 Welcome to the New America Foundation. I'm Peter Bergen, the Director of National Security Studies here. It's really a great pleasure to welcome you and also our two guests, Eric Schmidt and Tom Schenker of The New York Times. Whenever I read a New York Times piece that says Eric Schmidt and Tom Schenker, I know it's going to be great. And Eric and Tom has written this really excellent book, Counter-Strike, which we're here to discuss today. Eric has shared in two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The team, and Tom has been covering the Pentagon for many years. Prior to that, he was the foreign editor at the Chicago Tribune, and he was the Tribune's senior European correspondent covering the Bosnian War. So the way that we had discussed doing today's event was I would essentially kind of interview Eric and Tom a little bit about the themes of the book for about half an hour and then throw it open to your questions. So starting at the beginning, Eric and Tom, one of the kind of, I guess, unexpected things in the book for me was this discussion in the Pentagon about thinking about ways to deter terrorists, which the conventional wisdom of being is that terrorists don't hold a territory, they don't have a return address, essentially you can't really, and also they believe they're doing God's will, at least in the case of Al Qaeda, and therefore you cannot deter them. But I think you discovered something different. What we did, Peter, and thank you very much, by the way, for hosting this, and thank you all for coming. There was, Peter summed it up pretty well right after 9-11, and for a couple of years afterward, there was pretty much a belief that it was not possible to deter terrorists, that as we saw suicide bombers in Al Qaeda would carry out strikes and you really couldn't think of it that way. But we found in our reporting that there actually was some interesting research being done in the bowels of the Pentagon by some specific analysts and policy people there, looking at this question, are there elements of cold war deterrence that can be updated and adapted to go after terrorists? And what they found was, just as you said, Peter, that even though terrorists, of course, stateless, and it'd be like Al Qaeda, it doesn't have territory that you can hold dear, such as you could in the United States with the Soviet Union. There's no Kremlin, there are no military bases, there are no Dachas, with your members and their ballerinas that you could target. But what they did discover was there are other things that the terrorist community holds dear. They're prestige, they're honor, their sense of success before the UMA, the public, in their activities. And the idea that if you could somehow target that and undermine that, that you could at least delay or disrupt and perhaps even lessen the ferocity of these type of attacks. So this went hand in hand with a discussion about looking at terrorists as a network, not just as a vertically organized enemy as the tradition had been. If you could think about identifying some of these nodes in the network and how could you maybe deter some of those nodes? Well, again, the strategists in the Pentagon who were working on this said, okay, maybe you can't deter the suicide bombers or the bin lines, but there are a lot of people in the middle, the enablers, the supporters, the people who are the gun runners for these operations, the financiers, the logisticians. These people are largely in it for the money. And if you're going to take away their livelihood in some way, they're going to go somewhere else with their trade. So in the book we talk about several examples of where they identify parts of this node to essentially deter them. One of them is, for instance, looking in an effort and operation that was going on by the military in Nangahar province in Afghanistan, where they looked at the Hualas, these are the ancient money trading systems that are family-run businesses, essentially, that the Taliban had used quite extensively. And the military went in and took down about six of these family-run businesses. And this was important because it sent a message to the other remaining Hualas. It said, you have a nice home here. You've got a nice garden in the backyard and you're providing wealth for your family with this business. But you saw what just happened to your friends and neighbors here. We'll do that to you, too, if you don't think about taking... You can continue doing your business, but you're not going to be doing the business with the Taliban anymore. Well, classic deterrence in a sense of targeting that node but adapting it to that updated situation. Other examples that you cite in the book? Well, probably the most interesting place is cyberspace because if there is a safe haven where terrorists operate as you know so well, it's on the Internet. It's where they recruit. It's where they raise money. It's where they propagandize. It's actually also where they command and control. One of the most interesting case studies that we learned about was how the NSA, with its technical eavesdropping capabilities, has systems for monitoring worldwide cell phone calls to the Internet for certain code words that they know that terrorists use as part of their discussions. So the terrorists, to hide their discussions, now go on to online video gaming sites like my teenagers use at home because what happens at those sites, you're playing war games where the vocabulary is exactly the same as terrorist planning. So they log on at predetermined times and they carry on their command and control discussions hidden in the vast network of online gaming. But really where the military and the intelligence community are focusing their efforts is in the area of propaganda. And we've learned that the military has become expert at forging the watermarks of Al Qaeda. When Al Qaeda puts its messages online, it has a stamp, like a watermark or a seal to show that it's Halal, that it's perfect, that it's actually Al Qaeda talking. But the military and the intelligence community can go online post contradictory and confusing messages that have this, you know, the bona fides of an Al Qaeda watermark. And it just sort of confuses people and it disrupts what they're thinking. They've also become expert at hacking into the cell phones of terror leaders. And they go on and they, again, they talk about, ah, the guy over there, we think he's playing funny with the money. And it just sows a time of distrust and dissent among the groups. And then finally one of the most interesting things the military is doing to disrupt the safe haven of the internet is Arabic speakers working for the government and the military are logging on to jihadi chat rooms. And they're posing kind of interesting questions, they're saying. Well, we just read about this attack on a marketplace in Pakistan. Most of those people who were killed were Muslims. Tell me, brothers, how is this keeping with our jihadi movement to be killing innocents? And so they're trying to foment a discussion and questioning of what Al Qaeda and other terrorists are doing to sort of put off the day of the next attack. So distrust, confusion, dissent, they think achieves a deterrence effect in the end. One of the other things you do in the book is you kind of go down to sort of a level of the people involved in counterterrorism that, let's say, Bob Woodward would not have done. He would have kept it at the cabinet level. And so I was wondering if you could perhaps talk a little bit about how you selected the characters and who you selected, Juan Serrate, Mike Vickers, John Tyson, General Schlosser. What was the other than the fact they said that yes, they would be interviewed? You're right, Peter. What we're trying to do in this book is to give it some kind of narrative spine. The book is organized chronologically starting at 9-11 and ending essentially with the ray that killed bin Laden. And we were trying to find individuals who, as you said, were kind of below that principal level or even the deputy level that people probably had read about or maybe were writing their own books. And so they're well-known figures. But these were people really at the working level but still had a fair amount of authority. But we're also trying to find people who had experiences throughout that decade. It's easy to find somebody on 9-11 who maybe was in the government but then went out of government and stayed out of government. But we picked individuals who were there throughout. So if you take, then Brigadier General Schlosser, Jeffrey Schlosser was in Kuwait on 9-11. And actually he had been there long enough so he had experienced as one of the military officers there the concern about al-Qaeda when they attacked the USS Cole in Aden the year before. So you watch him and Schlosser is a commander in Kuwait. He then comes to the Pentagon and he's tasked by the Joint Staff to be one of the first officers at the Joint Staff level to look at this question of combating terrorism and how the military is going to be doing it. No, it's a brand new office. John Abizade then the staff, the director of the Joint Staff says, you're not going to be studying Eastern Europe or whatever I had in mind for you here but it has to come. This is a new assignment for you. Let's get on it. This is a month after 9-11. And we track Schlosser as he goes through. It's an interesting arc because he then spends time at one of the new agencies created after 9-11, the National Counterterrorism Center, in a very important role that the center plays is kind of thinking about the policy operation. It's called Strategic Operational Planning, where I'm