Capitol Hill Series   |   Briefing Series   |   Special Forums   Unedited Transcript For a printable version of this transcript, click here. To watch streaming video of this conference, click here. Middle East Policy Council Thirty-eighth in the Capitol Hill Conference Series on U.S. Middle East Policy   Iraq, Afghanistan, and the War on "Terror"   Speakers: Daniel Byman Assistant Professor, Security Studies, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University; Senior Fellow, Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Brookings Institution; author of Deadly Dynamics: States that Sponsor Terrorism (forthcoming in 2005) W. Patrick Lang President, Global Resources Group, Inc.; formerly the Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East Anatol Lieven Senior Associate for Foreign and Security Policy, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; author of America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism Michael Scheuer Former Chief, Bin Laden unit, Counterterrorist Center, CIA; author (as "Anonymous") of Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror, and Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America Moderator/Discussant: Chas. W. Freeman, Jr. President, Middle East Policy Council 628 Dirksen Senate Office Building Washington, D.C. January 11, 2005 Transcript by: Federal News Service Washington, DC CHAS. W. FREEMAN: If I could ask everyone to take your seats, please - it's 9:30 Arab time and - so we're about to get started. We're missing Anatol - no, there he is. (Pause.) I'm Chas. Freeman. It's my pleasure to welcome you here this morning. I'm president of the Middle East Policy Council, and have been since I succeeded George McGovern in 1997. We are a small, struggling organization that may or may not survive. I'll have something to say about that at the end of the program, but for those of you who are not familiar with us, I'll simply say that we have three activities and only three. We think we do them well. We hold discussions up here on Capitol Hill of issues which we feel are neglected or which are politically incorrect and therefore too hard for normal people to talk about. This is the 38th such session of such Capitol Hill Conferences this morning - not that the issue of terror is not much talked about. Second, we take the transcript of these sessions, in which you in the audience are an important participant, and we edit that transcript, and it becomes the first item in our quarterly "Middle East Policy," which I hope you are familiar with. It is the most frequently cited journal in the field. It is full of information and thought about contemporary issues in the Middle East as they affect the United States. And third, outside Washington, where no one can see it, we run a very successful teacher training program for high school teachers on how to teach about Arab civilization and Islam. We confuse about 1.3 million kids a year with a fact or two that they otherwise would not encounter, and we've trained something like 16,000 teachers by this point. We have about 40 sessions a year, and reach every state in the country. So that's what we do. And I want to proceed immediately to this morning's session. Again, those of you who have been to these sessions will know that there is a hard and fast ground rule, which is that people on the panel get about 10 or 12 minutes to speak, and if they start looking as though they're going over it, I will stand up and raise my fist and begin to look menacingly at them, and if they fail to respond, I will physically throw them off the podium. And so everybody - 10 or 12 minutes, and then we have plenty of time for discussion. And when we come to the discussion, I'd ask that you go to the mike and identify yourselves, and try to keep your comment or your question succinct and, if possible, directed at one or two panel members. So that's all about us and the session. With that administrivia behind us, let us turn to the topic of Afghanistan, Iraq and the war on "terror" - in quotes. We have, I think, a wonderful panel to talk about this this morning, and they're not going to go in the order - the biographies are all on the back of the program, so I'm not going to repeat them, but we do have an exceptionally well qualified group. Dan Byman will go first, then Michael Scheuer, then Anatol Lieven, and our wise, young colonel, Pat Lang, will go last. We're going to try to cover quite a range of ground in this morning's session. Dan, in addition to his role as a Washington securocrat, someone who moves from adademia to think tanks to government and back again - was on the 9/11 Commission; he's now at Georgetown, and I'm going to ask him to lead off. And I understand he's going to talk about Osama bin Laden; not in his role as the largest creator of U.S. government employment since FDR, but as a terrorist, and the history of al Qaeda and its evolution since 9/11 - more or less. And so Dan, would you come up, and I'll start the clock. DANIEL BYMAN: Thank you very much, Ambassador Freeman. I'd also like to thank the Middle East Policy Council for having me here. Many of my thoughts today are influenced by the multiple works of the distinguished gentleman - at least for seating purposes - on my far left, Michael Scheur, although, as you'll see, I don't agree with him completely. As Ambassador Freeman mentioned, I'm going to focus on al Qaeda's evolution since September 11th, really talking about the new environment, how the organization has changed in response, and then a little bit on where we stand today. And just to contradict some of the prevailing sentiment, I'll end with a touch of optimism. Most important to point out is that the haven in Afghanistan has been severely disrupted for al Qaeda. There have been elections that show that the Taliban is set back far more than many people - myself included - thought, and as a result, it's much harder for this organization to have a haven when it can train, plan, relax, recruit, and Chechnya, Iraq, Kashmir - the other kind of mini-havens for the jihadist movement - are not the same. There is nothing comparable to what existed in Afghanistan. And when you read interviews of former terrorists, one thing they talk about constantly is the pressure of the lifestyle - how the inability to relax anywhere, inability to see their families, to communicate is a tremendous strain over the years. And not having a haven like Afghanistan brings this strain to the fore. A second major change is that there is a worldwide effort against this organization. Now before September 11 in many countries, I would say, including the United States, there was effectively a permissive environment for al Qaeda; that as long as their activities were not too egregious, they could often operate below the radar screen and not be picked up by local security forces. Today this is much harder. This doesn't mean that everywhere there is an equally vigilant effort; but it does mean that the organization has to make far fewer mistakes in order to survive. A third big change is that the effort at home is much stronger. We could have the entire day lampooning mistakes at Homeland Security or the FBI, but the big shift since 9/11 is that these organizations are focused on the terrorism mission. And simply by focusing, by asking questions, by devoting resources, you could say that - I'm a professor so I tend to grade - you could say that they've gone from an F or even a "not present" before 9/11 to a C. And that's not exactly brilliant, but that's a huge shift in performance. There have also been some changes - not necessarily for the better - on the world environment that have affected the organization. One of the biggest that I know we'll talk about in depth on the panel is what has happened in Iraq. Go back to 1996. Bin Laden issued what many thought was a rather delusional public statement where he said that the United States has a massive military presence in Saudi Arabia. Why? It's obviously to control the region's oil reserves and as a springboard to attacking Iraq. And, you know, nine years later that statement is looking rather prophetic. And this is something that bin Laden predicted. The organization - both al Qaeda and the broader jihadist movement has used this as a mobilizing device. This is a highly unpopular war, not just in the Middle East, but throughout the world, and as a result you have large numbers of clerics who are effectively bought by the state who are denouncing this war and declaring it to be a legitimate jihad. You have groups like the head of al-Azhar, you have Saudi clerics who receive money from government who are saying that it is the duty of individual Muslims to go and fight in Iraq to resist the United States. That's how unpopular this war is. I would also point out with regard to Iraq that, naturally enough, in the United States we tend to focus on al Qaeda as a terrorist organization. However, historically, its emphasis has not been on terrorism. Its emphasis has been on supporting insurgent movements throughout the Muslim world, and as a result, by having a strong insurgency in Iraq, we are playing to the organization's strength, we are doing what it has done well historically and giving it an opportunity to show this off. Needless to say, the U.S. support for Israel and the warm U.S.-Israel embrace has also been something the jihadists have capitalized on, but I'd also like to highlight some less-known changes. Some of the biggest are the presence in recent years of movements that were local becoming global, and I'll single out two. One is in Algeria. You had a group that was focused on the Algerian government, the GSPC, that has embraced bin Laden's agenda. Also, several Kashmiri groups have effectively become global. These individuals are showing up in Iraq, for example, and as a result, even though hundreds of individuals may be being detained or arrested, the shift of these organizations that have thousands of people is a dramatic change for the worse for the United States. Another change is that the United States is increasingly seen as anti-Islamic. Part of this is Iraq, part of this is Israel - these are not necessarily new issues - but part of it is also the conduct of the war on terrorism. The United States has been cozying up to various skuzzy regimes - you know, Uzbekistan being an example - and as a result, complaints that the United States is against freedom, against liberalization have taken additional credence. U.S. efforts to try to regulate charities, to change education, statements by U.S. evangelical leaders have all been portrayed in much of the Muslim world as U.S. effort to undermine Islam. Now with this background, al Qaeda has changed. Part of it is that it has changed into a more regional, more networked organization, and I'll discuss this a little more later. Also, we've seen the organization become more sectarian in nature. It has become more anti-Shi'a in several countries. It has become more anti-Jewish. It was always very anti-Jewish and anti-Israel, but the targeting didn't reflect this until recent years. And their rhetoric at least suggests an increased economic focus. Now for all this is a rather negative portrayal of what's going on in the world, and you could say that the jihadist movement is doing well: It's still recruiting, it's still raising money, and what we're seeing is the spread of the al Qaeda model. The several hundred individuals who may have sworn loyalty to bin Laden may be on the run, may be being effectively pursued, but the thousands or tens of thousands of individuals who support this ideology are flourishing, and they are acting without the broader organization or with only loose connection. That's of grave concern. But I said I would end on a more positive note, and I think we can do that if we take al Qaeda's perspective of the world, as well. The first point to bring out is that networks are often bad for most actions. Networks - the advantage of a networked organization is that they're survivable. It's much harder to disrupt a networked organization; there's no head to cut off. But the flip side is the organization loses control. Bin Laden spent many years trying to prevent the jihadist movement from turning on itself, from having factions within about who represents the best variant of Salafi Islam, to make sure it didn't go after Shi'a, and when you are networked it is much harder to control this. And as a result, we've seen these tensions rise to the fore. It's also more difficult to orchestrate and calibrate your attacks. Before the U.S. election, bin Laden had a statement where he lampooned the idea that he was at war with the United States because of its values. He said, you know, look, are we attacking Sweden - you know, pointing out a very liberal state they are not attacking. I would say no, but the irony is al Qaeda, of course - or more accurately, the jihadist movement - is engaged in a struggle in the Netherlands. Why? Over values. It's much harder for the senior leadership to focus on politics because much of the rank and file does care about these value issues, and it's much harder for it to calibrate and act strategically. You're going to see national differences dividing groups, and also what we seen in Saudi Arabia is a dispute over whether to fight the United States first or whether to fight local regimes, and you'll have some Saudis saying, we should go to Iraq and fight the Americans there; others saying, no, our duty is to fight the al-Saud in the country first. So all this suggests that the organization may have many problems. The implication for the United States, as well, is that there is probably going to be less time for spectacular attacks; that because the organization doesn't have the haven in Afghanistan, because the organization is networked and thus can't exercise the same sort of training and control, it will be harder for it to do spectacular attacks that take many years to plan. I would not say impossible - does not mean we should rest - and a lack or fewer spectacular attacks doesn't mean fewer attacks. It's very easy to do a car bomb; you have large numbers of people learning how to do a IED in Iraq. All this can be done by individuals with very limited training and wreak tremendous damage, and kill a lot of people. But the truly spectacular attacks will be harder. The last thing I would point out is the broader implication for the ideology. One of the pieces of good news for the United States and the world