The FRONTLINE Interviews
Azmat Khan
Investigative Journalist
Azmat Khan is an investigative journalist and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. She has reported extensively on the United States' anti-ISIS air war in Iraq and Syria.
The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE’s Gabrielle Schonder on May 2, 2021. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Global Reaction to 9/11
One of the opening scenes of this project is actually capturing a collection of bipartisan members of Congress singing on the Capitol steps on Sept.11 “God Bless America.” …I wonder if you can help us sort of describe how that scene captures where we were as a country on the afternoon of Sept. 11.
So Bush had entered office with an incredibly divided electorate, right?There had been incredible divisions over that election.And on 9/11, everything changed.You saw leaders, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle come together in a way that would really have been unexpected just a few months before.And there was anger, there was patriotism, and there was a desire to not just address what had been done, but to prevent it from ever happening again.There was a kind of expression to the American people, as lawmakers, that we will not allow this to continue.
And that went beyond just formal gestures.I think it started to elicit conversations among lawmakers about what methods and tools would be available to prevent what was now being described as terrorism or the threat of terrorism emerging from different parts of the world, how to prevent it from ever happening again.
And so it really brought together people who were unlikely bedfellows in putting together a strategy on how to address terrorism.
In President Bush's first address to the nation, he describes the moment as good versus evil.And I wonder if you can help us, in looking back, understand what that tells us about how he viewed the enemy.
That framing of good versus of evil, of terrorism and its threat to the United States, was very much about defining acts of violence that are considered unacceptable.So terrorism itself it not necessarily defined, in his eyes, as political violence; it's defined as unacceptable violence, the kind of violence that we shouldn't tolerate.We shouldn't question why it's happening or its origins, but should just be rejected at face value.And one strategy or one way of doing that is to define it as good versus evil.
So if you were trying to build support for a war, if you were trying to get the American public to act, tapping into that idea of good versus evil and invoking this idea of terrorism and unacceptable violence, something that requires not just punishment but prevention from it ever happening again, you do need to tap in to these kind of binaries, these forces of good versus evil, in order to get people on board.
And 9/11 in many ways, with the kind of destruction that was unprecedented, that hit on the American homeland, was a moment in which you could really tap into the idea of good versus evil and build support not just for a war, but for other kinds of actions that might lead to more of a surveillance state.
After the attack, the international community rallies behind the U.S., and I wonder if you can help us understand America's place in the world order.
I think for many states, it was a warning that if this could happen to the United States, what else could happen to these other states abroad; that if one of the most powerful countries in the world—arguably the most powerful country—could be affected by an act of violence in this way, I think it really rallied states not just to the United States' side, but also in terms of thinking about their own strategy and wanting there not to be non-state actors attacking their homelands.It made sense for many of these other countries to rally with the United States, even though they may not have necessarily had that kind of relationship before.And it also broadened countries that, for example, could have either been classified into that good-versus-evil dynamic.
So Pakistan, for example, is a country that, you know, it had a chance to either be classified as an ally and partner or as an enemy and a bad.And so there were states that were immediately rushing to the American side and states that had a sort of decision to make in how they would be classified.
The Mission in Afghanistan
The decision to go into Afghanistan less than a month after the attack is described by the Bush administration as Operation Enduring Freedom, and I wonder if you can help us unpack the message that the U.S. was sending about democratic values.
So prior to 9/11, the United States had been concerned about the Taliban's rise in Afghanistan, but it wasn't until these attacks that they really started to make these overt arguments about freedom with respect to the Taliban.
The Taliban had made an offer to the United States to provide Osama bin Laden to a third-party country—for example, Qatar, some kind of a Muslim nation—rather than turning him over to the United States, and that was something the U.S. rejected.And so I think it's important to note that going to war was not necessarily the only option on the table in terms of trying to get Osama bin Laden.There were ways, there were offers that were made that were turned down.
And I think in many ways, the reason why is that the United States did want to display a show of force.It wanted to be able to respond to this not just in the kind of diplomatic moves or measures; it wanted to be able to strike a blow to Al Qaeda and also to invoke ideas of freedom in order to build support for that.
And so one of the most fascinating things about this time period is that many women's rights activists and many people who worked in the human rights sphere who may not have ordinarily advocated for military intervention were suddenly finding themselves arguing for this war.One of the most fascinating addresses was actually by Laura Bush, the first lady of the United States, who came forward to describe what the Taliban had done to girls in Afghanistan.And she really—she took over one of the president's fireside chats to make this argument.And there were a number of women's organizations that made this argument about freedom.
And so the actual—the sort of perception of this war wasn't just that this is something that these military generals want.The perception of it was that this was a quest for good; that human rights—some human rights organizations, some women's rights organizations were framing it around freedom, and it didn't have the sort of traditional persona that a lot of American wars have had in the past.It really invoked what some have called this “Responsibility to Protect” even though the United States was not willing to move on the Taliban before 9/11.
After 9/11, with respect to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, suddenly there was a lot of support for military involvement, even from unlikely corners.