working to the NCTC but working, thinking longer term policy for the White House. He then is deployed overseas again back into Afghanistan and looking at the region of Eastern Afghanistan. So again, he's back now on the ground taking what he learned in government first at the Joint Staff and at the National Counterterrorism Center and now he's commanding troops again right on the border and influencing and talking with Pakistani commanders across the line. He then comes back and is on the Army staff here before he ends up retiring. So there's one instance, the others you mentioned also have really interesting careers. Juan Zarate had been at the Justice Department, had literally just been transferred over to the Treasury Department on 9-11 and becomes one of the pivotal figures in creating this new focus at Treasury on combating terrorist financing. Follow the money basically is what Juan is doing, taking his legal training and building up both the intelligence, helping build intelligence at Treasury and then going after these networks to figure out where the money is coming so you can try and dry that up. He of course moves on to the White House and the National Security Council where he's a senior counterterrorism official in the Bush administration right up until the end and obviously today is still very involved at CSIS and other places working on the terrorism issue. So those are the kind of figures that we're doing trying to track, they have interesting histories and they're learning their experiences building as you kind of read through the book. John Tyson was another one? Yeah, he's the only person who we had to come up with a pseudonym or a nom de guerre. He's a senior DIA analyst. It's interesting, before 9-11 there were very few people in government who actually were tracking Al-Qaeda or knew what it was and not surprising but a little embarrassing. A senior White House official confided in us that on 9-11 there were people actually walking around hearing Al-Qaeda and saying Al-Hoo. So John Tyson was the original DIA analyst assigned to the Bin Laden unit back when this Saudi emigrate was just a big mouth with a lot of money and before 9-11 across the U.S. government there were so few people focused on Al-Qaeda they actually had each other's phone numbers on their speed dial. There was this cat-loving lady at the State Department, a CIA analyst and all of that. Obviously since 9-11 that has exploded and Tyson has remade really the Pentagon's top Bin Laden hunter up through the raid. One of the things we try to do in the book is it's organized intellectually the way the military approaches the world, tactical, operational and strategic. We try to find whether or not this quest for an overarching strategy to counter terrorism has been successful. I mean during the Cold War there was containment, there was deterrence. And so that's at the strategic level. Then operationally we try to examine this quest to understand terrorist networks that Eric described because the realization came that you can't capture or kill your way to victory in this campaign against violent extremism. You have to understand the networks and take apart the nodes because again an attempt to take down every terrorist will never happen. And then we have some great tactical case studies, young men and women in the field who are really doing the hard work. Those are some of the stories that we found most interesting to report. The young lieutenants, the young captains, the young intelligence analysts downrange and they really are an untold story because as you said most of the books written from Washington focus on the famous names. What is your conclusion about how the war went? The war against Al Qaeda. Well the war against Al Qaeda, as you know Peter, is not over by any means. What we talk about in the book is how as we look at the issues today of course the Al Qaeda leadership, the core leadership in Pakistan has been severely degraded. Obviously just in the last few months where the death of bin Laden, al Qaeda's Kashmiri, the death of the new number two in Al Qaeda, Atiya Abdul-Ahman and then just the other day on 9-11 itself suitably the operations officer in Pakistan for Al Qaeda apparently has died in another drone strike. So Al Qaeda in Pakistan is clearly under pressure clearly making it more difficult for them to both plan and certainly carry out some type of mass casualty attack as they did on 9-11. Still danger, Leon Panetta talked several weeks ago about perhaps having Al Qaeda in Pakistan beat on the cusp of strategic victory against the Pakistani based Al Qaeda and that stirred up all sorts of conversation in the intelligence community and the military because they're still dangerous, they're still training camps per se but they're still training and instruction going on in the tribal areas. And of course in North Waziristan still very much of a safe haven for Al Qaeda but for the Pakistani Taliban and TTP and various other groups where the Pakistani military even though it's base there in Miram Shah is not deployed in operations and that's where we see the focus of the drones taking in. The other concern obviously though is the proliferation and the rise of the affiliates both in North Africa, in East Africa and most notably in Yemen. The Yemeni arm and it's Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is the arm of course that was responsible for the so-called underpants bomber, the young Nigerian man in Christmas of 2009 who tried to blow himself up aboard the commercial airliner in Detroit luckily failed. Also ten months later the group that was responsible for packing printer cartridges full of explosives putting them on cargo planes likely bound for Chicago that plot also thwarted thanks to some help from the Saudi intelligence. I think what we're seeing here is a nimble more resilient adversary particularly here in the affiliates and then there's the concern about the homegrown threat here in the United States still very small but the concern that individuals here in the U.S. can be radicalized over the internet particularly by an individual like Anwar al-Alaki, an American born cleric now in hiding in Yemen but who was clearly operating here in the United States he operated mosques here in northern Virginia in San Diego and then as you point out Peter in your very good recent paper it was done with Andrew Leibovich and Syracuse it's not just Muslim extremists that are concerned but also other groups here in the United States right wing groups or right wing individuals even such as we saw with the individual in Norway so I think there's this a story about the big scale attack may have lessened but there's still very much a concern about the smaller scale attack that could be carried out I guess to answer how are we doing, how does it end the one takeaway I would share with those of you who haven't read the book is that ten years of counterterrorism efforts by the U.S. government haven't been able to put off the day of the next attack and perhaps to have lessened the severity but the next attack is going to come and the value here is for the U.S. government and the people of this nation to adopt a strategy of resilience not unlike in the U.K. or in Israel and it goes beyond infrastructure resilience to rebuild but it's a whole attitude about how we as individuals pick up the next day and carry on you know Eric mentioned the printer cartridge attack from Al Qaeda in Yemen it failed but it was a strategic victory the cargo industry shut down for a few days tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars had to be spent to repair that and Al Qaeda in Yemen bragged that whole effort cost just $4,200 so the strategy is sort of throwing pebbles into the cogs of the western economy and only by understanding that and adapting and carrying on after the next attack can we deny terrorists a strategic victory out of their political defeats? It's hard enough to write a book by yourself but is it doubly hard to write it as a team or how did you sort of divide up the work and how did you did you avoid you're still friends obviously so how did that work? Well fortunately Tom and I have been colleagues for more than ten years at the time we were partners at the covering of Pentagon for six years I came back from a leave and covering terrorism and we picked right up where we left off and this really this book is the result of a page one article that appeared in the Times about three and a half years ago from that we drafted a book proposal and then launched on this project and the way we went about it was in the chapter structure each of us took a lead often time the area that we happened to be covering or our personal interest we would take the lead at writing the first draft and then we'd swap it back to our partner and we did this throughout the process we were under a very tight schedule we were aiming to try and get this out just before the 9-11 anniversary which we were able to do we also did most of this with the exception of a short very profitable leave of absence to do some writing on our own time so it was kind of juggling this and you know fortunately that much of the subjects were covering took it as we get down toward the end a track with our day jobs as well but it was an intense period and that was time management because again Eric and I have a very easy working relationship we know each other's habits and we do have complimentary expertise and what we found at the end is that if we gave 80% of our time to the book 80% to our jobs 80% to our spouses 80% to our kids everything left over was just for us and how did you deal as New York Times reporters with