is Iraq. And I mean some of us regard that — okay, at a cost of a huge amount of blood and a tragedy — it has come to a reasonably positive outcome in Iraq, and to an extent now bits of Syria as well. This is a big shift, a big change.
[34:03] BERGEN: I don't disagree. I mean, look, counterfactuals are hard. So would there have been an Arab Spring in Iraq that might have toppled Saddam as Gaddafi was in Libya? I mean, we don't know. And I agree with you, Iraq today is a sort of semi-functional democratic state which has oil, which of course makes all the difference. But of course at a tremendous cost — at least 200,000 Iraqi civilians dead, forget about the numbers of Iraqi police and, you know, all the other things. And so we triggered a civil war in Iraq, which I think eventually did result in the rise of ISIS and all the history that followed. But today — and the United States is pulling all its troops out of Iraq on September 30, Sir Richard, as I'm sure you know — which is an interesting moment because I wonder, if Obama hadn't pulled out in December of 2011, which was a Bush-negotiated agreement — you know, even a relatively small presence of US troops and Allied troops in Iraq, would that have been enough to hold back ISIS when it came? Because the Iraqi army, as we all know, folded like a house of cards. But if they'd had American air support, if they'd had intelligence from the United States and its allies, could that have been rolled back? That's another big what-if. We just don't know.
But I think on the left of the Democratic Party, on the right of the Republican Party, there's a kind of unanimity now that the absence of American troops equals peace, which I don't believe. You know, people like Jim Mattis and Leon Panetta and others were really pushing to keep a residual US presence in Iraq in December 2011. Would that have been enough to prevent the rise of ISIS? We don't know. But the point is that there were people advocating a different approach.
THE LESSONS NOT LEARNED — FROM VIETNAM TO TODAY
[35:54] RAINE: I was going to ask you — as it were, raise that to the power of ten — and talk about the legacy of these 25 years on those who fought the wars and had the wars fought over them too. I start with those who fought the wars first. One of the great things you do in your book is you reference the number of occasions on which senior military officials were trying to draw on the lessons of Vietnam. So previous military experience is used in current military conflicts. And the way it was used is always interesting. So the first question really is how is this enormous reservoir of experience from 25 years going to be used in future? Is it going to be looked at slightly askance? Or do you think there's a stream from this experience that will inform future decisions?
[36:44] BERGEN: That is such a great question, because I asked the same question to senior US military officers recently retired, and their answer is that it's not been really remembered or used or thought about. And I will go back to Vietnam since you've mentioned it. So at West Point, my wife and I made a film about the generation that joined West Point in the 1971-1972 period — when, you know, joining the US military was like the worst thing you could do. And those are the McChrystals, the Petraeuses, the Odiernos, the people who really were the key generals in this. And, you know, Vietnam was a verboten subject at West Point, you know, and counterinsurgency was a verboten topic and wasn't even studied. Because the US military wants to fight the wars it wants to fight and knows how to fight. It doesn't like counterinsurgencies that go on for a long time, or messy, inconclusive — you know, there isn't a sort of surrender on the deck of some carrier.
And so I think the lessons of these wars should be retained. The question is, it seems that they may not be. And, you know, we are in an era of great power competition according to both the Biden administration and the Trump administration — that's their official policy. But that doesn't preclude — we're more likely to have a war like Afghanistan or Iraq, just by the law of averages, than we are to have World War Three, right? So hopefully the lessons will be retained. And they're not very pretty, the lessons, right? I mean, the victory doesn't come — these conflicts go on for a long time.
You know, was it Sir Gerald Templer who was leading the British in Malaya? And how did he win the war? In part, you know, by putting a lot of the population in essentially low-grade concentration camps is my understanding. So, you know, if you're going to do counterinsurgency — anyway, all by way of saying, like there is no panacea about winning a war. But there are at least bad approaches to it. I think with the ISIS war we had a least-bad approach. And I'm not saying it was a panacea, but it was politically and financially sustainable, and it did defeat ISIS. But in terms of the lessons learned, John, I think that my guess is the new crop of American military leaders will focus a lot on China and the potential war over the Taiwan Strait, and that's where the money is and that's where a lot of the energy will go. And, you know, by the law of averages we may get drawn into some other drawn-out insurgency somewhere in the world for reasons that I can't predict right now.