I want to ask you actually about, we spoke to Ambassador [Adela] Raz, the Afghan representative to the U.N. last week, a woman who's now representing Afghanistan, and she describes this period in an interesting way.This was a period of hope, that this was looking to the U.S. and this decision and this announcement and this message as a positive.Can you give us a little bit of a perspective?
So I'm just thinking about how it was framed early on.I think there were concerns early on that the United States would be nation building in Afghanistan, and that was something President Bush did address in some of his speeches, to say that this wouldn't be a goal necessarily.But there was a lot of pressure.There were many people who over time and with the Taliban's rise, particularly women's groups in Afghanistan, that had been sidelined.Girls in urban centers had to go to schools underground or weren't allowed to go to school at all.And so there was in some corners a welcoming of this intervention because it might provide new opportunities and abilities that weren't available, not just to women, but to certain minorities in the country as well, whether they be a Hazara minority or other groups that had found themselves pushed out, not just of government, but out of territory.
And the number of Afghans who had gone to Pakistan, who suddenly in that moment after 9/11 had been living as refugees and suddenly saw this opportunity to return to their homeland with some of the comforts that they had not been allowed for years, was incredibly promising.And they were really holding out hope, and it was something that the United States, as it started to build its vision and strategy for Afghanistan, did more than just allocate money.They actually invested in building schools and building health care clinics and doing this on a rapid scale so that by the time they held their first elections and President [Hamid] Karzai was running for president, that there would be metrics to show: "Look at what the United States has done in investing not just in this country but in its future, in its children, in its schools, in its health care."And there were a lot of grand promises that were made in that time, promises that I don't think were kept.
Looking back with the information we have now, when you think about these periods, what's sort of the glaring—what were we underestimating about this period?
So the U.S. poured billions of dollars into a country that was not equipped to take all of that money and investment in at the time in an effort to show some of these metrics, to show that the United States was winning this war.So they built schools across the country.They built clinics.They built all different kinds of infrastructure, including a police force, local councils.They built this infrastructure that was intended to nation-build.
And in reality, what wound up happening is that contractors siphoned off money at every step of that process; that there was an incredible amount of investing in people who were warlords, people who sought to use that investment of money as a means to enlarge their own armies, as a means to seize land, as a means to take over territory.And that money, in many ways, some would argue, wound up doing more harm than good.It created a class of people who had wealth and money and power at the expense of others, so it fomented tribal rivalries in many places.It pitted people against one another in the bid for contracts.
And when you actually go and you look, you know, 10, 14, 18 years on, at some of the things that were built and what they're like today, you can—you'll find that a lot of them, that a lot of these investments were really short-term investments.So, for example, I did a ground sample of 50 U.S.-funded schools in seven different battlefields across Afghanistan and found that about 10% of them were either never built or no longer existed, and that the overwhelming majority of them were now falling apart.
So despite these massive amounts of money that went into building, for example, these schools and educating these girls, [it] often wound up in the hands of corrupt warlords and contractors who took that money and the building that was built was a small fraction of what it was intended to be.And girls were—many of these schools didn't have any girls attending.
And so when you look at the promises—this is just one example, but if you look at the promises, you look at the schools, you look at the health care clinics, you might have seen some marginal increases, for example, with respect to maternal mortality.And in urban centers, we've seen incredible growth for women to have different job opportunities.But in many of the areas that the United States sought to reach most, different kinds of battlefield provinces where people—where the war was ongoing and were the Taliban had already captured hearts and minds, what you see today is that there are lots of women who still have not had those opportunities and, frankly, many women who just want to live in a world without war.
So the story of what went wrong when it comes to nation building and reconstruction isn't just a story of overhyping in Washington; it's a story of what happens when noble intentions go astray, when the United States tries to enter a society it does not understand.
… And what happens when the military tries to use humanitarian support for military goals and links these things that in the view of many aid workers and people who work in the humanitarian field believe shouldn't be linked, this idea that they are doing a lot of these different kinds of reconstruction efforts, these different kinds of nation building tools in an effort to try to win support for their war.
Failure to Capture Osama bin Laden
Let me go to Tora Bora for a moment, because we're sort of in this period right now of American strategy, right, and intention and ambition.But at Tora Bora, bin Laden flees to Pakistan and begins sending out videos one by one once he gets there.And it's clear our enemy has a strategy.But can you help us understand sort of America's at that point and whether we're already moving on, in fact, from Afghanistan.
So when bin Laden has fled from Tora Bora and American troops are not sure where he's gone—they believe that he's made his way into Pakistan; maybe the tribal areas is the perception—the focus and attention from the U.S. begins to shift.And that's when you start to see a look towards Iraq.And maybe that had been building behind the scenes for a while, maybe this was now the opportunity to raise it more publicly, but you start to see this widening of this war.And it was almost built into the structure.The so-called global war on terrorism always had within its focus this transnational approach that looked at what was deemed a threat from Islamic extremists, as they were called, in different countries.