writing a getting little bits of things which might be good for the book but maybe they go for the paper or is the paper of sort of pressuring you to put stuff in the paper before it goes in the book or how does that work because I can see that. So what we did was basically our rule of thumb was if there was information that we got that we knew wouldn't hold until our publication date we would put that in the paper and so there were a couple of instances where we put stories in the paper looking along those lines and then toward the end of the process for instance we had a whole interesting story about the Hunter bin Laden and the time they thought they almost had him. That is they thought they had some intelligence that put him across the border in a place called Torah Bora actually in 2007 I think and the military put so much stock in this intelligence that they ramped up what was then going to be the largest single air raid since the beginning of the Iraq war. I mean they were going to throw the kitchen sink at this place in Torah Bora the symbolic significance was not lost on anybody in the government as well as a full blown commando operation that was going to go up and try and collect the so-called squirters if anybody tried to get out. This went right down to the end they actually had B2 bombers in the air flying from Diego Garcia we did say that in the book I'm sure we said that and at the very end the intelligence was deemed not to be either credible enough or bin Laden was tipped off to it or whatever it was but the meeting took place but it was on a much smaller scale the commanders actually turned the B2s around and had them fly back onto base but it was an instance like that so after bin Laden was killed obviously we're not going to sit on that for the book anymore so we broke that out we put that story in the paper and luckily bin Laden was killed before you closed the actual manuscript right describe what that was like well it was very interesting one of our readers if you ever write a book I highly recommend you find people who care enough about you to read the book but don't care enough not to hurt your feelings because you really want to have people murder board it. One of our readers gave us some helpful critique along the way and this was probably in mid-April and he said it's a pretty good book but you need some kind of ending so we turned in the manuscript literally the deadline the book was done the last Friday in April and within 48 hours they'd gotten bin Laden so Eric and I and the entire national security team at the times worked around the clock that entire week what happened what does it mean some good tactical stories and all of that and the following weekend our publisher at Times Books and Henry Holt literally stopped the presses for us and Eric and I spent four days doing interviews going back to our sources strong-arming officials and we wrote a new concluding chapter with some interesting and exclusive stuff about the rate itself we freshened up the prologue we freshened up the epilogue and actually one of the hardest things was going through the entire manuscript for verb tenses because bin Laden was no longer an is he was a was the there were some events in Iraq which you talk about as being kind of pivotal and I guess one thing is the discovery of the documents in Taji can you explain why that was so important the Taji rate was significant this was one of the many commando rates that was being carried out by the Joint Special Operations Forces and they came across really in a rate the Joint Special Operations Forces were carrying out rates all the time but this one was a little bit different this happened to be on a conventional infantry patrol they came across a car and one of their patrols looked a little bit odd out of place and when the driver got out of the car he fled eventually self-detonated blew himself up but the man left inside the car had a a suitcase briefcase and in that after they checked sure it wasn't a bomb or an IED or anything they discovered basically what was the Al-Qaeda campaign plan Al-Qaeda and Iraq campaign plan for how to counter the surge that the United States was now starting in early 2007 and among the interesting things in this document besides obviously where they intended to move some of their militant forces was what the focus was going to be on one of the focus for instance was going to be the targeting of the refugees the people who begged the bread which was basically one of the daily staples of Iraqis and if you could somehow cut off that supply and show people that they couldn't even get one of their basic staples every day they were going to target the garbage collectors and allow garbage to pile up in the streets of Baghdad to show again how the Iraqi government and the United States would not be able to not be able to basically carry out the most essential functions so with this armed with this General Ray Odi Erna was able to effectively counter much of this and it became one of the essential parts of the campaign in dealing with and addressing and combatting the Al-Qaeda and Iraqis strategy there on the counter Part of that was also the so called belt strategy that they would be encircling Baghdad and I guess Audiano went and dismantled the belt that was one of the conclusions and documents. That's right he actually found hand drawn maps by Zarkawi that showed how Al-Qaeda and Iraq although it was a terrorist organization was actually going to mount some campaigns like a conventional force with a hierarchy and all of that and it allowed Odi Erno to reposition his forces against the Al-Qaeda forces and another interesting historic footnote there was a lot of talk about whether the Saddam's holdovers were in any way cooperating with Al-Qaeda in Iraq and whether it was coincidental or whether some had crossed over many of the lines of attack that were found on Zarkawi's map mirrored the Iraqi armies plans for defending Baghdad from American attack. What about the Sinjar documents? Yeah the Sinjar rate is one of my favorite case studies in the book. Sinjar is this dusty town in western Iraq along the Syrian border and it was a major rat line for the entry of foreign fighters, those who wanted to come to make jihad and fight and in particular the suicide bombers. It's interesting to note that very few Iraqis were suicide bombers. They actually wanted to live and have their country and take it back but there were a lot of foreign jihadis who came in and this was a time when suicide bombs were literally knocking back American and Iraqi forces. General Petraeus told us that during this period it was like being in the 50th round of a boxing match and he was taking all of the hits. So the American military had just put a brute force intelligence effort over this dusty camp at Sinjar. It was predators and J-stars and all that and they established what they call a pattern of life who comes, who stays when they leave and they knew the night that the emir of this area the al-Qaeda emir was passing through with some future suicide bombers and so the Joint Special Operations Command mounted a raid, they went in fast, they went in hard, the kind of thing they do very well now and even though a lot of the terrorists there self detonated they were able to retrieve just a treasure trove of documents and computer drives and all of that and it became known as an al-Qaeda Rolodex because as one of our sources told us it was fortunate that al-Qaeda was as anal of that documentation as were the Nazis. So they had copies of the passports of all those who'd come in to be suicide bombers. They're hometowns who had inspired them or who had recruited them and what it showed is that there were ink spots from where a lot of the suicide bombers were coming from that wasn't evenly spread across the Middle East. They were especially coming from Saudi Arabia and from Libya which was very, very interesting. So they've taken out the rat line for a while but what to do with all of this incredible information because the suicide bomber threat would of course reconstitute somewhere. It's a fact in the military that whoever uncovers the intelligence owns the intelligence. So all the Sinjar documents belong to a fellow you might have heard of named Stanley McChrystal who at the time was in charge of all the special operations forces. McChrystal was really a visionary in understanding how you had to flatten the American military intelligence to make our networks mirror the flexibility and the agility of terror networks. So he said, I'm going to unilaterally declassify a vast bulk of this treasure trove push it out across the intelligence community. He gave a big part of the documents to an exploitation team at Special Operations Command that was called Redbeard. They handed it over to the Countering Terrorism Center at West Point to do some magazine articles and some essays for the public to read but even that wasn't amplifying this enough. So the information was collated the names were tracked and it was divided into country by country portfolios and given to a fellow at the State Department who was the new Ambassador for Counterterrorism. And interestingly enough he had been Admiral McChrystal's predecessor at the Joint Special Operations Command. His name was Del Daly. Well now an ambassador Daly went to all of the countries in the Middle East and North Africa that were the source point for the suicide bombers and he met with the intelligence officers the top diplomats the law enforcement military he could use his generals background if he needed to he could use his diplomatic credit if he needed to. When he said to them this