 I want to thank everyone for coming. My name is Brian Fishman. I'm a counterterrorism research fellow here at the New America Foundation. I appreciate you guys taking the time out to be here today. And it's my pleasure to introduce David Gartstein-Ross to talk about his new book, Bin Laden's Troubled Legacy, which has the sort of provocative subtitle of why Al Qaeda is winning the war on terror. And I just want to, I really want to thank before David starts, I want to thank him for making a provocative argument, because I think too often we don't have provocative arguments made in sort of reasonable terms. And especially when we're talking about something like Al Qaeda, which gets so much attention, you see a lot of the same arguments recycled over and over and over again. And it's very, very useful, I think, to have somebody making an argument that I think is trying to poke the rest of us and force us to look at things in a new and different way. So with that, I'll get out of the way. David will talk for 15, 20 minutes or so, and then we'll do Q&A. Thanks. Thanks, Brian. So I guess I'll get up there. Yeah, sure, please. I'm looking at everybody more easily. Then I'll sit down when I'm done. Hopefully this mic isn't gone also. We'll see if this causes problems. All right. Two Nokia phones, $150 each. Two HP printers, $300 each, plus shipping, transportation, and other miscellaneous expenses adds up to a total bill of $4,200. That is all that Operation Hemorrhage cost us. On the other hand, this supposedly foiled plot, as some of our enemies would like to call it, will without a doubt cost America and other Western countries billions of dollars in new security measures. Thus began the lead article in a special issue of Inspire, the possibly now defunct English language online magazine of the Jihadi group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. It was published in November of 2010. The publication's cover featured a photo of a UPS plane and the striking headline $4,200, which was an unmistakable reference to a recent plot that ACAP had attempted to carry out using printer cartridges with bombs hidden in them. This was a clear statement of where Al Qaeda's strategy was at the time, the statement $4,200, a strategy that has more merit than many Westerners would like to admit. Today I'm going to outline something that my book discusses at length, which is the evolution of Al Qaeda's economic strategy and how it reached its current state. One thing I've learned from my early discussions about the book is that people want answers as to what we do now. As is the case with my book, much of this speech will be backward-looking rather than forward-looking. I do provide some solutions as to what the way ahead is, but rather I do think that history matters without a proper appreciation of the past, and in particular, without a proper appreciation of the very recent past, the past 10 years, it's going to be far more difficult to forge a better way ahead. If we don't even understand the past decade, how can we get our next steps right? So the question is, what have we done before, and what does this mean for future changes to our approach? So let's rewind 10 years to just before the September 11 attacks. Before Al Qaeda launched those devastating attacks, few within government paid any attention to it, and that despite the fact that by the end of 2000, Al Qaeda had executed two dramatic strikes against American targets. Osama bin Laden, who was Al Qaeda's late leader, was born in the late 1950s and traveled to Pakistan in the 1980s, soon after the Afghan-Soviet war began. Once he arrived, bin Laden became a major financier of the Mujahideen, providing cash to relatives of wounded or martyred fighters building hospitals and helping Afghan refugees. But it was his first trip to the front lines in Afghanistan in 1984 that left a lasting impression, and ultimately bin Laden established a base for Arab fighters in eastern Afghanistan in 1986. Now after losing that war, Russia didn't just withdraw from Afghanistan and defeat. The Soviet empire itself collapsed soon thereafter, and bin Laden thought that he had not just helped to drive a superpower out of Afghanistan, but that he had also helped to hasten the Soviet Union's collapse. Now, if one takes this as a given, this reveals one aspect of early Al Qaeda strategy, which is the centrality of economics to fighting against a superpower rival. After all, it's indisputable that the Soviet Union didn't collapse simply because it left Afghanistan. Rather, if one is going to draw a connection between the Soviet withdrawal and later Soviet collapse, the only way this can be done is through economics, through the argument that the costs imposed by the Afghan-Soviet war made it impossible for the Soviet Union to adapt to other challenges that it faced economically, including a grain shortage that gripped the country, and including the massively diminished worldwide price of oil due to a ramp up in Saudi production. The Soviet Union was very dependent upon its own oil exports. The fact that bin Laden did see his fight against a superpower as economic is something that is evident in his later rhetoric. He has on multiple occasions compared the United States to the Soviet Union, and when he has done so, his comparison has been explicitly economic in nature. Another aspect of bin Laden's fight in Afghanistan that carried over into early al-Qaeda strategy was the very broadness of the fight against the Soviet Union. The Soviet invasion outraged the Muslim world and the Arab world, and you had condemnations coming from heads of state, from the clerical class, from the media, from the man on the street. This is why you got so many volunteers, Arab volunteers, flocking to South Asia to help the Afghan cause. It was a testament to the outrage that this invasion caused. These Arab volunteers included humanitarian aid workers, cooks, drivers, accountants, teachers, doctors, engineers, religious preachers, and also a contingent of foreign fighters. It also included a donor network, known as the Golden Chain, whose financiers came primarily from Saudi Arabia and also from other Gulf Arab states. So essentially when one looks at this, bin Laden, during the Afghan Soviet war, sat at the top of a major organization that spanned multiple countries. It included a humanitarian wing, a military wing, as well as a donor base. There was lessons to be drawn from the breadth of the fight against the Soviet Union, lessons that would also carry over into the fight against the United States. So the first problem we encounter right after the 9-11 attacks, and this is a tremendous problem, is that we never fully comprehended al-Qaeda strategy at an official level. To comprehend what I would describe the U.S.'s shallow understanding of al-Qaeda, one need look no further than official documents outlining U.S. thinking in the conflict. For example, the National Military Strategic Plan for the War on Terrorism, NMSBWOT, of course it's acronymized, which was published by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, outlines America's ends, ways, and means in this conflict. And ends, ways, and means are so basic to military strategy. That is, what are, is the end state that an opponent is pursuing and what are the ways and means through which the opponent seeks to bring about this end state. So the NMSBWOT outlines America's ends, ways, and means, but never performs the same analysis for al-Qaeda, which is a glaring omission. The impression one gets is that al-Qaeda does not have an overarching plan. This is an impression one gets from multiple other bodies within government. The White House's National Strategy for Combating Terrorism does somewhat more to explain the goal of America's jihadi foes, talking about their desire to re-establish the caliphate, their desire to expel Western power and influence from the Muslim world, in their words, and establish regimes that rule according to a violent and intolerant distortion of Islam. But this National Strategy for Combating Terrorism also doesn't assess how they intend to get there. Likewise with the 9-11 Commission Report. It talks about Bin Laden's desire to re-establish the caliphate. It talks about the tactic of terrorism. It doesn't connect the two, as though there is an unresolved disconnect between the goal that this adversary seeks to achieve and the tactic that it employs in getting there. So, we're wrong about this. Al-Qaeda has, in fact, proven to be both a determined and also a skillful adversary. So what I'm going to do now is to outline the evolution of al-Qaeda's strategy over the past decade. We start with terrorist attacks in the economy. Bin Laden's perception of the 9-11 attacks was elucidated at length in October 2001 in an interview he gave with an Al Jazeera journalist named Tessir Al-Lune. It's significant contemporaneous evidence of what Bin Laden intended through these attacks. The very first thing he talks about that he believes al-Qaeda accomplished through these attacks was economic. According to their own admissions, he said, referring to the Americans, the share of losses on the Wall Street market reached 16%. They say this number is a record. Then he continued providing an exposition of the actual economic costs that this entailed, as well as associated costs, which showed that he'd given a great deal of thought to the economic damage that he had inflicted upon American society. The gross amount that is traded on that market reaches $4 trillion, he said. So if we multiply 16% by $4 trillion to find out the loss that affected the stocks, it reaches $640 billion of losses from stocks. But he knew that direct damage wasn't the extent of the damage. He also talked about loss productivity, building and construction losses. Essentially, he