And so you started to see the shift towards Iraq specifically.And in many ways, there could have been other opportunities to look at other countries—for example, Saudi Arabia, which the United States had made itself an ally, but actually most of the hijackers came from Saudi Arabia.And so you could have made an argument or the United States could have shifted its focus towards some of these other countries, and it chose one that was quite unlikely.The Bush administration chose Iraq as its sort of next place of approach to fight what was being framed as the global war on terror.And to many, it wasn't just an overreach; it was the manipulation of that public sentiment as a means to build support for a war.
Guantanamo
Let me ask you for a moment about Guantanamo and what to do with enemy combatants.When the images are broadcast globally, can you give me a sense of the impact in the region?
Images, as they started to come out from Guantanamo, really captured global attention, and it brought what many believed to be American values for what America claimed as its values in conflict with the images that people were seeing, right?They were seeing the dehumanizing of a population rather than these values of freedom.People, especially in many of the countries where these actions were taking place, saw this as—especially because people were being detained in Iraq, in Afghanistan, en masse, and then being shipped off to Guantanamo, it very quickly became a rallying cry for many.It wasn't just about recruiting people into political violence, which it did do.It affected much more broadly even people who otherwise would have been—who perhaps would have had some support for the United States or some understanding after 9/11.It really put the United States in a position that was incredibly difficult.
And this wasn't just conflict of values for the rest of the world.I think many Americans—some Americans saw it that way as well.This seems to be some kind of a conflict between how Americans think about freedom and what was happening at Guantanamo.And as stories started to come out about what landed people in that prison and why they were there and people who eventually had to be released because they simply didn't have evidence or the charges that they were brought in on were really minimal to begin with, the number of innocent people who were put in Guantanamo, and as those stories trickled out, it really started to become an area to focus American dissatisfaction and global dissatisfaction with the wars on terror.
I think about the methods that [Vice President Dick] Cheney and others are utilizing around this time period to fight the war.This is torture; this is the black sites.Looking back, what does it also say that we're willing to fight this war in this way?
You hear this phrase, "The gloves are off," and I think that was the mantra that permeated throughout the government in terms of thinking about how to prevent another 9/11.And as a part of that, the United States, especially the CIA, started to deploy tactics.Certain parts of the military started to deploy tactics that used these bizarre terms, “enhanced interrogation techniques,” terms—anything but torture.But in reality, when faced with what that looked like, what that was—waterboarding, the kinds of things that anyone else would readily call torture—you started to see a similar sort of fundamental shift, this conflict between what the perception of American values were.It actually revealed that many of those American values were a gross misrepresentation.
And in many ways, it showed the United States was entirely fraudulent in its claims for freedom and liberty—those images, those stories, the reality of these black sites, people who were disappearing, not just into Guantanamo but into rendition, where they were now being given to these other countries who abused with impunity and were just off the books.You know, we didn't know where these people were; we knew very little about what was being done to them.
But when stories would start to come to light, either from people who survived that torture, or, in many cases actually, from leaks and individuals who helped expose those black sites, and reporters who wrote the stories, you really saw in a way what kind of fraud those values of freedom and liberty and much of that war and what was being espoused, how much of a fraud it really was.
Invading Iraq
We talked about Iraq and the turn to Iraq, but can you help us understand the expansion of the word of the “axis of evil” and the carrying out of the freedom agenda and how that message was received by Iraqis?
So Iraq is complicated because there had been, in the '90s, a movement in which people across Iraq were encouraged by the previous Bush administration to protest.And large swaths of the country, especially the Shia heartland of Iraq—Karbala, Najaf, the south near Basra—people, the Shia groups and also a lot of Kurdish groups, who had been—both of whom had been incredibly marginalized under Saddam's government, welcomed this.There were certain groups that were ready for that kind of an intervention.
But across broad swaths of the Iraqi heartland, the Sunni heartland, you saw incredible resistance to this.I think that overwhelmingly, there was a fear of what would happen if the United States invaded, although many people were ready for an end to the Saddam regime.You know, this is a dictator who had terrorized many of his people for decades.Although many people were ready to see him go, I think there was still, even among those populations, even among the populations that were welcoming of his departure, a great deal of trepidation and fear of what would happen when the U.S. arrived.
This is a country that has been invaded in the past, that has had the British and others come and mark up its territory and draw its boundaries, and there is a serious fear of that kind of imperial hubris that many people in Iraq had, this fear of what would happen, and not just to Sunnis, but even to some of the other groups who, you know, if, for example, Iran, what has been a, you know, an—with the Bush administration, Iran was really perceived as a threat in many ways.And some of the groups that stood to benefit in Iraq were Shia groups that might be backed by Iran.And there was this question of what would happen if—that it could lead to a potential proxy war.And that was, you know, I think that was on also many Iraqis' minds as well.
Let me ask you about—this is very random, but the U.N. speech that Colin Powell gives, if you've ever talked to Iraqis about that moment.I'm just curious.
So for so many Iraqis, these moments blend together, and that was one—so they—to be honest with you, if I were to tell you what Iraqis tell me the most about the United States, it's not a speech or a vision or something that one of our presidents said, although they can reference those as well.