[39:36] RAINE: Peter, that's a helpful, if not particularly encouraging, answer. You had some great vignettes where returning generals from the field were trying to explain basically just how complicated both the political environment was on the ground and the theater itself, and how irreconcilable that seemed with the politicians' desire for clean-cut, easily communicated progress and a finality that was just elusive.
[40:07] BERGEN: Yeah. Well Americans want things over, you know, as soon as possible, right? And I think in general — people thought that World War One would be over in the summer of 1914. So there's always tremendous excitement around the beginning of a war, and then of course that declines when the reality sets in.
Yeah, the United States was founded as an anti-empire project. And I don't think — and I say this in the book — I don't think you can discount that as sort of part of the American DNA. If you were a British civil servant or military officer posted to India, you learned the language, you went there for 20 years. I'm not defending the British Empire, I'm not attacking it. I'm just saying there was a — you know, the French really understood Algeria, the civil servants and military officers. So in America, you know, people who joined the — I mean, there was no — no one really learned the language of these countries. There was an Afghan Hands program, which I discussed in the book, where you learned Dari or local languages in Afghanistan or Pakistan. It was career suicide to take this two years out of your career and really learn the languages.
So I think in my checklist of kind of things that we tended to get wrong is understanding the environment we're going into. I mean, the British had understood Iraq to a degree because you controlled it in the 1920s. But it was a relatively long time ago. We had no understanding of Iraq. The United States didn't know there were Sunni and Shia. I mean, there was a friend of mine, Jeff Stein, a journalist, who would often ask — something that shouldn't be a trick question to an American politician after the Iraq war was well advanced — which is, what's the difference between the Shia and the Sunni? And most of them had no clue. So we didn't understand the environment we were going into.
And I mean, obviously the people like General McChrystal who spent a lot of time in Iraq and Afghanistan — and one of the things I try to say in the book by the way, is part of the issue is, when you don't have a draft, and when you have a lot of contractors — more American contractors died in Iraq and Afghanistan than American soldiers. And so, you know, the commander-in-chief is much less accountable if there's no draft. He or she is much less accountable if it's not a parliamentary democracy where there could be a vote of no confidence. They're much less accountable if contractors are doing a lot of things that soldiers used to do. And they're also much less accountable in the following way.
[42:25] BERGEN: When you have an all-volunteer force which is now becoming something of a hereditary occupation — the most likely indicator that you might join the armed services is if a close relative is in the armed services — so only one percent of Americans serve. We have two million in the active duty reserves and national guards, less than one percent of Americans serve. So it doesn't affect a lot of people, and so it has made the ability for the commander-in-chief to go to war much more frictionless and painless. Even though obviously it does create pain, but, you know, it's hard to imagine with a draft that we would have done some of the things that we did. Now of course the professional military does not want a draft, because the draftees, you know, that comes with a whole range of other problems. But at least we should have some form of national service in a country that is so polarized right now, even if it didn't include military service.
RUMSFELD IN THE PENTAGON — A MEETING THAT CHANGED NOTHING
[43:28] DEARLOVE: Can I just, Peter, follow up? I mean, this is an anecdote really about, you know, country knowledge. I think it was in 2003. Henry Kissinger organized for me — literally, because they insisted on it, the DOD, to be smuggled into the Pentagon, and CIA was not to know about this — to meet with Rumsfeld, to talk to Rumsfeld about Iraq, and to explain to him, not that I'm an expert, but I have plenty of expertise to draw on, you know, how important the tribal system was in Iraq and how, you know, you could have a different policy. I sat down with Rumsfeld and Doug Feith, and, you know, Rumsfeld had those famous yellow pads. For three hours he took copious notes and questioned me. That meeting had absolutely zero impact on policy. Nothing changed at all. And the idea was to try to push them down a different track. And it just never happened.