more generally is that where this ideology has come into power, it has done disastrously, and that could be Afghanistan, that could be Sudan, and in a quite different way, that could be Iran. And where political Islam has tried to govern, it has had problem after problem and become relatively unpopular. And therefore, the United States and its allies are not waging a war against a popular governing ideology; they're waging a war against a popular opposition ideology. So some of what we fear most - the idea of these groups capturing a state - may be less of a nightmare in reality if it does come about. And in order to keep my remarks on time, I will stop there. Thank you very much. MR. FREEMAN: Thank you very much. You've given us a lot to think about. One thing I hope we will come back to, Dan, as we move the discussion forward is the question of what it is we're actually now trying to accomplish with 18,000 troops in Afghanistan. After all, we went there for two very clear reasons: one was to apprehend the perpetrators of 9/11 or decapitate the organization that carried out 9/11, which is something we've pretty much done; and to punish the innkeepers at this R&R center that you mentioned - the flophouse for Islamic revolutionaries known as Afghanistan, and we threw the Taliban out of power. So we accomplished our objectives, and yet somehow or other, we're still there pacifying the place, and keeping it safe for the cultivation of opium. So I think the question we do need to focus on during this session is - and maybe we'll come to it with Mike Scheuer, who is going to talk primarily about Afghanistan and Pakistan - is what would - what is victory in Afghanistan, what's success, and does this war have an end? Maybe that's enough. I think everybody knows who Mr. Anonymous is, and so - as it's hard to introduce somebody anonymous, so I'll let you read his bio in the back, and Mike, do you want to come up? MICHAEL SCHEUER: Thank you. Mr. Ambassador, I'd like to thank you for having me, too, and the Council. I take a little different view on where we stand in Afghanistan than Professor Byman and even Ambassador Freeman. I think we made a tragic miscalculation in the spring of 2003 - or 2002, rather, that we had won the war when we had only won the battle. We had won the cities very quickly, which was I think not surprising, and we basically left most of the insurgents - both al Qaeda and the Taliban - go home with their rifles and other equipment into mountains, into villages where we have no presence at the moment, and are not likely to have one in the near future. In addition, since March of 2002, after Operation Anaconda in eastern Afghanistan didn't work out as well as the military thought it would, we initially had body counts of 900 or a thousand, and I think we ended up in the low 60s as a final number. The military has been basically inactive in Afghanistan. The 18,000 forces we have there, as far as I understand it, remain mostly in garrison. The war has been carried to the enemy, to the extent it has been carried, by the special forces and the clandestine service, and that of course is limited to the Afghan side of the border. So I really question - it's like the issue of we've killed two-thirds of al Qaeda's leadership. Well, we've killed two-thirds of the leadership we knew of on 9/11, so that doesn't - it doesn't take us to the end. In terms of denying Afghanistan as a safe haven for al Qaeda, certainly if we examine the training camps at Kandahar or Host in Nangarhar Province - those are closed, there is nobody there, but most of Afghanistan is uncovered by U.S. forces, and certainly since the Iraq War, uncovered by overhead imagery and other sorts of technical collection because there just isn't any, so I would say probably two-thirds of Afghanistan is terra incognita to us at the moment. The second point I would make is Pakistan is about played out in terms of how much they can help us. I think no one had any right - and had I been a betting man, I would have lost my pension - to saying that Musharraf would have done what he's done so far. It has been extraordinary. Helping us in the cities, in Karachi and Lahore and Islamabad is one thing, but actually moving his military forces into the border areas, into the tribal areas along Afghanistan is extraordinary; something I would not have expected him to do. And I think they've pushed that rock as far as they can push it. They have suffered more casualties since August than we have in three-plus years in Afghanistan, and it's extraordinarily unpopular among the religious parties in Pakistan, but more importantly, among the tribal people. There was always a saying a Pakistan that the only people who need Pakistan are the Pak military. The tribes don't need Pakistan; we have our country here. So Musharraf has done about what he's could, so I think we're right in a - in kind of a stasis situation. We're not doing much militarily, the Pakistanis have, as I said, about played out their string, and some of the bills are coming due in terms of Musharraf's desire for more weapon systems. And what we've just seen in Afghanistan in terms of the election, I think, was simply the drawing of a line for the next civil war. People didn't vote for Karzai because he was a -- small d - democratic leader or a competent individual. They voted for him because he was Pashtun. And I think that message is clearly going to be received, not only by the Pashtun tribes in Afghanistan and on the Pak side of the border, but clearly by Fahim (sp) and Kanuni (sp) and the rest of those boys in the north. So we're edging towards a civil war in which I believe the Pashtuns will reexert their traditional dominance with the backing of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the rest of the Gulf countries. One thing we tend to overlook, I think, in Afghanistan is that it - for better or worse, it's a cockpit of international rivalry. Everyone that lines up at the U.N. and says we want a stable, peaceful Afghanistan, but no one has the same definition. So what we'll see, I think, over time is the Paks, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis lining up behind the Pashtuns; the Iranians doing their best to protect the Shi'as, who always seem to take the - take it in the neck; and the Russians, the Uzbeks and the Indians lining up with the northerners - the Tajiks and the Uzbeks in Afghanistan. So I think the Afghan drama has got several acts to go through yet before we can say whether we've succeeded or not, and I'm not, for one, very optimistic. How much time do I have on this? MR. FREEMAN: You've got about four minutes. MR. SCHEUER: All right. On Iraq, I would simply say - and as I've said before - is that there's no bigger gift we could have given to Osama bin Laden than the invasion of Iraq, and I am not an expert on Saddam or weapons of mass destruction, or anything about Iraq. I am pretty cognizant, though, of what it means for bin Laden and militant Islam. It means now the three most sacred places in Islam are occupied by either the Americans or the Israelis, in the view of many Muslims. Saudi Arabia - or not Saudi Arabia - the Arabian peninsula, the Israelis hold Jerusalem, and the Israelis and the Americans are interchangeable in the mind of many Muslims. And now we're occupying the second holiest place, in Iraq. It's a disastrous situation for us to be in. Whether or not 1.3 billion Muslims support bin Laden, 1.3 billion Muslims will be offended by the fact that all of their sanctities are occupied at the moment. Iraq, too - we've created, in a sense, a cockpit not unlike Afghanistan. Everyone wants peace and stability in Iraq. I don't think the Saudis and the rest of the Gulf countries, or the Jordanians and the Syrians - or at least the Jordanians - want a Shi'a-dominated state next to Iran, and clearly the Iranians don't want a re-upping, if you will, of a Sunni-dominated Iraq state. So I think Iraq is something that has spun out of control. From America's perspective, I think the most important thing about Iraq is that it has accelerated the change that Professor Byman talked about. We've moved from bin Laden and al Qaeda being a man in an organization to a position where it is now a movement or a philosophy, and a leadership symbol, a heroic symbol. For better or worse, bin Laden is the only credible Islamic leader around the world of international stature. Nobody that I've seen wears an "I Love Mubarak" t-shirt, or "We Love the al-Sauds" or anything like that, so the leadership vacuum is something that he has filled up very nicely. On the current condition of al-Qaeda - oh, and I would say also that currently we may be seeing in Iraq what we saw in Afghanistan when the Soviets invaded. The Saudis, the Kuwaits, the Egyptians, the Algerians, the Tunisians emptied their jails of Islamic militants on the condition that they accepted a ticket to Karachi or Peshawar and then ended up in Afghanistan, hoping that they would kill Soviets and die in the process. It didn't work entirely. They killed a lot of Soviets, but not all of them died. I think we're probably seeing the same thing in Iraq. I don't think it's a coincidence that so many of the dead foreign insurgents are Saudis, for example, and Professor Byman's point about donations - because this is a legitimate jihad, the money is flowing. I don't think the money is a problem any more. And the - two minutes - and the run-up of oil prices, I think, is one thing that hasn't been covered enough in the media. Going from $30 to $50 a barrel for awhile created a great new fund for donations to the mujaheddin in all parts of the world. Finally, on the condition of al Qaeda, I agree to some extent with Professor Byman and disagree a little bit. Clearly bin Laden's genius has been not seeking command and - one part of his genius is not seeking command and control on anything outside of al Qaeda. Professor Byman said that the first priority has been insurgencies, and I would put that second. Bin Laden and al Qaeda have always seen themselves as the vanguard of Islamic - Sunni Islamic militancy. Bin Laden has said very clearly, time and again, myself and al Qaeda cannot beat the Americans alone, we cannot hope to do that. We need a worldwide effort, hitting Americans, hitting their allies, causing disorder. And he said, my role, if I have one, is not as military commander, but as inspirer and instigator. And I think it's fair to say that it seems, with our help, that he is accomplishing that. I would say the next is the insurgency that Professor Byman talked about, and the third is bin Laden's own military unit. The only, really, command and control he has ever wanted in terms of attacks is on the attacks against the United States, and I think he maintains control of that. And I'm one that believes that one of the failures of the U.S. intelligence community is to assume if someone doesn't attack us when we expect it, that they can't do it or we've beaten them. I'm not at all sure we have any idea what their structure is inside of the continental United States. And finally, I'll leave you with that I don't think we've really begun to wage this war from the United States' perspective. I don't think policymakers on either side of the aisle have a clue about what they're doing. Bin Laden is not fighting us because of our society or our values, or our morals, or our elections, or women in the workplace, or Budweiser beer - none of this stuff the Ayatollah Khomeini used to rant about. They're focused on our policies. That's the danger. Right now al Qaeda's center of gravity is American policies. He's turned Clausewitz on his head. The biggest fear al Qaeda has, besides fighting a superpower, is that superpower will somehow change some of the policies that are - have been in place for the last 20 years. I'll leave it at that, sir. MR. FREEMAN: Thank you very much. I think both Dan Byman and Mike Scheuer, in one way or another, alluded to what I consider to be the most disturbing overall trend, which is the increasing unity of the Islamic world around the view that it is under assault from the United States and by American allies, whether through the Israeli occupation and rampages through Gaza and the West Bank, or through the American occupation and rampages through Iraq, or - in Osama bin Laden's case - also the claim that the al-Sauds somehow are fronting for the United States in controlling Mecca and Medina to the advantage of infidels. The net effect of all this has been - if you look at Osama's comments, as I read them - an increasingly self-confident tone coupled with the emergence of an objective of building a Islamic worldwide political movement to complement the military and terrorist actions that have been taken. And I - just to come to Mike's last point, and there probably is some disagree in the panel on this - my sense is that the one place where significant progress is being made in rolling up Islamic terrorists is Saudi Arabia. The problem there is being reduced; that is to say more terrorists are being killed than created because there's a three-part approach, which I don't see being applied anywhere else. First, there is a deliberate and effective effort to counter the ideas of the terrorists, the extremists, so the battle is joined at the level of ideology. Second, there's an effort to co-opt, amnesty or bring over, entice into surrender those who are opposed to the regime. And third, there is a ruthless campaign to kill anyone who fails to surrender and come over, and who persists in plotting terrorism. We now turn to a very interesting sort of projection of all of this - into the Russian sphere; how the Islamic extremists have been able to infiltrate and take over in some respects ethnic struggles in other arenas, and to unite these ethnic struggles in a broader context that corresponds to the one that Dan and Mike outlined. I'd like to ask Anatol Lieven to come up and tell us something about the stage beyond the Middle East as it is affected by Islamic extremism. ANATOL LIEVEN: Thank you so much. It's an honor to speak here in such distinguished company. Thank you all for coming. I'd be very glad to say something about my views of the Afghan situation in response to questions, but since Mike Scheuer and Dan Byman have spoken on that so eloquently, I thought I would say something about the Chechen conflict, both because - as Professor Freeman says - this is indeed a very interesting and indeed classic case study of how international