… What Iraqis bring up the most with me are often these checkpoint deaths in which U.S. soldiers were there in Iraq and manning.They constructed these security checkpoints all across the country, and suddenly, people who were used to driving on their roads were not familiar with what was essentially this checkpoint that grew overnight in which soldiers would have signs up that said, "Slow down, stop for this checkpoint."People didn't know to stop and would be shot as they approached.I feel like almost every Iraqi family I've talked to had some extended relative who died in a checkpoint death, where U.S. soldiers were manning these checkpoints, and a family approached, and they were killed.And the numbers are pretty startling.
But these checkpoint deaths really riled the population, and they were not surfacing in U.S. media because they weren't necessarily always captured until I think it was 2005 when this photographer, Chris Hondros, was in Tal Afar, Iraq, and was there as the U.S. shot at a car that was approaching—as soldiers shot at a car that was approaching.And it stopped, and as people started to tumble out of this car, it was, you know, just dozens of people that were—more than a dozen people that came out of this car, and one of them was this little girl who was just a few years old.She was maybe 5, I think, 5 or 7, and she just lost her parents, and she's covered in their blood, and she's just crying.
And this photographer takes photos of this family and the aftermath.
And it became one of the most resounding images, one of the most iconic images of the Iraq War and I think represents what so many Iraqis have experienced or tell me about all of the time, which is, you know, these checkpoint deaths were—just imagine—imagine it this way: Imagine if all of a sudden, overnight, another country comes into your city here in the United States, enacts new barriers so when you're driving to work or when you're driving to go see a relative, you have to stop maybe five different—five or six times on the way, on this normal route you took.And you don't know that you're supposed to stop and be checked.You don't realize, you know, as you're going, especially if you're traveling a long distance, you don't realize that it is your job now when you see men with guns to stop and open yourself up to questions and interrogations and the possibility of being picked up.And instead you might speed on by.And the fact that you're not stopping makes the use of lethal force, in the eyes of the American military, acceptable.To shoot to kill everyone in your car is now on the table.What would you think if that happened in your country overnight?And that happened to a lot of Iraqis. …
America’s Global Reputation
Help us summarize these periods that we were just talking about and looking back sort of what was lost in terms of American competency, trust, in officials, trust in intelligence during this period.
You mean by—like by the American public?
Let's segment it maybe.American public, but then also I'd love to know sort of the ambitions we talked about early and the message we were sending to the world and then eight years later the realities of that.I think I'm more interested in that, to be honest.
So the American public's global reputation had crashed.Other countries now saw it for what was essentially a fraud in many ways, as—it wasn't just that they were killing lots of civilians or that many people were dying and lots of money was going to corrupt actors.It was that they were also losing these wars.So that the United States could go into some of these countries, detain so many people, kill so many people and still be losing a war I think really took away from some of that credibility or some of the admiration that the United States had abroad.
But at home, for Americans, I think it was also doubly embarrassing, right?This was also a deterioration of values that they felt strongly about, that many Americans believed that their country espoused.And to see people in orange jumpsuits being degraded before American soldiers or to hear stories about people who were being killed or their body parts cut up or, you know, in some cases, that Americans had dug bullets out of civilians in an effort to cover up that they had killed them, you know, all of this was really deteriorating to American morale.
And then on top of that, you have Americans coming home in body bags.And, you know, as these troops were going to Iraq, these wars were being lost or they looked like they were losing these wars, suddenly Americans started to ask, why are we here, and is it worth it?Is it worth the costs, not just in terms of taxpayer dollars, any amount of money—is it worth the cost in terms of human lives and in terms of values?And I think for many Americans, by 2008 they had had enough.You know, that—even Republicans during the end of the Bush era really were starting to push for these costly ground wars, these wars of nation building, these wars that weren't doing so well, were a mistake.
There had been some success in Iraq with the surge and an effort to retake parts of Anbar and these—parts of the Sunni heartland.And there had been success with that.But even then, at what cost?Many people were thinking, it's time that we bring these people back, we return home, and we move on from what essentially is distracting us from all of the other things that we have to do.This has taken up so much space.So much oxygen was taken up by these wars, and Americans were fed up.Global news, American news had been dominated by these wars for many years.And the pictures were grisly; they weren't uplifting, they didn't show success.They showed even when there were successes, [they were] successes that came at incredible costs.And I think for many Americans by that point, irrespective of political affiliation, among many Americans there was a desire for change.
And so now I bring you to the change candidate, which is President Barack Obama, who's awarded the Nobel Prize before, somebody said, he even visited the Situation Room.… What do you think he had learned from Bush's legacy?
I think it taught President Obama a lot of caution—caution before entering a war.And you saw that with respect to the “red line” violation with Syria.It brought a great deal of deliberation not to move into anything with a great deal of haste, and so a major lesson was caution and thought and a deliberative process.And that was largely internal.Very rarely was there public debate or public transparency about some of these mechanisms.And he may have also learned that from the Bush administration; he saw that that very public signaling of what the United States intended to do allowed it to become something that was on the table for debate.And President Obama, his administration sought more secretive options for doing things so as not to necessarily have to incur that debate.