Now, just in comparison to that, the other thing that has always puzzled me — I retired in 2004 — and when I retired, the general view in London and to an extent in Washington was that Afghanistan should be a special forces operation. And we were going to have professional small groups in each of the provinces, you know, around the local sheikhs, who would, as it were, help them manage local insurgency. But that there was going to be no mass deployment of troops, boots on the ground. And of course, we now know what happened when there was massive deployment of boots on the ground. I just cannot understand really how the situation changed, because the Defense Department and Ministry of Defense people in the UK in 2004 when I retired were totally against large-scale deployment into Afghanistan. And suddenly, you know, we're sending 25,000 soldiers there. How do you have any explanation for that sort of radical change of policy which happened very quickly?
GO LIGHT, GO LONG — THE LEAST BAD OPTION
[46:08] BERGEN: I think the Taliban started coming back in 2005, 2006. So that's a partial explanation. But look, if I think if there's a lesson to be learned, Sir Richard, I think it is that go light, go long is the right approach. You know, a persistent presence with the permission and acceptance of the local government is the least bad option. And that was the option that we used against ISIS. That was the option that you're indicating probably could have worked in Afghanistan. We needed to do something in Afghanistan because they had no police and they had no army, and so we had to build up something. But Rumsfeld was very against the idea of nation building. He didn't want ISAF, the international assistance force, to go even outside of Kabul. And so something changed. But I mean the big footprint doesn't really work for a lot of reasons.
The other thing is the Afghan army — the United States built it up in its own image, with American-made helicopters, American jets, brigades, divisions. If it had had a special forces, a relatively large special forces presence, training up an army that looked a bit more like the Taliban — you know, might that have been more effective?
The other problem of course with 86% illiteracy in Afghanistan — people couldn't even count. You know, it's like, that was not an easy project. But I met my wife in Afghanistan. I'm very fond of the country. She's a Cajun from Louisiana, so not Afghan, but we did get quite a lot of things right in Afghanistan. There were hundreds of independent media outlets. Of course, women could work, girls could go to school. There were some good universities that were founded. There was an imperfect semi-democratic system. You know, it was a country that could have looked a bit like Tajikistan. You know, which — the Taliban conveniently don't believe in elections. They are, I think, more radical this time around. It's all very unfortunate. So, you know, hopefully we will learn from some of these lessons. We're not going to get it right, because whenever you go to war, you're always going to get stuff wrong. War inherently is the most uncertain of human enterprises.
But a quote I return to often in the book, which I'm paraphrasing, is from Clausewitz, which is a classic quote from him: the most important decision for the policymaker, and also his or her military, is to decide what kind of war are we embarking on, and not to mistake it for some other kind of war. And I mean, that seems like a simple point, but I think it's very easy to mistake the kind of war you're embarking on. We've seen that throughout history. Usually it's very rare for a policymaker to really get it right. And usually there's a bunch of initial mistakes that people do learn from. I think the United States and its allies did begin to learn from their mistakes over time. We're much less inclined to have a big footprint and giant bases and search-and-destroy missions and these kinds of things.
OPERATION NEPTUNE'S SPEAR AND THE PROBLEM OF SCALE
[49:39] RAINE: Peter, that's a great point. You do begin and end the book with the Clausewitz reference to the importance of judging the kind of war, which of course is enormously hard but equally important. You describe in the book both the most surgical, boutique operations launched by the US — and most graphically Operation Neptune's Spear — right through to full-on large-scale hundreds of thousands of men and women in theater. One of the impressions you leave the reader with is that the US is inevitably drawn to scale. Wherever it has the option, it goes max. Now, obviously not the case for the UK. We don't have the option of scale. So maybe there's an argument that makes you more loyal to more tailored operations. But do you think that's just an inherent problem with the US — that when they enter with the use of force, they're drawn to scale, they associate it with a decisive outcome? We saw this time and again in Iraq. If you just layer on another 10,000, another 30,000, you'll get the result. Whereas as you rightly say, sometimes the opposite is true. But it's so hard for the US above all to internalize that scale doesn't always equal superiority.