jihadis have been able to move into and even colonize a local ethnic conflict. Also, you could say - because if you look at the Chechen conflict and Russian policy there, we might say that the best advice to America or to the West would be to look at what the Russians have done and then do exactly the opposite in each case. And I must say that ever since I first came to Washington, fresh from reporting the first Chechen war in 1996, I have found many people in the American uniformed military and the intelligence community who have been willing to learn from the Russian experience in Chechnya. Unfortunately, I have to say that at the policymaking level, and too often in the world of the think tanks, there has been an attitude which rather recalls something that General - the late General Aleksander Lebed said to me years ago, back in I think it was 1994 even, before the Chechen war while he was still a general commanding in Moldova. He had been Soviet officer, of course, in Afghanistan. I was a British journalist on the side of the mujaheddin, so we had quite a lot to talk about. And I asked him at one point, General, you know, given what happened to us, the British, in Afghanistan on so many occasions when we tried to conquer the place in the 19th century, how could the Soviet Union, how could the Soviet army have made the same mistake again? I mean, why didn't you learn from what happened to the British? And he gave this very sour smile, and he said, ah, but you don't understand. You were capitalist, imperialist exploiters. We were bringing liberation to the people of Afghanistan. How could we possibly learn anything from you. (Laughter.) A very familiar attitude, I'm afraid, in this town. Anyway, when it comes to Chechnya as a case study, the first lesson, I think, of Chechnya - and something which has been very much obscured in the Chechen case, but to some extent more widely - is that it is of course a great mistake to concentrate on al Qaeda as such. Now Russian propaganda has encouraged this mistake, but it must be said that Russian propaganda is to some extent trying to exploit Western popular delusions on this score that everything comes down to al Qaeda. So I keep being asked again and again -- by Western journalists, by Russian journalists - do you believe that al Qaeda is present in Chechnya or has played an important role in Chechnya. And I say no. And they say, oh, so the Russian government is lying; there are no international jihadis, no international Islamic extremists in Chechnya. I say, no, that isn't what I said. I mean, as everyone here, I'm sure, knows very well - and as both the speakers have emphasized - this world of Sunni Islamist jihadi extremism and terrorism is not an organization; it's not a single organization certainly. It is a web or a net with different nodes. As Ziel Cappel (ph) has put it very well when he says that al Qaeda is not actually a base, as its name suggests, but a database. It is a source of recruits, certainly; of information, of technology, of contacts, of links, but it doesn't control everything. And of course these different nodes, on the one hand, share the same basic theology, though of course with certain distinctions, and they share the same basic ideological view of the world, and the same geopolitical - the ultimate geopolitical aim and the same vision of a future society. But of course the different nodes concentrate on different specific enemies at particular times, and that has been true ever since I first met these people - the Arab volunteers in Afghanistan - way back in 1988, when of course they were fighting the Soviet Union, armed and to a degree funded by us, but they made absolutely no secret of the fact that when they had defeated the Soviet Union - and they meant of course not just to drive it out of Afghanistan, but to destroy the Soviet Union itself - we were next. I mean, all this business about Osama having only become anti-American as a result of the Iraq War of 1990 and the American defense of Saudi Arabia is such nonsense. I mean, the people who moved into al Qaeda were speaking perfectly openly to Western journalists in Afghanistan about their hatred of America, their hatred for Israel, and their long-term plans in that regard. And in Chechnya, we have therefore seen a group of mostly, though not exclusively, former Arab veterans of Afghanistan, some who had previously fought as well in the Algerian conflict or in Bosnia, who then moved there to continue, as they would see it, the Afghan jihad against Russia, and are drawn from an extensive range of Middle Eastern countries. They have links to al Qaeda certainly. Al-Zawahiri visited Chechnya in 1996. He has written very clearly in his book or pamphlet, "Knights Under the Prophet's Banner," about how al Qaeda can also exploit Chechnya, you know, as part of the global jihad; how it can use Chechnya to mobilize more support among Muslims for its overall cause. But it's not that al Qaeda has been in command of the international jihadi forces fighting in Chechnya. Hatab (sp), their first leader, was an associate of Osama bin Laden; not, as far as I can make out in any way - certainly in Hatab's view - his subordinate. Now I was in a position as a journalist in visiting the Caucasus and Chechnya in the early '90s actually - and during the first Chechen war - actually to see some of the genesis of this jihadi presence in Chechnya, and it began of course not with an explicitly jihadi movement at all. It began with the move of Middle Eastern and above all, of course, Saudi-funded religious and charitable groups into the region. And it's a grave mistake in this regard, of course, to regard fundamentalist and jihadi as the same thing. When I was listening to a French minister on television last night saying that the French state must set out to - if not abolish fundamentalism, at least, you know, really set out deliberately a part of policy to reduce fundamentalism as part of the war on terror. Well, I don't know whether that's possible. I'm not even sure that this is something that is altogether appropriate in a democracy. But certainly something to keep in mind is that a great part of the fundamentalist world -- even a Salafi and Wahhabi (sp) one, and even in the former Soviet Union - is politically quietest. You could say that this corresponds to some extent to past distinctions in the Sufi world between Qadiri and the Naqshabandis, who also had some of these distinctions when it came to active involvement in politics and in military struggle. But certainly - I mean, most of the fundamentalist - Middle-Eastern-backed fundamentalists who moved into the Soviet Union were not aiming carry out jihad. They were in fact aiming to do what they said they were doing, which is set up schools, set up mosques, madrassas, fund the haj, spread their version of Islamic culture. But clearly this also provided cover for jihadi groups to come in as well. Now until the war of 1994, however, these groups - and indeed, in Chechnya, the new Koranic modern fundamentalists were also pretty weak - it was above all the Russian intervention of December 1994, without question - which sucked these groups into Chechnya and which gave them their chance. Without that, they would have had some presence; they would certainly have gone on trying to base themselves in Chechnya, but it is extremely unlikely that they would have attained anything like the power and influence they later achieved. Now their success in this regard during the first war comes from a number of different sources, which once again we would do very well to study given our present experience in Iraq, but also, you know, we cannot exclude the fact that, whether for bad reasons or good, we will be drawn into future occupations of this kind as well elsewhere in the Muslim world if we come under - god forbid - new attack like 9/11. The first is that this does to some extent conform to a historical pattern. Those who say that the exploitation of ethnic conflict or the mobilization of ethnic conflict in the name of radical Islam is a new phenomenon are completely wrong. If you look not just at the past history of the Caucasus, but to some extent of Afghanistan as well, the ethnic struggle of the Caucasian mountaineers mobilized and - and this is a very important point - organized in the name of Koranic radical Islam was of course the central feature of the Caucasian struggle against the Russians in the 19th century. It is also something which has played a critical part is Pashtun history, another deeply divided tribal people who on the one hand have a very strong ethnic and ethno-religious sense, but have always had a tremendous difficulty in organizing themselves along modern, nationalist, political lines. And so again and again, fighting the British, and now in this - and the Soviet occupation and today, you find Islam and jihad being used as a substitute, if you like, for what we would regard as more modern and effective forms of national and political mobilization. There is the effect of war itself. There is perhaps not quite such a long step as we think between the soldier who is prepared to die for his country or his cause and the suicide bomber who is determined to die. There is a difference, but it's not an absolute difference, and in the first war in Chechnya, you had groups who called themselves suicide forces. They were not actually going out to commit suicide deliberately, but they were willing to risk their lives in a - to what we would say is a fanatical extent. There is the impact of money. The State Department suggests that in the second Chechen war alone, up to $100 million has been transferred to support the Chechen resistance. Money is not, however, the most important thing. There is the visible willingness of these Arab and other volunteers to risk their lives and to suffer hardship to help the Chechens, particularly at a time when, as the Chechens see it, they're not getting help from anybody else. And finally, and very important - perhaps not in Iraq, but in other parts on the periphery of the Muslim world - I've almost finished - there is - and this is, by the way, also very true on the periphery of the Muslim world in Europe, and perhaps in parts of America as well. Olivier Roy (ph) and Ziel Cappel, once again, have written about this is a very interesting fashion. There is the fact that you have these groups who feel themselves to be deeply peripheral -- peripheral in the Muslim world; peripheral in the societies in which they live, whether the Soviet Union or the West; impoverished, alienated; and also alienated from their own traditional culture; in Western Europe often not speaking Arabic properly, let alone Berber; in the former Soviet Union maybe not speaking Chechen or very badly. And what happens is you get these missionaries from the Middle East who come in, and they say, you know what? You don't need to. You don't need to have this, you know, understanding of and knowledge of your tradition in order to be not just a true Muslim, but the best Muslim. Just sign yourself up to this limited set of principles - maybe even written in Russian or French, not in Arabic - and you are not just a good Muslim, but you are better than these lazy, decadent people sitting around in the heart of the Muslim world, or Saudi Arabia, or whatever. And that is a tremendously appealing thing. You know, if you are a young, impoverished, de-culturated, if you like, person, whether in Chechnya or in southern Thailand or even Afghanistan. Thank you. MR. FREEMAN: Thank you - very, very illuminating, and I'm - I want to thank you very much for taking us to the periphery before we return to the center of things in Iraq, which we now do with retired colonel Lang. Pat I think needs no introduction here. He has written a number of interesting articles in Middle East Policy, which I refer you to - one called "Drinking Kool-Aid," which I thought was particularly apposite. W. PATRICK LANG: It seems to have passed into the language now. MR. FREEMAN: Yeah, it has. You are the inventor of a phrase. Anyway, the other day I understand that someone went into the Oval Office - someone known to everybody here, a rather senior person who is on his way out of the administration - and was asked by the president what was going on in Iraq, and said, with his characteristic bluntness, we're losing - and was asked to leave the office forthwith and not continue the discussion. So there's a question about what is going on in Iraq, and perhaps the competition between reality-based analysis, much disparaged in Washington these days, and hallucinatory optimism, which is the alternative. Pat, you're not a hallucinatory optimist, so you must be reality based - please come to the podium. (Audio break, tape change.) MR. LANG: (In progress) - style and somebody I admire greatly and have for a long time. There is in Washington a great kind of division I think in government -- I'm not going to talk about the world of the universities and think tanks really - between those who are in the intelligence business, and by that I mean the analysts in this case and who have the job of describing reality as best they understand it in accordance with what ought to be and used to be a very strict kind of ethic of evaluation of evidence with rigorous rules and that kind of thing so that reality can be described to the government of the United States as a basis for policymaking. Now, it's true - somebody else once said to me that if the policymakers have made up their mind already, nothing you say is going to sway them, but I always took that as evidence to the fact that what you needed to do was get in the game early enough so that they hadn't made up their mind yet when you started to tell them. And that seemed to work pretty well. On the other hand, the other big group are the policymakers, the elected officials who come to office with an idea in mind of what sort of future they wish to create; what kind of a world is it that their policy, their vision of mankind's future will produce, and they work toward that steadily. Now, in their minds of course information and the description of the - and description is a mighty power as you all know - is often simply just a tool for creating the pre-conditions for the world to come that they desire and that they think is right. Well, not surprisingly, there is a certain tension between these two groups of people; you know, the people who on the one hand feel it is their obligation to provide real reality