I think he also learned that detention, that holding prisoners was incredibly politically costly, that having the U.S. detention and interrogation programs was probably the biggest blow to the U.S. reputation domestically and abroad that the United States had seen in a very long time.And he knew that had to end at least by U.S. hands, and he needed to figure out some kind of a means of ensuring the means to interrogate or get intelligence from detainees without necessarily having the United States running these very large prisoner populations that it had very little knowledge or control over or awareness of what was really happening within them.
Let me ask you again about sort of the loss of life and the increasing death toll in Afghanistan and Iraq around this period.What does it tell you that those lives seem not to be a part of the conversation here at home?
Do you mean American lives or foreign?
Foreign.
Traditionally, the deaths of foreign civilians have not been incredibly important to most of the American public when we're talking about U.S. wars, unless they're also accompanied by U.S. service member deaths, and suddenly that counting and “For what?” and that “Is it worth it?” question really starts to be integrated into the conversation.
But most of the costs, the political costs that President Obama was seeing at this time, they came from the impacts of these mass detention programs and of American soldiers on the ground.And the lives of Afghans or Iraqis I think were secondary to many Americans, because their goal was either to win the war, to bring troops home, and people were willing to incur that cost if it meant that this war might be won.So the deaths of civilians, I think, became a factor that many Americans didn't—it was never an issue.
For example, if you go back and you look at the campaign trails at that time, you know, at that election, people might have brought up Iraqi deaths or Afghan deaths, but it was nowhere near the kind of criticism that was raised from the violation of American reputation, the blow to America's reputation.I think that more Americans saw the harm in that blow through, for example, detention programs than they actually did the body counts of Iraqis.And there were people counting or attempting to try to count how many Iraqis were dying.There were websites.You know, there was certainly an anti-war movement at the time.But once you started to bring troops home, to some extent, or once you started to shift to other kinds of war that were less obvious or overt, that public sentiment in which maybe people cared about the deaths of Iraqis or Afghans started to go down.
Obama’s Use of Drones
Let me ask you about the way Obama embraces airstrikes and drones and what these programs reveal about this approach to war.
In many ways, the shift to aerial bombing, which includes drone strikes, but that shift to reducing the number of troops to the minimal amount possible and instead relying on airpower, which is essentially military might, was a very clever strategy to frame this as the war of someone else.So in Afghanistan, this no longer became "our war" necessarily; it became "We're supporting our Afghan partners in their war.And we're providing them money and aid.We're providing them training.And we're providing them the needs to do—to actually run these detention centers, to run these prisons.But they're in the lead.”This is what was often—how this was often described.Same with Iraq, right?We're providing assistance, support, money, training, all of these kinds of support with airpower as well to back them up, but this would be led by Iraqis.
And so that became the shift for him, which is, "I'm going to take out the political costs.I'm going to—the United States is no longer going to run these prisons; our foreign partners are.But in some cases where maybe there's something who's high on our list, we're not going to arrest them; we're going to kill them in an airstrike.”And suddenly, the controversy that accompanied an arrest and detention and putting them in Guantanamo and trying to prosecute them and being unable to prosecute them no longer mattered because you could put them on a kill list, and no member of the American public—very few members of the American public would be riled up by that.Suddenly, it was taking out those political costs while also getting the chance to frame this as the war of someone else.So it takes away also that perception of this imperial hubris by essentially framing this as the "war of that other country."“It's not our war; we're just supporting them.We're providing air support, we're providing training, but it's their war,” which also diminishes, you know, what has been a major critique of the war on terror, which is that this is imperialism at its peak.
… I wonder if you can help us understand what Obama is telling himself that he's doing during this time period.We talked about the caution of the early days, but around this period, now into the administration, what do you believe he was doing?
Obama was getting different messages.So his military generals wanted more troops on the ground in Afghanistan.They wanted to replicate the surge strategy in Iraq.And yet he himself wanted to prioritize what he saw as his domestic agenda, his health care package, and he knew in some ways that these costly wars and the continuation of them, of American involvement and of nation building, would distract him and his abilities to really perform in these other areas that he wanted to.But rather than taking, you know, one extreme or the other, he kind of took this middle ground or what appears like a middle ground, which was to provide a certain number of American troops that allowed these wars to continue, not the numbers that his generals were asking for, but not so few that these wars would end and every American could come home.
It was the continuation of the war on terror with the kind of guise of less American involvement in them.So that guise meant making it look like this was the war of these Afghan partners or these Iraqi partners.And I think in his mind, it was an effort to not get embroiled in entirely leaving and having the resurgence of these groups and being blamed for it, but not also committing to vast numbers of troops that would result in his receiving the same kind of backlash that Bush did.
And so instead, it was this middle ground that was an attempt to continue these wars without as many of the political costs as possible, as well as an effort to try to focus on some of the other parts of his agenda that he wanted to.And there's some who would argue that that was, you know, an entirely ineffective approach.