was speaking the economic language of the Wall Street Journal in describing what he thought the 9-11 attacks had wrought upon the United States. In a video that Bin Laden released in October, 2004, just before the U.S. elections that year, he amplified this analysis by pointing out how much damage 9-11 inflicted on the United States in comparison to the much smaller costs for al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda, he said, spent $500,000 on the event, while America, in the incident and its aftermath, was lost by the lowest estimate, more than $500 billion, meaning that every dollar of al-Qaeda defeated a million dollars. This statement by Bin Laden typifies what asymmetric warfare strategy is. Every one of our dollars defeated a million of their dollars, he said. Some of the U.S.'s reactions after the 9-11 attacks in establishing its counterterrorism apparatus and strategy have helped to further drive up the costs of possible terrorist attacks, including the inefficiency of our system of homeland defense. As I'll discuss, al-Qaeda's strategy would later come to rely upon exploiting this inefficiency. So a second facet of al-Qaeda's economic strategy for combating the U.S. has been to embroil it in bleeding wars overseas. Bin Laden also explicitly referred to this. The U.S. had a clear interest in taking military action in Afghanistan following 9-11 to deprive al-Qaeda of its sanctuary there. But exploration of further military actions against Iraq also began almost immediately. In November 2001, the Pentagon began formal consideration of plans to attack Iraq. Now if one has a proper understanding of al-Qaeda's strategy and that two prongs of strategy that I outlined economically undermine the U.S. and also make the war with the U.S. as broad as possible, it was entirely conceivable that the Iraq war could end up furthering both of these prongs of al-Qaeda's strategy. And I would argue that that's exactly what it did. The Iraq war was of course a very costly war, costing more than a trillion dollars in direct budgetary outlays and much more when you account for second-order economic consequences. But in addition, the Iraq invasion helped the other major element of al-Qaeda's strategy by feeding the overarching narrative that Islam itself was under attack and in fact drawing a number of people from neighboring states into the Iraq theater to fight against the United States. Long before the financial crisis hit, Bin Laden recognized that the invasion of Iraq played into his strategy of economic warfare. He spoke of this in the major address I just referred to that Al Jazeera broadcast in October of 2004. The overarching theme of that address was economic and he talked about how al-Qaeda was succeeding in its strategy of bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. He said that it was easy to bait the United States that al-Qaeda only needed to send two Mujahideen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human economic and political losses. And in a September 2007 video message, Bin Laden explicitly compared the US to the Soviet Union. He claimed that thinkers who study events and happenings were now predicting the American empire's collapse, comparing President Bush to Leonid Brezhnev who was the architect of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He said the mistakes of Brezhnev are now being repeated by Bush. This strategy of economic warfare would go through other phases. One of them was focusing attacks on a key economic vulnerability, that is the US's dependence upon imported oil. There have been several attempts at the oil supply in Saudi Arabia. But the dramatic collapse of the American economy in September 2008 ushered in a new phase in al-Qaeda strategy providing the US. This collapse made America seem mortal. It's a perception that is apparent throughout the ranks of Jihadi spokesmen as well as the rank and file. For example, the late Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Alaki said, due to this jihad, the US economy is reeling today. America cannot withstand this Islamic nation. It is too weak. America's cunning is weaker than a spider web. Online jihadi commentators also refer frequently to diminished US economy and to America's perceived mortality. This perception of imminent victory has produced adaptations to al-Qaeda strategy. The new phase has been described in inspire as the strategy of a thousand cuts. Inspire lucidly explains that large strikes such as those of 9-11 are, in its view, no longer required to defeat the United States. But rather, it says, to bring down America, we do not need to strike big. In such an environment of security phobia that is sweeping America, it is more feasible to stage smaller attacks that involve less players and less time to launch. And thus we may circumvent the security barriers America worked so hard to erect. These attacks don't even need to be carried out by individuals who are recognizable members of al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda, the organization, is attempting to harness something that is so important and so prominent in our public discourse. That is, al-Qaeda, the idea. Al-Qaeda encourages self-motivated supporters to focus on targets that will advance the organization's strategy of warfare. One great example is a two-hour video released in June, 2011, which urged Muslims to buy guns and attack targets of opportunity in the United States. The video emphasized economic targets, displaying the locos of Exxon, Merrill Lynch, and Bank of America. Indeed, rank and file jihadis and their online supporters seem to have internalized the importance of striking economic targets based on a review of their online discussions. In this new strategy of 1,000 cuts, whether attacks succeed in killing al-Qaeda's enemies may be beside the point. If an attack breaches the enemy's security, it will significantly drive up costs, even if it kills nobody and causes no structural damage. As Al-Qaeda noted and inspired, blowing up cargo planes in the ink cartridge plot would have made us very pleased, but according to our plan and specified objectives, it was only a plus. The attack, in his view, could be considered a success even without killing anybody. Others jihadist statements also reflect an awareness that even failed attacks can succeed in their objectives explicitly by driving up costs. Security is expensive and these costs can grind down Western economies. One analogy that I use frequently in describing my overall argument is actually something that came from a political science journal, International Security, published just about three months before the 9-11 attacks in September of 2001, an article entitled How the Week When Wars. And it began with an extended look at the famed Rumble in the Jungle boxing match that Muhammad Ali and George Foreman fought in Zaire in October of 1974. George Foreman had been heavily favored in that fight. He was the strongest, most powerful boxer of his generation. Muhammad Ali was definitely the underdog. In the match, rather than going to the center of the ring, Muhammad Ali retreated and leaned against the ropes and sometimes whispered horse taunts at George Foreman who lost his temper and his blows became a blur as he hit Muhammad Ali again and again. What Foreman didn't realize and what the spectators didn't realize is that the elastic ring ropes were actually absorbing the majority of the blows. Essentially, George Foreman's strength was turned into a weapon against him. As the harder he hit, the more tired he became. He was visibly exhausted by the fifth round and by the eighth round, Muhammad Ali knocked him out pulling off a stunning upset. In How the Week When Wars, the argument that that article advances is that this is exactly how a relatively small weak power like Al Qaeda or another non-state actor can defeat a superpower like the United States by turning its very strength into a weapon against it. One can see how well Al Qaeda has in fact over the past decade incorporated similar lessons. Al Qaeda and its affiliates are well aware of the costs that guaranteeing security from the threat of terrorism impose upon America and impose upon our national debt. A key step in moving forward is to recognize how jihadi militants are replicating Muhammad Ali's rope-a-dope strategy for defeating George Foreman. In the jihadis view, as the United States spends more and more to defend itself against terrorism, it makes itself weaker and easier to knock out rather than making itself stronger. Thanks, David. I guess I'm gonna ask a few questions and then we'll do Q and A. You raise really critical and central issues here about what Al Qaeda strategy is and I tend to agree with you that there has been far too little discussion of how Al Qaeda intends to get there from here. Especially in the United States and one of the things I wanna come back to a little bit later is why don't we have a more mature discussion in Washington about these specific things. But I do think it's worth sort of interrogating a little bit this notion that Al Qaeda is so strategic and far-seeing and is able to develop these strategies. I mean, Bin Laden laid out this economic approach in October of 2001, not in August. It was after the attack, even if it was around the same time period. That said, there are other documents. I was reminded as you were talking of Abu Bakr Naji's, the management of savagery, which lays out a very sort of similar sort of framework and sort of economic exhaustion. So my question is, how can we be certain and are we giving Al Qaeda too much credit for strategic foresight and how do we differentiate their propaganda from actual strategic framing? Because that's one of the hardest challenges for any of us doing research on this question. I