[51:08] BERGEN: Well, that is certainly true. I mean, we have 13,000 airstrikes in Iran within a few days of the war beginning, and with ultimately no big strategic effect. So I agree with you. On the other hand, I would also say that we, the United States and our allies, did learn from our mistakes. So the anti-ISIS war was conducted with relatively small troops on the ground. It was politically sustainable, financially sustainable. And as I mentioned, you know, go light, go long — do that with the permission of the host country, which we did in Iraq. And also, you know, the United States has forces in countries around the world, with the acquiescence and agreement of the host country, and it's not controversial. We're still in South Korea 75 years after the end of the Korean hostilities. So, you know.
And what's that? Well, yeah, I mean we have 25,000 American troops there. We only had 2,500 American troops in Afghanistan when we pulled out. We had more NATO troops in Afghanistan — Europeans — than Americans when we did the spectacular own goal of the Taliban withdrawal. But yeah, I mean there is a desire for scale, but I think there are also plenty of people in the American military who understand scale is not a plus. I mean, the war was being lost in Iraq in 2005, as Sir Richard will remember. I mean, that was a live discussion. By General McChrystal, who was running Joint Special Operations Command, he took his commanders to Gettysburg to have a retreat and discuss, you know, are we losing the war? Have we lost the war? And then, you know, there was really a sea change where counterinsurgency tactics got Americans off their big bases into the local population to protect them better.
So you have 3,000 civilians dying every month in Iraq at the height of the war. It went down to 300 Iraqi civilians within three, four years. And you know, so counterinsurgency tactics, allying with local tribes. So Richard raised this question — the Bush administration was very against allying with tribespeople, because that was not the modern Iraq they were trying to create. But they suddenly realized by 2005, 2006, that actually that was a really smart idea, because there were a bunch of Iraqi tribespeople who were shooting at the American military and their allies — who we put on the American payroll — who were then shooting at al-Qaeda. So that was the biggest surge: a hundred thousand people used to be shooting at you, and they're now all shooting at your enemy. So the surge in Iraq worked not just because of more American troops, but because of counterinsurgency tactics, a new general, General David Petraeus, aligned with — and the smartest thing the United States did in the Iraq war was to ally with the Awakening movement, which was this Iraqi tribal uprising.
[53:58] RAINE: They were with the grain there, weren't they?
[54:02] BERGEN: Yeah. I mean, it suddenly — so they got smarter over time. But it came at a tremendous cost, because that's five years after 9/11 that there was a better understanding of how to deal with these kinds of wars.
UKRAINE AS A NEW LABORATORY FOR WAR
[54:17] DEARLOVE: Peter, it's strange to say this, but okay, I've been retired a long time. But if you now look globally, we have a new laboratory for warfare. It already seems as though the war in Iraq — let's say the war on terror, the war in Iraq — is rather dated. And we have Ukraine, which is completely, as it were, revising methodology, and you have new methods of fighting. Maybe this is an unfair question because your book doesn't deal with this, but to what extent now is the sort of new laboratory of war — which I would describe Ukraine as — how is this impacting on the American Armed Forces so far? Because it's a very different way of dealing with a crisis, and it's going to be seminal, I think, in what many defense capabilities look like in the next 15 to 20 years.
[55:23] BERGEN: I completely agree. And the Pentagon — sometimes now known as the Department of War, otherwise known as the Department of Defense — clearly they understand this, and they put a lot of money towards it. The Special Operations commanders got $54 billion to research autonomous weapon systems. And, you know, the Pentagon is trying to be much more nimble. I mean, they were famously still flying 1950s-era jets in the US Air Force. So the procurement system in the Pentagon has been sclerotic — that's the most generous way you can put it. So also very expensive.