… During the Obama years, the [Edward] Snowden revelations occur, and I wonder if you can help us understand the fallout of these revelations.
I think one of the most enduring parts of the Snowden fallout was it showed that the Obama administration had sought to do something and had kept it from the American public, something that should have been a matter of debate, something that the American public should have been informed about and had the opportunity to comment on and debate.And so it revealed that the administration had been secretive, had kept things from the public.And this president who styles himself as somebody who is very much about deliberation and thoughtfulness and public debate suddenly came off as somebody who perhaps was not different than, for example, when thinking of the Bush wiretapping scandal or some of these previous instances in which there were vast programs that were conducted in secret and kept from the American public, suddenly it seemed as though Obama was no different.
The Rise of ISIS
He makes the decision to withdraw troops from Iraq and declare victory.The decision doesn't conform to the reality of the situation, and I sort of wonder if you can help us understand what he's doing here, and is this his "Mission Accomplished" moment.
So there is a perception of this that I often hear that I personally don't agree with, which is that the Americans left with the job unfinished, and now that's why Al Qaeda or what became ISIS came to power.And I think it's more complicated than that.But I know that there was also similarly at the time, there was this mantra that the United States had spent so much time during the Bush administration and into part of the Obama administration on Iraq at the expense of the place where the real war was, which was Afghanistan.And so he had pressure to kind of end this war.
And there are some who say he did it too quickly and that that led to the rise of ISIS.But in many ways, it's still applying this idea of military might as a means to fight terrorism, or a means to end these conflicts, this idea he was still relying on military might to end these conflicts.And pulling troops is one thing, but actually being focused on some of the issues that give rise to conflict in the first—so keeping Iraqis from feeling alienated from their government was one of many reasons, but a very important reason for why ISIS was able to take power.It wasn't whether or not American troops were in the country or not.I think it had a lot more to do with other complex factors, historically factors like the fact that there were very—there was very little political opposition that had had a chance to grow in the country, except for certain Islamist groups; the fact that the U.S. occupation had resulted in many people being detained en masse and people radicalizing in prisons; the fact that many Iraqis who felt shut out from Nouri al Maliki's government, especially many Iraqi Sunnis in Anbar and other parts of Iraq, Mosul, places where people felt they weren't being represented.All of these are things that the United States could have been involved in without necessarily invoking military might or having a great number of troops on the ground.
So I think that the decision about his bringing troops home is often used to describe this as an unfinished war, but the problem is he's even framing it around war in the first place and not thinking through the factors and circumstances that gave rise to ISIS and focusing on those.
And the United States, even during the Obama administration, was very active in empowering some group of Iraqis over others.In many of these towns, they worked with—in many cities and provinces across Iraq, the Americans worked with certain groups.They hired them as police forces, like entire tribes essentially in some places, and they pitted people against one another.In many places, Shias were empowered into government forces, or particular tribes were at the expense of others, and so it created this climate that endured, even after the Americans left, in which there were broad swaths of Iraqis who felt like they had been left by their government, disenfranchised, and were ignored.
One of the most heated moments, the most fascinating moments was a crackdown in 2013.… So in 2013, there were a group of people in a city called Hawija, where people were protesting the Iraqi government and Nouri al-Maliki's actions, and the government responding—responded by cracking down incredibly hard on them.And there's really hard-to-watch footage of this in which you can see the aftermath, after the Iraqi forces had shot at, I think from helicopters, at these people protesting.And you see whoever is filming this walk through the carnage on the ground, and you see people lying.And one of them, I remember, he was in a wheelchair, and he was incredibly maimed, and he speaks to the camera and tries to say something.
But you have these people that were cracked down upon for mere protest, and that footage spreads across Iraq.It starts to rile people up.I think that man in a wheelchair is—was also just heartrending for many Iraqis to watch, that these people who'd been protesting were met with that kind of resistance, and then to watch somebody walk by him without offering any assistance: "This is what our government is doing for us."And that's when you started to see those protests take place in other parts of Iraq, in Ramadi, in Fallujah, that eventually ISIS exploited.
So to measure this as though American troops on the ground would or would not have prevented ISIS's rise is, I think, misleading.I think the real question is of, did America ever think through the complicated factors that read—that led to the rise of groups that eventually became ISIS, but to groups like Al Qaeda in Iraq.If they had looked at some of those factors and focused on those, I think that would have been the approach through which you can decide whether a mission is accomplished or not when you're not necessarily framing it as military might or as a military war.
The Election of Donald Trump
… Let me take you to the 2016 campaign and the 15th anniversary of 9/11, which is when Candidate Trump visits the World Trade Center.It's his first public appearance related to the attack.… I'm curious, though, about the language he uses about 9/11 to sort of—the language of the war on terror that he's also borrowing, how he uses that politically in his speeches.