think some people do give them too much credit. I think my book doesn't, I'll explain in a second, but one example of giving them too much credit, I think, is Bruce Riedel's book on the search for Al Qaeda. And I don't dislike Riedel as an analyst at all. This is not against Riedel, but I disagree with him on a point that he makes in the book where he says that one of the purposes of the 9-11 attacks was to draw the United States into both Afghanistan and Iraq. I don't think Bin Laden had the foresight that the US would ultimately enter Iraq. I have not seen any evidence suggesting that he had that in mind. But to me, strategy is not so much having a strategy map, especially when you're a small non-state actor who does not get to drive strategy the way the US does get to have a broader plan. Strategy isn't, you have a master plan mapped out and things proceed exactly as you want. Rather, strategy, much of strategy is adapting to changing circumstances. And I think what Al Qaeda has done is they've done a good job of adapting to changing circumstances and they've explained how. Now, I agree that in some of this, there are propagandistic statements. And clearly, when one looks to things like destroying the United States through these small attacks, they're not gonna, small attacks are not gonna be the death of America. So they're even within things that I think are meritorious arguments. There's also propaganda embedded within that. These are both strategic and also propagandistic statements. But I think when you look at what they're explaining each step of the way, one can see that the strategy is a coherent strategy. And some of it, sometimes they will succeed more than they believe. Sometimes they will fail and thus, those failures never make their way into the overarching strategic calculus that they hail. But I mean, for me, what I ended up doing is A, not assuming that Al Qaeda had it all mapped out in advance. And B, also looking at trying to separate propaganda from actual strategy by looking both at the realistic nature of what they claim. And second, comparing that to actual actions, I think that's a good way to see whether the strategy is actually mapping for each phase. So it's interesting, much of the evidence that you just marshaled in, quite a bit of what you talk about in the book is generated from AQAP, which is striking because this is, I think, most intelligence analysts in the United States and certainly what we see in the media suggests AQAP represents the largest threat to the United, to the U.S. homeland at this time. But that was not the case 10 years ago. At the same time, there is a lot of, some might call it triumphalism, it might be how you would frame it, talk about the elimination of Al Qaeda or the defeat of Al Qaeda, whatever that means exactly. Especially in the wake of the death of Osama bin Laden. And in a variety of subsequent strikes that I think are quite important as well. How does the sort of the relative rise of the affiliates versus the center impact this strategy in the way that you think about it? Well, for one thing, I may agree with what you said about Al Qaeda and the Arabian Peninsula coming to the fore. And you know, AQAP is a little bit unique among the affiliates. It's much more of a branch than an affiliate given its historical relationship with Al Qaeda. But what I saw prior to bin Laden's death is kind of this division in which AQAP seemed to be more focused on propagandizing to Westerners, carrying out smaller scale attacks that could still cause a great deal of damage, Umar Faruq Abdel Mathalab, and the two ink cartridge bombs, both of which ultimately got onto passenger planes after being put onto FedEx and UPS planes. While the Pakistani central leadership, among other things, was focused on carrying out larger scale strikes. The October 2010 plots that were designed to carry out a number of urban warfare style, Mumbai style attacks in Europe, were examples of what was intended to be larger strikes. I think they moved to a bit of a division of labor. But you know, the rise of the affiliates means number one that, well, first of all, there's going to be the question, right, about what is the relationship between the core and the affiliates? And you know, prior to Bin Laden's death, I'd been on the side of Bin Laden probably playing a greater role in formulating Al-Qaeda strategy for the affiliates than many people thought. And I think that so far, it seems that the Abadabad documents tend to bear that out. My own view is that at least right now, the central leadership still remains very important because it can turn these affiliates from being essentially regional threats to being more strategic threats to the United States. That if you didn't have, now that might become less so over time because obviously we live in a world in which there's massively improved communication technology. You don't necessarily have to communicate through a core. But I still tend to think that the core is fairly important in transforming things from regional actors to more global actors. Why don't we have this conversation better? Right? This is a massive gap that you're identifying, right? I mean, I would go one step further in some ways than you would have. I think that we oftentimes don't look at the, even the end state that Al-Qaeda would like to achieve in a realistic way. It's sort of reflected as this sort of specter of the caliphate rather than really understanding what they mean by that. But you're talking about something a little bit different which is the gap of strategy. Why haven't we had that conversation and what do we do to have that conversation rather than just saying, what policies do we take over the next decade as opposed to the last decade? How do we make this conversation better over the next decade? Because ultimately what we're dealing with here is not just what should our perfect strategy be but how do we adapt going forward? How do we improve the way that we develop our counter-terrorism policy? I think, I talked to a number of planners in government. I mean, there's two parts to the question. How do we, all of us including us outside of government have this conversation better than there's a question since a lot of this strategy is of course gonna be flowing through the US government. How do you have this conversation better within government? So starting with the government piece of the puzzle, I talked to a number of people who were active in formulating US strategy within government, asking them, first of all, do you think there's something I'm missing? Do you think that there's actually some good strategic document which outlines all of it? The answer was, but from all of them was no. Charlie Allen, who was working to head up DHS's Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the argument that he made is, yeah, I mean, we really should have done this, but we were so busy trying to prevent various threats that we didn't have the time. And actually, all things considered, DHS is one of the branches that I think Leece needs to do that analysis because it really is just charged with defending against a potential threat. Not that it wouldn't be helpful, but it's one of the branches I'm more forgiving of. But I think that the second thing, which was offered to me by Brian Michael Jenkins of the Rand Corporation, is that we just didn't see terrorists as being worthy adversaries, which is a little bit perverse because on the other hand, we poured a lot of money into this and legitimately did go to war with a certain subset of terrorist organizations. But I think that there's a view that, unlike the Soviets and the Cold War, unlike German generals during World War II, we didn't really need to study these guys and understand what their overarching strategy is. And the NMSPWT, the National Military Strategic Plan for the War on Terror, actually makes the argument that they didn't need to understand the strategy because it's a diffuse organization with no overarching goal, which isn't entirely correct. I mean, I think that their lack of strategic appreciation is a major, major oversight. So within government, I think that a frank acknowledgement of the errors we've made over the past decade is an important part of that. Outside of government, to me, it comes down to just having a better framework for thinking about these issues. Oftentimes, a better framework and also I think making this discussion a little bit more evidence-based. One bad tendency, I think, outside of government is often you'll have people who've held top security clearances, make declarative statements about what Al Qaeda is all about without any proof with just the assumption that they should be believed because they'd been in such and such a position. I think there are thinkers, like one person I respect a lot is Bruce Hoffman, whose work I think tends to be very evidence-based and very well mapped out in that regard. I think it's important because now we have a huge stock of material and much more so once these abodabod documents become declassified. I think it's really possible to have these evidence more rooted in evidence. But when one is a strategist or is involved in strategy at any level, you have to have a basic appreciation of what strategy entails. And a lot of our discussions seem to have proceeded without those foundational questions of what makes a strategy? How do we conceptualize a terrorist organization? And I think as our field becomes a bit more mature, my hope is that people will be better at doing that and you'll get other disciplines that play more a role in guiding these discussions. Does your argument imply that we win simply by spending less? One can't necessarily say that. It depends on what we spend less on. I don't think that every dollar spent is a victory for