is honest to goodness information this is not American propaganda these are allocated documents that show that suicide bombers are coming from your country the jihadi fighters are coming from your country transiting through Syria to make war in Iraq. You may think this is our problem but let me tell you the suicide bombers won't come back but the jihadi fighters will and you will have an incredible problem on your hands and the data was so compelling that the suicide bombing rate dropped by 85% within 6 months and General Petraeus credits that diplomatic mission with halting suicide bombing in Iraq more than any of the military operations and it shows how the whole of government has to work together to really counter violent extremism. You said that you got some exclusive stuff about the hunt for bin Laden what did you learn that wasn't out there already? You know some of this has now come out in some of the articles it's quite detailed but I think what we had talked about was for instance as you go in one of the reasons why that helicopter went down that first helicopter was the unusual how warm it was that evening in Abbottabad it was much warmer than they had planned on in practice for and is that first helicopter that came in was hovering over the compound it created this unusual wind tunnel almost effect that helicopter pilots feared when they hover over an enclosed space and it basically you lose the lift that you need to have there and you can compensate for that if you know these things but is that helicopter came down of course you had the first problem in the raid itself which the SEALS had to then modify to one of the other things we talk about though in the book on that raid Peter is the tremendous operational security that bin Laden used in that and obviously it's been well reported that he had no there were no internet, no television no signal essentially coming from that compound that you could detect but he was so careful about this that people who came to visit him these small number of couriers and others who came to visit that compound not only were they required to check their cell phones at the door and turn them off but he required that they take out the SIM cards to those cell phones several miles away so they couldn't be tracked if anybody was watching them or watching the signal coming off of that so there was little details like that they kind of give you insights both operationally how how this was working as well as bin Laden's own stuff and of course the questions that were raised afterward seemed to be so lightly guarded after many years there no doubt he had a certain sense of complacency I think for the full story we'll have to wait for your book when it comes out next year but I think since we were writing For History, one of the things that hadn't been written about before a book which I found very fascinating was the incredible amount of planning that went into the bin Laden raid for what could go wrong and what could go right in fact when all of the principals were sitting in the sit room that night they had in front of them what they called the playbook it was a three ring binder probably four inches thick and it was all about the what ifs bin Laden was captured alive and they had military JAG standing by they had interrogators standing by they knew which aircraft would take him to which ports and then to which ships for interrogation and they truly were anticipating everything one of the last minute changes that we reported for the first time is that after the president decided to go with the commando raid as opposed to a large bomber strike or a predator strike that might obliterate any chance of identifying DNA he posed the question what happens if your operational security is detected not by bin Laden but by the Pakistanis and so at the last minute they crafted a fight your way out strategy as painful as that would have been quasi-ally Pakistan and that's when additional helicopters were added to increase the size of the package in case the initial team was discovered by local police or even the army and they were ready to fight their way out to get bin Laden out just one final question before we throw it open to the audience Pakistan is a place you spend a lot of time Eric and Tom obviously you've reported on it and in a sense it's the heart of all the issue how do you see it seems to me but in the US military there is a certain group that might want to move to a policy of containment with Pakistan as opposed to an alliance and clearly it's been reported that Cameron Mundt of the ambassador really pushed back in particular on one particular drone strike that was March 17th after the release of Raymond Davis and was essentially overruled by the CIA so from a Pakistani perspective it seems that there are multiple competing agendas that the US government has which I think is probably true the State Department has one view the CIA has another DOD has another how do you see our relationship the America's relationship with Pakistan developing in the future there was obviously this huge rupture after bin Laden which was accumulation of Raymond Davis and the drones based on your sort of reporting now are better on a working level or worse or is this going to be bad for the foreseeable future what's your... I think Peter what we've seen starting with obviously even before Raymond Davis there were tensions over the drone strikes and other incidents but from Raymond Davis through the capture of the death of bin Laden to today what you've really seen now is I think the relationship pretty much has bottomed out at least it's bottomed out in the last few decades it's actually been interesting to watch and listen in the last few weeks that the name calling and finger pointing seems to have quieted down and my sources tell me that's a deliberate effort on the part of both sides and in fact when the Pakistanis announced the death of this new number two al-Qaeda leader they took an unusual step to help credit the CIA for providing some of the information the CIA was fully prepared to not think anything about this and they would have considered that a victory but the fact that Pakistanis went out of their way in their statement that they put out to credit the Americans for help seem to be a baby step toward rebuilding this relationship now that said in talking to people who for instance who work in and around Admiral Mullen who's really the American point person for Pakistan he's met with General Kayani more times than anybody anybody else in the government he's meeting with them again shortly of a conference in Spain before he retires at the end of this month the concern within these people who work closely with Pakistan is it's going to take several months if not more than a year to get back to where we were with even at the point of the Raymond Davis strike if it ever gets that back to that level and that even at that level was pretty low I mean right now the United States is still holding back what they call coalition support funds those are the monies that the United States agreed to reimburse Pakistan for their operations along the border and the 100,000 or more troops that are there basically conducting what the U.S. and Pakistan say are counterterrorism operations there have been complaints that this money hasn't been delivered on time in the past because the Pakistanis not providing the proper accounting receipts this time however Secretary of State Clinton has said holding it back until we see some commitment on your part you the Pakistanis that you're truly committed to not only Rudy not Al-Qaeda but many of these other groups that you've written so much about over the years Peter and we're looking at the Pakistani Taliban and the Haqqani Network which is perhaps the biggest thorn in the side of this relationship and one of the groups that the Pakistanis really are protecting in the north of Aziristan and which are the leading killer of American and other NATO troops in Afghanistan where they're from and are now being being blamed and attributed for this most recent attack this 19-hour attack upon the NATO and U.S. compounding Kabul so as we look at the United States beginning to withdraw its forces there's a lot of concern over Pakistan continuing to play this double game of perhaps helping or at least implicitly supporting the CIA drone strikes and the tribal areas but also supporting some of the militant groups on the other side as they look in a long term way at supporting groups that will be their strategic hedge against India their traditional rival and ally to the east and they're looking beyond the day when the United States leaves Afghanistan at least leaves in significant numbers to prevent the kind of deterioration in Afghanistan they saw the last time major powers left then after the Soviet war We'll take some questions if you could wait for the microphone and identify yourself we'll start with Christina Lam Hi a couple of questions one you talked about the fact that Bin Laden's killing gave you an ending to the book I wondered if you could be honest how in the book prior to that whether you thought that they were close to getting Bin Laden or not and then the second question you talked about the recent successes that the US has had in killing senior Al Qaeda people do you think that's a result of information that was found in the raid you talked about Al Qaeda being kind of anal in keeping in documenting things or how has the US managed to have those successes recently thank you to your first question that Friday when we turned in the manuscript we had no idea they were on the cusp of a raid to get Bin Laden it was one of