The Trump language that I remember really sticking out to me, and I heard about in Iraq and elsewhere, was, I think it was January 2017, and he's just entered office, and he visits the CIA, and he says to them, you know, before—in front of a wall.I think it was in front of a wall of the CIA's fallen.He starts to talk about Iraq, and he says, "Maybe we should have taken their oil."And his framing of this leaned into every stereotype that these, the so-called war on terror was for oil, this idea that it was about a pillaging of resources.All of that, he played into all that in a way that I remember seeing others abroad talking about, not just Americans.I mean, it was offensive to members of the CIA who were offended that, in front of this wall of fallen, he was invoking this very politicized concept.It was offensive to many Americans who, you know, wanted that chapter of America's involvement in the world of Iraq to be over.
And then abroad, it confirmed what so many people believed, that was behind, you know, what so many Iraqis and others see as a pillaging of their country, as some kind of an effort—whether, you know, whether or not that was truly the intention, I think the intentions are much more diverse than that, but that was the perception; that was the takeaway.
And I think in many ways, it can be hard with Trump to read between what's rhetoric to get people riled up and what is actually policy.But that was something that I think, you know, he has—he leans into those ideas, into the most extreme rhetoric that he can use about 9/11, about Muslims, about terrorism that he can us to rile up his base.He has done that in so many instances.
And you know, 9/11 and the World Trade Center, it's unsurprising that that would be something he would invoke, is even now.When we talk about refugees in the United States or we talk about different points of political division, there's a synergy of certain ideas about 9/11 and patriotism in America and some of these other values.They may not—now, they may not be used necessarily to talk about global war, but they're talking about domestic war of some kind.… He was able to very expertly manipulate that for more than just a global agenda.He's been able to use it to rile up people with respect to his domestic agenda.
… Early on, [Secretary of Defense James] Mattis briefs the president around the same time period, early in the administration, at the Pentagon in “The Tank” and sort of gives the president a bit of a history lesson on the war on terror and on American allies and the value of keeping troops overseas.In response to that sort of lecture, Trump says, "We've spent over a trillion dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan; we need to get out of there.We're paying too much money and getting nothing in return, and now we have to rebuild Mosul before we can leave."I wonder if you can help us understand the president's view of America's role in the world and how that contrasts to his predecessors.
So Trump did articulate, even on the campaign trail, a desire to end some of America's long wars.And there was a contingency of Republicans, a large contingent of Republicans, who agreed with him, the Ann Coulter types who also supported this idea.Steve Bannon, a key architect of the Trump administration, also took this perspective.And for a while, I was actually digging into what the likelihood of the Afghan War ending was, and it was really fascinating the things I learned about what Steve Bannon was doing to try to end the war in Afghanistan.
This was one of those things that felt—that seems less like rhetoric, that Trump really seemed to desire to want to end some of these costly American wars.And I think the best example or the strongest evidence I saw of that was when he pulled troops out of parts of Syria and allowed Turkey to come in, resulting in a lot of Kurdish forces moving.
And the reason why that showed that was because there seemed to be very little upside to doing that, to be honest, in terms of American objectives in the region.You know, these troops were not dying.There weren't, you know, lots of attacks on these troops.They were in an area of Syria that essentially kept Turkey and Syrian Democratic Forces from going to battle.So to pull them out means you actually really have to be committed to the vision or idea that Americans shouldn't be there…So it really seems likely in so many ways that Trump genuinely wanted to end American involvement, on the ground at least, in costly wars.He had no problems with continuing to use airpower, you know, airpower deployed from Qatar, from Kuwait, from other parts of the world where Americans had bases, the UAE, places where Americans are parked and are able to engage in military combat through the air.He was very comfortable using that, but I think that in terms of U.S. troops on the ground, he had a commitment to trying to return them that was different from his predecessors.
I know many people who were pushing for peace and end to the war in Afghanistan who were caught so off guard by the fact that their biggest champions were in the Trump White House.I remember that it was surprising to many of these people who were pushing for peace in Afghanistan, and that's because you might not see it looking at some of Trump's rhetoric about war or the ways in which he's talked about carpet bombing or the way he's talked about "maybe we should have taken their oil."You wouldn't necessarily know it from that, but yes, he was different from his predecessors in that he frequently, when faced with his military advisers asking him for larger numbers of troops, either disagreed or provided the smallest possible number in order not to have a conflict with him and his military generals, which had happened to him on a number of occasions.
So this was something that he was willing to incur political costs for.And you saw those costs with respect to moving U.S. troops out of northeast Syria.
What was his critique of the way that Bush and Obama had handled the war on terror?
I actually think his critique came up in that CIA visit, which is, what did they even get out of it?Was it worth it?And Trump is the kind of person who constantly talks about negotiation and trades and deals, making a good deal, and I think that he saw those wars as not a good deal.What did America get in exchange for these wars?Is the world safer?I don't—I don't think he saw it necessarily as safer with respect to American lives.He calculated or saw that these deaths were incredibly unpopular.Deaths of U.S. service members were incredibly unpopular, and maybe, if the United States had gotten oil or something strategic from it, maybe this would have seemed more palatable to someone like Donald Trump, based on some of the remarks that he's made.