Al Qaeda, nor is every dollar saved a victory for the United States. But systemically, yes. I mean, if we had spent less over the past decade, we would have been much better off. I mean, I would phrase it this way. I would frame it this way. If you look at us a decade ago, Al Qaeda, it had been laden clearly and this is unequivocal in his own writings and speeches. He even said this publicly. He was accessible to us. He clearly identified the US's economy as its key strength, the key thing that made the US a military power. So one thing that goes into the calculation is not just what do we wanna do with this adversary, but what is it that the adversary wants to undermine and how do we make sure that they don't succeed in doing that? I mean, what I see is if you look at the past decade, I see us expending a lot of our resources without thinking about what will the impact be long term. And it's particularly problematic when we've expended resources in a manner which isn't reflective of having a strategy. Like often, the drone wars to me are one example of where we have often, not always, but often mistaken a tactic for a strategy. Yeah, let's come back to that. And I'll ask my final question and we'll go to Q and A, which involves the drone fight because they have proved very successful in taking out the central leadership and are now being used in Yemen and in other places around the world. And that has led many in Washington to conclude that the fight against al-Qaeda is very successful. I mean, where do you see that today? What happens if I'm in Al-Zawahiri is killed? Does that impact the argument that you're making? And if so, how does it? Well, Zawahiri being killed would because what that would mean is the rate of attrition within the organization at the very top level would be, if you had two killed within like a seven month period, I would have to reassess my argument in my view. I mean, so far nothing that's happened has changed my view, but there are some things that can come along and change one's view. There are also unknowns that could actually alter my argument in important ways. For example, one thing that's largely unknown is al-Qaeda's budget. I mean, there's an interesting article that came out late last year by Shazad, a journalist who was killed by ISI. And what it indicates is that al-Qaeda had about a $23 million budget to spend inside of Pakistan, independent of its eternal operations budget. We have a few windows in, but there are certain things that can be far different that could actually significantly change my analysis. And at the end of the day, I try to account for those unknowns, but there's always, the Soviet Union was much structurally weaker than analysts thought it was in the 1980s and then it collapsed. That was based on a misreading of certain factors. So I acknowledge that there could be certain things, my analysis gets wrong. But as to the state of the network, one thing that I've recommended quite a bit since my book has come out, one piece of writing is a thesis written at Fort Leavenworth School of Advanced Military Studies called the Form, Function, and Logic of clandestine cellular networks written by a then major named Derek Jones. And it looks at another one of these key questions that we don't talk about enough. And that key question is what is the impact of losing a leader in a position on a network, on what he calls a clandestine cellular network? And the argument he makes is that it has almost no long-term impact. Like that you can't just defeat an enemy like this through attrition at top levels of the organization. I think it makes a very compelling case. I think that there are a few holes in it. I mean, one of the holes is, what about an ideologue? Like, I think he is actually more valuable to the organization than an analysis that just looks at possible replacements will factor in. But the overall argument he makes is you can't just win through a war of attrition at top levels of the organization. Rather, it has to be mapped into an overall strategy. He has some interesting strategic recommendations. But to me that's a very important work in its analysis. And it looks specifically at Al Qaeda in Iraq. Also, Israel's experience with fighting against Hamas is another good indication of where they've wiped out the leadership on multiple occasions. But it's not as though Hamas has gone away. And to me that is one of these very important questions. We need to understand what the impact is of killing any given leader on the network. And if the impact isn't that great, then we really are mistaking a tactic for a strategy. Yeah, I lied. I'm gonna ask one more question, which is that does a strategy that spends less? I mean, the argument when it hits the sort of real world, people will interpret a strategy that spends less as one that accepts more risk. Is that true? Do we need to understand and be able to accept more risk? You know, you see hints coming out from the note. You know, no politician is gonna say that, right? But you see hints from the administration when they talk about the need to have, need to improve resilience and those sorts of things that acknowledge the fact that that risk is there and that at some point there will be another attack of some kind. Do we have to acknowledge more risk? Do we have to accept it? Or do we simply need to allocate resources better? And if so, I'll let the audience will probably ask Cal, but. I mean, that's a very good question. It's a critical question. I mean, I think that the first thing we need to do is the easy thing, which is allocate resources better. When it comes to the question of, do we have to accept more risk? I mean, the first thing I would want to do is to improve our efficiency of policing efforts. But when it comes down to it, when you're looking at a budget with numerous threats, we've been operating essentially as though we have a zero risk paradigm for terrorism. And it's caused a lot of spending in this area. And I question whether, you know, spending this much really makes us safer overall. Now, you have to, I mean, the thing that I'm most concerned about protecting against is the large-scale attack. I mean, I'm not gonna answer that. I'm actually gonna boot this question. I very rarely boot questions. But just because it's a difficult question to answer in the abstract, but my gut tells me that the answer may be yes. Okay. Questions from the audience? Anybody? Folks are shy? Yes, sir. Well, wait for the microphone will come around and please say your name and affiliation and ask. Sure, my name is Robert. My name is Robert, I'm a private citizen. And in your view, where do you think that al-Qaeda has the greatest presence or influence at the moment? Thank you. That's a good question. I mean, I'd say that there are four areas that could legitimately be considered safe havens to one degree or another. And those are the tribal areas of Pakistan, parts of Yemen, Northern Mali, and Southern Somalia. Of those, the area which I see as the greatest concern at the moment for a terrorist attack would be Yemen. I see the greatest long-term concern as being Pakistan, because I believe that's where the group is gonna relocate unless Zawar Hurri is killed or unless he decides to go to Yemen because it's a more favorable operating environment. And I'd see Somalia as the area where depending, I mean, I'm only now coming around to the view that we have a coherent strategy for Somalia. So I'm trying now to map out what the impact of that strategy is gonna be. I mean, it's had a lot of gains over the course of the past, say, three or four months. And part of the question is, are these gains gonna be sustainable gains? But I mean, looking at the history of Somalia and the fact that improving the governance of the Somalia's transitional federal government is gonna be very difficult. I'd say Somalia is the area where they're most prime to have a lasting presence. I'll keep asking questions until the audience is ready. Part of the evolution of al-Qaida, I would argue, has been driven by the success we've had in our direct counterterrorism operations, the drones, the pressure that we've been able to apply on Pakistan. It seems to me that at least some of al-Qaida's strategy has fundamentally been chosen by us rather than them in the sense that we have destroyed and taken apart their ability to focus on these large-scale attacks. I mean, to what extent has al-Qaida learned or to become the organization and network that it is today? And to what extent is it just sort of a process of not exactly natural selection, but perhaps unnatural selection in terms of our targeting capabilities? I mean, I'd say it's a mix of both. I think it's more a process of natural selection as you put it because one thing they've had to do is to learn on the fly against a country coming at them with all of its might. Before that, I think they did, al-Qaida, of course, emerged from the Afghan-Soviet war. This was something that in the waning days of the Afghan-Soviet war, Osama bin Laden and Abdullah Azam, who is his mentor, ended up setting up in order to make sure the jihad didn't just end with Afghanistan. But they did a fairly good job of setting themselves up. You had his efforts in Sudan early on, then moved to Afghanistan. Each step of the way, there were occasional attempts against al-Qaida, so they improved their resiliency each time and steeled themselves as much as they could prior to the September 11th attacks. And that being said, the US's response to 9-11 almost wiped al-Qaida out as an organization. I mean, there will be debate for many years about Torah Bora and what would have happened if in this decisive battle in December of 2001, the US, rather than relying upon Pakistani forces, had ended up committing US troops to try to intercept