the most closely held secrets in Washington even people who were chopping on the intelligence that we talked to subsequently didn't know who the target was people who were working you know fueling and routes and all that sort of stuff I think though our overall conclusions didn't change at all nor is where we are in this campaign which is that terrorism counter-terrorism is really the new Darwinism you know the American side has gotten better but the adversaries are a learning enemy as well and that while the death of Bin Laden was necessary to crippling Al Qaeda it's not sufficient and as Eric described the terror threat remains very serious today but just in a different form Al Qaeda central still wants a weapon of mass destruction for mass casualty or mass effects the affiliates especially in Yemen are viewed as more dangerous today than Al Qaeda central and General Carter Ham who heads the American Africa command told us just earlier this week that he's seeing a new syndicate forming among the terror groups based in Africa where they're vast ungoverned areas and that while they have not previously shown the capability to strike outside their areas this syndication is a new and worrisome threat so even though we had no way of knowing how close America was to Bin Laden I think his death was a dramatic ending to our book but didn't really change our analysis of what the next 10 years will look like just to answer the second part of your question I think well I think the intelligence people that I've talked to have said that the documents they took out of the House say less about current operations than where Bin Laden's head was what was he thinking in terms of the next attack how was he communicating with his subordinates the frustration that he had that they weren't able to kind of carry out the kind of large scale attack against the United States of the West that he was hoping and I mean there may no doubt there were certain nuggets and elements that they've been able to pull together and piece together but I think in terms of the most recent success I think that's really a culmination of a number of things one is the CIA has been able to build a very effective network of informants of their own on the ground they haven't used ISI informants in many years because frankly most of those informants when the information was being passed about a drone strike was passed on to the militants a few hours beforehand so it's taken a lot of time they've suffered certain casualties but I think that network in itself has become quite effective the other thing you have to remember is after Bin Laden's death there's all this confusion about what happens you know where's the who's the next leader going to be I mean Zawahri eventually surfaces as people expect it to be the new number one but I think there's been a fair amount of chatter as the intelligence community calls it they've been able to listen to and detect there's been certain emails that have been going around their operational security has probably suffered somewhat in this confusion as people try, as members of the network try and write themselves and figure out where are we here whose community came with whom particularly with Zawahri who was really off on his own a little bit that was kind of one of the other interesting insights into the Bin Laden documents was how it was really Bin Laden and Atiyah kind of working together with the affiliates although Zawahri made many more statements he was in a place apparently where he could do that and really Bin Laden and Atiyah who seemed to be more connected to the affiliates than Zawahri necessarily was on an operational level which is interesting so you disrupt not only Bin Laden but then you get Atiyah and it's even more disruption in this network and the intelligence community loves disruption like that because one of the hallmarks of this campaign that we write about over the ten years is how the American and Western intelligence communities have been able to take this vast amount of information that they glean from various informants but also from spy satellites and all the eavesdropping platforms they have now and crunch it through supercomputers and turn that information around into leads that then they can hand to these operators the people on the ground who like the Bin Laden raid I mean these are more than a dozen raids like this every night in Afghanistan alone they're now able to turn that information around much more quickly so they're hitting safe houses before the militants even know that their buddies have been picked up or killed they don't have that much warning as they did in the past so I think it's kind of a combination of a lot of things that has led to this success and as more people are killed I think it also helps those and all the money that the CIA is spreading around suddenly you have informants who are looking at the writing on the wall and said maybe now is the time to come in from the cold and help out well I still have a chance by picking up on that the raid in Quetta that netted this guy Mauritania at last I guess two Fridays ago which was a joint Pakistani U.S. that's right what is going to happen to him in the sense that I mean is he going to go to Guantanamo will he be do we have a sense because this is the first time that a relatively high value person has been actually arrested in Pakistan probably the last time was in 2004 since then it's all been drone strikes so this is kind of a how was the Obama administration positioned to deal with somebody like that from a sort of in its legal framework I mean who would interrogate him where would he go how would he be handled just thank you for correcting me on that Peter because it was not a Tia this statement came out was after Mauritania's capture that was so significant when the Pakistanis credited the CIA raised a really important question where if an individual like this is captured not in Afghanistan not in Iraq what happens we saw in one case this guy Warsawmi who was the go-between between the Somalia Shabab and AQAP he's caught at sea and he's picked up and eventually sits on a Navy ship for several weeks before they finally bring him to New York before anybody knows what's happening I think in this case we're still waiting to see how this is going to play out because the administration does not have a policy in place right now to how you deal with these it's dealt with on an ad hoc basis individual case by case so the question is will they let the Pakistanis hold him for a while will they allow the CIA access to him for questioning will at least provide questions that can be asked of him by the ISI and that's going to be an interesting signal to see where this US-Pakistan relation goes in terms of the coordination that they have on this but where he ends up I would strongly doubt he would end up at Guantanamo Bay everybody I talked to in the US Justice Department says that ain't happening we're not putting any more people there so where does that leave it we see that every time they bring somebody to New York or the United States we see the hue and cry from the hill and other places about what that means in terms of how you try them and hopefully they could somehow reopen a prison in Afghanistan for these guys you hear some talk of that but for the most part I think the strategy now if you want to call it that is we are going to hopefully have a number of allies who will capture these individuals hold them allow us either access to them or questions to them and we'll kind of have to work out the details later in terms of how you prosecute them just identify yourself when you ask the question my name is Lee Young from Montgomery County, Maryland I try to compare with history and then we said domestic US policy or their practices for one thing you say you can define hero or tyranny or enemies depending on which side you are talking about so we are thinking about if you say terrorists whether they are real terrorists by a good sense and it's wrongfully labeled by the CIA or FBI or whatever agency or multi-corporations the second is the CIA or FBI or any government agency or corporation they usually label it wrongly against anybody corruption or anti-conspiracies or send them to jail or torture send them to continental aid two questions one is compared to the history for the first real reason that a kid or terrorist would behave that way whether it's a revenge against US policy or their victimization against their own population sure thank you very much thanks it's a great set of questions and I think just because something is a cliche doesn't mean it's not true one man's guerrillas and another man's freedom fighters so to be sure perspective is important I think though that Eric and I would not lose our journalistic objectivity to say that groups who routinely murder innocents even of their own faith are probably carefully classified as terrorists fair enough at the same time this nation does have its obligation our own millennial goal which is to eradicate the poverty that is a root cause of terrorism the poverty of hope the lack of of education all those things but that is really a millennial global challenge and in the meantime I think the government has made a decision that it will continue with intelligence operations military operations and diplomatic efforts to contain and defeat violent extremism in your obviously you reported throughout the bush two terms and now you've had the two and a half years of the Obama are you the people you talk to surprised about the Obama presidency in terms of say the drones the tripling not just continuity with Bush it's actually amplification in some