So the Ukraine war of course has shown that the United States needs to be much more nimble, much less expensive, and swarms of autonomous drones are the likely future of the battlefield. And the Pentagon is very aware of it. The number two guy in the Pentagon is actually a guy called Steve Feinberg. He's a billionaire. He works until he has meetings at 11:30 at night. He is working around the clock to kind of solve the issue that Sir Richard has just raised, which is we can't have a procurement system that takes 15 years to get a weapon system onto the battlefield. We need a procurement system that's more like the Ukrainian procurement system, where there's a rapid cycle between the person using the system and the manufacturer themselves. And the fact that the Ukrainians are now selling systems to the Gulf states because of the Iran war speaks for itself. So Ukraine is going to be one of the world's leading defense contractors and manufacturers, whatever the outcome of the war with Russia will ultimately be.
And yeah, war is going to be different. And I mean there's another thing I would add to that, Sir Richard, which is the advances in AI in areas like synthetic biology. I think in Stanford they just synthesized 18 new viruses, de novo — viruses that have never existed. They're all benign, they're all viruses that would attack a certain kind of bacteria. So that's great. However, you know, the democratization of the ability to do damage to others — AI certainly allows you to do things that you might not have done before. And I'm not pretending some of these — building a new virus requires a lot of sophistication. But the point is that we're going to see — we already saw, the United States — one of the big changes after 9/11 was the armed drone. The United States enjoyed a total monopoly on that technology, and now, you know, groups and states around the world, and also small groups like al-Shabaab in Somalia and other militant groups, have these weapons. So the day when an armed drone is deployed against, you know, the Houses of Parliament is not — that's not science fiction. The day when an armed drone is deployed against an American target in the United States — that's coming soon, I think. And obviously certain targets are well defended, but others are not. You can't defend everything.
ONE DECISION TO WATCH
[58:39] RAINE: Peter, sadly we're almost out of time. But just to fast forward to the present and looking at the wars that are still going on, sadly, decisions will be taken which affect the courses of those wars. We've been talking about Russia-Ukraine, also of course wars in the Middle East. What's the one decision that you're tracking that you think could make a real difference to the course of any of those conflicts?
[59:11] BERGEN: I think President Trump should declare victory and walk away from the war in Iran. You know, dress it up however he wants for his supporters. Give the Iranians some kind of level of control over the Strait of Hormuz, which they de facto already have. And just say, hey, we obliterated — I was right the first time — we obliterated their nuclear program, we set them back militarily, they're in terrible shape. And just move on. Because the war is — and of course he probably won't do that, for a variety of reasons, including his own ego. But one of the lessons of warfare is cutting your losses. By the way, that's a great — Trump is a business guy, and not putting good money after bad, you know, not cutting your losses — that is a business principle that you would think he would sort of — but will he do that? Who the hell knows? He changes his mind on an almost daily basis. But this will go down as one of the biggest American blunders since 9/11, along with the Iraq war.
And I think maybe — well, obviously the Iraq war was a much more bloody affair, went on for a very long time — but this was a spectacular own goal. And hopefully the American policymakers, perhaps other than Trump, will force his hand. You know, there are the midterm elections of November 3. He'll almost certainly lose the House, he might lose the Senate, in which case Congress really actually does have some ability to constrain his actions. It's been a very toothless body. But if it's controlled by the Democrats, he would really have to respond, I think, to a resolution firmly ending the Iran war. So that's what — John, to answer your question then — I'd be looking for what happens on November 3, and do the Democrats get both houses of Congress, and the extent to which they can, from a legal-constitutional point of view, put some brakes on this whole enterprise.
[01:01:22] RAINE: Peter, thank you. That's a great answer. We'll all be watching eagerly November the 3rd. And also, it's been great having this opportunity to talk to you, to both look back and indeed to look forward. Thank you.
[01:01:36] DEARLOVE: Thank you very much, Peter.
[01:01:38] BERGEN: Thank you, gentlemen. It's not a sort of uplifting, optimistic kind of discussion, but then history is not really full of uplifting and optimistic things.