fleeing al-Qaida leaders. But I think there's a decent case to be made, as your colleague Peter Bergen does, that had the US done this, that could have, maybe not been the end of al-Qaida, but could have perhaps have, the organization may have existed, but it might have eliminated the organization as a strategic threat. What that shows us is what I said at the outset, which is that in determining between the two, I think the process of evolution through natural or unnatural selection is probably the more important of the two, because what they had prior to 9-11 really wasn't good enough. They still got almost destroyed in Afghanistan. And so since then, there's been much more of a pressure on operational security, on resiliency of the network and the like. One of the things, when you say we need to spend less, and I completely agree with you, and I, the sections of the book that I really find incredibly compelling are those about our inability to sort of have reasonable discussion about these issues. But when we sort of look at the use of drones in particular and pressure on the al-Qaida network with kinetic means, one of the things that happens is, we look at that environment and we always sort of say, well, we're going to transition from this tactic to something else. We're going to empower our local partners to step into the gap, and we will suppress the threat for now, and then our local partner is gonna step in. And that empowering of a local partner seems to be a natural way to think about how we spend less on these problems. But empowering local partners is something that we have proved very bad at. We have not had a lot of success doing this. Can we improve that process? How do we improve that process? Especially when we're talking about Pakistan, we're talking about a Yemen in the midst of tremendous problems and even in other partner areas, Iraq and other places where things seem to be going a little bit better. It's a very difficult question to answer, which is going to very much depend upon the particular areas of what's going on at that point. What I would say is we should have how to do that in mind as we enter a military campaign. As I said, I turned to Somalia before briefly to say that I've come around to the idea that we actually have a strategy in Somalia. I mean, several months ago I didn't think that we did. I've actually, at some point I'll write about it because it certainly hasn't come up in the open source literature before. But drones are part of a more comprehensive strategy, whether it can last, that's a question. But one example of a drone campaign that occurred without a strategy, in my view, is the drone campaign in Yemen in December of 2009, where we didn't have the, we didn't have the people on the ground mapped very well, ended up killing a lot of people who shouldn't have been killed. And this is something that generated resentment towards the United States, as well as some positive views towards al-Qaeda in the areas where we bombed. It was, perhaps, could be considered somewhat of a tactical victory, but at a great strategic cost. That's why I think that having a strategy in mind, and the second thing is at the outset, mapping in terms of intelligence as much as you can in order to, understanding that civilian casualties, particularly certain individuals, major leaders of tribes, for example, or clans in Somalia, that's something that can have a major impact in terms of making the US look bad and potentially driving people into the hands of the adversary. I think that happens at the outset. Now, how do you have a local element empowered? Well, the best example of where that occurred is, of course, Iraq and Anbar province in 2007, where one of the major things that went right for us in... It's kind of like we talked about how al-Qaeda strategy has often been determined by the US. This is a major area in which the US's success was actually determined by al-Qaeda. Like, one of the things that really went right is that al-Qaeda had massively overplayed its hand in Anbar. And as a result, you already were having an indigenous backlash, and the US jumped on that, partnered itself with the awakening, but it took a while for the US to come around to the awakening. I mean, the awakening really was, it wasn't just something that the US had set up, it really was an indigenous movement against al-Qaeda that pre-existed, the US even really taking note of it. And similarly, I think in areas where al-Qaeda has been strongest, that's usually where it's most unpopular. Now, there's questions about Somalia because when you're competing against anarchy, no matter how brutal you are, you might actually come across as popular because you're still better than anarchy conditions. But certainly, Shabab's involvement in the current famine, you have a drought in all of the Horn of Africa. The areas that are most hit by famine are those areas which are controlled by Shabab, in part because Shabab kicked non-governmental organizations that were providing humanitarian aid out of these areas. There are reports, although I mean, I can't substantiate this, but there are reports of Shabab actually moving Somalis in refugee camps back into the famine stricken areas. If those reports are true, then you're going to have a great deal of resentment on the ground against this organization, which will make them vulnerable to there being local partners. And as I said, in Somalia, quite clearly, the US is actually trying to empower local partners. So I think that it's been something we've been bad at. There have been some successes and looking at the various factors of what went right and those successes is going to be one important part of the various things I laid out in addition to intelligence strategy and then conditions that can give rise to robust local partners. Yes. How about right behind Jennifer, and then we'll move forward. Hi, Pam Benson from CNN. You mentioned El Alaki was more valuable to the organization. Was that strictly as an English propagandist as an operations leader? And do you see anyone that could replace him as an English speaker? Yeah, that's precisely what I mean, that he was valuable to the organization as an English propagandist, that he was someone who had this unique mix of being seen as theologically legitimate by his followers as speaking perfect English, being familiar with the Western and particularly the US cultural context and also being charismatic. I'm not going to say that nobody will step in and fill in the void. I mean, there are some very charismatic quasi-jihadi spokesmen throughout the world who are kind of like what Alaki was prior to becoming Alaki in Yemen. He was this kind of quasi on the fringe figure where he'd kind of be within the lines, kind of outside the lines. I think there are other figures who can make the transition from being an on-the-line figure to an I've thrown in all my weight with Alkaida figure, but it's not clear that that's going to happen. So for Alaki, I'm sure that there'll be other spokesmen like him. I'm not sure that you'll have another spokesman who's as good. I mean, you look at Alkaida's first major English language propagandist, Adam Gadan, and he's an embarrassment. I mean, he's this guy who speaks like English isn't his first language even though it is, who mispronounces words. He wouldn't even be charismatic in Lord of the Rings, which is clearly the universe that he's come from. All right. Yeah, right here. I'd like to. My name is Aisha and I'm a TV reporter with Voice of America. So I would like to go back to the very basic question. What would, in your viewpoint, what would have been the right strategy then to counter Alkaida? And then where does the tactic or the strategy of negotiations with the terrorists fit in? Okay, so quickly before you give up the mic, for the first question, what would have been the right strategy? You mean just overall over the course of the past 10 years? Yes, in your viewpoint. Okay. So as to the first question, what would have been a better strategy? I think that the very first thing, and this is what I point to as the Keystone Error, is map Alkaida strategy. Like before you go to war, understand what it is your opponent is after. And I think if you have Alkaida strategy mapped as well as you can at the outset, without the, well, this is a diffuse organization, no unified goal, then you're going to end up making less errors along the way. I think that basically take the two strategic goals that I put forward from Alkaida and try to combat both of them. One, he wants to make us spend a lot of money, and two, he wants to make the war as broad as possible. So at the very outset, you're limited to Afghanistan. Try to eliminate Alkaida in Afghanistan, Pakistan, if you can. Don't move on to Iraq, don't start drawing military resources away, because the war in Afghanistan would have looked very, very different had we not suddenly gone into Iraq with the drawdown of CIA, special forces and other things that entailed. So that's the first thing, keep it narrow. Second, when we set up the Homeland Security apparatus, look, I'm not going to pound my fist too heavily on all of that because there was a fog of war effect, and legitimately within government, they were trying to prevent another attack. But I think that the glee that was almost taken in the inefficiency of certain measures was problematic. One example of this is TSA lines, where there's very much a boastfulness in the US government about how everyone's being treated the same in TSA. And let me be clear, I'm not advocating racial profiling, which I think is probably the least effective means of profiling, but look at things like, if you look at terrorist profiles across a broad range of terrorists, one thing you don't find is like four-year-old terrorists. You