as a diet item so that you don't get the computer-generated rule of garbage in, garbage out as a result of policy, on the one hand. And on the other hand, you have the people who want you to shut up so that they can get on with telling the world how they in fact want things to turn out. And that's just the reality of life, folks; that's how things really work around town here or indeed in capital - in London or any place. So I was asked yesterday by a reporter who called me up over this Salvador option nonsense yesterday if in fact, you know - that the situation was always such that the governments of the United States had sought to institute creative policies with regard to information. And I said, well, there are always these tensions, but in fact things have seemed to have gotten completely out of hand in the last four years or so. Perhaps the Clinton people didn't have as firm a set of opinions about how things ought to be or there were some other breaks on their behavior. But under normal circumstances, what happens is - in these intelligence agencies, in my experience anyway - is that people right at the top are usually quite intelligent, well-read, or urbane people who understand that there has to be some reality base for the decisions they're going to make or else things will just get completely out of hand. And so there are - although lower-level-policy people have a great tendency to go around and to try to pressure intelligence analysts into not saying what they don't want to hear or not including things in national intelligence documents, or voting the right way, and revisions of national intelligence estimates - things like this. When you get to the very top, there usually is some core of people, like the man we were talking about a minute ago, who are going to insist, in fact, that people leave the intelligence guys alone so that you could - we could hear what they have to say because they are in fact the people who are going to ensure that we don't fall on our faces. Now, on my thesis with regard to Iraq - and I'm supposed to talk about Iraq here today - is that the Iraq story is not really so much about Iraq or the international jihadis or any of that stuff; it's really about us -- really, it's about us. And I've tried this thesis out on people in various parts of the world and it goes over with varying success so we'll see how I do today here - this idea. But in fact, I think - you know, in my experience of government, it's a continuing theme that we Americans as a group - and I'm not talking about individuals here. I know there are quite a few really gifted people here who are great empaths and who understand other people's culture's really well and feel them - a lot of them are in this room; I know them. But in fact as a mass of people in the United States and in the governments that we create for ourselves, there is a continuing inability to understand that other people really are different than we are. And as a result, we tend to attribute to them motives for things they do --which we're comfortable with -- which we think reflect where society and human nature ought to be at this time - how people ought to feel about various issues, where the human race is going, and what reaction these people will have if we try to liberate them and make them free people. And I have - you know, I have had in my rather checkered and now getting to be a rather long life - beginning to - I've been involved in a number of attempts across the world to get people to understand how it is they ought to behave in our view. And we've had varying success. And in Iraq, I think you have a particular example of that. You also have an example of that in the descriptions that are variously made of the international jihadi movement, you know. You hear all the time - and we've heard this here today and I - you know, I certainly accept the views of my learned friends here - that in fact that al Qaeda has transformed itself in one way or another from what was essentially a command-and-control-type organization into a networked organization, and that this changes them in this way or that way. On the other hand, other people have said that in fact it was - you know, that they never really attempted to do that except with regard to their own particular assets under local control by Osama bin Laden. And I would tend to subscribe to the latter view. I don't really believe that al Qaeda is an international conspiracy or the jihadi movement is an international conspiracy. I don't believe that it's an international movement - I don't think it's a movement in fact. I think it's a historical phenomena which recurs periodically in the course of Islamic history every so many years, when people start to really think about the fact that they are discontented about the alignment of forces in the world. It's a very easy thing to think in fact that our policy is what causes these people to dislike us. Well, it certainly doesn't help and in this case, I think it has certainly exacerbated their attitudes toward us and tended to focus attention toward us. But I think there is an underlying phenomena of hostility within the Islamic world which tends to recur every so often and which is given focus by particular sets of historic events. And we are in the midst of one of those recurrences of this phenomena at this time. Now, in the case of Iraq, now the problem we have there is I think a recurrence of our problem in fact. Our problem is that with regard to Iraq, the government of the United States, ignoring the council of many people in the intelligence community, who in fact knew better, and in the academic world who knew better - and this gentleman here did his very best to try to convey these opinions to the government - in fact, they ignored this and instead of invading the Iraq of the Iraqis - the Iraq which reflects what Iraqi society is, has been, the ethnology of Iraq, the alignment of forces in Iraq for over 1,000 years with the Sunnis clearly in charge - the Sunni-Arabs, or their Turkish allies and friends at very times in charge - and the position of Shi'a Arabs as a subordinate, underclass in Iraq, we decided that in fact every Iraqi wanted to be participant in the world as we believed it ought to be. And so we decided that - the government decided in fact that it would invade the Iraq of our dreams and this was an Iraq in which we would be welcomed in the streets, we would need very minimal force, there was no requirement for an occupation. So as a result, you have the United States Army and Marine Corps now in Iraq with a grossly under-strength force committed in a place where we probably can't generate a lot more force because other people don't want to go in there with us and we don't have a lot more force to generate except over a long period of time. If you look at the newspapers today, you'll see that at one point General Abizaid faced the situation in Iraq with 100 main battle tanks in the whole country. Now, there are people who will say here, well, you know, do you need tanks to deal with guerrillas? Hell, yes, you need tanks to deal - (chuckles) - with guerrillas. We're not talking about a football game, we're talking about a situation in which my cousin and my former student at West Point, somebody's brother is walking down a street in some place in Iraq and he's very likely to come under attack through ambush, and you know what, in that situation, as a practicing soldier in the old days, I will tell you want you want to do is not have a fair fight; you want to have an unfair fight. You want to look back over your - (chuckles) - and you want to see an Abrams tank; that's what you want to see because whoever shoots at you, you're going to come out on top in the process of building fire supremacy. And that isn't what we have. At the same time now in Iraq, we are persisting in believing that we are going to reorganize the country. Our entire program in Iraq is based on the idea that we can reorganize Iraq to our heart's content and then we're going to move on to reorganize other places. Who is next on the list? Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, you name it, and there are people in all of these countries who think that's a wonderful idea; you know why? Because they haven't experienced it yet, that's why. That's haven't experienced the chaos that will ensue when we pull the keystone out of the arch and all the blocks fall down just as they have in Iraq today. So when you look around in Iraq and you see that things are falling to bits and it's very difficult holding election because the Sunni Arabs won't accept the diminution of the power that they have hailed for age-old periods in Iraq over everybody else. Should we be surprised at that? Yes, we should; we should be surprised that we have been so foolish in fact and that we persist in this foolishness. Now, the story that we were just told was that a friend of ours went into the Oval Office and told the highest authority in the land that the war is not going well in Iraq and was in fact thrown out of the building. What does this mean? It means that we are still persisting in our fantasy; that in fact we believe in fact that we understand how these people ought to be and we can organize them - organize them with minimal effort because in fact they really want to be like us. I mean, it is almost a cartoon-like thing to think of the films of 30, 40 years ago about Vietnam, right? You can think of the sergeant, the Marine Corps drill sergeant in the movie "Full Metal Jacket" created by that genius of the cinema, Stanley Kubrick, who says to his boys who he's training - he says, just remember, inside every gook there is an American trying to get out. That line is repeated strangely enough in the movie by - "Apocalypse Now," when the crazy cavalry colonel on the beach says exactly the same thing because it was a recurring theme which the artists of the world understood then. And we have done this over and over again; we continue to do it and so long as we refuse to understand that these people have in fact different motivations that we do - they have a different culture, which is absolutely legitimate that they don't have to be like us in fact in order to live good and fruitful lives. Until we accept that and believe it, we're going to continue to have misadventure after another. If we're going to persist in this foreign policy, then in fact we need an army of about - (chuckles) -- 800,000 and a Marine Corps with 250,000. We're going to have to pour our blood and treasure to these places forever. You know, we tried doing this kind of thing for 100 years of the 20th century over and over again. My family's misadventures in the Philippines, in China, mine in various places are all testimony to the fact that we've tried this again. Why on earth we have returned to this dead dog is beyond my comprehension. (Laughter.) MR. FREEMAN: Why don't you tell us what you think? (Laughter.) I gather that you feel that we invaded Iraq with a set of dogmas rather than a set of plans, and that we destroyed the Iraqi state while we were trying to remove the regime, and that we haven't replaced the regime yet, and that it's all going very well. MR. LANG: A good summary. MR. FREEMAN: Thank you. Well, this brings us to the more interesting part of the discussion, which is the free-for-all with those of you in the audience who have listened patiently and I hope attentively to four excellent but very different views of the same elephant. And I would now invite you to come up and raise your questions or make your comments. Again, come to the microphone, please; say who you are; and if you know who you want to have first crack at the question directed that way. Thank you. Sir. Q: Hi, my name is Clay Swisher (ph) and I would like to pose a question for Dr. Byman and Dr. Scheuer. Not to single you out, Dr. Byman, but you are on the panel - you made a - (chuckles) - passing comment about some of the friction points between us and the Arab and Muslim world, and it sounded as almost as if it was a footnote when you were mentioning that our policy towards Israel are certainly one reason that fuses global insurgency. I'm wondering if you could elaborate on that more and if you could perhaps offer your thoughts and, Mr. Scheuer, if you could offer yours. It's time the U.S. start addressing what those policies are and if they are consistent with American values of life, liberty, and property, and if it's something that should be treated now days as something more than a footnote, that it should warrant more serious debate and consideration than just mentioning, well, there is always this. Thank you. MR. FREEMAN: All right, Dan. MR. BYMAN: No, it certainly is not a footnote. I was focusing on change and you're mentioning an element of continuity. What is a little different about this are two things I would say in the last five years. Needless to say, U.S. support for Israel has been a constant so people who are - who say this isn't that important say, you know, why is it important today but not important 20 years ago. Two different things: one is the information revolution, and what that means is that what happens in Jenin is watched in real time by people around the world. We saw this with Mohammad al Durrah (ph) where people around the world were watching a father trying to shelter his son unsuccessfully. And as a result, the filter that time places was reduced and as a result the emotional level is higher. Related to that is in much of the Arab world in particular, there was tremendous control in the media. And as a result, regimes could temp down as well as increase sentiment according to their policy. The information revolution has reduced this considerably. Related to all of this is a shift in U.S. policy, which has become less critical towards Israel. Needless to say, the United States and Israel always were and I think will be, for as long as I will live, very close allies. But the shift has been to one that is not a questioning relationship, not a critical one. And this is something that I'm hoping may be changing at the moment. The election of Abbas as prime minister may not be the landmark event everyone is claiming it is in the true sense, but it is an opportunity for change, and I would give the Bush administration credit actually several years ago for trying to engineer this position. And at the same time I would give them tremendous criticism for once they succeeded in bringing this position in power, cutting him off