cases there has been some discontinuity was that a surprising thing for you writing the book and reporting on it I think it was a surprise for most people and certainly the democratic base that was Obama's principal supporters in the election I think here was a guy who campaigned certainly of ending the war in Iraq but also he was going to you know increase the commitment to Afghanistan I think what through people was the idea that he was also going to as you said double down on the covert operations I mean there was very clearly a spike in the number of drone attacks by various measurements the his first year in office in 2009 Obama ordered CIA carried out more drone strikes in Pakistan than all eight years of Bush's administration and in 2010 that figure more than doubled again it's down slightly this year for various reasons including some of the sensitivities around Raymond Davis and other things and trying not to irritate the relationship but it really showed that this president is how he can sometimes you know he's streaked he's labeled in the domestic political reign as somebody who's trying to conciliate or trying to negotiate in the middle and here he's taken these very dramatic of directing increased covert operations drone strikes and of course the bin Laden rate itself based on his own acknowledgement that it best the intelligence community this is after staring at that compound for months and months putting every asset they could on it still the assessment was roughly 50-50 that bin Laden was there and given all the risks that Tom talked about I think a lot of people in the military in the intelligence community and others have been pleasantly surprised from their view at how aggressive the president has been that said of course the president has brought a whole new orientation that he laid out in his Cairo speech of how terrorism was not going to be the only lens through which American foreign policy was conducted it was an important pillar along with many other things but that that you can't you know carry out relations foreign relations in a number of countries particularly in the Muslim world in the Middle East through that vehicle alone gentlemen over here thank you I'm Chris Harman with Marine Corps University welcome gentlemen and I enjoyed the talk and look forward to the book during the period you cover there wasn't a national strategy for counter-terrorism yet from Mr. Obama there were two from Mr. Bush 2003 and 2006 you were covering the Pentagon you're covering the war I'd be very interested in your views of those documents by the Bush White House thank you sure that's a wonderful question thank you because one of the early drafts of our manuscript so focused on the strategy and the documents that our editor said no this book has to be about people not about paper but you're and he was absolutely right but your question is terrific when it is addressed in great detail in the book the first of the strategy documents you mentioned said flat out terrorists were willing to give up their lives for their cause are undeterrable the second of the documents you mentioned the language was already changing to say that there may be aspects of deterrence that can be brought to bear and then I guess the final document you didn't mention is the national military strategy signed out by Admiral Mullen earlier this year formally and officially adopts deterrence as we've described it as part of American counter-terrorism strategy so the evolution of thinking is part of official documentary strategic thinking now for all to review and analyze somebody's covered the Pentagon for so long to what extent is there a relationship between a strategic document like this an actual action on the battlefield or is it it's another great question to be sure the marine rifle company commander doesn't stop and pick up the NMS and flip through it for guidance the strategy documents do prove a value though because by specifically addressing a president or the chairman or the secretary's priorities they focus the bureaucracy they focus energy they focus money they focus priorities and those then trickle down through the system to affect what resources that rifleman has the kind of mission he's given what he's supposed to be doing so there is a membrane linking the strategic through the operational down to the tactical how do you guys assess the changes at the top of DOD and at CIA and the fact that there are a lot of JSOC type folks who are now senior positions or various places in the government how do you see things changing if at all with this new group in charge well I think certainly you've got very interesting personalities kind of moving around there are players that are well known within this administration but in new places if you look at General Petraeus that's going to be one of the most interesting places to watch as you take all his operational experience as a commander in Iraq and then in Afghanistan because a consumer of an intelligence but working very closely with the intelligence community over this past decade and now he's running the show at CIA I think he's going to put that building on notice pretty quickly and be testing them, be testing their assumptions everyday and what he does and I think it's going to be an interesting relationship because that building is eating other new directors alive when they come in but I think Petraeus is coming in obviously with a lot of public support is the most acclaimed general officer senior military officer of his generation he's got a lot of support on the hill and you know there's still people over at the White House who are wary of him maybe he was put at the CIA rather than allowed to roam around the political realm but I think in the end he still has a fair amount of support there too I'll let Tom talk about Secretary Pineda Sure just one other point first Eric and I had a story a couple weeks ago that talked about how the 10 year campaign against violent extremism has really changed military culture and one of the most significant ways is that senior officers of the special operations community are now being salted across the conventional force in ways that never would have happened to a snake eater before 9-11 I mean you have a seal ahead of special operations command okay fair enough that's where they live but you also have a seal as the number two officer at central command over the entire Middle East you have a seal as the number two officer at southern command for all of Latin America truly historic as far as Secretary Pineda I think it's interesting even though Eric and I cover the war on terrorism the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan it's worth remembering that Gates was brought in by President Bush to solve the war in Iraq he was kept on by President Obama to fix Afghanistan but Pineda's war is really going to be against Congress and the executive branch over money and that will really define his tenure to be sure money translates directly into strategy but I would bet that more of Pineda's day is spent looking at ledgers than looking at strategy documents in the front Hi Shelton Williams you began by saying that the resilience of the American people and their ability to absorb and react and move on from a terrorist strike might be the most important lesson of your book which I've already read how do you think we're doing as the American people and what information strategy is being adopted to address a specific issue Yeah I think the American people are not doing as well as they should just look at the anniversary of 9-11 when all of the very valid intelligence reports of a potential trio of bombers came in I mean just imagine 9-11 the event that we commemorated a week ago three airliners excuse me four airliners three specific strikes now we're worried about three guys with maybe a truck bomb had it gone off had people been killed that would have been a tragedy but it's of a completely different order so I think America has recalibrated successfully to understand that terrorism is not the existential threat that it was described as on 9-11 but I think there's still an unhealthy climate of fear from the street level and sadly all the way up to our political leadership in our valedictory interview with Secretary Gates he said that as he left office finally leaving public service behind one of the things that made him saddest was that we'd become a fearful nation and America's not a fearful nation we're a bold nation sometimes too bold to be sure and that fear had translated into a polarized political environment where anybody who looked weak on terrorism would be criticized by the opposing party when what you really want for strategic level threats is that bipartisanship that this country used to show at the water's edge and outward just to follow up on that Eric did you I did that information about the three guys who may be Arab and maybe American and maybe here I mean did it just all wash out because or these is just still sort of a semi plausible thing well so here's the story of that information what happened was this was information that came from a single source a CIA informant in Afghanistan who had been credible in the past and so he had to take it for what it was in that but he was relying on a couple of what they call subsources people who weren't as well weren't as trusted and his information might not be as good so his information comes over the transom sometime Wednesday night late Wednesday night early Thursday morning of last week and the agency would normally have spent more time vetting this information bouncing it off of other sources to collaborate it before they even