also tend not to find very old suicide bombers. I mean, there are various ways that you can try to limit down the people who are searched. To me, one example I give a lot is Al Gore during one trip to Wisconsin being singled out for secondary screening twice. And regardless of what people think of Al Gore's politics, he's probably not gonna blow up a plane. Now, that's only one example, of course, or two examples, since it's Al Gore two times. But when you aggregate it through the system, it ends up being an enormous inefficiency, that there's someone who's a known quantity and you know they're not a terrorist, but you're gonna search them anyway because there's a concern that you wanna treat everybody the same way. And I think that that indicates the kind of inefficiency that when, where we were a decade ago, you're this massively rich country that could afford inefficiency. You could understand why this went into effect. But the fact is, when you're dealing with more constrained resources, you actually have to set up your checkpoint security and other kinds of security more efficiently. And that's just one example. But I think setting up, looking at the system and trying to make sure from the outset that you have efficiency applied to all of these areas. And I'll put one more thing as kind of a prior concern, which is not just Al Qaeda strategy, but also what are the strengths that we have that make us a powerful country and a powerful opponent for Al Qaeda. And that also gets back to actually the same set of resources that I'm talking about. And one more reason that you need to strength, structure Homeland Security in many ways, in so many ways, in a more efficient manner. And the thing that I always put forward as the easiest thing to make our efforts much more efficient is civil service reform. And I'm gonna keep saying this, that we wouldn't be as reliant upon contractors, which tend to be more expensive, not that individual contractors are greedy, but there's a lot of overhead that goes into that. We wouldn't be so reliant if we had civil service reform where federal employees could be hired and fired more like in the private sector, where it's not almost impossible to get rid of people. Now, I think that I'm not too optimistic that this is going to happen, but I keep saying it because it's to me one of those clear areas where if we did it, it would be tremendously good for our government. As to negotiations with terrorists, you know, it's one of those things that comes down to who the so-called terrorists are. I mean, there are certain, when you look at Al Qaeda, and I say so-called because certain Taliban groups I wouldn't classify as being terrorists, but within Al Qaeda, they have a pretty well-mapped ideology that leaves no room for gray area. I mean, they see those who don't subscribe to their interpretation of Islam as being enemies, and they've shown that both in their attacks against the West and also killing other Muslims who they perceive as not being good Muslims. So I think people who are Al Qaeda core members, there's not a whole lot of room for sitting down and talking things over at all in my view. Whereas when it comes to different groups that have gotten drawn in for other reasons, there's much more room to talk. When you map out Taliban groups, and like I said, this is why I use the term so-called terrorists, for certain Taliban groups, some of them are in Afghanistan doing basically what has always happened in Afghan war, which is switching sides, going with the victor. There are other people who have financial incentives to be part of the battle, then there are others who are more kind of hardcore and what we term irreconcilables. I think if you have a good mapping and a good understanding of who you're talking to, it can be valuable, but I mean, talking for the sake of talking can either waste your time or perhaps even be counterproductive if you're, for example, sitting down at the table with Ahmad al-Sawahiri and you think you might find common ground. Why don't we come up here and then we'll go back this way? This is a really interesting conversation. I'm, excuse me, I'm Mitzi Wortham with the Naval Postgraduate School, and I've been around a long time. And my experience with the military was that they were so amored and amored with technologies are force multiplier. That was the way in which everything was looked at. The need to understand other people was just not a part of the mix among the policy people as well. Now, there are real changes going on and what I find so fascinating is the changes that are going on in the military schools where I know a young woman who's gonna be a junior at the Naval Academy who's gonna be spending nine months in China working on her Chinese. I mean, who would have thought of that 10 years ago? So from that perspective, I think there's hope, but there's this other problem which is hubris, which is, of course we're number one, and I don't know how you deal with that. And I guess my question for you is, how would you feel if some other nation invaded the US and said, we wanna tell you how to run your country? And the assumption that we feel we can do that to other countries, I find baffling. Yeah, I mean, in response to that question, I think it depends on the nation and how good their food was. And... No, I mean, obviously the answer there is quite, with the caveat that it depends upon the context. Right, I mean, there are certain... It always depends on the context. Right, that's absolutely correct. But there are certain areas, like for example, in Afghanistan, that's an area where I think things could have gone much better in part because it's a country with such a history of foreign invasion that if you have an appreciation for the history and you define your mission in limited ways, it actually has a much greater chance for success than say Iraq, where it's not a country. I mean, you had the British invasion there in the 1920s, but it's a much more perilous thing to do. Likewise, the history of the Horn of Africa is a history of multiple nations invading each other. The expansion of Somalia, the expansion of Ethiopia, British involvement, Italian involvement. It means remarkable just how much conquest was going on there. And then state collapse in Somalia, just like you had state collapse in Afghanistan. I think those areas, like when you're going in to try to remedy a failed state, that's always when your chance of success is the best. But I mean, so I took a question where the answer was fairly obvious to put a little bit of caveats in there, but bottom line is absolutely, like A, cultural appreciation and B, invading a country should always be your absolute, absolute last resort. I mean, the only time you might be perceived in a positive way is when you're going in and trying to write a failed state as opposed to topple a government and tell people how to live their lives. Let's go back here, Jennifer. Hi, my name is specialist Justin Arrington. I'm a civil affairs soldier with the Army. Thanks for making this, think a little bit harder about this. Thank you. It's pretty helpful. I guess my question is we have this concept in small unit tactics in the military where if we're going out on a mission and one of our soldiers gets hit, the first priority is not necessarily to establish aid on that soldier, it's to change the conditions on the battlefield that led to that casualty. And so the question that that evokes in my mind for you is why is the flip side seem to be more prevalent of that approach where in the policy realm where casualty avoidance is the objective and there's not much of a demand for a mission, because we're in military, we're a little more comfortable taking a blow or two, as long as there's an objective involved, there's a mission that we're supporting. Casualty avoidance isn't the objective at the end of the day, it has an element. So how does that kind of flip side work in the policy realm? Well, I think it's political. I mean, just bluntly, and this, Brian and I were talking a little bit in terms of how much risk acceptance should we have? And it was even a question that I booted, which I so infrequently do to questions. But I think the reason comes down to, that there's this assumption, and I'll give you a set of argument, which I very much dislike. It's the argument that the American people could not handle another terrorist attack. This is an argument that comes up when there's a, it's come up a number of times when I point to a certain policy and say, this policy is a bad policy. And the response I get is, but the American people could not handle another terrorist attack. What that response is saying is, I think that if there were another major terrorist attack, the American people would respond so badly that we have to have bad policy that can marginally make us safer from that other attack on the assumption that the American people would then do something even worse. This is problematic because it's a fear of your own populations overreaction that causes you to make bad policy in the first place. I think that instead we should try to make good policy and rational policy. So I mean, that's what the answer is. The military is an environment where people know what they're getting into. And so there's an expectation that people accept a certain amount of risk, but there's not the same sort of expectation for the American people. And the bottom line is that we can never live in a 100% risk-free environment. I mean, that's just something which we don't have. There will never be a 100% safe from terrorism. That doesn't mean that we should stay up cowering. It just means that there is risk in life. And I think it's important to just make good policy as opposed to making policy based upon, making suboptimal policy, which is