at the knees. And to me that - trying to go back to the Mitchell plan, go back to the basic principles, is something the United States should actively be trying to do. One of the ironies to me of this whole situation is - I think the Kashmir dispute is tremendously important for U.S. security and tamping down the problem there. But I can't tell you how to do that. I can't tell you what the answer is. I think most thinking observers can look at the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and tell you what the outline for the final settlement could be on both sides. And that's unusual to have a valid, nasty, horrible, conflict persisting concurrent with the outlines of quite real and acceptable solutions. So I'm hopeful we will return to being an ally of Israel that is not only a close friend but one that is going to push Israel in the direction that it clearly should go in. MR. FREEMAN: Mike. MR. SCHEUER: My own view on this is more narrow than just - or maybe not involved so much with values and morals on this. I just think it does America tremendous harm in the Islamic world for us to be so obviously the dog that's led around by the tail. We don't behave at all as a great power and probably one of the great weaknesses of great powers is not to behave as such. And I think the Israelis have done a marvelous job in terms of being able to control the nature of debate in this country over our policies toward Israel. Whether it's people sending out from IPEC a list of rules on how to review my books or, you know, the fact that if you criticize Israel you're an anti-Semite; it's a tremendous covert action. I wish our intelligence community could have done the same over the course of the past 30 years anywhere. But my gripe here is the only way things change is through debate and we're not able to debate this issue in this country at this time to any great extent. No one suggests abandoning the Israeli, but it's certainly an all or nothing discussion whenever it's raised and it's a dangerous thing. I think -- personally, I'm very much a person who believes nation states are not going to pass away and Israel should be able to do whatever it wants to do to protect itself. My question comes in is whether it's worth any American lives or American funds to suffer as a result of what the Israelis want to do and I think that's a debate we need to have in this country. MR. LANG: One of the real interesting books, I think, about this whole subject is called "One Palestine Complete," which you might read, which is a story of the period of the British mandate in Palestine. And I forget the name of the author - somebody will probably remind me. Q: (Off mike.) MR. LANG: Thank you - I know he is an editor of the Jerusalem Post I believe. And I think that is a very instructive book because you look at that book and what you come to realize looking at it is that the period of the 1920s, the '30s are filled with exactly the same kind of issues, hatreds, difficulties, violence that you see today. I mean, nothing is different at all in the least. And I think that is the underlying reality in the Palestine situation. I wander around Palestine and Israel from time to time asking people, you know, about what they feel about the other side. And what I - my conclusion is in fact that there are not sufficient people really reconciled to the idea of each other as yet to make the possibility of a longstanding peace a reality. Now, that may well emerge, but I don't think we are there yet. And I know you can quote all kinds of statistics like Khalil Shikaki and this guy, and that guy about how they all want this, but if you ask people in fact what they will actually settle for - what is it they really want and blow your way through their obfuscations and delaying tactics, and I'll tell you this, in the end you find out what they really want is very exclusive in nature and not really intended to be a true partnership with other side. So I just don't think we're there yet; I don't think we're there. We may well get there someday but I don't think we're there. MR. FREEMAN: You've been lurking in the aisle, I assume in order to ask a question. Q: I lurk all the time. I'm Bill Sammy (ph) with Radio Free Europe. First a comment, a very brief one: I think the suggestion that Iranian involvement in Afghanistan is done purely -- interest of protecting that country's shares -- a reductionist argument, as someone once said, that Iran has other interests in Afghanistan that go beyond the Shi'ia population. But perhaps you would want to touch on some of those. My other question links with state support for terrorism. This obviously is still an interest of the United States and I was hoping our panelists would touch on that. Thank you. MR. FREEMAN: Who would like to take on these issues? Mike, do you want to start? MR. SCHEUER: On Afghanistan, clearly in my 10 minutes I should have spent a little more time. Iran has multiple interests both cultural and historically in Afghanistan. They are clearly in competition with the Sunnis for using Afghanistan as a portal into central Asia for spreading Shi'ism and Sunnism in that area of the world. So yes, it was a rather absurd statement to limit it just to that. MR. FREEMAN: Dan. MR. BYMAN: To talk briefly about the problem of state sponsored terrorism: this has changed dramatically in the last 15, 20 years. If you look at the - MR. FREEMAN: Pull the mike a little closer. MR. BYMAN: If you look at the two most active sponsors of terrorism - state sponsors -- they are Iran, which is on the U.S. list and of course Pakistan, which is not. And what both countries are up to are engaging the terrorism that is directed against - in Iran's case in particular - against U.S. interests. But Iran has not been responsible for using terrorism to kill Americans directly in many years. Both countries are supporting proxies to achieve a range of national objectives but the scope and scale of state sponsorship of terrorism is dramatically different than it was 20 years ago. When we talk about al Qaeda and, I think, state sponsorship today, what we should be focusing on is a very different challenge, which is something I've been labeling for lack of a better term passive sponsorship, which are countries that deliberately look the other way while support for radicalism occurs on their soil. And usually this is because there are strong domestic interest groups that support radicalism. An example - MR. FREEMAN: You're describing the U.S. support for the IRA. MR. BYMAN: Exactly. This is the United States and the IRA in the 1970s; this is the Saudis and various jihadist groups in the 1990s; this is Pakistan and jihadist groups - perhaps that continues to this day. These are countries that for various reasons do not confront their own problems at home and to me that is where our effort on state sponsorship could go. Unfortunately, we lack the thinking about this issue in a serious way: we lack categories; we lack legislation and as a result we have extreme categories, which is you are not a sponsor or you are and as a result we don't even follow our procedures on that. MR. FREEMAN: Anatol. MR. LIEVEN: Yes, I think one phenomenon that one needs to examine very closely in this regard is the fact that even authoritarian states, I mean, particularly weak authoritarian states of the kind you get across most of the Muslim world, do not control even their own forces to the extent that it sometimes assumed here in America. Therefore you have the phenomenon that you have people within the state system who are at the very least turning a blind eye to terrorism without this being the will of the government as such. And Mike Scheuer said that Musharraf has gone very far indeed - probably as far as the Pakistani system will allow in helping us against terrorism. I've always remembered - when I was last in Pakistan, I talked with a senior police officer in Karachi and he said that when he received information to go after a particular jihadi figure or group there or when received orders to do so from above, he shared that information with two colleagues - two. He informed the rest of his department or the men who were going to have to carryout the operation literally the minute or so they got into their jeeps and buses to go out and carry out the arrest because he was convinced with good reason that his police organization was thoroughly penetrated by sympathizers of the extremist groups concerned and that they would be tipped off and they would disappear. On Iran - no I don't think it was a Radio Liberty journalist but it was an American journalist not so long who asked me about some - he asked this question: how long has there been this Iranian stake in Afghanistan? How long have the Iranians been so concerned? And it was obvious from his tone and from the context that he expected me to say, well, you know, it goes back to the Taliban days or it goes back to Khomeini. And I said, well, not much more than 2,500 years - (laughter). I do think from that point of view it is worth remembering both with regard to Afghanistan and Iraq, and a number of other things as well. Unless we all succeed in simply, you know, destroying ourselves as a world situation or the present order of - or the reorder of world states that has lasted for a very long time. It is overwhelmingly probable in historical terms that long, long after America and Britain have gone home from the Middle East Iran will still be there. MR. LANG: I think we forget the fact that from inside these Muslim and Arab countries, a lot of groups we're talking about look very different. They don't look - in their context they don't seem the same thing at all. One example I can give you is this example of the Society of the Muslim Brothers, the Ikhwah al-Muslimun, in Jordan. I mean, for many, many years - I mean, it's an open secret, everybody really knew about it that the Hashemite monarchy provided shelter to the Muslim Brothers, especially when they were driven out of Syria on repeated occasions. And in Jordan they never caused any particular trouble. As long as they kept quiet the people tolerated and their aspirations were thought - was vaguely providential, you know. And I remember, for example, as well during the first Chechen war -- which Dr. Lieven was intimately involved with - the immediate reaction here in the United States to the idea that the Chechen rebels against the Russians who in that time were not so much influenced by Wahabi-inspired jihadism I think is maybe more still involved with these Naqshabandis and people like that. But the immediate reaction here was in fact that these had to be bad people and they were rebels against the emerging Russian state, be it modern of Westernism of that time. You know, I thought that was ridiculous. I heard a former chief of staff of the U.S. Army say over at CSIS that of course we have to back the Russians against these people; of course we have to. Why of course? You know, this is a complete mystery to me as to why we would think that. But we continue to see people in that way automatically. MR. FREEMAN: I'm just going to make two comments on state sponsorship of terrorism. First, to the extent that state sponsorship is the issue, we know how to deal with that. You can deter state actions in ways that are very difficult to achieve with non-state actors. It's not that you can't inhibit non-state actors; you can; we know how to do that with organized crime, which is the classic non-state actor and terrorists are not fundamentally different in terms of the sort of the problem they represent for the state. So in some ways our job would be easier if indeed state sponsorship of terrorism were once again the norm as it was in the past. Second, and more important perhaps, addressing the point that Dan made about acquiescence by states in use of their territory for various purposes related to terrorism. The danger here is that the trends in the Muslim world overall - the increasing lack of sympathy and indeed active antipathy to the United States will gradually have a series of effects. One of them of course will be to make American bases or the American military presence in a Muslim country an attractive nuisance in the sense that it attracts rather than repels security problems; therefore the American presence, although intended to bolster security, ends up becoming a security problem. That's the first and probable result; we saw that in Saudi Arabia and we may see it elsewhere in the Gulf if current trends continue as well as in Uzbekistan and Pakistan, and other places. The second is that governments, because of the withdrawal of sympathy for the United States by their populace and the turn toward antipathy toward Americans, are not longer able to be partners with the United States, and therefore are forced to withhold cooperation because that is what their publics demand. And the third is of course that non-cooperation transmutes itself into some sort of clandestine support for the enemies of the United States, which is indeed what majorities in many Muslim countries now would prefer. So we have a set of evolutions going on here that bear directly on the question you raise. The end of the story, as several of the speakers said, has not yet been written. I have Jeff, then you, sir, then you, then you, and then you, and so why don't you sit down and I'll call you as we come along and I'll call you later. Q: All right, Jeff Steinberg with Executive Intelligence Review. I'll direct the question at Pat Lang and Anatol Lieven since Pat Lang just raised the subject of my question, namely the Muslim Brotherhood. In one of the last of the staff reports of the 9/11 Commission, which went through the sort of detail account of the attacks of September 11th as told by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, there is sort of a brief but interesting not that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed joined the Muslim Brotherhood at age 16. So I wonder if the panelists could address the question of what is the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda in this larger militant jihadist movement and what are the implications of that since it's a much larger, much more established, and much more sophisticated organization? MR. FREEMAN: You raised it; you start the answer. MR. LANG: Okay, all right. Well, of course the society of the Muslim Brother and its main part - kind of like the official IRA - has become a political force in a lot of ways. But your right; I