… We've now talked about three presidents.I'm wondering, as we look back at each of them and their handling of the response to 9/11, what did they all sort of underestimate about the wars and our enemies?What was sort of the summary of, in many ways, how are they learning from their predecessors' mistakes and the legacies that they inherit?
I think Trump learned from his predecessors that American wars in the Middle East, in South Asia, had not yielded the kinds of results that had been promised.So he had the added benefit of time, right, of looking back now, that it's been this many years since the United States invaded Afghanistan, and we're still at war there, and it looks like we're losing.So he had the ability to look back and see now that it seems as though military might is not necessarily going to win this war.
At one point, he did make a comment in which he talked about Afghanistan.He said, "Listen, we could win it tomorrow if we bombed the entire country, but I'm choosing not to do that."And so I think he saw it as, you know, not worth it for what he truly wanted.And he had other actors that he was more concerned with—Iran, for example—that I think maybe he would have been more willing to engage with a conflict or on a conflict with respect to Iran, more likely to do these proxy wars in which the United States supports some of Iran's foes in conflicts that are happening in countries around the world, whether that's—you know, Yemen is one example.But he had the benefit of hindsight and realizing whether or not a war was worth it, and came to the conclusion that many of these American wars abroad had not been worth it in terms of something tangible for the United States.
Twenty Years Later
Bush's war, Obama's war, Trump's war: There's a steady beat of a loss of American leadership and trust and image of competence and moral authority lost over these 20 years we've been discussing.I wonder if you can sort of help us understand how we got here after those early days of 9/11 that we began this conversation speaking about.
… I think it says something about American imperialism that a war can continue for so long and the United States doesn't have what it not only originally intended to, but something that is—you know, the United States would get down on its knees now for some of the deals that would have been offered in the early years of these wars, things that were on the table, and that that is so far gone that the options that the U.S. is looking at are really less, far less desirable than things that would have been possible for it to have achieved in the past.
And so even just the outcomes of these wars or the potential results of these wars are—they make you go back to question the original "Why are we at war?What is our goal here?"And when you start to apply those questions to these current conflicts, you're left really wondering what the strategy and objective was in the first place.Was it to get bin Laden?Because we got him more than a decade ago.Was it to depose the Taliban and make sure they would never come back to power?Was it to ensure that Iraq is led by a stable government?When you start to look at these questions of what the intentions are, and when you start to think about whether or not the U.S. should even be playing this role in the world, I think that the so-called global war on terror is—should serve as some kind of caution for those considering that America should be playing an active role in the world and doing so through military might, because what we've seen is, in all of these wars, that military might didn't just not end up giving the results that America desired, but in many cases served to self-perpetuate some of the conflicts that the United States was trying to fight; that in some places it served to solidify support for some of the actors the U.S. was fighting.And it varies across different war zones; I don't want to conflate them.But I think the cautionary tale here is whether or not military might can really yield an end to conflict in the way the United States has sought for it to do.
… So on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the week that this is going to air, there has now been this announcement that we are leaving the region, and I wonder if this is in many ways President Biden's attempt to move on from the 9/11 period and whether he can escape that.I wonder if you can help us to understand this.
So while U.S. troops might be leaving Afghanistan, there are still going to be American troops in Qatar, in Kuwait, in other airbases across the world who will be involved in air support, in airstrikes in some of these places that we've been at war.Military generals have said that they don't want to give up the power of air support air war, the ability to bomb some of these countries, even if U.S. troops are leaving them.
Now, if the United States wants to conduct a bombing in Afghanistan, it may not be as fast as it would be maybe in some cases if American troops were on the ground, but there is still that possibility and authority to do so if needed.Military generals have asked for that.
Now, one thing that rarely also gets talked about are American contractors, whether they're citizens of the country of Afghanistan or whether they're third-country nationals.But contractors could also play a large role.From the last time I looked at numbers, there were more people contracted by Americans in Afghanistan than there were U.S. troops in Afghanistan.In fact, it was almost double.
So when we think about these wars ending, those wars ending are often framed as the presence of U.S. troops, but that's not necessarily what makes a war.The presence of U.S. troops in that country isn't required to continue a war there.You can continue it via air and not have troops on the ground.So the idea that these are ending is hard for me to believe—is truly, truly ending.It's ending maybe for some U.S. service members, but it's not going to end in terms of the apparatus that the United States has constructed to conduct these wars.
And it's also not going to end for people in these countries.So in Afghanistan, if the Taliban, which it seems poised to do, is able to take power in some parts of these countries, would the United States deploy airpower to try to defeat them?Would they just let that takeover happen?These are questions that I think when that opportunity presents itself, we're likely to see that the United—these wars are not actually ending.
So war is so much more than just combat troops.It's Special Operations forces and airpower, and oftentimes people who don't need to be on the ground in the country for that war to continue.The United States dropped more bombs in Afghanistan in 2019 than in any year of that war until then, even though it had one of the smallest troop levels that year than it had in that entire war.1So you can continue a war at record pace without necessarily having that many Americans there.
So I'm doubtful that removing American troops from the country truly means ending the war there.
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