dictated by certain political considerations, whether fear of American overreaction or just fear of something happening on one's watch. The only thing I'll just quickly add to that is two of my colleagues here at the New America Foundation, Peter Bergen and Andrew Lievovich and Jennifer in the back as well. Jennifer Roland in the back. Recently did a study where they looked and they said since 2001, 17 Americans have been killed in the homeland from jihadi terrorism as opposed to about 72 Americans killed in hate crimes during the same period, about 15,000 Americans killed every year in murders. So just to understand the scale of what we've dealt with, now there have been some near misses obviously over Troy a couple of years ago and a variety of other plots as well that would have dramatically raised those numbers, but it is worth keeping the scale in mind. Yeah, in the back Jennifer. John Walcom from Bloomberg. Just a quick comment on the last point which is I'm not sure whether the fear is how the American people would react or how the American media and the American political system would react. They may not be the same, but a question. You've talked a good deal about America's vulnerability to what you say is al-Qaeda's financial strategy. I'd like to ask you about the converse. How vulnerable is al-Qaeda even with $4,200 attacks to a financial strategy? And how effective has the effort for 10 years to break that golden chain been? Certainly the US's sanctions regime has been quite successful in breaking down traditional sources of al-Qaeda funding. We know for a fact that al-Qaeda is hurting financially and the US's financial war against it has been a very big part of that. I think that it's not bringing it to its knees, but absolutely that's one area that has been quite successful. I mean that being said, in certain countries, Saudi Arabia in particular, you have people who are well-known al-Qaeda financiers who are kind of men about town in Riyadh and elsewhere and who this is known. And the United States doesn't do a whole lot to combat this or I mean we make noise about it but at the end of the day, especially in our relationship with Saudi Arabia, it all comes down to oil and this gives the United States less leverage than it would like in such relationships. So it's been good, it hasn't fully been decisive and then there's, like I said, there's this other kind of layer of unknowns which there are certain things that I don't know and I think aren't known even within government about current sources of al-Qaeda financing, what their actual overall budget is and the like unless we're getting a whole lot more from the Abadabad documents on this issue than I think, then that's an issue where there's a lot of what Donald Rumsfeld called known unknowns. Sure, right here. My name is Zach, I'm a student at Catholic University and my question is more pragmatic. It, assuming that we do have bad policy and overspending on this issue, how do you think we go about changing that? We've acknowledged that changing policy is difficult because it's an emotionally unpopular decision 10 years after September 11th. So is the solution to change the minds of the American public, for example, through appealing to the media to look at these numbers and your arguments or just to try to convince policymakers to go ahead and make publicly unpopular decisions? Well, that's a great question and my own personal way of trying to go about this is to convince policymakers, in part because I find that when any of my arguments are translated into kind of populist arguments, I tend to like them less. Like, I mean, just a lot of my points on one side or another. I mean, I tend to be kind of an idiosyncratic thinker, so not all of my thought is easily categorized on the left or the right. But I find that when they get repeated more popularized, I kind of dislike the way they're used, whereas when they just go into policy, it's much cleaner. I mean, a lot of things that I say don't really make very good rallying cries. Like, we should be spending less to save more money so we'll be stronger against Al Qaeda. Like, I mean, maybe, I mean, 50 years ago you had five Pashtuns who were picketing the White House with some fairly long, I mean, I was just doing research for an Afghanistan-Pakistan historical piece and it was very interesting. It made national news in 1961 that five Pashtuns were picketing the White House. And so, and they had a fairly complex slogan as well. Their slogan was to stop Pakistan from bombing Pashtunistan with American-made weaponry. And it made national news, even though I think Americans didn't know what Pashtunistan was and Pashtun then was spelled P-A-S-H-T-O-O-N. Point being, I draw some solace in the five Pashtuns and their protest outside the White House, which though it may not have completely changed American policy, can give hope to all of us. Yes, ma'am. I really hope that answer wasn't too flip. They told me I'd get extra points from them if I mentioned the five Pashtuns in this speech. I'm Gila from Voice of America, Afghan TV. And my question is that, do you think U.S. policy, U.S. strategy is successful in Afghanistan but it's failing in fighting against al-Qaeda? And how successful it is soon? Well, I think that in Afghanistan, I wouldn't call it a success. I mean, I think that the U.S. was not wrong to go into Afghanistan. I think that it was a state that had failed. You had the Taliban's brutal governance and al-Qaeda had a safe haven there. So I think that going into Afghanistan was the right thing, but a lot of the very interesting questions about Afghanistan are unfortunately, I think, questions that have already passed us by. For one thing, if the U.S. had not gone into Iraq, Afghanistan would have looked very different. I think there are other mistakes made with respect to Afghanistan, including setting up a very centralized constitution for a country that has traditionally been very decentralized. I think the lack of a policy towards Pakistan, as Pakistan funded the insurgency in Afghanistan, was also a problem. And I think that U.S. planners really thought that Pakistan would be easier to flip than it was. Richard Armitage quite famously called up Musharraf and threatened to bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age if it didn't comply with U.S. demands. And Musharraf ultimately banned a number of jihadi groups and took some other steps towards what the U.S. wanted. But there's this whole history there which begins with Afghan, which gets into the five passions I mentioned before. It begins with Afghan aggressions against Pakistan over Pashtunistan and a desire to split West Pakistan into two, which in the 1970s, when Daoud ended up executing his coup and referring immediately to the Pashtunistan dispute, you got Pakistan responding under Zulfoqar Ali Buto with a forward policy of supporting Islamist groups inside of Afghanistan, including Hekmat Yar. This is prior to the Afghan-Soviet war. These Islamist groups who opposed the Afghan state. That was a response to Afghanistan's aggression against Pakistan. Now, I'm not saying that makes Pakistan's subsequent actions forgivable, but it introduces this complex mix, which has both the strategic doctrine with respect to Afghanistan itself and also with respect to India. It has changed an organizational culture as you got the Islamization policy for society under Mohammad Zia al-Haq. And then you have these personal relationships that started to form in the 70s, then in the 80s with the Afghan-Soviet war between ISI officers and between the Pakistani military and Islamist groups in Afghanistan. Then that was accelerated in the 1990s with the Taliban, which actually proved these strategic calculations to be correct, because the 1990s, that was the only period since the creation of Pakistan when Afghanistan had good relations with Pakistan and bad relations with India. So what you have is a complex, what I've just described is actually a very complex mixture of motivations on Pakistan's part, including strategic calculations, organizational cultural calculations, and personal relationships that make it very difficult for that country to turn back. That's another thing which I think has gone wrong, the lack of a Pakistan policy. All of which goes to say, no, I'm not saying that we're doing great, yay in Afghanistan, but I do think that we're at a point where our course in Afghanistan is actually pretty set. I mean, when you look at the various think tank reports coming out from various sides of the political spectrum, they all converge around the same set of ideas about what's gonna happen between now and 2014, moving towards more counter-terrorism and advisory operations on the US's part, standing up the Afghan forces, and then eventually moving to a residual force. And these reports, and I think these reports, I think are important not for the virtue of think tank reports, but because they show how different political factions are thinking, and they're kind of converging around the same set of ideas, even though the very small differences between them seem to be very bitterly fought. I'm gonna take my moderator's prerogative again. We are on sort of a glide path in Afghanistan, I agree with you, and at the same time, we are in the process of getting out of Iraq largely. Where is this gonna leave us in five years? Will we have reduced our spending on these issues to a sustainable level? I mean, ultimately, it seems to me that that's where we're headed. We know that this is a problem that isn't going away overnight. We're trying to find a way and to find a strategy that we can sustain in an era of economic uncertainty and increased competition from other global powers. Right, I mean, a lot of us would say, those of us that study al-Qaeda, it