understand the implication of your question, which is that in what way are some of the elements of the jihadi phenomenon descended from the Muslim Brothers. And I think there is - you can trace a clear relationship to some of the Egyptian groups that became Egyptian Islamic jihad and things like this - were splinters of the Muslim Brothers, driven underground in various ways - I think that's true. They are definitely in the mix; they are probably one of the main threads in the development of Sunni jihadism, but, you know, I mean, having said that, what you're talking about really is an expression of the kind of historic forces that we're really talking about. And water finds its own course and, you know, it's going - people have the kind of grievances and aspirations that I'm talking about, at any rate; they're going to find expression through a - organizationally. So, yeah, they are definitely related. MR. FREEMAN: Anatol. MR. LIEVEN: Yeah, just briefly. I believe the British police and security forces used to make a distinction between pub nationalists - Irish nationalists, you know, who get together in pubs and they sing republican songs and they, you know, commemorate the old defeats and the old battles -- and the hard men, you know, the people who are actually prepared to join the active IRA and carry out terrorist attacks. I mean, the one is derived from the others. The recruiters operate in - or operated in that republican world of sentiment but then set up much smaller, tighter, closed secret groups who actually carry out the attacks. So they can't be separated; at the same time, they can't be identified absolutely as well. I mean, if the British police had set out to arrest every Irish republican in Britain who sang republican songs in a pub, we'd have a very large portion - (chuckles) - of the British population in jail by now including, I may so, my own relatives since my mothers name was Monaghan (ph) -- (chuckles). MR. FREEMAN: Some of mine, too. MR. SCHEUER: I would say the ties between the Brotherhood and the jihadi movement are very close. You know, if you go back to the war against the Soviets, Bel Hazam (ph) was a very prominent Muslim Brotherhood figure and we used to kind of cut the world in half. Hazam brought to the mujaheddin in Afghanistan money through the Muslim Brotherhood. Bin Laden brought the money in from the gulf. And personally, when Hasad (sp) did in the Brotherhood in Syria, bin Laden's family welcomed many of the senior leaders of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood who escaped into Saudi Arabia and gave them employment, places to live. And when bin Laden lived in Khartoum in '91 through '96, some of his closest associates were x-members or exiled members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. So it's a very hard thing to measure but I think it's clearly there. And I would ask, if I remember correctly, Ambassador Freeman, in Egypt, we weren't even allowed to talk to the Brotherhood because it offended the government there. So we don't really have much of an intelligence base on the Brotherhood. MR. FREEMAN: In an earlier period, I believe the embassy did defer. MR. SHEUER: Yes. MR. FREEMAN: I can say with some pride that nowhere did I serve where we ever accepted such inhibitions. It's a question for an ambassador in terms of relations with the host government and what slack Washington allows him or her. Sir, and Mrs. Steinberg, you're next. Q: I'm Eda Dina (ph) - (unintelligible) - of Freedom Institute. My question, I'll direct to Mr. Lang although I welcome comments from anyone on the panel. You made the valid point that the policymakers often assume that - ignore the differences between Americans and some of the societies in which we intervene. But isn't there also a point to be made that sometimes they ignore the similarities? I have in mind - you identified the - you said, no one gave thought to the fact that we might actually have to occupy Iraq in order to implement our intentions. But isn't it also the case that people didn't think that occupation of Iraq would be a bad thing from the point of view of the Iraqis? And in support of that, I'll say that once asked the prime minister of Estonia whether he wasn't concerned that the Iraqis might view Estonian and American intervention the way Estonia viewed the Soviet presence in Estonia, and he said, not all. In a mirror image of Mr. Lievin's general - Russian general, he said the Soviets were communist imperialists and we're there to bring freedom. MR. LANG: Well, I actually never heard anybody say that they thought the occupation of Iraq would be a good thing. I would have remembered that. MR. FREEMAN: Yes, because it's preposterous. For many, many reasons. People occupy places and they find that they are corrupted by the experience even as the occupied are equally corrupted. One does not fight a war for the purpose of occupying places. Until now. This was a first. MR. LANG: But in fact, we didn't prepare to occupy Iraq. I mean, if people in the Islamic world think we did, they don't know how we would do that - (chuckles) - because -- on a previous occasion here I made the observation that my father was an official in the occupation of Germany for several and he went to school for that, for a year-and-a-half before the event, and it was all very well organized in the best American industrial tradition, you know, and we didn't do any of that. We didn't bring enough force in the period when poor General Garner was sent over there to try to stand up the government; there was nothing there to support him. The idea was evidently this is kind of a liaison party. These people didn't have vehicles, they didn't have staff, they didn't have a logistical base, they didn't have communications; they had nothing. And they arrived on the seen; they found in fact that there was nothing to deal with; the government had dissolved and had gone away, and the country was in chaos. You know, this isn't preparation. We did not prepare to invade Iraq and we failed to do that because in fact we simply believed that in our fantasy, that it would not be necessary in fact that, you know, we would overthrow Saddam's government, and the in fact very efficient and hardworking Iraqi bureaucracy would stand up the next day, come to work in their blue suits, white shirts, and red ties, you know, go to the ministry and everything would be great. And guess what; it didn't happen. And when it didn't happen - we had been sure that it wasn't necessary that we had no fallback plan at all. And I remember in the months before the election, when I used to still be willing to go over to the f-word TV news outfit and talk on their programs, that some of their consultants - I used to talk to them in the makeup room or the greenroom, and used to say, well, what if - what if you're wrong? You know, what if it becomes necessary to occupy the country? What if there is resistance? What if the Iraqis do what on long acquaintance I believe they are likely to do, which is to fight back against this indignity, you know - what are you going to do? Nah, you don't have to worry about that; that's completely out of the question; that will never happen; it isn't even worth thinking about. So you know, we did this to ourselves, which was kind of our main point. MR. FREEMAN: I think, just as a footnote to that, there was fairly extensive planning done for a reconstruction phrase in Iraq - what might have been called occupation - but in the end, the response to that was done under State Department auspices over the course of a year. But in December of 2002, the Joint Forces Command was assigned responsibility for that effort by the secretary of defense, and he also instructed them not to look at the State Department planning, which they did not. In fact, Jay Gardner's efforts to bring someone from the State Department planning effort into his team met with a angry rebuff from the vice president and the secretary of defense; and the individual concerned was dismissed. So there was a chain of command here that deliberately did not plan in accordance with the fantasies that Pat Lang has suggested we were indulging in. MR. LANG: Well, I mean, you know, you - it was a noble effort; I'm well aware of what Ambassador Freeman is talking about and it was a noble effort but in the end it wasn't accepted. You know, if it's not accepted - MR. FREEMAN: It's not used. I was actually at the Joint Forces Command and asked them whether they had looked at the State Department effort; they said no, they had been told not to. And they said, anyway, they were told it was worthless. I said, well, how can you know that it's worthless if you haven't looked at it? They said, well, we've been instructed that it's worthless; so it was worthless. Mrs. Steinberg. Q: Michele Steinberg from EIR Online. I'd like to move into an area that is currently before the United States Senate, which is the confirmation of the chief law enforcement officer, Mr. Gonzalez as it relates to the war on terrorism. I would like all of the panelists, to the extent that there is time, to comment on this. Of course Gonzalez is implicated in the preparation of the memos that authorized the infliction of pain short of death and other nice terms to disguise skirting the limits of torture and crossing into that as a means of obtaining actionable intelligence. I have heard that policy described as sabotaging our overall military mission in Iraq. I would like a comment on what that has done to the integrity of our military and American institutions and also its effect on the Arab and Muslim world in terms of welcoming the United States as the beacon of hope, which I think the government - the present government is still deluded in thinking is the case. But I think it's a very grave issue and having a chief law enforcement officer who did embrace that view of getting intelligence presents certain problems. MR. FREEMAN: Well, anyone who would wish to comment on that. Dan. MR. BYMAN: Sure. I'll chime for some opinions. We talk about the effect on the Muslim world. Something like Abu Ghraib - I actually think we as a broader analytic community have missed the point. If you put 150,000 troops in a difficult war zone for an extended period of time and surround them with cameras, in particular I would say phone cameras, you're going to see problems and abuses inevitably - that when you have counterinsurgency warfare, this is by nature an exceptionally brutal form of warfare. Now, it might not have been Abu Ghraib if particular things had been done differently. But the idea that you would have a long-sustained conflict where civilians are mixed up with combatants and nothing horrible is going to happen to some innocents, it reflects the level of nativity about warfare. We have sold ourselves the bill of goods on the nature of counterinsurgency warfare - that we can do everything in a simple, clean, honest way and only good guys will do this and only bad guys will be hurt when in fact interrogation techniques and singling out the combatants make this much, much more difficult. Having said this and having thus expressed some sympathy for the position of the U.S. government on this, one thing that amazed me was this was actually a golden opportunity to highlight the rule of law, which is to say the abuses that occurred are of course completely inappropriate and as a result, someone should be punished - not someone who is a low ranking officer, but someone quite senior should be held accountable. And this to me was actually a golden opportunity to show the rest of the world that the United States is a nation of laws and is a nation of accountability, and rather than seize this, we shunned it, which I think was a big mistake. MR. SCHEUER: Can I - MR. FREEMAN: Please. MR. SCHEUER: Can I pick up on that? I would like to take Professor Byman's point a little bit further. We are living with the results of delusionary attitudes towards warfare. We can't have wars like the Serbian war, the great 25,000 foot war where no Americans got killed and you couldn't see anybody on the ground getting - (inaudible, background noise) - this is a much different activity. And Afghanistan and Iraq are both instances where we, the mightiest power on earth, have not at all intimidated our enemies. They looked up after the war in Afghanistan and after the initial war in Iraq and said, Jesus, we ran this one - we survived this one, we rode it out, it didn't bother us. And to me, Abu Ghraib is the natural consequence of probably now 20 years of not wanting to tell the American people or behave in a way that would show the American people that wars are necessarily about killing. And the whole question of rendition programs or prisoner program of Guantanamo is a direct result of two things: first, not wanting to talk about the nature of war, but second, the plague that America suffers from of the law enforcement mentality - that somehow if we get enough information from this one guy in prison we're going to be able to capture Osama bin Laden and that's going to be the end of the day. And so my view on this is, you know, it's wrong; of course it's wrong, but it's not a - it's not a - it's not something that came up under this administration; it's the last 20 years of this - trying to conduct foreign policy through the U.S. courts. I think that's a huge problem for us. MR. LIEVEN: This is a point I have been making for many years concerning also the Russian experience in Grozny and indeed the American experience in Mogadishu - the very ugly nature of this kind of warfare. And indeed, I don't know if you read a report in the Economist in its last issue or the one before last perhaps by now about U.S. troops in Ramadi. And much of this recalls word for word what Russian soldiers said to me about their experiences in Grozny - (audio break, tape change) -- and so my view on this is it's wrong, of course it's wrong, but it's not something that came up under this administration; it's the last 20 years of this trying to conduct foreign policy through the U.S. courts. I think that's a huge problem for us. MR. FREEMAN: Anatol. MR. LIEVEN: This is a point that I've been making for many years concerning also the Russian experience in Grozny and indeed the American experience in Mogadishu - the very ugly nature of this kind of warfare. And indeed, I don't know if you read a report in The Economist in its last issue, or the one before last perhaps by now about U.S. troops in Ramadi - and most of