bring it to the White House to make it known there but because of the timing of this and the fear that this could be linked to a plot backed up against 9-11 which is going to be on Sunday now in the fact that they knew bin Laden and Atiya had at least talked about if not set in motion some type of 9-11 anniversary plot this information had to be treated a little differently than you normally would treat your basic threat so when the government came out with this statement that it was specific credible but unconfirmed well let's unpack that specific meaning they had specific information about as many as three individuals two of whom they believe could be U.S. citizens coming into this country to carry out what they believe would be some type of car or truck bomb in either Washington and or New York they had various they had some information but sketchy information about physical description of these guys their height their weight roughly what they looked like but not really enough to kind of say oh yeah that's John Smith or that's whoever it might be they knew their travel at least again this is all according to the informants have to be careful here we still don't know if this story in itself is true or could have been just disinformation but the story the informant told was they started in Afghanistan they transited through at least one or two countries and then come to the United States perhaps as recently as the previous week so not two weeks ago about a week so this gets put into the the hopper here and this is at a time when the defenses of the country already coming up and this has been planned for months the administration has been holding all sorts of planning on how they would increase threat levels they would you'd see more of the police and military presence on the streets that you saw all that was going to happen anyway the combat air patrols that some of you might have heard things like that what was different though was now you had a very specific threat even though it couldn't be confirmed in their normal time frame of how to deal with this it essentially boiled down to we're not quite sure what this is but we can't take any chances given this is 9-11 and given all the focus on this and given all the talk about the whole much effort this government has taken with other allies to prevent an attack like this so as we work through the weekend I'm talking to law enforcement sources in particular and here you still have that FBI CIA attention of some of the law enforcement people and NYPD people saying the agency has been unusually candid with us both in terms of the information and where this is coming from so even a greater degree of transparency than you normally might see even after post 9-11 absolutely nobody wants to be fingered the day after a plot that happened on 9-11 because they withheld any information at all so they're very candid with this the White House makes the call on Thursday they're going to go public with this for two reasons one is you basically are crowdsourcing this information anybody knows anything about these guys you're putting them on alert again these are two US citizens so what's happening within the databases of the country they're running these databases, names and descriptions and travel patterns things that TSA and Customs and Border Patrol are doing more effectively now they had one name, first name of one of the individuals named Suleiman so you're running every Suleiman anywhere you can spell that name through all your computer bases and trying to track it with anybody who's traveling that way so it's crowdsourcing number one, number two it's a deterrent to the plot if it's out there at all you're now saying we're on to you guys well now we're going to even redouble our efforts because now we're looking for you as well as anything else is it real or not as of yesterday people are starting to kind of climb down from this but they're also concerned because even before 9-11 what I was hearing from intelligence sources was Al-Qaeda is probably not going to try and attack right into the teeth of this defense but what they may do is throw out a lost leader like this something that looks like a threat but isn't and then a couple months later that's when the next attack is coming when people kind of feel like they've dealt with whatever threat they might have been in in training but they're not anymore and the bigger concern they frankly had was that some whack job some lone wolf domestic threat is some guy or woman in their basement is going to say 9-11 anniversary this is my time to get my 15 minutes of fame let me pick up a rifle and go shoot up a shopping center thankfully that didn't happen either that was essentially from our standpoint what we saw happening in the last few days that's very helpful the gentleman here with that beard Jim Phillips with the Heritage Foundation and as you alluded to Al-Qaeda has killed more Muslims and non-Muslims more Arabs and non-Arabs and I'm wondering in the course of your book you came across any particularly encouraging examples of gaining help or intelligence for some of our Arab and Muslim allies I mean as Americans we think of 9-11 but in Jordan they had 11-9 Jordanian intelligence as we've seen was engaged not only in Iraq but in Afghanistan to what extent did they help tracking down Zarkawi and I think sometimes American intelligence shiny satellites, high tech solutions but really to eradicate and destroy Al-Qaeda I think it's going to be require human intelligence and in there it seems like the Arab and Muslim intelligence agencies have an advantage in able to infiltrate and as the top ranks of Al-Qaeda are retreated these people should be coming up you know to what extent if you came across any have we been helped by Egyptian intelligence and then finally you mentioned the Hawalis in Afghanistan what's the status on the golden chain the big donors in Saudi Arabia and to what extent do we have Saudi real cooperation in rolling up the big financiers of Al-Qaeda well you've named some of the countries both Saudi Arabia and Jordan have been very close partners in the campaign to combat violent extremism in fact it was intelligence from Saudi Arabia that identified the printer cartridge bombs they probably would have gotten through successfully had it not been for Saudi cooperation as far as the Saudi donors you know for years Saudi Arabia was a very ambivalent partner in fighting Al-Qaeda and then as has happened so many times terrorism in Saudi Arabia overplayed its hand and with those attacks on the royal family Saudi Arabia certainly cracked down much more stringently on the internal financing and activists on its territory you made the important point though about the number of innocent Muslims killed by terrorists since 9-11 depending on whose figures you use the UN or others it's 80-85% of all terror victims since 9-11 have been innocent Muslims that's a statistic that the US has been very clumsy in amplifying with good reason the US shouldn't lecture the Muslim world the military shouldn't lecture the Muslim world it's important for leaders of the Muslim world to talk to their own community about this problem and while the US has tried to work with them to help them amplify it anything that has fingerprints of Washington will be a counterproductive message one of the scenes in your book is President Obama saying getting very angry because he there's a proposal for the State Department to kind of have a voice that's countering violent extremism and Obama is saying why don't we have this it's like whatever almost 8 or 9 years into this and as a result of which there is something of the State Department that's designed to how useful is that in terms of the kind of kiss of death problem the US gets involved in these discussions or if it's a message about their killing Muslims civilians again is that credible coming from the US give your assessment of this development at the State Department I think that particular cell which is led by a gentleman named Ambassador Richard LeBaron who had this effort since it had been out several months ago I think the results are still out, they're still somewhat mixed I mean they have been able to do kind of what Tom was saying and get Arabic speakers or Pashto speakers or some of the key languages that are spoken by the militants and try and get in this time be a little bit more proactive and go on the offensive I think and some of these particularly most vitriolic websites and chat rooms where you have not just being reactive but getting in there and up a little bit and that isn't covert, right? No, this is all open, they're doing this I mean they've also tried to take videos I mean they did this right after when the Egyptian Arab Spring is unfolding in Tahir Square they're taking the statements of Zawahri for instance of how you need to have armed conflict is the only way to bring about the downfall of these apostates and they're juxtaposing it in these videos they make over at the State Department or through their contractors through the Humanity there in Tahir Square where of course Al-Qaeda had no role whatsoever in generating that kind of support so they're bit by bit with these very small efforts compared to what we see in terms of a military campaign or an intelligence campaign trying to get a niche, trying to get a foothold in at least stymine engaging in the kind of conversations that Tom talked about that raised doubts putting them on the back foot so they're not out there on the offensive the other thing the same area of the State Department is doing this is a more broadly under Dan Benjamin shop the State Department's coordinator for