may be bad for business on one level, but frankly, if we are focused on al-Qaeda as our greatest threat in 20 years, we're probably doing pretty good, because that means it's not China, it's not Russia, it's not some sort of dramatic global warming or something, I don't know. Are we on the right glide path? Are we headed towards the right place? And if not, what are the sort of major changes that we would make? I mean, I still obviously have critiques about the overall efficiency of our homeland security system. I've voiced some of these at TSA point and just the lack of coordination among the various agencies. You know, as to whether we're on a glide path where we're gonna get there, you know, it's an arguable position. You know, in part, as you said at the outset, my book is somewhat provocative in part to get people to think about these issues. But the argument that we are on a glide path is at least an arguable one. People, we don't know exactly what the budget is, right, because we don't know fully, you know, I tried to map what our budget is for intelligence, homeland security, along with various military things that are devoted to the war on terrorism. It's very hard to fully map. People I've spoken to who've served within government seem to think it's not sustainable even if the wars wind down, but it's not as though they really know the answer either. It's at least an arguable position and if I disagreed, it would just be an opinion. I think one other thing to think about, though, is that, you know, you look at the October 2010 plot and one of the reasons it was uncovered was because of a detainee in Afghanistan who then, you know, the U.S. at the time did not have Eunice Almaratani's name. Almaratani was the architect of the October 2010 plot to carry out these urban warfare style attacks in Europe. They learned that person through a detainee who was picked up on the Afghan battlefield. So the question is as we pull our military resources away from Afghanistan, do we lose the ability to find out about plots like this? And I'm just saying that that's one other thing that needs to be part of the equation and that's been a point I've made quite a few times around town as people think about, as you have this argument which I strongly disagree with about al-Qaeda being dead come up, it's that, you know, yeah, we've been able to stop dramatic attacks. Do dramatic attacks become more likely as we pull away from Afghanistan? And I think that there is a fairly good chance that the answer is yes. Yeah. Yes, sir. My name is Mohammad Ahmadiyy. I'm for Ways of America, actually Afghan service but radio. I don't want to, I want to know that how do you see the relationship of fundamentalist groups in Afghanistan such as Hakan-e-Network and Hikmatiar-e-Isbislami who acting against the current government in Afghanistan and also they launch attack against youth troops or native troops in Afghanistan. And recently Admiral Mullen accused the Pakistani ISI intelligence which has a relation with Hakan-e-Network. How do you see the serious threat and risk of these Hakan-e-Network against the NATO forces in Afghanistan? I guess NATO forces in Afghanistan, I mean, from recent history it certainly seems to be a significant risk. I mean, one of the debates that you get is, you know, how big a risk is the Hakan-e-Network overall. You have this report that came out from Brian's old stomping grounds, the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point which argues that in fact the Hakan-e-Network was a far more important part of global jihadism than most analysts have believed. I mean, I'm in the midst of doing somewhat of a deep dive on the Hakan-e-Network and so I would actually, that's another question I would boot a bit until I've gotten a chance to really go through the thousands of pages of archival evidence that I'm trying to read through. Any other questions out there? I'll ask one final question and then we'll do one last tour. Yeah. And which looks, you know, at some of the bureaucracies that we created, you've talked about DHS a little bit, but we also created NCTC, we created the DNI as a response to the 9-11 attacks and attempted to through those institutions strengthen our ability to do strategic intelligence, to develop the right way to think about these problems. So my question A is, do we need to change those institutions? B has the, I mean, maybe that's B. A is, you know, do we look to those institutions? Have they fallen down on the job in terms of understanding al-Qaeda or is the problem at the political level? Is this embedded in the intelligence community in the way we do intelligence? Because one critique that we have of the intelligence community is that we spend most of our resources chasing individuals and chasing specific networks and not enough time and effort stepping back and looking at the big picture. Is that the heart of the problem? Is it that policymakers don't want to hear it? And depending on your answer to that, do we need to reform these institutions that we've created? Do we need to make a change? OK, well, I'll start with kind of, I mean, there's kind of two paths you're looking at. There's the architectural path, and then there's the analytic path. You know, architecturally, I'm not as concerned about there being this expansion of institutions like NCT, CDI, et cetera, and DHS. They're there. I'm more concerned about the micro architecture rather than the major architecture. What I'm concerned about is the mushrooming of smaller shops within these institutions that seemingly do repetitive work. And the question is, could some of that repetitiveness be weeded out? And the answer is not as apparent as one would like because of some of the secrecy that pervades these institutions. As the top secret America series in the Washington Post makes clear, sometimes even people who are running a program don't have access to a part of the program that they're running, which is cleared at some even higher level. That's problematic for overall architectural design of the system. When you get to analysts, and one thing I do recommend in my book is analytic reform, which needs to be undertaken with humility. I mean, one of the things that is, I think, apparent over the past 10 years is the unintended consequences. When you come in and you try to change something, maybe you change it in a good way. Maybe you get something that you don't want. But I do think I can level a few criticisms at some of the way analysts are structured in certain parts of government. There's not, and this is after doing a lot of interviews with people serving in an analytic capacity to get a sense of what they think is working, what they think isn't working. The biggest thing that I came away with is lack of specialization. That there's very little incentive for many of them to specialize and get to learn an area quite well, which goes to what you're talking about as we chase people, we chase groups. We have less of the big picture. In understanding history, political context, it is a very important part. Like in Libya, we went in there without having the tribal structure mapped. That is, in my view, quite an indictment of what that part of the intelligence community had been doing, that there are certain things we really should have known about Libya before going in. And the answer was, I don't know. And it's not as though those analysts are necessarily bad analysts, but something had broken down that we had so little information when we decided to enter into a war in Libya. So I think that encouraging specialization within the intelligence community, and I think also, this is another area where we get to civil service reform type issues. I mean, you have 800,000 people, I think, performing intelligence work in these capacities. I mean, how many of them are actively helping to defeat terrorism? I'm not saying that the answer is going to be none. I'm not saying that the answer is going to be less than 100,000, but what is the value of the work that's being done? I mean, that's an important question. I think that some of the analytic reform needs to get down to questions of what is the value of work? And I'll have people in different capacities show me what different intelligence shops are doing and complain a bit about it and say, and some of the products they show me are indeed shoddy products. That doesn't necessarily mean that those intelligence shops don't have any value, but I think that that is one of the questions that needs to be asked. I wrote in the Atlantic last month about an amendment that was proposed to the Homeland Security Authorization Act, which is actually based on some of, by recommendations in my book, and I mean, I think it's a good idea to try to actually get some of the official institutions within government that survey these things and look at quality, to look at our analytic quality to try to improve that. I do think that that is an important aspect, and I think also embedded within that is a way to save money, which is, again, the more you can build specialization and get contractors, I don't want them completely out of the process. In fact, as someone who does contracting work, obviously I have a financial incentive for contractors to be a part of these things, but I think that that's another area where we're overspending because of lack of indigenous expert capabilities within government. Okay, David, before we let you go, I'm actually gonna give some of the introductory remarks that I forgot to do. David is with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, PhD from Catholic University, and a JD from NYU. I was so excited to hear him talk. I forgot to say those things at the beginning. So, David, thank you very much for coming, and we really appreciate you having you. Thank you, Brent.