this recalls word for word what Russian soldiers said to me about their experiences in Grozny and how they reacted. I mean, of course if you think you're going to be shot when you go into a house you're going to chuck a grenade in first and ask questions later. On the specific thing of Gonzales and the sort of officially sanctioned torture of prisoners, I would say that relatively, including relative to many Muslim regimes, God knows, America has behaved with relative - relative restraint, historically speaking. What of course makes this so bad and indeed grotesque is that this administration has combined such policies, in effect, with this rhetoric at least of bringing democracy, human rights to the Muslim world. I mean, that, frankly, as a combination, it's a sick joke. And once again, the administration had a chance really visibly to distance itself from what had happened but the choice of Gonzales is simply a confirmation and a slap in the face, frankly, to democrats in the Middle East but also to Europeans who would like to cooperate with America in trying to bring some progress - democratic progress to the region. MR. LANG: I think to most soldiers there's a very big difference between killing people in combat and on large scale, which is a necessary part of warfare, which gets very rough. And on the battlefield, you know, if you're in the middle of an action and you have enemy wounded around you and the action is not completed and things aren't going - you're probably going to shoot their wounded, which has happened I'm sure in this war as it has in every other instance, you know? That's just a normal part of the way things go. But in fact I think there's a very great difference between the application of massive force to effect legitimate military objectives on the one hand and treating somebody like a dirty dog in a prison by taking their clothes off and heaping them up in stacks and enjoying taking pictures of them. That's just a disciplinary matter; that's not policy, I don't think. If it was encouraged by the administration by its laxity and its attitude toward people's rights, including enemy combatants' rights, then I think that's a great shame, you know? But in fact, I don't think it's a good idea to go around saying that in this kind of warfare and that kind of warfare - that's a lot of crap, to put it bluntly. You know, I've been in a number of wars like that and people behave themselves a lot better than this in fact. If you want to see how bad this can get, if you let yourself go down that path, you should go and read Paul Aussaresses's little book, "The Battle of the Casbah." He was the French intelligence officer who destroyed the FLN apparatus in Algiers. And the way he did it was that when they arrested suspects they tortured them until they confessed and then they shot them immediately. They probably killed 800 or 1,000 Algerians in a series of nights over a period of four or five months. You start going down the path of saying that, well, this is a tough fight, this is a difficult thing, so we're justified doing this or that, you're going to end up in that bag and I don't think the United States wants to be there. MR. FREEMAN: But I think, Michele, in all candor, you're asking the administration to acknowledge mistakes and to repent of its sins, and it does not acknowledge that it made any mistakes or that it has any sins to repent of. And indeed, those who argued against the intervention in Iraq and who have made some of the points about a more effective conduct of the war on terror that have been made by the panelists have been dismissed from the second term, and those who advocated the policies to which you object and about which many of us have grave doubts have been held on in office in the second term. So I don't know how to answer your question. It's a political judgment on the part of the White House, and it's consistent across the board. You know, Judge Alberto "Torquemada" Gonzales is not an exceptiona. He's in the mould of the "Ayatollah" Ashcroft, whom he's succeeding. I would argue that the United States, in fact, is on much better ground when we aspire to a higher standard, and when we have the capacity to inspire others by our example than when we sink to the low level that others may have attained - like the French in the Casbah. Sir? You've been waiting a long time. Q: I'd like to ask a question. MR. FREEMAN: And who are you, first? Q: I'm Jeff Loding (ph). I'm with the Japan Project. MR. FREEMAN: Right. Q: And I'd like to ask a question about the network that has been mentioned multiple times. The different nodes in the network - I believe, if I understand correctly, that you said that they structurally are somewhat clones to the original al Qaeda cell. When those clones act together in Iraq or in Chechnya, do you see those as planned mobilizations or are they anomalies? And secondly, what does a leader like Osama bin Laden - what kind of gravity does he have with a separate node that has its own leader and its own set of goals? MR. FREEMAN: Who wants to start on that? MR. BYMAN: Please correct me if I didn't understand exactly your point, but when it comes to the individuality of the various nodes and when they come together and when they don't, there is an idea that bin Laden has promulgated, which is if you look at the state of the various Muslim resistance movements in 1992 you had many nodes that were all going in different directions, had different goals, and he gradually tried to bring them together. And in part that was operational; in part that was ideological. We wanted to say, look, you have common goals; you should move towards them. In part it was, you know, by the way, if you need a logistics cell you should all go to this guy because he can help you, and it was very effective. And we've seen the movement move in that way, and the since September 11th, I would argue, return a bit more to the pre-9/11 era where its component parts become more important. The desire almost always is to have larger groups acting in some concert. This isn't only in kind of relatively absurd think tank game theoretics. Do you really want swarms of individuals acting on their own? Almost any political leader will tell you that coherent organized action is the key to success, and al Qaeda has striven for that and has done that to some degree. But, that said, what bin Laden does - and what Mike pointed out earlier - his very important role is inspiring new nodes, is trying to get five guys in a café who haven't thought of themselves as warriors to think of themselves as warriors and to organize to act and to join a broader movement. So it's both moving different groups together and inspiring new ones that are an important part of what he's about. MR. FREEMAN: Anatol. MR. LIEVEN: Yes, very briefly. No, clones is exactly the wrong idea, of course. These groups grew up autonomously, some of them long predating al Qaeda, as we've heard. And I think Dan has given exactly the right picture of how this has worked. Of course, though, a critical question in this regard is the spread of technology - above all, god forbid, technology of mass destruction. If this spreads sufficiently far in future, then of course the power even of relatively small groups to carry out catastrophic attacks will be enormously increased. But for the moment - although, as you can see, I'm very critical of this administration - I would agree with Professor Byman that breaking up this al Qaeda attempt at a degree of centralization has been relatively successful and certainly quite important. MR. FREEMAN: Mike. MR. SCHEUER: I think bin Laden made a decision early on in terms of unity and control that it wasn't - it was neither wise nor possible to obtain. I think in some ways he has given a hostage to fortune because he doesn't have control over - direct control over events. I think Madrid probably caused him a little bit of angst. If it had come off as it was supposed to there would have been many more casualties. The last thing al Qaeda wants to do is to be the agent of transatlantic reconciliation, and a big attack in Europe might do that. I'm pretty convinced that he doesn't mind what Professor Byman calls the swarms of people doing things. As long as they're doing them against the West and against the Americans and their allies, it's all moving in bin Laden's direction. Again, his concern on command and control is within the military component of al Qaeda. MR. FREEMAN: But I'm sure you would not argue, Mike, that all this was about Osama bin Laden. I mean, we've succeeded in beatifying him within the ranks of the Islamic extremists by giving him so much attention. MR. SCHEUER: No, I think that's wrong, Mr. Ambassador. I think that's the silliness that was hatched under Clinton, who had decided - and now this government has carried the same day - that somehow if we didn't talk about this guy he would go away. MR. FREEMAN: Yeah. MR. SCHEUER: I think he's extraordinarily important, not only because of his own character and his own behavior and his own rhetoric but because the Islamic world is bereft of leadership. MR. FREEMAN: So he's a symbol and he's a - MR. SCHEUER: He's a hero. He's cut from the mold of Islamic heroes. MR. FREEMAN: That of course gets to the point about his efforts to form a pan-Islamic resistance - a political movement. MR. SCHEUER: Well, I think there's two different questions here, sir. Clearly al Qaeda is the strategic threat to the United States in the near term. At some point we're going to have to decide how many of these offshoot insurgencies we want to fight, or we need to fight. MR. FREEMAN: Right. No, I think that is a fundamental point because some would argue that in fact we have broadened the struggle to such an extent that we are uniting many enemies against us who would not otherwise take that role. Sir. Q: I'm Robert Hickson. Until a couple of years ago - my last assignment was as a professor at the Special Operations University, former Special Forces officer - back in Vietnam too. My question has to do with the moral responsibility of the military officers today, especially the active duty ones and not just the retired ones, and also the strategic culture in our military. My question is directed primarily to Colonel Lang and Michael Scheuer because both of you, in your very profound strategic and grand strategic analyses, are also very attentive to the moral issues, including elements of prudence - which used to be the first cardinal virtue, and still is - and the lack of integrity. It's been my experience, I regret to say, that within the military in the active duty senior generals that I've often worked with before the war started, there were a lot of invertebrate primates. I regret to say that, but I'm talking about thinking men like in the Special Operations Command, where we have grand strategic missions, not just military strategic, and fundamental questions that any strategic mind would ask: what are our war aims and peace aims; who is the enemy; who are you going to fight against terrorism, which is a method like combating psychological warfare: you're not going to defeat it. I wouldn't want to mention any names in these various things but I've been involved in this for a long time. And what I'm very concerned about, because I see so many facile criticisms of a very intelligent network of people, so-called neoconservatives, many of them ethnic, many of whom I know are very intelligent and they really take initiatives. What I see is the passivity among our military officers, and I honor you for what you said in your book, Mr. Scheuer, and your modesty, about how few generals stood up and resisted and said certain things because they could see where they were going. And I know the questions that were not asked when we were going into certain areas, and I would like you both to respond to this. I was very touched in your book when you talked about the generals as you were writing the book, that acceded to their civilian masters bringing in Mongol troops and Indians to help in the occupying force. So a terminal imbecility. But it's this lack of even thinking with love of our own men after what some of us went through in Vietnam, that these generals now are not raising the strategic questions and really, with the evidence, with the cultural strategic religious intelligence - and I'd like you to address this matter because I know both of you are - MR. FREEMAN: I thank you for raising that. We were actually discussing it before the meeting. And, Pat, you should lead on it. MR. LANG: I think in that article that Ambassador Freeman talked about that I wrote for his publication earlier about the Kool-Aid, you know, it was really about this issue, really, this act, and the problem of this was - this whole phenomenon of our run-up to the war was that the leaders, both the leaders of the intelligence community and the leaders of the armed forces did not, in fact, in my opinion, honor their obligations, in fact, which was to stand up to these people and say no. If you're fired, so what? What are you there for if not to be fired? I used to work for - when I was the defense intelligence officer for the Middle East I worked for a guy - actually he was kind of first among equals, but he used to tell us every day at meetings of the Board of Defense Intelligence Officers that, remember, you're here today to act as though it is your last day. And I think that's extremely true. The standard of performance of military officers is supposed to be such - and I think this extends in large part to civilian intelligence as well is such that you have a primary obligation to the people of the United States and the Constitution which goes far beyond your personal interests. And if you're not willing in fact to stand up and be counted, then you become just another faceless bureaucrat. You end up in the position - say if you take Germany in World War II as an example, Field Marshall Keitel, who ran Hitler's headquarters, and Hitler was asked one time, who is this guy, and he said, oh, he's the ma who runs my office. Well, you can think of various analogues, in fact, for people like that in our government today, and I am told by former associates and students of mine now serving in both Iraq and Afghanistan, that the attitude prevails there that even though people who know better tell the boss what the real deal is, in fact the general atmosphere is that we are not allowed to believe that that is the case because we have guidance from