counter-terrorism is they're trying to go out and working with the embassies and that is rather than trying to kind of fit have one cookie cutter strategy of how do you go out outside the United States to combat violent extremism they're trying to finally be very tailored so that you can look at local grievances almost neighborhood by neighborhood in various countries and adopt strategies working with the embassies and local NGOs to try and combat the root causes of some of these things one of the things they're trying to do now with small amount of grant money is in the Eastly neighborhood of Nairobi a traditional hotbed of Islamist extremism in Kenya and trying to work with community leaders there to come up with a Kenyan solution to this not an American solution but supported by the State Department and the Embassy there it's been very difficult though because again this is very piecemeal it has to be done on a local level and they haven't had a whole lot of money to go after this but it is these are the kind of efforts I think long term that are going to have the kind of payback but they have to getting back to this kind of ink spot kind of reversing the ink spot how do you combat this keeping these grievances on a local level rather than allow them to bloom and to expand exactly what Al-Qaeda is trying to do is to network these local grievances and tie it into a national and international cause this lady here Tessa Baker, hi I have a few questions, I'll try to keep it to two besides the sum of bin Laden's death which is obviously a very salient component of kind of Al-Qaeda's story over the past year there are all of these events that are occurring across MENA in terms of the possibility that the Muslim Brotherhood will come to power in Egypt in the elections in November Somali government taking back control of Mogadishu and the impact on Al-Shabaab and the potential for Al-Shabaab to kind of face some threats there Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen was Saleh handing over power potentially to his deputy so that what does the Arab Spring kind of writ large and I use that term loosely mean for intelligence gathering mean for kind of this deterrent strategy against violent extremist organizations in this region also moving to the strategic communications aspects that you guys were just discussing to what extent does engaging these jihadis on their kind of home turf potentially legitimize the jihadis themselves and I want to point to with the Kabul attack yesterday and the day before there was an ISAF Twitter account that was directly engaging a Taliban representative was picked up by the telegraph you know the guy had 300 followers the ISAF people had 12,000 followers this 300 guy follower is now going to have bazillions more people so to what extent by engaging these people do we not just legitimize their message and give them a better platform from which to disseminate that information can you just hold your answer because we're running out of time and I want to get this gentleman here and also the gentleman in the middle there because he's being very patient hi John Grady just quick question when you look right up on the Saudi Peninsula how are all of these affiliates being financed and how is Al Qaeda which had this elaborate financial schemes throughout the world how are they continuing to be financed okay and the gentleman in the check shot thank you University of Maryland you spoke at great length about the significance of cyberspace for command and control of terrorist groups could you speak of the continuing relevance for physical areas like Pakistan, Yemen for command and control of terrorist groups great I'll start on the Arab Spring and again we're here in Washington and we have colleagues who are living and working there who are the experts but I guess I'm right now I'm in the glass half empty mode the wonderful excitement and energy that started the Arab Spring clearly proved that Al Qaeda what could be viewed as irrelevant you know an organization that said only through violent extremism can you rid yourself of the yoke of despotic leaders well that was disproven by just you know the energy and the commitment of all of these young people my concern now as the Arab Spring comes into autumn and winter pardon the metaphor is there's a gap between the expectations of last spring and a reality that at least is uncomfortable maybe even failing on the ground and into that gap between reality and expectations is a lot of space for Al Qaeda to operate and so I think they do have tactical advantages to return and we have to say as well that some of those despotic leaders have been deposed were allies and partners of the American government in this campaign so some of those lines of communication have been broken as far as your question about does engaging you know elevate these guys if you read our book you will not think that we believe this government is any good at strategic communications to talking on the funding issue I don't think all the donors have been dried up I think the Saudis and other governments have done a better job going after these but they're still out there and I point you to the WikiLeaks documents that we reported on and I remember writing a story for the Times looking at the really blistering language that State Department diplomats had for officials in Qatar and Kuwait and today even Treasury it doesn't take much to get a Treasury Department official to say something even on the record in terms of these are key allies of course with US forces being based in both countries and yet there is great frustration bordering on anger of this government that Kuwaiti and Qatari governments have not done enough to crack down on these donors their legislatures have not done enough to pass the kind of laws that would make these type of activities illegal in the country so I think there is still quite a source of revenue coming out of those countries and Saudi Arabia is a big place even though the Saudis have made great strides in combating the financing there they're working much more closely with the Americans there are actually Treasury Department officials in Riyadh working side by side in a special counter-terrorism finance cell that they operate and there are still a lot of people in Saudi Arabia who are able to get money to these causes and so it's just a matter of kind of keep focusing if I understood the last question correctly the question of is physical control of the place still important? Absolutely all you have to do is look at a place like North Waziristan and Pakistan this is an area that we talked a little bit about the discussion where the Pakistanis have said essentially we can't go in there and pick your choice pick your reason either way we're spread too thin everywhere else to go in there and the tribal areas are more likely the idea they go in there they're taking on a very determined enemy if they go in there and the idea that that could both be a backlash against them in terms of attacks throughout the rest of Pakistan if they could lose the army could go in there and face some kind of defeat so there's a lot of concerns there on top of the suspicions of course that because the ISI is so close to some of these terrorist networks they have no interest in going after them you look at Yemen right now and the territory that AQIP physically has been able to take and now interestingly enough how American officials are saying they're actually not just interested in driving out the remaining Yemeni security forces but now they're actually taking and holding territory in Yemen and kind of starting to set up as the Taliban has in parts of Afghanistan kind of parallel government if you will it's not nearly as developed of course as Afghanistan is but territory where plotters can continue to plot that's one of the big concerns there I mean John Brennan said a couple of times last week that counterterrorism cooperation Yemeni government has never been any better than it is today well it's kind of like saying the Yemeni government used to control this whole building and we would try and cooperate them and rooting out the extremists that were infiltrated and now they basically control this room well yeah they're going to be cooperating because that's the last, this is the Alamo here folks we're going to be cooperating because the government faces that kind of pressure right now but to say that cooperation's improved is a little bit misleading I think and then finally one of the questioners mentioned Somalia which is a really interesting trend what's happened here is the Shabaab has basically been pushed out by an African Union peacekeeping force that's been there now several years about 9,000 troops that has actually gotten pretty good at doing this kind of urban warfare after some disastrous engagements initially they're still learning but they've actually got more seasoned troops that are coming in from Burundi and Uganda they've got more seasoned commanders pushing them there you've got a number of kind of quietly American contractors who are working there as well doing some training the big question there is Shabaab still controls a lot of the territory outside of Mogadishu area and the big prize of course for them is Kismaya the port of Kismaya is where they derive most of their revenue in terms of port fees and all that so that's going to be the next target I mean if they can break Shabaab's lock on Kismaya in that port you'll really see a turnaround in Kismaya but still I mean it's still very much a country with just the most fledgling of governments I want to thank Eric and Tom for a very stimulating presentation