above. Well, that's a real failure of the professional ethic in both - certainly in the military services. I'll let Mr. Scheuer talk about his outfit. MR. FREEMAN: I think when the civilian leadership is deaf to professional military advice and punishes dissent, which is reality based, we have to admit that the problem goes beyond the military. Mike? MR. SCHEUER: This issue I think cuts to the heart of America's problems. I think in the years ahead we will see that the Graham Commission and then the 9/11 Commission were abject failures because they never were willing to take a look at personal culpability in terms of how we got to 9/11, just on this one issue, which is one I can speak to with some degree of experience. Ralph Peters has written that the senior levels of our military and our intelligence services are populated by minor con men, and unfortunately over the course of my career I think that has grown to be very true. There is not a willingness to tell the emperor that he has no clothes. There was a tremendous argument, just for example, within the agency over the formation of the Terrorist Threat Intelligence Center, which is an absurdity in terms of the intelligence community at the moment, but it was blessed. It was bipartisan. Andrew Card was on one side and Senator Levin was on the other side, and so it had to be a sacred, foolproof institution. Well, what it is is a voyeur. It is an organization that looks around for threats. And it's now a big organization that does that, but as Colonel Lang will tell you, every other intelligence component in the community also does threat. And what they've done is suck off a great number of the officers who were actually supporting operations overseas, whether they were military operations or operations conducted by the clandestine service to put into this TTIC, which is, again, just the voyeur of threat, and no one stood up. Tenet didn't stand up; no one stood up and said, wait a minute, you're going to weaken our attack against the enemy by doing this. We shouldn't have to tell the president every day that there's a threat - this is a war. But that to me is the most recent example but I've seen it repeatedly where, for any number of reasons, most of them career reasons, and the pot of gold that's at the end of the road with consulting firms now for generals and SIS officers and the intelligence community, there is a clear lack of willingness to buck the system, and no willingness to resign. MR. FREEMAN: I think there have been some exceptions, some from the Foreign Service - Mr. Kiesling and others - who did what I think is the right thing when one has a fundamental problem with policy and can't, in good conscience, implement it, namely to resign and publicly state the reasons for doing so. In recent history we've seen, in connection with this terrorist business, one chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, Ron Fogleman, resign on principle rather than allow his subordinates to be subjected to a witch hunt. And we have the case of the retired generals who have criticized the appointment of Mr. Gonzales as attorney general, although it is easier to do that from retirement, admittedly, than it is from active duty. Nevertheless, I think they see themselves as setting a standard and setting an example. But I think you raise a very profound point and it's one that's deeply troubling, I know, to many in the military as well as in the career civil service ranks at the agency, at the State Department and elsewhere. It's not going to go away and it shows no signs of improving. Sir. Q: My name is Jelks Cabinus (ph). This is sort of a follow up to the last question, except not military-specific or people-specific. In 2002 there were a lot of voices that were questioning the wisdom of the action we were getting ready to take in Iraq, both from a military strategic point of view and also from a perception in the Muslim world in general. And those were ignored or dismissed by the administration in particular, and I just wanted to know if it was felt that there was any indication that now that we're in there and, woops, this is not quite what we expected, if that has changed anything from within the inner circle - if any notice of any perception has occurred. MR. LANG: Well, as you may guess, I'm not in the inner circle but everything I hear indicates to me that nothing at all has changed whatever. The basic judgments remain very largely the same. It's just gotten so messy in Iraq now that the sent General Luck over to try to figure out how to fix this without having to say it needs fixing. So I don't think there's a lot of change. MR. FREEMAN: I would say that Gary Luck, whom I know, has the great merit of being blunt and honest. He does not allow himself to be fooled very easily. He's also a hell of a killer - not disturbed by death. So the question then is, will those in Washington who made the decisions that have turned out so poorly in practice be willing to consider some arguments about changing course? And so far the answer is no. MR. LANG: You know, this is a common misconception, that there are some party of military officers out there who have a weak stomach about killing. Not so, in fact. There are very few people like that and they are always thought of as misfits in the armed forces. MR. FREEMAN: That's right. Sir. MR. SCHEUER: Could I make one quick comment? MR. FREEMAN: Oh, please, Mike. MR. SCHEUER: I think one of the tragic things that happened because of the Iraq War is the American people have come away believing that the intelligence community, both on the operational side and on the analytic side are bumbling fools. I can tell you very clearly that from within the office that is charged with attacking terrorism at CIA, there is a universal belief that Iraq would basically undo most of what we have done since 1996. And as far as I know, that was written and the question becomes, did it get to the president? Leaving aside the question, would it have made a difference, the question to me is there's no way of knowing whether that analytic view or operational perspective ever reached to the president because within the agency since Mr. Casey died there's been a steady retreat of taking substantive experts to talk to the president or the secretary of defense or to the secretary of state, and under Mr. Tenet, Mr. Tenet because the briefer in chief to the president. He was there every day for the first time in the history of the CIA. So much of what's gone on and the damage done to the agency and to the other analytic components of the intelligence community is unknowable because we don't know what the president was told. And in that sense I really do believe that the ability to avoid these situations was there all along and the question lies with these people, as I said, Ralph Peters called "the minor con men." What did they tell the president and what did they tell the secretary of defense, not just under this president but under the past several presidents? MR. FREEMAN: Sure. I think one can spend a lot of time, and I would argue waste a lot of time, trying to figure out why it was that we launched a war which was so widely opposed by the uniformed military, the intelligence services and the diplomatic service. And there's no question that the bureaucracies, if you will, in this case were very skeptical and by and large opposed to the course of action that our political leadership decided upon. But I think, you know, that's done. The question you raise I think is the right one: we're there. Now, how we got there is a matter for us to discuss over a drink, but how we get out is the operative issue. And how we get out with honor and how we get out without compounding some obvious errors that have been made, and how we get out in a way that helps rather than hurts the security of our country, is the operative issue. And unfortunately we just went through a presidential campaign in which there was absolutely no discussion of this key issue. So we had our moment to redefine our purposes and our course of action and neither candidate stepped up to that issue. So here we are in 2005 and we are waiting, in effect, for the debacle to become so obvious that even those who operate on the basis of hallucinatory optimism are unable to continue to do so. That is a sad situation to be in. Sir. Q: Thank you. My name is Wahid Faqeed (ph) and I'm working with VOA Afghanistan Service. But as a Middle East student my question is that in the '60s and '70s in the Middle East we have terrorists mostly aligned to the secular leftist group. In the '80s we had some Shi'a mostly concentrated in Shi'a sections in the Middle East, and now in the '90s and 2000 we've got into the majority of Sunnis. My question is are we chasing the wind or are the events chasing us? I mean, what is our analysis of this phenomena? And my other question probably is mostly directed to Michael. How does he see the Afghanistan situation? Will it improve or it will worsen as we go along? Thank you. MR. FREEMAN: Anatol, I'm going to ask you to start with this and then Mike. MR. LIEVEN: It's a fascinating phenomenon which I also observed in the former Soviet Union, that people who are basically, if you like, political - well, to put it in neutral terms, would be political figures, or you could say political entrepreneurs or opportunists who in the past would certainly have adopted the language of the left - left wing national liberation slogans and so forth - and in the '90s the adopted Muslim or Islamist ones. And in some cases they adopted this and it didn't really stick and they dropped it again and it went away, and in other cases it did stick and this identity became more and more and more important. It's a very complex process. But I think that what we definitely have to beware of is something that Zbigniew Brzezinski has warned about repeatedly, which is uniting our enemies rather than dividing them. I mean, it should be obvious to all of us, to everybody who knows the Middle East, that there are indeed many, many, many different strands in the different kinds of discontent, in the different kinds of anti-Western feeling or anti-American feeling in that part of the world. Unfortunately so much of what we've done has had the tendency to drive these things together. One can even - obviously now - see the possibility, if this administration, well, does what some of its members would like to do and really goes after Iran on the one hand and Hezbollah on the other, that you will in fact have the regrowth of Shi'a terrorism. One can see the possibility that Palestinian terrorism - Palestinian nationalist terrorism - will indeed go back to what it used to be; it will internationalize itself again. Now, that would be, oh, my god, what a triumph for us in the war against terror. I hate to have started out with one enemy after 9/11 and to have created three. What was the other question? MR. FREEMAN: I think that was the essence. MR. LIEVEN: Afghanistan. Yes, I mean, I too would say that, with Daniel Byman, that things are a bit better in Afghanistan that I myself, for example, had predicted. One thing about the present position of the Taliban in Afghanistan is I think worth noting because it's a bit complex, which is indeed that over very, very large areas of the Pashtun countryside, the Taliban is completely protected, the people there are certainly not informing on the Taliban; they're sheltering them whether for plan reasons, family reasons, to some extent religious and cultural reasons. But there is an important difference between sheltering people in your village and allowing them to use that village for attacks on American forces or on ISAF or on the Afghan government, which could well bring the B-52s down on your head. Now, it is an absolutely central part of the Pashtun culture not to surrender relatives to outside forces, particularly, God knows, infidel ones like the Americans. It's a rather different matter allowing your guests to endanger you and your family by actually carrying out active policies. And that, I think, explains this curious situation where on the one hand we're not making headway - we really are not making headway in tracking down the Taliban. It's perfectly obvious. On the other hand, the Taliban has been strikingly unsuccessful actually in proportion to their numbers in attacking us. How this will go in future, however, God alone knows. I mean, Karzai has very much been elected as somebody who can put a veneer of unity over these ethnic differences in Afghanistan. If he goes, I myself would not like to predict how that country will develop. MR. FREEMAN: Mike. MR. SCHEUER: On the first issue I would add one more strand to what Professor Lieven said about the differences of the Islamist groups, whether they're different complaints or they're different feelings about local governments. There's also so many different kinds of Islam, not only Sunni Shia'a but sects within each and tendencies within each and the syncretic nature of Islam in the Far East is an issue. And I think the one thing that - again, not to deify Osama bin Laden, but the one thing bin Laden has seen is that those cultural differences and sectarian differences are so great that it's very difficult to find a uniting force or a glue within Islam to unite all of those people, and across the spectrum what he can use is American foreign policy. And that itself was not enough. What is enough I think is the combination of American foreign policy and satellite television. So every day the Chechen mujaheddin can see what's happening in the West Bank, and the boys in Southern Thailand are having a view of what's going on in Ar Ramadi. The combination of hatred for U.S. policies and the daily televising of the immediate, on the ground repercussions of those policies is an extraordinarily effective glue for our enemy. On Afghanistan, I just have the feeling - for better or worse I've been in that vineyard for close to two decades and I have a tremendous respect for the Afghan people in the sense that they're going to do what they want to do at the end of the day. There was never a more altruistic covert action program that the U.S. program in Afghanistan, not because we wanted it to be but simply because the Afghans would never do what you told them to do no matter how much money you gave them. And if they were going to do something that you wanted done they might change their mind just so you didn't think they did it for you. My own view is that the ethn